The Man Who Lost the Sea (33 page)

But this man, this passenger they’d charged twenty-five dollars per mile now; it wasn’t fun. He was a guy in trouble if ever G-Note had seen one, anxious, worried, even frantic—so anxious he’d say yes to a demand like that, even if he did take it back later; so anxious he was stumbling homeward through the rain at three in the morning. You should help a fellow like that, you shouldn’t use his trouble against him. Which didn’t seem to bother Gorwing, not one bit: coming into the street-lit area of North Nyack, now, G-Note could glance sidewise at Gorwing’s face, see the half grin, the cruel white teeth showing. No, it didn’t bother Gorwing.

So … you found out new things about people all the time. Such a thing could be surprising, but, if you don’t want surprises like that, you just keep away from people. Thus G-Note shrugged away the matter, as he asked, “Where you staying now?” for Gorwing moved around all the time.

“Just drop me off by O’Grady’s.”

O’Grady’s, the poolhall, was across town from G-Note’s place, on the same avenue; yet, passing his own shop, G-Note turned right and made the usual wide detour past the hospital. He made a U-turn at the poolhall and stopped. For a good-night, Gorwing had only, “Now you said you wouldn’t let me down.”

“All right,” said G-Note.

“Forty-sixty, you and me,” said Gorwing, and turned away.

G-Note drove off.

Eloise Smith hoped Jody wouldn’t be mad. His was not the towering rage of this one nor the sullen grumps of that one, but a waspish, petty, verbose kind of anger, which she had neither the wit nor the words to cope with. She loved Jody and tried her very best to have everything the way he wanted it, but it was hard, sometimes, to know what would annoy him. And when anything did, sometimes she had to go through an hour or more of his darting, flicking admonishments before she even knew what it was.

She’d broken the telephone. Kicked the wire right out of the wall—oh, how
clumsy!
But she’d done worse than that from time to time, and he’d just laughed. Or she’d done much less serious things and he’d carried on just terrible. Well … she’d just have to wait and see. She hoped she could stay awake, waiting—goodness, he was late. Elks nights were always the latest; he was secretary, and was always left to lock the hall after the meeting. But he usually got home by two anyway—it was three already, and still no sign of—oh—
there
he …

She ran and opened the door. He spun in, dripping, out of breath. He slammed the door and shot the bolt, and pushed past her to peer out the front window. Not that anything could be seen out there. He turned from the window. He looked wild. She stood before him, clutching her negligee against her breast.

“Eloise … you all right?”

“All right? Why, of course I’m all right!”

“ ‘Thank God?” He pushed past her again, darted to the living room door, flicked his gaze across and back. “You all alone?”

“Well, not since you got here,” she said, in a hopeless attempt to produce some levity. “Here, you’re wet through. Give me your hat. You poor—”

“It might interest you to know … you’ve driven me half out … of my mind,” he panted. She had never seen him like this. He might be a little short of breath from running from the car to the house, but not this much, and it should be, well, tapering off. It wasn’t. It seemed to get more marked as he talked. He was very pale. His red-rimmed eyes and the rain running off his bland features gave him the ludicrous expression of a five-year-old who has bumped his
head and is trying not to cry. She followed him into the living room and rounded on him, to face him, and for the third time he pushed past her, this time to fling open the dining room door. She said timidly, “Jody, I broke the telephone. I mean, I fell over the wire and it came out.”

“Oh, you did, did you.”

He was still panting. “Jody!” she cried, “whatever is the matter? What’s
happened?
”

“Oh, what’s happened?” he barked. His eyes were too round. “I call you up and somebody cuts the wire, as far as I know. I rush out of the hall to the car and the door slams behind me, that’s all. My keys on the table. Can’t get back in, can’t start the car. Try my best to get here quickly. Hitchhiking. Get waylaid by a couple of the ugliest hoodlums you ever saw, they
robbed
me.”

“Oh dear—did they hurt you, honey?”

