“I’m trying to explain something. Why don’t you be polite and listen? I was saying that when you don’t get to talk much, you get to where you sound kind of funny when you do talk. Kind of stilted and awkward, you know. You’re not sure of yourself.”
“Shut up!”
“But I—”
“Dammit, will you shut up? There’s somebody coming!”
She jumped up and ran into the kitchen. I followed her. I watched as she opened the back door and stepped out onto the porch. It was getting dark now. The lights of a car swept over the trees and blinked out. The driver tapped out a shave-and-a-haircut on his horn.
Fay Anderson laughed and stayed down the steps.
“It’s all right, Collie. It’s just Uncle Bud.”
“Uncle…Uncle Bud?”
“Fix yourself another drink. Fix three of them. We’ll be in in a minute.”
It wasn’t a minute. It was a lot nearer, I’d say, to thirty minutes. And I couldn’t hear their conversation, of course, but I had a strong hunch that I was the subject of it.
I fixed three drinks, and drank them.
3
His real name was Stoker, Garret Stoker. He wasn’t her uncle and I doubt that he was anyone’s, but everyone called him Uncle Bud. He was a man of about forty, I think. He had snowy, prematurely gray hair, and warm friendly eyes, and a smile that made you feel good every time he turned it on. I don’t know how she’d gotten acquainted with him, and probably she didn’t either. Because that’s the kind of a guy he was, if you know what I mean. You meet guys like Uncle Bud once—just over a drink or a cup of coffee—and you feel like you’ve known them all your life. They make you feel that way.
The first thing you know they’re writing down your address and telephone number, and the next thing you know they’re dropping around to see you or giving you a ring. Just being friendly, you understand. Not because they want anything. Sooner or later, of course, they want something; and when they do it’s awfully hard to say no to them. No matter what it is. Even when it’s like something this Uncle Bud wanted.
He wrung my hand, and said it was a great pleasure to meet me. Then, still hanging onto my hand, giving it a little squeeze now and then, he turned around to Fay.
“I just can’t understand it, Fay. I still believe you’re joking with me. Why, I’d have bet money that there wasn’t a man, woman or child in the United States who hadn’t heard of Kid Collins.”
“Bet me some money,” she said. “I’ll give you seven to five.”
“Well…” He laughed and released my hand. “Ain’t this little lady a case, Kid? Never serious for a moment. But she’s true-blue, understand, a real little pal, and the kidding’s all in fun. She don’t mean a thing by it.”
“Yes, sir, I understand.”
“Let’s see, now. When was that last fight of yours, the big one? Wasn’t it in, uh—?”
“It—it was in 1940. The Burlington Bearcat. He was—” My voice trailed away. “I mean it wasn’t a very big fight, sir.”
“Sure sure. A preliminary bout. But it was still a mighty big fight. Uh, it was in—I was arguing with a fellow about it the other day, and he claimed it was held in Newark. I said it was in, uh—”
“It was in Detroit,” I said.
“That’s right. That’s exactly right!” he exclaimed. “Detroit, 1940, a four-round prelim. What did I tell you Fay? Didn’t I tell you I knew the Kid’s record backwards and forwards?”
Fay groaned and slapped herself on the forehead. Uncle Bud winked at me, and I grinned and winked back at him.
I began to like him a lot.
Fay said that if we wanted any dinner, we could darned well fix it ourselves. So that’s what we did. Uncle Bud pounded the steak and put it on to broil, and I peeled and sliced potatoes. He opened some cans of peas and apple sauce, and I made coffee and ice water.
“Well, Kid,” he said, while we were waiting for the stuff to cook, “I’m glad you’ve decided to settle down for a while. Now, that you’ve found friends—people who admire you and really take an interest in you—”
“Settle down?” I blinked. “Settle down where?”
“Why right here—where else?” he said firmly. “Our little lady kind of needs someone to keep an eye on her, and there’s a nice little apartment out over the garage. Yes, sir, you just move right in, Kid. Just take it easy for a few days. Get rested up and keep Fay out of trouble and I’ll see what I can stir up for you. I got an idea that I might be able to put you next to something pretty good.”
