John D. MacDonald

End of the Tiger and Other Stories

For Dorothy, friend, ornament, and buffer zone, among other things.

Copyright © 1966 by John D. MacDonald.

Hangover © 1956 by the Hearst Corporation.

The Big Blue © 1949 by Popular Publications, Inc. This story was originally published by Popular Publications under the title “Blue Water Fury.”

End of the Tiger © 1963 by United Newspapers Magazine Corporation. Reprinted from This Week Magazine.

The Trouble with Erica © 1953 by the Hearst Corporation.

Long Shot © 1955 by Popular Publications, Inc.

Looie Follows Me © 1949 by Crowell-Collier Publishing Company.

Blurred View © 1964 by United Newspapers Magazine Corporation. Reprinted from This Week Magazine.

The Loveliest Girl in the World © 1964 by United Newspapers Magazine Corporation. Reprinted from This Week Magazine.

The Bear Trap © 1955 by the Hearst Corporation.

A Romantic Courtesy © 1957 by the Hearst Corporation.

The Fast Loose Money © 1958 by the Hearst Corporation.

The Straw Witch © 1964 by United Newspapers Magazine Corporation. Reprinted from This Week Magazine.

The Trap of Solid Gold © 1960 by The Curtis Publishing Company.

Afternoon of the Hero © 1966 by John D. MacDonald. This story was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post under the title “Funnyman.”

The Singular John D. MacDonald

Dean Koontz

When I was in college, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.

Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.

Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.

I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.

Over the years, I have read every novel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place — mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere — was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.

Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced characters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.

Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more. Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.

In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of Strangers to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that, as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyway, but I took his advice to heart.

In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by — though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.

Hangover

July 1956, Cosmopolitan

He dreamed that he had dropped something, lost something of value in the furnace, and he lay on his side trying to look down at an angle through a little hole, look beyond the flame down into the dark guts of the furnace for what he had lost. But the flame kept pulsing through the hole with a brightness that hurt his eyes, with a heat that parched his face, pulsing with an intermittent husky rasping sound.

With his awakening, the dream became painfully explicable — the pulsing roar was his own harsh breathing, the parched feeling was a consuming thirst, the brightness was transmuted into pain intensely localized behind his eyes. When he opened his eyes, a long slant of early morning sun dazzled him, and he shut his eyes quickly again.

This was a morning time of awareness of discomfort so acute that he had no thought for anything beyond the appraisal of the body and its functions. Though he was dimly aware of psychic discomforts that might later exceed the anguish of the flesh, the immediacy of bodily pain localized his attentions. Even without the horizontal brightness of the sun, he would have known it was early. Long sleep would have muffled the beat of the taxed heart to a softened, sedate, and comfortable rhythm. But it was early and the heart knocked sharply with a violence and in a cadence almost hysterical, so that no matter how he turned his head, he could feel it, a tack hammer chipping away at his mortality.

His thirst was monstrous, undiminished by the random nausea that teased at the back of his throat. His hands and feet were cool, yet where his thighs touched he was sweaty. His body felt clotted, and he knew that he had perspired heavily during the evening, an oily perspiration that left an unpleasant residue when it dried. The pain behind his eyes was a slow bulging and shrinking, in contrapuntal rhythm to the clatter of his heart.

He sat on the edge of the bed, head bowed, eyes squeezed shut, cool trembling fingers resting on his bare knees. He felt weak, nauseated, and acutely depressed.

This was the great joke. This was a hangover. Thing of sly wink, of rueful guffaw. This was death in the morning.

He stood on shaky legs and walked into the bathroom. He turned the cold water on as far as it would go. He drank a full glass greedily. He was refilling the glass when the first spasm came. He turned to the toilet, half-falling, cracking one knee painfully on the tile floor, and knelt there and clutched the edge of the bowl in both hands, hunched, miserable, naked. The water ran in the sink for a long time while he remained there, retching, until nothing more came but flakes of greenish bile. When he stood up, he felt weaker but slightly better. He mopped his face with a damp towel, then drank more water, drank it slowly and carefully, and in great quantity, losing track of the number of glasses. He drank the cold water until his belly was swollen and he could hold no more, but he felt as thirsty as before.

Putting the glass back on the rack, he looked at himself in the mirror. He took a quick, overly casual look, the way one glances at a stranger, the eye returning for a longer look after it is seen that the first glance aroused no undue curiosity. Though his face was grayish, eyes slightly puffy, jaws soiled by beard stubble, the long face with its even undistinguished features looked curiously unmarked in relation to the torment of the body.

The visual reflection was a first step in the reaffirmation of identity. You are Hadley Purvis. You are thirty-nine. Your hair is turning gray with astonishing and disheartening speed.

He turned his back on the bland image, on the face that refused to comprehend his pain. He leaned his buttocks against the chill edge of the sink, and a sudden unbidden image came into his mind, as clear and supernaturally perfect as a colored advertisement in a magazine. It was a shot glass full to the very brim with dark brown bourbon.

By a slow effort of will he caused the image to fade away. Not yet, he thought, and immediately wondered about his instinctive choice of mental phrase. Nonsense. This was a part of the usual morbidity of hangover — to imagine oneself slowly turning into an alcoholic. The rum sour on Sunday mornings had become a ritual with him, condoned by Sarah. And that certainly did not speak of alcoholism. Today was, unhappily, a working day, and it would be twelve-thirty before the first Martini at Mario’s. If anyone had any worries about alcoholism, it was Sarah, and her worries resulted from her lack of knowledge of his job and its requirements. After a man has been drinking for twenty-one years, he does not suddenly become a legitimate cause for the sort of annoying concern Sarah had been showing lately.

In the evening when they were alone before dinner, they would drink, and that certainly did not distress her. She liked her few knocks as well as anyone. Then she had learned somehow that whenever he went to the kitchen to refill their glasses from the Martini jug in the deep freeze, he would have an extra one for himself, opening his throat for it, pouring it down in one smooth, long, silvery gush. By mildness of tone she had trapped him into an admission, then had told him that the very secrecy of it was “significant.” He had tried to explain that his tolerance for alcohol was greater than hers, and that it was easier to do it that way than to listen to her tiresome hints about how many he was having.

Standing there in the bathroom, he could hear the early morning sounds of the city. His hearing seemed unnaturally keen. He realized that it was absurd to stand there and conduct mental arguments with Sarah and become annoyed at her. He reached into the shower stall and turned the faucets and waited until the water was the right temperature before stepping in, just barely warm. He made no attempt at first to bathe. He stood under the roar and thrust of the high nozzle, eyes shut, face tilted up.

As he stood there he began, cautiously, to think of the previous evening. He had much experience in this sort of reconstruction. He reached out with memory timorously, anticipating remorse and self-disgust.

The first part of the evening was, as always, easy to remember. It had been an important evening. He had dressed carefully yesterday morning, knowing that there would not be time to come home and change before going directly from the office to the hotel for the meeting, with its cocktails, dinner, speeches, movie, and unveiling of the new model. Because of the importance of the evening, he had taken it very easy at Mario’s at lunchtime, limiting himself to two Martinis before lunch, conscious of virtue — only to have it spoiled by Bill Hunter’s coming into his office at three in the afternoon, staring at him with both relief and approval and saying, “Glad you didn’t have one of those three-hour lunches, Had. The old man was a little dubious about your joining the group tonight.”

Hadley Purvis had felt suddenly and enormously annoyed. Usually he liked Bill Hunter, despite his aura of opportunism, despite the cautious ambition that had enabled Hunter to become quite close to the head of the agency in a very short time.

“And so you said to him, ‘Mr. Driscoll, if Had Purvis can’t go to the party, I won’t go either.’ And then he broke down.”

He watched Bill Hunter flush. “Not like that, Had. But I’ll tell you what happened. He asked me if I thought you would behave yourself tonight. I said I was certain you realized the importance of the occasion, and I reminded him that the Detroit people know you and like the work you did on the spring campaign. So if you get out of line, it isn’t going to do me any good either.”

“And that’s your primary consideration, naturally.”

Hunter looked at him angrily, helplessly. “Damn it, Had...”

“Keep your little heart from fluttering. I’ll step lightly.”

Bill Hunter left his office. After he was gone, Hadley tried very hard to believe that it had been an amusing little interlude. But he could not. Resentment stayed with him. Resentment at being treated like a child. And he suspected that Hunter had brought it up with Driscoll, saying very casually, “Hope Purvis doesn’t put on a floor show tonight.”

It wasn’t like the old man to have brought it up. He felt that the old man genuinely liked him. They’d had some laughs together. Grown-up laughs, a little beyond the capacity of a boy scout like Hunter.

He had washed up at five, then gone down and shared a cab with Davey Tidmarsh, the only one of the new kids who had been asked to come along. Davey was all hopped up about it. He was a nice kid. Hadley liked him. Davey demanded to know what it would be like, and in the cab Hadley told him.

“We’ll be seriously outnumbered. There’ll be a battalion from Detroit, also the bank people. It will be done with enormous seriousness and a lot of expense. This is a pre-preview. Maybe they’ll have a mockup there. The idea is that they get us all steamed up about the new model. Then, all enthused, we whip up two big promotions. The first promotion is a carnival deal they will use to sell the new models to the dealers and get them all steamed up. That’ll be about four months from now. The second promotion will be the campaign to sell the cars to the public. They’ll make a big fetish of secrecy, Davey. There’ll be uniformed company guards. Armed.”

It was as he had anticipated, only a bit bigger and gaudier than last year. Everything seemed to get bigger and gaudier every year. It was on the top floor of the hotel, in one of the middle-sized convention rooms. They were carefully checked at the door, and each was given a numbered badge to wear. On the left side of the room was sixty feet of bar. Along the right wall was the table where the buffet would be. There was a busy rumble of male conversation, a blue haze of smoke. Hadley nodded and smiled at the people he knew as they worked their way toward the bar. With drink in hand, he went into the next room — after being checked again at the door — to look at the mockup.

Hadley had to admit that it had been done very neatly. The mockup was one-third actual size. It revolved slowly on a chest-high pedestal, a red and white convertible with the door open, with the model of a girl in a swimming suit standing beside it, both model girl and model car bathed in an excellent imitation of sunlight. He looked at the girl first, marveling at how cleverly the sheen of suntanned girl had been duplicated. He looked at the mannekin’s figure and thought at once of Sarah and felt a warm wave of tenderness for her, a feeling that she was his luck and, with her, nothing could ever go wrong.

He looked at the lines of the revolving car and, with the glibness of long practice, he made up phrases that would be suitable for advertising it. He stood aside for a time and watched the manufactured delight on the faces of those who were seeing the model for the first time. He finished his drink and went out to the bar. With the first drink, the last traces of irritation at Bill Hunter disappeared. As soon as he had a fresh drink, he looked Bill up and said, “I’m the man who snarled this afternoon.”

“No harm done,” Hunter said promptly and a bit distantly. “Excuse me, Had. There’s somebody over there I have to say hello to.”

Hadley placed himself at the bar. He was not alone long. Within ten minutes he was the center of a group of six or seven. He relished these times when he was sought out for his entertainment value. The drinks brought him quickly to the point where he was, without effort, amusing. The sharp phrases came quickly, almost without thought. They laughed with him and appreciated him. He felt warm and loved.

He remembered there had been small warnings in the back of his mind, but he had ignored them. He would know when to stop. He told the story about Jimmy and Jackie and the punch card over at Shor’s, and knew he told it well, and knew he was having a fine time, and knew that everything was beautifully under control.

But, beyond that point, memory was faulty. It lost continuity. It became episodic, each scene bright enough, yet separated from other scenes by a grayness he could not penetrate.

He was still at the bar. The audience had dwindled to one, a small man he didn’t know, a man who swayed and clung to the edge of the bar. He was trying to make the small man understand something. He kept shaking his head. Hunter came over to him and took his arm and said, “Had, you’ve got to get something to eat. They’re going to take the buffet away soon.”

“Smile, pardner, when you use that word ‘got.’ ”

“Sit down and I’ll get you a plate.”

“Never let it be said that Hadley Purvis couldn’t cut his own way through a solid wall of buffet.” As Hunter tugged at his arm, Hadley finished his drink, put the glass on the bar with great care, and walked over toward the buffet, shrugging his arm free of Hunter’s grasp. He took a plate and looked at all the food. He had not the slightest desire for food. He looked back. Hunter was watching him. He shrugged and went down the long table.

Then, another memory. Standing there with plate in hand. Looking over and seeing Bill Hunter’s frantic signals. Ignoring him and walking steadily over to where Driscoll sat with some of the top brass from Detroit. He was amused at the apprehensive expression on Driscoll’s face. But he sat down and Driscoll had to introduce him.

Then, later. Dropping something from his fork. Recapturing it and glancing up to trap a look of distaste on the face of the most important man from Detroit, a bald, powerful-looking man with a ruddy face and small bright blue eyes.

He remembered that he started brooding about that look of distaste. The others talked, and he ate doggedly. They think I’m a clown. I’m good enough to keep them laughing, but that’s all. They don’t think I’m capable of deep thought.

He remembered Driscoll’s frown when he broke into the conversation, addressing himself to the bald one from Detroit and taking care to pronounce each word distinctly, without slur.

“That’s a nice-looking mockup. And it is going to make a lot of vehicles look old before their time. The way I see it, we’re in a period of artificially accelerated obsolescence. The honesty has gone out of the American product. The great God is turnover. So all you manufacturers are straining a gut to make a product that wears out, or breaks, or doesn’t last or, like your car, goes out of style. It’s the old game of rooking the consumer. You have your hand in his pocket, and we have our hand in yours.”

He remembered his little speech vividly, and it shocked him. Maybe it was true. But that had not been the time or place to state it, not at this festive meeting, where everybody congratulated each other on what a fine new sparkling product they would be selling. He felt his cheeks grow hot as he remembered his own words. What a thing to say in front of Driscoll! The most abject apologies were going to be in order.

He could not remember the reaction of the man from Detroit, or Driscoll’s immediate reaction. He had no further memories of being at the table. The next episode was back at the bar, a glass in his hand, Hunter beside him speaking so earnestly you could almost see the tears in his eyes. “Good Lord, Had! What did you say? What did you do? I’ve never seen him so upset.”

“Tell him to go do something unspeakable. I just gave them a few clear words of ultimate truth. And now I intend to put some sparkle in that little combo.”

“Leave the music alone. Go home, please. Just go home, Had.”

There was another gap, and then he was arguing with the drummer. The man was curiously disinclined to give up the drums. A waiter gripped his arm.

“What’s your trouble?” Hadley asked him angrily. “I just want to teach this clown how to stay on top of the beat.”

“A gentleman wants to see you, sir. He is by the cloakroom. He asked me to bring you out.”

Then he was by the cloakroom. Driscoll was there. He stood close to Hadley. “Don’t open your mouth, Purvis. Just listen carefully to me while I try to get something through your drunken skull. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“Certainly I can—”

“Shut up! You may have lost the whole shooting match for us. That speech of yours. He told me he wasn’t aware of the fact that I hired Commies. He said that criticisms of the American way of life make him physically ill. Know what I’m going back in and tell him?”

“No.”

“That I got you out here and fired you and sent you home. Get this straight. It’s an attempt to save the contract. Even if it weren’t, I’d still fire you, and I’d do it in person. I thought I would dread it. I’ve known you a long time. I find out, Purvis, that I’m actually enjoying it. It’s such a damn relief to get rid of you. Don’t open your mouth. I wouldn’t take you back if you worked for free. Don’t come back. Don’t come in tomorrow. I’ll have a girl pack your personal stuff. I’ll have it sent to you by messenger along with your check. You’ll get both tomorrow before noon. You’re a clever man, Purvis, but the town is full of clever men who can hold liquor. Goodbye.”

Driscoll turned on his heel and went back into the big room. Hadley remembered that the shock had penetrated the haze of liquor. He remembered that he had stood there, and he had been able to see two men setting up a projector, and all he could think about was how he would tell Sarah and what she would probably say.

And, without transition, he was in the Times Square area on his way home. The sidewalk would tilt unexpectedly, and each time he would take a lurching step to regain his balance. The glare of the lights hurt his eyes. His heart pounded. He felt short of breath.

He stopped and looked in the window of a men’s shop that was still open. The sign on the door said Open Until Midnight. He looked at his watch. It was a little after eleven. He had imagined it to be much later. Suddenly it became imperative to him to prove both to himself and to a stranger that he was not at all drunk. If he could prove that, then he would know that Driscoll had fired him not for drinking, but for his opinions. And would anyone want to keep a job where he was not permitted to have opinions?

He gathered all his forces and looked intently into the shop window. He looked at a necktie. It was a gray wool tie with a tiny figure embroidered in dark red. The little embroidered things were shaped like commas. He decided that he liked it very much. The ties in that corner of the window were priced at three-fifty. He measured his stability, cleared his throat, and went into the shop.

“Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening. I’d like that tie in the window, the gray one on the left with the dark red pattern.”

“Would you please show me which one, sir?”

“Of course.” Hadley pointed it out. The man took a duplicate off a rack.

“Would you like this in a box, or shall I put it in a bag?”

“A bag is all right.”

“It’s a very handsome tie.”

He gave the man a five-dollar bill. The man brought him his change. “Thank you, sir. Good night.”

“Good night.” He walked out steadily, carrying the bag. No one could have done it better. A very orderly purchase. If he ever needed proof of his condition, the clerk would remember him. “Yes, I remember the gentleman. He came in shortly before closing time. He bought a gray tie. Sober? Perhaps he’d had a drink or two. But he was as sober as a judge.”

And somewhere between the shop and home all memory ceased. There was a vague something about a quarrel with Sarah, but it was not at all clear. Perhaps because the homecoming scene had become too frequent for them.

He dried himself vigorously on a harsh towel and went into the bedroom. When he thought of the lost job, he felt quick panic. Another one wouldn’t be easy to find. One just as good might be impossible. It was a profession that fed on gossip.

Maybe it was a good thing. It would force a change on them. Maybe a new city, a new way of life. Maybe they could regain something that they had lost in the last year or so. But he knew he whistled in the dark. He was afraid. This was the worst of all mornings-after.

Yet even that realization was diffused by the peculiar aroma of unreality that clung to all his hangover mornings. Dreams were always vivid, so vivid that they became confused with reality. With care, he studied the texture of the memory of Driscoll’s face and found therein a lessening of his hope that it could have been dreamed.

He went into his bedroom and took fresh underwear from the drawer. He found himself thinking about the purchase of the necktie again. It seemed strange that the purchase should have such retroactive importance. The clothing he had worn was where he had dropped it beside his bed. He picked it up. He emptied the pockets of the suit. There was a skein of dried vomit on the lapel of the suit. He could not remember having been ill. There was a triangular tear in the left knee of the trousers, and he noticed for the first time an abrasion on his bare knee. He could not remember having fallen. The necktie was not in the suit pocket. He began to wonder whether he had dreamed about the necktie. In the back of his mind was a ghost image of some other dream about a necktie.

He decided that he would go to the office. He did not see what else he could do. If his memory of what Driscoll had said was accurate, maybe by now Driscoll would have relented. When he went to select a necktie after he had shaved carefully, he looked for the new one on the rack. It was not there. As he was tying the one he had selected he noticed a wadded piece of paper on the floor beside his wastebasket. He picked it up, spread it open, read the name of the shop on it, and knew that the purchase of the tie had been real.

By the time he was completely dressed, it still was not eight o’clock. He felt unwell, though the sharpness of the headache was dulled. His hands were shaky. His legs felt empty and weak.

It was time to face Sarah. He knew that he had seen her the previous evening. Probably she had been in bed, had heard him come in, had gotten up as was her custom and, no doubt, there had been a scene. He hoped he had not told her of losing the job. Yet, if it had been a dream, he could not have told her. If he had told her, it would be proof that it had not been a dream. He went through the bathroom into her bedroom, moving quietly. Her bed had been slept in, turned back where she had gotten out.

He went down the short hall to the small kitchen. Sarah was not there. He began to wonder about her. Surely the quarrel could not have been so bad that she had dressed and left. He measured coffee into the top of the percolator and put it over a low gas flame. He mixed frozen juice and drank a large glass. The apartment seemed uncannily quiet. He poured another glass, drank half of it, and walked up the hallway to the living room.

Stopping in the doorway, he saw the necktie, recognized the small pattern. He stood there, glass in hand, and looked at the tie. It was tightly knotted. And above the knot, resting on the arm of the chair, was the still, unspeakable face of Sarah, a face the shiny hue of fresh eggplant.

The Big Blue

I walked down the length of the curved concrete pier at Acapulco, passing the charter boats getting ready to take off across the sparkling blue morning water after the sail and the marlin.

Pedro Martinez, skipper of the shabby-looking Orizaba, was standing on the pier coiling a line. I have gone out many times with Pedro during the season for the past five years. Other craft are prettier, but Pedro’s equipment is good, and he knows where the fish can be found. Pedro did not look happy. Not at all.

Lew Wolta sat in one of the two stern fishing chairs half under the canopy. He looked up at me, waved the half-empty bottle of beer in his big hand, and said, “What the hell kept you, Thompson?”

I had met Wolta the afternoon before. He and his friend, Jimmy Gerran, had stepped up to Pedro to sew him up for the next day at the same time I did. We had joined forces. I knew that Wolta had wanted the Orizaba because he had seen the four flags flying and the hard, lean, black bodies of the two sails on the tiny deck forward of the cabin.

When we had gone across the street to seal the bargain over a beer, I had begun to regret my quick decision. Wolta was a tall, hard, heavy-shouldered man in his late thirties with a huge voice, white teeth gleaming in a constant grin, and washed-out eyes that never smiled at all. He kept up a running chatter, most of which seemed designed to inflict hurt on the younger, frailer Jimmy Gerran, a quiet lad with a humble manner.

Over the beer, Wolta said, “Yeah, I ran into Jimmy up in Taxco, and it was pretty obvious that he needed somebody to get him out of his daze. Hell, I’ve never been in this gook country before, but I’ve got a nose for fun. Leave Jimmy alone and he’d spend all his time walking around the streets.”

At that he had slapped Gerran roughly on the shoulder. “Tomorrow we hook a sail, boy, and it’ll make a man out of you.”

Pedro stepped down onto the fantail, and I handed him my lunch and equipment. Pedro said, in quick, slurred Spanish, “This man talks to me, Señor Thompson, as if I were his gardener.”

“What did he say?” Wolta asked suspiciously.

“He said that he thinks we’ll have a good day.”

“That’s fine!” Wolta said, his eyes still holding a glint of mistrust. “How’d you learn this language?”

“I live here,” I said shortly. “Where’s Gerran?”

“I sent Jimmy after cigarettes. Hope he can find his way back to the boat. Here he comes now.”

Jimmy gave me a shy smile and said good morning as he climbed down into the boat. Pedro’s two hands were aboard — his engineer and his sailor. The sailor went forward and got the anchor line. The marine engine chuckled deeply as Pedro moved ahead away from the dock. We were about fifth or sixth away from the dock.

Wolta examined the heavy boat rods curiously. He fingered the gimbal set into the front of the chair. He said, “You set the rod butt in this thing, eh? Universal joint.”

Jimmy said, “I’ve never done this before. What happens, Mr. Thompson?”

“You sit and hold the rod. Your bait, a fish about eight inches long with the hook sewed into it, will ride the surface about fifty feet astern. See, the sailor’s dropping the bamboo outriggers now. The line will run taut from your bait to a heavy clothespin at the tip of the outrigger. Then there’ll be twenty or so feet of slack between the clothespin and the tip of your rod. The sail’ll come up and whack the fish with his bill. That’s to kill it. It’ll knock the line out of the clothespin, and the fish will lie dead on the water while we keep moving. Then the sail’ll grab it. As soon as the slack is all gone, hold tight and hit him three or four times. Not hard. Like this.” I took the rod and showed him.

“How will I know if he’s hooked?” Jimmy asked.

Wolta roared. “He’ll rise up and talk to you, boy. He’ll come up and tell you all about it.”

Jimmy flushed. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Thompson.”

I was assembling my equipment. For sail I use a five-foot, five-ounce tip, 4/0 star drag reel carrying five hundred yards of 6-thread, 18-pound test line. Wolta looked on curiously. He said, “That’s a lot lighter outfit than these, Thompson.” I nodded. The boat rods carry 32-thread line, 14/0 drag reels. Wolta said, “That rod won’t fit in the gimbal, will it?”

“No,” I said shortly.

Wolta frowned. “What the hell! If you can use that stuff, why should we fish with rope and crowbars?”

I said, “If you never fished for sail before and if you hooked one with this equipment, you’d have a thousand to one chance of bringing him in. He’d break your line or your tip every time.”

Wolta gave me that grin. “I guess you know what you’re talking about,” he said.

The bait was all sewed. It was taken off the ice, and Pedro helped rig the lines. As soon as we rounded the headlands, the bait went out. I said, “You two fish. As soon as you’ve hooked one, the other man reels in. Fast. I’ll take the place of whoever hooks the first one.”

“Hooks or catches,” Wolta said suspiciously.

I looked him squarely in the eyes. “Hooks!” I said.

“Okay, okay,” he mumbled, turning away. I had learned something interesting about Lew Wolta.

The first half hour was dull. Pedro headed straight out, and the shore line began to recede; the dusty brown hills began to appear behind the green hills that encircle Acapulco. The swell was heavy. I watched both Jimmy and Wolta and saw with relief that neither of them seemed conscious of the movement of the boat. A seasick man aboard spoils my pleasure in the day, as I know how badly he wants to return to the stability of the land.

The bait danced and skittered astern, taking off into the air at the crests of the waves, sometimes going under the surface for a dozen yards.

Wolta called for more beer and called loudly again as the sailor was uncapping the bottle.

The engineer, acting as lookout, yelled and pointed. Pedro took a quick look and heeled the boat around. The sail was a dust brown shape dimly seen a few inches under the surge of the blue sea.

We dragged the bait by him, and he seemed to shake himself, move in a big circle, come in on the bait with arrowlike speed. He was headed for Gerran’s bait. For a moment the sail knifed the water a few yards behind the bait and then there was a boiling spot on the flank of a wave and the line snapped out of Gerran’s clothespin.

I watched the line tauten as Pedro cut speed.

“Now!” I said.

Jimmy hit him just a shade late, but hit him with the right force. The line whined out of the reel as the sail, about seventy pounds of angry, startled temper, walked up into the air, three feet of daylight showing under his bullet-lean tail.

Jimmy gasped. The sail jumped high again, ten yards farther. High in the air he shook his head, and we saw the bait snap free and fall out in a long arc. The fish was off the hook and, somewhere under the surface of the sea, he was heading for distant parts.

There was that letdown of tension that always comes with a lost fish.

“Absolutely beautiful!” Jimmy said softly.

Wolta gave his hoarse laugh. “Absolutely butter-fingered, pal. You had him and you lost him.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jimmy said.

“I’d have liked to see him boated,” Wolta said. “What the hell good is it to look at a fish?”

Pedro smiled at Jimmy and said, in his thick English, “Bad luck. Next time you get heem.” Then he turned to Wolta. “You reel in too slow, meester. Faster next time, eh?”

Wolta, smiling, said, “You run your boat, pop. I’ll reel in like I damn well please.”

I threw my bait out over the side toward the stern. I was learning about Wolta. I said in Spanish to Pedro, “This one is all mouth, my friend.” I said to Wolta, “I just told him that if I hook a fish, he’s to cut your line if you don’t bring it in fast enough.”

Wolta said, “Okay, okay. Don’t get in a sweat, Thompson.”

I sat down. I had the drag off, my thumb on the spool. Jimmy said, behind me, “You don’t use the clothespin?”

“No. When I get a strike, I let the line run free, then throw on the drag when I hit him. It’s harder to do it right this way, but when you get onto it, you can figure the time to fit the way each fish hits.”

Wolta said, a faint sneer in his tone, “Don’t bother the expert, Jimmy.”

I let that one pass.

Ten minutes later Wolta said, “I hear it takes about a half hour, forty minutes to boat one with the equipment I’m using. How long does it take with your rig?”

“Longer. Maybe an hour with the same size fish.”

He still wore the smile. He said, “That’s great! I pay a third of the boat the same as you and then when you hook one, I got to stop fishing for an hour.”

“That’s right,” I said mildly.

Pedro had reached the area he liked. He began to zig-zag back and forth across the area. The Spanish word for that maneuver is, very neatly, the same as the Spanish word for eel.

I was first to see the fish coming in toward Wolta’s bait. I said, “One coming up.” Pedro slowed a little as Wolta tensed. It was as unreasonable as any sailfish. It cut by Wolta’s bait and, instead of hitting mine first to kill it, it gulped it whole. It was one very hungry fish. I hit it immediately.

When it jumped, I saw that it was probably a shade smaller than the one Jimmy had hooked. As it ran I saw Wolta reeling in rapidly.

Any sailfish could find freedom if it had the sense to run on a straight line, take all the line, break the line at the end of the run. But five hundred yards is a long way to go in a straight line. I stood in front of the chair. When it jumped, I kept the line taut, pulling it off balance, slapping it down against the sea before it could shake its head.

It headed for the Orient; then, as I was getting worried about the line, it began to cut around in a vast circle, and I won back a little line. It stopped jumping. Bringing in the line was the usual tough problem. A hundred yards from the boat and twenty minutes later it walked on its tail for a good dozen yards and then, as I had expected, it sounded. I horsed it up, a few feet at a time. It made one more jump close to the boat and then came in, dog weary. Pedro handled the gaff. The sailor grasped the bill, and Pedro belted it across the back of the neck with the weighted club.

The sail came in over the transom, glistening with a hundred impossibly beautiful irridescent colors. Jimmy squatted and watched the colors slowly fade until the fish became the usual shining gunmetal black of the dead sail. He turned glowing eyes up toward me and said, “That was wonderful!”

“The experts are always wonderful,” Wolta said. He grinned at me. “Do I have your permission to fish?”

He got his line in first. Fresh bait was put on the other line, and Jimmy took his place in the chair. It was not over five minutes later that a sail, without warning, came up from downstairs and slapped Wolta’s bait. I was behind his chair. He waited the proper time until the line straightened and then hit, much too hard. But it didn’t do any harm because he wasn’t hitting against the fish. The sail was waiting longer than usual.

Instinctively I reached down over Wolta’s shoulder and released the drag so the spool would run free, allowing the bait to remain dead on the water.

Wolta pushed my hand away hard, saying in a tight voice, “Catch your own fish, Doc.”

It was a comedy of errors. The fish took the bait, and then Wolta tried to hit it with the drag off and without his thumb on the spool. The spool whined and the line snarled. Pedro came running and grasped the line ahead of the rod and yanked hard three times, setting the hook. The fish went high. It was one fine sail. I guessed it as close to ninety pounds. The world’s record is 106 pounds off Miami in 1929. Pedro managed to click the drag back on and ripped at the snarled line while the sail jumped wildly, lashing, fighting.

With the snarl gone, the fish hit the end of the slack with a jar that made Wolta grunt and yanked his arms straight, yanked the rod tip down. When the fish jumped again, Wolta horsed it so hard that he spun the sail in the air.

I yelled at him, “You’ll bust the line!”

He worked with a tight hard grin on his face. The sail took line on him, but took it with the full drag and with Wolta’s hard thumb on the spool. I don’t know why the line didn’t break. It would test at 96 pounds.

I’ll say this for Wolta. He was a powerful man. Cords like cables stood out on his brown forearms as he horsed the fish toward the boat. Pedro began to look worried. Even boating a tired fish is rugged work. Last year, just as a man reached for the bill, the fish took one more leap, freeing himself of the gaff. The bill entered the brain of the sailor through his left eye. And Pedro saw himself trying to boat a fish that still had a lot of fight left.

Pedro worked the boat, turning it perfectly, keeping it so that Wolta had free play of the fish. The fish made short hard savage lunges close to the boat. Pedro left the wheel, handled the gaff himself, sunk it neatly. The fish gave a convulsive heave that nearly lifted Pedro over the side. The sailor went half over the rail, grasped the bill with his gloved hand, and slammed the fish twice behind the eyes. Pedro heaved it aboard.

The fish lay there. Reflex muscles made it quiver. Wolta grabbed the club from the sailor and hit it again. It was an understandable thing to do. But the way he did it, the way the club smashed against the hard flesh, revealed something savage and soul-naked about the man. Pedro looked disgusted.

Wolta turned to me and said, “I got it in spite of you. Next time keep your damn hands off my rod and reel, mister.”

I said, “Wake up, Wolta. If I hadn’t thrown off the drag, you wouldn’t even have a fish. He didn’t have the bait when you hit him. I let the bait free so that it stayed back there. You kept me from putting the drag back on. That’s why your line snarled.”

He smiled at me. His pale eyes still held anger. “If you say so, expert. Anyway, this one will outweigh yours.” He kicked the dead fish. I didn’t like that, and neither did Pedro. A sail is an honorable opponent, a brave fish, a gentleman of the sea. Even dead he isn’t to be kicked.

“It probably will,” I said.

We had the two flags up for the two sails. I took Wolta’s place while he went inside to have another beer. I had noticed that his thumb was raw where he had pressed it against the escaping line.

Jimmy Gerran dropped his bait back into the water. Wolta hollered out, “Both the men have got a fish, kid. Now let’s see if you can lose another one.” He laughed hugely. Jimmy smiled weakly. I smiled not at all.

We fished without result for over an hour and then we ate. Even without another strike, it would have been a good day. But I was pulling for Jimmy to latch onto one. And I had a hunch that when he did, he’d do a better job than Wolta had. Only Wolta seemed oblivious of the fact that enormous luck had kept his line from snapping.

We were out a good dozen miles, and the sun was almost directly overhead, making a dazzling glare on the blue sea.

The time went by slowly. Wolta said, “Somebody catch something. I want some more fishing.” He waited a few minutes. He said, “Jimmy, if you don’t have anything by three o’clock, I’m taking over.”

I said, “Don’t you think we ought to stick to the rules?”

“Okay, Jimmy?” Wolta said. “Three o’clock?”

Jimmy didn’t look at me. He said, “Sure, Lew.”

The older man had him buffaloed. I knew the signs. I liked Gerran. So all I could do was to think that it was just too bad.

While I was wondering how Gerran got himself tied up with Wolta, Pedro hissed and said in Spanish, “There is a monstrous fish to starboard, senor.”

I searched the sea until I saw it. It was too close. There wasn’t time for me to reel in and change to the boat rod. This fish wasn’t going to be brought in on my tackle.

For a moment I had a yen to try for him, anyway. But I reeled in quickly.

Wolta said, “What’s up? Why’re you reeling in?”

At first the sun was in my eyes. And then I saw him coming in like a freight train. He slapped Jimmy’s bait out of the water. It fell dead, free of the clothespin, and the fish took it. Jimmy hit it perfectly, four times. The huge fish was on his way out to sea when he felt a nasty little jab inside his jaw. He felt a jab and a tugging weight. To free himself of it, he went upstairs. He went up in a shower of spray — five hundred pounds of blue marlin.

Wolta yelled in astonishment. A wide grin split Pedro’s face. The hands gabbled in excitement. There aren’t many fish like that one off Acapulco. Jimmy didn’t give him any slack when he jumped again and again. Then the big blue headed for off and beyond, and the reel sang a high shrill song of irresistible power.

Jimmy should have been using a 30 ounce tip, a 16/0 reel and 54-thread line. In relation to the blue, his tackle was as relatively light as mine was for sail. Jimmy held the rod and gave us one taut, startled look as Pedro and I grabbed the straps and strapped him to the chair.

The reel continued to sing, and the line going into the water was a white hissing streak. I began to pray to Aztec gods for the big fish to get tired of that straight line. Pedro was back at the wheel. He jammed it into reverse and backed along the line of flight of the fish. The powersong diminished in pitch a few notes, but still the monster drove on, trying to run from the pain in his jaw. He made a leap a full fifteen hundred feet from the boat. He was so far away that he looked like a minnow. Pedro stopped backing instantly to keep from piling up slack.

Jimmy began to pull on the fish. It was going at right angles to the boat. Pedro kept the boat in a small turn to keep the fish centered over the stern. With both hands on the rod, Jimmy pulled slowly, pulling the rod from a horizontal to a vertical position. Then, as he lowered it quickly, he reeled in a few feet of the precious line. It was heartbreakingly slow compared to the speed at which it had gone out. Fifty times he strained to pull up on the rod, gaining a few feet each time, and then the fish, undiminished in power, took it all away from him again.

We were covering a lot of ground. Every time the fish took off, Pedro would keep after it, conserving that precious line. Once the spool showed as the fish stopped his run and jumped.

I glanced at my wristwatch. Forty minutes so far. The sweat poured off Jimmy Gerran, and his shirt looked as though he had been doused with a bucket of water. I kept encouraging him in low tones. I knew what the fight was taking out of him. Heave up and reel in, heave up and reel in. Minute after minute.

