Night My Friend (11 page)

O’Bannion, who had never heard of Green, spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning out his desk, separating the few personal possessions into a home-bound pile. When his secretary returned with her afternoon coffee she asked him what he was doing, though it must have been obvious.

“I finally did it, Shirl,” he told her. “I walked out on the old man.”

She sat down hard, the coffee forgotten. “You mean you quit?” she asked, still not quite able to grasp it.

“I quit. Walked out while he was still swearing at me. Now if I can just pack my briefcase and make it to the elevator before he comes after me, I really will have quit.”

“What will you do?”

“I’m sure I won’t sit around the house feeling sorry for myself. This is the best thing that could have happened to me.” It sounded properly convincing, even to him.

He zipped shut the briefcase and told her goodbye. There was no sense being emotional about it at that point. “Goodbye, Mr. O’Bannion,” she called after him. “Let me know when you get settled.”

“Sure. Sure I will.”

He rode down in the elevator with an afternoon’s assortment of secretaries bound for coffee and businessmen bound for martinis, but he no longer felt a part of them. The cut-off had been too clean, too certain. He was a man without a job, and he wondered how he would tell his wife.

Kate and the kids were still out shopping when he reached home just before five o’clock. He hung his raincoat carefully in the closet and mixed himself a drink. It was the first time he’d drunk before dinner in years, but he felt as if he needed one.

Kate came in as he was pouring the second.

“Dave. What are you doing home so early?”

“I quit my job. Finally walked out on the old guy.”

“Oh, Dave—”

“Don’t worry, honey. I’ll have another one by Monday morning. I’ve still got a few contacts around town.”

“Who? Harry Rider?”

“I might call Harry.”

“I wish you hadn’t done it. That temper of yours, Dave—”

“We’ll make out. We always have.” Then, because he’d only just thought of them, “Where are the kids?”

“Outside playing.”

“We won’t tell them for a few days. They needn’t know over the weekend, at least.”

“All right, Dave.”

“Want a drink?”

“I want you to tell me about it, how it happened.”

He told her about it. They talked for the better part of an hour, until the two boys came running in for supper. Then they ate as if nothing at all had happened, as if it were a Friday night just like any other. But it wasn’t, and he noticed toward the end of the meal that he was speaking more kindly to the children than he usually did. Perhaps he was beginning to feel a bit guilty.

After supper, when the boys were being tucked into bed by Kate, he phoned Harry Rider.

“Harry? How are you, boy? This is Dave O’Bannion.”

The voice that answered him was sleepy with uncertainty. He’d forgotten that Harry Rider always napped after dinner. “Yes, Dave? How’ve you been?”

“Pretty good. Look, Harry—”

“Yes?”

“Harry, I quit my job this afternoon.”

“Oh? Kind of sudden, wasn’t it?”

“I’d been thinking about it for a while. Anyway, I’m looking, if you know of anything around town.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. Then Harry Rider said, “Gosh, fella, I don’t think I could help you right now. Maybe something will turn up though.”

“Well, if you hear of anything, Harry—”

“Sure. I’ll keep you in mind. Glad you called.”

After he hung up, O’Bannion sat for some moments smoking a cigarette. When Kate came back downstairs, he was ready for the expected questioning look. “I heard you talking.”

“I phoned Rider.”

“Why?”

“Why not? He’s got a lot of contacts around this town.”

“All the wrong kind.”

“Maybe in a few weeks I won’t be so fussy.”

“Can’t you get unemployment insurance or something?”

“Not right away. I wasn’t fired, remember. I walked out.”

“But Harry Rider! He never did a favor for anybody in his life that didn’t have a dozen strings attached.”

“You didn’t used to think he was so bad, back before we were married.”

“That was before we were married. A lot of things were different then, Dave.”

He lit a cigarette and started pacing the floor. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry. He didn’t have anything for me.”

She shook her head as if to clear it. “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess the whole thing is just too much for me all at once.”

“Just stop worrying. I’ll have a job by the end of next week and a better one than I left. You can bet on it!”

She smiled at his words, even though neither of them felt quite that optimistic. They both knew it would be a long weekend.

