Some Came Running (3 page)

It was all just exactly like he had played it out in his mind. Except for that damned glass eye. It was almost occult, how like it was. Sometimes there had been just two loungers, sometimes six or seven. But there were always loungers. He had thought about it a lot, this homecoming, in a lot of different places—with the carnival and the circuses he worked for, later on on the bum, still later when he lived with his sister, Francine, who was Frank’s twin, in North Hollywood.

At the top of the stairs, he looked back and saw the clerk struggling up with the heavy B-4 bag and the satchel. He had completely forgotten all about him. He ran back down the stairs and held out his hand for the small bag.

“Here, give me that.”

“I can manage it,” the clerk said coldly.

Dave took it anyway.

The clerk shrugged.

Again, Dave felt that reasonless fear for his own eyes. “I don’t want you to strain yourself on that thing,” he joked.

“A man can stuff everythin’ but a ten-room house in one of these things,” the clerk countered.

“This war has ruptured a lot of redcaps,” Dave said. “What if the VA had to pay them compensation?”

“Do you want the country to go broke,” the clerk countered, but he did not laugh. He was apparently used to this trick of people having to make conversation with him. He led the way on down the hall. “Here we go, Mr Hirsh,” he said, opening the door. “The bedroom is on in here.” He carted the big B-4 bag into it. Dave could hear him hanging it up on the closet door.

He disposed of his overcoat and got the bottle out of it. He had it open in his hand when the boy came back in, staring unconcernedly with the bright blue eye. It was the first undistracted look Dave had got at it and it made him want to wince. It was a botched-up job, even for the Army.

“How about a drink after all that exertion?” he said, holding it out. He tossed a half dollar on the daybed.

The clerk pocketed it. “I didn’t hear you. Sure. I can awys use a drink.”

When he spoke this time. Dave detected the accent he had been trying to put his finger on. He handed him the open bottle. “You’re not from around here, are you? Where you from, Jersey?”

“Yeah, Jersey City.” He did not quite say Joisey.

“We had a bunch of Jersey boys in my outfit,” Dave said. “What’s your name?”

“Barker. Freddy Barker. I was station down at George Field near Vincennes and married a girl from here. Came back out here after I got discharge.”

He took a sparing drink from the bottle and made as if to hand it back, but Dave made a gesture for him to have another. Instead, the clerk set it gently on the end table.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said. “Is there anything else I can get you right now, Mr Hirsh?”

“Yes, there is. As a matter of fact,” Dave said. He opened his left blouse pocket. “I’d like to have some ice. And I’ve got a bank draft here for fifty-five hundred dollars that I’d like for you to take over to the Second National Bank and deposit for me.”

There was just a second’s pause. “Why you want me to deposit it for you?”

“Because I don’t want to go over there myself,” Dave said. “And while you’re gone, pick me up a couple bottles of whiskey.”

“Okay.” The clerk was looking at him curiously with his good eye. The other, as always, was aloof and cold. “It’s got to be signed, doesn’t it?”

Dave nodded and got out his pen. “I’ll sign it right now. It’ll be worth a couple of bucks to you to get it in before the bank closes.”

“I’ll do it right away.”

Dave handed him the check and a twenty-dollar bill. “Instead of whiskey, why don’t you get me a fifth of Gordon’s gin and a bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth.”

“I doubt if anybody’ll have that kind.”

“Okay, then just get the whiskey. Any good blend.”

The clerk nodded. “That’s a lot of money to trust a stranger with,” he said.

“I know, can’t you see how worried I look?”

The clerk grinned, a little, a lopsided weird grin because his left eye did not join in and grin with the rest of him.

“You said the Second National, didn’t you?” he asked. “A checking account?”

“That’s right. Don’t you want another drink?”

“Yes. I’ll take one.” He picked the bottle up off the table. “Your brother Frank is a member of the board at the other bank, isn’t he?” he said. “At the Cray County Bank?”

“I believe he is,” Dave said. The young clerk drank the raw whiskey easily. Then he folded the check and bill and put them in his jacket pocket. When he got up, the expression of his good eye was as veiled as that of the glass one. “I’ll get this done for you right away, Mr Hirsh.”

