Some Came Running (66 page)

“Well, thanks, Shotridge,” Dawn said. “I appreciate your sentiments.” She smiled at him kindly, to sort of alleviate the slenderness of her reply.

Apparently, this was not the answer Shotridge hoped for. He stood looking at her almost uncomprehendingly for a moment, then picked up the other highball from the table and said, “Well, I just wanted you to know. I love you, you see, and I believe you’d make a wonderful respectable wife-and-mother-for-my-children.” His face flushed guiltily as if he had said something unmentionable.

“Well, I can’t, Shotridge,” Dawn said. “There’s something here inside that keeps eating at me. I have to become a great actress.”

“I understand,” he said somberly. “Well, shall we go play pool?”

“Yes; for a dollar a game,” Dawn reminded him.

“That is right,” he said, and set off for the foyer carrying the two highballs. Dawn followed him, carrying one highball and the wine and thinking God what she couldn’t do to that boy if she wanted to, if she was the kind of a woman who did things like that. As they went up the stairs, she looked back down into the big foyer to see Bob French and Gwen entering the front door and called hello to them, and paused long enough to be sure they saw her. Bob was obviously pretty tight and as usual when he was tight on his way to the poker game in the men’s bar.

F
RANK WAS PERCHED
at the tiny, little men’s bar in the locker room watching the poker game when he himself saw Bob French.

The oldster came striding in through the door from the corridor, grinning from ear to ear and rubbing his hands together briskly with that extraordinary energy of his. Frank had once gone out for a walk with him when he and Gwen were down at the house, but never again. After six blocks, he had been totally worn out.

Frank grinned. Holding a cigar in one hand and a glass of whiskey and water in the other he was sitting and watching the hands as they fell to the stud players at the big table in front of him. Ordinarily, he would have been playing, but not tonight. When he had first entered the locker room, he had seen the thin, dark face of State Representative Clark Hibbard sitting at the other poker table talking to Harry Shotridge, young Jimmy’s dad. What those two might have their heads together about he could not know. But he had been looking for a chance to talk to Clark about his secret plans for the highway bypass. Only up to now the opportunity had never seemed to come up. Well, he admitted, maybe he had been a little scared to make it come up; it was an important deal. But now, seeing Clark here, and feeling as good about everything and Christmas as he did, had decided him, on the spur of the moment—and with a rising excitement that was at least 50 percent anxiety—that now was as good a time as any and he would talk to him tonight and if he didn’t he would be a coward.

This was maybe the most important deal he would ever have a chance at in his life. At least it could be if it turned out right. It was certainly too important to keep putting off. But hell, no wonder he was a little nervous.

So, having made up his mind he had settled back. Patiently, he had continued to lean back against the bar watching the game while Clark and Harry Shotridge continued to talk. When he had first entered, both men had looked up and spoken to him but neither had invited him to join them. From this, he immediately figured they were talking some private business deal of their own and had kept his distance. He didn’t want to talk in front of Harry anyway himself. Hell, if this thing went through he might become Harry’s biggest real estate competitor overnight. He had been waiting nearly an hour when Bob French came in.

Grinning, Frank watched him approach. He had always had a big soft spot for Old Bob. Probably because he was such a character. Neither Bob or Gwen played golf but both belonged to the Club and kept their dues paid up. They would not be seen for months and then would suddenly appear at the most unexpected times and spend an evening, and then maybe not be seen again for months. They were both that way in everything. Highly unconventional.

Gwen French herself was one of the few women around Parkman that Frank had never imagined himself having sex with. Something about Gwen gave him the impression she was a sexless woman—an idea which he disliked just on pure principle—and consequently always made him a little ill at ease around her. If he didn’t know her better and in spite of all her frankness about her sex life—which he knew was a fact from allusions by certain men around town—he would almost say she was some kind of a religious fanatic or something so naturally he liked Old Bob the best.

“Hello, Robert,” he grinned as the older man stopped before him.

“Frank,” Bob said, grinning and rubbing his hands together eagerly.

