“Got keys. I’ my hand. Now.”
I took them, loaded him in, started, and headed for town. He said he was drunk, and to head him off from talking. I did, for maybe a mile. Then: “’E’s lower’n a worm, Duke. How could she marry ’at slug?”
“If she likes him, O.K.”
“Him? She likes what ’e’s got.”
“Watch it, fellow, you’re tight.”
What he seemed to be saying made me sick, and I wished he’d shut up. He said. “She likes ’is grub.”
“ ... She likes grub, period.”
“You got that much grub, Duke?”
“No, have you?”
“He has. Period.”
He quieted down, but then was off again: “Duke, if he wan’ Holly, like man wan’ woman, I might shoot th’ bassid, but respect’m, li’l bit. But whatch say, Duke, jerk don’ wan’ her on’y wan’ her blood.”
“You mean, he drinks it?”
“I mean, she’s a Hollis!”
“And Hollises, they’re hot stuff?”
“Y’ goddam right.”
“Aren’t you a Hollis?”
“Yop. ’M hot stuff too. Why, y’ poor Nevada rat, they come ’n Ark ’n Dove. ’A’s hot’s y’ c’n get.”
“The ark I heard of, and the animals, two by two. But the Dove is a new one on me.”
“Dove’s ship.”
“Same like the Ark?”
“Same’s Mayflower, on’y better. Lis’n, Duke, quit crack’n dumb, quit it I said quit it! ’M drunk, ’m splain’n good’s can. Hollises, they come. ’N Ark ’n Dove, to S’ Mary’s City. ’N t’ scum like him, to goddam bus boy, it’s same’s marry’n God. Same, on’y better. God, maybe, loves ’m, no ’count’n f’ taste. Hollis wou’n spit on ’m.”
He cussed some more, then apologized for doing it, because he said in Prince Georges they didn’t cuss good, like in Anne Arundel, where they do it in meter. But my heart was jumping, because of what he seemed to be saying, that whatever was back of the marriage, it didn’t include any love. Little by little, instead of shutting him up, I led him on to talk, and all of a sudden he burst out: “He nailed ’er feet to board. Like they do ’em geese.”
“What geese, Bill?”
“Stuff’n their livers up.”
“Oh, to make the patty?”
“O.K., y’ know how’s done. Duke, she wou’n look at ’m, ha’n been f’ grub. She went ’way, see? F’m S’ Mary’s, ’count S’Mary’s got no work. Went ’way, five years ’go, age eighteen, took job ’n Wash’n, Byu’ Grav’n Print’n, live on Branch Av’nue. Eat, Mr. Val place. Spen’ all ’er money, f’ grub. Grub she mus’ have, Duke, ’r she die. Got’s trouble. Fatnis, ’n glan’s. ’N ’en he got in it.”
“Yeah? What he do?”
“He’n care about her, not one hoot’n hell. Till, until, ’e hear name. Hollis. Hollis. Chrisalminey, to Valent’ scum, same’s God, on’y better. ’N ’en he nail ’er. Nail ’er feet. Give ’er grub, big thick steak—’n give ’er free. ‘No check, so glad ’t las’ meet someone ’preciates my li’l steak.’ ’N first time ’n ’er life she got ’nough t’ eat—’n free. Did she go wild, boy oh boy oh boy, wi’ rings on ’er fingers, bells on ’er toes, ’n rainbows play’n ukulele—y’ hear me, y’ damn Nevada stringbean?—ukulele I said, ’n bass drum. ’N ’en ’e says: ‘Miss Hollis, hozzit we get mar’d?’ She dis laugh, Duke, ha-ha. ’N she foun’ out. S’prise, s’prise, check f’ steak, seven dollars ’n eighty cents. He twis’ it, Duke, ’at chain ’e had on ’er f’oat. Round ’er neck ’e twis’ it. No free steak, no tater, no pie, no pudd’n—nuff’n. Free day, count’m, one, two, three—free. ’At does it. All over. Ole ball game. They get mar’d, have wedd’n. I done my bes’, Chrisalminey, me’n Marge bofe. He got idea, buil’ at d’ive. Know some guy, got chain on ’m, sell ’em fish, got orster shells, big pile out back, down Maine Av’nue. I say, Val, I do it. I buil’ d’ive, haula goddam shells, buil’ it. I took six mont’. ’E cou’n get in place, cou’n live in it, ’t all. Lot good ’t did. Y’ see. ’E’s got ’er. Jus’ chain-twis’n bassid.”
