One More for the Road (22 page)

“Then get on with it. Take her home. I'm too old for her, for you, for everyone.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“That's not old.”

“Yes it is, if you're me and a thousand men behind me. I've got four more years, then I'm gone.”

“You'll only be thirty.”

“Wake up! No one wants a thirty-year-old fairy godmother!”

I blurted it out:

“What's going to happen to you?”

Sonny froze in place and without looking at me, in a cold voice said, “I hate people asking what's going to happen to me!”

“I just mean, what? I'm asking as a friend.”

“Let me look at you. Yes, poor sap, you really think you are my friend. Why,” said Sonny, staring into the rain, “when I hit thirty, three-oh, I'll buy some rat poison.”

“You wouldn't.”

“Or a gun. Or maybe I'll defenestrate. Fine word, eh? It means jumping through a window. Defenestrate.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Silly boy, someone like me, thirty's the end. No more.
Finis
. That old song: Nobody wants you when you're old and gray.”

“Thirty's not old.”

“Are you telling granny? Thirty's when you have to pay for it, right? All the things you once had free, now you dig out the wallet and peel off the green. I'm damned if I'll shell out for what now is my divine right.”

“I bet you talked like that when you were five.”

“I was born talking. Only one way to stop me. Out the window!”

“But you have a whole life ahead.”

“You maybe, dear chum, not this lady on the piano bar singing the blues. I've got fingerprints all over my skin. Not an inch isn't an FBI file of bounders, cads, and the criminally insane.”

“I don't believe that.”

“Poor naive sap.” But he said it gently and chucked me under the chin. “You ever been kissed by a man?”

“Nope.”

“I'm almost tempted.” He loomed, then pulled back. “But I won't.”

I fixed my gaze at that woman, it seemed, a mile away.

“How long have you known her?”

“Since high school. She was one of my teachers.”

“Oh.”

“Don't say ‘Oh.' I was Teacher's Pet. She was never mine. She told me I was headed for great things. Pretty great, huh, downtown Saturday nights leading a dog pack of gutless wonders.”

“Did you ever try to be great?”

“Jesus!”

“Well, did you?”

“Try what? Being artist, writer, painter, dancer?”

“You should have picked one.”

“That's what she said. But I was busy at wild parties in Malibu or Laguna. She still hung on, and there she is, a whipped cur.”

“She doesn't look whipped to me.”

“No? Wait there.”

I watched him through the bar-room window as he ordered another Dubonnet and made a phone call. When he came back out he said, “Just talked to Lorenzo di Medici. Know anything about the Medicis?”

“Venice, right? Formed the first banking systems? Friend of Botticelli. Enemy of Savonarola?”

“Sorry I asked. That was one of his great-great-grandsons, just asked me to live in his Manhattan penthouse in September. Secretarial work. A little light housekeeping. Thursdays off. Weekends on Fire Island.”

“You going to accept?”

“She can't follow me there. Come on!”

Sonny walked off.

I looked at the woman across the street. Half an hour of rain had made her older.

I stepped off the curb. That did it. She turned away in a fresh downpour.

 

Summer was over.

Of course you can't tell in Los Angeles. No sooner do you think it's finished than it comes back full-blast for Thanksgiving, or spoils Halloween with 98 degrees instead of rain, or a strange hot Christmas morn with snow melted that never fell, and New Year's Eve a Fourth of July.

Anyway, summer was over, not because of season's change but just people going away, packing their grips, stashing photographs, ready to vanish in a war that was clearing its throat just beyond the ocean. You could tell summer was over in the voices of your lost and never quite found friends, whose names, if they had some, stuck in your throat. Nobody said goodbye or farewell, it was just so long, see you, with a deep sad sound to it. We all knew that whatever bus or trolley we took, we might never come back.

With the park empty on a final Saturday night, I walked Sonny to his streetcar. Just before it arrived, Sonny, not looking at me, said, “You coming along?”

“Where?” I said.

“To my place, silly.”

“It's the first time you ever asked.”

“Well, I'm asking now. Hurry up. I'm going away.”

I looked at his profile, the pale flesh drawn over the hidden cheeks and nose and moonlit brow. He felt me examining him and turned his head to really look at me, like a discovery, for the first time.

“Thanks a lot.” I hesitated and had to shift my gaze. “Thanks, but I don't think so, Sonny.”

Sonny gasped.

“I'll be damned, rejected by a Martian!”

“Is that what I am?”

“Yes, yes,” Sonny laughed. “But someday you'll marry another Martian and raise a dozen kids for John Carter, Warlord of Mars.”

I nodded weakly. “I think you're right.”

“I am. Well, here goes, home to a lonely bed and off to the Medicis
mañana
. Sure you won't change your mind?”

“Thanks.”

The trolley had stopped. He climbed up and looked down at me and the park and the city skyline, as if drinking it in, trying to remember it all.

“Sonny,” I said, on impulse.

He fixed me with his liquid gaze.