Frank had only to look at him to tell he was pretty tight. He always got a curious added glint in his eye, when he was, a sort of hungry, excited glint of eagerness, of rebellious eagerness, if you could say such a thing. That was the only way you could ever tell if Old Bob was tight, and you had to know him pretty well before you could learn to tell it. He just got higher and higher and more and more excited the more he drank. For an old guy his age, he could put away astonishing amounts of liquor. None of them ever mentioned this, and Bob himself with bland cheerfulness always kept repeating how little he could drink on account of his age and his health all the while putting away quantities which would have killed a much younger ordinary man. And yet there were long periods when Frank knew for a fact he would go without drinking anything at all. A very strange man. A poet. Well, if he wanted to be a poet, it was his own business, he could afford it. With his wife’s money added to his own inheritance, he could indulge himself in just about any outlandish hobby he wanted to. And Frank for one felt it was nobody’s business but his own. But he knew a lot of people who didn’t feel that way.

“What are you doin out roamin around tonight, Bob?” he said with a grin.

Bob French looked at him, grinning and rubbing his hands together. Then he turned to the poker table. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” he leered. “I see there is a game in progress! I wonder if I might perchance sit in?”

There was a droning bass rumble of assent from the table, but nobody seemed very happy about it and Frank knew why because he had played with Bob before when he was like this.

“Aren’t you indulging tonight, Frank?” Bob said grinning.

Frank shook his head. “Not tonight, Bob. Just sittin here watchin and havin a drink relaxin.” He had, in fact, had four drinks here. And was getting ready to have some more. How long were those two bastards going to keep on talkin?

“Well,” Bob said. His eyes had almost the bright, cruel eagerness of a hunting bird. Frank decided the old boy was really quite tight.

“I think,” Bob grinned, “I might just have one small drink myself now you mention it. I don’t think one would hurt me.”

The bartender was out working the main bar and Bob went around behind the counter. Keeping up a running chatter all the time to Frank he mixed himself a highball glass two thirds full of martini out of his own bottles on the rack and carried it over to the poker table.

Frank swung around to watch knowing what would happen. Bob French began to win almost at once. He played in an unorthodox way, betting and calling without even seeming to take time to think, and keeping up an incessant pointless—though witty—chatter all the time. This disconcerted the other five players who in contrast had been playing slowly and in almost dead silence; almost immediately all of them began to play badly and too fast.

Frank watched grinning, and feeling his liquor a little. It had taken Frank himself some time to get onto this style of playing of Bob’s when drunk. Because under all the laughing chatter and apparently wild betting Bob was calculating everything just as coldly as any poker player. The trouble was, before long his laughing witty talk and seemingly recklessness had you laughing, too—and letting down. About the only way you could play against him when he was like that was to close off your ears to him and try to just play your cards. But you couldn’t even do that very well because you never knew what he was doing.

He didn’t seem to care so much about winning as he did confusing everybody else and making them lose. It was almost as if something drove him into trying to antagonize everybody, while some obscure form of cruelty peered out of those rebelliously eager eyes of his as he reached out and swept in your money.

Frank couldn’t understand it. Usually, Bob was the kindest politest man there was in the world. A real old-school gentleman. What got into him, to make him act that way? If there was anything Frank could not tolerate, it was bad manners.

It didn’t make him like Old Bob any less. But it sure did make him disappointed in him. —Damn it, how long were those two guys going to
talk?

