Some Came Running (8 page)

Up at the bar, Dave’s father was having the barman put six bottles of beer, instead of one, in the sack with his fifth of whiskey. Without paying, he clutched the sack and stumped to the door, looking neither right nor left.

’Bama pulled his hands out of his pockets and lit a cigarette, and then stepped over and held the door open for the old man with his sack. Old Man Herschmidt stumped on through, and ’Bama holding the door with one swayed-back buttock as if it were a usable appendage jerked his head at the bartender and made a motion as if writing on his cuff, then pointed his finger at himself. Then he turned out and was gone, up the street.

“He’s not paying for all that!” Dave protested.

“He’s done done it,” Hubie drawled.

“What’s he do for a living?” Dave asked, looking after him.

“He gambles,” Dewey grinned.

“Is that all?”

“That’s enough. If you gamble like he gambles,” Hubie said.

“He’s pretty good,” Dave said.

“Good enough to make a lot of money around here. When he works,” Dewey said. “But half of what he wins, he donates to the bookies in Terre Haute or Evansville or Indianapolis.”

“The rest he spends,” Hubie drawled.

“He’s a hell of a pool player,” Dewey said. “Makes a lot, that way. At’s where he’s goin now.”

“Has he got a name? I’ve never heard anybody call him anything but ’Bama,” Dave said.

Dewey grinned boyishly and his incredibly handsome blue eyes lit up with relish. “His name is William Howard Taft Dillert. He was born in 1912.”

“But you don’t never want to call him that,” Hubie grinned. “Specially Howard. That’s what his mother calls him.”

“See, they’re from down around Florence, Alabama,” Dewey grinned. “That’s why the nickname. His sister use to work in a plant in Birmingham and took the family there. Then she moved up here to Parkman to work for Sternutol Chemical and brought them here. Now the other brother works for Sternutol, too. ’Bama came along with him for a visit and just stayed.”

“They don’t much like it, either,” Hubie said. “That was ten years ago. I don’t bet there’s fifteen people in town knows what his real name is. Countin his family. Dewey just happen to go up the same day he did to register for the draft, is how he found out.”

“He hates that name like poison,” Dewey grinned.

“Dillert’s a good old Southern name,” Dave said.

“Yeah, but William Howard Taft isn’t,” Dewey said. “’Bama says his old lady sure would’ve done him a big favor if she’d only waited six months to have him.”

“Yeah, at least Woodrow Wilson was a good Democrat,” Hubie said.

Dave laughed. It was the first real laugh he’d had all day, and it was a short one. And immediately it had stopped he felt exhausted, depleted. He felt as though if it hadn’t stopped he might go on laughing and laughing until it turned into crying hysterics. The kind where you lie on the floor weeping and listening to yourself and wondering why. Thinking about it now, he felt it bubbling up in him, and he choked it off.

“Well, I’ve got to go,” he said. “Got to get cleaned up to go out to Frank’s tonight. You tell ’Bama thanks for all that beer and stuff.”

“We see you down at Smitty’s later,” Dewey said. He looked at his watch. “My girl’ll be gettin off at the brassiere factory before long. We’re gonna meet her here.” He grinned. “She gets two weeks’ pay today.”

“Yes,” Dave said, “sure.” He nodded and got up and went toward the door. He felt too full of beer, and he was hungry for food again already. But he couldn’t stay here and eat. He had to get out.

He went out and turned the other way from ’Bama, down the hill away from the square toward the hotel. It was still dribbling snow, and this surprised him.

He thought that had been a long time ago. Before all this life had started rushing back at him, from all sides, zeroing on him, like a man standing in the middle of a maze of railroad junctions, trains shooting at him from first this side and then that side, whistling past, and the blinding lights, and the smell of coal smoke and vitality.

T
HE STREETS WERE
almost deserted. Not busy at all.

