End of the Tiger (15 page)

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.

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.