He passed out, and all the time in the drugstore I felt giddy, from buying stuff for her feet, using my own money, and knowing she didn’t want this man, but only the food he had. We started back, and pretty soon he asked where we were. I told him the District line, and he growled: “What I say t’ you? I been drunk again?”
“So much and so silly I don’t just recollect. In fact, I wasn’t really listening.”
“Tha’s it, Duke. Thanks.”
“You practically said nothing at all.”
“Pal, y’ all right.”
I parked on the loop out front, but had hardly cut lights when Marge came running out, so relieved to get the Epsom, and to see who was back of the wheel, she could hardly talk. I handed the keys to Bill, who sat there fumbling them, and the boxes to her, warning her to watch the water, that she didn’t use it too hot. I said it two or three times: “It’s Epsom that draws out the swelling, the liquid there in the joint. Not heat. Lukewarm does it.”
We were through the front door by then, she and I, and she hustled out to Mrs. Val’s bedroom. But in the living-room it was like some crazy dream, with Val walking around, snapping his fingers, and paying no attention to the Epsom; the waitresses working, gathering stuff up; and a thing on the love seat that was like a cartoon in the papers. He was, I would say, fifty, a small man in blue coat, blue shirt, gray pants, and two-toned party shoes, with white hair and a red, sun-burned face. He seemed to be in a rage, and no talk about ankles, the trick Homer had pulled, or anything would calm him down. He was grounded, apparently, for lack of the keys to his car, and meant to be driven home. Whatever Val would say, he’d keep coming back to it: “But, Mr. Vawl, I must awsk you to drive me. I will not take a cawb. I’m amized you awsk me to. I—”
“Mr. Commissioner, I will, when—”
“I’m ready, Mr. Vawl, to gow.”
“But the boy—”
“Has decawmped, as you towld me.”
“And my wife—”
“Has already heard my regrets, expressed to her in person, and has grawnted permission, Mr. Vawl, so if you down’t mind—”
Hammers went in my head, as they had when I hit Pabby Ramos, and I prayed to be saved from wrong-time adrenalin. But about that time in came Bill, weaving, belching, and mumbling. Mr. Commissioner looked at him and went on: “Mr. Vawl, it’s a simple mawttah of prowtocowl, and I shall sit hyaw—”
It was the first I’d heard of protocol, and how it was different from Hadacol I didn’t at that time know. But while he was talking, Bill was lurching, past the love seat, past the table, past the sofa, around to the brass basket full of wood left over from spring. He picked up a chunk and said: “Watch ’t, Val—duck! I’ll teach the son a bitch protocol!”
Now, in the ring, you hit, duck, or block, and on that stuff you do or you don’t. My hand was there, and maybe the adrenalin helped, I don’t say it didn’t. But catching the chunk was just the beginning, because all hell broke loose, with the girls screaming, Val yelling at Bill, Mr. Commissioner yelling at Val, and me yelling at everyone: “Break it up!”—whatever that meant. I went over the sofa at Bill, tied him up, and dropped the chunk in the basket. But he kept right on with his talk, right over my shoulder. He said to Mr. Commissioner: “Pro’col, y’ goddam squirt, pro’col here is me! Stan’ up when I speak t’ y’. What you c’-missioner of? Hey, ’m ask’n y’. Y’ dayum li’l end o’ nuff’n! Y’—”
“Bill!”
The voice in the door wasn’t loud, but, brother, did it carry! Marge jerked her thumb at the girls and told them dress. Soon as they were out she went over to Bill, unwound my arms from around him, and looked at him. He took her hand, slapped his own cheek with it, and started to cry. I wanted to cry. She didn’t wait to see if I did or not, but marched herself to Mr. Commissioner, and said: “John Dayton, you order your cab and go!”
r /> “Why—Mowge Dennis!”
“Stop talking that way!”
“When did you get here, Marge?”
“I been here. All the time. I’m Holly’s sister-in-law. Why, the very idea of you, with all the trouble we got, carrying on like this!”
“This—this is a hell of a note.”