“God bless,” I murmured.

“I sure as hell hope so.” And the trolley was moving with him in the open doorway, giving one last wave of his cigarette holder and an uplift of his slender chin.

“How does that song go?” he called. And the streetcar was lost in thunders. “‘Tangerine'? Johnny Mercer's song. All the rage that year. ‘Tangerine,'” said my waiter back in another year, his face a blank on which memory wrote itself. “That strange guy, Sonny? Had a nice sweet soprano. God, I can hear him now. And the laughter. I think that was why we all followed him. No money, no jobs, no love life. Just Saturday nights to stay busy. So he sang and laughed and we followed. Sonny and ‘Tangerine.' ‘Tangerine' and Sonny.”

The waiter stopped, embarrassed.

I finished my wine. “What,” I said at last, “what ever happened to Tangerine?”

The waiter shook his head but then hesitated and shut his eyes for a moment. “Hey. Hold on. Right after the war, in 1947, I bumped into one of those crazies, the old gang. He said he had heard, didn't know for a fact, probably true, Sonny had killed himself.”

I wished my glass was full but it was empty.

“On his birthday?” I said.

“What?”

“Did he die on his thirtieth birthday?”

“How did you know that? Yeah. Shot himself.”

“Thank God it was just a gun,” I said at last.

“Beg pardon?”

“Nothing, Ramón. Nothing.”

The waiter backed off to go get my bill, then paused.

“That song he was always singing. What were the words?”

I waited to see if he might still remember. But it didn't show in his face.

The music rose in my head. And all the old words, right on to the end.

“Don't ask me,” I said.

W
ITH
S
MILES AS
W
IDE AS
S
UMMER

 

“H
ey … hey … wait for me!”

The call, the echo. The call, the echo, fading.

With apple-thudding bare feet, the boys of summer ran away.

William Smith kept running. Not because he could catch anyone but because he could not admit his feet were slower than his wish, his legs shorter than his goal.

Yelling, he plunged down the ravine at the heart of Green Town, seeking friendships hid in empty tree houses blowing their burlap-bag door curtains in the wind. Searching caves dug in raw earth, he found only burnt marshmallow fires. Wading the creek, even crayfish saw his shadow, smelled his need, and scuttled back in milk-sand explosions.

“All right, you guys! Someday I'll be older than you! Then, watch out!”

“… Watch out …” said the bottomless tunnel under Elm Street.

Will slumped. Every summer—much running, no catching. Nowhere in all the town was there a boy who threw a shadow just his size. He was six. Half the people he knew were three, which was so far down you couldn't see it. The other half were nine, which was so far up, snow fell there all the year. Running after nines he had to worry about escaping the threes. It was a sad game at both ends. Now, seated on a rock, he wept.

“Who wants them? Not me, no sir! Not me!”

But then, a long way off in the noon heat, he heard a great commotion of games and frolics. Slowly, curiously, he stood up. Moving along the creek bank in shadow, he climbed a small hill, crawled under some bushes, and peered down.

There, in a small meadow at the center of the ravine, were nine summer boys, playing.

Circling, they knocked the echoes with their voices, plunged, rolled over, spun, jigged, shook themselves, raced off, hurtled back, leapt high, mad with summer light and heat, unable to stop just being alive.

They did not see William, so he had time to recall where he had seen each before. This one he remembered from a house on Elm, that one from a shoe shop on Maple, a third had last been seen leaning against a mailbox near the Elite Theater. Nameless, all nine of them, gloriously frisky, nutty with their games.

And, miracle of miracles, they were all his age!

“Hey!” cried Will.

The frolic ceased. The boys unscrambled. All gazed, some blinked at him. Some looked to set the panic off. Panting, they waited for Will to speak.

“May—” he asked quietly, “—may I play?”

They peered at him with their shining honey-warm molasses-brown eyes. Their smiles, the white smiles pinned to their faces, were wide as all of summer.

Will threw a stick far over the ravine.

“There!”

The boys, answering with their own sound, bolted off. Their furious romp kicked up vast sunlit clouds of dust.

One trotted back. The stick was in his smiling mouth. He laid it at Will's feet with a bow.

“Thank you,” said Will.

The other boys ran, danced, waiting for a throw. Looking, Will thought, cats are girls, I always knew that. But dogs, just look! All summer ahead, us here together, and dogs are nothing but—boys!

The boys barked. The boys smiled.

“You're my friends, right? We'll meet every day, right?”

They wagged their tails. They whined.

“Do like I say, and—bones and biscuits!”

The boys shivered.

“Biscuits and bones!”

He hurled the stick ten million miles out. The summer boys ran and he thought, No matter if they have pups, dogs are boys, no other animal in the whole world so much like me, Dad, Gramps. And suddenly he ran yipping, barking, fell on their dance-ground, pummeled their dusty earth, leapt their wet tree stumps. Then in a great yelling swoop they rocked off, all ten, toward wilderness country.