Then the fish came like an express train, right for the boat, its miniature sail cutting the water. The line came fast then. It passed the boat within fifty feet and went on out in the opposite direction. I was afraid of what would happen when it hit the end of the temporary slack. Jimmy was smart enough to stop reeling and wait, rod level. The spool jumped from complete stillness into whining speed as the line went out. But this time the fish turned and tail-walked some three hundred yards from the boat.

Once again the laborious process began. When I saw the blood on Jimmy’s wrist I knew what the blisters were doing to his hands. His face was set and death-pale, and there was more blood on his lower lip.

Wolta sat in the other chair and said in a wheedling voice, “Kid, you’re bushed. You’re not tough enough for that baby. Next time you get a chance, slip the rod over here. Old Lew’ll bring him in for you.”

The kid didn’t answer, but he didn’t seem to be working so hard on the fish. I know the feeling. I’ve been hooked into fish who have almost convinced me that it is impossible to bring them in.

Yet he worked on, his arms trembling each time he pulled. I looked at my watch. An hour and fifteen minutes of heartbreaking, muscle-ripping, back-bending labor.

“Come on, Jimmy. Hand it over,” Wolta said. I wanted to tell him to shut his face. But it was the kid’s problem, not mine.

Jimmy began to rest for little intervals when he could have been regaining line. But the big marlin wasn’t as eager as he had been. He was fighting doggedly, but without that first, wild, reckless speed.

Wolta said, “Tell you what. I’ll slip into your chair and you slip out. Take the rod butt out of the gimmick just long enough to slip your leg under.”

Jimmy made no objection. I moved back. Wolta came over and began to fumble with the buckle on one of the straps. Jimmy sat without trying to regain line.

The fish was about a hundred and seventy yards out. Suddenly his first fury seemed to come back to him and the fish shot out of the water at an angle, covering what seemed to be twenty yards in a straight line, leaning up out of the water at an angle, dancing on his tail, lashing the sea to foam with his enormous tail.

I saw Jimmy’s hands tight on the rod, saw the dried blood on his wrist. “Lay off, Wolta,” he said thickly, hardly speaking above a whisper.

Wolta laughed his great gusty laugh and continued to work on the buckle. Jimmy told him to lay off again. Wolta paid no attention, and only said, “I can bring that big baby in.”

The fish was taking out line slowly. Jimmy took his right hand off the rod butt, swung it in a short hard arc. His fist hit Wolta in the mouth. Wolta took two stumbling steps back and sat down hard. Jimmy didn’t even look around. He began to fight back a few feet of line at a time. Wolta got up with a roar deep in his throat. For once that mechanical smile was gone from his bruised lips. He started toward Jimmy, big fists clenched.

The sailor, a hundred-and-twenty-pound Mexican with dark soft eyes, suddenly appeared between Jimmy and Wolta. He looked mildly at Wolta, and his hand was on the haft of his belt knife. Wolta stopped as though he had run into a wall.

He gave me a mechanical smile and said, “Okay, okay. Let the kid lose the fish.”

Jimmy labored on. He looked as though he would keel over from exhaustion, sag unconscious in the harness. But somewhere he found the strength to match the wild courage of the fish.

One hundred and fifty yards. One hundred and twenty. One hundred. And he had been on the fish for over two hours. When the fish was within seventy feet of the boat, it spun and went on out again, but not more than a hundred yards. I heard Jimmy’s harsh sob as he began once more to bring it in. The marlin sounded, going down two hundred feet, lying there like a stone. Jimmy brought it up, foot by foot. The blue came up the last thirty feet at enormous speed and shot high into the air, seeming to hang over the boat for an instant, living beauty against the deep blue of the sky. When it hit the water, the spray shot up against us.

It came in slowly from twenty yards, lolling in the water, rolling to show its belly, all fight suddenly gone.

Two hours and forty-three minutes. Pedro gaffed it and it was killed and the sailor with a line around him went down into the sea and got a line on the fish, got a firm loop around the waist of the tail.

Wolta had to be asked to get on the line with us. Jimmy sagged limply in the harness, his eyes half closed, his hands hanging limp. A heavy drop of blood fell from the palm of his hand to the deck. We got the monster over the side. It was the biggest blue I had ever seen. Not record of course. Record is 737 pounds, Bimini, 1919.

Wolta made no sound of praise. Phlegmatic Pedro forgot himself so far as to pound Jimmy on his tired back with a brown fist, saying, “Muy hombre! Muy hombre!”

Literally translated it means, “Very man.” But the sense is, “You are one hell of a man!”

We unstrapped Jimmy, and I actually had to help him in to the bunk. He gave me a weak, tired grin. We headed in.

Wolta said, “How about letting me fish on the way in.”

Pedro said, “Too late, meester.”

Wolta said, “Lot of fishing I got today. Just about one damn hour.”

“You got yourself a big sail,” I said.

The blue dwarfed our two sail. Wolta snorted and went and got a beer out of the ice locker.

Boating the blue should have been the high point of the day. Or even that punch in the mouth. But it wasn’t.

The high point came after we were on the pier. We were the last boat in. Dusk was coming. A man waits near the pier by the big scaffolding where they hang up the fish. He takes pictures, good pictures, for a moderate fee.

The crowd was beginning to drift away. They came back in a hurry when the big blue was hauled up onto the pier. They came back and gasped and gabbled and asked questions.

Wolta answered the questions. Wolta stuck out his chest. Though he didn’t have the nerve to say so, he answered the questions in such a way that the crowd was led to believe that it was his fish.

The line was thrown over the scaffolding and it took four men to haul the blue clear of the ground. Pedro brought the rods up, leaned them against the side of the scaffolding. The blue was in the middle with the two sails on either side.

The man had his camera set up. I wasn’t interested in being in a picture with Wolta. The crowd got back out of the line of the picture. Wolta put his heavy arm on Jimmy’s shoulder and said to the crowd at large, “Tomorrow the kid and I are going out and get another one.” And he laughed.

Somehow he had edged over so that he was closer to the blue than Jimmy was. I smiled wryly as I thought of Wolta showing copies of the picture to his friends.

Jimmy said tightly, “Hold it!” He held up his hand. The photographer ducked out from under his black cloth looking puzzled.

Jimmy shrugged Wolta’s arm off his shoulder. He said, “Wolta, we aren’t going out tomorrow or any other day. Together. And suppose you have your own picture taken with your own fish and get the hell away from mine!”

The crowd was hushed and expectant. A woman giggled. Wolta looked pale and dangerous. He said, “Kid, you shouldn’t talk that way to me. I’m warning you!”

Jimmy doubled one of his torn hands and said, “Move off!”

Wolta slowly relaxed. “Okay, okay. If that’s the way you want it.” He went off into the crowd.

Jimmy looked directly at me and said, “Mr. Thompson, I’d like you in this picture and Pedro and the other two men.”

I spoke to Pedro. We stepped into the picture.

Just before the camera clicked, I glanced at Jimmy beside me. Tears of anger still stood in his eyes, but his chin was up and he was smiling.

I still have the picture. It’s before me right now. And when I look at the expression on Jimmy’s face, I’m reminded of the expressions I saw on many faces several years ago...

The faces of the men when we dropped out of the sky into that prison camp in the Philippines and liberated them.

End of the Tiger

I saw Tiger Shaw the other day. He didn’t recognize me. There’s no reason why he should. When he was going with my big sister Christine, I was just one of the swarm of little brothers and sisters who knew enough not to get too close to him or you’d get a Dutch rub with those big knuckles.

I saw him in a narrow street in town, unloading a truck into a warehouse, tattoos on his big meaty arms, his belly grown big as a sack of cement, all of him looking sour and surly and dispirited. It seemed too bad, because he was a beautiful young man back when he was one of the best athletes they ever had in the high school. He lasted a year in college before he got into a scandal about throwing games, and they let him go into the army.

Christine and Tiger were a pair of beautiful people that summer.

There were seven of us children in all. Now there are six, and when we all get together with all our wives and husbands and kids, we think of Bunny and are saddened, because he was the littlest one of all and dear to us. The times of getting together are rare because we’re scattered now. Christine’s husband teaches at the University of Toronto. Her eldest is twelve. All the marriages are pretty good. Mine is fine.

And when we get together, one of the things we always do is to tell grandfather stories. There are a lot of them. He raised us — he and our mother. He was a big wild random old man, very partial to dramatic scenes. At least half the things he did made absolutely no sense to us as children. He never explained. He just lived according to his unpredictable instincts. But it is strange how, as time goes by, we begin to see how some of the nonsense things made sense.

Until the day he died, I don’t think we all ever really forgave him about the goose. Yesterday, when I saw Tiger Shaw, I wished that my grandfather had at least tried to explain about Gretchen. That was the name of the goose.

That May, the summer Christine and Tiger were in love, Nan, the youngest sister, bought the baby goose from a farm up the road for ninety cents saved out of her allowance. For about three days it belonged to her, and then it belonged to all of us and owned the pond out in the side yard. We kids were all her fellow geese, and she plodded along behind us, making small nervous sounds about all the dangers the world holds for an unwary goose. She was blazing white and took excellent care of herself with that clever serrated bill. Anybody who rowed the skiff around the pond had Gretchen aboard before they could even launch it, standing in the bow, honking her pleasure.

By July Gretchen was of pretty good size, and she was enchanted with Christine’s long golden hair. Christine would sit, and Gretchen would preen that hair, never tugging or hurting, making little chortling sounds in her throat. We all learned Gretchen’s likes and dislikes. She could be patted a little but not very much. She was nervous about the night, ignored cats, despised dogs, and would bow very low in ceremonious oriental greeting when anyone approached.

Tiger was at our place a lot that summer. He was a hero, of course, huge and golden. But we quickly learned wariness. He was quick and he knew the places that hurt. And he would roar with laughter, and we, out of pride, would laugh with him, though eyes might be stinging.

I remember those long summer dusks after the evening meal before the littlest ones had to be shooed off to bed. We’d all be out in the side yard, and on the side porch, and Gretchen would come padding up across the yard from the pond giving oriental greetings.

One of the grandfather stories we don’t tell is about Tiger and the goose.

Gretchen was wary of Tiger Shaw, and it seemed to be a plausible instinct. As I remember that evening, Tiger was going to take Christine to some sort of barn dance just over the county line. Christine had on a blue dress with little white flowers. Her hair was brushed to a soft gleam. In the country fashion, Tiger had to stay around for a little time before taking her away into the gathering dusk, going down the road with her in that car of his that made a snarling sound that faded into the distance, sounding as it died away like a bee buzzing nearby.

We kids were fooling around in the yard. Sheila was acting wistful. She was near to her dating time, when the young men would be coming for her. Our grandfather was on the porch in the rocker, and off in the east, by the far hills, there was darkness and a pink inaudible pulse of lightning.

Tiger and Christine were sitting a few feet apart, and Gretchen plodded up behind them, behind the low bench, and with a big whack of her white wings made an awkward hop up onto the bench, leaned the adoring curve of her neck toward Christine, and began, with little chucklings, to preen the fine strands of the golden hair.

We were all watching it, thinking uneasily that Gretchen was uncommonly close to Tiger Shaw. He was very quick for such a big muscly person, quick without looking quick. And he was seldom without a cud of gum in his jaws. That is one of the memories of him, the knots working at the jaw corners and the smell of spearmint.

He reached and took Gretchen high on the neck with one hand, slipped the gum out of his mouth with the other, and when she opened her bill to yawp her protest, he thumbed the wad of gum up into the hollow of the top of her beak. He released her at once and began to roar with laughter.

We all laughed. It was so ridiculous. Gretchen closed her bill and it stuck. She looked astonished. She began to shake her head the way you shake your hand to shake moisture from your fingertips. She shook herself dizzy and fell sprawling off the bench. Then she began to run in circles in the yard, wings laboring, trying somehow to run away from this terrible impasse. Our nervous laughter turned shrill, climbing toward the edge of hysteria.

Above it all, above Tiger’s laughter and our shrillness, I heard the grandfather laugh, the drum-deep bellowing of him as he came down off the porch. Soon, in terror, Gretchen began driving that precious bill against things, against posts and stones, against places where the ground was hard. Then we were all howling in a shared panic, in heartbreak and concern. Because we all knew what that bill was to her — knife and fork, comb and brush, weapon, tool, sieve, bug-catcher.

So we tried to run to catch her, but my grandfather swept us back with his huge arms, laughing, bellowing at us that it was funny. I hated him then. I hated the three of them — my grandfather, Tiger, and Christine.

Because, you see, Christine was laughing, too. She stood up, hunched over, laughing. Grandfather and Tiger beat each other on the back and roared with delight at the deranged scrabbling terrorized creature, telling each other how funny it was. Christine moved slowly toward the steps, shrieking laughter, and as she hobbled up the steps it changed to a keening, wailing sound, the tears running down her face.

My grandfather’s roaring laughter stopped abruptly as the screen door banged behind her, and he turned quickly away from the still hilarious Tiger.

Following grandfather’s orders, we caught Gretchen, wrapped her firmly in burlap, and took her to the porch. Grandfather gently pried the bruised bill open and, holding Gretchen’s head against his thigh, skillfully worked the sticky mass out of the concavity. Tiger stood watching, chuckling reminiscently, while we hiccuped in the aftermath of tears. When she was as clean as he could get her, my grandfather put her down and took the sacking off her. She scrambled to her feet and went headlong for the safety of her beloved pond, half running, half flying.

Tiger said it was time to go and sent Sheila in to get Christine. Sheila came out in a few moments and said Christine had a headache and couldn’t go. Tiger hung around for a little while, acting sort of ugly. And then he went off, and the snarling drone of his car faded quickly. We went down to the pond. Gretchen was soiled and she had some broken feathers, but she looked unapproachably white there in the blue dusk, floating out in the middle, making no sound for us.

There were no more boat rides, no more preening the golden hair of the big sister, no more chuckling sound behind us when we walked across the yard, no more visits in the dusk. We told each other that if grandfather had let us help her before she became too terrified, it might have been all right, and we might have kept her trust.

We never quite forgave our grandfather for that. Maybe he wasn’t interested in our kind of forgiveness. He was a wild and random old man, and sometimes he made no sense at all. But when I saw Tiger the other day, I suddenly realized that if we’d helped Gretchen quickly, then it might have been just one of Tiger’s little jokes, and Christine would have gone off with him that night and other nights, and the world might be quite different for her now. By delaying us, grandfather showed her Tiger’s kind of laughter, of which there is often too much in the world.

But he never explained.

The Trouble with Erica

September 1953, Cosmopolitan

Erica, leaning forward from the back seat, told Mack where to turn. He was aware of the fragrance of her and thought he could feel the touch of her breath against the side of his throat. “Now just two more blocks, Mack, and it will be on the right with the porch lights on.” She hesitated over calling him Mack. When the evening had started, it had been Mr. Landers and Miss Holmes, Marie, beside Mack, leaned forward and punched the lighter in. Mack felt a mild amusement. Marie had gone a little sour on the evening.

It was a narrow street, down at the heels. The house was small, and Mack guessed it probably looked less defeated at night with the lights on than during the day.

He stopped, and Marie hitched toward him and pulled the back of her seat forward so that Quent and Erica could get out. Erica turned gravely once she was out of the car and said in her husky voice, “It was nice, people. Nice to meet you, Marie, and you, Mack. I hope I’ll see you soon again.”

“No doubt of that,” Quent said with that effervescence that had been his all evening. “Be right back,” he said.

They sat with the motor running. Quent walked Erica up to her door. Mack heard Marie sniff. He tapped a cigarette on the horn ring and lit it. “Pretty girl,” he said casually.

“Oh, sure,” Marie said.

“Don’t you like her, baby?”

“She’s just fine, Mack. Just absolutely fine. I haven’t had such a gay little evening since I was a Girl Reserve.” She imitated Erica’s voice, saying, “Just a little dry sherry, please. The music is quite loud here, isn’t it?”

Mack glanced at the porch. Erica and Quent were standing under the porch light. He saw them shake hands and nearly choked. “Like going back to when I was seventeen,” he said wonderingly. “No. Sixteen. By seventeen I wouldn’t let them get away with that.”

“You were a dog, of course,” Marie said.

Quent came striding back out to the car, got in beside Marie, and pulled the door shut. Mack started up fast, the powerful motor roaring in the quiet of the darkened street.

“How do you like her?” Quent asked eagerly.

“She seems like a very nice girl,” Marie said evenly.

“Nice kid,” Mack agreed.

“She’s really got me going,” Quent said. “I’m glad we all got along so good together. I was kind of afraid.”

“Afraid we’d be too coarse and worldly for the little dear?” Marie asked, an unpleasant note in her voice.

“Now don’t be like that, Marie,” Quent said. “You know I didn’t mean anything like that.”

“Then exactly what in hell are you talking about?” Marie demanded.

“Shut your pretty face, darling,” Mack said.

“I was afraid he was going to tell me she’s a nice girl,” Marie said.

“Look, it was a good evening,” Quent said. “Let’s break it off good.”

“Okay,” Marie said. “Nightcap at my place?”

“Not tonight,” Mack said. “Tomorrow is a working day. Landers and Dale have got stuff piled up. Right, kid?”

“Right, Mack,” Quent said.

Mack drove back toward town, parked in front of the blonde stone and glass apartment house where Marie lived on ample alimony. He got out, and Marie slid out on his side, and he said, “Back in a second, kid.”

He walked into the sterile tile lobby with Marie. He grinned at her. She was a sturdy blonde with shrewd eyes, good clothes, and a sulky mouth. They were easy with each other, and he knew she had learned that if she got rough, it was always a few weeks before he called her up again.

“Now we shake hands, maybe?” Marie asked. “An evening with sweet young stuff and you can’t even come up for a drink.”

“You want him up for a drink? You want to listen to him talk about love’s young dream for an hour perhaps?”

“Please. Not that.”

“Okay, so I drop him and come back for my drink. That makes better sense?”

Her slow smile came. She ran her fingertips down his cheek. “Mmm,” she said. “Good sense.”

“Within an hour, honey,” he said, and turned and walked out. His heels made loud firm noises on the tile, and as he pushed the front door open he heard the soft closing of the door of the self-service elevator. He walked out toward the car where he could see the glow of Quent’s cigarette. He got in and slammed the door and headed through town.

“I’m conversational,” Quent said. “Nightcap?”

“A short one.” The streets were empty, and he parked in front of The Alibi. They went in and sat at the curve of the bar. Mack tilted his hat back off his broad forehead. There was a party in one of the big booths — two girls and three men, all loud and out of focus.

“The usual, Joe,” Mack said. “What about you, Quent?”

“Just a beer, I guess. Millers is okay.” The bartender moved off. Quent said, “God, she’s a hell of a girl, Mack. Never met anything like her.”

“From the way you’ve been acting, kid, I knew you had something on your mind. How did you say you met her?”

“I didn’t. I didn’t want to be laughed at. You know that Dowling case I was working on, where she wanted to leave her money to the church. I called on her and she had a lady with her, a friend. While I was there Erica came in a car to pick up the other lady, and it turns out the lady is Erica’s aunt. Erica was in the east for a couple of years and she got homesick and came back out here. She lives with her aunt now and she’s got a part-time job at the library. She works mornings, but I guess I told you that already. What do you think of her, Mack?”

Mack lifted his drink and took a long slow sip. He glanced at his partner’s intent young face. “It’s really stacked,” he said casually. “I bet it would be fine.”

Quent turned sharply and frowned at him. Quent’s cheeks were red. “Damn it, that’s no way to talk.”

“Don’t get in an uproar, kid.”

“You can’t look at any woman in a decent way, can you?”

Mack grinned. “Sure. I’m an evil old man. Ask anybody.”

Quent finally smiled, reluctantly. “All right. You were kidding me. Seriously, I’m thinking in terms of marriage, Mack. It’s time, I think.”

“I was married once,” Mack said. “It is, indeed, a very unpromising relationship.”

“You had bad luck.”

Mack thought of all the implications. He took a few sips of his drink, slid the glass a few inches along the bar top, and examined the wet streak it left.

“Do I have to like the idea?” he asked softly.

“What do you mean?”

“Look, kid. The business is growing. And you know why. We both draw peanuts and put the rest back into the firm. We’re hot. Equal partners. Look at the picture. You get married. You have to draw more. It stands to reason. You draw more, and I have to draw more, or else let the firm owe me. So what happens to the plans? We start leveling off. We don’t grow any more. The answer is we have an outfit that gives us both a nice comfortable living. But is that enough? I thought we had the idea of really getting big. Marriage in five years, Quent. Fine, I’d say. But right now... hell, you can see how I feel.”

“She’d understand that, Mack. She really would. She’s smart. You can tell that. We draw a hundred apiece right now. We could stay within that.”

“For five years? You and she and your three kids? Life doesn’t work that way. If she’s that smart, she’s going to know what we’re netting, kid. And she’s going to start resenting the way we keep ploughing it back in. She’s going to wonder why she has to take it easy during the good years so that she can have more dough later on when she won’t enjoy it so much. Kitties love the cream, kid.”

“I can’t help it, Mack. I’ve... got to marry her.”

“Name it after me.”

“Damn it, you always twist things around.”

“Take it easy, Quent. Anyway, how much do you know about this girl? I’m only eight years older than you, but by God, sometimes I feel forty years older. Marriage lasts a long time. At least it’s supposed to. Don’t rush into it. How long have you known her, anyway?”

“Six weeks, Mack.”

“Know a girl six months and marry her and it’s still fast. I always have to keep slowing you up. You know that. Remember the Berton deal? That could have been a real jam if I let you go ahead the way you wanted to.” Mack tossed off the rest of his drink and stood up. “Finish your beer, Quent. I’m bushed.”

They went back out to the car, and Mack dropped Quent off at his small apartment, headed on east as though going to his place, then circled and went back to Marie’s apartment.

He sat in his car for a time without going in. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, frowning ahead through the windshield at the dark street. A city bus hissed to a stop, let a man off, waddled off down the street.

From what Quent had said about her he had expected Erica Holmes to be Miss Anemia. A bloodless and bifocaled thing with elfin mannerisms. Quent wasn’t noted for his taste in women. But Erica had been a thing to stir the blood. Every time, during the evening, when she had been close to him, the backs of Mack’s hands had tingled. She was a grave brunette, her hair so dark it looked almost blue under lights. She had tilted gray eyes, that husky voice, and a body suitable for a calendar in any repair shop. But it was more than that, he knew. It was a certain aura, an invisible emanation of desirability that could be felt ten feet away from her and increased in geometric proportion as he got closer. And she obviously had the kid mumbling to himself. He thought of one little incident during the evening. When he had danced with her, she had become rigid each time he tried to pull her closer. And once, when dancing, her fingertips had accidentally brushed the nape of his neck, and they had felt like ice. He sat, eyes narrowed, thinking. He got out, flicked his cigarette away, and walked slowly toward the lobby entrance, separating the proper key from the others.

Mack was at his desk when Quent came in, whistling. Mack saw Mrs. Ober slant a speculative glance at Quent, and he knew that Mrs. Ober was not deceived. Prior to Erica, Quent had been a young man who never came in whistling. Mack had coldly selected Quent for the fine intuitive quality of his intelligence. The younger man was not the sort of person with whom Mack felt most at ease. Mack thought of Erica for a time, and then sighed and turned back to the work on his desk.

At eleven o’clock Mack went out. As he waited for the elevator he turned and looked at the door of the reception room. Landers and Dale. It had started three years ago in one crummy office, just he and the kid and Mrs. Ober. Five rooms now, and four people working for them. Another five years and they’d have the whole floor. Ten years and they might have their own building. Crazier things had happened. The kid hadn’t been pulling full weight the past six weeks.

Mack went out and walked five blocks to the public library. He went into the main desk and asked for Miss Holmes. Erica Holmes. The girl at the main desk told him she was in the reference room, the door to the right. He walked through into the sunlit silence. A few people frowned up at him as his metal-tipped heels struck hard against the wooden floor. Mack looked at them blandly. Erica was behind a semicircular desk in the corner. She wore glasses with heavy rims. As she looked up at him, smiling without too much enthusiasm, he saw that the lenses did not distort her eyes at all. Probably a very minor correction. She wore a black skirt, a white blouse with starched cuffs and collar.

“Good morning,” she said in a low voice. “I had a lovely time last night.”

“I wanted to see you in your natural habitat, Erica.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”

“And maybe see how natural it is.”

She tilted her head a bit on one side. “What does that mean, Mack?”

He looked at her mouth. Wide and soft and firm, lips lying evenly together. He said, “Just making jokes. Poor ones, I guess. Did you do library work when you were back east?”

“No.”

“Just that? No.”

“Is this some sort of an inquisition, Mr. Landers? If so, I’ll have to ask you to excuse me. I’m really quite busy.”

He grinned. “I feel like a father to the kid. You know how it is.”

“Please don’t talk so loudly. You’re disturbing the whole room.”

“Buy you lunch?”

“No thank you.”

“Have I said something wrong?”

“Please, Mack. You’ll get me in trouble here.”

“Come on out by the front steps a minute then.”

“I can’t.”

“Then we’ll talk here.”

Her lips tightened. Her knuckles were white against the edge of the desk. “I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”

He walked out onto the front steps, leaned against the front of the building, and lit a cigarette. It was a good five minutes before she came out. She looked angry.

“What is this all about, Mack?”

He looked into the gray eyes, saw them slide uneasily away. “I guess you misunderstood me, Erica. Hell, I was just being friendly. Quent told me you worked here mornings, and I had a call and I was going by, so I stopped in. That Quent, he’s a fine boy, don’t you think?”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Of course I think so.”

“Guys like that are rare. You know... idealistic, dedicated. I was telling Marie last night that I lost my illusions when I was sixteen.”

“Too bad, Mack.”

“We’ll have to have an evening together, Erica.”

“Really, I don’t see...”

“Just the four of us again. What do you say?”

She half turned away from him. “That would be nice. I have to go back in now.”

“I’ll work it out with Quent, then.”

“Yes, do that.”

“Or we could go on a picnic. Hell, I haven’t been on a picnic in years.”

“I really have to go in, Mack.”

“Nice to see you, Erica.”

She gave him a tentative smile and went in quickly. He held the big door open and watched her go up the several steps to the main floor. He watched her coldly and he saw the faint awkwardness of her as she went up the steps, and he knew that she was aware of his eyes on her.

He went down the street toward the club, deciding to have a drink before lunch. A slight celebration. A one-man celebration. He was smiling a bit.

As the day ended, and Mrs. Ober was leaving, Mack went in and sat on the corner of Quent’s desk and said, “I stopped in and saw Erica today when I went by the library.”

Quent stared at him. “What for?”

“What for? To make a date with her, maybe? Use your head. No, I had the idea that it would be nice if the four of us went on a picnic. How long since you’ve been on a picnic?”

Quent relaxed. “Years. You asked her? What did she say?”

“She seemed to go for the idea. Marie is a hell of a good cook. We can work it this way. Cold fried chicken à la Marie. Potato salad maybe from Erica. You and I bring the beer. Go up into the hills while the weather is still good. You going to see her tonight?”

“Yes, I am.”

“We can try to set up a date.”

Quent grinned. “Sorry, it takes a little time to get used to the idea of you surrounded by nature.”

“Hell, I always sit on the ground once every seven or eight years, kid. Let’s try to set it up for next Sunday. Leave about ten?”

“It sounds like it’d be fun, Mack. I’ve been thinking about... what you said last night.”

Mack adjusted his hat and clapped Quent on the shoulder. “Forget it. Hell, we’ll get along. I worry too much. I’ll set it up with Marie. Next Sunday.”

Mack was on his second drink when Marie came in. He stood up and the waiter pulled the table out and Marie slid in onto the bench beside him, smiled up at the waiter and said, “Gibson, please.” She winked at Mack as she took off her gloves. “Have a big rich day, darling?”

“A truly handsome day. Honey, what do you think of picnics?”

She stared at him. “Picnics? God! Ants in the potato salad and nothing to sit on but rocks.”

“We’re going on one.”

“What did you say you were drinking? I better change my order.”

“No, actually. The same four like last night.”

“Goodie. I’ll bring my bird book. Really, Mack!”

“It’s all set. We leave Sunday at ten in the morning. Up into the hills. Hi ho. Cold chicken and potato salad and beer and scenery.”

“You mean it, don’t you? Wasn’t one evening with young love enough for you?”

“Just being with them makes me feel young again, honey.”

Her drink came, and as she sipped it she turned so that she could look at him over the rim of her glass. She set the glass down. “You, my friend, look entirely too smug. What evil thing are you cooking up?”

“Evil? On a picnic? Please!”

“I think you better tell me what you have on your mind, Mack.”

“You are an unflattering type. I just happen to want to go on a picnic.”

“I’ll wait until the third act, then. It better be a good script.”

“It’s all ad lib.”

“Do I supply the chicken?”

“You do, my love.”

The next morning Quent reported that Erica had agreed to a picnic, and he said it was funny she wasn’t more enthusiastic about it, because he knew that she really enjoyed the out of doors, and they had taken long walks, leaving the car parked near the highway a couple of times. He said that she praised her aunt’s German potato salad, and she would come with a large bowl of same.

On Thursday Mack took some time off in the afternoon and drove up into the hills. He spent considerable time exploring side roads. When he was satisfied, he made small check marks on his map and returned to the city.

In the afternoon he went into Quent’s office. “Kid, I think we better take both cars. You know how Marie is. She gets restless and wants to take off, and maybe you and Erica would want to stay longer.”

“That makes sense, Mack. You follow me or something?”

“We don’t even have to do that,” Mack said. He unfolded the map and spread it out on the desk. “I told a friend we were going on a picnic and he told me about this place. He says it’s fine. Easy to find. We can meet there, kid. Look. Eighteen out of town and turn left on thirty-one. Go nine miles on thirty-one up into the hills, and you see a barn right here with half the roof gone. Turn left on the first road right here beyond the barn. It’s a dirt road, and you go to the end and you come out right on the side of the mountain where you can see for miles. Nice and private. He was up there a couple weeks ago.”

Quent studied the map. “That’s easy enough. Sure.”

“So we can meet out there at eleven. Marie’s going to get some nice chickens.”

Mack awoke at eight Sunday morning when the alarm went off. For a few minutes he didn’t remember it was the day of the picnic. Then he smiled and stretched and got up feeling good. He hummed under his breath as he shaved, pulling the skin tight and doing a good clean job.

He opened a tin of tomato juice, put the coffee on, and then phoned Quent. Quent answered on the second ring. “Oh, it’s you, Mack. Say, it’s a nice day for it, isn’t it?”

“A swell day, kid. Up to a point.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“I just went down to go get the paper, and my left rear tire is flat and the spare is too soft to put on. I found a place that will send a guy to fix things, but he can’t get here for an hour or so. And there were a couple of things I was going to do. How about you helping me out, kid?”

“Of course, Mack.”

“I left that zipper case down at the office, that red job that keeps things cold. I was going to start early enough so I could take it out to Walker’s and load it up with cold beer. You can buy it there any time. Can do?”

“Sure.”

“That means you’ll have to go right by Marie’s place. So it’ll help the timing if you pick her up, and I’ll pick up Erica. Okay?”

“Glad to do it, Mack. Want me to phone the gals and tell them about the switch?”

“I don’t see any need of that. They both said they’d be ready at ten. You tell Marie what happened and I’ll tell your gal. And I’ll see you out there. Don’t get lost, kid.”

“You’re talking to an old eagle scout.”

“Thanks for helping out.”

At ten o’clock Mack pulled up in front of Erica’s house. He went up to the door. She opened the door and looked at him, looked out at his car, and asked, “Where’s Quent?”

He explained the change in plans. She introduced him to her aunt, a small woman with nervous mannerisms. Erica wore a tweed skirt, a pale cardigan, and moccasins. She seemed a little uncertain and said she’d better phone Quent.

“Why? It’s all arranged. Besides, he’s left already, probably.”

She kissed her aunt, and Mack carried the big yellow bowl of potato salad out to the car. It was covered with waxed paper tied on with cord. He placed it carefully on the back seat, shut the door on Erica, then went around and got behind the wheel. She seemed subdued.

“Great day for a picnic,” he said.

“It certainly is. It might be a little cooler when we get higher.”

“Not enough to matter.”

She sat far over on her side of the seat. He drove through traffic as fast as he dared, watching carefully ahead for Quent’s car. He decided that if he saw Quent ahead he would slow down and turn into a gas station. After he got on thirty-one, he was certain that he was ahead of Quent. The big car rocked and leaned on the mountain curves.

They had nothing to say to each other. When he saw the barn ahead, he glanced into his rearview mirror. The road behind him was clear. He passed the dirt road just beyond the barn. Erica turned suddenly and looked back. “Isn’t that the road? Quent told me.”

“You misunderstood, honey. It’s the second road after the barn. Right up here.”

“But I’m sure Quent thinks...”

“If he doesn’t show up, we’ll go back and take a look.”

The road ended at a small clearing he had seen before. He parked the car and turned off the motor. The cooling engine made ticking sounds. The wind made a soft sound in the leaves.

“Let’s take a look around,” he said.

“I’ll wait here in the car.”

He opened the door on her side. “Come on. Let’s find a good place. Let’s be girl scouts, lady.” He grinned at her.

She got out of the car, and he said, “That looks like a promising path.” He stood aside, and she went ahead, holding the branches so they wouldn’t slap him in the face. The path was resilient with pine needles. After a hundred yards it opened into a small clearing. There was grass, a large log.

“This looks okay,” he said.

“Let’s go back.”

He sat down on the log and took out his cigarettes. “Here. Sit down and smoke and take it easy.”

She took a cigarette. She didn’t seem to want to look at him. “Sit down, Erica. You make me nervous.”

She sat on the log a good four feet away from him. She sat with her hand braced against the rough bark. He watched her and saw the quick lift of her breathing. He saw her moisten her lips nervously.

He reached over almost casually and folded his fingers strongly around her wrist. She stopped breathing for a moment and then turned sharply toward him. “Mack! What’s the idea?”

He chuckled and moved closer to her. She stood up. He gave a quick yank to her wrist, and she was pulled toward him, falling to her knees. He put his arms around her, and she was like a woman made of stone, unbreathing. And then he felt the sudden softness, the great shuddering breath she took. He kissed her and then looked calmly at her face, looked at the glazed scimitar eyes, at the broken mouth. He laughed somewhere deep in his throat and took her in his arms again.

Afterward, he stood up and lit another cigarette. His hands trembled a bit. He looked down at her face, at the blue-dark hair spread wild against the grass of the clearing. Her eyes were tight shut. She was breathing deeply, and with each exhalation she murmured, “Darling... darling... darling.” It was a meaningless metronome sound, as soft as the wind in the leaves overhead.

He sat on the log, watching her with a curious cold tenderness. After a time she opened her eyes and looked vaguely around, like a person coming out of deep sleep. She sat up, then knelt and brushed at the twigs and bits of grass that clung to her skirt. She stood up and looked at him without expression, then stepped over and sat beside him on the log, not close to him. She picked up her leather purse, took out a comb, and combed her dark hair carefully, looking straight ahead.

“Cigarette?” he asked when she had finished.

“Please.”

He lit her cigarette and she looked at him over the lighter flame, meeting his eyes for the first time. She turned away, her shoulders hunched.

“So it was a dirty trick,” he said. “Go ahead. Rave.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said. Her voice had a faraway sound.

“You must have something to say.”

“I just feel... damn empty. It was probably a mistake. The whole plan. I thought... coming back here. I thought it would change things. God knows I tried hard. Back there too many people... know. When they know, there’s no defense.” She turned and looked at him again. “How did you know?”

He studied his cigarette. The breeze whipped the smoke away. “I don’t know. An instinct. Little things. Signs and portents. You get a hunch and you follow your hunch. That deal of you shaking hands with him to say good night. That was a sort of a tipoff.”

“It had to be that way.”

“Sure.”

“Oh, God, if there was some way... something that could be cut or burned out of me. Mack, why didn’t you leave me alone, even if you guessed?”

“I told you in the library. I feel almost like a father to the kid.”

“I wouldn’t have hurt him! I wouldn’t have hurt him!”

“Not this year, maybe. Then what goes on, honey? Some smart guy selling vacuum cleaners? A meter reader? Some drunk at a party? Don’t kid yourself.”

“Stop,” she said faintly. “Please stop!” She held her hands over her eyes. The discarded cigarette was near her moccasin, smoke drifting in the grass.

“Now you tell me you love the kid.”

“I do!”

“That’s good. Then you know what to do.”

She lifted her head. “Or?”

“That’s an unnecessary question, isn’t it?”

She stood up. Her face was all at once slack, gray, older. “You did go right by where we should have turned, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“You’ve been so damn clever, Mack, haven’t you?”

He stood up. “Sure. Old Mack. A big I.Q., darling. Let’s go.”