“Have another drink before you go if you want,” Dave said.

“If I have another drink, I’ll wind up spendin’ the afternoon here,” the clerk said. There was no humor in his face. He went to the door.

“I’ll bring you back a deposit slip,” he said.

Dave sat still a moment or two, thinking about the clerk. He liked him. But then he liked most everybody. But he hadn’t handled him right. He got up and walked over to the window, taking the bottle with him. But he did not drink, and a big arrogant grin spread over his face. He was thinking about the faces of the people in the bank, when they saw his name on that check. And he was thinking about his brother Frank’s face, when he heard about it, which he would soon enough.

Down below him Freddy came out from under the hotel marquee in a topcoat now but bareheaded in the spitting snow. Dave watched him cross the street diagonally and go up the other side to the square.

Standing at the window, for a moment he forgot the town. He seemed to go back into the Army. You didn’t get over it all at once. And the one-eyed clerk had brought out a singularly strong emotion in him. He had just finished spending four years of his life with boys like that. They called him Pop. And they brought their troubles to him. They believed that, being nearly thirty-five, he by rights ought to know more about life than they did. He had wound up as a sort of elected father of the outfit, and now he missed that. Wherever they were now. All scattered out. A lot of them dead. And a lot of them crippled, too, like Freddy.

It seemed that in the last few years the cripples had become a normal part of everyday life, a steady stream of them, rolling back from over both seas, hardly anyone even noticed them anymore. He was suddenly reminded of Falstaff’s speech about the maimed and crippled rabble, that had come home with him, from the Continental Wars.

It must have been a lot like this in Rome, too, during
her
great days of world leadership. Except now the government bought them cars which the taxpayers paid for. Well, civilization had advanced a lot. The only thing was he, Dave, had about got to the place where he didn’t much give a damn about civilization anymore. Except, of course, for the comforts. That’s what kept us all going wasn’t it: the comforts.

Sometimes, and increasingly the past year and a half that he’d served with the Occupation Army in Germany, Dave got the feeling he was living in a dying age. It was the same feeling he got when he listened to Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring,
a picture not of the birth of the world but the death, and the now primitive tribes that sang hauntingly of the former greatness of their people and put the rusted gun and the wrecked auto upon their stone altars and worshipped them as gods because they no longer knew how to operate them.

Along roads and streets no longer plainly marked, amongst courthouses and buildings turned into grass grown piles of masonry, filled with the rotting records of an entire civilization, gone.

And, in Germany, it was not hard to believe it completely. Here it was a little harder.

At such times, it was not too difficult to believe that a man of his own years if he learned to throw a knife and taught himself the intricacies of archery he could plan ahead upon someday making himself chief of the Wabash Valley, or even chief of all Illinois.

Except the man was always too lazy. And he wasn’t getting any younger, either. He was getting noticeably older, in fact. Getting bald and until the Army took him and worked it off him had been getting rounder with the unhealthy fat of eating and drinking too much. The comforts. It appeared to be a toss-up, which would outlast the other, he thought, the world or the man.

But either way, the man would lose. Lose the bodies of women, lose the physical health, lose the witty intelligence, lose all the great loves the man might have had.

That seemed to be what the emotional progression always ended up at. All his life, he thought, he had been afraid of getting syphilis. Well, it was a wild, weird, melancholy thing, when it took him, and the only thing to do was wear it out. Probably thinking about all the cripples was what had brought it on.

Still holding the bottle, he left the window and went into the bedroom to the closet and from one of the sidepockets of the B-4 bag fished out his books. There were five, all Viking Portables. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wolfe—the five major influences his sister, Francine, had called them. She had sent them to him in Europe one by one as they came out.

Dave grinned. Sister Francine. It was her address he had put on the hotel register. It was she he had been living with—and largely off of—in Hollywood when he got drafted. She was a good old gal, but she just couldn’t get over being an English teacher. It had given her an abnormal love for literature, she had to feel that what she did was important.

Well, a lot of people labored under that self-delusion. He grinned derisively at the five major influences, the biggest mark of his time spent with her—what was it? eleven, almost twelve years. Off and on.

