You Live Once (20 page)

“When Sewell spoke to me today my anger turned me blind. I knew that it was all over in a different sense. I was angered because I had saved him and this was the way he would repay me.”

Pryor stood up slowly. The faces of the listeners changed. The orange fountain pen made a tiny scratching sound as the last few words were taken down.

Pryor turned toward Kruslov. “Now that you know all the reasons, Captain, now that I have explained everything in detail, may I go home? I’ll appreciate it if this is given no publicity.”

I swear that Kruslov was so shocked he almost said yes. He licked his lips and said, “Oh no, Mr. Pryor! You can’t go home.”

“Do you plan to detain me? Here?”

“I’m afraid I’ve got to.”

“Well, get your formalities over as soon as possible then. Will I be able to go home this evening?”

I saw the Kruslov brain begin to tick. He stood up and smiled and said, “Mr. Pryor, rest assured that we’ll take care of all this just as efficiently as we know how. If you’ll come along with me, sir?”

They half bowed to each other. As they went out the door together, Willis Pryor said, “Remember now. No publicity. And I’d like to talk to Jud Sutton as soon as possible. Get him for me, please.”

“Right this way, Mr. Pryor,” Kruslov said gently.

We were all left in the room. Somebody sighed. Then we all filed out of there, not looking at each other. We all shared some nameless guilt. We’d all seen the shining structures fall, the streets decay, the walls crumble. We didn’t want anything to do with each other. Maybe we had all resigned from the human race a little bit.

Young John Olan was standing in the main corridor when I left. Nobody seemed to want me, so I left. A reporter had edged up to me and I had snarled at him. John Olan was studying a pocket chessboard.

“More prepared variations?”

I startled him. He recognized me and smiled at me. “That’s right.”

He jerked his head toward the other end of the corridor, the official end. “He did it? My father and my sister?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

His eyes were dark mirrors, reflecting nothing. His
mouth moved in a quick grimace of pain, wiped out immediately.

He looked back at the board in his hand. I no longer existed. He was back in a special clean geometric world, where the god was reason, where the goddess was logic, where hearts were prisms, cold and true and neatly cut. Perhaps it was a good world to hide in.

I left him and walked slowly to my car in the late afternoon sunshine. A thunder front was rolling up the sky, and the sun was beginning to be misted, and the city was full of an orange light, lambent and ominous.

I missed Dodd’s funeral. Toni drove me out to the airport in my car and I caught flight 818 to New York at one twenty
P.M.
on Monday, in accordance with the terse telegram I had received.

STACE

I went in no mood of capitulation, with no humility, with rather a well banked anger that burned dull and low under the covering coals.

It was a close thing. I went from Kennedy into heavy traffic and got out of the cab in front of the C.P.P. building on Madison near Fiftieth at twenty after five.

The elevator banks were disgorging their full quota of the sharp-eyed girls from the offices. The big sepia photo-mural of the Fall River plant above the directory, across from the elevators, looked just the same. The main offices specialize, through handling and atmosphere, in dwarfing you. A boulder in the field, you become a pebble in a shoe when you hit the topside offices.

I was alone on my ride up to the hushed beige splendor of eighteenth floor reception. A soft-voiced duchess, all prepared to leave her upholstered nest for the day, focused eighteen inches over my head, lifted a forest green phone from the beige formica of a free-form display. desk and confirmed my appointment with a rusty little accent that was entirely delicious. I said I knew where to
go and, the barometer of my spirits dropping steadily, I trudged back through lesser sanctums to the corner office where a golden girl opened the two-inch-thick door to let me in. Homer Stace, Executive Vice-President in Charge of Production, Member of the Board, sat thick and secure with his back to all the glass and a segment of the river, and a distant tug with colors sharp and bright against afternoon smog.