With neither his disapproval, nor his impatience showing on his face, Frank looked around the locker room. Clark and Harry Shotridge were still yakking away. Outside of them—and the poker players—there was no one else around tonight. Except for Tony Wernz IV of course at his customary table in the corner. The figure in expensive sports clothes sprawled in the cornermost chair as if aware this was the farthest point to which he could retreat, one emptied whiskey bottle and one partly full one sitting on the table before him, and so drunk that he appeared in danger of falling off the chair at any moment. This was Anton Wernz IV, father of little Anton V (and also two daughters), main stockholder—or would be—in the Second National Bank, and owner—or would be, when Old Anton III finally died—of the Wernz Investment Loan and the biggest single block-holding of real estate in Parkman and the County. Young Tony IV (who was a man of about forty and a few years younger than Frank) was such an eternal perennial at the back table of the men’s bar that almost nobody took any notice of him anymore, unless they just happened to be looking that way like Frank was now. Of course, they all went over and said a few polite words to him to which he would grunt thickly in return, and a couple of them would always be ready to put him back on his chair if he should happen to fall off which he occasionally did, but outside of that he might as well not even have been here. Usually, big Paul Fredric, the Second National first vice president (now president it was, since Tony had become chairman of the board), would be on hand to see that he got home when Les the pro closed up; although in the past few years, this privileged duty had been relegated to one of younger vice presidents. Or if his wife was with him—she was very prominent in the women’s clubs circle—she would send someone back to collect him and get him out to the car. On the few occasions when nobody from his hierarchy was there, Les the pro, who owed his job to Tony and Marie, would always see that he got home. But almost always there was someone there, either Paul or the young vice president or Tony’s wife, who was president of the local WCTU because both she and Tony were leaders of the prohibition and anti-liquor leagues in Cray County.

Frank, at the bar, enjoyed feeling disgusted with his drunkenness and not a little bit superior, while he drank his own drinks and waited on Clark Hibbard. Tony stared straight ahead slack-faced at the wall beyond the other, and empty, table. The only movement he made was to pour whiskey into the glass with his right hand and raise it to his mouth. As a matter of fact, Frank thought enjoyably, he looked dead. Even so, Frank did not make the mistake of imagining that Tony IV was so dead that he could be taken on any kind of a business or real estate deal. He knew far better.

Eventually—while Bob French continued to laugh and sparkle and win the poker hands—Clark Hibbard and Harry Shotridge concluded their talk and got up from the table. The tall Clark slapped the shorter Harry on the back, and followed him on up toward the bar after a polite word or two to Tony Wernz.

“How’s it going, Tony old man? Having a good time, boy?” Representative Hibbard said in his crisply enunciated editor’s voice.

The numb man might as well not have heard. “Unh,” he said without blinking his eyes or moving.

For a moment, Frank felt sorry for him. It must get pretty sickening to have everybody buttering you up all the time when you knew they didn’t mean a word of it. If that was the result of power and prestige and money, Frank was glad he was only a common little man and content to remain so, by God.

“Fine, Tony, fine; that’s fine,” Hibbard said cheerfully. At the bar, Clark slapped Harry Shotridge on the back again.

“Aint you playin tonight, Frank?” Harry said. “You must be off your feed.”

Frank smiled and shook his head. “Not tonight, Harry. Ain’t feelin competitive enough.”

“You’re probly right at that. Looks like Old Bob is on one of his rampages again,” Harry grinned, and moved to go. “I’ll see you, Clark.”

Clark Hibbard nodded. “Sure will, Harry,” he said. He smiled. “And we’ll talk about that other.”

Harry Shotridge nodded back, like a man who is proud of knowing a great deal more than he is telling, and then slapped Frank on the back. “See you around, Frank,” he said, as he started for the door.

“See you, Harry,” Frank said, and looked after him. He was aware of Clark Hibbard watching him from just beyond his eye range. Could Clark have tumbled to his waiting? Well, it was never a good thing to bring things out in the open too damn quick. Lazily, he swung back around on the stool and cocked his elbows up on the bar behind him. Beside him, Clark Hibbard eased himself up onto the stool next to him.

Frank was aware that Clark had always looked down on him, and had a low opinion of his mental equipment. But this did not bother him any since Clark was that way about pretty nearly everybody. It had already occurred to Frank that Harry Shotridge might have been having the same idea about the bypass, and that that might be what he was talking to Clark about. But he was willing to dismiss that. Harry wasn’t smart enough. He said nothing and waited for Clark.

“Well, how’s my number one Cray County constituent?” Clark said. “Everything progressing smoothly?”