The Complete Crime Stories (8 page)

Suddenly, though, she sat up, listened, and turned to him. “That ain't no miner.”

“Oh, yes, it is. He—”

“That ain't no miner. That's water. I can tell by how it sounds.”

“Gee, if we could only get some! But I can't even start the lamp. I'm scared so bad I can't spit.”

“Give me that lamp. I can spit.”

She took the lamp, and he heard it hiss from plenty of good wet spit. He struck the flint, and flame punctured the darkness. “We got to hurry. That won't last long.”

“Keep still, so I can hear.”

He held the light, and she crawled on her hands and knees, cocking her head now and then to listen. The flame grew smaller and smaller. Suddenly she thrust her hand under a slab of rock. “There it is.”

“You sure?”

“Give me the bucket.”

She took the bucket and thrust it under, and at once came the loud
clank
of water on tin. They looked at each other, and he spoke breathlessly: “That's it! That's how it sounded, only now it's in the bucket.” The lamp went out, and they waited in the dark while there came a few drops, then a pause, then a few more drops, then the rapid staccato of a full trickle, then a long pause, then the separate drops again. After a long time she shook the bucket, and they heard the water slosh. “That's enough. That'll get us out.”

They poured water in the lamp, struck the flint, and a fine big flame spurted out. They were off at once. They went through more dead entries, then came to where the going was better. He laughed—a high nervous giggle. “Ain't that a joke? Won't them miners feel silly when I tell them that haunt ain't nothing but water?”

“It come to me, just like that, that them was drops.”

“And think of that—that was why they stopped working that coal. That's why the company had to close down them entries. Not no miner would work in there.”

“Gee, that's funny.”

When, still laughing at this, they popped suddenly on to the old drift mouth, it was nearly dark outside, and snowing. They said stiff good-byes; she thanked him for helping her out, and promised to protect him in his guilty secret. She started down the mountain toward the part of the camp where she lived. He watched her a moment, and then something rose in his throat, an overwhelming recollection—of a naked patch of flesh, lovely smell, and brave, hissing spit.

He called in a queer strained voice: “Yay!”

“What?”

“Come back here a minute.”

She ran back and stood in front of him. He wanted to say something; didn't know what it was; then heard himself talking, in the same queer voice, about his hope there was no hard feelings about what he had said, back there in the mine, before they started out. She didn't answer. She kept looking at him. And then, to his astonishment, she came up and put her arms around him. Then he said it. He pulled her to him, pushed his lips against hers for the first time, and the words came jerkily: “Listen. … The hell with going home. … Let's not go home. … Let's get married. … Let's … be together.”

She stayed near him, touched his face with her fingers, then looked away. “We can't get married.”

“Why not?”

“We got no money. You got no money. I got no money, nobody in a coal camp has got any money. … Gee, I'd love to be with you.”

“My old man would take us in.”

“And your old lady would throw us out.”

“All right, never mind the married part. Let's not go home tonight. Let's stay up here, in one of these shacks.”

“They'll be looking for us.”

“Let them look.”

“We'd be awful cold and hungry.”

“We can build a fire, and I got two sandwiches left.”

“… All right.”

They tried to say something else, but found themselves unexpectedly embarrassed. But then he began shaking her, his eyes shining. “Who says we can't get married? Who says we got no money? Why, I'll have a job! I'll have a real job! I'll have a company job!”

“How will you get a company job?”

“The haunt! Don't you get it?
I'll
prove to them miners that haunt is nothing but water! Then they can get that coal! Boy, will they give me a company job for doing that! Will they!”

“Gee. I bet they will.”

“Listen. Do you really mean it? About camping out tonight?”

“I don't want we should be separated, ever.”

“Kiss me again. Maybe we can catch a rabbit. Can you cook a rabbit?”

“Yes.”

Inside, an astral miner picked up an astral bucket and sadly prepared to join the great army of unemployed.

Career in C Major

1

A
ll this, that I'm going to tell you, started several years ago. You may have forgotten how things were then, but I won't forget it so soon, and sometimes I think I'll never forget it. I'm a contractor, junior partner in the Craig-Borland Engineering Company, and in my business there was
nothing
going on. In your business, I think there was a little going on, anyway enough to pay the office help provided they would take a ten per cent cut and forget about the Christmas bonus. But in my business, nothing. We sat for three years with our feet on our desks reading magazines, and after the secretaries left we filled in for a while by answering the telephone. Then we didn't even do that, because the phone didn't ring any more. We just sat there, and switched from the monthlies to the weeklies, because they came out oftener.

It got so bad that when Craig, my partner, came into the office one day with a comical story about a guy that wanted a concrete chicken coop built, somewhere out in Connecticut, that we looked at each other shifty-eyed for a minute, and then without saying a word we put on our hats and walked over to Grand Central to take the train. We wanted that coop so bad we could hardly wait to talk to him. We built it on a cost-plus basis, and I don't think there's another one like it in the world. It's insulated concrete, with electric heat control, automatic sewage disposal, accommodations for 5,000 birds, and all for $3,000, of which our share was $300, minus expenses. But it was something to do, something to do. After the coop was built, Craig dug in at his farm up-state, and that left me alone. I want you to remember that, because if I made a fool of myself, I was wide open for that, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. When you get a little fed up with me, just remember those feet, with no spurs to keep them from falling off the desk, because what we had going on wasn't a war, like now, but a depression.