Mack watched Quent carefully during the next few weeks. The days were growing shorter and cooler. Mack watched the slow inexorable change in his partner, watched the listnessness, the climate of the rejected. One evening, knowing that Quent had gone back to the office after dinner, Mack returned also, occupying himself with work that could have waited until the next day, knowing that there was no need, actually, to talk to Quent, yet feeling a strong compulsion.

He wandered at last into Quent’s office. Quent looked up, and Mack saw the lean pallor of his face, the obscure sickness in his eyes.

“Knock off and have a quickie?” Mack said.

Quent stretched and yawned. “I guess so. Sure.”

They walked side by side through the darkness to the brittle cheer of the Alibi and sat at stools at the quiet bar. When the drinks came, Mack waited and then asked quietly, “What’s the pitch on those wedding bells, Quent?”

Quent’s smile was not a good thing to see. “You tell me, maybe. Erica’s going back east next week. She doesn’t seem to like it out here.”

“You kids have a little scrap?” Mack asked.

“I wish we had, Mack. I wish like hell that we had. Then I could figure it out. She just... cooled off toward me. Ever since that picnic it hasn’t been the same. As if she took a good second look at me and decided I wasn’t the guy after all. What the hell is wrong with me, Mack? What is it?” There was a certain taut desperation in his tone.

“Don’t think that way, kid. That’s no way to think.”

“What other way is there? Tell me that.”

Mack knew there were no words. Nothing, after all, to say. “Quent, it’s one of those things. Roll with the punch, kid. Couple of months and you won’t remember what she looked like.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s a big wide wonderful world, kid. And a good cigar is a smoke.”

“You’re a good guy, Mack, and I know what you’re trying to do and all that, but it isn’t doing any good and it isn’t going to do any good, so let’s just drop it, shall we? Let’s just drop the whole thing. I don’t want to do any talking about it.”

“Sure, kid. Sure.”

Mack tried to talk shop, but it was flat. The air was stale. The drink didn’t taste right. Quent was trying to respond, but his eyes were dead. Mack kept wishing there was some way to explain. They finished the drinks. Mack paid, and they went out onto the dark street.

“Want a ride, kid?” Mack asked.

“Thanks. I think I’ll walk it.”

Mack’s car was in the opposite direction. He stood and lit a cigarette and watched Quent until he had turned the corner and the sidewalk was empty. He wondered why thinking of Erica should make him feel older, feel a little worn around the edges. Hell, a blind man could have sensed it. That was the trouble with Erica. The kid was well out of that deal. He’d get over it. It was something you had to keep telling yourself. The night wind cut through his topcoat, and he shivered. Marie expected him. As he walked slowly toward his car he decided that this was a night for going home. A little warm milk. Call Marie in the morning from the office. This was a night for going home and going to bed and hoping sleep would come quick before your mind started roaming around that squirrel cage.

Long Shot

October 1955, Argosy

It was a chilly evening at the Orange Lane Dog Track, and the crowd was thin. The cool wind tore away the brass notes of the band so that the music came across the infield in fragments. There were another four minutes before the windows would close for the seventh race. I was at one of the five-dollar win-place-show windows. Joe Stack, the manager, had moved me up from the two-dollar show window, where I had started. Lately he had been hinting about moving me back to the money room. We got along well. He had decided I was steady.

It makes a good deal for anybody in school, as I am. I’m in my senior year. The track pays you fifteen a night to work behind the windows. If he put me in the money room, I’d start drawing down twenty.

He moved up beside me and looked at the ticket numbers and said, “Slow night.” He saw the book I had open on the shelf under the window. “What’s that?”

“Math quiz tomorrow.”

He shrugged and yawned. Then he moved a little closer and lowered his voice. He pitched it so low that Dave Truelow on my left and Stan Garner on my right couldn’t hear him. Particularly Garner. “Johnny, you see anything like I asked you?”

“Not a thing, Joe.”

“Keep looking,” he said, and moved casually away. The minutes were running out, and we began to get some business. The dogs had been shut in the starting boxes. I had no business when the buzzer sounded, so I shut the window. I heard the zing of metal on metal as the bunny came around the track, and heard the roar as the race started. I yawned. I tried to look at the book again, but I kept thinking about Stan Garner. It wasn’t up to me to tell Joe Stack that Garner was roughing the customers. He didn’t do it often. Just when it seemed safe.

There are a lot of ways to do it. Stan Garner knew most of them. Drunks are the easiest. A drunk puts down a five and wants a two-dollar ticket. Stan counts off the change as three, four, five. But he counts the ticket as three so that the drunk moves off with two dollars in change and his two-dollar ticket. On a windy night like this one, if a drunk bought with a ten, Stan would fast count him out about six dollars and hold it down and say, “Watch the wind, sir.” The drunk would shove it in his pocket and wobble off toward the track.

Sometimes Stan would wink at me. He said to me once, “Get what you can, Johnny. The customers will rough you if they get a chance. You have to use the angles to stay even.”

Joe Stack was putting me on the spot trying to get me to inform on Garner. I felt no moral responsibility toward Stan Garner. He is a stocky, smiling little guy, crooked all the way through. He’ll never go into crime in a big way. But he’ll never be honest when he can be crooked. I didn’t worry about Stan.

I did my worrying about Dave Truelow, who has the window on my left. Dave and I were friends in the beginning. We applied for the jobs and got them on the same day. We’re both seniors at the University. We stopped being friends a month ago when I took it on myself to tell him that he was making a bad mistake playing out of the box.

Here is the way it works. When you report in, you are given a money box. If you’re just selling, there may be only fifty or seventy-five dollars in it. As you sell your tickets you put the money in the box. Every once in a while someone from the money room will stop around and take out a few hundred and give you a receipt to put in the box. After the last race you have to be able to total out. The money you started with, plus total ticket sales off the machine, less cash and receipts on hand. The management has no objection to our buying a ticket for ourselves now and then. Those tickets are supposed to be purchased with money out of your pants, not out of the box. Sometimes when an owner steps up and makes a good bet just before race time, the information will go all the way down the line, and nearly everybody will buy themselves a ticket.

There’s no harm in that if the gambling bug doesn’t bite you. But when it bites you and you start playing out of the box, hoping to make out before checkup, then you can be in trouble.

I shouldn’t have tried to give Dave a lecture. He knew that I knew he was playing out of the box. But even before that, our personal relationship had become tense because of a girl named Joanne Jamison.

Her father is an owner and trainer. During the season they travel from track to track. She and her father and mother travel and live in a big house trailer. An employee named Arn drives the pickup truck that pulls the big dog trailer. They have a nice string. Dave and I both fell for Joanne at the same time. She is button-sized, with blonde hair like silk, and big dark eyes and lashes and brows. She always seems to be half laughing at you. She likes nice things and nice places to go. She is content with a hamburger and a drive-in if that’s all you can swing. But she is more contented — and shows it — when you can have drinks at the Tampa Terrace and dinner at Ybor City. She is fun to be with. She sparkles.

As I said, it is a good job to have when you are in school. I had my courses arranged so I could work the matinees on Wednesday and Saturday. That way I could make a hundred and five dollars a week during the season and still keep up reasonably well in the classes. At least I wasn’t falling too far behind.

But it is not such a good job when you start competing for Joanne. The money seemed to melt away too easily. And money is the pulse of the track. Gambling is the only reason for the existence of the track. Money beats in the air like a drum you can’t quite hear. If that drum beat gets in your blood, then it can be a very bad job indeed. If you check out short, the management can be very very difficult. Perhaps the atmosphere is emotionally unhealthy. Without trying to sound too moral, I can say that it is only unhealthy if you have the streak of weakness that permits you to cheat. I had honesty hammered into me right from year one. I wasn’t capable of forcing myself to play out of the box, and I guess that was what Joe Stack had sensed and what made him anxious to help me along.

I knew Joe Stack was being devious. I knew he had guessed that my friend, Dave Truelow, had been playing out of the box and had been lucky at it. So he told me to watch Garner. I don’t know what he was trying to prove, or what he thought I would do. Dave had gotten the inside track with Joanne. His grades were in pretty bad shape. He was beginning to act jumpy. I knew all I had to do was tell Joe Stack that Dave was playing out of the box regularly. Joe would fire him. He wouldn’t be able to wine and dine Joanne, and she would have to be content with my more meager date money. But I couldn’t do that.

After the races were over, I saw that Dave checked out with no difficulty. From the way he glanced at me I guessed he had had a pretty good evening. Joe, as usual, gave me a ride back to the campus after the armored car had been dispatched. As we drove out by the empty parking lot Dave passed us in the small used convertible he had bought. The top was down, and I saw Joanne beside him, some sort of white net affair over her pale hair. It hurt to see her going out with him. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.

“I wonder if Dave gets any sleep at all,” Joe said.

“He gets some.”

“How is he doing at the school?”

“I don’t really know.”

“You aren’t as friendly with him as you used to be. Break up over the girl?”

“I guess so.”

“Nice-looking girl, Johnny. Nice expensive little item.”

I was glad he didn’t continue it. I was glad he dropped it right there. After I was back in my room, it took time to get my mind riveted to the math book. Joanne kept getting in the way. I could see her walk, and see the way her mouth curved when she smiled.

We had a huge crowd on Friday night. It was the kind of evening the Chamber of Commerce claims Florida has all the time. Colored spots played on the infield fountains. The dogs ran hard in the white glare of the floodlights. The windows were busy. It was a bustling, good-humored crowd, with heavier money than usual.

When we had a breathing spell after the fourth race, and I had over four thousand worth of receipts in my box, Stan Garner winked over at me and said, “Davey is ailing.”

I glanced at Dave. He was looking straight ahead. His color was bad, and his face looked sweaty. I looked back at Stan Garner and raised one eyebrow in question.

“He went heavy on Dancing Ann. Maybe four hundred worth.”

Dancing Ann had been hit and rolled on the first turn. I whistled softly. I hadn’t been keeping track of anything outside my own window. Garner is the type who can work hard and keep his attention on ten different things at once.

I looked at Dave again and I knew that this was the night when he was going to come to the end of the string. He had a bad case of the fever, and up until now it had paid off. But it had changed, and I sensed that he was going to ride it all the way down. It wouldn’t be a pretty thing to watch. I couldn’t be happy watching it, even though it meant that Joanne would be my girl when it was all over.

We were running ten races. He made no bet on the fifth, at least no bet that I could see. I saw him bet the sixth. By then the word had gotten around. A lot of us saw him bet the sixth, holding the keys down for a frightening length of time, the bell bonging as each ticket was printed. He checked the sheaf of tickets and put them in his pocket and made a pencil notation on a piece of paper under the counter. His hand shook as he made the notation.

“About two hundred,” Garner whispered. “On Skipjack I think.”

The word was passed along. All the men behind the windows sweated out the sixth race. It was vicarious disaster. It was like watching a man cut his own throat slowly. Skipjack came in fourth. We watched Dave Truelow. He looked five pounds lighter than when he had reported.

He made another sizeable bet on the eighth. Garner was the one who spoke to Dave, called across to him. “Getting in a little heavy, Davey?”

Dave turned slowly. His voice and eyes were expressionless. “A little.”

“How much, kid?”

“Eleven hundred.”

That word was passed along, too, and I found that I, like all the others, was pulling for Dave to come out of it. But I knew he wouldn’t. And I think he knew he wouldn’t. Luck goes sour and it won’t come back.

I don’t know how Joe Stack heard about it. He had his own sources. I didn’t see him coming, but suddenly he was behind Dave. He stood there. He didn’t say anything. I saw Dave look back at him and then hunch more closely over his work. Joe stood there throughout the betting on the ninth race, and then went back to the money room.

When the results were posted on the ninth, Dave turned toward Stan Garner and me. He had a crazy look on his face. “That’s what I needed to get even. Boxer Boy. That’s what I was going to play. Eight to one it paid and I didn’t get dime one down.”

“He’ll have himself a good time figuring this last one,” Garner whispered to me. “Two favorites and six tanglefeet. He can’t get enough down on either favorite to make it all back.”

“What will they do with him?”

“This isn’t any twenty- or thirty-buck shortage, Johnny. They’ll hold him for the cops.”

Dave waited until moments before the board closed. Once again he held down the keys. Garner stood on tiptoes and looked across. He checked the numbers against the starting position and said, in a tone of awe, “Kathy’s Prince! Good God!” Then he shrugged. “He’s down eleven hundred. Another hundred won’t make it hurt any worse.”

I tried not to look at Dave as the race was being run. We could not see the finish line from the windows. We could all hear the sound of it, the rising roar as the dogs came around the final turn and into the stretch. Dave stood utterly motionless. The crowd sound died away abruptly as it always does, and people began to move toward the exits and the big parking lot.

The P.A. system announced a photo finish between dogs one and seven. Seven was Kathy’s Prince. I looked at Dave. He wavered a little and held onto the edge of the counter for support. I began automatically to prepare my checkout. The bank had finished its final number of the evening.

I was looking at Dave when it was announced that seven had won. I saw the life come back into him, saw his shoulders straighten and his color come back. He gave us all a big wide grin. One hundred down at twenty to one would clear up the shortage and give him eight hundred gravy.

A half hour later I stood in the shadows of the stand on the parking lot side and waited for Joe Stack. I had seen Dave drive out with Joanne. I had heard her laughter, like clear silver in the night. I felt abused and tired and shabby. I leaned against a pillar and smoked and waited for Joe. The lights were out, the fountains still.

Joe came walking heavily out. “Oh, there you are. Wait long?”

“Not too long.”

We walked to his car. We got in and he put the key in the ignition but he didn’t turn it on. He turned toward me. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “Don’t let it get you, kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“It didn’t happen this time. It didn’t happen tonight. It might not happen next time, but it’s going to happen. You can bank on that. It’s as sure as sunrise. Don’t play dumb with me, either. I mean Dave. Like with Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall on his head. Tonight he has the money and the girl and everything.”

“I guess he does.”

“You don’t have to see it happen, do you? I mean you don’t have to have it driven into your skull.”

“No, I don’t, Joe.”

“And when it happens, will it teach him anything?”

“It might.”

“Don’t kid yourself. He’s had the smell of it. He’s had the fever in him. They don’t ever get over it. I’ve been waiting for a word from you, and you haven’t given it. Maybe I like that. Anyway, I’m firing him.”

I couldn’t even feel good about that. “That’s too bad,” I said.

“I think we’ll see a lot of him. On the other side of the windows.”

“But not for very long.”

“No, Johnny. Not for very long. Now you can take your innings with blondie. That make you feel good?”

I sat and thought it over. He was waiting for an answer. I remembered the sound of her laugh in the night. I had kissed her twice, and I remembered both those times.

“I guess it doesn’t make me feel good, Joe.”

“You off blondes?”

“I... I guess I’m off that one. I guess she’s more than I can afford. Maybe I can find one that looks like that sometime — but a girl who’ll settle for a hamburger and a bus ride.”

He laughed and he started the car. We didn’t talk on the way back. When he let me off he said, “I do a little betting myself. I bet on you, Johnny. And I think I’ve won — all the way across the board.”

He let me off on the usual corner, and I walked back through the campus to my room. I thought about Dave and Joanne, and I found that I didn’t feel bad at all. I’d dropped a strange weight off my shoulders. I didn’t feel tired, abused, or shabby. I felt pretty good. There seemed to be some likelihood I was growing up.

Looie Follows Me

I remember how it promised to be a terrible summer. I had squeaked through the fifth grade and I was going to be eleven in July and I had hoped that on my eleventh birthday my parents would come up to visit me at Camp Wah-Na-Hoo, bearing gifts.

It was our third year in the big house twelve miles from town. Dad called it “a nice commuting distance” in summer and “too rugged for a dog team” in winter.

One of the main reasons for wanting to go to Wah-Na-Hoo was on account of the Branton twins, Kim and Cam, who lived a couple of hundred yards down the road. I knew that if they went for two months and I didn’t go at all, they’d make my life miserable all winter yapping about the good old days at Camp. They are twelve years old, and Dad says that he can’t ever look at them without wondering when they’ll be the right size for a harness and bit.

The second reason was that if I stayed home all summer, Looie, the five-year-old kid sister, would tag around after me all day with her hand in her mouth.

The big discussion came in May. I was called into the living room and told to sit down for “a little talk.” While Dad took off his glasses and stowed them in his coat pocket I made a quick review of recent misdemeanors and couldn’t decide which one to think up a defense for.

“Jimmy, your mother and I have been discussing the question of camp for you this summer.”

I dropped defensive plans and went on the offensive. “I can hardly wait to go,” I said.

Dad coughed and looked appealingly at Mother. “The fact of the matter is, Jimmy, we feel you’re a little young. We think you should wait one more year.”

Then they told me that I would have fun during the two weeks at the shore and I made low-voiced comments about a hotel full of old ladies and besides the Branton twins were going and I played with them and how did that make me too young.

And so after I lost the discussion, I had nothing to look forward to but mooching around our childless neighborhood all summer with the clop clop of Looie’s feet behind me. My parents had been mysterious about something nice that was going to happen during the summer, but I had a heavy suspicion about things they called ‘nice.’ They even called sending me to Syracuse to visit Aunt Kate ‘nice.’

And I was prepared to resist going to Aunt Kate’s to my dying breath.

The mysterious ‘nice’ thing arrived on the fifth of July. Its name was Johnny Wotnack from New York City. It climbed out of Mrs. Turner’s blue sedan and it stood in our driveway and stared suspiciously around at the big yard, the oaks, the orchard on the hill behind the house.

Dad had stayed home from the office that day. He started outdoors, and so did I, but just as I got to the door, Mother grabbed my arm and hauled me back and said, “Now wait a minute, Jimmy. That little boy is going to stay with us for a few weeks. You are going to share everything with him. He’s a Fresh Air Child and we agreed to take him in here for a while and make him feel at home. So you be nice to him. Understand?”

“Why did he come here?”

“For fresh air and sunshine and good food so he can be healthy.”

“He looks plenty rugged to me.”

Johnny Wotnack had a small black shiny suitcase. Dad spoke to Mrs. Turner, and she waved to Mother and drove off. Dad picked up the suitcase and said, “Glad you could come, Johnny. This is my son, Jimmy. And his mother. And the little girl is Looie.”

“Please to meet you,” Johnny said politely enough. But there was an air of cold disdain about him, a superior condescension. He was almost thin, and his face had a seamed grayish look like that of a midget I saw once at the sideshow. His hands were huge, with big blocky knuckles.

Johnny gave me one cool glance. “Hi, kid,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

His hair was cropped short, and he wore blue jeans and a white sweat shirt. Dad took him upstairs right to my room, went inside and pointed to the extra twin bed, and said, “You’ll bunk in here with Jimmy, Johnny.”

I suddenly realized that the pictures I had cut out and taped to my walls looked sort of childish. I wished I had known about him so I could have taken them down. Johnny slowly surveyed the room. “This’ll do okay,” he said.

Mother went over to him and gently pulled his ear forward as though she were lifting a rock under which she expected to find a bug.

Johnny snatched his head away. “What’s the gag?” he demanded.

Mother gave her telephone laugh. “Why I just wondered how dirty you got on the trip. Those trains are a fright. I’ll start hot water running in the tub.”

She hurried out of the room. Johnny said weakly, “Wait a minute, lady.” But she was already gone. In a few seconds we could hear the heavy roar of water filling the tub.

The three of us stood there, uneasy.

Dad said, “Well, Johnny. Make yourself at home.” He went on downstairs, leaving me there with him. Looie was with her mother.

Johnny sat on the edge of his bed. He kicked at the suitcase with his sneaker. I looked at him with fascination. There were two deep scars on the back of his right hand, and one finger was crooked. To me he was a perfect example of urbanity and sophistication. It seemed an enormous indignity that Mother should shove him into a bathtub the first minute.

I said, “It happens to me too. The baths I mean. Until they’d drive you nuts.”

He looked at me without interest. “Yeah?”

“I’m going to be eleven in July. July fourteenth,” I said. “How old are you?”

“About twelve, I guess.”

I was horrified. “Don’t you know for certain?”

“No.”

That was further proof of sophistication. It was a miraculous detachment to be able to forget your own birthday, to be indifferent to it. I determined right then and there to forget my own.

When he came downstairs for lunch, his hair was damp. But his face still had that grayish, underground look. He sat silently at the table while Mother and Dad made a lot of gay conversation about how nice it was in the country.

He pushed his glass of milk aside. Mother said, “Don’t you like milk?”

“Never could get used to the taste of the stuff.”

“In this family,” Mother said in her don’t-cross-me voice, “the children eat what is placed before them. Without question. We hope you’ll do the same, Johnny.”

He raised one eyebrow and grinned at her almost as though humoring her. He drank the milk down and wiped his mouth on the back of the scarred hand. “I still don’t like it,” he said.

Dad quickly changed the subject. After lunch he said, “Now you kids run out and play.”

Johnny headed for the garage. Once upon a time it was a barn. He went around it, then dug a cigarette butt out of his pocket along with a kitchen match. He lit it carefully after striking the match with his thumbnail. He took one long deep drag, huffed out the smoke, butted the cigarette, and put it back in his pocket just as Looie came around the corner of the barn, her face screwed up ready to cry if we were out of sight. She came toward us with a wide happy smile.

“ ’Fraid she’d snitch,” Johnny said.

“She would,” I agreed.

“I’m going to get sick of this Johnny, Johnny business,” he said. “The name’s Stoney. Stoney Wotnack.”

“Ha! Stoney!” Looie said. “Stoney, Stoney, Stoney.”

“That’s right, doll,” he said.

I couldn’t think of what to say to him. It was almost like trying to talk to Auntie Kate. He said. “What’s to do around this dump, Jim?”

I said eagerly, “Well, we can climb the apple trees, and there’s a crick the other side of the hill to fish in, and I’m making a cave in the crick bank and...” My voice trailed off. He hadn’t changed expression. There hadn’t been the tiniest gleam of interest in his eyes. “What do you like to do?” I asked weakly.

Stoney shrugged. “Depends. I get a charge out of heisting candy from the five and dime. You can sell the stuff for enough to go to the movies. You can smoke in the balcony. Or you tell a guy you watch his car he’ll give you two bits. And let him know that maybe you don’t get the two bits first, he gets a hole in a tire. Or at night you can go hunting in the alleys for drunks. Roll ’em for everything but their clothes.”

I couldn’t follow him very clearly. And I didn’t want to display my ignorance by asking questions. But he had opened up new and exciting vistas of experience. I saw myself sitting debonairly in a movie balcony puffing on a cigar.

He sighed. “But you can’t do that stuff here. This place is... empty. No noises except bugs and birds. My old man was on a prison farm once. He didn’t like it.”

I said, “Want to look around?”

He shrugged. All the things that had looked pretty good to me turned out to be as childish as the pictures on the walls of my room. I had been proud of our six acres, the same as Dad, but under Stoney’s cold stare everything dwindled away to a horrible, insipid emptiness.

At one place he came to life. The Branton twins and I had gotten hold of a feed sack, stuffed it with sawdust, and hung it by a long rope from one of the rafters in the barn. When Stoney saw it, his shoulders went back and he strutted up to it. He went into a crouch, jabbed at it lightly and expertly with a flicking left, and thumped his right fist deep into it. He bounced around on his toes, jabbing, hooking, snuffing hard through his nose. The thump of his fist into the sawdust gave me a horridly vivid picture of how that fist would feel in my stomach.

He finished and said, “Little workout’s a good thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, consciously imitating his cold tone.

“Another couple years and I try the geegees.”

“The what?” I said.

“Golden Gloves, kid. Golden Gloves. That’s a life. Win in your division and turn pro and play it smart and you’re all set. Better than lugging a shine box around in front a the Forty-Second Street Library, kid. I watch ’em work out at the gym. Look, we got to get a bigger bag and fasten it more solid. It swings too much.”

“Yeah,” I said coldly.

“Got any funny books?” he asked. “I feel like reading. The crime kind.”

“They’ll only let me have cowboy ones,” I said apologetically.

“Them big fairies in the pink shirts give me the itch.”

“I like Roy Rogers,” I said defensively.

He stared at me and chuckled coldly. “Roy Rogers! Ha!”

We walked aimlessly around for a time. I suggested weakly, “We could pretend something.”

He didn’t even bother to answer that one. I went moodily back to the house alone. Looie was trudging around on the pointless walk, following Stoney. I didn’t like her following me usually, but this sudden shift of allegiance annoyed me. I sat in a chair on the porch. Dad came out and said, “Where’s Johnny?”

“Walking,” I said.

“Can’t you think up a game or something?”

“He doesn’t like games.”

Mother came out and heard that last part. She said to Dad, “It’s quite an adjustment for the boy. I think we ought to leave him alone for a little while. Polite, isn’t he?”

Stoney did not come out of his mood of chill disdain. Within three days he had settled into a pattern. He fixed the sawdust bag and spent two hours every morning ‘working out.’ Dad lined up some chores for him, and after his workout he did his chores quickly and expertly. He was silent at the table, speaking when spoken to. In the afternoon he wandered around and around, tagged by Looie. She talked to him constantly, and I never heard him say anything to her that was longer than one word.

Mother and Dad began to really work on bringing him out of what they called his ‘shell.’ As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t in any shell. There just wasn’t much around to interest him. Mother and Dad asked him a lot of questions to get him talking. But it didn’t work. Then they took us on rides, and we went to the movies and went swimming. But nothing did any good. Stoney was obedient, clean, and reserved. And I never saw him smile.

On the eleventh day of his visit Dad had set us to work grubbing the tall grass out from around the base of the apple trees. The dogged way Stoney worked made it necessary for me to work just as hard. Looie had found a hop toad and she was urging him along by poking him with a twig.

Suddenly there was a loud neighing sound, and the Branton twins, Kim and Cam, came galloping down the hill. They are the biggest kids of their age in our school. They have long faces and bright blue eyes and not very much sense.

Stoney straightened up and looked at them and I heard him say one short word under his breath. I saw that word once, chalked on a fence. I had wondered how to say it.

They ran around us three times and pulled up, panting and snorting. They both talked at once, much too loud, and I finally got the idea that there was some kind of sickness at Camp Wah-Na-Hoo and everybody had been sent home.

Stoney stood and stared at them. Kim said, “Hey, you’re from the Fund, Mom said.”

“You want it drawed for you in a picture?” Stoney asked.

“Yipes, he can draw,” Cam yelled. Kim jumped up and grabbed an apple tree branch. He swung his feet up and got them over the branch, let go with his hands, and hung by his knees. Then he started a gentle swinging. At the right part in the swing, he straightened his legs and dropped, half twisting in the air so his feet hit first. He had to touch his hands to the ground for balance.

Cam stared at Stoney. “Okay, let’s see you do that.” Both the twins seem to be made of nothing but hard, rubbery muscle and pink skin.

Stoney gave a snort of disgust and started to work again. “Scared to try, even,” Cam shouted.

Stoney straightened up. “What does it get me, pal, falling out of a tree? Once I see a guy fall out a thirty-story window. When he hit, he splashed. There you got something.”

Cam and Kim went into their act. They hung onto each other and yelped. They gasped with laughter. They pounded on each other and jumped up and down and gasped about thirty-story windows. When they do that to me, I get so mad that tears run right out of my eyes. Stoney acted as if they weren’t there. After a while the twins got tired. Kim snatched Looie’s toad, and they went racing up through the orchard, yelling that they’d see me later. Looie was yelling about the loss of her ‘hopper.’

When they were seventy feet away, Kim threw the toad back to us. We heard it hit up in one of the trees, but it didn’t come down. Probably wedged up there.

Looie was screaming. Stoney said, “Pals of yours?”

“Well, they live in the next house.”

He gave me a contemptuous look and took Looie’s hand. “Come on, Sis, and we’ll get us another hopper.” She went snuffling off with him. I was about to complain because he had left me with the work, and then I noticed that he’d finished the last of his trees.

The next time I saw them, Stoney was leaning against the barn, his eyes half shut against the sun glare. Looie had a new hopper and she was hopping along behind it.

With the Branton kids back, the tempo of things stepped up. They galloped into the yard in the late afternoon. Stoney stood and watched them without expression. They separated to gallop on each side of him. Kim dropped onto his knees, and Cam gave Stoney a shove. Stoney went over hard. He got up and brushed himself off.

Cam and Kim circled and came back to stand panting in front of him. “Well?” Cam said.

“Well what?” Stoney said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

Stoney hunched his shoulders. He looked at the house and for a moment he seemed to be sniffing the air like a hound. Then the tension went out of him. “I’m not going to do anything, friend.”

“Yella!” Kim yelled.

Stoney looked wryly amused. “Could be, friend. Could be.”

I was disgusted with Stoney. I headed out of the yard and hollered back to the twins, “Come on, guys. Leave him with Looie.”

We went over to the Branton place. I was late getting back to supper. I came in with my shirt torn because they had ganged me. They hurt my arm, but I got over it before I went home. I didn’t want Stoney to see me crying.

The next morning the twins came over and used the punching bag for a tackling dummy. The rope broke and the bag split when it hit the floor. Stoney leaned against the wall and watched them moodily. I knew the way the twins operated. They were trying to get a rise out of Stoney. And once they did, it would be too bad for Stoney. The twins work as a unit. In school they cleaned up on Tom Clayden, who is fourteen and pretty big. Tom quit when Kim was holding him and Cam was hitting him.

After they had gone, I said to Stoney, “Shall we fix the bag?”

He shrugged. “I only got two more days here. Skip it.”

The following afternoon I was up in the room working on my stamps. A bunch of approval items had come in the mail, and I was budgeting my allowance to cover the ones I had to have.

It was getting late. I knew that Looie was trudging around after the restless Stoney Wotnack. The sound came from afar. A thin, high screaming. I knew right away that it was Looie’s built-in screech. She uses it for major catastrophies.

Dad wasn’t back from the office yet. I got out in back the same time Mother did, but Mother beat me to Looie. Looie was too gone from screeching to make any specific complaints. Mother went over her, bone by bone, and dug under her blonde hair looking for scalp wounds.

All we could find were some angry-looking rope burns on her ankles and wrists and a little lump on her forehead right at the hair line.

When the screeching began to fade into words, I told Mother that she was yelling about Indians. We got her into the house, and finally she calmed down so that Mother could understand her too.

Mother said, “Oh, it was just those silly Branton twins playing Indian.”

For my money, silly was a pretty lightweight word. The Brantons throw themselves into the spirit of any game they play. I got tangled in one of their Indian games the summer before, and Mr. Branton had to come over and apologize to dad about the arrow hole in my left leg in the back. The Brantons were kept in their own yard for a week, and when they got out, they twisted my arm for telling.

Just then Stoney Wotnack came sauntering down across the lot with his hands in his pockets. He was whistling. It was the first time I had ever heard him whistle.

Mother turned on him real quick and said, “Johnny, didn’t you know those big twins were picking on little Looie?”

“They quit after a while,” he said idly. I could see she wanted to ask him more, but he went on into the house.

Looie’s yelping had simmered down to dry sobs that were a minute apart. I could see by the expression on her face that she was thinking of something to ask for. She knew that she usually got a “Yes” answer right after she was hurt.

Mother said, “When your father comes home, I’m sending him over to the Brantons. This sort of thing has happened too often.”

Dad came home a half hour later. I saw a little gleam in his eyes as Mother told him about Looie. Dad gently rubbed his hands together and said, “A decent local government would put a bounty on those two. But I couldn’t go out after them. It would be too much like shooting horses, and I love horses.”

“This is nothing to kid about, Sam,” Mother snapped.

“Okay, okay. I’ll go have words with Harvey Branton. But if they carry me home on a shutter, you’ll know it went further than words. Remember, darling, he’s the guy who lifted the front end of our car out of the ditch last winter.”

“Just give him a piece of your mind.”

Dad turned to me. “Jimmy, would you care if you weren’t friends any more with the twins? I can tell Harvey to keep them off the property.”

“Have I been friends with them?”

Dad stood up. “Wish me luck,” he said.

Just then a car came roaring into our driveway and the car door slammed almost before the motor stopped running.

Harvey Branton came striding across the grass to our front porch. He walked with his big fists swinging and a set look around the mouth.

Twenty feet from the porch he yelled, “I want a word with you, Sam Baker!”

From the way he looked, if I were Dad, I would have headed for the storeroom in the attic. But Dad came out onto the porch and leaned against a pillar and held his lighter to his cigarette. “Just coming over to see you, Harvey.”

Harvey Branton pulled up to a stop, his face a foot from Dad’s. “You’re harboring a criminal in this house, Baker. This is a decent section. I won’t have you bringing city riffraff up here to pick on my children.”

“Pick on your children!” Dad said with surprise.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know anything about it, Baker. My two boys were worked over by an expert. I have the whole story from them. That gutter rat you’re boarding attacked them. Kim has two black eyes, and so does Cam. Their mother has driven them down to the doctor. Kim’s nose has to be set, and we think that he’ll have to take stitches on the inside of Cam’s lip. A man couldn’t have punished them worse.”

Dad said mildly, “Harvey, I was coming over to tell you that unless you could keep those two pony-sized kids of yours from picking on Looie, you could keep them off the property.”

“Harmless play,” Harvey rasped. “Don’t change the subject. I’m talking about brutal assault, and that riffraff is your guest, so you can damn well assume the responsibility.”

Mother came out onto the porch and said, “I just got the rest of the story from Looie. She wandered away from Johnny, and your two fiends jumped her and tied her to one of the saplings in the back pasture and piled brush around her legs. They had matches and they told Looie they were going to burn her alive. They were holding lighted matches by that dry brush. She said they had red paint on their faces.” Mother’s voice sounded funny and brittle, like icicles in the winter.

“A stupid lie,” Harvey Branton said.

“Looie has never lied in her life,” Dad said softly.

Harvey gave him a mean look. “I’m not saying who is a liar, Baker. I’m just saying that I know my own boys and they wouldn’t do a thing like that and your wife is trying to shift the responsibility.”

Stoney Wotnack came out of the hallway. He came across the porch. His hands were out of his pockets, and I saw that the big knuckles were bruised and reddened. He stopped and looked up at Harvey Branton and said, “I seen it, mister. Them two creeps you got woulda burned her. Now take back what you said about Mrs. Baker.”

Harvey made a sound deep in his throat. He grabbed Stoney’s arm and said, “Son, it’s going to take me about ten minutes to teach you to stay the hell away from decent children.” He raised his big right hand, and his lips were drawn back from his teeth.

Dad said in a voice so low that I could hardly hear it, “Branton, if you hit that kid, I’m going to try my level best to kill you.”

I’d never heard Dad use that tone of voice. It made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.

Branton slowly lowered his hand. He let go of Stoney and stepped back away from the porch. He said, “I’m going to sue you, Baker.”

“Go ahead,” Dad said. “Maybe those two kids of yours will be put in an institution where they belong when the judge hears the case. Keep them off my property from now on.”

The car door chunked shut again, and the back wheels spun on gravel as big Harvey Branton backed out into the highway.

Dad said, “Somebody better help me. When I stop leaning on this pillar, my knees are going to bend the wrong way.”

Mother went to him and kissed him and slapped him lightly on the cheek. “Just like Jack Dempsey. A real killer, aren’t you, darling?”

She turned and put her hand on Stoney’s head. He stood rigid and uncomfortable. Dad said, “Boy, this is your home away from home. We want you back here with us every chance you can get.”

“Knock it off!” Stoney said. He twisted away from Mother and went into the house. We heard his steps on the stairs.

We all talked about it at dinner. Stoney didn’t say anything. Near the end of the meal he said with a faint tone of wonder, “That big monkey was really going to fix my wagon.”

“How did you lick both of them?” Dad asked curiously.

“Both, three, six, who cares?” Stoney said. “They both lead with the right and swing from way back and shut their eyes when they swing. All you gotta do is stay inside the swing and bust ’em with straight rights and left hooks.”

Dad stayed home from the office the next day to see Stoney off. Mrs. Turner came and got him to drive him down to the station. Dad carried the black suitcase out to the car. Stoney had a little more weight on him and he looked heavier in the shoulders, but otherwise he was exactly the same.

Mrs. Turner said, “And what do you say, little man?”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Stoney mumbled.

The car drove off. “Grateful little cuss, isn’t he?” Dad said.

“Maybe we’re the ones to be grateful,” mother said mildly.

We went back into the house. Dad was the one who, by accident, found out about the shoes. And I heard them talk and figure out together what had happened. The only way it could have happened was for Stoney Wotnack to get up in the middle of the night and put a high shine on every pair of shoes he could find. It must have taken him hours.

I saw Mother’s face. She had a shiny look in her eyes, and her voice was funny, the way it gets every fall with hay fever. That seemed to me to be a pretty funny reaction to some newly shined shoes.

She shook Dad by the arm and said, “Don’t you see, Sam? Don’t you see? He didn’t know how to do anything else.”