His accent seemed to be gone, and so did the protocol, and I grabbed Bill by the arm, drug him out to the cottage, and parked him on the bed. When I opened the closet door to put his coat on a hanger, there was Homer’s maroon with all keys right in the pocket. Mr. Commissioner picked his out and at last shoved off for town, and the cab he had ordered would do to haul the girls. Val grabbed the phone, snatched a list out of his pocket, and began calling people to say their cars would be sent, this very night at once, as “the tangle is straightened out—and you’ll have it right at your door, if you’ll say where the keys should be put.” I realized I would spend the night delivering cars to town, shuttling back by cab, delivering some more, and shuttling some more.
I sat down on the love seat, to get adjusted to that, and think over all I had heard, as well as what I had seen—like the way things were done, in this peculiar state, with Val not able to stand up to some jerk of a government official, and Marge able to shrivel him up in two words. But then I began to feel bitter, not at the night’s work ahead, but at the way Val took it, putting this bunch of wheels ahead of this thing that had happened, and who it had happened to. I knew those ankles were serious, as Bill seemed to know, drunk as he was. Why didn’t Val know it too? At first it had seemed wonderful he didn’t love her. Now it made me sore, and I felt the hammers again. How long they beat, I don’t exactly know, but then Marge was there in the door, beckoning me to the bedroom.
Only one lamp was lit, and she was lying there, still in the orange dress, her feet in a little tub. Her eyes were closed, but she lifted a hand when she heard me. When I sat on the bench beside her, I saw beads on her brow that said she was still in pain. I took my handkerchief and blotted them, and she nodded her head just a little, in a way that brought us both back to that day out by the tree. I said: “Keep your feet dunked under and you’ll be getting relief. Don’t let Marge make it too hot. Just puts more strain on your heart, swells up the fluid inside. I’d take an Anacin, and a sleeping pill if you have one.”
“I wanted to thank you. For getting the Epsom.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I wanted to.”
I went stumbling out, and all through that crazy night, driving cars up, putting keys in wacky places, coming back and starting all over, I hardly minded at all, because she had wanted to thank me.
CHAPTER VII
“DUKE, CAN I ASK a favor?”
“Of course, Mrs. Val, anything.”
“It’s about my lunch when you fix it.”
“Something the doctor ordered?”
“I mustn’t have any pie.”
It was next afternoon, with Val gone, the doctor gone, Bill gone, and Marge gone, and most of the excitement over, meaning wires, calls about the cars I’d delivered, and pictures on the society page. Before leaving, Marge had dressed her, in pink of some sort, and I had moved her, by getting her into the chair she used in the kitchen and sliding her along on the carpet, as of course she still couldn’t put any weight on her feet. I was about to get her lunch, but her three o’clock lunch, one I hadn’t heard of until today. Her appetite, she said, had come back, since the pain was gone.
She explained, very chatty: “Dr. Semmes doesn’t think much of pastry, and wants me to lay off it, he says. But—he didn’t mention ice cream—of course it’s really a dairy product—and I’m sure it’ll be all right. It’s in the pantry freeze, Duke, all kinds of different flavors. Will you find me a pint of strawberry? And soften it up just a little? In the oven, a few minutes? ... Oh well, make it two. A natural food can’t hurt me.”
I don’t know what hit me funny about it, unless she talked too much, or it seemed queer ice cream was in and pie wasn’t. Also, I wondered why Marge, before leaving, hadn’t said something about it, as she had talked to the doctor. I asked if this meant a diet, and this filthy little four-letter word got kind of a shocked silence. Then: “Well, no, Duke, nothing like that, I hope. Dr. Semmes knows my trouble, and would be the first to remind me I have to keep up my strength. It’s just—I had a taste in my mouth—something I’ve had before—I told him about it today. He thinks—they always have to blame something—the pastry could be the cause. I suppose it is—the least little bit rich.”
She looked me in the eye, as a cat does when you suspicion him, and can’t imagine, even with feathers on his nose, why you’re picking on him. I reminded myself how her nature changed when this subject came up, and how even Bill, much as he seemed to love her, never said any different. I studied her, and all of a sudden remembered a guy I had trained, who also had a taste that had to be treated. I said: “You mean, Dr. Semmes made tests? That you wanted kept from Marge? That you rang him just now, after Bill and Marge left, to get the answer in private? Is that it, Mrs. Val?”
“What do you mean, tests?”
“You’re throwing sugar, aren’t you?”
“Sugar? Sugar?”
“In your water, sugar.”
“You dare say that to me?”
“I do, yes.”