“They did not. Matter of fact,” he panted, “I told them off, but good. And they better not fool with me again. Not that they will—I guess they learned their lesson.” Angrily, proudly, he hitched his shoulders, a gesture that made him aware of his wet coat, which at last he began to remove. She ran to help him. “Oh Jody, Jody darling, but you didn’t have to rush back like that …”

“Didn’t I,” he said solemnly, in a tone dripping with meaning, not one whit of which she understood. He pulled himself, glaring, away from her, and, while she stood clutching her negligee to herself again, he ponderously took off the coat, glaring at her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. You poor dear.” She thought, suddenly, of a woman she had seen in the parking lot at the supermarket, whose child had bolted in front of a car. People had shrieked, brakes had squealed, the woman had run out to scoop up her frightened but unharmed youngster—and, in her relief, had whaled the tar out of him.

That was it—Jody had been so terribly worried about her, he’d gotten into all this trouble rushing to help her, and now that he knew she was safe he was, in effect, spanking her.

She grew very tender, very patient. “Oh
Jody
 …” she said fondly.

“You won’t ‘Oh Jody’ out of this one,” he said.

“Well, I’m
sorry!
” she cried, and, “Oh, Jody, what is it? Is it the telephone? Will it be hard to get it fixed?”

“The
telephone
can be fixed,” he growled in a voice again inexplicably loaded with meaning. He passed through the dining room into the kitchen, again flicking his glance here, there, up, across. “Got everything put away,” he said, looking at the glass cupboard, the dish shelf.

“Well, don’t I always?”

“Doubtless,” he said bitterly. He opened the refrigerator.

“Let me fix—”

“I’ll do it myself,” he said.

Her tenderness and patience gave out at that point. She said in a small voice, “I’ll go to bed then,” and when he did not respond, she went upstairs, lay down and cried.

She managed to be silent, stiff and silent, when he came upstairs, and lay in the dark with her eyes squeezed shut while he undressed and washed and got into his pajamas and into the other bed. She dearly hoped he’d say something, but he didn’t. After a long time, she whispered, “Well, good night, Jody.” He made a sound which might have been an offensive “Ha!” or just a grunt; she couldn’t be sure. She thought he fell asleep after a while, and then she did, too—lightly, troubled.

The glare of her bed lamp awoke her. Up through it, and up through the confusion of puzzlement and sleepiness, she blinked at Jody. Seen so, standing by her bed and glaring down at her, he looked very large. He never had before.

He said, “You’d better tell me all about it right now.”

She said, “Wh-what time is it?”

“Now you listen to me, Eloise. I’ve learned a whole lot of things in the last few hours. About you. About me. About—” Suddenly he raised his voice; at the rim of the glare of light, the vein at the side of his neck swelled. “I’m just too doggoned nice to everybody. When I told off those thugs, I tell you, something happened to me, and from now on I won’t stand for it any more!”

“Jody—”

“Two of them, twice my size, and I told
them
.”

“You did?”

In retrospect, Eloise was to look painfully back upon this moment and realize that on it turned everything that subsequently happened between them; she would realize that when she said, “You
did?
” he heard “
You
did?”—a difference in inflection that becomes less subtle the more one thinks about it. Later, she thought a great deal about it; now, however, she could only shrink numbly down into the covers as he roared, “Yes,
I
did! You didn’t think I had it in me, did you? Well I did, and from now on nobody puts anything over on me! Including you, you hear?”

“But Jody—I—”

“Who was here when I called you up at two o’clock?”

“Who was—Nobody!”

He sank down to the edge of his bed so their heads were more nearly on a level, and fixed her with a pink-rimmed, weepy, steely gaze. “I … heard … you,” he intoned.

“You mean when you called?”

He simply sat there with his unchanging, unnatural glare. Wonderingly, frightened, she shook her head. “I was watching a movie on TV. It was just ending—the very end; it was a good one. And I—I—”

“You told your … your …” He could not say the word. “You told whoever it was not to talk.
But I heard you
.”

Dazedly she sat up in bed, a slim, large-eyed, dark-blonde woman in her late twenties—frightened, deeply puzzled, warding off certain hurt. She thought hard, and said, “I spoke to
you
—I said that to you! In the picture, you see, there was this girl that … that … Oh, never mind; it’s just that in that last moment of the picture everything came together, like. And just as you rang and I picked up the phone, it was the last minute of the picture, don’t you see? I was sort of into it—you know. So I said to you, ‘Don’t say anything for a second, honey,’ and I—Is that what you heard?”

“That is what I heard,” he said coldly.