Dad looked at me and smiled. It was that same funny-looking smile that he wears when he walks out of a sad movie.

None of it made any sense to me. All I knew was that I’d spend the rest of the summer with Looie walking one step behind me, sucking on her hand.

Blurred View

The funeral was a wretched affair. I suppose it was done as tastefully as one would expect. But great gaudy swarms of Gloria’s friends from the television industry came up from the Los Angeles area. They were dressed sedately but still managed to seem like flocks of bright birds, men and women alike, their eyes bright and sharp and questing.

They had been at the inquest too, turning out in numbers that astonished the officials. I had not been surprised. If I had learned any one thing from my marriage, it was that those people are incurably gregarious. They have absolutely no appreciation of privacy and decorum. Their ceaseless talk is like the chatter of birds, and largely incomprehensible to the outsider.

After the funeral I settled a few final details before going away. The lawyer had me sign the necessary things. Gloria had managed to squirrel away more than I expected, and she had invested it very shrewdly indeed. My own affairs were in a temporary lull. Bernard, at the gallery, made the usual apology about not being able to move more of my work and offered his condolences — for the tenth time. I closed the Bay house and flew to the Islands.

Helen’s greeting was sweet and humble and adoring. She is a small, plain woman, quite wealthy, a few years older than I. She was most restful after the contentious flamboyance of Gloria. Her figure is rather good. During the weeks we had together she made several shy hints about marriage, but the unexpected size of Gloria’s estate gave me the courage to think of Helen as a patron rather than a potential wife.

We returned to Los Angeles by ship, in adjoining staterooms, and parted warmly in that city. She was to return to New York to visit her children and settle some business matters concerning her late husband’s estate, then fly back out to San Francisco to be near me.

I moved back into the Bay house and listed it with a good broker. It is a splendid house, set high over the rocks, but a little too expensive to maintain, and a little too conspicuous for the bachelor life I contemplated. Also, there was a silence about it when I was alone there that made me feel uneasy, and made it difficult for me to work in the big studio that Gloria and I had designed together.

After I had been there alone for five days, a seedy little man arrived in the afternoon. He drove up in a battered little car and came to the door carrying a big manila envelope in his hand.

He was trying to say he had something to show me. He was humble and nervous, and had a little recurring smile like a sudden grimace. He smelled sweaty. Something about him alarmed me. Reluctantly I led him back through the house to the studio.

He said, “Mr. Fletcher, I just want to work something out. That’s all. I don’t want you should get the wrong idea about anything. It’s just one of those things. And we can work something out. The thing is, to talk it over.”

I’d had my share of bad dreams about this kind of situation. My voice sounded peculiar to me as I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He had put the envelope on a work table. He said, “What I do, I’m an assistant manager, Thrifty Quick. My brother-in-law, he’s a doctor, got a home right over there across the way. You can’t see it today, it’s too misty. The thing is, I was laid up in April. Dropped a case on my foot, and I stayed over there with my sister. I guess I’m what they call a shutter bug. I’m a real nut on photography. It keeps me broke, I’m telling you.”

“Mr. Walsik, I haven’t the faintest...”

“What I was fooling with, long lens stuff on thirty-five millimeter. I was using a Nikon body and a bunch of adaptors, a tripod of course, and I figured it out it came to f22, sixteen hundred millimeters, and I was using Tri-X. I don’t suppose the technical stuff means anything to you, Mr. Fletcher.”

“You don’t mean anything to me, Mr. Walsik.”

“Figuring back, it had to be April tenth. A clear morning and no wind. Wind is bad when you use that much lens. You can’t get sharpness. The thing is, I was just experimenting, so I had to find some sharp-edged object at a distance to focus on, so I picked the edge of that terrace out there. I took some shots at different exposures, and after a while I thought I could see somebody moving around on the terrace. I took some more shots. I made notes on exposure times and so on. You know, you have to keep track or you forget.”

I sat down upon my work stool. This was the monstrous cliché of all murders. I had thought it a device of scenario writers, the accidental little man, the incongruous flaw. With an effort I brought my attention back to what he was saying.

“... in the paper that she was all alone here, Mr. Fletcher, and you proved you were somewhere else. Now I got to apologize for the quality of this print. It’s sixteen by twenty, which is pretty big to push thirty-five millimeter, and there was some haze, and that fast film is grainy, but here, you take a look.”

I took the big black and white print and studied it. I was at the railing, leaning, arms still extended. He had caught her in free fall toward the rocks, some six feet below my outstretched hands, her fair hair and nylon peignoir rippled upward by the wind of passage. It brought it all back — scooping her up from the drugged and drowsy bed, walking with her slack warm weight, seeing her eyes open, and hearing her murmurous question in the instant before I dropped her over the wall. The print was too blurred for me to be recognizable, or Gloria. But it was enough. The unique pattern of the wall was clear. It could no longer be “jumped or fell.” And with that picture, they could go back and pry at the rest of it until the whole thing fell apart.

When he took the picture out of my hands, I looked up at him. He stepped backward very quickly and said a shaking voice, “I got the negative in a safe place with a letter explaining it.”

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Like I said, I just want to work something out, Mr. Fletcher. The way I figure, if I try to push too hard what I’ll do is spoil everything. What I want is for life to be a little easier. So I could get a little bit better apartment in a handier neighborhood. And there’s some lenses and camera equipment I want to buy. I won’t be a terrible burden, you understand. But I don’t want to sell you the negatives. I want like a permanent type thing, the way people got an annuity. I’ve got some bills I want to pay off, so the first bite, believe me, is bigger than the ones I’ll want later on. I was figuring it out. If you can get a thousand for me now, then in three or four months I’ll come back like for five hundred. I don’t see why we can’t work it out this way. I want you to be comfortable with it so you won’t try to upset anything.”

He was actually pleading with me. And obviously frightened. And I found myself reappraising marriage to Helen. She could more readily afford Mr. Walsik. I had no choice, of course. I had to agree.

He told me where to meet him and when, and I promised to bring along the thousand dollars in tens and twenties. After he had left, I had two stiff drinks and began to feel better. In ridding myself of Gloria I had saddled myself with Walsik, but he seemed a good deal easier to manage.

I found him two nights later exactly where he said he would be — in one of the rear booths of a tiresome little neighborhood bar. I handed him the envelope and he tucked it away. As I got up to leave, two burly chaps grabbed me, snapped steel on my wrist, and bustled me out to an official sedan.

They tell me that I held out for fourteen hours before I finally began to give them those answers as deadly to me as the cyanide will be in the gas chamber.

After it was over, they let me sleep. The next afternoon they brought Walsik to see me. He was not seedy. He was not humble. His voice was not the same. He had that odd, febrile, animal glitter so typical of Gloria’s friends in the industry.

“While you were on the grass-skirt circuit, Frank baby,” he said, “we borrowed your pad. We brought the long lenses. We rigged the safety net. A big crew of willing volunteers, baby, all the kids who loved Gloria. We guessed that’s how you did it. We took maybe fifty stills of Buddy dropping Nina over the wall. How did you like my performance, sweetie? You bought it good. After you bought it, we brought the law into it to watch you give me money. Sit right there, Frank baby. Sit there and bug yourself with how stupid you were.”

I heard him leave, walking briskly down the corridor, humming a tune. Somebody said something to him. He laughed. A door clanged shut. And I began to go over it all, again and again and again....

The Loveliest Girl in the World

She was a chrysanthemum girl, slender by all sane standards, yet not gaunted to the thinness of a high-fashion model. But very useful for the consumer items. You called the agency and you booked this Lya Shawnessy, which was what the agency had named her for obscure reasons of its own, and what they sent you was this Jean Anne Burch, basically from Canton, Ohio, one and the same girl.

And useful. More useful now in the late part of spring than she had been back in the winter, because now her understanding of what Joe Kardell wanted of her was more instantaneous. Also, when he would go dry on a special problem, and Ritchie couldn’t come up with anything either, she sometimes would have a shy idea that would work. It was a good product face, the bone structure so good it could even take flat lighting. And if the deal was to enchant the people with the idea of gobbling Yum-Bars, there she was, staring out of the color advertisement, all a glowing, textured innocence of delight in the masticatory wonders of Yum-Bars. Yet in all that innocence there was a subtle additive — something in the fullness of upper lids, in the modeling of the mouth — expressing a sweet sensuous innocent pleasure in everything, symbolic of the ideal consumer.

She took color beautifully, and direction well, and had few bad angles even in black and white. Joe Kardell had started using her in the winter, using her for things exactly right for her, and he wondered at what subtle and self-deceiving point he had begun using her for jobs not exactly right, jobs where another face would have been better, jobs where he could overcome that small discrepancy through his total mastery of his tools.

At least he had avoided location work, preferring as always the big bare studio on East 35th, where he had total control, Ben on props and lights and scut work, Ritchie loading the cameras, keeping the running record of the shots, music holding the mood, the three of them and the model working with the swift minimum of confusion of a good surgical team.

She had checked in at one on this drizzly spring afternoon, and been ready at ten after. It was one of the jobs suited to her, a college fashion thing for fall, a sort of hood and parka thing, and he was at the point where he knew he should not use her again for anything, no matter how right she was. And he knew that Ben knew it, and Ritchie knew it. All that awareness. How could they miss it?

“You beat your buddies up the hill,” he said. “You’re out of breath, waiting, smiling a little on account of you beat them, and the sun has got you squinting a little bit. Good. Now chin an inch up and an inch toward me. Good. Now you’re alone. They’ve turned back. Smile sad. Good. Now look up into the pretty trees at the pretty leaves. Good. Push the hood back a little. Little more. Good.”

It went swiftly. He made his small professional adjustments in depth of field, composition, lighting, nailing her in her beauty into the emulsion, until near the end when he knew he had it and thought himself safely lost in work, she was turned toward him and suddenly his eyes filled and he could not see her in the ground glass. There was the music and the three of them waiting, and he could not see and he could not look up. He took the shot and turned away.

“That does it,” he said.

Ritchie said, “That’s only eleven on...”

“I told you that does it!”

The rudeness shocked them. Ben cut the music. Out of the corner of his eye, Joe Kardell saw Ritchie shrug, saw Jean Anne head for the dressing room. He did not look directly at any of them.

Ritchie took the rolls out to be marked for the color lab pickup and came back and said quietly, “We got the little kids here for the candy thing, Joe. Any ideas how we should set it up?”

“You do it,” Joe said.

Ritchie looked blankly at him. “But you were going to...”

“Do I get arguments, or do you take pictures?”

Ritchie’s face was white. “I’m not going to take this kind of...”

“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, Ritchie. I... don’t mean any of this. I’ve just got to get out of here. I’m taking off. You’ll do a good job on it.”

“You taking off with her?”

“Don’t push it, Ritchie.”

“Okay. I work for you. But I thought I was your friend. Am I?”

“I’m not keeping track lately,” he said and walked away. He got his hat and topcoat and waited in the corridor. She came out in her rain cape, carrying her kit, and stopped when she saw him, her look startled, glad, apprehensive.

“Joe?” she said, her voice soft and tentative.

“We’ll drive around,” he said.

“All right.” Maybe she was supposed to be somewhere else. But it couldn’t matter to her. Not even enough to mention it or phone in about it. That was the way it took you. It pushed everything else out of focus, like a long lens that brought the clarity to just here and now and the dear beloved face.

They walked down the street to the parking garage and stood silent in the grubby gloom while they brought his car down. All the years of scrupulousness and he could not feel any sense of holiday out of walking away from his work in the middle of the day. He felt heavy, troubled, yet so glad to be with her.

They got into the car, and he turned the wipers on when they turned out into the slow soft rain. He went up to 42nd and west, and then up onto the highway and north, past the piers and the ships and the yellow-gray look of the river. He remembered how it was a thousand years ago, a brassy kid with a used Rollei, the first decent camera he had ever owned, taking that winter essay on the tramp ships and the men, working in the cold pearl light of dawns until his hands were too numb to set the lens. Then all the labor in the borrowed darkroom — cropping, editing, dodging, bringing it all down to fifteen pure, savage prints. Nothing sentimental. Just the hard flavor of how it was to be working on the ships in the winter.

“Jean Anne,” he said, “we have to...”

“I know, darling,” she said. “But not here. Not like this. Where I can see you. Driving along, it’s like talking on the phone, sort of.”

“How did it start? Can we talk about that part while riding?”

“The day you had the headache, Joe. That’s when it started making bad jokes, all trying to make you feel better, and we all got laughing. And when the job was done, there wasn’t anything else scheduled and we did that crazy ad.”

“Forlorn little match girl selling matches outside the Zippo factory.”

“Was it then for you?”

“Sooner. Two weeks earlier. On that eye thing.”

“I wondered about that. I wasn’t right for it. Joe... was it very specific that early?”

“No. I just wanted you there. The jobs I used you on, they seemed more fun for everybody. I told myself that’s all there was to it.”

“Like I did. That’s what people tell themselves, I guess. It’s just this much and nothing more. When they know it can’t be anything more. I didn’t want it to be more.”

“Do you think I did?”

“Now we’re getting into the what-do-we-do part of it, darling, and I have to look at you when we talk about that.”

“Did you know we would talk today?”

“I knew we had to. Soon. I knew you knew it. I knew one of us would... make it possible.”

He took the Cross County over to the Thruway. Traffic was light. He had fifty dollars on him, blank checks, credit cards. She did not ask him where he was going. She had all that quality of trust, of gentle compliance. He wondered how it would be to just keep going. He knew he could not. But he wondered.

He exited at Suffern and drove to the motel road that went up the mountain, turned up that road and, out of some obscure impulse of cruelty, said no word of explanation. He glanced at her. She sat with that blind acceptance of all of it, and there were no tears. But her face was set for tears.

Atop the mountain, he drove past the motel office and on to the restaurant. The parking attendant was not on duty. He drove into the lot, parked, started to open the door to get out. She put her hand on his arm. He looked back at her, and she said his name with her mouth without making a whisper of sound.

As he took her in his arms to kiss her he realized this was the third kiss for them. Such a weight of guilt. Three kisses. In his despair, he made it too rough a kiss. When he realized it was too rough, he made it more cruel, hurting her mouth. The kiss said, at first, this is a man. Not some game. It was pride, and then it shamed him and he released her, got out of the car, and walked around to let her out.

They went to the big restaurant. Quarter to four. The lounge was empty.

“Drink?” he said.

“I don’t think so. Tea, maybe.”

So they went to the restaurant part. It was big and nearly empty. They took a table for two by the windows where they could look far into the gray misty distance, down at a half-seen cloverleaf, a few cars crawling. The waiter brought tea and cakes. She looked at him and then looked down, her face pale.

He made a professional measurement of the quality of the light against the left side of her face and thought, I would use the Nikon with the 105 mm lens, a Plus-X load, go back six feet about, and take this angle, probably a thirtieth at f/2. Portrait of a girl who thinks her heart is breaking, taken by a man who knows his is.

“Mostly it’s how much you are,” he said.

Her eyes lifted. “I think I know what I am.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not fluff, Joe. I’m of consequence. I have value. I take pride. I’m twenty-three.”

“A very old party.”

She took a little cake, bit a corner off of it, then put it down. “Not a pretty baby, or a pretty child, or a pretty little girl. So that they always said, ‘Ah, darling.’ Nobody started saying ‘Ah’ until I was nineteen. Now a pretty woman. Yes, indeed. Pictures to prove it. But it came along late enough so I know what it is. So I don’t give it the wrong value. Do you understand that?”

“I think so.”

“Strong, too.”

“Are you strong, Jean Anne?”

“There was the polio. I told you about that, didn’t I? But not how it was those years of bringing those nerves and muscles back. A lot of hurting, Joe. And pride. But strong for loving, too. I’m sure of that about me. A lot to give. But is there enough strength for us? That’s what I don’t know.”

He rubbed his palm slowly across his forehead. “It’s how much you are. Like I said. And funny to have it focused on me. I mean what the hell. I’m Joe Kardell. Going bald. Thick in the middle. Two teen-age kids. Young Joe is teen-age. The girl is only twelve.”

“But why me?” he demanded.

She shook her head. “Your word is wrong. Why us? I love you. I can’t tell you why I was vulnerable. I can tell you about you. You are a good man. You are kind and wise and sensitive and funny. But I don’t love you because. I just love you.”

He stared at his fist. “All the choices are lousy.”

“I know, darling.”

He did not dare look into her eyes. “Take Ruthie. Fifteen years married. She’s a good woman. My God, that sounds patronizing. Some of my best friends are good women. It’s more than that. I love Ruthie. We’ve got a good thing going. We always have had.” He looked cautiously at the girl.

“I accept that,” she said.

“But I keep thinking I could do it a lousy way. I could just sort of... turn myself off. You know? Stop all communication. And she would get frantic. Her nerves would go bad. Then I could turn it into fights. And I could turn it into a big enough fight after four or five months so that I could give a very plausible imitation of a guy walking out on a shrew. Now wouldn’t that be nice?”

“To even hear you say it makes me feel sick. If I turned you into that kind of a man, Joe, then neither of us would be very much.”

“I know. What do we want? We want an affair? Just like that?”

“If... if you...”

“Shut up! Don’t you know what you’d be doing to yourself?”

She tried to smile. “Run along, girlie, and find some nice young man. I don’t want some nice young man. I want Joe Kardell.”

“Do me the honor of allowing that maybe I do love you, Jean Anne. I mean maybe I’ve been caught in what you could call an occupational hazard, but you did come along, and neither of us were trying to start anything. Right?”

“Right, darling.”

“So I love you, and I don’t want Jean Anne in an emotional mess with an older man, even if it’s me. In a deal like that I get one of the loveliest girls in the world on a very selfish basis, and you get a bruised heart.”

Still trying to smile, she said, “Falling in love is supposed to be such fun.” But the tears came and ran out of blue eyes, one tracking down to the corner of her mouth where her tongue nipped quickly out and licked it away — a very young and very childish and brutally touching gesture.

“So what we talk about,” he said, “what we have to talk about is knocking it off before it gets a fair start.”

“A fair start,” she said, her eyes going around. “What would a fair start be? I think of you every waking moment, and I’ve never been so wretched in my whole life. How could there be any more of a start than this?”

“You’ll get over it quick.”

She raised a cool eyebrow. “And you too?”

“Real quick. In eighty-eight more years I won’t remember a thing.”

“I wish we had...”

“Don’t start sentences that way. Please, girl. I’ve got sixty of them I can start that way and none of them do any good, because the wishing doesn’t do any good. There’s just one thing clear. We get out now or we get in deeper. There’s no such thing as holding it right where it is. You know that.”

“Of course I know that.”

The tea was gone, the cakes untouched except for one. He sat in silence for a little while and then said, “We better head on back to town.” The lounge was beginning to fill up. Some people had come into the dining room.

“You run along,” she said.

He stared at her. “I can’t just leave you way the hell and gone out here.”

“You have to, Joe. I have only so much strength, and I’m right at the end of it. You just have to walk out right now, and never never ask for me again, because if you do, it will be more than I can take. I have money in my purse and I am used to finding my way from here to there, so just stand up and walk out. Now!”

He stood up slowly. “You’ll be all right?”

She turned her head and stared fixedly out at the gray light of the gathering dusk. They had turned the inside lights on. Her fist rested on the edge of the table, her knuckles white with the strength of her clasp. It was a small wrist and hand, as vulnerable-looking as the hand of his daughter. He picked up the check for the tea and walked away.

When he was out by his car, as he opened the door he looked down toward the motel office. It was a cheap and plausible solution, and, of course, no solution at all. But he thought of all the people he knew who seemed to thrive on such deadening compromises. The irony and impossibility of it bit into him deeply. The deadened people were never loved by such a one as Jean Anne. He gave the roof of his car a mighty smack with his fist, got in, and drove away from there.

He drove back into the city and parked on the street and unlocked the studio and went in. He pawed around in the office and found the test Polaroids of the candy job. They looked all right. He sat at the desk and checked the scheduled jobs. He breathed a deep sigh of mingled regret and relief when he saw that there was nothing within the next week on which he could conceivably use Lya Shawnessy.

She had made it totally clear. Phone me and I come running. But he was safe for a week. And, maybe, at the end of the week, he could endure another week. And then another.

He sat quite still for a little while, a stocky man with dark quick eyes and a blue shadow of beard. He took his hat off and leaned forward onto the desk, his head in his arms. He made a snorting sound that startled him. He sat up, snuffled once, looked at his watch, and phoned Ruthie. He said he was sorry, but he had been too busy to let her know he would be a little late. He told his wife he would be home by twenty past eight.

As he turned out the light he thought it was probably a very ordinary thing. If you could look at it sort of from the outside. And that was the trick from now on. Keep it ordinary. Keep everything very very ordinary.

Triangle

September 1966, Cosmopolitan

She looked at him, and for the first time he realized that the second drink was affecting her. There was an owlish intensity in her gaze. She was a small dark girl, eyes large in a small face, eyes earnest under the dark curl of bangs, mouth showing the small erosions of discontent.

“The lousy stupid things I do to myself,” she said, “I play these games, Johnny. The what-if games. So it’s a hypnosis thing. I know she’d never let you go. Even if you wanted out, which would be a fool thing.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Tina.”

She scowled at him. “The thing is, which you know, the hypnosis thing goes only so far, and then I drag my feet. Sometimes I think I’m the most dishonest person I know. Remember the night we couldn’t get a cab?”

“Of course.”

“Any number of cues I could have given you, and you would have taken it from there, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Oh, you know so, Johnny. You know so. I’ve got no international fame for glamor, but I’m suitable. And you’re a human type male type, and we have this kind of awareness that’s been going on with each other for months and months, and who could fault you? Who blames the guy?”

“His wife.”

“Yes indeed, and that’s our little problem, isn’t it?”

“Mine.”

“Anyhow, I guess you could say the game was called on account of rain that night. And after you went trundling on back to hearth and home, I paced my lonely pad telling myself I was a real smart girl. It went like this. He is Johnny Powell and he is one hell of an attractive man, so attractive that if it ever went one inch past where it’s gone already, you’d be hooked for good, and it’s a lousy thing to do with your life, Tina, to become the sad little town mouse, stealing the suburban husband from time to time. You see, it couldn’t be casual.”

“For either of us.”

“Thank you, dear. It’s a sweet lie, but I appreciate it anyway. Anyhow, after trying to sell myself on how bright I was, I got down to the real truth of the thing. Terror. The fear of sin. You see, I’m really the worst kind of cheat.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The modrun woman! Johnny, I’m up to here Victorian. I guess I’ve got to have all the licenses and permits. But, Johnny, where where did all the men go? Did the girls like Frances get them all?”

“There’s some around.”

The waiter looked into the booth. He signaled for another round.

“But I’m twenty-nine years old, Johnny, and when do I stop playing kid games with grown-up people like you?” Tears grew on the black thickets of lashes and rolled free. She dabbed them away.

“Maybe the next won’t be a game.”

“Comfort me, dearie, with brave words. Sure. But what scares me now is, maybe, despair. You know, I get assigned to some other account and there is another Johnny Powell, and maybe he’s only half what you are, but I have to set up all the trite misery for myself, go the dreary route with him because I have to sell myself at least one dream, because the clock ticks on. Maybe just as trite as what could have happened to us. I work for you. I’m a city girl. And you have that big glowing country wife and those dear darling glowing kiddies. Do you mind if I hate Frances a little?”

“Go ahead.”

“She’s so invulnerable. Why do they always have to look like Doris Day? Ah, that shining meaty smile, and knowing the PTA song. Oh God, Johnny, I sound so cheap and nasty, and it’s all pure envy. I’ve got a kid sister, up to her hips in babies, up to her armpits in suds, and I hate her sometimes, too. I’m Aunt Tina, career girl. You and Frances are good people, and I’m glad I didn’t get any further into your lives. But sometimes I can feel so...”

She covered her face and sat hunched, weeping silently. The drinks came. He saw a man in another booth staring at them. What could it look like? The end of the affair. But what was it when there’d been no affair? He felt tender toward Tina. He sensed it would be best to let her work herself out of tears. Gentle words might make it worse for her. He was aware of the city night around them, murmurous, full of mouths and lights and motors, with dark rooms and dark places in the heart and ten thousand simultaneous scenes, and he wondered how many of the scenes had dialogue interchangeable with this one. If everyone were masked, perhaps all the words would be alike.

She recovered and was shy. Her eyes looked torn, and she took small nibbles of her drink.

“Self-pity in the third degree,” she said. “Another of my noble traits.”

“There’s more in the inventory. Pride, spirit, decency, sensitivity.”

She smiled at him. “I’ll do what has to be done, sir. You don’t have to buy me with flattery. But it’s the mechanics of it I don’t quite see. Isn’t it going to look sort of strange and hollow to her, no matter how I do it?”

“It makes me feel sick, Tina, to even ask you to do it. But you have to know more about the marriage. You’ve got the right to know more. The kind of a job I have, there has to be trust. So many trips, so many late nights. A woman should feel loved and secure. Maybe Fran needs that security more than most. I don’t know. Maybe because of her folks splitting up when she was small. God knows I haven’t been a rovin’ man. I don’t need that kind of trouble. You and I, we’ve been as close as I want to come. And you see, Tina, I haven’t reacted the way I should because I have been conscious of this being a kind of infidelity. Do you understand?”

“Of course.”

“We’d been at the club, and in the middle of the evening she turned all strange and remote, and I didn’t know what was up. But I did feel guilt — on account of you — even though I knew we were going to stay, what would you call it, pristine. We went home early. She’d danced with Hal Ward. He was tight. He was trying to make a pass. So he figured, I guess, to smooth the way by giving her the old get-even-with-Johnny motivation.”

“Hal doesn’t know a damned thing about us!”

“That’s what I would have said, but apparently he saw us somewhere and he couldn’t figure any other reason for us being there, and maybe we looked furtive or something. We didn’t see him, but he saw us.”

“He’s a wretched man!”

“At least he didn’t hand her your name. Maybe he was showing restraint. Or maybe he didn’t recognize you — just saw me with a female who wasn’t Fran.”

“With a friend like Hal, who needs enemies?”

“I know. And when we got home early from the club, it could have been settled very quickly and easily. But as soon as I found out what it was all about, I became full of indignation and outrage. They say you get the biggest reaction from an unjust accusation. I’d say the reaction is bigger when there is just a tiny germ of truth in the accusation, just a little stink of guilt. So instead of trying to help her, I got proud as all hell. I wouldn’t even discuss it. I wouldn’t deny it or confess it, so naturally she took my attitude as a confession. The best thing I could have done would have been laugh. But that’s the sort of thing you remember too late. After a week, when I finally woke up and saw what I was doing to her because I happened to feel abused, I made the complete denial I should have made in the first place.”

“A little too late.”

“Yes, indeed. And I could hear myself hitting false notes — because of the guilt and because it was a little too late. My God, I even sounded as if I were the chicken husband making the usual trite lie. She pretended to accept it. Maybe she believes me with ninety percent of her, but the other ten is dubious, and it’s a little wedge sticking into a sort of dangerous potential fracture-line in our marriage. Every trip, every night I have to stay in the city is like giving that wedge a little tap. Staying in town tonight is another little tap. No matter what you think of her, she’s never really had enough confidence.”

“But... what if I sound as hollow as you did? I’ve got this guilt-for-no-good-reason, too, you know. And won’t I just be sort of a... solid fact instead of a vague suspicion?”

“With a sixth sense or something she’s narrowed it down to you anyway.”

“What? How do you know?”

“The name came up during the last quarrel. When you were assigned to the account, I used to mention you. I’ve always talked shop at home. She’s always been interested. For the last couple of months I’ve still talked shop, but I never mentioned your name. That was pretty stupid, I know. But again it was the product of guilt, I guess, and it was subconscious.”

“Oh boy.”

“Oh boy, indeed.”

“There’s that scene in the movies where the other woman calls on the wife and begs her to let him go. And then there’s the scene where the wife calls on the other woman and tells her to get out of Walter’s life. But how do you do this scene? I’ve never seen it played.”

“I don’t know how you can do it. But, you see, I know both of you. I know you both well enough to know you’ll like each other.”

“She’ll adore me!”

“You’ll have to say you’re doing it without my knowledge. You’ll have to say that I made some bitter and cryptic remark to you and you pried the rest of the story out of me. You’ll have to tell her that you’ve been attracted to me.”

“That’s no lie, darling.”

“But I ignored all the openings, and you finally decided I was that rarity in our business, the faithful husband. In fact, you can let her know I have a considerable reputation for same.”

“It wouldn’t have been a serious thing with me otherwise, Johnny.”

“And you can say I’m not exactly hitting the ball squarely around the shop lately.”

“But you are.”

“Sure, but how well will I scramble if the marriage keeps getting a little more sour? I love her, Tina. And for the first time I can’t seem to really communicate with her. Suspicion is a sick, terrible thing.”

“So I tell her that because I do sort of love you, even though it’s a dead-end street for me, I had to bury my pride and come talk to her.”

“I can’t tell you how much it will mean to me. To both of us. But it’s... such a ghastly thing to ask of you, Tina.”

She touched his hand quickly. “Idiot! I’d roll from here to Canarsie for you through broken bottles. And it’ll make me feel better about myself. Create a little self-respect for a change.”

“The man who does get you is going to be very very lucky, Tina.”

“Put that in writing so I can show it to him — if I ever find him. Did you say next Sunday?”

“It would be a good time. I’ll be in Chicago all next week. You might phone her on Saturday and set it up.”

“I can borrow Meg’s little car and drive up there. I’ve wondered what your house is like. I have a crazy feeling, you know? I have the feeling she and I are going to become friends.”

“I hope it can happen. You’ll like her.”

“I sense that, damn it. Johnny, I better stagger out into a cab. I’ve had it — completely.”

“I’ll take you back.”

She looked rueful. “Just put me into a cab, dear. It would be bad timing right now to get the game to go along with the name, wouldn’t it? Tonight I’d be too tired to even drag my feet. Don’t look so alarmed, dear. It’s just a lousy joke.”

When he opened the taxi door for her, she turned and touched her lips to his cheek. “Good night, Johnny. You’re the nice one who got away.”

The misty rain had stopped, and the city night was humid. He walked seven blocks uptown and two and a half blocks east.

While he walked he managed to keep his mind emptied of all inward things, staring attentively at the objects and persons in his line of vision, identifying them the way a child finds goats and kings in a puzzle maze. But as the miniature elevator carried him slowly aloft, he could hear the bump of his heart amid a drone of silence, and fancied himself in a magical machine that dwindled him as it lifted him upward. Feeling dwarfed and vile, he looked at himself in an oval mirror and grinned like a yawning dog.

Sometimes he imagined the key would not fit, and measured his relief against his terror, marveling at how precisely they cancelled each other. But it fit, and the same light was on, and in another room a pink shade backlighted the pillowed tangle of blonde. She looked at him, and he turned away and went to make a drink. He heard her behind him, a scented whisper, turned into her look of drowse, then fed on the lips’ sweetness until the drink, unheeded, tilted icy onto the back of his hand — saw a single eye then, close, wide, vast, focused beyond him.

She rolled her forehead against his jaw and said, “It went well?”

“She’ll go see Fran on Sunday.”

“We’ll cheer them on from Chicago. Poor little cat’s paw.”

“Who is the cat’s paw?”

She backed away, exaggerating demureness. “It’s such a dear role. Maybe we all take turns.”

She moved from shadow through the light and back into shadow toward the doorway. He braced himself with schoolyard defiance and said, “I don’t like you, Jemmy. You know that. I don’t like you.”

She turned in the pink doorway glow. “What has that got to do with anything?” There was a mild patience in her tone, as if he had violated a protocol understood by everyone. And then she was gone into the pink light.

He turned and looked out the window. The glass was a cylinder of stone in his hand, too heavy to bring to his lips. He wondered if the window faced north.

He wished, by an effort of will, he could turn himself to stone and remain there, facing in an uncalculated direction so that when the city ended, he would fall into the rubble, an archeological curiosity.

But then it began once again for him, that force beyond shame, beyond guilt, beyond the small coins of appraisal — that timeless, merciless engine of his anticipation.

The Bear Trap

We had been driving through country baked hard by summer. At about three in the afternoon I stopped at an isolated gas station. We were tired, and the children had begun a peevish wrangling in the back seat. I thought a gas and Coke stop would freshen us up. Heat shimmered in the desert, and far stone hills looked cooler than they were.

The gas station was a cluttered place, with frayed and faded pennants, a souvenir stall bright with cheap dusty pottery, a fat owner who served us with condescending joviality. Cars thrust by at high speed, whipping up dust circles. I drank half my Coke and looked around for the children. They were sixty feet away, examining something in a cage.

I walked toward them, the sound of my approach lost in an oncoming roar of truck. I saw Janet cautiously extending her fingers toward the cage bars. An old fear came strongly into my mind, vivid and sickening. I pulled her back roughly and without warning. It hurt her a little and startled her a great deal. She began to cry. And so, of course, did Janice, her twin. Buddy, their younger brother, moved back with feigned indifference when I ordered them too harshly not to touch the cage.

The fat proprietor kept two narrow, furtive coyotes in a makeshift cage too small for them. There was a rank smell about them, and their cage needed cleaning. Though even at best they are not prepossessing beasts, there was something baffled and helpless about their tucked-in flanks and evasive pacing that was touching and sad. It was perhaps that flavor of bewilderment that made Janet wish to offer the passing comfort of a touch.

As I took the children back to the car Betty came from the women’s room behind the gas station. I sensed from the way she walked and the expression around her mouth that her fastidiousness had been offended by the facilities. And I knew also that this stopping place, though at first agreeable to her, would become my fault — hence both reprehensible and punishable.

She looked at the twins and said in an edged way, “Now what?”

Janet, amid snufflings, said, “Daddy hurt my arm.” She said it with a faint odor of that special primness that signals a parent at fault.

“Really, Hal!” Betty said.

“I pulled her back before one of those coyotes took her fingers off.”

“Couldn’t you have just spoken to her?”

“Let’s go,” I said. I wanted to be away from there quickly. But I did not leave the memory behind. It came with me, undamaged by the years, vivid. It was a memory I had not examined for a long time. It was a memory that shamed me.

We drove along the burned road through the dry land. There was a quality of rigid silence in the way Betty sat beside me. The twins made damp muted noises. We had over two hundred miles to go.

“I’m sorry I hurt your arm, dear, but I was scared you’d be hurt by the coyote.”

“He wasn’t going to bite,” Janet said. “He didn’t like it in that cage.”

“When I was young,” I said, hunting carefully for the right words, “not much older than you are right now, I had a friend named Judy Hoover. She got too close to a cage where a bear was, and he reached out and hit her and killed her.”

The twins gasped, and Buddy lunged forward and asked with great eagerness, “Was there blood? Was there?”

“Why,” demanded Betty icily, “do you make up such ridiculous things to tell them? What do you expect to gain?”

I glanced at Betty. Her face was angry. “It happened,” I said. “It really happened.” I glanced at her again and saw a questioning uncertainty in her eyes.

“All right. It happened, Hal. That’s no reason for telling the children.”

“I was telling Janet so that she could understand why I was unintentionally rough.”

“You were rough, Hal, because you’re always irritated when we have to stop. Your idea of a trip is to keep traveling until everybody is a ragged ruin. You were rough because you were cross.”

“Was there any blood?” Buddy demanded.

“We are not going to talk about that ridiculous bear,” Betty said firmly. Buddy sat back where he belonged. Janice whispered something to Janet and the twins giggled.

I was content not to talk about it. I had never told Betty about it. I had never told anyone all of it.

It had happened when we had lived in West Hudson, the summer before I had gone away to school. We had moved to West Hudson when I was ten and in the fifth grade. Judy Hoover was a year younger and in the fourth grade. I cannot remember how I met her. She was on the fringe of my awareness and she moved gradually and steadily into focus. I remember that she was not a pretty child. She was brown and blond and skinny and active, very fleet of foot. In the dusk games of summer evenings she was very difficult to catch, and even more difficult to evade. She was constantly in motion. I cannot remember her ever being still. I used to help her with arithmetic and, later, plane geometry and algebra. She was bright in everything but math.

She was an only child and she lived with her father and mother in a big old house two blocks from us. I would go over there and we would go up to her room and I would try to hammer the plausibilities of mathematics past the bland incomprehension of her blue blue eyes. I remember when, after I had turned thirteen, Mr. Hoover suddenly made a rule that we could not study in her room. It seemed to both of us to be an incomprehensible ultimatum. He changed toward me that year. He had always been very friendly and jolly. He grew cooler. I thought it was because I had offended him in some way. I did not understand until much later.

In school, in the early years, I was popular enough and husky enough to be able to risk having a girl as a good friend. And Judy was a good friend. We both read a lot, read the same books, talked about them. After reading a book we particularly liked we would become characters out of the book — until the next good one. I would not say we were inseparable. That came later. Sometimes we would not see each other for a week. But we always picked up where we left off without effort.