He nodded to me, giving the steak a turn.
I said, maybe he already had his eye on something he could put me next to.
“Sharp.” He laughed. “I told Fay you were. I said, ‘Now, Fay, maybe the guy’s had a rough time, but if that’s Kid Collins you’ve got with you, he’s nobody’s fool. He’s nervy and he’s sharp,’ I said. ‘He’ll know a good angle when he sees one and he’ll have what it takes to carry through on it. And you treat him right, and he’ll treat you right.’”
“Look, sir. Look, Uncle Bud…”
“Yeah, Kid? Go right ahead and get it off your chest.”
“Well, I appreciate your kindness, the compliments and all, but—but you don’t really know anything about me. You couldn’t. You’re just trying to be nice, and probably if you really knew the kind of guy I was, you wouldn’t feel like this.”
“I’ll tell you what I know, I know people, Kid. I know what they’ll do and what they won’t. Or, put it another way, what they can do and what they can’t. I was a city detective here for years—maybe Fay told you? Well, I was, and I was able to put a lot of bright boys next to some pretty good things. Some of them had played an angle before, but most of ’em hadn’t. They’d never turned a trick—didn’t think they could—until I showed them the way.”
“And you’re not a detective, now?”
He glanced around sharply, frowning at me for the first time. Then, he pursed his lips and went back to stirring the potatoes.
“We’ll have to see,” he said absently. “We’ll have to get better acquainted. I think you’d be just right—smart enough, but not too…”
“Yes?” I said.
“Never mind, Kid.” His smile came back. “There’s no rush. It’s something we’ll have to take our time on.”
We ate dinner; he and I did, rather. Fay came to the table, but she didn’t really eat anything. She just sat there—mussing the food on her plate, drinking and sniping at us every time we opened our mouths.
“This damned house,” she said, glaring at Uncle Bud. “I thought you were going to turn it in for me right away. I thought you were going to make me a nice little profit on it. You talked me into buying the damned dump, and then you—”
“Now, Fay,” he said, calmly. “You’ll do all right on it. You’ll make out—one way or another.”
“Oh, yeah?” Her eyes wavered. “And what about that lousy station wagon? I tie up practically the last nickel I got in the thing, and you—”
“Now, Fay. You know I got you a good deal on it. You know you need a good car living out here.”
“Who the hell wants to live out here?” She almost yelled it. “Who the hell talked me into it?”
“You’ll thank me for it. You just trust your old Uncle Bud, and you’ll be wearing diamonds.”
He turned the conversation to me, asked me what I’d been doing since I quit fighting. I said I’d been in the army for a while right after I quit, and I’d just been knocking around since then.
“The army, huh? Get along all right?”
“Why, pretty good. I thought I did, anyway.”
Fay laughed. Uncle Bud frowned and shook his head at her.
“I did the best I could,” I said. “But they weren’t very patient, and it kind of looked like they were trying to see how tough they could make things on me. So, well, I landed in the brig a few times, and finally they sent me to the hospital. And right after that they let me go.”
&
nbsp; “Mmm-hmm.” He nodded thoughtfully. “You were, uh, all right then? Just, uh, just couldn’t adjust to the military life. Well, that’s not unusual. I understand that there were any number of men who had that kind of trouble.”
Fay laughed again and Uncle Bud gave her another shake of his head.
“Sure,” he said, softly. “I understand how it was, Kid. It’s that way all through life, it seems like. People expecting a guy to get along with them, but they won’t try to get along with him. Maybe he just needs a little help, just a little understanding, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred he won’t get it.”
I said I wouldn’t want him to get the idea that there was anything wrong with me. There really wasn’t much wrong with me, you know—not then, there wasn’t—and I felt that I had to say it. Because if there’s one thing that scares people, it’s mental trouble.