It was strange he didn’t remember the day the old man left or the day he returned, but it didn’t work like that. It worked like this: One day they discovered he was missing, but they didn’t know how long because sometimes when he got drunk enough he just slept at the shop the welding shop, which was really a converted shack of a garage and they never bothered him there, though sometimes the fire went out on him, and he would almost freeze, but this was rare because it was rare for him to get drunk like that, but still it was enough for them not to realize he was missing, no farewell note, no good-byes, just suddenly began to realize he was missing; then they started living their lives without him being there; a long time later when they had about got used to it he suddenly reappeared they began to see him on a street or in a store silent irascible and morose finally they realized he was back to stay they never spoke to him and he never spoke to them.

Not for a long time anyway.

Of course, by then, they all knew the story. Their father had run off with the wife of the family doctor and a large part of the doctor’s savings. Five years later, Old Man Herschmidt came back. Minus the doctor’s wife, minus the doctor’s savings. He proceeded to settle down in Parkman again. He moved in on the other side of town and went back to his welding, and he and his lawful wife never spoke to each other again.

Up to then, they had been an ordinary family of an ordinary welder who did not get drunk over ordinarily much.

He remembered the night they finally realized he was missing. Frank called them all in while their mother remained alone in her bedroom, they sat down around the kitchen table, and Frank said we must never ever mention this to Mother again, we must never mention his name again, he is dead, he no longer exists by the Grace of God and our own ingenuity, we will make out, it will probably kill her, and that was when Francine said scornfully nuts! to both counts and Frank said all right it’s going to be embarrassing and who’s going to be making the money? It looks like I am, and you take it or leave it. Frank was then a senior in high school. So was Francine, since they were twins.

So they never mentioned it, or him, again even when he came back to town. It was as if he really did no longer exist even when they saw him on the street. It never seemed to bother him. Nothing did. He was already Old Man Herschmidt. The only time he was ever mentioned that he could remember was when he himself was packing up and preparing to leave and Frank said, Like father, like son! Frank was then already married and his wife pregnant, the daughter of the man who owned the cheap notion-semi-jewelry store he worked for which he later developed with his own blood into exclusiveness and was already having his own girlfriends on the side. Like father, like son! he told him with some little ruefulness and gave him the five dollars.

The girl herself was a nice enough girl. A country girl. Who had filled out at thirteen and been bewildered by it since she discovered (probably by accident) that she liked sex when she hadn’t ought to. The three of them, all seniors and all good buddies, had been serving her night after night, but her father decided on him because Frank owned a prosperous business, prosperous at least by the standards of New Lebanon, Dark Bend River farmers, which the other two seniors also were.

He himself had lost his own virginity in the eighth grade. And wasn’t that about the time Frank had changed the family name?

The eighth grade was also the year that Francine, no longer able to suffer the continuing embarrassment that Frank had warned of, left town on her own and began putting herself through teacher’s college, wasn’t it?

God, how it jumbled and tumbled out no continuity. How long had it been since he’d thought about it? And only those three main threads to give it any semblance of reason at all!

The old man was back, of course, by the time he left and he had gone up to see him on his way out of town, but then he hadn’t had nerve enough to go in. So he stood outside and looked in through the grimy window at the alien figure in the dark-glassed mask holding the torch and went away without either speaking or the couple of bucks he might have been able to milk him for, not because he was afraid or hated to speak to him he had spoken to him many times since he got back, but because he was embarrassed to be leaving town in disgrace.

His mother had said with her laboriously acquired religious sorrow, only: You have sinned, son, sinned very bad, but God will forgive you if you ask him to write me often you’re my son.

Christ the things you think of.

A year with that carnival.

Another with circuses.

And no meaning anywhere.

Except to work up from hammerhead to peewee gandy dancer, assistant to a seller of cheap novelties. More money for more broads. He learned to short change fairly well. And, of course, he drew upon that material later for those short stories.

The meaning of meaning.