Monday morning was warm and rainy, with a west wind blowing the drops of rain against the front windows with disturbing force. O’Bannion gazed out at it unhappily. It would not be a pleasant day to be trudging the streets of the city in search of a job. The kids, not yet old enough to attend school, were cross with the prospect of a day indoors, and he could see that Kate was already tense.

“Cheer up, honey. I’ll phone you after lunch.”

“Where are you going to try?”

“Oh, there are a few offices around town that might have openings, especially for someone who walked out on the old man. I’ll hit those today and tomorrow, and if the scent is cold I can always try an employment agency.”

He went off in the car because Kate wouldn’t be needing it and he wasn’t quite up to facing the ride in on the same old commuters’ train. It was still too early in the day, and there would be people he knew, people he wasn’t yet in the mood to chat with. In the city, he parked the car at the ramp garage he occasionally used, nodding silently in reply to the attendant’s cheerful morning greeting.

The first place he tried was an engineering firm where he had contacts. He thought. They listened in friendly agreement to everything he said, and one of them even offered to buy him lunch. But there was no job available and he wasn’t yet ready to accept charity. He thanked them and went and bought his lunch from a white-coated sidewalk vendor who sold dry ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. He found an empty bench in the park and ate among the damp trees, thankful at least that the rain had stopped and the wind had died to a gentle breeze.

The job he’d left, O’Bannion was beginning to realize, had done little to prepare him for the necessity of stepping quickly into something else. He’d never had any opportunity to build upon some sketchy engineering courses he’d left unfinished at college. The job, for all its nine-thousand-a-year salary, had been little more than an arduous managership of an office full of unmarried and just-married girls more intent on dates and marriage than work.

He called on two other places that afternoon, and the best he came up with was a promise of something “maybe in a month or two.” That wasn’t good enough. He was already more depressed than he cared to admit to Kate.

Tuesday was much the same, and Wednesday. That afternoon, he swallowed his pride and called the familiar number of his old office. He got by the switchboard operator without being recognized and in a moment he was talking to Shirl.

“This is Dave. How are you?”

“Mr. O’Bannion! I’m fine, how are you? Everyone’s been asking about you.”

“I’ll bet. Who are you working for now?”

“They have me in the pool till they get someone to replace you. Have you found anything yet?”

“Not yet. I’ve got a couple of leads. What I called for—has there been any mail for me? Anything personal?”

“Just the usual junk, Mr. O’Bannion. Except this morning a letter came for you from California. Los Angeles. It looks as if it might be personal.”

“It is.” He had some friends in Los Angeles who often misplaced his home address and wrote him at the office.

“Should I forward it?”

“I suppose so,” he said, and then had a second thought. “Say, would you like to meet me for a drink after work? I could get the letter from you and you could tell me what’s been going on.”

She hesitated a moment, but finally agreed. “All right. I guess I’d have time for one.”

“Fine. I’ll see you at five—a bit after five—over at the Nightcap.” He hung up and then phoned Kate to tell her he’d be a bit late for dinner.

By the flickering candlelight of the Nightcap, a quiet little place where it seemed always to be the cocktail hour, he really looked at Shirl Webster for the first time. She’d been his secretary for the better part of the past year, but in that dubious manner of modern business he’d tended to take her mostly for granted. She was nothing more than an impersonal machine to take his letters and dictation, answer his phone, and perhaps suggest a birthday present for his wife. He’d never really thought of Shirl Webster as a woman, though he was aware now that she was surely a woman, and a striking one at that.

“I’m sorry it all happened,” she said, seeming to mean it. “I liked working for you.”

He noticed for the first time that her eyes were blue, a very light blue in sharp contrast to the dark of her hair. She was a tall girl, perhaps nearing thirty, with a certain regal grace about her. “I’m glad of that, at least,” he said with a chuckle. “There were days when I thought the whole place was in league against me, including you.”

She shook her head. “Not at all. I was kept busy all day Monday explaining what had happened to you. All the girls miss you.”

“Makes me sound like a bluebeard or something.” He sipped the martini in front of him. “Do you have that letter?”

