The Long Ride (7 page)

A twenty-year-old PFC named Brown, whose mother was dying in Biloxi, had sat and watched him. He watched him take apart and put together that mechanism fifty times. Brown, who had been refused an emergency furlough to watch his mother die because he’d already had one a month before when they thought she was going to die and hadn’t, kept opening and closing his hands as though wanting to help. He counted the process up to sixty, then got up and tore the rifle out of Wells’s hands and threw it against the barracks wall, screaming. They discharged the boy on a Section 8 that week, but his mother had died by the time he got back to Biloxi.

At eleven-thirty, Harry Wells studied his lighter once again, then tried it again. He watched the spark fail to catch in the too-short wick. Carefully he took the lighter apart again.

CHAPTER

In the Garwiths’ room, Cicely said, “I’d just better have them send something up, Allan. I mean, do you feel like eating? Your tummy isn’t bothering you any more?”

“No, it’s not bothering me any more.” He lay flat on his back on the bed, staring up, his one arm lying limp in a diagonal line on the bed. He was wearing shorts, and his bare chest, arm, stomach, legs were smoothly muscled. He was thinking about Margaret Moore. He didn’t know why. Maybe, he thought, because when he’d faked the attack in the station wagon she’d got up and bent down close to him and put her hand on his forehead. He’d been nervous, intent on making his performance convincing and stopping them from running on to Laramie. But he’d still been aware of Margaret Moore’s face close to his own, the cool feeling of her hand on his forehead, those good breasts of hers just inches from his face…

“What shall I order?”

“How about a New York, about six inches thick, baked potato and sour cream, French-fried onions and a Roquefort salad?”

He turned his head and watched her carefully. She had showered and spent an unholy time in the bath afterward. Now she was wearing her best nightgown under a flowery housecoat. She had put her hair up in tight curlers and removed her make-up. Her face glistened with cream and seemed especially thin, as though the removal of make-up had allowed the bones to stretch the skin further. Her nose seemed especially large. Marilyn Monroe, he thought.

“Well—” she said, frowning a little. She got her purse from the writing table and took out the small pink wallet where she carried their money. She took the money out and counted it.

“Why,” he asked, “do you go through all that? You know right down to the stinking dime how much money you’ve got. I say I want a New York, baked potato, French-fried onions and salad with a Roquefort dressing, and you’ve got to get out that damn wallet and count the money.”

She looked at him, eyes misting, and put the money back into the wallet blindly. Her mouth trembled. A tear rolled down a cheek. “Allan, I just—” She shook her head, her voice quivering.

“Oh, God,” he said. He put his arm over his eyes and lay there, wholly disgusted. “Order me a hamburger.” He thought of the money, packed in that box, sitting now either in a train boxcar or in the Cheyenne post office. His nerves jumped, and he knew he would have to keep his mind off that.

He heard her pick up the telephone. In a moment she was saying, “Yes, please. A very thick steak, medium-rare—a New York cut, please. French-fried onions. A large baked potato with sour cream. A tossed salad with Roquefort. And coffee. Yes, please. To be delivered to the room. And one tuna sandwich.”

He took his arm from his eyes and looked at her as she put the telephone down. “One tuna sandwich?”

“Allan, I’m just not hungry,” she said, wiping her tears away, holding her chin up.

“Oh, God,” he said. “You get a kick out of that, don’t you?”

“Allan, sometimes I just don’t understand. I ordered just what you wanted, and that’s what I want you to have. I love you, don’t you understand?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And you get your giant-sized jolts out of sitting over in the corner nibbling on a tuna sandwich while I gorge myself on steak. What’s the fun in it?”

She shook her head, holding her tears back. “Sometimes I just don’t understand anything. I want you to enjoy dinner. And a tuna sandwich is all I want, truly.”

“All right,” he said, covering his eyes with his arm again.

He lay silently. When he got that money, he was going to ditch this one but fast. Oh, but you were going to see some fast ditching when he got that money!

He listened to her moving around the room. In a moment he could hear voices in the hall. Mrs. Landry, he realized. Then that laughing one. Miss Kennicot. God, he thought. Loose from an asylum. The doctor that delivered that one should have put it back where he got it. He shut his eyes beneath his forearm, waiting for the steak he really wanted. After this it was going to be steak every day, and no Cicely to sit watching him eat it while she nibbled like a cow-eyed martyr on her greasy tuna sandwich. And he was thinking of Margaret Moore again. Right across the hall. Just that far away from him.