It was about four-thirty on a fall afternoon when I decided to call it a day and go home. The office is in a remodeled loft on East 35th Street, with a two-story studio for drafting on the ground level, the offices off from that, and the third floor for storage. We own the whole building and owned it then. The house is on East 84th Street, and it's a house, not an apartment. I got it on a deal that covered a couple of apartment houses and a store. It's mine, and was mine then, with nothing owing on it. I decided to walk, and marched along, up Park and over, and it was around five-thirty when I got home. But I had forgotten it was Wednesday, Doris's afternoon at home. I could hear them in there as soon as I opened the door, and I let out a damn under my breath, but there was nothing to do but brush my hair back and go in. It was the usual mob: a couple of Doris's cousins, three women from the Social Center, a woman just back from Russia, a couple of women that have boxes at the Metropolitan Opera, and half a dozen husbands and sons. They were all Social Register, all so cultured that even their eyeballs were lavender, all rich, and all 100% nitwits. They were the special kind of nitwits you meet in New York and nowhere else, and they might fool you if you didn't know them, but they're nitwits just the same. Me, I'm Social Register too, but I wasn't until I married Doris, and I'm a traitor to the kind that took me in. Give me somebody like Craig, that's a farmer from Reubenville, that never even heard of the Social Register, that wouldn't know culture if he met it on the street, but is an A1 engineer just the same, and has designed a couple of bridges that have plenty of beauty, if that's what they're talking about. These friends of Doris's, they've been everywhere, they've read everything, they know everybody, and I guess now and then they even do a little good, anyway when they shove money back of something that really needs help. But I don't like them, and they don't like me.

I went around, though, and shook hands, and didn't tumble that anything unusual was going on until I saw Lorentz. Lorentz had been her singing teacher before she married me, and he had been in Europe since then, and this was the first I knew he was back. And his name, for some reason, didn't seem to get mentioned much around our house. You see, Doris is opera-struck, and one of the things that began to make trouble between us within a month of the wedding was the great career she gave up to marry me. I kept telling her I didn't want her to give up her career, and that she should go on studying. She was only nineteen then, and it certainly looked like she still had her future before her. But she would come back with a lot of stuff about a woman's first duty being to her home, and when Randolph came, and after him Evelyn, I began to say she had probably been right at that. But that only made it worse. Then
I
was the one that was blocking her career, and had been all along, and every time we'd get going good, there'd be a lot of stuff about Lorentz, and the way he had raved about her voice, and if she had only listened to him instead of to me, until I got a little sick of it. Then after a while Lorentz wasn't mentioned any more, and that suited me fine. I had nothing against him, but he always meant trouble, and the less I heard of him the better I liked it.

I went over and shook hands, and noticed he had got pretty gray since I saw him last. He was five or six years older than I was, about forty I would say, born in this country, but a mixture of Austrian and Italian. He was light, with a little clipped moustache, and about medium height, but his shoulders went back square, and there was something about him that said Europe, not America. I asked him how long he had been back, he said a couple of months, and I said swell. I asked him what he had been doing abroad, he said coaching in the Berlin opera, and I said swell. That seemed to be about all. Next thing I knew I was alone, watching Doris where she was at the table pouring drinks, with her eyes big and dark, and two bright red spots on her cheeks.

Of course the big excitement was that she was going to sing. So I just took a back seat and made sure I had a place for my glass, so I could put it down quick and clap when she got through. I don't know what she sang. In those days I didn't know one song from another. She stood facing us, with a little smile on her face and one elbow on the piano, and looked us over as though we were a whole concert hall full of people, and then she started to sing. But there was one thing that made me feel kind of funny. It was the whisper-whisper rehearsal she had with Lorentz just before she began. They were all sitting around, holding their breaths waiting for her, and there she was on the piano bench with Lorentz, listening to him whisper what she was to do. Once he struck two sharp chords, and she nodded her head. That doesn't sound like much to be upset about, does it? She was in dead earnest, and no foolishness about it. The whole seven years I had been married to her, I don't think I ever got one word out of her that wasn't phoney, and yet with this guy she didn't even try to put on an act.

They left about six-thirty, and I mixed another drink so we could have one while we were dressing for a dinner we had to go to. When I got upstairs she was stretched out on the chaise longue in brassiere, pants, stockings, and high-heeled slippers, looking out of the window. That meant trouble. Doris is a Chinese kimono girl, and she always seems to be gathering it around her so you can't see what's underneath, except that you can, just a little. But when she's got the bit in her teeth, the first sign is that she begins to show everything she's got. She's got plenty, because a sculptor could cast her in bronze for a perfect thirty-four, and never have to do anything more about it at all. She's small, but not too small, with dark red hair, green eyes, and a sad, soulful face, with a sad soulful shape to go with it. It's the kind of shape that makes you want to put your arm around it, but if you do put your arm around it, anyway when she's parading it around to get you excited, that's when you made your big mistake. Then she shrinks and shudders, and gets so refined she can't bear to be touched, and you feel like a heel, and she's one up on you.