She nodded and handed over a flat envelope with a Los Angeles postmark. He pardoned himself and slit it open, just to make sure the news was nothing more urgent than weather and kids and when-are-you-coming-to-visit-us. Then he folded it away in his inside pocket.

“Nothing important?” she asked.

“The usual stuff. They’re old friends. I’ll have to write them, tell them about my new status.”

“Do these leads of yours sound good, Mr. O’Bannion?”

“I’m not your boss any more. Call me Dave.”

“All right—Dave.”

“To answer your question, no—the leads don’t sound good.”

“Maybe the old man would take you back. He’s having a hard time replacing you.”

“I have a little pride left, unfortunately. Want another drink?”

For a moment he thought she’d agree, but then she shook her head reluctantly. “I have to get home.”

He realized that in almost a year he’d never even thought where home might be. “Got a boy friend, Shirl?”

She blinked at him. “I’m too old to call them boy friends any more.”

“Oh, come on! How old are you—twenty-five?” He’d knocked a few years off his real guess.

“You’re sweet. Now I really have to go. But keep in touch, let me know how you’re doing.”

“I will.”

He watched her walk to the door, hips tight against the contoured fabric of her skirt, and he wondered why he’d never noticed that walk before.

Thursday was too nice a day to be out of work. It was fine to walk along Main Street on your lunch hour and moan about having to return to a desk on such a beautiful day, but O’Bannion quickly discovered it was only frustrating to be job-hunting on such a day. The trees in the park were already blossoming with spring, and the people he passed were smiling. He would have felt happier in a thunderstorm.

Friday was more of the same. An offer of a job at a thousand dollars a year less than he’d been making, a promise of something “maybe in the summer,” a regret for a position just filled. It all added up to a big zero.

On Saturday morning he went to see Harry Rider. He knew the man would be at work on a Saturday because the tracks were racing. Harry’s main source of income demanded a six-day week. He was a big man, with a face and hairline that made it difficult for O’Bannion to remember him as Kate’s one-time suitor. The years had changed them all, but none more so than Harry Rider.

“What can I do for you, Dave?” he asked, not bothering to rise from behind the wide desk strewn with typewritten sheets, racing forms, and three telephones.

O’Bannion stared at the thinning hair, the wrinkles of tired skin around deep, calculating brown eyes, and said, “I phoned you last week. Maybe you forgot.”

“Oh! Sure, I remember now. You’re out of a job.”

“That’s it. I’ve got some good leads in town, but you know how it is when you just walk out on something. No two weeks’ pay or anything like that.”

“Need ten bucks?” Harry Rider was already reaching for his pocket. The words, coupled with the motion, made O’Bannion suddenly ill. He was sorry he’d come.

“No, no—nothing like that. I was wondering if you knew of anything around here. Even something temporary. You said once you had a lot of influence in the right places and just to come see you.”

“Sure. I can get you a job cleaning out the stables up at Yonkers. How’s that?”

O’Bannion’s face froze. “I didn’t come here for that sort of talk, Rider.”

“Just kidding. Never take me serious! Ask Kate. She never took me serious.”

“We weren’t discussing Kate.”

“Sure, sure. She know you came to see me?”

“No.”

“Just as well.”

“I intend to tell her when I get home. I have no secrets from her.”

Harry Rider chuckled. “Maybe it’s time you started having a few.”

He could see he was getting nowhere with the man. There was no job in the offing, only this opportunity for ridicule. “I’m sorry to take up your time,” he told Rider, rising from the chair.

“Wait a minute! Maybe I’ll hear of something in your line.”

“Thanks. Don’t trouble yourself.”

He was going out the door when Rider called after him, “I’ll be in touch with you, Dave.”

O’Bannion didn’t bother to answer.

On Sunday he went to church for the first time in a year. Listening to the minister rant about the evils of overabundance, he wondered why he’d bothered. The previous evening he’d told Kate about his visit to Harry Rider. She reacted about as he expected and there had been an unpleasant scene. She hadn’t accompanied him to church on Sunday, and when he returned to the house he found her mood had not improved.