I was fifteen and beginning my second year of high school when Judy entered high school as a freshman. The beginnings of awareness have been so exhaustively dealt with that it is hard to speak of what happened between us without uncomfortable triteness. We both thought it was our special miracle and had never of course happened to any other two people in exactly that way. I can even remember the very moment when she stopped being Judy my friend and became Judy my girl.

I was walking along the second floor corridor of the high school building toward the drinking fountain. Adolescence had filled me with curious imaginings and lurid dreams. With my new awareness of the flesh, I watched a blonde girl walking ahead of me, watched her good legs and the swing of her skirt and the feminine shoulders. She turned, and I saw with amazement that it was Judy, and saw that she had somehow become pretty. It was never the same again.

Though high school children did not go steady then to the extent that they do now, we became a unit, an entity, in the social life of the school. Judy and Hal. Hal and Judy. It was unthinkable that either of us would go out with anyone else. My parents accepted the situation more readily than hers. Judy told me many an account of household combat over our design for living. But Judy had a firm line of jaw and it was eventually accepted — though with not the best of grace. She told me once that her father had tried to get a transfer so they could move her away from me. I said that if that happened, we would run away together. She said it was the only possible thing we could do.

Mr. Hoover was cool toward me. He was a tall loose-jointed man with many awkwardnesses of posture and movement. He spoke in an abrupt jerky way. His hair was very dark, and his skin had a glossy yellowish look to it. I thought him quite old but now, looking back, I realize with a feeling of shock that he was young. His awkwardnesses I would now classify as boyishness. They had married very young. Judy’s mother was a handsome woman who played a harp, an instrument I thought highly exotic.

Judy and I were closely supervised by Mr. Hoover. He intended to afford us no opportunity for sexual experimentation. But in my last year in the high school, before that last summer, we found opportunity for greater closeness. She was a virgin when she died, but I had the memory of my hand touching that young breast, memories of bruised lips, of aching closeness. I now believe that without the difficulties placed in our path by her father I would have possessed her. We were very much in love. All the path of our life from then on was clear to us. There could be no greater certainty than ours.

Judy was good. I do not mean that in a moralistic sense. She was stubborn as mules, sometimes moody, often capricious. But she was gay, honest, intelligent. And pretty, and clean as a cat.

It happened on the twenty-third day of August. It was a Friday. I was pumping gas that summer, paying off the loan that had gone toward my Model A Ford. I had permission to take it away to college with me — if I paid off the loan. The station was owned by a man named Shinley. It was on Bay Street near the railroad crossing. It was a little after three in the afternoon, a hot afternoon. I knew that Judy had gone swimming at the West Hudson Country Club with Martha Baer. Had I not been working, I would probably have been there too. It is a small inexpensive club with a big pool.

I brought change to a man and when he drove away, I saw Martha Baer standing there looking at me with a strange expression. She was a stocky girl with glossy black hair and a happy smile. She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be looking at something right behind me, so intently, in fact, that I turned around to see if Judy was sneaking up on me.

I asked Martha what was up. She answered me in a flat, singsong, recitative voice. “Mose killed Judy. Mose killed Judy a little while ago.” She turned and walked away, a dumpy girl in red slacks, walking slowly through the August afternoon.

It took a long time for the words to make any sense. It was like throwing a rubber ball at a wall, aiming at a hole just big enough for the ball. It keeps missing and bouncing back. Then it goes through the hole. The afternoon stopped. Everything stopped. I felt like ice. Then I realized I was in my car, going too fast toward the edge of town, half-crying, so that it was hard to see.

You could get sandwiches and cold drinks at the club, but it was expensive. We all used to walk down the highway from the club to a lunch stand run by a bald man named Goekel and his redheaded daughter. They did a good business. In June Mr. Goekel had acquired a bear. It was a black bear, not large. Some friend of his had acquired it somehow in the Adirondacks. Mr. Goekel had it in a big, sturdy cage and he planned to turn it over to a zoo when the weather got cold. In the meantime I imagine it improved business because a lot of people would stop to look at it. I believe it was Ginny, the redheaded daughter, who named him Mose, Old Man Mose.

Judy and I always stopped at the cage to say hello to Mose. Mose trudged forever back and forth inside the bars, swinging his head, turning ponderously at the corners. Sometimes he would give a sigh that seemed very human. He wasn’t very big, and his coat had a dusty look. His muzzle was blunt. He had little weary-looking piggish eyes. “Poor old Mose,” Judy would say. “Poor tired old Mose.”

On rare occasions Mose would stop his pacing and heave himself up and stand with his forepaws against the bars. It made him seem much bigger. He could look you in the eye. He would stare out and grunt and drop back down and continue to plod back and forth.

As I made the turn on the highway a gray ambulance passed me, heading back into town. It was traveling within the speed limit, its siren silent, no red dome light flashing. There were many cars and a lot of people at the stand. Mose was dead in his cage. His blood looked very dark on the rough cement floor. The stand itself was closed. The shutters had been pulled down and locked. People stood and looked at the dead bear.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later, long after the funeral, that Martha Baer told me in detail how it happened. They both had a hot dog and a coke and they were standing close to the cage, watching Mose pace back and forth. I can still see how it would have looked. The two girls, one dark and stocky and one slim and fair, watching the dusty bear in his highway prison. Judy was wearing sandals, a white skirt, and a yellow sweater. The hair of both girls was still damp from swimming. Judy, between hungry bites, was crooning to the bear, saying, “Poor old man Mose.”

Martha said they were standing quite close. Mose did his trick of heaving himself up onto his hind legs. Martha said she instinctively moved back a half step. Mose was peering out through the bars in his piggish way. Martha said she took a drink from her bottle of coke just then, squinting her eyes against the sun. Just as she lowered the bottle she heard an odd thick heavy sound. She said it was sort of a damp sound, as though someone dropped a soaking wet wadded towel onto a tile floor. She saw Judy fall, the top of her head ruined. She saw the white skirt and yellow sweater against the dust, the bottle rolling as the coke spilled, the hotdog roll bursting apart. Mose dropped to all fours and began pacing again.

She said she got over being faint after they had covered the body, before the ambulance arrived. She said she watched when the state trooper killed the bear. She said she wanted to see the bear killed. The trooper had stood, biting his lip. He waited with the muzzle of the gun between the bars until Mose plodded into close range. With the gun almost against Mose’s head, the trooper had fired. She said Mose stood for a moment, looking down at the concrete floor. Blood dropped from his muzzle and then he collapsed. The trooper fired all the rest of the bullets in his gun into the bear’s body. Martha said dust puffed out where each bullet hit. She said she had wanted to see the bear killed, but it hadn’t been just the way she had expected.

My life seemed unreal to me for about two years. I could not comprehend that this thing had happened. After two years I came back into focus and stopped a lot of damn foolish activities and went on to college, just two years behind schedule. I had rolled in my own martyrdom long enough. But things never became for me what they had once been.

I remember now that during college when I spoke of Judy to any other girl, and I am afraid I did that too often, I would say that she had drowned. It was more understandable to them. There was something too macabre and even elusively comic to say she had been killed by a bear. Comic is a shocking word to use under such circumstances, but it is true. It is the first instinctive reaction before the realization of horror. Horror is there in the incredibly quick blow of the cruel paw that smashed the fragile skull.

But this is also the memory of shame. And that, too, must be admitted. The incident happened in September, the month after her death. I certainly knew better. I have no excuse. Or, if there is any excuse permitted, it is that I was young and bitterly hurt, and the young have fetishes about the display of emotion.

It was a thick misty afternoon, a day of mild rains. I was on the front porch of our house with a friend named Don Ailery. Don’s little brother was there, too, an active pest five years old. My family was out. The front porch extended around the corner of the house. We were around the corner, Don and I, sitting on the glider, our feet on the railing, talking. The talk was about Judy and the bear. I guess the whole town had talked about it for a month. My awareness of my own loss was something that came in great waves. The worst was to wake up in the morning and remember that this would be a day without Judy. One more day out of the thousands ahead of me.

The smaller brother was thumping around on the porch, playing some game of his own. I was talking about Judy. I was proud of my control. A hard guy. You didn’t bleat about loss. You played your minor role in “Hell’s Angels,” judiciously accepting the bad flip of the coin.

I hear my own voice. “She wasn’t a bad kid, Don. Not a bad kid at all. She could be a pest sometimes. I guess you remember how she looked in a bathing suit, all right. Judy could be a hot little number.”

Don was looking beyond me, his face strangely blank. I turned and saw Mr. Hoover standing there looking at us. He had a box in his hand. It was a small cardboard box tied with brown cord. He looked at me. He had heard me. He looked at me without anger. He looked tired and puzzled. He held the box awkwardly. No one spoke. Even the little brother seemed quelled, though he could not have understood the implications of the situation.

Mr. Hoover turned abruptly away and walked back down the porch to the steps. I followed him slowly, and there were no words I could say. I could not say that my words meant nothing, that I bled inside, that by my disloyalty to her memory I was salting fresh wounds. It started to rain, harder than before, as he walked out to his car. He stopped by the car in the rain and looked back at me, still with that look of incomprehension. I can see him standing there. The car is high and square. He wears a wide mourning band on the sleeve of his gray suit. He got in and pulled the door shut and drove away.

I never learned what was in the box. I guessed that it contained some of Judy’s things, things they thought I might like to have. She died ten days before my birthday, and I wondered, too, if it was the present she had bought me before it happened. I have often wondered what was in that box.

That is my special memory of shame. Yet on this day, driving at sixty-five toward receding mirages, I knew that the meaning of the memory had changed. The loss and the sadness were there, but I could no longer think of what might have been had she stepped back away from Old Man Mose. Now, no other end seemed thinkable for her. It had happened long ago and far away, and distance had given it the flavor of inevitability.

The loss remained. I glanced at my wife. Her hand was on her thigh, clamped into a square small brown fist, lightly freckled. This was Betty, and I knew her well — every shade of mood, every inch of body, every intonation. The twins, children she had given me, were singing in their small sweet toneless voices.

I thought of my love for her, summoning it up, cloaking myself in that love.

It is the only defense I have. Because every time I remember Judy, it seems to me that I have spent my whole life among strangers.

And I do not care to be so alone.

A Romantic Courtesy

When the port engine developed oil pressure trouble, John Raney’s pilot, Sammy Dowd, informed Raney he was going to alter course and set the Twin Beech down at San Antonio to get it checked. Raney felt irritated by the delay. He was anxious to get back to his ranch, north of Fort Worth, early enough to take a long swim in the pool and horse around with the kids and relax from the tensions of the past few days.

It had been a business trip, one of the important ones. The two days in Corpus dickering with the bankers on the new oil deal had been wearing, but he had the satisfaction of getting the terms he had hoped to get. On the way back yesterday morning he had stopped off at Lee Guthrie’s spread near Charco to select some new breeding stock for Lee to ship up.

He had changed to khakis, and Lee had taken him on a jeep tour of the ranch after they’d dickered over the stock. When they got back to the ranch house, they found that mutual friends had flown in. In the evening a poker game started with the stakes just high enough to make the palms of your hands sweat. It lasted all night, and when it broke up at eight in the morning, Raney had broken even, coming out just about two hundred dollars ahead.

After breakfast Raney had a sudden strong urge to head back home. Because the trip was from ranch strip to ranch strip, there seemed no point in changing and shaving.

After Sammy had put the aircraft down, John Raney stuffed the oil deal papers he had been studying back into the briefcase and went off and found a phone and called Betty at the ranch and told her about the delay.

“Now don’t you let Sammy take off with that thing until it’s fixed up right, you hear, honey.”

He pictured her at the phone with her worried look that put two vertical wrinkles in her pretty forehead, and grinned fondly. “If you rather I’d walk, it’ll take up quite a chunk of time, puss. Couple of months.”

“How did everything go?”

“Smooth and pretty, puss. Like I told you it would. I’m going to stake you to that new patio you got all drawn up.”

She squealed with pleasure, then gave him a report on the kids and asked about the breeding stock and when it would come. After the call he sauntered back to where Sammy was watching two mechanics working on the engine.

“How does it look, Sammy?”

“They’ve located it. I’d guess about forty minutes.”

“Want to come get some coffee?”

“No thanks, John. I’ll stick here and see how it comes along.”

John Raney ambled over to the main terminal building to the coffee shop. He was a tall man, close to forty, lean, angular, slow-moving. His khakis were sweat-stained, and he wore his ranch hat tipped forward as a protection against the glare. There was tough ginger stubble on his jaw and dust on his boots. He wanted a long soak in the big pool and then some tall cool drinks, and later, after the kids were in bed, a long spell on the patio watching the night and the stars. He would rest up over Sunday, tend to ranch business on Monday and Tuesday, and be off to El Paso on Wednesday in the Beech with Betty to Dick and Dusty Fremont’s housewarming.

The money was piling up, faster than he had ever dreamed. A few breaks and a lot of hard work, and now he was in the clear and moving fast. No regrets.

He sat at the counter and ordered coffee. While waiting he looked in the mirror and saw the woman alone at a small table against the wall behind him. And he felt as though his heart had stopped. She had not changed. Not at all. Funny to have been thinking about no regrets, and then the next moment see her and have the sight of her take the lid off this one little hidden regret. Betty was all he wanted. She was good and honest and pretty. But Gloria had come first, and he had lost her.

When his coffee was served, he paid for it and carried the cup over to the table where the woman sat alone. She looked up from her magazine with that very cool expression a handsome woman uses to fend off the unwelcome advance. Her eyes widened with sudden recognition and she exclaimed, “John! John Raney! How wonderful!”

“Join you, Gloria?”

“Of course! But they’ll announce my flight any minute. I hope it’s going to be late. It’s been a long time. How long? Fourteen years! Isn’t that dreadful?”

He hung his hat on the wall hook and sat opposite her. “A long time ago and a long way from here, Gloria. You look wonderful.”

“I must say you’re looking very fit, John.”

“But not very presentable. I wasn’t figuring on running into any old girl friends.”

“Were there so many of them?” she asked archly.

“Not many. Just the one, I guess.”

In a silence that had suddenly become awkward he sipped his steaming coffee. They had met when he was an infantry second lieutenant with a division training at Needles, California. She was working in Riverside. Three of them, John and two of his friends, had been dating her. John at last gained the inside track. They planned marriage. The affair was brief and stormy. But though Gloria was in love, she was also ambitious — and John Raney had little to offer her. When Christopher Kimball, Major Christopher Kimball of the Philadelphia Kimballs came into the picture, Gloria was quick to break the engagement.

“How is the Major?” John asked.

She made a face. “Ancient history, John. Unfortunately. He got to be a colonel. After the war he got some very curious ideas. He wanted to retire from life, hole up in some grim little mountain town in Colorado that he thought was delightful. We were divorced, and I went to New York. I might as well tell you the whole grim story, darling. I married a very sweet boy named Jerry Cobbler, but that was all he was — a very sweet boy who utterly refused to grow up. So number two went kaput, too, and he went back to his mother. But don’t think I’ve made an utter botch of everything. I’m married to Wendell Cowliss now, and have been for three years. Surely you’ve heard of him.”

“Sorry.”

“He’s a very talented and wonderful man. He’s older than I am, but he’s truly young in spirit. He’s the owner and producer of some of the biggest television shows in the country. It makes a hectic life, believe me. We’re on the run every minute. Wendell likes to get out and get the feel of the country. I’m meeting him in New Orleans tonight. It’s a fabulous life, John. Perfectly fabulous, the people we meet. It’s like being in the heart of things every minute. I’m really happy.”

John Raney, looking at her closely, did not think she had the look of a happy woman. There were lines of tension by her mouth and her eyes. There was a nervous brittleness in her voice. The black hair was as glossy as ever, the soft mouth as provocative, but she was under chronic strain.

“But I do want to know about you, John. Did you get the little ranch you used to talk about?”

He grinned at her. “I sure did.” He tried to tell her it was twenty-six thousand acres, but she interrupted him.

“Married? Kids?”

“A little blonde wife named Betty and three husky boys.”

She looked at him wistfully. “Gee, you know sometimes I wish...” She made a face. “I’ve gone this far. I might as well say it. Sometimes I wish you and I had... done what we planned before Chris came along. Wendell can buy me anything in the world I want... but if I could have been with you on some little ranch, working hard, raising kids, entering stuff in the county fair, riding into town on Saturday night in the pickup.... I think I would have made a good ranch wife, don’t you?”

John Raney realized with an amusement tinged with annoyance that he was being patronized. Until that moment it had not occurred to him that she could look at him as a sort of grubby semifailure. He was used to being recognized at once as John Raney, no matter how he happened to be dressed.

“Hard work,” he said, “being a woman on a ranch. Chop wood, run the tractor, feed the hogs. Lonely life.” He knew just how he would set her up for the revelation of a success that at times seemed even to him gaudy and unreal.

“You work hard,” she said, “but you can see the results of your work. It’s something concrete. And you look happy, John. You look tired, but you have... a flavor of contentment. I’ll bet your wife is happy, too.”

“Want to see a picture of her?”

“I’d love it, really.”

He took out his wallet and held it under the edge of the table to make the selection of a picture. He was grinning inside with anticipation. He carried a little folder of color photographs. He looked through them quickly, Betty in that Dior thing in front of the enormous fireplace. Betty and the kids the day the Mercedes was delivered, with the big ranch house in the background. He decided on the one of the barbecue, with Betty and the kids, and the planes parked off the strip near the horse barn, and the flamboyant bar under carnival canvas. He held that one, relishing her embarrassment, and looked across at her, and saw in her eyes an unexpected look of both warmth and vulnerability.

So, not knowing why, he put those pictures back and dug into the wallet and found the one he had carried for so long. A black and white one, creased and cracked. Only one kid, the first boy. A toddler. Betty, in faded jeans, leaned smiling against the corral fence, squinting into the sun, with nothing in the background but the drab contour of the land. He handed that picture to Gloria.

“She’s pretty, John. And she looks awfully nice.”

As she handed it back her flight was announced. He walked out with her into the white heat of the sun, and he stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, hat tilted forward over his eyes, and watched her climb the stairs and turn at the top and wave good-by, a dark slim handsome woman, smartly dressed, hurrying back into her fabulous life, tense and brittle and just beginning to be aware of her own discontent.

After her flight left, he sauntered back to the repair apron and found them bolting the cowling back in place. After the takeoff he sat and looked west at the hill county, and the silvery loops of the Guadeloupe River. He felt a deeper contentment within himself. The last buried regret was gone. The dark Gloria of Riverside was now a poised and superficial stranger.

He decided he would tell Betty about meeting her, tell Betty tonight as they sat on the terrace under the starry night. And in telling her, he would be telling her something else, something beyond words. He knew Betty would understand about the picture.

The Fast Loose Money

As soon as I came in the house, Marie knew something was wrong. I guess it showed. I had a faraway feeling, where you have to stop dead and remember where it is you usually hang your hat, as if you’ve never been in the house before. And when you go to change your shoes, you sit on the edge of the bed and look down at them and you can’t make up your mind which one to untie first.

She followed me into the bedroom and said, “What’s wrong, Jerry? What is it?”

“Go away,” I told her. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t bother me.”

She put on her hurt face and sniffed at me and went away. I could tell her any time. It was going to be a ball. After I changed, I went out the back door, and Marie said, “Where you going now?”

“Over to see Arnie.”

“You know he isn’t home yet. He won’t be home for a long time. You know that.”

“So I’ll wait.”

“When do you want to eat?”

“I don’t want to eat.” She sniffed again, and I let the screen door bang. It was a warm night. About nine o’clock. I generally get into the city about noon, and I check the three lots and work them, and then I make the night deposit and then I come home. Arnie can quit when he feels like it too, and he’s usually home about eleven.

So I went over into Arnie Sloan’s back yard and sat in one of those beach chairs he keeps out there, rain or shine. I guess his wife, Janice, saw me out there, and she came out and said, “What you doing, Jerry?”

“I thought I’d hang around and wait for Arnie.”

“He won’t be here for a long time.”

“When he gets home, tell him I’m out here,” I said, and she knew from the way I said it I didn’t feel like making conversation with her, so she went back into the house. I could see her in the kitchen for a while, and then the kitchen lights went out.

It was a warm night. I could hear somebody’s hi-fi turned way up, and hear the summer bugs. It made me think of all the times Arnie Sloan and I have sat out in his back yard and gabbed. A lot of the time we’ve had long, friendly arguments about which one of us really has it made. It’s pretty much a toss-up, I guess. You take my deal. I’ve got long-term leases on three good parking lots down in the city. The JT Parking Corporation. JT for Jerry Thompson. Marie and I own the stock. The books are always in apple-pie shape. I could stand an audit any time. I draw enough so we can live the way we do. And once in a while we cut out a little dividend for ourselves. But if you play by the rules, you’re a sucker.

Every parking ticket is in serial sequence. You come in to park, the boy puts the IBM time stamp on the back of the office stub and the one you walk away with. The office stub goes under your windshield. When you come back, the boy stamps the ‘out time’ and collects your cash money. So, on each lot, you can check the file of stubs in serial sequence and know just how much dough came in, and how much to enter on the books for that day. The way I work it, I got two sets of serial sequence tickets. So: I feed in say fifty dupe tickets on one lot. When I cash up the lot, I set those aside and figure out what the take on them was. Say it turns out to be sixty bucks. Once I’ve destroyed the dupe tickets, that sixty bucks is loose money. It goes in my pocket, and from there it goes in the wall safe in my closet at home. Who can check loose money?

There’s a way they can check on you if you’re stupid. You start spending that loose money and living too good, and you can get checked. So what you do is live off your book income, and spend the loose money where it doesn’t show. On trips — things like that.

Arnie says his deal is better. He owns a little piece of a midtown restaurant. It’s one of those fancy expense-account places, where lunch can run you twenty-five bucks a head if you want it to. Arnie is head waiter and does a lot of the buying. He gets a cash kickback on the buying, and he gets fat tips. He declares maybe half the tips, but the rest is loose money, and he handles it the same way I do. We arrange to break away at the same time, and when we take the girls to Cuba or the Bahamas or Mexico, we have a ball. I guess we both average ten to twelve G’s a year loose money.

But most of the time we talk about the war. War II. That’s where I met Arnie. I was a sergeant in C Company of the 8612th Q.M. Battalion stationed at Deladun, a rail junction about thirty-five miles north of Calcutta. We had warehouses there and plenty of 6x6 trucks, and it was a soft deal. Go load stuff off the Calcutta docks, check it in, warehouse it, then either ship it north by rail, or run priority items by truck to Dum Dum Airfield for air transportation, or turn it over to a Q.M. truck company.

Arnie Sloan came to us out of the replacement depot, and I couldn’t figure him at first. A very slick guy who wore tailored uniforms and kept his mouth shut. I had a lot of things going on the side, so I had to keep my guard up in case he was an I.G. plant. I could figure he wasn’t a stupe like most of the G.I.’s in that outfit. We took it very easy with each other until finally we both knew the score. We were both hungry, and for hungry guys that station was paradise.

Just take a small item for example. You lift three bottles or four out of a case of liquor ration for officers, then drop what’s left from the top of a stack fifteen feet onto a cement floor. Who is going to fit the glass together and find out how many bottles were in there? And a bottle would bring fifteen or twenty bucks in Calcutta any time.

We teamed up, Arnie and me, and we figured a lot of angles. C Company was under Captain Lucius Lee Brevard, from South Carolina, and he plain didn’t give a damn, and neither did his lieutenants. The officers kept themselves stoned and ran down to Calcutta to the big officers’ club just about every night.

After Arnie and me made a pretty good deal out of PX wristwatches, we used the dough to branch out into the missionary bond racket. Things were so loose we didn’t have much trouble getting a hitch to China and getting orders cut any time we wanted them. Missionary societies in the states would put say five G’s into a missionary bond at the Chase Bank and the bond would be sent to some poor slob who was head of a mission in China. The catch was he had to exchange it for Chinese dollars, called CN, at the National Bank of China at the legal rate. That could be thirty to one when the going rate was six hundred to one, so instead of three million CN, with five G’s, he’d only get a hundred and fifty thousand.

So I’d go up to Kunming, make my contacts, change a big wad of Indian rupees into CN on the black market, and buy the bond for one and a half million CN, which would cost me about twenty-five hundred bucks. Then I’d mail the bond to my sister, and she’d take it to the Chase Bank and get the five G’s back and deposit it in my savings account. We could make a twenty-five-hundred-buck profit on one five-G bond, but the trouble with that was it was all on record, and it was taxable, and later on Theater Headquarters stuck their nose in and stopped the racket.

Gold was better. Inflation was so bad in China that those jokers were hungry for gold. And it was no trick buying gold in Calcutta. You could make thirty to forty percent on your money every trip. Then they started to get rough and shake you down when you went into China, and the risk was too big. So Arnie and me, we teamed up with an A.T.C. crew that had a regular schedule in a C-47 flying the Hump. Arnie got one of the static line braces, and we located an old Indian in Calcutta who made a mold, and he’d cast static-line braces in gold. Once they were covered with aluminum paint and screwed to the ceiling of the aircraft, no inspector was going to catch them. Hell, sometimes that airplane flew to China with five solid gold static line braces screwed onto it.

By that time we were making too much to risk sending it to the states in those hundred-dollar money orders you could get. We had the problem of how to put the green stuff into such a portable form that we could get it back to the states without any questions when we were shipped home.

As if we didn’t have enough problems, old mushmouth Lucius Lee Brevard busted himself up in a jeep after a big evening in the city, and Captain Richard E. Driscoll took over C Company. He was a little blonde guy with long eyelashes, chilly blue eyes, and a way of holding himself very erect. He did absolutely nothing for three days. Just when we were beginning to relax, he made his move. He conducted an official inspection without warning. Then he called a company formation. It had been so long since anything like that, that the boys felt they were being imposed upon.

We were a sad-sack outfit. I don’t think any two guys were dressed alike. I can remember him standing so straight out there in that white-hot sunlight, with the wind kicking up little dust devils behind him.

“At ease!” His voice was thin, but you could hear it. “All officers and enlisted personnel are restricted to the company area until further notice.” He waited quietly until the long groan was over. “No vehicle will leave the motor pool without a proper trip ticket countersigned by me. All personnel will wear the uniform of the day. There will be a complete showdown inspection tomorrow morning at nine. All non-coms in the three top grades will assemble at the orderly room in ten minutes. Dismissed.”

No pep talk. No statement of intent. Just G.I. chicken, right out of the book. We endured a week of it, and it didn’t slack off an inch. Driscoll was ruining our income. So Arnie and me had a little meeting, and we called in some of the other guys we knew were all right.

Everybody had ideas. A lot of them were no good. Too many of them were outright defiance and would end you up in the stockade, back to buck private. But some of the ideas were okay. You see, if Driscoll had a good officer team, we wouldn’t have had a prayer. But he was trying to operate with the same batch of foul-ups Captain Brevard had left him.

Arnie summarized it. “Okay, guys. Get the word around. Whatever you do, you do slow. Whatever can be dropped, you drop it. And follow every order right to the letter. The stuff everybody has been doing as routine, you don’t do it unless you’re ordered to do it.”

And within two weeks the company went to hell. We’d barely managed to scrape along the old way, without bringing the brass down on us. But now nothing worked. A sergeant would take six trucks down to the docks. After he was long overdue to come back with a load, an officer would go down in a jeep to find out what happened. He’d bring the sergeant back to the captain.

“Sergeant, Lieutenant Quinn reports he found the loaded trucks parked at dockside. Why didn’t you come back?”

“Sir, I was ordered to take the trucks down for the load. Nobody told me where to take the load. I waited for orders, sir.”

“Sergeant, I will give you an order. In the future, every time you go to the docks for cargo, you will bring it back here for warehousing.”

“Yes sir.”

And two weeks later he was on the carpet again. He had picked up a load in ten trucks and brought it back when he was supposed to take it directly to the sub-depot at Dum Dum.

“But, sir, the captain ordered me to bring all cargo back here, sir.”

Trucks weren’t gassed because nobody ordered them to be gassed. The mess ran out of chow because nobody ordered it be requisitioned. There was nothing Driscoll could use as a basis for courts martial, or even company punishment. Everybody obeyed orders — slowly and awkwardly. If it had been just a few guys, maybe Driscoll could have fixed it by transferring them out. But it was the whole company. He got the message all right. He knew that all he had to do was loosen up and we’d get back to our normal low level of efficiency. But he was too stubborn to quit. He tried to be everywhere at once. He couldn’t trust his own lieutenants to follow through. It peeled the weight off him, what little there was to start with. No matter how hard he tried, the battalion brass was on his neck every minute. Seven weeks from the day he took over, he was relieved of command.

It only took a week to break in the next guy, and by then Arnie and me were back in the money business. By the time we were rotated home on points for discharge in July of ’45, we had comfortable little balances back in the states and quite a load to take with us. I’d been able, through a lot of breaks and hard work, to get mine in U.S. cash. I carried it home in a hollowed-out wood carving from Java, packed tight. Arnie invested all his in perfect star rubies and sapphires, put them in the bottom of his canteen, poured melted wax on them, and when it had set, filled the canteen with water.

One week after they had turned us into civilians on the same day at Fort Dix, we totted up the scores. I had a little better than thirty-eight thousand bucks out of the war, and Arnie had almost thirty-one. But I’d had a start on him.

We’d figured on going into business together, but he didn’t like the ideas I came up with, and I didn’t think much of his. So we split, and I started with the one parking lot, and he worked as a waiter until he found the place where he figured it would make sense to buy in. But we kept in close touch. He married a year before I did, and when I decided to marry Marie, the house next to his was for sale, and it was a nice neighborhood, so we moved in. Marie and Janice get along just fine.

And we’d spent a lot of hours out in his back yard drinking beer and talking about the old days. Lately he’d been trying to talk me into a new deal. He thought he could talk his partners into letting him go to Europe to line up new sources of supply for some of the fancy stuff they serve at his restaurant. He wanted to take a big wad of loose money over and open up two number accounts in Switzerland for us. He’d looked it all up.

“It’ll work like this, Jerry. With a number account, nobody can trace you. It’s against their law. And you can tell the Swiss bank what to invest in. They hold the securities in the number account and bank the dividends. By the time we’re fifty, we could have such a big slug of dough over there that we could quit and move to Spain or Italy and live like kings the rest of our life. What the hell’s the good of just blowing the loose money?”

It sounded pretty good, but I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I was up to about twenty-six thousand in the wall safe, and I didn’t feel exactly easy about turning it all over to him. If he decided to get funny, I couldn’t yell cop, could I?

But the idea of a number account or any other kind of account had gone pretty sour. I lit another cigar, but it tasted so bad I threw it into the darkness of Arnie’s lawn. I knew I should be hungry, but the thought of eating made my stomach knot up. It was a little after eleven when I heard Arnie drive in. My house was dark so I knew Marie had gone to bed.

Arnie came out into the back and said, “Hi, Jerry? Where the hell are you?”

“Over here.”

“Janice said you wanted to see me about something.” He fumbled his way to a chair beside mine and sat down.

“How are things going?” I asked him.

“Fine and dandy. Fine and dandy. And you?”

I knew I was going to tell him. I didn’t know how to start. I had to tell him how it was at six o’clock when I was helping out at the biggest lot on account of the rush. And a guy came in and I didn’t look at him, just held my hand out for the stub, but he didn’t give me one, and then I looked at him and nearly sat down on the asphalt. He hadn’t changed as much as I’ve changed and Arnie had changed. He hadn’t put on the pounds like we have. He was smiling, and in our past relationship I hadn’t seen him smile much.

“Hello, Captain,” I said.

“Hello, Sergeant. Got a minute?”

“Sure, Captain. Sure. My God, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” I took him back into the cubbyhole office that’s part of the shack on the front of the lot.

He sat down, still smiling, and said, “A little over sixteen years since I made my mistake, Thompson.”

“Mistake, Captain?”

“I made the mistake of trying to take the company over and run it. I made the mistake of trying to take it away from you and Sergeant Sloan.”

“I don’t know as we were running it, Captain.”

“Just mister, Thompson. Mister Driscoll. You know, Thompson, I’ve never considered myself a vindictive man.”

I didn’t know what he was driving at. I didn’t know why the way he was smiling should make me so uncomfortable. “What do you mean, Ca... Mr. Driscoll?”

“You boys really took me over the jumps, didn’t you?”

“You know how those things are.”

“You taught me how they are. Good business you have here, Thompson.”

I shrugged. “Three lots. I make out.”

He turned and looked through my dusty window at the beat-up office building across the street. “Suppose, Thompson, a man wanted to find out just exactly how well you’re doing. Suppose he rented desk space near a front window over there and used a mechanical counter and took the trouble to check all your traffic in and out?”

My smile felt as if I wasn’t wearing it straight. “He’d have to be... pretty curious, wouldn’t he?”

“And have a lot of time on his hands, too.”

“I... guess so.”

“Cat and mouse isn’t my game,” he said. “I’m enjoying this, I suppose, but not as much as I thought I would. So I’ll leave out the routine and cut it short. Here. This is for you. I don’t generally deliver these myself, but I made an exception in this case.”

I picked it up. It was a subpoena. As I stared at it blankly he stood up and said, “We’re scheduling you at two P.M. tomorrow, Thompson. Bring your books and records for all of last year, the duplicate of your return, and you might be well advised to bring your attorney.”

“I don’t understand,” I said in an empty way.

He placed a card on the corner of my desk. He paused in the doorway and said, “Give my regards to Arnold Sloan. I expect to see him soon.”

I picked up the card. RICHARD E. DRISCOLL. TREASURY INTELLIGENCE. FEDERAL BUILDING.

Arnie said, in a nasty way, “Look, buddy, are you just going to sit there and sigh at me? I put in a long day. I’m ready for the sack. If you’ve got something to spill, let’s start hearing it.”

But I still couldn’t find the place to start. So I did it another way. I took the captain’s calling card out of my pocket and handed it to him.

“What’s this?” he said.

I didn’t answer him. He took out his lighter. I watched his face as he read the card. I watched him real close.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The Straw Witch

Lately Williamson found himself remembering all those weeks he had spent in that Dutch cellar with the old man named Gulligan. He wondered why he should think of it now, after twenty years, why he should dream of it.

This mission was going smoothly. The one with Gulligan had gone wrong, all wrong. Their security had been compromised, and there wasn’t damn else they could do but hide in the cellar blackness and try to talk the timid girl who brought the food to them into taking a message to Ostlund, assuming he was still alive and hadn’t sought other cover.

Gulligan, like an old hound, had caught the whiff of death. In the darkness his mind wandered, and he talked on and on. Gulligan was a sour old hulk, an Irish murderer, a lifelong saboteur and conspirator, just the sort of malignant riffraff they sent on missions like that one. They never sent their clean young men to assassinate civilians.

Gulligan had muttered away in the darkness, talking of death. The wounds and the whisky and the women had not killed him, but they had readied him.

It seemed odd to Williamson that after all the years Gulligan’s voice should come so clearly into his mind. “I don’t know how they summon all the others, Billy boy, but for the ones like you and me, for us they send one of the straw witches. Now not that I mean to be telling you they’re made of straw, lad. It’s a habit they have, known to my father’s father and way back to before the Romans built their walls of stone. On the nights when the moon rises full and yellow they gather where there’s a black pool, and quaggy ground so no fool can approach them. You can hear them on a still night, making their little singsongs of laughter, sitting with their pale beautiful feet in the black water, all of them with silver needles knitting straw in the moonlight, fashioning it into wee gallows ropes and dainty shrouds.”

“For God’s sake shut up, Gulligan!”

“No, they’re not of straw. Not at all. They are the fairest you could find in a day’s journey, lad. Dark-haired lassies with skin satin fine, eyes of a tilt, full of dark secrets and half laughter. Colleens for the taking, lad, all heats and softness under a black dress, and pale arms bare in the moonlight.

“When yours comes for you, lad, you won’t be thinking she’s a straw witch. No, you’ll have your mind on but one thing, and she will take your hand in hers and be in such a sweet hurry to take you to a private place. But when you reach to her, her thighs will be as smoke, her breasts no more than the wind passing, and it is only her lips you will find, with a snow taste to them, cold as pebbled snow, and with a quick and clever suck she takes your wind away and your murderer’s soul.”

“Shut up, Gulligan.”

“Now don’t I know as certain as my name it was a straw witch came for McClure and for Donovan? Leech and Fitzroy and McGuire? And more beyond remembering. And one will come for me because that is the way it has always been for us and always will be.”

But no straw witch had come for the old man. Gulligan had taken sick in the dampness and burned with fever. When he began to rave and call out, Williamson had felt for the socket at the base of the skull and done it quickly. Still, he kept remembering the sound of those last words, “Darlin’, darlin’.”