I didn't touch her. I poured two drinks, and set one beside her, and said here's how. She kept looking out the window, and in a minute or two saw the drink, and stared at it like she couldn't imagine what it was. That was another little sign, because Doris likes a drink as well as you do or I do, and in fact she's got quite a talent at it, in a quiet, refined way. “… Oh no. Thanks just the same.”

“You better have a couple, just for foundation. They'll be plenty weak tonight, I can promise you that.”

“I couldn't.”

“You feel bad?”

“Oh no, it's not that.”

“No use wasting it then.”

I drained mine and started on hers. She watched me spear the olive, got a wan little smile on her face, and pointed at her throat. “Oh? Bad for the voice, hey?”

“Ruinous.”

“I guess it would be, at that.”

“You have to give up so many things.”

She kept looking at me with that sad, orphan look that she always gets on her face when she's getting ready to be her bitchiest, as though I was far, far away, and she could hardly see me through the mist, and then she went back to looking out the window. “I've decided to resume my career, Leonard.”

“Well gee that's great.”

“It's going to mean giving up—everything. And it's going to mean work, just slaving drudgery from morning to night—I only pray that God will give me strength to do all that I'll have to do.”

“I guess singing's no cinch at that.”

“But—something has to be done.”

“Yeah? Done about what?”

“About everything. We can't go on like this, Leonard. Don't you see? I know you do the best you can, and that you can't get work when there is no work. But something has to be done. If you can't earn a living, then I'll have to.”

Now to you, maybe that sounds like a game little wife stepping up beside her husband to help him fight when the fighting was tough. It wasn't that at all. In the first place, Doris had high-hatted me ever since we had been married, on account of my family, on account of my being a low-brow that couldn't understand all this refined stuff she went in for, on account of everything she could think of. But one thing she hadn't been able to take away from me. I was the one that went out and got the dough, and plenty of it, which was what her fine family didn't seem to have so much of any more. And this meant that at last she had found a way to high-hat me, even on that. Why she was going back to singing was that she wanted to go back to singing, but she wasn't satisfied just to do that. She had to harpoon me with it, and harpoon me where it hurt. And in the second place, all we had between us and starvation was the dough I had salted away in a good bank, enough to last at least three more years, and after that the house, and after that my share of the Craig-Borland Building, and after that a couple of other pieces of property the firm had, if things got that bad, and I had never asked Doris to cut down by one cent on the household expenses, or live any different than we had always lived, or give up anything at all. I mean, it was a lot of hooey, and I began to get sore. I tried not to, but I couldn't help myself. The sight of her lying there like the dying swan, with this noble look on her face, and just working at the job of making me look like a heel, kind of got my goat.

“So. We're just starving to death, are we?”

“Well? Aren't we?”

“Just practically in the poorhouse.”

“I worry about it so much that sometimes I'm afraid I'll have a breakdown or something. I don't bother you about it, and I don't ever intend to. There's no use of your knowing what I go through. But—something has to be done. If something isn't done, Leonard, what are we going to come to?”

“So you're going out and have a career, all for the husband and the kiddies, so they can eat, and have peppermint sticks on the Christmas tree, and won't have to bunk in Central Park when the big blizzard comes.”

“I even think of that.”

“Doris, be your age.”

“I'm only trying to—”

“You're only trying to make a bum out of me, and I'm not going to buy it.”

“You have to thwart me, don't you Leonard? Always.”

“There it goes. I knew it. So I thwart you.”

“You've thwarted me ever since I've known you, Leonard. I don't know what there is about you that has to make a woman a drudge, that seems incapable of realizing that she might have aspirations too. I suppose I ought to make allowance—”

“For the pig-sty I was raised in, is that it?”

“Well Leonard, there's
something
about you.”

“How long have you had this idea?”

“I've been thinking about it quite some time.”

“About two months, hey?”

“Two months? Why two months?”

“It seems funny that this egg comes back from Europe and right away you decide to resume your career;”

“How wrong you are. Oh, how wrong you are.”

“And by the time he gets his forty a week, or whatever he takes, and his commission on the music you buy, and all the rest of his cuts, you'll be taken for a swell ride. There won't be much left for the husband and kiddies.”

“I'm not being taken for a ride.”

“No?”

“I'm not paying Lorentz anything.”

“… What?”

“I've explained to him. About our—circumstances.”

I hit the roof then. I wanted to know what business she had telling him about our circumstances or anything else. I said I wouldn't be under obligations to him, and that if she was going to have him she had to pay him. She lay there shaking her head, like the pity of it was that I couldn't understand, and never could understand. “Leonard, I couldn't pay Hugo, even if I wanted to—not now.”

“Why not
now?
”

“When he knows—how hard it is for us. And it's not important.”