You can be an ex-convict, even a murderer, say, and maybe it won’t bother ’em a bit. They’ll give you a job, take you into their homes, make friends with you. But if you’ve got any kind of mental trouble, or if you’ve ever had any, well, that’s another story. They’re afraid of you. They want no part of you.
Uncle Bud seemed to believe what I told him. The way he had me sized up, I guess, was as a guy who hadn’t been too bright to begin with and had got just a shade punchy in the ring.
“Sure, you’re okay, Kid. All you need is some dough, enough so’s you can take life easy and not have to worry.”
“Yeah. But…well, I guess I ought to tell you something else, too, Uncle Bud. I’ve—I’ve always tried to do the right thing. Never anything really bad or—”
“Oh, well.” He spread his hands. “What do the words mean, Kid? What’s good and what’s bad? Now, I’d say it was bad for a nice guy like you to have to go on like he’s been going. I’d say it would be good if you never had to worry about money for the rest of your life.”
“Yeah, I guess it would be.”
“Naturally. Naturally, you wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. You wouldn’t have to. It would just be a case of putting pressure on certain people—people that have more dough than they know what to do with—and making ’em come across. That would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
I hesitated. “Well, it sounds—”
And Fay slammed her glass down on the table.
“It sounds rotten!” she yelled at Uncle Bud. “It sounds terrible, filthy, lousy! I don’t know why I ever—I won’t have any part of it, understand? You may talk Stupid here into it, b-but you can go ahead without me, and I w-won’t—”
She stumbled to her feet, crying, and staggered out of the room. Uncle Bud raised his eyebrows at me.
“Poor little lady. But she’ll snap out of it. Now, why don’t you and I do these dishes, and then I’ll run along.”
We cleared up the dishes. I tried to talk to him while we were working, trying to get something more out of him about this proposition he had in mind. But he kept changing the subject, his voice getting shorter and shorter. And finally he turned on me, half-snarling, and told me to drop it.
“Forget it! I’ll tell you whatever you need to know, when you need to know it!”
He glared at me, his eyes kind of glazed. And I was too startled to say anything back to him. I’d thought he was such an easy-going, good-natured guy, and now he looked like some sort of vicious, mean-tempered animal.
“I’ll tell you something else, too.” He tapped me on the chest. “I ain’t just kidding about you sleeping in the garage. That’s where you sleep, get me, and you sleep by yourself. You don’t make no play for the little lady.”
I nodded, feeling kind of hurt and embarrassed. I guessed I had stared at her quite a bit that evening, but I hadn’t meant anything by it. I didn’t have the slightest idea of trying to take advantage of her.
“Maybe I’d better clear out. If you think I’m that kind of guy, I wouldn’t want to stick around.”
“Aw, now, don’t take it that way,” he said soothingly. And suddenly he was his old self again. “You’ll have to excuse me, Kid. Just forget I said anything. I’ve had a pretty hard day, and I spoke without thinking.”
I walked out to the car with him. We shook hands, and he said not to worry about a thing, just to take it easy and he’d be out to see me the next day. He left then, and I went back into the house. And, of course, I didn’t feel very easy. I couldn’t help but worry.
I fixed myself a couple of drinks. They kind of eased me down a little, so I fixed another one. I sauntered over to the sideboard with it, and picked up the newspaper clippings again. I thumbed through them absently, wondering why they were there and why Fay’d had me come here—and suddenly I stopped wondering. Suddenly I knew why. I didn’t know the how of it, the details, but I knew what it was all about.
I dropped the clippings, as though they’d all at once caught fire. I turned back around, and there she was, just coming out of the bedroom. She was pale and sick-looking, but she seemed fairly sober. She sat down and reached for the bottle, smiling at me in a kind of tired, taunting way.
“Well, Collie?” she said. “Well, my blushing boy, my beamish friend?”
“Well, what?”
“You really don’t know?” She poured a big drink of whiskey. “You’ve been slapped in the face with a polecat and you still can’t smell anything?”
I shrugged. She drained her glass, and reached for the bottle again.