He had left the cellar three nights later, holding that same knife against the back of the plump, terrified girl until he was out on the streets and clear. And then his luck had been good. Those days had been simpler. An official pardon and the occasional medal. In those days everyone was agreed on the identity of the enemy. Now it was all a confusion, and easiest to stop thinking about the right of it or the wrong of it, and do what was paid for, do it neatly and professionally.

Memories of Gulligan could not spoil this present mission. The fee was high. Two blunderers had made a try at the assignment and failed to kill. So now the man was hard to reach. This time they were in no hurry to have it done. They wanted to be certain. The target was an ambassador. As with so many others, this was assassination for political advantage.

Williamson had been moved into the area and provided with a job and false identity. The ambassador’s big country house was floodlighted at night. There was an electronic intercept system and guards around the clock. When the ambassador left the house, it was in a limousine with bulletproof glass, and the automatic garage doors did not open until he was in the car.

It took Williamson a month to find a way to do it. He found a safe night place from where he could watch with the powerful binoculars. He saw that the routine with the house dog was what made it all possible.

At first he thought it might be possible to do it with a rifle when the ambassador let the dog out. But the distance was too far. It was a night shot and too chancy, and the man had been scared into the habit of caution. He would open the front door at some time between ten and eleven each night, just wide enough to let the dog out. It was a big red setter. About fifteen minutes later he would open the door and whistle for the dog.

The answer was, of course, the dog itself. His best place was a little over two hundred yards from the house, on a wooded ridge. Fifty yards behind him, just off a small suburban highway, was a good place for the car.

The dog ranged well in the night, but even so, Williamson had to wait many nights before it came close enough for him to risk whistling to it. It barked, came closer, whined softly as it smelled the liver. He had cut it into small chunks. The dog was wary. He talked to it steadily in a low tone.

After a week it was in the habit of coming to that spot, with woof of greeting, to eat the fresh meat, have its ears scratched, listen to the friendly voice in the night. Williamson brought along a pencil flash and, shielding it with his body, got a good look at the collar the dog wore, heavy and half buried in the silky red hair. Two days later he had found a collar sufficiently like the one the dog wore

Fortunately the animal was obedient. When he heard the whistle, he would lift his head, then turn and lope back toward the house. He would go directly to the door and be admitted, and it would close. Williamson began bringing a stopwatch. The best time from his accustomed spot was thirty-three seconds. The slowest time was forty seconds. The median time seemed to be about thirty-six seconds. When he was certain that it could be done that way, he made his contact and told what was needed. He stressed the fact that the timer had to be extremely accurate, and that the entire pack — timer and explosive — could not weigh over twelve ounces.

When it was delivered, he found that the total weight was almost fifteen ounces, but he decided that would do.

Sweating slightly, he disengaged the timing device and tested it for accuracy. Between forty and fifty seconds it was accurate to within two seconds. He finally decided that he would set it at forty-four seconds. The additional weight might bother the dog. Once inside the door, it would very probably give its master extravagant greetings and expect to be petted. It would not really matter whether or not the man was bending over it. If he was within six feet of the dog, he would die. If he was within ten feet of the dog, he would probably die.

He reassembled the packet, set it for forty-four seconds, and affixed it to the collar he had purchased. A small thumb switch would activate it, and it made no sound to bother the dog.

They wanted to know when it would happen so that they could take maximum advantage of the incident. He gave them a date that would provide three more nights of test. On those three nights he removed the dog’s collar and replaced it. And, being thorough, he waited until the dog heard the whistle, pressed the imaginary switch, and watched it hurry off toward the white brilliance of the house.

On the target night he was in position at nine o’clock, with the lethal collar and the bits of meat on waxed paper laid out. He waited with all the endless patience he had learned.

At twenty of eleven the dog was let out of the house. He saw it come prancing through the brightness. He knew it would stop briefly among the trees and then head out to the familiar place. As the dog gulped the liver, he removed its collar and put the other one on.

The dog twisted and whined at the unfamiliar weight. He had to keep it close by. He took out the second packet of liver and fed it a bit at a time. The dog pranced and woofed. This was a new game.

Williamson was ready for the whistle. When it came, he reached quickly, found the switch, and activated it. The dog started toward the house. Williamson had decided that the roads might be blocked very quickly, and it would be better to deny himself the satisfaction of seeing the white front door blown outward.

So before the red dog had gone twenty feet, he jumped up and began to go swiftly down the slope. He turned and looked back and saw the dog standing in the moonlight, looking back at him, its head cocked quizzically.

“Go home!” he said. “Go home, dog!”

He started down the slope and saw it come after him. This, too, was a new game with the new friend. Now he knew the dog could not make the house in time, so he began to run. He tripped on the slope, fell and rolled, and scrambled up. He ran down to the road and began to race along the shoulder toward his car. He suddenly heard, to his horror, an excited woof close at his heels, and then the sleek hard shoulder of the dog nudged against his leg as he ran, almost tripping him. He looked down and saw the delighted dog running easily along with him, grinning up at him in the moonlight.

And when he looked ahead to see how far it was to the car, wondering if he could make it, knowing he could not, he saw beyond where he left it, a girl standing under the cone of the streetlight. All he had time for in this world was to see the shine of her dark hair, and see that her arms were bare and white, her dress was black, and that she stood indolently, looking toward him as though she were waiting for him.

The Trap of Solid Gold

April 1960, Ladies Home Journal

If Ben and Ginny Weldon had only had the time to sit down quietly and think things through, they might have seen just how they were heading for a time of crisis. More than crisis, in fact. “Disaster” is not too mild a word, not when all the hope and promise is so great. By careful prediction they could have guessed that the early months of 1965 would be the time of ultimate trial, but of course they had no time to sit down and think. They would have admitted a growing uneasiness, small fore-warnings of doom that were briskly poked back down into the subconscious whenever they became aware of them.

Marriage is a small brave ship, and embarkation is valiant and hopeful. But the channel is narrow, the set of the tide tricky, and the buoys and markers forever shrouded in mist. They had set out in a tighter ship than most, which is a matter of luck, a factor for which you can be grateful without ever making the mistake of believing you have earned it. They were whole people, with the capacity to give and receive love in equal measure, with humor to give them that special balance of objectivity, with good looks, health, education, ability, and uncontrived charm. These factors are luck. You have to earn all the rest of it.

And so it was a special shock to realize that by 1965, after ten years of marriage, the copilots had lost the channel, the wind was rising, and the thunderous reefs were sickeningly close.

Marriage courts and counselors relate that the one most prevalent cause of marital difficulty is money. This seems a small, mean, shabby thing, with no dignity in its connotation of bickering. But money is a strange poison. It is an index of security, and when it becomes a problem, it has a nasty tendency to tinge those other less tangible aspects of security with despair.

In view of Ben Weldon’s position and his ability, if is both ludicrous and tragic that money should have been the hidden rock that cracked the hull of the stout little ship. By 1965 there were five in the boat.

Chris, at eight, was a small boy full of areas of a deadly earnestness, but with such a brimming joy in being alive that he was afflicted with frequent seizures of a wild and manic glee that would take him whooping to the top of a tall tree in a startlingly few moments.

Lucille, age six, was known only as Ladybug. She wore seven different personalities a day, from imprisoned princess to aging ballerina, combining an appetite for conspiracy with a thespian lust for costume.

Penny was a three-year-old chunk of round, warm appetite and placid insistence upon being hugged frequently, a goal consistently achieved despite a chronic condition of stickiness.

This is the Weldon family, whose combined ages total 79, who live at 88 Ridge Road in Lawton, New York, a one-hour-and-seventeen-minute commutation from the city.

The view of an outsider was perfectly expressed when they had, as a weekend house guest, a man they had not seen since college, a man doubly precious to them because it was he who had first introduced them. Just before he left, as they stood by the drive, Ben’s arm around Ginny’s slender waist, the friend said, with a fondness spiced with a dab of envy, “You kids have really got it made.”

One would have thought so.

Take a look at one target of this odd disaster, Benjamin Dale Weldon, age 32. By profession he is an executive, one of the rare good young ones, employed by National Directions, Inc., as Assistant to the Vice President in Charge of Unit Control. Weldon is a tall man with a dark semi-crew cut, glasses with thick black frames, and the kind of rugged-wry asymmetric face women have the tiresome habit of calling “interesting.” In his first years with National he gave a deceptive impression of low-pressure amiability, which obscured his special talents, but now they are thoroughly known and appreciated. Under pressure, he can plow through jungles of intricate work. He can properly delegate authority, backstop his superiors, make effective presentations, keep his temper, side-step company politics, resolve controversy, and make the people working for him feel as if they are a part of a special team.

All this is, of course, a description of a splendid No. 2 man. But Weldon has that additional gift of being able to come up with the important and unusual idea at the right time, and the willingness to fight for his idea to the extent of laying his career on the line. This makes him a potential No. 1 man, and the company is totally aware of his present and his future value.

For his abilities they pay him $23,500 a year. In return for this salary he is expected not only to function adequately in his job but to dress conservatively and well, comport himself with traditional National Directions dignity, live in a house and a neighborhood suitable to his position, entertain properly, take first-rate care of his family and their future, and take a hand in civic affairs.

The executives of National Directions, and in particular the president, Brendan Mallory, see in Ben Weldon a pleasing prototype of the young National executive, a sort of ambassador at large. They are gratified that he had the good luck and the good sense to marry a girl who is and will continue to be of great help to him.

Brendan Mallory has a private timetable in his mind whereby Benjamin Weldon will assume the presidency at age 55. At that point Weldon will not only be receiving one of the more substantial salaries, but he will have additional income through the bonus and stock-option plan. But this, to Brendan Mallory, is of secondary importance. The man who heads the firm must, first of all, have respect for the obligations and responsibilities of the position, realizing that his decisions can have an effect on the national economy.

Brendan Mallory realizes that it is a most delicate problem to nurture the growth of the young executive. He must be taught to understand the blessings of and the reasons for conformity without deadening that creative individualism that the No. 1 man must have if the company is to remain competitively strong.

Virginia, wife of Benjamin, is lovelier at 30 than at 20, an outgoing blue-eyed blonde, who wears her multiple emotions close to the surface, who has pride and the gift of laughter. She is loving, rewarding, and incurably absent-minded. She fills with a violent indignation at any injustice. Her energies inspire awe. Toward her children she is scrupulously, unpermissively fair, whacking them soundly when they need it. As a consequence there is order in their small world, and they feel secure, well loved, and feel no urge to express themselves through tantrum or bratty whining.

So here is paradise on Ridge Road. Strength, love, ambition, and a future. Nice people too. No sleazy little cocktail-party flirtations. No amorous discontent.

At the end of 1964, if you had asked them if paradise hadn’t become just a little conditional, they would have stared at you, and then defended themselves with great indignation. And that could have been the clue — the little excess of indignation.

If they had had the time to sit down quietly—

But there were the commuting to the city, and the job itself, and the increasing frequency of the field trips, and the two kinds of entertaining — business and friendship — and the Lawton Country Club (as a result of Mallory’s hint that he should belong), and the sitter problem and the Cub Scouts and the P.T.A. and the Community Chest and the Red Cross and the Civic Betterment Committee and the Ridge Road Association and, of course, five birthdays and holidays and church and anniversaries, and correspondence with friends and relatives, and television and shopping and essential do-it-yourself projects and office work brought home and that essential reading that must be done to keep up with the world’s swift pace.

So if there was a rare chance to sit down quietly, they took it. And spent the time making up little mental lists of the things undone. They no longer had time to talk to each other in any leisurely, thoughtful way, and so they were losing one of the best parts of a good marriage — and making it not quite as good as it should have been.

It should have been more of a clue to Ben and Ginny that, all that year, whenever they did have a chance to talk, they talked about money. Oh, it was reasonably amiable, with an infrequent edge of rancor showing only briefly. They tried to make a kind of joke out of it. And why shouldn’t it be a joke? When you’re making $23,500 a year, money problems are a joke, aren’t they?

Ben paid the bills, so the true nature of their situation was trying to intrude itself on his awareness long before Ginny became aware of the growing tensions. Let it be said firmly and finally right here that these were not two silly, improvident people, whimsically tossing money left and right. Ben had paid a good share of his own way through school. Ginny had been on a tiny allowance. They had started marriage with debts, not riches, and had lived to a rigid budget, and paid their way. Ginny knew every rice dish in the book.

Perhaps the first intimation of what would eventually and incomprehensively turn into disaster was the Incident of the Cigarettes.

In January — right after New Year’s, in fact — when the checking account needed very dexterous juggling, Ben Weldon switched from cigarettes to a pipe. He told himself it would be good for him. Ginny had always wanted him to smoke a pipe. He told himself that it was purely secondary that cigarettes, at a pack and a half a day, were costing him $164.25 a year. He wondered why he had bothered to figure it up.

He struggled with the pipe problem until he had mastered the techniques. His birthday was in April. He got home from the city later than he wanted to, because he knew Ginny would keep the kids up so they could give him their presents, but it was one of those unavoidable things.

He sat in the living room, and the cake was brought to him so the kids could see him blow out the candles, and the song was sung, and the kids gave him the presents, the littlest one first, as was the household custom. He lifted himself out of his weariness to make those exclamations that would satisfy them, and those jokes that would delight them.

The present from Ginny was the last one he opened. It was a pipe in a fitted case, with a beautiful grain in the wood. He remembered the brand name and the model name from the day when he had selected a pipe. And he certainly remembered the price. He had told the clerk that he didn’t feel like paying $25 plus tax for a pipe.

He looked at the beautiful thing, and he felt a resentment so sharp, so bitter that it shocked him. In one gesture she had cut the heart out of his campaign of frugality. He looked at her and saw her smile, which anticipated his pleasure in the gift, and in that instant he wanted to smash it to the floor in its fitted case.

Her smile faded and she said, “Don’t you like it? I thought it—”

He caught himself quickly and said, “It’s beautiful, honey. It really is. And the style is just perfect.”

So the kids had to see the ceremony of the first lighting of the new pipe, and then Ginny permitted them one small piece of birthday cake each, and shooed them off to bed.

After she came back to the living room she said, “Is anything wrong?”

“What could be wrong on my birthday, blondie? Bring me a kiss.”

The unexpected, irrational force of his anger over such a simple thing should have prepared him better for subsequent developments.

On an evening in early May, Ben got out the checkbook and paid the bills. This necessary ceremony was something that he had begun, not exactly to dread but to feel increasingly irritable about. He sorted them and paid all the little ones first — fuel oil, dentist, doctor, phone, light, gas, water, car repairs and so on. He totaled them and deducted the total from his balance. Next he looked over the big ones, and paid the ones that had to be paid. Every month it seemed as though an unexpected big one would come along. This time there were two discouragingly fat ones, the fire insurance on the house (paid annually and not included in the mortgage payments) for $208.20, and a life insurance premium of $442.50. They had to be paid. And a final check for $400 had to be drawn to Ginny’s order, for deposit in her checking account to take care of the household expenses. He tried not to think too much about the balance left: $41.14. He had his commutation ticket for the month and a little over $20 in cash. Light lunches in the city this month.

Ginny came in just then, and as she walked by she patted him on the shoulder and sat in the chair near the desk.

“Made out my check yet, financier?”

“Are you that hungry for it?”

“No. I think I’ve got to hit you for a raise, boss.”

“What?”

“Four fifty anyway, but five hundred would take some of the strain off.”

He glared at her and said, more loudly than he intended, “Just what do you do with all of it?”

She looked startled, then indignant. “What did you think I did with it? I buy groceries for five. I buy clothes for me and three children. Gas and oil for the car. A one-afternoon-a-week cleaning woman. Sitters. A yardman once in a while now that you don’t have as much time as you used to have. Dry cleaning. Toys. Movie money. Sometimes I even buy myself a dollar lunch. Prices are going up, darling. Up and up and up, and I’m asking for a cost-of-living adjustment. What’s the matter with you lately?”

He adjusted a weak smile. “I’m sorry, honey. Look here. Everything is paid. Here’s what’s left.”

She got up and stared at the figure and then sat down again rather heavily. “But you need more than that for the month!”

“I’ll get along. I can draw trip expenses in advance for the Toledo thing.”

“I’m not... foolish with money, Ben.”

“I know that.”

“But where on earth does it all go?”

“Good question.”

“You’re making good money. Don’t we owe the bank something on that open note?”

“Oh, I’ve whittled that down to just twelve hundred.”

“Will it be better when that’s paid off?”

“It might be. A little.”

She straightened her shoulders. “Well, I can certainly get along on the four hundred, Ben. If I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t have—”

“I didn’t mean to bark.”

“Golly, I don’t blame you. We’ll just have to live... simpler.”

“Where? How?”

“Those are good questions, too, aren’t they?”

And it was turned into a joke, but the strain was there, the tinge of poison. And all the affirmations of love could not make it go away entirely.

It was, Ben thought, as the lean month went by, just a case of holding on, cutting corners until income jumped again. It made him feel guilty, however. It was a shameful situation to be unable to live without strain on an income which, ten years ago, he would have considered wildly affluent. It was best not to think of what might happen should some emergency situation come up.

And so in June, of course, which had promised to be a better month, Chris nearly lost his right hand. He was in a school bus on the way to a picnic, sitting by the window on the right side of the bus, his right arm out the window. As they were making a turn at low speed on a gravel road the right front tire blew. The bus skidded, went through a shallow ditch and into a stand of small trees. Chris said later that he had tried to pull his arm in, but the motion of the bus had jammed everybody against him. At first it was believed that no one had been hurt. The sound Chris made was lost in the general turmoil. But then he fainted.

When Ben got to the hospital at four o’clock they had been working on the hand — pulped between tree and bus body — for over an hour. Ginny was very white and very still, and her eyes were huge.

They did the basic structural repairs in the first operation. The third day following there were evidences of infection. In spite of the sulfas and antibiotics, his fever went up to dangerous levels, there were consultations and tentative recommendations for amputation. It was a nightmare time, with the hospital the center of all thoughts and schedules. The child was so stolidly brave about it, so uncomplainingly courageous and gallant that it seemed to make the whole thing more pointlessly tragic.

Almost during the last hour of decision, the infection began to respond. There was a second operation in July, very delicate and intricate, close work with muscles, tendons, nerves, to achieve optimum functioning of the hand. He healed with such miraculous speed — a facility reserved to small healthy boys — that he was able to go back to the hospital for the final operation in late August, a relatively minor one to readjust repairs previously made in the index finger and thumb.

By the time he started school in the fall, the bandages were off. The hand was slightly but not obviously misshapen. The orthopedic surgeon was quietly proud of his work, of the restoration of an estimated 60 per cent of function. But Chris often wept with frustration at the hand that would not follow the commands of the mind and, when it did so, was so girlishly weak. He had a series of exercises that he tended to overdo. “By the time he is twelve, he will have eighty per cent function,” the doctor said. “Perhaps later it will become more. He will adjust, and never notice it.”

When your only son is injured, it is degrading to think of money. You get the money, somewhere, and you don’t think about it, at least very much. The hospitalization covered a small part of the expense. Ben had the optimistic feeling that he could recover the rest of it from the Department of Public Instruction. He had a local lawyer, Harold Crady, look into it.

Crady finally reported back. “I’ve been around and around on this thing, Ben. The insurance company takes the stand that their coverage does not extend past taking the kids to and from school, or on special instructional field trips. This was a picnic, not authorized by the company, and the bus was not being driven by a regular driver.”

“Who was driving it then?”

“The brother of Chris’ teacher. The Public Instruction people take the stand the bus was ‘borrowed’ without sufficient authorization. The driver has no personal liability coverage, and he hasn’t got dime one, Ben.”

“Then what do I do?”

Crady shrugged. “You could file suit against the Public Instruction Department and the insurance company and the driver.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

“Because I don’t think you’d get anywhere. You’d just be making a bad risk of more money, Ben. Take your loss. That’s the best thing you can do.”

Hospital, surgery, anesthesia, nurses, operating room, and outpatient care came to $3006.65. Hospitalization covered $401.20 of this total. It was particularly ironic that Harold Crady’s bill for legal services in the amount of $100 had to be considered a part of the expense of the accident. Ben Weldon raised the $2700. He cashed the last few Government bonds. He had been trying to forget that he owned them, so that he would leave them alone. He got a little over $900 for them. He borrowed against the cash value of his insurance, a final $1000, bringing his insurance borrowings to an even $4000, on which interest at 6 per cent was piling up, and leaving him a cash-value equity of a little over $100. He went down to the Lawton National Bank. His 180-day note had been whittled down to $1100. He paid the interest to date and had it rewritten for $2200, with the overage deposited in his checking account. Mr. Lathrop Hyde, the vice president, was cordial enough, but Ben Weldon thought he detected a certain reluctance, an almost imperceptible reserve and skepticism. There had been Hydes in Lawton Valley back when New York had been a full day’s trip away by carriage. He never could feel entirely at ease with what Ginny in her more irritable moments called the aborigines. They all seemed to have an emotional resentment toward the new people, which was at odds with their pleasure in making money out of the explosive growth of the area.

On leaving the bank Ben was uncomfortably aware that interest alone on his debts was costing him a little over a dollar a day, and all reserves were gone.

That night he and Ginny had to drive into the city to attend a theater party that was a professional obligation. Three couples from National Directions, with Ben the junior in rank, and the president of a client firm in Dallas and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Blessing.

Sometimes such evenings turned out to be fun, and Ginny had enjoyed many of them. But this night Mrs. Blessing relayed her apologies through her husband to the people she had never met. She was confined to her hotel bed. Something had upset her, possibly the New York City water. Mr. Blessing stated that Myrna was very sensitive about water. He was to go right ahead without her, and, clearly, he had been going ahead very effectively at the hotel bar.

Ben had been in conference with the man, and had admired the agility of Hank Blessing’s business brain. He was a big freckled man with a fringe of gray-red hair, small pale-gray eyes. In the present negotiations with National he was in the dealer’s chair and was capable of squeezing every last advantage out of it.

It astonished Ben that a man so coldly shrewd in conference could be such a total after-hours boor. Service at dinner before the theater was infuriatingly slow, providing a chance for Hank Blessing to proceed further with his self-inflicted paralysis of the cerebral cortex. He dominated the table with increasingly coarse tales of his homespun beginnings, while the three National executives and their wives sat with glazed smiles inadequately concealing acute distress. A man alcoholically convinced of his own irresistibility and charm will nearly always focus all of it on the nearest beautiful blonde. Ginny became Hank’s rebellious target.

They were late to the theater. Hank made a horrible racket in the aisle as they were finding their seats. He managed to plant himself beside Ginny and mumbled further exploits to her, ignoring the shushings, until he went soundly asleep. The play could have been excellent. The leading lady was sick. Her understudy ran through the part as though anxious to make a late date, drowning out her cue lines, yelling the tenderest passages.

Hank came up out of sleep at the final curtain, refreshed and ready to go. Ben was able to beg off, using the sitter as an excuse.

As they drove north on the parkway, Ben became aware of Ginny’s ominous silence. There had been other horrible evenings, to be sure, but they had always been able to make jokes on the way home.

“Charming guy, that Hank Blessing,” he said at last.

“Utterly.”

“We’ve been going around in a tight little circle with that guy. We ought to get it all locked up tomorrow.”

“And I went around in a tight little circle, too, darling,” she said hotly. “Two drinks he spilled on me. And I’m so tired of being pawed I could scream.”

“Come now, honey. You weren’t—”

She whirled in the seat to face him. “How could you keep track of what was going on? You were too busy thinking about how you’re going to... lock it all up tomorrow.”

“Honey, really now—”

“Don’t you really-now me, Ben Weldon. We used to go out together, a million years ago. Now when we go out, there’s an angle. I get dragged to town to prove that the young executive gets married just like ordinary people do. And I’m told that it’s my job. I’m helping you get ahead, or something. Well, I’ll keep right on doing it, because I suppose it’s part of the bargain, but you might as well know I consider it cynical and degrading, and I hate every minute of it!”

She flounced around and began to stare out her window at the night, as far from him as she could get.

“I wasn’t aware of the fact I was torturing you,” he said stiffly.

“What did that evening cost?” she asked in a small voice.

“What do you mean?”

“What did it cost? Total. Is that a hard question?”

“Tickets, dinner, drinks. Oh, I’d say about two twenty-five. But it’s a legitimate expense that can be deduc—”

“When do you have to go to Dallas?”

“It’s set up for next Tuesday.”

“First-class air out and back? The very best hotel? Room service? Bonded bourbon and steaks two inches thick and the biggest rental car on the lot—”

“It’s always that way. We can’t afford to give the impression of cutting corners. Actually it’s a public-relations and promotion expenditure, and I’m not exactly loafing, you know.”

“This dress,” she said in a dreary voice. “I’ve put the hem up and down so many times I feel like I’m wearing an elevator. And we decided it would be so jolly and unusual to just stay home for our vacation this summer. All I had to do was cook for five and keep house. No more cleaning woman one half day a week. I wonder how scraggly I dare let the lawn get before I hire Gus to cut it. You come home so bushed, I haven’t the heart to ask you. We can’t afford to entertain the people we really like very often, so we have to turn down invitations, which at least saves sitter money.” She sighed heavily. “It’s a double standard, that it is. You take trips and live like Aly Khan and then you come back to your well-mortgaged home and listen to your wife whine.”

“Ginny—”

“It must bore you stiff.”

“We have to hang on. That’s all. This is a bad time. We just have to get through it.”

She turned back toward him, this time with earnestness. “But don’t you see, darling, that there should be more to life than just ‘getting through it’? These are supposed to be the good years. We don’t have any fun. Neither of us sees enough of the kids in the right way. Oh, I know. You’re the fair-haired boy, and things will get fat in the future, but what if we’re so beat down by the time things do get good that it won’t mean much?”

“Should I quit?” he snapped.

“Typical,” she said in anger. “Typical! You get all defensive and won’t even talk about it.”

“I’ll talk about anything constructive you care to bring up.”

He knew he was driving a little too fast, and dared her mentally to make any comment about it. The grim silence threatened to continue all the way to the house, but a mile after they had made the turnoff toward Lawton, the motor began to make an odd sound, a combination of grinding and clanking. He slowed down quickly.

“Is that little red light supposed to be on?” she asked.

The very moment he noticed it was the oil-pressure light, the car acted as though he had stepped on the brake. He put it in neutral and used what was left of the momentum to coast onto the wide shoulder. The motor was dead. He tried the starter and the starter would not turn it over.

“What is it?” Ginny asked.

“No oil, I’d guess. I wasn’t watching the heat.”

He got out and opened the hood. The heat that came off the block felt much like that of an open fire.

“Do we have to get oil?” she asked.

“No, we do not get oil.”

“Don’t bite my head off. I just don’t understand these—”

“The moving parts were operating without oil. Friction created great heat. The moving parts expanded and that increased the heat. The main bearings were the last thing to go, and they didn’t go quick enough so I ran it too long and it heated up beyond the melting point of the moving parts, and now the motor is frozen.”

He looked at her face in the pale moonlight and the reflected glow of the headlights. She looked puzzled and blank.

“Frozen?” she asked. “But you can feel the heat coming off it!”

And that was the very end. He whooped and gasped and staggered, and the tears ran out of his eyes. After baffled moments she joined in. They clung to each other.

When he could catch his breath he said, “Ruined! Got to buy a new motor!”

“Luck of the Weldons,” she gasped, and they were off again.

While they were still fighting for control, a police car stopped and Ben arranged for them to send a tow truck back. The disabled car was given a $25 tow into Lawton, three miles away. They left it in the agency parking lot and took a taxi home, and sent the sitter home in the same taxi.

Ginny phoned him at the office early the following afternoon. She had been to the agency. They had checked the car. The motor was shot. The estimate for putting in a new one was $770. It seemed that something had bounded up off the road, possibly flipped up by a front wheel, and had with devilish neatness sheared the drain plug off the bottom of the pan.

“They said our insurance couldn’t cover a thing like that,” she said solemnly.

“No. It wouldn’t cover that.”

“Billy suggested we trade it, but he said he couldn’t give very much, the condition it’s in.”

“How much?”

“Seven hundred dollars.”

“What! That was a thirty-eight-hundred-dollar car eighteen months ago!”

“Well, that’s what he told me.”

“I better talk to them.”

“What am I going to do for a car, Ben? You know I run a taxi service with these kids. I have to have a car. Should I rent one?”

“Can’t you borrow one?”

“I asked Billy, but they have a rule. Something about their insurance. I could try Alice, though. Stu is away for the whole month, and she can’t use two cars. But I sort of hate to ask her.”

“Give it a try, will you, honey?”

“O.K. How did it go with... last night’s companion?”

“About the way he wanted it to go. I’d hoped he’d be guilty and hung over, but he came out strong.”

“I got a call from Saks a little while ago. They were checking the address to mail a gift certificate. They said I’ve got a two-hundred-dollar credit all of a sudden, and they wouldn’t say from whom. So I guess he remembered slopping drinks on my dress. What should I do about it?”

“Honey, you might just as well use it. Get a dress.”

“No, sir! I’ll use it, all right. I’ve got uses for it. Bras, slips, nylons, blouses, skirts. Next time you get me next to a tycoon, I’ll joggle his elbow, believe me. ’By, darling.”

Ginny was able to borrow the neighbor’s extra car, and as soon as Ben had a chance he went to the agency. They would not go a penny over $750 unless, of course, he wanted to buy their biggest model, loaded with extras. Then they might go a couple hundred higher. He shopped around briefly, but he was handicapped by not having the car to show. He could only describe it. He had just finished the payments on the disabled car. Without cash, his only option was either to have the car repaired, and then refinance it to pay the bill, or to trade it and finance the new one. Billy pointed out the significant difference in the equity of the two vehicles one year from date. He said they would make a very special deal on a 1964 model.

Ben looked over the stock list and bought the cheapest ’64 station wagon in the warehouse. He dispensed with the usual extras — the only one he bought was the heater-defroster. It had been previously serviced and was ready to roll. They pushed the papers through quickly. Ben drove the gray wagon home, any pleasure in the new car well muted by the knowledge of being another $2200 in debt.

The third option, the one he had not let himself think about, was to purchase a good used car, something sturdy and reliable right off Billy’s used-car lot, for possibly $1200. It could be one year older than the disabled car. The $500 difference could be financed readily.

But at this station in life he occupied a certain recognized position. All public actions had to be consistent with this position. In so far as vehicles were concerned, he had already taken the risk of a slight inconsistency by owning only one. The house had a two-car garage. The typical Ridge Road family had one reasonably new Detroit product and a second car, usually an import, for the wife. It was not in good taste to have two spanking-new cars. The second car could be bought used, and it had character if it was slightly battered and noisy.

But Benjamin Weldon could not buy a used car as the family’s only car. It would indicate either an uninteresting sort of eccentricity, or serious money problems. Either conclusion was unpalatable. Everyone had problems. Everyone managed to get by, somehow, and keep up appearances. It was a test of both management and character, like dressing for dinner in the jungle.

Ben Weldon did not care about the opinions of Lawton. But of the two thousand men in the area who went down to the city every working day, at least fifty not only were in his age group and approximate earnings group, but were employed by organizations operating in the same areas as National Directions. Three men were, in fact, employed by National Directions, two junior to Ben and one senior to him. In any tensely competitive situation, trivia become excruciatingly important.

The fifty of the two thousand men who rode down to the towers of the city each day were blandly cordial to one another. And without being able to state precisely why, they watched one another with minute care. They learned to read the small signs. They could pick out the overconfident ones who, through talking too loosely and readily, were slamming doors they might have entered. They saw the first signs of decay in the man who would be felled by liquor. They detected evidences of the marital rift or the destructive affair long before the gossip became public property. And they could tell, with an uncanny, unerring accuracy, the ones who were on their way up and out of this narrow routine.

It was all casual, with the desperation carefully hidden away, but each year a few dropped off, and newcomers closed the ranks. They went down or up, and in either case their houses went on the market, and they rode those trains no longer. And at the lunches in the city, and in the idle moments before meetings were called to order, the smallest departures from standard behavior were discussed.

“What’s with Weldon, buying a used car? I thought he was crown prince over there. They cut his pay?”

“Maybe he’s just smarter than you and me.”

“Maybe. Seems funny, though.”

“Maybe he guessed the market wrong, or he’s playing the horses.”

Ben Weldon knew exactly how the system worked. Yet he guessed that if he had less at stake, he would have gone ahead and bought the used car. But when you’re playing the game for the house limit, it is stupid to go around handing the world any kind of club to beat you with. It would not be a crime to buy a used car. The crime would be in giving the men who control your destiny any personal questions to ask about you that do not have obvious and reasonable answers.

“If he can’t manage on what we’re paying him, how could he hope to run this outfit someday?”

Ben Weldon drove home in his brand-new car, and took his family for a short ride at dusk, wondering if he had been intelligent — or just scared.

October was a thin month. November was a little better, but it made Ben feel defeated to think of the onrush of the Christmas season. He made up budget after budget, and tore them up. No matter how he strained over the figures, he could see that, with luck, they could reduce the indebtedness each month, but by such a discouragingly tiny figure that it seemed to stretch endlessly into the bleak future.

When you have a chronic toothache, you eventually end up in the dentist chair. Ben had heard of a C.P.A. in Manhattan who had reputedly done wonders in straightening out the tangled personal finances of some of his friends.

He made one appointment and had to break it, and kept the second one, appearing with all his books and records and copies of his state and Federal tax returns, and his operating budget.

The wonder-worker was J.J. Semmins, with an office on West 43rd Street. He was a small fat man with a permanent scowl of impatience, an unlit cigar, a diamond ring, and audible asthmatic breathing. He had a huge bare desk in a very small office off the anteroom, where several people were working. He spread Ben’s papers all over the top of the desk and growled at Ben to have a seat and be patient. He went through the papers so fast that Ben could not believe he was absorbing what he was reading. From time to time he would scribble a note on a scratch pad. He reassembled the papers, plunked them on the corner of the desk and leaned back.

“Weldon, you keep good records. You should see some of the stuff comes in here. It looks like you’re even using your head here and there, but that isn’t helping you a bit, is it?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Twenty-three five, you make. And right off the top, for Uncle and the governor and other payroll deductions and that cooperative pension plan comes seventy-one, and none of that can you change, so we’re talking about sixteen four. Right? So twenty-six hundred goes into life insurance. It’s a little over ten per cent of total income, but with three small kids it isn’t out of line. Can you juggle the policies around and get the same coverage for less money?”

“I tried that. I’ve got a good agent. He couldn’t come up with a thing.”

“And you’re borrowed to the hilt on it. Now we’re talking about thirteen eight. Give me the story on this two hundred a month to your mother.”

“She’s quite old, seventy-four. She had her children late, and my father’s been dead thirty years. No Social Security to help out. She’s out in Columbus, Indiana, living in the house I was born in. We’ve tried to get her to come live with us, but all her friends are there. She seems to get along on two hundred. I’d send more if I could.”

“Any other children helping out?”

“I’m the only one living.”

“The house out there is in her name?”

“Yes, but—”

“Worth anything?”

“I don’t know what it would bring. It’s not big. A frame house in an old part of town, but she still likes it there. She has a woman come in and help her. The same woman for years and years.”

“If she signed it over, you could sell it and rent a nice little apartment for her. Put the money on these debts and cut your debt service.”

“I just couldn’t do that. It’s a matter of pride to her. I’ve heard her say a hundred times that the house is ‘free and clear.’ That means a lot to her.”

J. J. Semmins sighed. “So we’re talking about eleven four. If your house was free and clear, it would make the difference. Two ten a month on the mortgage and nearly six hundred a year town and county taxes. That’s a load, those taxes.”

“They’ve been going up ever since I bought the place four years ago. National brought me in from the Cleveland office then. Lawton is growing so fast they’ve had to spend a lot of money to take care of the services, schools and so on.”

J. J. Semmins scribbled for a moment and then leaned back. “Take the mortgage payments, taxes, and call it one fifty a month for heat, light, phone, electric and water and so on, call it five a year goes into that place. It’s a lot of house.”

“We hunted a long time before we located it, Mr. Semmins. And it scared us a little, even though I knew we bought it right. I can get seven more than I paid for it right now.” He paused and looked down at his fist for a moment, searching for the right words. “The firm I work for, Mr. Semmins, takes... a special interest in me. When I was brought into the home office, there was a certain amount of... gentle pressure brought to bear. They wanted me to live up to a certain standard, and the house and its location are part of that.”

“So now we’re talking about sixty-four hundred, which is what you got left after the house, and your wife takes forty-eight hundred of that. Right? So here’s sixteen hundred for car, clothing for you, entertainment, club dues, recreation, commutation expenses and, theoretically, interest and principal payments on your loans, plus medical, dental, personal, legal... and you come to me with this impossible situation and say that there’s nothing you can change, and I’m supposed to make up a miracle for you? You’re brighter than that!”