What, he wondered, was she all about anyway? Where did she come from? Where was she going? Free and easy, that one. Would she take a proposition? A good one, with some money back of it? Yeah, he thought; she would.

He could feel a pulsation of excitement. He suddenly got up and strode to the bath. Cicely said, “Do you feel all right, dear?” He didn’t answer. He shut the door behind him and locked it. He looked at himself carefully in the mirror, thoughts of Margaret Moore putting a little knot in his middle.

He examined himself carefully in the mirror. Good face. Good physique, all except the missing arm. For a moment he kept his eyes off where the arm had been amputated. He didn’t mind exposing that to Cicely, but not to himself. When he lay around with it exposed to Cicely, he kept watching her eyes going to it. It still unnerved her, he knew, and he found a pleasure in that. But right now he did not want to look at it himself.

Instead he looked at the rest of his good, well-formed athlete’s body. He’d been a good athlete. Nobody could say he hadn’t. If he’d decided to pick up one of the three college scholarships he’d been offered, the whole country would know how good an athlete he was. In football…

His face became grim. Who said he hadn’t been one of the best high-school backs in the state? Fast? Skilled? What did you want? So why hadn’t he been the best? He closed his eyes, remembering those words of Nick Pomasetto, the beefy fullback who’d played with him in high school and gone on to play varsity at Michigan State. They had been alone in the locker room after a hard scrimmage just before their last game. He’d never got along with Nick. They hadn’t spoken much, just played together in the backfield.

That afternoon Nick had said, “You’re good, buddy-boy. But you’re faking half the time. If you weren’t so damn good everybody would know it. You’re scared, buddy-boy. You’re scared one day you’re going to get your face kicked in, your groin punctured, your leg twisted off, just some small accident that’s going to ruin it for you. So you’re faking. What makes you so scared, buddy-boy?”

He’d threatened to take Nick Pomasetto’s head off with one swing. But Nick had only laughed softly and walked off to his shower. He’d never spoken again to Nick. Nick had never again spoken to him. Not after that last game they’d been forced to play together. But he could still hear that soft Italian voice accusing him…

He shook his head angrily. Stupid bastard. So Nick went on to college and worked off his scholarship like any other lump of beef for hire. Now he’d graduated, what would he have? A few years of pro ball? Getting himself smashed up week after week at what kind of money? Peanuts, for a work-horse like Pomasetto—they were a dime a dozen in pro clubs. Then when his brains were shaken loose enough, what then? Coaching some high-school team or some two-bit college team somewhere in the sticks? And the money reduced to a third, maybe less, of the peanuts he’d gotten for the pro ball.

Allan Garwith’s mouth curled bitterly. He turned on a faucet, looking at himself in the mirror, rinsing his hand absently. What would Nick Pomasetto think if he knew Allan had a hundred thousand on the hook? One hundred thousand, no tax, free and clear—if nothing went wrong. And nothing was going to go wrong. Somehow, fate had dealt him this chance, and he was not going to lose it.

His eyes drifted to the stump of his arm. He closed his eyes and turned off the faucet and dried his hand. He started out of the bathroom, then stopped to tighten the handle of the faucet. He was nervous again, his nerves singing. He walked back to the bed without a glance at Cicely, dropped on his back and covered his eyes once again with his one arm.

Again he heard movement in the hall. Margaret Moore this time? There was a knock on their door. No, not Margaret Moore moving in the hall; the dinner coming in instead. When the dishes had been arranged, he sat on the edge of the bed. Cicely carefully cut his steak into small portions, and he started eating without a word. Cicely sat in one of the chairs, carefully nibbling on her tuna sandwich as though it were one of the world’s rarest delicacies.

“What,” he said finally, “did you tip the joke of a waiter who brought this in?”

She blinked. “Ten cents. I had a dime all ready for him.”

He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head once and resumed eating. The steak, he had to admit, was delicious. Everything was delicious.

When he was half finished Cicely asked anxiously, “Is it all right, Allan?”

“Remind me,” he said, “never to order a steak in this crummy hotel again.”

“Oh, Allan. I was hoping—”

“Don’t hope. They must have cut this piece of so-called meat off an eighty-year-old buffalo.” He glanced at her. Tears were in her eyes again. He felt better.

He finished the dinner, then pushed the tray away and lay back on the bed. The food felt good inside of him. It had relaxed him. When he relaxed again, he felt the knot of want once more. The image of Margaret Moore was going through his mind.