She laughed with relief. “I said it to you, to you, not to anyone here, you silly! And—well, I was sort of mixed up, coming out of the TV that way, to the phone, and you began to sort of shout at
me, and I couldn’t hear the TV, and I kind of ran to it to turn it up, just for a second, and I forgot I was holding the phone and the wire caught my ankle and I fell down and the wire pulled out and
—Jody!
” she cried, seeing his face.

“You’re a liar, you bitch.”

“Jody!” she whispered faintly. Slowly she lay down again. She closed her eyes, and tears crept from beneath her lids. She made no sound.

“I can handle hoodlums and I can handle you,” he said flatly, and turned out the light. “And from now on,” he added, as if it were a complete statement; he must have thought so, for he said nothing more that night.

Eloise Smith lay trembling, her mind assuring her over and over that none of this was really happening, it couldn’t happen. After a useless time of that, she began to piece the thing together, what he’d said, what she’d said … she recalled suddenly what he had blurted out about the Elks’ Hall, and the car, and all … what was it? Oh: he’d called, apparently to tell her he was on the way; and she’d murmured, “Don’t say anything for a second, honey,” and he’d thought … he must have thought oh dear, how
silly
of him! “Jody!” she said, sitting up, and then the sight of his dim rigid form, curled away from her in the other bed, drove her back to silence, and she lay down to think it through some more … And he’d gotten himself all upset and yelled, and then she’d broken the wire, and probably thought her—
her
—but she could not think the word any more than he had been able to say it—he’d thought that whoever it was had gaily pulled out the wire to, well, stop his interruption. And then apparently Jody had gone all panicky and berserk, had run straight out to the car, got himself locked out of the Elks’ Hall with the car keys still inside, had headed north—away from town, and gas stations, and other telephones—and had tried to hitchhike home. And something about hoodlums and being robbed on the way—but then he said he’d driven them off, didn’t he?

She gave it up at length. Whatever had happened to him, he obviously felt like a giant, or a giant-killer maybe, for the first time in his life, and he was taking it out on her.

Well, maybe in the morning—

In the morning he was even worse. He hardly spoke to her at all. Just watched her every minute, and once in a while snorted disgustedly. Eloise moved quickly with poached egg, muffin, coffee, marmalade; sleepless, shaken, she would know what to do, take a stand, have a sensible thought, even—later; not now.

Watching her, Jody wiped his lips, threw down his napkin and stood up. “I’m going for the car. If you’re thinking of letting anybody in, well, look out, that’s all. You don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“Jody, Jody!” she wailed, “I never! I
never
, Jody!”

He walked past her, smiling tightly, and got his other hat. “Oh boy,” he said to the cosmos, “I just hope I run across one of those thugs again, that’s what I hope.” He banged the hat with the edge of his hand, and set it uncharacteristically at a rakish slant on his head. Numbly, she followed him to the door and stood in it, watching him go. He sprang up the steep driveway like a spring lamb. At the top he turned without breaking stride and came straight back—but not springing—scuttling would be the word for it. His face was chalky. He saw her and tried, with some apparent difficulty, to regain his swagger. “Forgot to call the phone company. Get a taxi, too.”

“You can’t,” she said. “I broke the wire.”

“I know, I know!” he snapped waspishly, though she felt he had forgotten it. “I’ll call from Pollard’s.” He glanced quickly over his shoulder, up the driveway, and then plunged across the lawn and through the wet shrubbery toward their only neighbor’s home.

She looked after him in amazement, and then up the drive. Over its crest, she could see the roof of a car, obviously parked in their turn-around. She was curious, but too much was happening; she would not dare climb the drive to see who it was. Instead she went in and closed the door and climbed upstairs, where she could see from the bedroom windows. From this elevation, the car was plainly visible. It wasn’t theirs. Also visible was the ugly giant lounging tiredly against the car, watching the house.

She shrank behind the curtain and put all her left fingers in her mouth.

After a time she saw Jody plunging across the long grass of the vacant acre that lay between their place and Pollard’s. He pushed through the shrubs at the edge of the lawn, stopped to paddle uselessly at his damp trouser-legs and then sidled over to the driveway. He peeped around the hollyhocks until he could look up the drive. The ugly man had apparently detected some movement, for he stood up straight and peered. Jody shrank back behind the hollyhocks.