“I thought a fresh viewpoint might—”

“I’m sorry. What good is it yelling at you? You’re the man in the trap. Can you knock off at least the club?”

“We use it as little as possible, but they come up from New York and they expect—”

“O.K., O.K. How about this money you’ve been paying into the pension plan? Can you get your hands on it?”

“Theoretically I could borrow what I’ve donated at no interest. If I left the firm, it would be turned over to me, the exact amount I’ve put in.”

“How much is the total?”

“About nine thousand now.”

“Could you borrow it?”

Ben studied his fist again. “I have the right to. But if I exercised that right, it would have to be because of some... very obviously expensive and disastrous thing, such as a child in an iron lung or something. If I just borrowed it, it would be evidence that I can’t live on my salary.”

“But you can just barely get by on it right now, man, provided you have no more trouble!”

“I’m supposed to live on it,” Ben said miserably.

J. J. Semmins threw his yellow pencil against the far wall. It bounced back and rolled under his desk. “I get so sick of this same deal all the time,” he said. “Hundreds of you bright guys are in this trap. The big shots you work for made theirs so long ago that they think they’re paying you a king’s ransom. They want you to live big on it, advertise how good they are to work for. They’ll make certain the guys in the factories take home fat money, because the unions have put the fear of God into them, but the bright guys right under their noses, they’ll pay them twenty-five thousand and then put the pressure on so you spend all but a couple dimes paying your taxes and living as fat as they could have lived twenty years ago on the same money. Then, if you crack, it’s your fault. If you demand more money, you’re unreliable. If you start shopping around for more money, you’re labeled disloyal. Thirty-five would be about right for you, Weldon. You could reduce those debts down to zero and start a little savings program. Taxes would take a bigger bite, but you’d have about the right amount left. Go ask them for thirty-five. If they won’t give it to you, shop for it.”

“That’s a joke I can’t laugh at. Sorry.”

“There’s another choice. Sell the house. Grab that nine thousand in the retirement fund. Pay your debts, drop your insurance, and go to Florida or someplace and buy a gas station. You’ll live longer. You’d be surprised to learn how many guys in your shoes have done just that. They’ll tell you they got sick of commuting and conforming and so on. They won’t admit they got starved out. But they did, and it’s a shameful thing. Big business needs the guys they’re driving away because they’re too chinchy to pay them what they think they’re paying them. You’re the forgotten man, Weldon. Go anywhere in the country and beef about not being able to live on your salary, and you’d have them rolling in hysterics. Nobody will ever be sorry for you. You’ll get all the sympathy of a man with two black eyes. But from where you and I sit, it is a tragic, unnecessary thing, and we both know it. But it’s a story that won’t sell.”

Ben managed to force a smile. “Like the small-town bank clerk back in the ’twenties, trying to act like a substantial citizen on nineteen dollars a week.”

“And a lot of those guys took it as long as they could before they grabbed the money and ran.”

“I guess I can at least thank you for... confirming the situation, Mr. Semmins.”

“I won’t bill you, buddy. I don’t have the heart.”

“But—”

“Let’s have no arguments, please. What will you do?”

“Try to squeak by, I guess. Cut every corner we can. Try to hold on. You see, the stakes are big.”

“Sure,” Semmins said. “You sit in this great big poker game and you’ve got twelve dollars and you sit there, folding every hand, waiting for a royal flush, and while you’re waiting they ante you to death. Isn’t there some guy over there who is interested in you enough to sit down and go over these records with you?” He sighed. “I suppose not. All I can say is good luck.”

Ben Weldon reported this to Ginny, but he did not let her see the depth of his feeling of helplessness. He made it light, in so far as he was able, and, as Christmas hung over them, an ominous tinsel avalanche, they vowed all manner of economies as though it would be great fun. Economies can be fun for the recently wed: a romantic game, with the long walks to save bus fare, the happy magic of finding a quarter in the gutter, the painstaking budget to squeeze out the $4 a week to put in the savings account — against the future house, car, baby.

For those longer wed, economies can be a game if there is a special goal — the new house or the cruise or the swimming pool. But when it is part of a struggle to survive, and there seems to be no end to it, and you do not know when some small and expensive disaster may wipe out all your efforts — then there is a corrosive and destructive quality to it all. It can be a dreary battle, waged with the presentiment of defeat.

And there is not really too much you can do. You can put an end to the habit of bringing fond and silly gifts to your wife, little things you happened to see in store windows. You can avoid taxis as much as possible, give up the tenth-of-a-cent bridge game on the train, avoid all lunch dates that threaten to be expensive, try to get a little more wear out of the business suits between dry cleanings, give up the relaxing ceremony of the before-dinner drink. And you can begin a practice you have always avoided, the sly and delicate art of fudging the expense account. He found that he could show a small profit on each trip. Twelve dollars, seventeen dollars. It made him feel like a petty thief, but he told himself it was a practice hallowed by tradition.

Yet, with all these practices, he felt as if he were engaged in an exercise in futility. He was the captain at the wheel of the small boat, The sea was rushing into the hold. Every now and then he could rush down and bail for a few moments with a teacup before returning to his duty station.

There was a more serious aspect to it, one that he could not dare admit to himself. He had attempted to build an impenetrable wall between the increasing tensions of his personal life and the demands of his career.

There was an afternoon meeting ten days before Christmas, and as they were waiting for Brendan Mallory, who would conduct it, Ben Weldon heard Charlie McCain, saying, “—got them to promise to deliver it Christmas morning, a little M.G.A., robin’s-egg blue, and Kath’s eyes are going to bug like a stomped frog—”

Midway through the meeting Weldon was staring off into an equitable world where Ginny was driving her brand-new little M.G.A. down a sunny country road, the wind ruffling her blond hair, her eyes adance—

“Sir?” he said, falling abruptly back into here and now.

Mallory looked at him oddly and said, “You do have the break-even figures on Western Products, Ben?”

“Right here,” he said, flushing, and opened the folder to the summary his staff had prepared for him and began to make his report.

As the meeting adjourned, Brendan Mallory said, “Spare a few minutes, Ben?”

It was a command. He went with Mallory to the office of the president on the tenth floor. Mallory was a dapper little man with a narrow mustache and a deceptively ineffectual look. His voice was unerringly brisk and light and casual. But all the hidden force of the man was gathered somewhere and projected through steady bright blue eyes, as intent and merciless as the eyes of a falcon. No man who had endured the special focus of those eyes tended to underestimate Mr. Mallory.

“Sit down, Ben. We never seem to get a chance to chat lately.”

Ben sat in a deep leather chair. Mallory perched on the corner of the desk, arms folded, smiling down at him. “All arguments and no chat,” Ben said, returning the smile, feeling inside himself the special alertness of a blindfolded man on a tightrope.

“I’m very pleased with what you’ve been doing, Ben.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I discussed it with Ed and he agreed we should bring you into the bonus setup, starting this January.”

“I’m very grateful, Mr. Mallory.”

“I wonder if you aren’t pushing yourself a little too hard.”

This, Ben knew, was a direct result of the woolgathering in the special meeting. He carefully broadened his smile, and said, “I don’t feel oppressed, sir. As a matter of fact, I think I do better the heavier the work load is.”

“Everything outside the office is fine?”

“Yes, sir,” Ben said heartily.

“Give my regards to the lovely Virginia, please. Tell her you two are coming for dinner after the holidays. Alice adores you both.”

“We’ll both be looking forward to it, Mr. Mallory.”

“I thought you might be pushing yourself a little too eagerly, because you’ve seemed a little bit drawn and... remote lately, Ben. This has no bearing on your efficiency, but you don’t seem to have the — ah — lift you used to have. That light touch of yours that can take the tension out of sticky situations. And I do believe you’ve become a little less gregarious. I know that lunch with the people you work with all day can be monotonous, but sometimes things are resolved in little unexpected ways.”

Is there anything the little devil doesn’t see? Ben asked himself.

“Maybe I’ve been getting self-important,” Ben said with what he hoped was precisely the right amount of lightness.

“Not you, Ben! That’s a vice you’ll never have. I’m glad things are going well, and it’s been nice to have this little talk.”

“I do appreciate the bonus deal, sir,” he said, getting up.

Mallory shrugged as he led him to the door. “Be assured you earned it, Ben. And because it’s unexpected money, spend it foolishly. It will do you and Ginny good. Sometimes I wonder if you young people aren’t too reliable.”

He gave Ben a parting touch on the shoulder. Not a pat or a slap, but a barely perceptible touch, a curious gesture of reassurance.

Ben decided not to tell Ginny of the bonus. Had he been told the figure, he would have told her. He spent the entire train ride home trying to guess what it would be. He told himself that it would be a glorious $10,000 that would get him even with the board, with some to spare. But that was ridiculously optimistic. He knew the bonus scale of past years, and he knew corporate earnings, and he finally settled on $3500 as being a conservative and reasonable guess.

That evening he went over his financial accounts and saw that his most intelligent use of the money would be to reduce the bank loan by $1500, pay another $1500 on the insurance loan, and leave $500 in the checking account for emergencies.

Had they not previously made an agreement on the cost of the Christmas gifts they would give each other, Ben, in view of the bonus to come, might have refused to set such a small figure — no more than $5, and no cheating, please. After all, they told each other, Christmas is for the kids. And it isn’t the value of the gift anyway. It’s the act of giving.

Something that left a wound deeper than she had any right to expect happened to Ginny Weldon five days before Christmas. She had yet to find the proper $5 gift for Ben and she had begun to feel dismayed at her lack of success.

She was in a gift-shop area, bent on a specific errand, when she happened to notice in a window a beautiful English croquet set in a fitted hardwood box. She walked by the window, stopped abruptly, and turned back. Ben had admired Stan Sheridan’s layout the summer before. They had played a few times at Sheridan’s at afternoon parties on weekends, and Ben had been quite good at it. Afterward he had paced off their back yard and had told her that if they transplanted a few shrubs, there was plenty of room. He had mentioned getting a set quite a few times, saying it would be fun for them and for the kids. But he had never done anything about it.

Ginny knew that this was the perfect present, in spite of the fact that the season was wrong. It was the unusual sort of thing, the fun thing she always tried to find for him. It would be especially for him, but it would be a present for the whole family too. She was filled with a warm glow of excitement and anticipation, and a delight at having found the perfect thing so accidentally. The mallets, balls, and posts were varnished and striped with bright, pure colors in holiday mood.

Her happy sense of the rightness of the gift carried her into the shop and into the hands of a supercilious little clerk who called her “modom” and handed her a mallet from the set on display inside the store. As she held it, smiling with the thought of Ben’s surprise and pleasure, he told her the set was $124.95.

The blunt figures burst the dream. She handed the mallet back to the clerk, said something about thinking it over, and saw him shrug in a slightly patronizing way as he put the mallet back in the open hardwood case.

She walked out, and it took her a few moments to remember the small errand two blocks away. She squared her shoulders as she walked. This year five dollars is the limit. Stick to it, girl. You promised. Don’t cheat, because he won’t. And stop feeling so dreary about it. It isn’t that important.

He had stopped talking about croquet and there was, she knew, a whole list of things he had stopped talking about. As she walked she could see the cumulative weariness of her man, in his face and his posture. And it struck her, a sick blow at the heart, a twist of anguish so intense she was not prepared for it. He doesn’t have any fun, she thought. He is so good and I love him so much, and he doesn’t have any fun any more. Nobody does.

The sound, inadvertent, moved up through her throat, half sob and half cry of protest, and in the instant she realized other people were staring at her with startled curiosity, she felt the tickling run of tears on her face. She turned from them and stood facing a wall of decorative tile that was part of a store front — stood a few inches from it.

There was an insistent tugging at the sleeve of her coat and she looked down into the tear-blurred face, the soft, concerned, gentle face of a small round woman in a derelict fur coat.

“You all right, dearie? Anything I can do, dearie?”

“I’m... all right. Thanks.”

“Sometimes they die around Christmastime, dearie, and it’s God’s will. They wouldn’t do it if they could help it, poor things, but when the next Christmas comes around, it’s dreadful hard. Just get through it, dearie, best you can, and next year won’t be so terrible bad as this one. I know.”

And the woman was gone. Ginny got tissue out of her purse and wiped her eyes. In all the ways of pride she pulled herself together. And she went on with Christmas. She could tell herself over and over that it was too like a petulant child to whine about being unable to afford big glossy presents. But the wound had been inflicted, deep enough so that it could not ever heal perfectly.

In the last moments of shopping she found a walnut pipe rack and humidor thing for Ben for which she paid $4.98. In the shop she had been pleased by the way it looked, but when she unwrapped it to gift-wrap it herself, the finish had that shiny look of cheapness. After she had worked on it a long time, cutting the gloss by carefully rubbing it with steel wool, it was much more handsome.

Ben’s present to her was a small antique vase he found in a shop on Second Avenue. She could only guess the amount of stolen time used in finding something so lovely that was within the limit they had set.

The kids had prepared long and discouragingly expensive lists. Ben and Ginny had budgeted $100 for them, and due to the increased pressure of work because of the end of the year, Ben had been unable to help her but, as he told her later, she had performed a vast miracle of judgment and selection.

The bonus came through on January tenth. It was for $1500. Ben managed, for Ginny’s sake, to conceal his disappointment. He knew it was a bit churlish of him to feel disappointment. There could easily have been no bonus at all. But he had so carefully worked out just how he would disburse the anticipated $3500, and had dwelt upon how much that amount would ease the endless tension—

Ginny, thinking it came as a surprise to him, too, was delighted. And it seemed to dilute some of her growing resentment toward National. He said nothing to decrease her pleasure. He did not tell her that, because it was considered 1965 income, a tiny additional tax nip would be taken out of each monthly check for the rest of the year.

He paid $600 on his $2200 note at the Lawton National Bank, reduced the insurance loan by $400, and left $500 in the checking account for emergencies.

And then began the time of waiting. The winter was exceptionally severe again, the fuel bills high. The reserve shrank to $300. The house thermostat stopped working and had to be replaced. Ladybug had flu for a week and, in spite of Ginny’s precautions, she gave it to Chris, and the prescribed antibiotics were $14 a patient. Ben, returning late from a stormy meeting of the Civic Betterment Committee (men who work for National take an active interest in the affairs of their home communities), took to the deep snowy ditch to avoid a skidding drunk, and the tow-truck fee was $15. The water company, with the approval of all agencies concerned, slapped a special $20 assessment on all users.

These were the small things. A very special guest, a member of the board of directors of National, drops a handsome Danish cocktail glass on the hearth. Once there were a dozen. Now there are seven. So for any special entertaining for more than seven in the future, a new set must be purchased. Little things. Like being pecked to death by sparrows.

So the little things make you irritable with each other. But it is not only the little things that corrode dispositions. It is the unspoken awareness, always just around a dark corner of the mind, that big things can happen, and do happen, and the process of life is in part the knowledge that they will happen and in being prepared for them. They lived with the knowledge of their defenselessness. In a primitive culture, they would have worn charms to ward off evil, and had they been able to believe in the efficiency of the charms, they would have felt secure.

But in suburbia there are no magic things you can wear suspended from a string hung around your neck. You pray for breathing space, for time to plant your feet.

Love was there, in abundance. But an endless worry about money is an astringent that sucks the juice from love, renders it wan and slow-moving. And penury is, perhaps, more endurable in matching surroundings. It becomes grotesque in a $40,000 house.

The stress of enduring an unfair situation makes people seek outlets for their irritability. Ben and Ginny were handy targets for each other. The apologies, in time, became more a matter of protocol than of guilt. And each of them built up a distorted picture of what the other one thought. Ben taught himself to believe Ginny thought him a spineless conformist who dared not complain for fear of upsetting plans so far in the golden future they were meaningless. Ginny grew to believe that Ben considered her spoiled and petulant, unwilling to endure all this for his sake, thinking only of pleasures she was missing. And, in the perversity of all mortals, they made more effort to fit the mistaken conception than to correct it. Some of the warmth went out of the house, and a lot of the closeness went out of the marriage during the cold months, and the children felt it and were troubled by it, and acted in ways unlike themselves without knowing why — knowing only that they more frequently deserved punishment, and taking a curious satisfaction in receiving it.

There was no snow in Columbus, Indiana, on the morning of the third day of March, and the temperature was in the low twenties, and dropping steadily. It had been above freezing during the night, and there had been a hard driving rain, which had frozen in a cellophane skim over everything the rain had touched.

Martha Weldon had got up early, as was her habit, and had the coffee on before Geraldine Davis came down, smiling, yawning, to the kitchen. Martha was a tall, heavy woman with an air of pious thoughtfulness, an authoritative, rather ponderous presence. Geraldine was also a widow, and she was four years younger than Martha. Geraldine had begun to “help out” at Martha’s house seven years ago. She was a small, lean, tireless woman of good spirits but with a talent for malice. Her life income from her husband’s insurance was too tiny to support her. She made ends meet by helping Martha and two other elderly women. She had the knack of keeping it on the basis of a friendship between equals, so that the necessary matter of slipping money to her had to be done with greatest delicacy.

Martha also had a small income. It had been larger quite a few years ago, and it was fortunate that, as it dwindled, her only living son, Ben, had been able to contribute to her support.

Three years ago one of the women Geraldine helped had died, and the other had gone to Oklahoma to live with a daughter. Geraldine told her problems to Martha. As a result, Martha suggested she give up her miniature apartment and move in with her. There was more than enough room. They would be good company for each other. It seemed an excellent arrangement.

After breakfast on that cool, bright morning Martha sat at the desk in the living room and wrote to Ben and Ginny. She knew that Geraldine knew what she was doing, and she also knew that it would give Geraldine her usual opportunity to make overly casual comments about how long it had been since Martha had seen her grandchildren, and how young people these days lacked consideration, and how you’d think a boy doing as well as Martha kept telling her he was doing, making all that money and all, could afford to send more. Maybe he just never thought of it. Young people were certainly thoughtless.

It was a few minutes after nine when Martha stepped out the front door to put the letter in the mailbox attached to the post at the head of the porch steps. The board floor of the porch was painted a dark green. She took two heavy steps on the dry wood, and a third step onto the slick, transparent, invisible ice. She struck the edge of the top step with a terrible force, felt her thigh snap, and tumbled in a white roaring spin of pain to the cement sidewalk, down the four shallow steps of the porch, and lay there moaning, rolling her head from side to side. She was half aware that Geraldine had come to her, that Geraldine was in great panic. And when Geraldine made a stupid futile effort to pull at her, as though to drag her into the house, Martha screamed once, with the strength of a young woman, and fainted.

Ginny phoned the office at 12:40 and caught Ben just as he was leaving for lunch. Geraldine had not been very coherent. Martha had had a bad fall, and was in the hospital, and Ben should come at once. He told Ginny he would leave right away. He kept a small travel case with the essentials at the office for emergency business trips. His secretary had not left yet. He had her check flights for him and make a reservation. He could use his air-travel card and reimburse the company. The other men were out to lunch. He left it to her to tell them the situation, and he dictated a hasty memo that made staff assignments of the work he was handling, and told her to reshuffle his appointments as best she could.

When he saw his mother in the hospital that evening, he was deeply shocked at the way she looked, and at the uncontrolled trembling of her hands. He stayed in the house. Mrs. Geraldine Davis made up a bed there for him with what he thought was an unwarranted surliness.

He had a long talk with the doctor the next day. Due to the nature of the fracture, they had had to set it immediately. Splintered bones had had to be pinned. Her heart had stood up well under the general anesthetic, but they had had to give her plasma for shock. The doctor would not commit himself on whether she would be able to walk again, but he was ready to admit that she would be bedridden for quite a long time. Ben signed a hospital form accepting financial responsibility. He stayed that day and the next, spending as much time with her as he could, but he was never alone with her. Geraldine Davis was there the entire time. The women were obviously close.

He flew back the morning of the third day, told Ginny the details he had not told her over the phone, and that evening they phoned Martha at the hospital. Ben had arranged for a phone to be put by her bed. Ginny and the three children talked to her. Ben dived back into a brute load of work, work so heavy and demanding that he had no time to think of the extra financial burden her fall had entailed.

Six days later, at midnight, the doctor in Columbus phoned and woke him from a sound sleep to tell him that his mother had contracted pneumonia and she was not responding to medication. She was in an oxygen tent, and it was perhaps best that he come as soon as possible. Ginny packed his things and drove him to the airport.

Air connections were bad. He did not arrive at the small hospital until quarter after ten the next morning. She had been dead for not quite an hour. He made arrangements for the funeral service and the burial with the same firm that had buried his father so long ago. He phoned Ginny, and she said she would make arrangements about the children and arrive the next day. He said he saw no reason for it. It was just an added expense, and it could not possibly do any good. She seemed hurt at his attitude.

But he was delighted to see her when she arrived. He had seldom felt as lonely, and the town where he had been brought up had never looked so strange to him.

And he was glad to hold his wife in his arms for a long reassuring moment because he was ashamed of himself. It had happened the night of the day she had died. He had awakened in the night and he had been unable to go back to sleep. Suddenly, in the darkness, there had come to him a sudden tingle of excitement and pleasure and relief as he realized he could now sell the house, and even in a hasty sale it would bring far more than the hospital and the burial expenses. It was a sound house, and the location was convenient to the downtown area. He would come out of it with a profit, and it would no longer be necessary for him to send the $2400 a year to her. It was a despicable and degraded rejoicing that made him feel soiled, but he could not help himself. He mourned her. But mourning was stained by his awareness of being freed by her death from the nagging trap he was in.

Ginny had met Geraldine Davis on previous visits, and it seemed to Ben that Geraldine seemed more friendly toward Ginny than toward him. But when Ben and Ginny were alone later, Ginny said, “I don’t think we’re the most popular people who ever stayed here, darling.”

“I was born in this house and I swear she makes me feel like an interloper.”

“The poor thing is probably worried sick about what she’ll do now. You can’t blame her, you know.”

“That must be it,” he said.

The service at the church was well attended. The Weldons were an old family. The great majority of the people at the church were elderly. There was the traditional ceremony at the grave, and then Ben and Ginny rode back into town in the limousine provided by the funeral director. There were no words with which Ben could tell Ginny how necessary it was to have her beside him.

They were back in town at two o’clock, and Ben had the driver let them out in front of the old office building that housed the offices of Gebbert and Malone. Old Willis Gebbert had been a friend of his father, and had handled what small legal business the family had had for sixty years. He had made the appointment earlier. Judge Gebbert had been at the church, and Ben had pointed him out to Ginny. “Must be ninety and still practicing,” he whispered.

The old-fashioned office was full of dark, heavy furniture and it smelled like dust and medicine.

Ben introduced Ginny to the judge, and he was courtly with her. His hair was wispy white, his blue eyes watery, his head in a constant visible tremor, brown spots on the backs of his large white hands. But his voice had not lost its deepness and resonance.

“A sad thing,” Judge Gebbert said. “She was a wonderful woman. She made Sam Weldon a wonderful wife, Benjamin.”

“I appreciate your saying that, sir. We’re going to have to leave today and get back to the children and the job. I was wondering if you’d take on a last chore for the Weldon clan. I’d like to give you a power of attorney to sell that house for me and pay off the medical and funeral expenses — I can have the bills sent directly here — and remit the balance to me.”

Judge Gebbert coughed in a slightly artificial way and stared out the window for a few moments, then sighed and said, “Nobody can say Martha wasn’t in her right mind, and nobody can say her mind wasn’t made up. She came in here almost two years ago, son, and I made up a will for her. Geraldine Davis gets the house and furniture and the money in her savings account, and you get the right to go over the house and take any personal stuff you might want to keep. Want to look at my copy of it, Benjamin? I can get it in no time at all.”

“No. Don’t bother. I’m sure it’s just as you describe it, judge.” His mouth felt dry and he felt far away, as though he were dreaming all this.

“She said to me you were doing so good you wouldn’t need it, and if anything happened to her, Geraldine’d have no place to lay her head, no kin and no money, and by making out the will that way, she could stop fretting about it. It was going to be a secret, but she told Geraldine about it all later on so Geraldine wouldn’t worry either — you know the way your mother was, son.”

“Judge, how about the... bills?”

Judge Gebbert looked at him with a slight frown. “I guess you can do that much, can’t you? I don’t know who else would be responsible.”

“Thank you for your time, judge,” he said, getting up.

“Geraldine talked to me on the phone just before you came here. Seemed to know you were coming. Asked me about occupancy. I told her she’s in her legal rights to stay right here, and it’ll go through Probate Court with no trouble at all.” He gave an astonishingly vital baritone laugh. “If after all these years I can’t draw a will, I better get out of the law business.”

They walked the six blocks to the house. There was a faint rumor of spring in the air. Ginny held his arm.

“Darling,” she said gently, “we’re jinxed. If molten gold was coming down, we’d be out there with sieves, wouldn’t we?”

“Don’t make with the gallant little jokes. Not now, please.”

And at the tone of his voice she took her hand away and walked beside him, half looking away, tears standing bright on her lower lids.

They were on the porch of the house before Ben noticed the new sign in the window. Room for Rent. The door was locked. As he got out the spare key the door swung open and Geraldine stuck her hand out, palm up, and said, “I’ll take that key!”

He put it on the narrow wrinkled palm and stared at her. She stared back with a satisfied malevolence. “You don’t have to come in further than this front hall either. This place is mine, all legal, and you aren’t welcome here, you nor your blond wife either, Ben Weldon.”

“What’s the matter with you, Mrs. Davis?” Ginny demanded.

“Right here is your suitcases, all packed neat. And here’s this big wood crate with everything personal packed right in it, so you don’t have to go through my house poking around. I saved you the trouble, I did.”

“Why are you acting like this?” Ben demanded.

“Martha — God rest her soul — loved you, but I certainly got no call to. You’d go flying all over the country like a king, and you wouldn’t come near her. She wouldn’t see her grandchildren from one year to the next. Oh, I know how lonely she was. But you didn’t care, neither one of you. Send a little money, that’s all you had to do. So little you didn’t miss it at all, and you thought you were doing something big. I’ve been waiting years to tell you off, Ben Weldon. And right now you can get out of this hall and off my land. What do you want done with the box of stuff?”

“You don’t understand—” Ginny said.

But Ben said, “Never mind, honey. Send the box railway express.”

“Collect,” Geraldine said firmly.

“Collect,” Ben said and picked up the suitcases. They walked out onto the porch, and she slammed the door.

As they walked down the street Ginny looked back and saw her peering at them from the living-room window. She seemed to be grinning, but she was behind the curtains, and Ginny could not be certain.

When all the bills were in, Ben totaled them. They came to $3212.50. There was no hospitalization. The expenses of death are not deductible items for tax purposes. He would be able to claim her as a dependent for the year, and that was all.

This was the final rock that stove the hull of the small boat. He phoned the Lawton National Bank from his office and got Mr. Lathrop Hyde on the line. After he had identified himself, he said he could arrange to come in Monday morning at ten when the bank opened and discuss his note. Hyde had him hold the line while the folder was brought to him.

“Right now, Mr. Weldon, it’s sixteen hundred balance due on a hundred-and-eighty-day note, and the due date is — h’m-m-m-m — next Wednesday. Now I wouldn’t want to have to tell my loan committee I’d put through another extension on this note, Mr. Weldon.”

“I could pay it off with the proceeds of a new note, couldn’t I?”

“Well now, we’d have to see about that.”

“That’s what I want to discuss with you on Monday, Mr. Hyde.”

“Tell you what. You bring in an up-to-date personal balance sheet, Mr. Weldon. And bring your wife along.”

“It hasn’t been necessary in the past to—”

“Her signature goes on the notes too.”

“But I’ve always taken the notes, and she’s signed them at—”

“You just bring her along, and I’ll be looking for you at ten o’clock sharp, Mr. Weldon.”

When Ben and Ginny entered the bank on Monday morning, Ben had with him a personal balance sheet on which he had expended great care. It expressed his equity in the house based on current values, and his equity in the car based on purchase price. It included the $9000 in the retirement account. It assigned what he hoped was not too florid an evaluation of household furnishings and equipment. He had managed to squeeze out a net worth of $26,000 before current debts, and it gave him a certain amount of dubious assurance.

Mr. Lathrop Hyde’s desk was planted out in the open, against the back wall of the upholstered bullpen adjoining the customer floor of the building. Mr. Hyde greeted them and seated them courteously enough. He was perhaps sixty, long and solid in the torso, with gray hair worn long on one side so that it could be combed across the bald area and pasted in place. He had a long, square-cornered, fleshy face, with odd spots of high color on the cheekbones, pebbly brown eyes and a very wide mouth with thin colorless lips. His habit of dress was incongruously tweedy and informal. He took an active, leadership interest in community affairs. He and Ben had served on quite a few of the same committees.

As Ben handed the balance sheet over, he noticed a folder with his name on the tab centered in the middle of Lathrop Hyde’s blotter.

“Let’s see what we have here, folks,” Mr. Hyde said.

He studied each item on the brief statement with great care, checked the margin beside each one with a very small check made with a very hard pencil. He put it aside and let the silence grow until Ben had to say something and said, “Is that what you wanted from me?”

“I hoped it would look a little better, Mr. Weldon. You’d have a long wait getting that much for the house. Used furniture and equipment — especially in a house where there’s children — isn’t worth listing. And if you check the blue book, you’ll find you have no equity in that car at all. There isn’t enough equity in the house to allow a sound second mortgage. I guess I didn’t find what I was looking for.”

“What were you looking for, Mr. Hyde?” Ginny asked sweetly.

“Security, Mrs. Weldon. Security.”

“So are we,” she said.

“What? Oh, I mean ample legal security on which we can loan money, Mrs. Weldon. There’s no fat left in those insurance policies. You own no securities. And you certainly have a substantial amount of current bills to pay.”

“Nearly all of that is because of my mother’s recent death,” Ben said.

“I heard about that. May I extend my sympathies.”

“Thanks. If I can’t renew my note when it comes due day after tomorrow, Mr. Hyde, I’d like to borrow five thousand. I’d use sixteen hundred to retire the note, and pay off the balance of those bills.”

“A hundred-and-eighty-day note?” Hyde asked mildly.

“Yes.”

“And how would you expect to pay it back?”

“I’ve been sending my mother two hundred dollars a month, Mr. Hyde. That will no longer be necessary. I can pay the two hundred on the note instead.”

“Which in one hundred eighty days would be twelve hundred dollars. It is against the law, Mr Weldon, for us to loan money on an open note when we see little expectation of its being paid back within the stated time. A fully secured note is a different thing, of course. I’m sorry, Mr. Weldon.”

“Do you think I’m a bad risk?”

Mr. Hyde frowned slightly. “That’s an unfortunate expression, but since you used it, I’ll answer you frankly. Yes.”

“But—”

“Just a moment, Mr. Weldon. We are tightening our policy as far as you people are concerned. You bright young men who work in the city are very persuasive, you know. And we — uh — less sophisticated types are apt to be a little too awed by the salaries you are paid. And so, without realizing it until recently, we’ve let ourselves get into an unhealthy position on open notes to you brisk, successful young gentlemen. You make big incomes, but you live up to them and beyond them. Thrift seems to have become a dirty word nowadays. Personally, I am inclined to think of all this, on old-fashioned grounds, as a lack of character.”

Ben glanced at Ginny and saw she was white with anger.

“Mr. Hyde,” he said, “you seem to be moralizing.”

“Perhaps I am. You people dismay me in a way. You’re all house-poor, car-poor, club-poor, party-poor. You seem to try to be proving to each other that you can live on one and a half times your income. At our expense. We have too many renewals. We’ve been loaning money on promises too slender. One little recession, Mr. Weldon, would shake most of you out of the fragile limbs of your tall trees, and the Lawton National Bank would be holding the bag. And all of you would be without assets or resources. We owe our own shareholders better judgment in these matters.” He smiled broadly for the first time. “It would be such a shame if the party suddenly ended for all of you.”

“I resent being classified as having... this lack of character you mention,” Ben said thickly.

Hyde tapped the balance sheet lightly. “Haven’t you done the classifying yourself, my dear boy? Right here. You make nearly twenty-five thousand a year and, except for this retirement-account money, which was taken apparently before you could see it, you haven’t a dime. What am I supposed to think?”

Ben controlled himself with an effort. “I respect your obligation to your stockholders in the bank. But please don’t moralize about situations you don’t understand.”

“Oh, but I have an intimate understanding of them, Mr. Weldon. Through supplicants such as yourself.”

“What can you do for me?”

“I can give you a ninety-day extension on this outstanding balance, and I must ask you to pay the interest up to date on the due date. I can assure you that there will not be another renewal. Why don’t you borrow from your retirement account, Mr. Weldon? Isn’t that permitted? It usually is in most companies.”

“That’s my problem,” Ben said, standing. “Mail me the renewal agreement. Come on, Ginny.”

“Your attitude isn’t going to make future relationships any easier, Mr. Weldon.”

“It is my deepest wish, Mr. Hyde, that there will be no future relationships of any kind.”

Hyde smiled once more. “It’s perhaps for the best. After all, you could have the sincerest desire in the world to pay us that... unobligated two hundred a month, but you people have so many unexpected social obligations.”

Ginny was standing. She leaned toward the desk. “They keep saying banks are friendly. They keep saying bankers are nice. You’re a monster, Mr. Hyde. It’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it.”

Hyde chuckled, almost fondly, as they left his desk. They could not reach him. Nothing could reach him, nothing they could do.

Ginny was crying by the time they reached the car. He drove to the station. As he got out she was snuffling, but trying to smile. “I guess we know what we are now,” she said.

“He made me bring you along so he could sink the knife a little deeper. That’s the thing I resent most.”

“But what are we going to do, Ben?”

“I’ll talk to you tonight.”

By the time he got home he had worked out a program for handling this new problem. It seemed to be the only answer, but it depressed him to think about it. It wasn’t brought up until Ginny had finished the dinner dishes and the kids were in bed.

Ginny came into the living room and sat in the corner of the couch and pulled her legs up. The floor lamp behind her made her fair hair luminous and left her face in partial shadow She faced Ben, who sat making a protective ceremony of stoking his pipe, lighting it evenly.

There was a quality of expectancy in the silence between them, the product of their separate awareness that this was, at long last, the time of showdown, the obligatory scene that was a product of far too many months of this big, abundant and wretched life.

“What are you going to do, Ben?” she asked.

He noticed it was “you,” not “we.” He said, “There aren’t any miracles, honey.”

“But we have to do something!”

“I know that. Two round trips to Indiana. That’s top priority. When the air-travel bill comes in, I have to come up with the money fast. I’ll guess between five and six hundred. We haven’t got it. There’s nobody I dare borrow from. But I did some very discreet checking, and I’m pretty sure I can get six hundred from a loan company. They’ll take a chattel mortgage on the furniture, and they’ll do no checking on me that will be so obvious anybody will be able to guess. With their service charges, it will come to about thirteen per cent interest. I can get it right after the first of the month, so the twelve payments of fifty-something a month will start the first of May.”

“And we’ll just owe more money,” she said in a dead voice.

“We’ll have the two hundred I won’t be sending mother starting April first. I’ll write the hospital and the doctor and the funeral home and send them each a small payment out of that two hundred as a gesture of good faith, and explain that I’ll have to pay them off that way, a certain amount each month. And I’ll make a payment on the bank loan out of that two hundred too. I don’t think those people in Columbus will raise a fuss. They must be used to this sort of thing.”

“So it’s your idea to do it all out of the two hundred each month. So we shall be living exactly the same as if we were sending it to your mother. How long will it take? Just tell me how long it will take if nothing happens.”

“Including the bank loan, and interest and all... call it two years. A little over.”

“Two delicious years if nothing happens. And something will, so it’ll be longer. Believe me, it will be longer. I wanted a miracle, Ben. I didn’t want more of the same. You know the miracle I wanted? I wanted you to march up to whoever you march up to down there and draw out that whole nine thousand dollars sitting there, and tell them you were taking it because you need it. But that’s too big a miracle to hope for.”

“You don’t under—”

“When will you get a raise, darling?”

“I’ve told you how—”

“Tell me again. I want to hear it again.”

“There’s practically no chance of a raise until Bartlett retires. Where I am, the money goes with the job. I’m slated to take over Bartlett’s slot. There’ll probably be small upward adjustments, but nothing to get healthy on. He’s fifty-eight. He’s got seven years.”

“And what will you get when you take his job, darling?”

“I believe he gets about fifty-five, with a bonus between fifteen and twenty, and a small share in the stock-option plan. I expect I’d get fifty and a bonus of twelve to fifteen, assuming we’re running as far in the black as we are now.”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” she said with a quiet bitterness. “Oh, whee, oh, joy. You’re going to be so terrifyingly important, and yet you can’t borrow nine thousand dollars of your own money. Why is it? Just why? Explain it to me.”