Suddenly he knew. There had been something about her, some vague familiarity, as though he’d known someone like her some time, somewhere. Now he knew what it was. New Orleans. New Orleans, with the fear shaking his teeth loose, blood flowing out of him, and Charissa…

He was suddenly there again, in the bar smelling of shrimp and oysters, drinking beer to fortify himself against the pressing heat of the tired, gray city. The sweat had streamed down his fact and ribs, soaking his flowered sport shirt. He’d lost count of the number of beers he’d drunk. He only knew that he was running out of money saved from the packing-house job in Loma City. And Charissa, plump, smiling, a mysterious look of pleasure in her dark eyes, had walked by his table. He’d said, more to himself than with an intention to stop her, “That is a beautiful behind—truly beautiful.”

He’d been surprised the words had come out so clearly, so loud. He’d known the beer, with the heat, had gotten to him, because he always spoke more carefully, more loudly, when he was getting drunk. Later his words would mush, like anyone else’s. But there was that high-glow stage when he spoke very distinctly, very loudly. And he knew he’d just done so.

She’d stopped, broad and full-breasted, the thin dress displaying her ripe body well. She’d be fat, really fat, in a few more years, he’d thought at that moment. But he’d felt a sudden jab of desire that surprised him. She had a broad, copper-tinted face and quick, appraising eyes that looked you over and took you apart and yet never lost their look of pleasant invitation. He’d thought she was going to spit at him. But instead she smiled, showing perfectly even, perfectly white teeth—a beautiful smile—and said, “You are a naughty little boy, do you know that?”

She’d accepted his offer of a drink. Three hours later he’d stumbled into the small, untidy house outside of the city where she’d driven him in a rattling 1949 Ford sedan. He was not sober for five days. In that time he was virtually consumed by Charissa’s heavy, vociferous, unholy physical appetite. He’d come back to reality the sixth day. She’d told him, “Now, little boy, you have been fed well, no?” Laughter, low and full, like the sound of a quick stream. “You are all, how you say, pushed out of shape. So?” She nodded. “All right. Now is the time for you to do something else.”

It had taken him a while to sober up completely. He remembered only vaguely what the two men who’d come to the shack looked like. But they had talked, and he remembered that talk very clearly. They were planning to run a cache of dope into the country. It had to be smuggled up from Mexico. It now waited for them in a small Gulf-Coast town down there. All they had to do was sail across the Gulf in a boat owned by one of the men and pick it up. He’d never been involved in anything criminal other than stealing junk from dime stores, hubcaps, nothing serious. But the plan had seemed so simple, and his cut would be eight thousand dollars. He’d agreed. They would go in two weeks.

When the men had gone he’d asked Charissa, “Why me? I don’t know a boat from a streetcar.”

She’d smiled and started his excitement all over again. She unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it from his shoulders, a soft, knowing smile on her lips. “You are young and strong. They know what is what, but you have the muscle, see?” Later she’d said, “But, little boy, we have nothing until you earn your eight thousand dollars. Nothing on the shelves. No food. No whisky. Not even beer. You must do something now, something—ah—little. You know?”

Something little turned out to be a little gas station on the edge of New Orleans. Charissa had had her eye on it for some time. Softly, carefully, she’d explained how simple it was, then brought out a pistol he’d had no idea she owned. It was clean, oiled and loaded.

That night, very late, he’d gotten out of the car Charissa parked beside the pumps of that station. He’d asked for a map of the city and followed the attendant inside. The attendant was a young man with a pimpled chin and hair the color of com husks. Inside, Allan Garwith had removed the gun from inside his jacket and pointed it at the youth, demanding all the money in the register.

He’d never forgotten how the youth had stared at him blankly, then shaken his head. He’d been amazed and yelled for the boy to give him the money. But the boy simply stood there with a stupid, stubborn look on his face, shaking his head.

“Shoot him then!” Charissa had called, a wild edge in her voice, “and take it!”

But he’d suddenly come apart, staring at that stupid, resolute look on that kid’s face. He’d turned and run to the car. He’d screamed at Charissa to drive off. She had, with an angry screech of tires.

She drove across town, into the country, her otherwise soft and full mouth a white, tight line. When she stopped, she looked at him, at the way the gun in his hand was shaking uncontrollably. Her dark eyes glinted. “Ah, little boy—I didn’t think you would do that. What you are, that didn’t really show before, did it?”