After that, he traveled the South with a magazine subscription gang, where his short-changing ability immediately endeared him to his boss. He quit after three weeks because he was no good, he could not convince himself that they ought to buy magazines and hence could not possibly convince them, but he would not confess this because he hated to admit to anyone, especially the boss, that he was an abysmal failure at so simple a thing in which the boss, an ignorant man who could not even read, succeeded so brilliantly.

Once, for a short period, he had dealt blackjack in Kansas City while he and a buddy worked a short con game for a few damn few bucks on the side. But this did not last. He, who still had his morbid dislike of being disliked, came out of it with a hundred bucks cash clear, this ambition to be a big gambler as distinguished from con man, and his ex-buddy’s undying disdain.

With this hundred, and two suitcases full of the meaning of meaningless or should I say the meaninglessness of meaninglessness? all right, two suitcases full of clothes, he moved in on Sister Francine teaching high school English in Greater Los Angeles.

Ha wonder what ever happened to Sister Francine?

He had been there before. But this time, when he fell in love with an educated girl named Harriet Bowman who would not sleep with him, he moved there permanently.

All his life he had been horrified at the indifference the rest of the human race showed him. Even as a small boy, he was constantly shocked at the way people went about as if his existence meant nothing at all. Long before he ever fell in love, he would wake in terror in the middle of the night from the awareness that
nobody
loved him enough to sacrifice everything for him.

So when love came, man it was
really
something!

He did not know if he loved her because she was educated, or because she would not sleep with him; but he decided it was because she basically was such a wise, good, sweet, kind person. It was his first great love. He was deeply thrilled by the violence of his own emotions. He was also often discomfited. But he even enjoyed this, too. When he was drafted in 1943, nine years later, she still would not sleep with him.

She was, in fact, married, was she not? To a lawyer. A lawyer who did not belong to, and had not ever even been introduced to, Francine’s circle.

Because in order to be near her, he himself had had to associate with Francine’s circle of artist and intellectual friends, of which the educated girl Harriet Bowman was what you might say an inactive member. She was of the type who did not have to read, talk, or think, she just sat on her magnet and let it attract, knowing with a sure generations-old instinct that the world was full of iron filings, and that everyone admired her for her brains. This was what he fell in love with. He was an iron filing. Ergo.

So, he associated. That was how he met George Blanca. How he met Kenny McKeean. How he started writing. And how he met that other guy: I don’t remember, Wally French Dennis said, who was now dead in the war.

Why remember? Trees to you, Joyce Kilmer, trees! Alan Seeger dead behind some disputed barricade. Do you know what my dog’s favorite song is? He was getting bitter,
really
bitter. That was bad. Be glibly bitter, literarily bitter, bon motly bitter. Okay. But don’t be
really
bitter, don’t do your remembering
really
bitter. That’s no good. My, but the streets were deserted, weren’t they?

He remembered him as he was then. He believed her a virgin. And nothing would convince him otherwise, though no one had ever suggested she was not. But his ego just couldn’t stand the thought that she had been slept with before and could still resist him so stoutly. It really became a sort of polemic argument with the then him, he remembered. And as far as she was concerned, he never resolved it.

Francine, who had given up prose for poetry, helped him write several poems to her, one of which he even liked well enough to keep (still had it), which he read her. God, no one would ever know how he worked at that! It availed him nothing. She was as immovable as a rock. It was not as if she were uneducated. He just could not believe it. He began to lose his faith in education. Once, he so lost control of himself that he abruptly asked her to marry him. He returned the next day intensely relieved that she only had smiled sweetly and sadly, and shaken her head without speaking.

The more she refused it him, the more he respected her integrity—which while his nervous system screamed with a perpetual rage at her supreme self-confidence—that knew he would keep coming back.

Back up the street a car honked. A young girl squealed. And another young girl squealed back. High school must be out already.

He remembered it finally got to be a vague disquieting impression he carried with him all the time that nothing was what you could actually call real, neither Francine George Kenny and his death, none except himself and the educated girl Harriet Bowman, who would not sleep with him and sometimes even she was not real and only his love for her was real.