He rose and took slow steps toward the fireplace and turned and stared at her for a thoughtful moment, planning his words. “I’ll have to say this, Ginny, with no concession to modesty. I’m surprisingly good at what I’m doing. We deal with a lot of other corporations. I meet a lot of people. I’d say, and this is a pretentious thing for a man to say about himself, that there probably aren’t over a hundred guys in my age range with the same potential I have in the whole country.”

“Then why aren’t we—”

“Let me finish the explanation. It’s what you asked for. Some of those guys have landed, by bad luck, in the wrong slots. Some of them have changed jobs too many times, always pressing for the immediate salary bump. And I don’t think there are more than three or four in the whole batch who wouldn’t change with me in one minute, salary and all.”

She stared at him. “What!”

“I’m in the big big league, Ginny. And it’s exactly where I should be. I’m watched every minute, because there’s so much potential power at stake. It isn’t just the officers and directors of National, honey. At the top of the pyramid in big business there’s a group of men who know each other. It’s become pretty well known that I’m the heir apparent. It’ll be years before I’m in the kingbird’s seat, but they know of me, and they’re watching, too, and if there was any kind of shake-up at National that threatened to sidetrack me, they’d come in with the right offer.”

“Why don’t they now?”

“Because the kind of fool who would take it they don’t want.”

“So you can’t take out the nine thousand that belongs to you and put it back later when you’re making all this big money?”

He suddenly felt inexpressibly weary. He went back to his chair and sat down and said, “Just why do you think I can’t ask for it?”

“Because you’re supposed to be infallible about everything or they’ll think you’re not good enough for the top of their pyramid.”

“I couldn’t have said it more accurately. Apparently you do understand.”

“I’ve listened. You listen.”

“Of course, honey.”

“I’m proud of you. Keep that in mind. I know you can do what they think you can. I can see how it can be pride with you too. But a woman has a different slant. I know you can do it. You know you can do it. So what are we proving and who are we proving it to by standing around in this... thin air?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem to work harder all the time, and you get less kick out of it. You never come home any more just busting with triumph, Ben. The things we do together are all... obligations, carefully planned, never on impulse. I claw you for no reason. You snarl for no good reason. We live with these two kinds of pressure every waking minute — your job pressure, and this stupid, ludicrous thing of just barely being able to make ends meet on a salary most people in the country would consider real wealth.”

“I don’t think I’m trying to prove—” He broke off.

“Please don’t go all haughty and stuffy. An electrician was here last week.”

“What has that got to do with—”

“He came to fix the refrigerator. He bought a beat old cabin cruiser two years ago. He’s been working on it himself for two years. As soon as school is out, he and his wife and two kids are going down the inland waterway to Florida. He found time to study navigation and small-boat handling in night school. It’s almost three months away, but he’s so excited about it he glows like a lantern when he talks about it.”

“I should go to night school and learn how to fix refrigerators.”

“Stop that, Ben. Please. All this is hurting our marriage. You’re honest enough to see that. It’s hurting the kids, this atmosphere of continual tension. I’m in favor of vast success and golden years, I guess. But not at this price. I mean that. Not at this price.”

He looked at her for one long moment. “Just what are you saying, Ginny? It has the sound of an ultimatum.”

“What good is the golden future if you ruin the good things while waiting for it?”

“Other people are able to—”

“This isn’t other people. This is me. I can’t afford the big leagues, Ben. Emotionally, I can’t afford them. I’m sorry.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t want to hang around and watch what we have left go the same way the rest of it went. I better ask you the same thing. What do you plan to do?”

“Live up to... my maximum potential.”

“When every morsel of joy has gone out of it, and all you have left is pride? Is that enough?”

“It looks like it will have to be, honey.”

“And you won’t take the slightest risk of upsetting their... big fat opinion of the crown prince?”

“Not the slightest.”

There was destruction in the long silence, and they looked away from each other. When love is twisted, a marriage can end, even though love is still there. It needs only the words of ultimatum to be said, and then the dreadful effects of pride.

The words were there, waiting to be said. Each of them believed the other one to be blindly selfish, and wondered that it had not been more evident up until now.

“We’re both tired right now,” Ben said gently, and so the words were not said. But the narrowness of it had frightened them both.

Ben Weldon could not sleep that night. He left the bedroom at two in the morning, so quietly that Ginny did not awaken. He made coffee, and he sat at the kitchen table. He went to the drawer where Ginny kept the cigarettes for their entertaining and opened a fresh pack. At dawn his mouth had a bitter taste, and half the pack was gone. He located the budget summary he had prepared for the interview with Semmins, and a copy of the balance sheet he had prepared for his meeting with Hyde.

He thought of many things, and he made a decision, but it gave him no feeling of relief. He sneaked back into bed a half hour before the alarm went off. When he came out to breakfast, Ginny stared curiously at him and said, “You were up in the night?”

“For a little while.”

“What did you do, smoke five cigarettes at a time?”

“Like a candelabra.”

When she drove him down to the station, they sat in the car waiting for the train to come into view up the tracks.

“It will rain later on,” she said.

“I’ve got that other raincoat in the office.”

“Ben... about last night.”

“Yes, honey.”

“You should know this. Even if you were willing to do it my way, it wouldn’t be easy — I mean I’d always be wondering if you were thinking I’d... held you back.” She gave a dry little laugh, and he saw where the morning light touched the little network of weather wrinkles at the corner of her blue blue eyes. “Nothing is easy any more, I guess,” she said.

“Don’t fret about it,” he said. “Here comes Old Unreliable.” He kissed her and got on the train and rode down toward the cold arena.

Brendan Mallory had flown back from London the previous day, and so his schedule was full. But his secretary was able to give Ben an appointment at 4:40. It was a dreamlike day for Ben Weldon. All day he had the feeling he was standing a half step behind himself and off to one side, watching himself go through the routines as one would watch a stranger.

All day he kept thinking of alternative possibilities, some of them logical, some of them absurd.

In his favorite alternative, Brendan Mallory would look up from his study of the figures, his eyes vivid with shock and concern, and say, “Why, I had no idea we’d been forcing you into such a ghastly position, Ben! Why hasn’t somebody brought this to my attention before? This is absurdly unfair! It shall be corrected immediately. A man carrying the load you’re carrying these days shouldn’t be forced to endure this kind of personal anxiety!”

In another scene, he had filled a gas tank and wiped the windshield and he was taking the money from the customer when the man looked at him intently and said, “Say, aren’t you the Ben Weldon that used to be with National?”

There was, of course, a background of hot sun and sandy beach, and his brown children playing on the beach, with Ginny near them, barefoot and splendid, and a boat anchored at a dock.

“You’re right, friend,” he would say, “but we got out of that ulcer trap. We didn’t know what real living was until we came down here, friend.”

There was another that kept slipping into his mind, making his stomach feel hollow. The word would be passed around in some mysterious way, and he would spend the sour, defeated weeks and months sitting in waiting rooms, filling out forms that would be filed away and forgotten, and the men he talked to would treat him with a brusque courtesy that did not quite conceal their contempt for the sort of man who would quit the team just before the Series.

“Sit down, Ben. Sit down,” Brendan Mallory said in his light and casual voice. “Something that has to come directly to the top, eh?”

Ben knew that when Mallory learned of the request for the appointment, he would have checked with Bartlett, who would be just as much in the dark as Mallory. So he was outside normal channels, and in National, when you bypassed your immediate superior, you had to be sure of your ground. He sensed a wariness in Mallory. This was it, and it made all the day’s conjectures seem silly. It was an effort to grope for and remember his planned opening.

“This is a personal thing, Mr. Mallory. I guess it’s a request for advice.”

“You know I’m ready to help in any way I can, Ben.”

“Before I ask for advice, I’d like to make one general point, sir. In many ways I’ve been led to believe that I’m considered a valuable man. It may be bad taste to bring it up this way, but can we assume it’s true?”

“It’s definitely true. Bringing you into the bonus picture was a pretty good clue as to what we all think of you, Ben.”

“So if I am valuable, can I make the further assumption that an extra effort would be made to keep me happy, Mr. Mallory?”

Mallory reached for the small gold model of a military jet on his desk and gave it a quarter turn before answering. “That’s such a hypothetical question, I can only give a hypothetical answer, Ben. We will do our best to treat you fairly. Isn’t it time we came to specifics?”

“Of course. I’ve come directly to you because I know this is a policy question. It may sound petty, but I’m asking you to look at the broad implications of why I have to bring it up. I can’t live and support my family on what you’re paying me. We have no other source of income. I have here our budget figures, and a personal balance sheet. We’re in debt, with more probability of going further in debt than paying it off. I’d like you to look these over and—”

Mallory, with a slightly pained expression, raised his hand and said, “Please, Ben. I don’t want to pry into the personal details of your life. Statistically you’re in the top five per cent income wise.”

“That’s no comfort if it doesn’t work out, sir.”

“I don’t want to bore you with reminiscences, Ben, but Alice and I didn’t have an easy time of it, believe me.” He chuckled and shook his head. “The macaroni years, that’s what Alice calls them. We had to watch every last penny, and sometimes it was a wearisome thing, but I can’t say that it did us any harm. I think it did us a lot of good, as a matter of fact. It doesn’t hurt anyone’s character to be careful, Ben.” He smiled and his voice became more confidential. “We both know it’s harder on our wives than on us, those lean years. And sometimes a woman can force a man to make... a small error in judgment. You can tell Virginia that you made the old school try, and the man said not yet. And we’ll both forget this little chat.”

“I can’t let it drop, Mr. Mallory. That’s the point I’m trying to make. If you’d look at the figures I—”

“This isn’t like you, Ben. It can’t possibly be so serious. You have a beautiful home, handsome, healthy children, a lovely wife. I can get a little angry when I think of the way you live now compared with the way Alice and I lived during the lean years. It’s a sign of our times, I guess.”

“What do you mean by that, Mr. Mallory?”

“Nobody is willing to wait any more. They have to have it now. You people all seem to want to live the abundant life before you earn the right to it.”

“It’s the kind of abundant life I’m living that I don’t want. And I’m not yearning for a cabin cruiser or a mink coat for Ginny or an airplane of my own, Mr. Mallory. I want to get out of debt because I feel degraded by being in debt when I make so much. But too much of what I make goes to keeping up the front you people demand of me. Let me unload that house and stop being a clubman and stop doing semibusiness entertaining I can’t write off, and I can get out of the swamp.”

“We pay you as much as we do, Weldon, because we expect you to live in that style.”

“Then it isn’t enough. Somebody should make a study of the suburban budget, Mr. Mallory. Too many of us are trapped.”

“Trapped? By a need for economy? What kind of a trap is that?”

“We’re not communicating, Mr. Mallory. I wouldn’t have taken up your time if it wasn’t important. I hoped this talk would go better than it’s going. I’ve got to have thirty-five.”

“You’ve got to have thirty-five thousand dollars a year!”

“If I’m to go on in the same job, and live on the same scale. I got that figure from an expert who did study my figures, Mr. Mallory. The tax bite will be much larger, of course. But the difference will be enough for me to get out of hock and begin to save a little, build up an emergency fund, lay money away for the education of my kids.”

“Ben, how many people are on your approximate level of pay in this building, in this home office?”

“As a quick guess, fifteen.”

“Closer to twenty, I’m afraid. Though salaries are not supposed to be public knowledge, quite a few people work on payroll and on overhead-expense data. An eleven-thousand-five-hundred-dollar raise would not pass unnoticed. And it would be a source of discontent.”

“Why should it be? If I am slated for bigger things, as you have hinted, why wouldn’t it be considered merely a confirmation of those plans?”

“Traditionally the salary is matched to the job, not the man, until you become one of the top officers of the corporation. But is that all we’re here for, Ben? Is that all National is — a money cow to be milked as often and strenuously as possible?”

“On the other hand, Mr. Mallory, should National have an irresponsible attitude toward the personal problems of its junior executives?”

“That’s a rather large word, Ben.”

“It wasn’t said hastily. To maintain the façade of my existence I’ll have to get that thirty-five, sir. Somewhere.”

It was that final deadly word, with its implications of disloyalty, that immediately changed the atmosphere in Mallory’s office. Ben had vowed not to bring that factor into the discussion. It would be there, but only by implication. But he had been pushed into the position of saying it, and things would not be the same again.

Mallory studied him for a moment. Ben had the feeling that Mallory had put a small strong hand against Ben’s chest and walked him backward and, with a final push, had then slammed and bolted a big door, and now looked at him through an armored peephole.

Or, in a more fitting analogy, two ships had hove to, side by side, exchanging cautious messages, until suddenly one had run up its battle flags, opened the gun ports and cleared the decks for action.

“We certainly don’t want to lose you, Ben,” Mallory said heartily. “You belong in the National family.” He had watched Mallory in action too many times not to see that this was the Mallory attitude toward all outsiders. Cordial almost to the point of being effusive, the eyes clear and friendly, the smile correct to the final millimeter of spread.

“Thank you, sir.”

Mallory came around the desk as Ben stood up. He put his hand out and Ben took it. “I recognize your problem, Ben, and I’m glad you brought it to me, and you can be assured I’ll do my very best to find a solution. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as we can come up with something.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mallory.”

There was no escort to the office door, no light touch on the shoulder. Ben went back down to his floor, his office, his desk. He sat down and looked out the glass wall at the beginning of the rain. Everything is so gentle and delicate here, he thought. They don’t ride you down in the elevator and give you a swing, and bounce your pants off Lexington Avenue. But somehow it feels exactly the same.

A few moments later he called Gearling, the treasurer, and asked to borrow the balance in his retirement account.

“You... want to take it out, Ben?” Gearling asked.

“It’s permitted, isn’t it?”

“Of course! Of course! The — uh — whole amount?”

“Yes.”

“How soon do you want it?”

“As soon as you can get it, Edward.”

“It has to clear through the trust account that handles the retirement fund, Ben. Three days?”

“That’ll be fine. Thanks.”

“When will you — uh — put it back in, Ben?”

“Sometime before I retire, Edward. I guess I’d have to, or it would mess up my retirement, wouldn’t it?”

Gearling suspected that Ben was making a joke, so he laughed in a slightly hollow and uncomfortable way.

That evening Ben told Ginny what he had done. He wanted to see her happy. He wanted to see her eyes shine. He wanted to get at least that much out of it, the way they give the big loser a free taxi ride home. But she stared at him, her eyes round in shock, and then her face came apart like a small child readying itself for tears, and she fled to the bedroom.

Ten days later Bartlett phoned and asked Ben to come to his office. It had been a curious ten days. There had been a subtle yet obvious change in attitude toward him. He learned indirectly of a policy memo that had not been routed to his desk, and suspected there had been others. Men who had been stiff and rather formal with him in the past were now relaxed and quite friendly in his presence. Those who had sought him out now seemed to avoid him. Bartlett was taking an unusual interest in the details of matters he had previously left entirely up to Ben.

When he walked into Bartlett’s office he was not surprised to see Brendan Mallory there, or see his open friendly smile.

“Sit down, Ben. Sit down,” Mallory said. “Ed and I have been up one side of this and down the other, and I think we’ve come up with something that will solve your special problem.” There was an ironic emphasis on the word “special.”

“I’m glad to hear that sir.”

“You’re too good a man to lose, Ben. We’re quick to admit that, believe me. Gil Walker sent in a formal request for early retirement for reasons of health, and we’ve been sitting on it, wondering who to put in out there. That’s Southwest District, out of Denver, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“With all respect to Gil Walker, Ben, that district does need the kind of talent you can bring to the job. It’s a good place to live, I hear. And, traditionally, the district managers do better, salarywise, than a lot of us slaves in the home office.”

“I’ve heard about that, sir.”

“From the way it looks, Ben, you ought to make about thirty-two or thirty-three at the beginning and, if you can build it up, as I’m sure you can, it could peak at forty in a very short time. So it’s quite a handsome promotion, and it seems to Ed and me to be a good solution all around. And it certainly won’t hurt your future value to the corporation to have a few years of running a district on your record.”

It’s so neat, Ben thought admiringly. You bring the outstanding young men out of the districts into the home office, the way you brought me in, but you never, never bring a district manager to New York. There’s good reason. He’s acquired an incurably regional point of view. The pay is good because it has to be good, because it is just as high and far as the man can go with National. So you sit out there and you do one gutsy job of following the instructions from the home office, and it is, in a sense, a demanding job, but you never get your fingers into policy. It’s a handsome promotion if you think just about the money. But all of a sudden they’ve dropped the barricade across your highway, and you know just how long the road is. You can move to a bigger district — at their request — and that is all. You’ll be the youngest district manager in National. And ten years from now you’ll be of average age for district managers, and eventually you’ll retire to a little better than reasonable comfort. You can do the job. It’s no snap job. It’ll take diligence and concentration and good judgment. But there will be no opportunity to exercise that rare executive muscle that creates brand-new plans, programs, policies, and attitudes. It will use all the rest of you, but not that.

So look at us as we sit here, full of face-saving devices and fabrications. Theirs is a salvage operation. They have decided they were wrong in believing they had a machine that would push new roads through the wilderness. But the same machine can be very useful keeping old roads in repair. It is uneconomic to scrap it. So grease it well and put it to work.

The other choice is to resign here and now and get into another outfit where the road to the top level will not be so neatly blocked. But would not that run us into the same thing?

He realized they were looking at him and had been for a few moments too long, but they both wore expressions of polite attentiveness, and the pleased look of men who have found a way to do a seemingly generous thing. They had beribboned the gift with the fictitious hint that he could and would return here after running a district. It could not happen.

“I’m pleased you think I can handle the job, sir.” We all know very damn well I can handle it, don’t we?

“Done and done,” Mallory said with satisfaction, moving in quickly for the handshake. “I can speak for Ed, too, when I say we’re both very pleased at the way we’ve been able to work this thing out.”

“Now it’s decided, Ben,” Ed Bartlett said, “there’s no point in dragging our feet. Suppose you get cleaned up here by the end of the week and report out there Monday.”

“For a quick look,” Mallory said hastily, “then fly on back and take care of personal matters and then take your time driving your family out there. See something of the country. I’m sure that will be all right with Gil.”

The three men were standing. They smiled at one another. They were all members of the National family, and when these little family problems came up, you made a practice of handling them in a warm, human, cooperative way.

Ben Weldon spent a week in Denver. Gil Walker was delighted that Ben was taking over the district. Gil talked a great deal about the benefits of being a district manager, of being the top dog in the area. He was proud of his staff of sixty-two. The staff seemed competent, pleasant, and as wary of Ben as he expected them to be.

Gil steered Ben to a good real-estate agent who found a house that seemed nearly perfect, at less than he had expected to pay. He told Ginny all about it over the phone. She sounded ecstatic at the description, and told him to nail it down fast — the same advice given him by the agent.

He made the deposit. He was taking an evening flight back, leaving at ten o’clock, Friday night. He had checked out of the hotel. After dinner alone he had time to kill, and so he drove the rental car out to the house where they would live.

It was a very cold night, and the stars were vivid. He parked in the driveway and walked slowly around to the back of the house and sat on the low wall that enclosed the open patio. He smoked the cigarettes that he could afford, and he wore a new sports jacket, new flannel slacks, a new topcoat. He looked at the long slant of the land he would own, and he wondered if he had done it all as well as he could do it. He knew it was a question that could not be resolved, one that he would ask himself, probably, for the rest of his life.

On the evening of the day he had accepted the new job, he had gone home with two bottles of champagne. He beamed at his Ginny and presented her with the champagne. She stared at him in blank confusion. He took the champagne out of her hands and kissed her with splendid emphasis and resounding duration.

When he released her, gasping, she said, “What is this all about?”

“It is because you are a woman of rare perception and intelligence. And if I have your solemn promise never to gloat, I’ll tell you it is because you were entirely right, and I was dead wrong, darling.”

“About the job?”

“What else, pray? I just got bumped ten thousand, baby.”

“Ben! I don’t know what to say! How incredibly wonderful!”

“And we’re going to live one mile in the air, woman. You are standing in the presence of the brand-new district manager, Southwest District, headquarters in Denver.” Even as he beamed at her proudly, he was watching her closely. It was the critical moment.

He saw the doubts go out of her eyes. “Then champagne is exactly the right thing, isn’t it?” she said.

“Please chill it immediately. And jump when I give an order. I expect more respect around here from now on.”

“Lord and master,” she said, smiling, and came into his arms again.

He held the flame of his lighter to read his watch. Another ten minutes and it would be time to start to the airport. You did what you felt you had to do, and when it was done, you lived with it.

They could be content here, secure and happy. Things might become as good as they had once been, before insecurity began to corrode their contentment.

But he knew, and he would always know, that he had once climbed to a high and lonely place, that with the climbing irons and the ropes he had reached the last sheer drop before the summit. He had swung there in the frosty gale until finally, too numbed to make the final effort, he had climbed back down the way he had come, back down to a niche where he could be warm and safe and out of the wind.

He knew he would read and hear about the ones who made it all the way to the high peaks. The lower slopes of the mountains were warm and easy, and the trails were marked. The high places were dangerous. He knew how close he had come, and he could read about the others who had made it. Their powers and their decisions would affect him. And all his life he would wonder just how it felt to be up there.

He stood up and snapped his cigarette into the night and walked back to the car. As he got behind the wheel he found himself wondering if it was a happy ending. He smiled with derision at himself as that ancient phrase came into his mind. Happy endings were reserved for stories for children. An adult concerned himself with feasible endings. And this one was feasible, as an ending or as a beginning. You had to put your own puzzle together, and nobody would ever come along to tell you how well or how poorly you had done.

Afternoon of the Hero

May 21, 1966, The Saturday Evening Post

He woke up quite alone in his half acre of bed, in the sealed, soundproofed, shadowy expanse of bedroom, measuring the bulge of pain behind his eyes, tasting the sourness of his tongue. Soon, willing himself to make the effort, he hitched to the side of the bed, swung his legs out, and sat up quite slowly, making a face, scrubbing at his thinning harshness of black hair. He wormed his bare toes into the fur of the big white rug beside the bed and saw himself indistinctly in a distant mirror, the round doll-man in the bright pajamas. He reached to the big button board set into the headboard and punched the one for the draperies. The electric motor whined into life and opened the heavy draperies that covered the big window wall, letting in the flood of mid-May sunshine.

He pantomimed an extreme agony, covering his eyes with a heavy forearm, holding the other hand out in defense, and saying in one of his Balkan accents, “No, Andreyev, not the torture of the lights, comrade, I beg you.” He peered over his forearm, blinking. “I did it! I did it! I sabotaged the hushpuppy production, you all.”

He sighed and pushed the button for the tape. After a few scratchy sounds the music came on with a depth and fidelity too impressive for the song. It started up in the middle of a ricky-tick version of the Bahamian ballad Yellow Bird, a girl singing the lyrics in a gassy mock-sensual way.

He hummed skillful harmony and stood up and became a mortally wounded fellow bent on reaching the bathroom before expiring. He burlesqued it, using all the ingrained art of that big fat spry useful body, faking the smack of forehead against doorframe, the dazed rebound.

The big bathroom opened into another room with matching tile, containing his exercise equipment, rubbing table, barber chair, and steam box. His spacious shower stall had six shower heads and a back wall mirror. After soap and heat, he danced and gasped for a time in the chill spray of ice water. He knotted a large coral towel around his belly and went back to the bedroom. He went directly to the button board to ring for Robbie but stopped just before his finger touched the button. Just one more time, he thought. He had been aware of the magazine over on his desk from the instant he was completely awake. The special messenger had brought it out to the house the previous evening. Today five or six million copies were going into the hands of the public.

He brought the magazine back to the bed and sat and read that part again.

It would be too trite to say that King Noonan, one of the most fabulously successful comics of our time, is, underneath his exuberant exterior, a lonely and complex fellow. And perhaps it is no longer fashionable to look for the basic motivating force. But, if backed into a corner, I would say that the King’s engine is fear. He is not lonely — not with that permanent retinue. Nor is he complex in the ordinary meaning of the word.

King Noonan runs scared, and thus he runs very hard indeed. He is afraid of the effects of the abuse he inflicts on his big durable body. He is terrified of death. He is afraid of being laughed at for the wrong reasons. He is afraid to think of the probable reasons for the failures of his marriages, the failures in friendship. Failure is indeed his demon. Failure professionally, personally, socially, emotionally. And so he drives himself in the pursuit of a perfection that will make failure unthinkable, and we are the ones who gain thereby.

One day one of the demons will catch him. But in the meantime we are privileged to watch the chase, and enjoy the by-product of his fear, that great comic art, sometimes vulgar, sometimes as sensitive and delicate as great theater, always competent. Fear is the engine, and laughter is the long bright road.

He slapped the magazine shut and scaled it across the room, pages rattling. He went after it and picked it up and put it back on the desk. He wandered to the window wall and looked down at the pool. There were a few swimmers, and all the others were stretched out, flesh oiled, in the sun. No sound of them came into the room, no splash or shout or girl laugh, though he could see their mouths. Like a film with the sound gone bad. An idea moved through the back of his mind, a skit where the sound came and went, the silent parts always giving the audience an incorrect and bawdy idea of what was going on. Could they fake running a film backward? Ask Jorgie about that. Maybe do the rubber cane bit in reverse pantomime.

Robbie appeared less than a minute after King punched his bell. He came in briskly enough, and the smile was there, but King sensed something tentative about the man. The narrow jockey-face looked closed and defensive. So maybe it had been a rougher night than he remembered.

“There are some strange pussycats in the pool,” King said.

“Oh, Franklin sent those two out. What they are, they’re for the stewardess part. What he said, either one is okay with him, so you pick. They got the knives for each other, naturally.”

“Chrissake, Robbie, that isn’t until August.”

“I know. He says let’s get set as far as we can as soon as we can, on everything that doesn’t start nibbling the budget. What’s the matter with you maybe hustling Kerner on the script some, Franklin says.”

“Tell him to goose Kerner, and what’s the matter with you? I fire you last night?”

“Two or three times, King. Look, we’ve got in maybe forty calls, what they say mostly is that Jessup is a rat fink after all the time he spent with you, then doing that fright thing. They say you want he should have a broken leg, okay. I called Barney like you said, and he said nothing actionable.”

King Noonan stared at him. “Like I said?”

“Last night you said call Barney.”

“Chrissake, baby, I must have been sauced. Look, do I ever give a damn what’s written about me? No. Jessup is in the business of selling magazines. Right? I’m in the business of selling King Noonan.”

“Well, it was rough. You know that. It was rough.”

“Everything is rough wherever you look, Robbie. Let’s join hands and start the dancing around here. This is the way we open. I want Mitch to come pound me some to get my heart started, ten minutes of that, and then Hymie come give me a shave and a trim. While that is going on I can be going over the Chicago material with Mert and Willy. That’s tomorrow night out there, and it isn’t smoothed out yet. Breakfast here in... thirty-five minutes, mucho eggs scrambled, and a herd of those little sausages like yesterday. Have Mary Ann up here to go over those series ideas while I eat, and Maddy to take notes. But the first priority, you find Joseph and send him up here with an ice-cold pitcher of orange juice belted real good with vodka.”

Robbie moved toward the door. “Fennison is here with that deal about the French television...”

“Baby, after Mary Ann. Then we schedule and run like a train.”

He was stretched out on the rubdown table with big Mitch chopping at his shoulder muscles when Joseph scurried in and poured a tall glass of juice. Hymie was waiting by the barber chair, stropping his razor. Mert and Willy came in with pink copies of the Chicago material. The juice had reminded him of something. He had Mitch quit and he sat on the table and said, “This juice, I remember I was eighteen, nineteen, working this club in Camden, New Jersey. A little palace for cockroaches and the material strictly blue, the bar whisky two bits a shot, the broads cruising like vultures, you know the type place. So on a Saturday we all hear the place is closing, it’s the last night. Midnight we roust the customers we’ve got, maybe three, and word is around, so the bartenders, the broads, the entertainment from the other joints along the street, they come in through the back, and what we have is these odds and ends of bottles. Aquavit, Curaçao, crap like that, so we make a hell of a big punch bowl, and it tastes so bad we squeeze a hell of a lot of oranges in.” He was into the rhythm of it then, the clown face mobile, words flowing into the apt gestures, timing professionally precise, voice flexible. He told the little audience of four how one of the girls, anxious to use up all the bottled goods, had, when they mixed the second batch, dumped in the entire contents of the bartender’s little bottle of chloral hydrate, thinking it some kind of bitters. He bounced off the table and imitated the way they went down — the glaze, the sag, the little blind stagger. He had the audience howling and weeping with laughter. “Three years before I could stare an orange in the face,” he said and got into the barber chair. Hymie tilted him back and wrapped his face in the steaming towel.

He put on his dragon robe for breakfast. Mary Ann Mize was waiting for him at the bedroom table, sipping hot coffee. Maddy was over at the desk, her steno book and pencils ready. He ignored Mary Ann and went over to Maddy and kissed her, then hooked a finger in the top of her blouse, pulled it away from her body, stared severely down, and shouted, “You men down there! Back to work! We need more barrage balloons to save London.” Maddy flushed and giggled.

He went to the table and began to eat, without word or glance for Mary Ann. She was a fox-faced woman in her forties, with a sour inverted smile. She waited him out.

“So make the pitch again,” he said at last.

“I will make the pitch. And keep making it. Pressure, sweetie. This year is in the can, and the ratings are holding. Pressure from the network, the sponsors, the agencies. And pressure from me, sweetie. We should give them another thirty-nine weeks like the last thirty-nine weeks. It is hot and running. Everybody thinks you’d be insane to move to a new format, even if we could come up with a good one.”

“Do you think I’m insane?”

“Sweetie, after fifteen years I think I know how your mind works. Always you want to quit ahead. Right. About next season you wonder if it could go stale, and you get scared that...”

He turned the direction of the piece of buttered toast and, cat quick, thumbed her chin down and shoved it into her mouth. “The King is never scared, Mary Ann.”

She chewed and swallowed, her eyes narrow and angry. “You buy my advice, so take it, King. I say ride it another season. Already we’ve got six good scripts. We shuffle the writers some to hold it fresh. We’ll hold a top rating, believe me.”

He aimed a finger at her. “What you do, you brief me on the new ideas right now. Maddy writes down my reaction. I come back from Chicago, I say whether we ride the same thing another year or we come up with a new one.”

“The time is getting short, you know.”

“And if we go with the same one, it’s a risk for me. For taking a risk, I get paid money. They understand I’ll want more?”

“They understand and they’re crying, but they’ll pay.”

“Shut up and start reading.”

All things considered, it was an easy day. By one in the afternoon he had disposed of Franklin and the French deal. He had given Mary Ann some new ideas to whip into shape. Mert and Willy were putting final touches on the Chicago material. He had made a couple of long lazy phone calls to friends on the Coast, proving in an indirect and discreet way that Warner Jessup had been faking it out and hadn’t moved in close enough to sting the King.

At one o’clock he put on some baggy madras shorts and went down to the pool. Joseph was tending the garden bar, and some of his people were beginning to set up the lunch buffet. Hobbie and Marda and some of that crowd had come over, and thirty seconds after King had a drink in his hand, he realized that they were going to give him the rough treatment on the Jessup bit, with Hobbie leading the way. So he did the only thing he could; he took it right to them, pantomiming extravagant terror of every small thing. He went on the high board and did a guy too frightened to jump, who finally fainted and fell off. When anybody came up behind him, he would give a great shuddering leap. He renamed himself Chicken a la King, and after he started them all swinging his way, he zeroed in on Hobbie Thorn with particular attention to Hobbie’s network cancellation, and he kept driving it in until Hobbie finally went roaring off in his golden convertible, the back of his bull neck brick red.

It was sometime after three o’clock when, among the pool group, he noticed one of the pussycats Franklin had sent up from town. He got her aside. A small-boned blonde, young, wise-eyed, with a lot of facial business, conversational extravagance, the choppy gestures of the industry. Her name was Adele Bowen, and she recited a whole string of credits with watchful aplomb.

He sat on a bench and beamed up at her and said, “The way we’ll work the picture, dear girl, we shoot it tight, like in thirty days, but we play it free and loose, like improvise, so we can all have some fun. I like to move around in the lines, and you got to pick it up without breaking up.”

“King, I’ve done a lot of...”

“You do me some quick takes right now, dear girl. Walk by me and double take into horror and astonishment.”

She went into it without pause, the bland glance as she passed, the halt, the slow turn of the head, eyes widening, mouth sagging, a look of comic, stricken idiocy.

“Fine. Now you are getting yourself set to pounce on a very attractive guy. You’re working up to it. Play it broad.”

She fixed him with a vast, suggestive, avaricious leer. Slowly, slowly, she raised each palm in turn to her lips and pretended to spit. She moistened her lips, gave a little hitch to her bikini pants, one slow suggestive roll of her hips, and then came swaying toward him, eyes slitted, working her fingers like claws.

“Give me some heartbreak.”

She stopped and looked at him, half smiling, half frowning, her head tilted. “Oh, no, darling!” she whispered, and with the tender smile still in place, her eyes filled slowly, and one tear trickled as she shook her head.

He took her wrist and pulled her down onto the bench beside him. She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Now, cookie,” he said, “you are me and Hank Franklin sends up these two broads, so which one do you pick if you are me?”

She moved away a little to stare suspiciously at him. “What do you expect me to say to a mad, mad question like that, King?”

“What’s the name of the other pussycat?”

“Wendell. Priscilla Wendell.”

“Appraise her for me, dear girl.”

“Well, I’ll just assume you do want me to be terribly honest and fair. As she had made goddam certain you and everybody else would see, she truly has one hell of a figure. She’d make Mansfield feel insecure. She’s Equity, of course, but honest to Jesus, King, I can’t think of her as pro. What she’s had is experimental theater and girl college stuff. And some chorus line. Put it this way. What I just did, she couldn’t do. She seems nice, but a thing like this would be out of her league. She’s so damned anxious to beat me out for it, she’s all tightened up. But she seems nice enough. You know. Maybe she could cut it later on, but this year she’s green.”

He pinched her by the chin and kissed the tip of her soft young nose and said, “Hang around, pro. I’ll have the word.”

Priscilla Wendell was in a white tank suit. She had a long rich shine of chestnut hair and soft green-brown eyes. She was trying to play it very cool, but her eyes swiveled too much, and her hand was damp and chilly and trembling. He was slightly stoned and a little bit sleepy, so he took her around through another door and through the big silent house and up to his bedroom study. He picked an old script at random and leafed though it and found a long female speech and told her to read it. She stood very erect. She had a precise and cultivated voice, and he knew she was no good for what he wanted of her. Adele would do the stewardess.

He paced and listened to her and then went up behind her as she read and fitted his hands to the deep curves of her swimsuit waist. He stuck his nose into the chestnut hair. She was tall, almost as tall as he. The contact made her voice thin. She lost her place and found it again, and read with less assurance.

He turned her around slowly and brushed the script out of her hands and stared at her. Her smile remained wide and fixed and rubbery, while her eyes tried to run, darting little glances around him and beyond him and across him. She put her hands, awkward and butterfly-light, on his shoulders, and he knew she was scared weak but steeling herself to acceptance.

Scared. Suddenly he found it very touching. All this bounteous and terrified flesh, and this terrible anxiety to please.

The two of us, he thought. And some of his little houses came tumbling down. What if you said it, just once?

“Pussycat, look at me. Listen to me. I want to say something. Pussycat, every goddam minute of every goddam day, unless I’m stoned out of my mind, I’m scared. Believe me, baby. I am scared!”

To his consternation, his voice broke and his throat thickened and his eyes began to sting. He looked at her smooth young uncomprehending face, and before his first sob could erupt from him, he yanked her into his arms. He bawled and snuffled into the sweet and pungent hollow of her neck and shoulder, holding her rigid and alarmed body, and suddenly he knew he could not give this much away to anyone. So he caught at it quickly, and with the skill and force of all the years, he twisted it into the crying bit, the thing he had started way back in the Johnny Ray days, the regression bit that ends with that uncanny and perfect imitations of the mewlings of a newborn child. When he had control of it, he released her and went into it, watching for her reaction. She was dazed and puzzled and then she began the laughter the clown must always have. He adjusted his act to her laughter and brought her along into helplessness, gasping, doubling, laughing until she cried. Then he ended it and held her in his arms again, feeling the little spasms of her hilarity in her big young body. He gave her a hearty and vulgar and painful tweak, and she leaped and hugged him strongly, and then, with her half laughing, half crying in his arms, he began to lead her over to the huge gaudy bed.

“Oh, you funny man,” she gasped. “You funny funny man!”

Content

John D. MacDonald
End of the Tiger and Other Stories

The Singular John D. MacDonald Dean Koontz

Hangover

The Big Blue

End of the Tiger

The Trouble with Erica

Long Shot

Looie Follows Me

Blurred View

The Loveliest Girl in the World

Triangle

The Bear Trap

A Romantic Courtesy

The Fast Loose Money

The Straw Witch

The Trap of Solid Gold

Afternoon of the Hero