Nevertheless, the sight of the five books there on the dresser, their pages swelled with too much reading, their covers warped from too many barracks bags, really touched him deeply. He had dragged them halfway across Europe, they had seen a lot of country with him.

Affectionately, he arranged them between hotel water glasses for bookends and then, still holding the bottle from which he had not drunk yet, went back into the other room to the windows. Freddy was just coming back around the corner carrying a paper sack. Dave watched him go in under the marquee, feeling a strange sense of loss for that imposed fatherhood he had suffered in the 3615th QM Gasoline Supply Company. When the knock came on the door, he went over and opened it.

The clerk set the ice bowl down on the table and immediately reached for his pocket.

“They didn’t give me a deposit slip. They wrote it down in a bank book. It’s in the slot.”

He looked at Dave questioningly.

Dave nodded and went through the motions of opening the checkbook and checking the amount because he knew that was what the other wanted. Freddy appeared satisfied and handed him his change.

“I had to get the whiskey,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Dave said, and handed him back a five-dollar bill.

“Thanks,” the clerk said. He stuck it in his pocket.

“Do you want another drink?” Dave said.

“Well, I might have just one.” His face was already liquor-flushed, and he did not look like a tough ex-vet anymore. Nowhere, that is, except for that one icily dispassionate, bright blue old soldier’s eye that some Army doctor had stuck in his face by way of replacement.

He’s just a kid, Dave thought with surprise. He’s no more of a tough ex-vet than I am.

“That air kind of hit me outside,” Freddy said, picking up the bottle and studying it. “Say, do you know Ned Roberts, the Second National cashier?”

“Ned Roberts?” Dave said. “Ned Roberts. Yeah. Sure. He was two years ahead of me in school. Is he their cashier?”

Freddy nodded. “He remembered you.”

“He did, hunh?”

“He looked funny,” Freddy said. It was clear he knew there was something a little out of the ordinary that he was not in on. “I couldn’t tell if he was surprised because it was you, or if he was surprised because it was that much money.”

Dave grinned. “Probably both. Maybe he was thinking about my brother on the board of the other bank.”

The clerk nodded, indifferent. But he was looking at Dave curiously. “You know, I’ve lived in this town almost four years, and I still don’t know anything about it,” he said. “It’s a funny kind of town.”

“Not so funny,” Dave said. “Probably not much like Jersey City, though.”

“No. Not much. Well, I’ll see you later,” Freddy said. He went to the door, and then turned back, his face closed up tight like a poker player making a big raise. “Mind if I ask you something?”

“No. Shoot.”

“You was in the QM.” He nodded at Dave’s shoulder patch.

Dave nodded. “3615th QM Gas Supply Company. I was Company Medic.”

“If you was in the QM, how’d you get that Combat Infantryman’s Badge?” He nodded again, at the emblem of the Kentucky rifle on its blue field with the silver wreath around it.

“My outfit fought as Infantry during the Bulge,” Dave said. “They gave it to us by Division Special Order. We were up there gassing tanks, when the breakthrough came.”

“That was a rough go,” Freddy said.

“I didn’t get it in any Army store,” Dave smiled, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Well,” the clerk said, “thanks for them drinks.” It sounded awkward, as if he felt he had gotten out of line.

“What were you in?” Dave said. “Infantry?”

“No. Air Corps,” Freddy said. “But my brother was. He got his in the Hürtgen Forest.” He went, his last sentence hanging in the air, an awkward attempt at explanation, embarrassed.

Dave mixed himself a whiskey and water and sat down in the chair of the desk which had been placed in the corner between the windows. Tilting it back on two legs, he looked out the side window up the street to the square.

It was such a funny thing, about soldiers. Funny, in a way that made you want to cry. Everybody always assumed the other guy had had it tougher than he did. The men in Europe thought the men in the Pacific had it tougher because of the jungle. The men in the Pacific thought the men in Europe had it tougher because of the firepower. And it carried right on down the line.

It’s like some kind of a mass male guilt psychosis, he thought. Nobody thinks he has as much guts as he should, and the man who only lost one hand drops his eyes before the man who lost them both.