“Sit down, Sewell,” he said. Mr. Stace is a big florid man who started with grease on his hands. Along the way he cultivated ersatz British mannerisms, a look of spurious stupidity, a bumbling jolly manner. He delights in being underestimated. He’s as sharp as a Chicago ice-pick.

Not for me the window dressing, the mannerisms, the jolly bumbling. For me the cold eye, glacial, unearthed somewhere in Greenland and imported frozen in a block of mercury.

I sat.

“What kind of an outrage is going on out there? Exactly what the hell are we taking on these days? Playboys? Sex maniacs? Since when does a responsible position with C.P.P. become window dressing for a night-life career, Sewell? You young social lions sicken me. What kind of stupid God damn reason can you think of to convince me that I ought to keep you on the payroll, even to scrub washrooms?”

It worked like an air injection system. It turned on the blower under my banked fire. I stopped sitting. I stood up and slammed both fists down on his desk top.

“What makes you think I want to stay on your damn payroll?”

He came right up to meet me, nose to nose. “People like you are a dime a dozen, Sewell.”

“Don’t classify me, damn it.”

“I suppose you’re unique!” He bawled that with the monstrous arrogance of a rhino.

“Yes!”

“Irreplaceable?”

“Yes!” I hit his desk again. “I don’t have to work for this outfit. I can work for anybody. I’ll do all right.”

We glared at each other. His voice changed. “Sit down, damn it,” he said softly. We both sat down. He made a quarter turn on his big chair, took a mint out of his desk drawer, tossed it into his mouth, turned a bit further and looked out his special window. I looked at the back of his thick stubborn neck.

Finally he grunted to his feet, crossed to the corner of the office, opened a cabinet and took out a bottle of Irish whisky, half full. He raised it and one eyebrow. “With water,” I said.

He took the ice from a small gas refrigerator with a walnut finish. He made two generous drinks and brought them back, gave me one, spat what was left of his mint into a leather wastebasket.

“Skoal.”

“Skoal.”

He took his sweet time, never looking directly at me. Finally he said, “Sewell, what do you think happens to the young men who are so obviously perfect C.P.P. material?”

“They get to be president some day. The hell with them.”

He took another sip. “Bad guess. They do all right. They get to be plant managers. And they head up various sections. They retire with pleasant pensions and have charming grandchildren.”

“So?”

“Now what happens to the mavericks?”

“You fire them personally.”

He nodded. “I fire a lot of them. A lot of them leave and go with other outfits. We manage to keep a very few. We have to.”

“Why? For comic relief?”

“Because we eventually need them for top management. To lean on the plant managers, the section heads
and all the other ‘almosts.’ Something is wrong with our system, Sewell, with the whole system throughout industry of selecting men and promoting them for those very traits which prevent their reaching the real top—the peak of the hill where it’s damn cold, tough and lonely. For our future success we need to retain, nurture, cherish a few of the offbeat types. Like you.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You aren’t going to get much chance to rest, Sewell. I’m personally going to drive hell out of you. If I make it too rough you can leave, and the hell with you.”

“Look, I …”

“Shut up a minute. In five years, if you last, I’m bringing you in here. Then it will really get rugged. You’ll go back there into Raymond’s job.”

“Thanks.”

He looked at me sourly. “Do you mean that?”

“Not entirely. I earned it.”

“You also earned having the can tied to you.”

“I know that too.”

“Finish your drink.”

I finished it and stood up. We shook hands. He had a smug satisfied gleam in his eye. I realized with surprise that I could even get to like the bastard.

When I reached his office door I looked back. He was looking out his window.

“By the way, I’m marrying my secretary.”

He didn’t move or turn. “I don’t care if you marry a cretin cleaning woman. All I want out of you is fourteen hours a day.”

I shut the door harder than I had to. Tory had waited. I gave him the full report. We got drunk. He put me on a midnight plane. I was at the plant at eight-twenty on Tuesday morning. I married MacRae the following Saturday. We’re going to live at Brookways until they move us to the next town.

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.