“Sure, you know.” She nodded. “This house and a crooked ex-cop and those pictures, and—and you. Even you could add that one up.”
“About that crooked ex-cop. About him…and you. He sort of acts like—I mean he said a thing or two to me that—”
“Yes? Well, that’s one thing you don’t need to worry about. There’s nothing between us. There isn’t going to be anything.”
“I don’t think he looks at it that way. It’s none of my business, of course.”
“Right. So let’s get back to something that is. Listen closely to Old Mother Anderson, and then get the hell out. Because I’m only laying it on the line for you once…A chump is required, Collie. A Grade-A hundred-proof sucker. Someone with a barrel of nerve and a pint of brains. Does that description fit anyone of your acquaintance?”
“I wouldn’t care to say. It might partly fit certain people I’ve met. Women who drink too much and talk while they’re drinking.”
“Boing!” She triggered a finger at her forehead. “But I’m my own chump, Collie. Strictly my own. Oh, I do an occasional benefit performance, but, by and large and on the whole, to coin a phrase—correction: two phrases—”
“I thought you were going to tell me something. You make a big production out of it, and then you don’t say anything.”
“I’ll tell you something. This. All you need to know, Collie. If he thought you were half-way bright, Uncle Bud wouldn’t want you. He’s not too sharp himself—if he was he’d still be on the force—and he won’t play with anyone who is.”
“Including you?”
“Forget about me. I don’t count—and you can sing that to any tune you like.”
“I guess I don’t understand,” I said. “You picked me up today. You brought me here to meet Uncle Bud. You do all that, and then, after I’m half-way in, you—”
“It’s confusing, isn’t it? Why not just say that I’m a cuhrazy, mixed-up neurotic. Or we might say that occasionally—just occasionally now—I feel a twinge of decency.” She took a swig straight from the bottle, and the whiskey trickled down over her chin. “Get out, Collie. This little frammis has been cooking for months, and if you leave it’ll go right on cooking until it boils away. Nothing will happen without you. No one else would be chump enough to touch it.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess…” And then something happened inside my head, and I left the sentence unfinished. It was as though I’d been walking in my sleep and suddenly waked up.
Kidnapping? Me, a kidnapper? Why was I arguing with her? What in hell had come over
me? I’d never done anything really bad. Just the things a man like me has to do to stay alive. Yet now, just since this afternoon, I was…I pushed myself to my feet, feeling dizzy and sick. Everything was kind of blurred for a minute. “That’s my good boy, that’s my Collie darling,” I heard her say. “Just a minute, honey.”
She hurried into her bedroom, and came back with her purse. She took out a small roll of bills, stripped off one of them and squeezed the rest into my hand.
“I’d ask you to stay tonight, Collie, if it wasn’t for Uncle Bud. I don’t want him talking you into this mess, and if he saw you before you got away—”
“I know. I’d better go now.”
“Take the bottle with you. You look lonely, and a bottle can be a lot of company.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed me; and afterwards she leaned against me for a moment, her head against my chest. She made a mighty nice armful, all warmness and fullness and sweet-smelling softness. I brushed her thick black hair with my lips, and she sighed and shivered. And moved out of my arms.
“What about you? What’s going to happen to you, Fay?”
“Nothing. The same thing that’s been happening since my husband died.”
“But I thought there was something, some organization or treatment that could help you.”
“There is, but not for what ails me. They haven’t found that yet. When you’ve leaned on someone all your life, been completely dependent upon him and never made a decision of your own. And when he’s suddenly taken away—Oh, n-never mind, Collie. Just go and keep going.”
She turned on the porchlight for me so I could find my way across the yard. Where the lane entered the trees, I turned around and waved.
The lights went off. If she waved back, I didn’t see her. Everything was dark, and she and the house were gone. As though they had never existed. I felt kind of sad in a way, but at the same time I felt good.
I picked my way down the lane, taking a sip from the bottle now and then. A couple of times I stumbled and fell down, but it didn’t bother me much. And it didn’t seem dark, but light.