“Duke, you may go.”
“I won’t.”
She reached for the phone, which I had put beside her, but I covered it with my hand and set it out of her reach. She started to cuss, sounding much like Bill, and I hardly knew the sweet person I loved so deep. She asked: “Are you by any chance insinuating that I have the diabetes?”
I told her, quite slow, taking my time: “I’m not. I’m insinuating a whole lot worse. At your age, which Bill says is twenty-three, you have, or should have, a hundred per cent normal pancreas, able to supply the juice, or insulin as it’s called, for a normal woman. A woman of one hundred and twenty pounds. Short as you are, one hundred and ten. But it cracks up supplying insulin to four hundred pounds of blubber. I didn’t say diabetes, but the windup’ll be the same. Lady, you’re going to die.”
“I don’t weigh four hundred pounds!”
“What do you weigh?”
“None of your damned business!”
“Over two hundred and sixty, though. That was the first thing I noticed, when I got the first aid from your bathroom—the pair of identical scales, tucked under the cabinet. Because two hundred and sixty is as far as one scale goes, and to weigh, you had to have two. I bet that was a sight, you standing sprat-legged, weighing yourself by halves.”
She got so furious she cried, but I kept driving them in. I said: “As a matter of fact, you’re dying now. Your heart nearly went out when you fell in the hole. It’s laboring now, supplying blood to all that lard, though from your looks I would say it was normal. Your pancreas can’t take it, your ankles are near the end, and your kidneys will make the K. O. One of these days you’ll topple on your face, and Mr. Val will go around bragging of the custom-made casket he got you, as of course no regular casket would fit.”
For some reason that reached her, and she moaned and closed her eyes. Then: “I’ve known I must die, I’m resigned. I do the little I can, my mite of good on this earth, until I hear the call. I’ve asked you: isn’t that enough? Do I everlastingly have to be told? Can’t I die in peace? How often do I have to say it? It’s glandular! It’s an affliction! There’s no cure, and—”
“It’s not glandular.”
“ ... What?”
“You heard me, I think.”
“And what, then, is it?”
“You. You and your dishonest soul. You, that haven’t the guts to say no to your gut.”
“Listen, I may be weak, and we’re right back where we started. If it’s not glandular, why can’t they find any cure?”
“They can. They have.”
“Funny they wouldn’t tell me.”
/> “They have, I think. As Dr. Semmes tried to tell you today. But you can’t hear them, can you? You kid yourself they may mean pie, but not ice cream—oh no.”
“And what is this wonderful cure?”
“Don’t eat so goddam much.”
She turned white, not at the words, but the sense, at the fear of not having food. I wouldn’t have been human then if I didn’t go get her lunch. I heated her up two take-outs, warmed her ice cream, found some chocolate sauce, melted it, poured it on top of the cream, found maraschino cherries, put them on top, so I had a tray that looked like something in movies. I set it beside her and said: “There you are, meat, cream, sugar, everything. You’re trying, as you lie there, to make yourself heave it at me, but with the character you got, what you’re going to do is eat it. Aren’t you?”
“And I thought I had a friend.”
“Friend? What you want is a pallbearer.”
She started to cry, and I squatted there, to be plastered with goo if that was what she wanted. She didn’t do any plastering. She ate the last slice, the last crumb, the last drop.
I took the tray, came back, and asked if there’d be something else. She said I could pack, as she’d have to tell her husband of the things I had said, and he’d have to let me go. I felt myself go numb, as that threw me back to the officer, my confession, and what all that might mean. I hated to eat her crow, but after some seconds, when the scare of the bars had done its work, I did. I said: “I have talked very plain, but as you said just now, we once said we were friends, and I spoke for your own good. If you’re bound you must tell Mr. Val, there’s nothing I can say, but before you do, I’d like to tell you more—about myself—my days in the ring—what I learned there—so you’ll know I can help you—if you’ll only let me.”
But her face only got meaner, and, fear or no fear, you can take just so much. I said: “How’d you like to go to hell?” Then I flung out, went to the cottage, and packed.
But the thought of her ankles rode me, especially on certain angles, like her being helpless to get to the bath-room, and maybe needing to go, so I went back, as though to borrow the phone. I said, if Mr. Val had to be told, I’d rather do it myself, and picked up the receiver to dial. She said: “Duke, will you put that down? And sit here, where we can talk?”