The Moth (27 page)

“I’m not hungry, thanks.”

“Drink?”

“If I put down any more booze, I’ll fold.”

“If there’s anything you’d like, please ask for it. You did sing like an angel as perhaps I should have mentioned sooner, and are certainly entitled to
something
in the way of special indulgence.”

“Nothing I think of now.”

“Can’t you
look
at me?”

“I’m cutting bread.”

“... Jack, I can’t figure you out.”

“Any law you’ve got to?”

“Maybe not, but you can’t blame me for thinking. Yesterday I washed you out, for reasons we needn’t go into. But today, and especially tonight, you sang, and the reasons I had didn’t make sense. I mean, what came out of your throat was something a woman could go for. And yet, you’re cutting bread. What’s the answer?”

“If I told you, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“And I certainly want to.”

“It’s the same one: Your husband’s a nice guy.”

“And how would you know?”

“He’s been pretty nice to me.”

“But not to everybody, you might find.”

“Pretty near everybody, from what went on yesterday and today. He’s got an awful lot of friends, guys that seem to think the world of him. Guys in the oil business, with hard rock in their bones and something like it, anyway good solid stuff in their souls. And their wives. At the church, I noticed
they
like
him.
I didn’t notice them falling all over themselves over you. You were left off by yourself, I’d say—far left, and rear.”

“I don’t go for old fogeys.”

“Maybe they don’t go for you.”

“Maybe that’s the trouble.”

She got the tears going on that, and began a long song and dance about the lonely life she’d led, since she buried her father “beside my uncle and my mother, in the little cemetery on the hill.” Then she said: “I had to have somebody to run the wells, and these awful filling stations I’m afflicted with, and he came along, and it seemed like the thing.” But, she said, it “hadn’t worked out,” and she was beginning to wonder if it all wasn’t a “terrible mistake.” All it cut up to, to me, was a twenty-minute egg that had grabbed a good manager by marrying him, and then began shopping for a little excitement on the side. She let the cat out of the bag one time, I thought, while she was going to town on the way she was treated, when she said: “And what do I care what they think? What do I care if they
all
gang up on me? Maybe it’s mutual.”

“O.K., but why pick on me?”

“You really want to know?”

“Just for curiosity, I’d like to.”

“Your curls, for one thing.”

“Baby, I just need a haircut, that’s all.”

“You get them cut, and I’ll murder you. Right there, the way they peep out, over your ear, I could eat them. Them and your dimples.”

“My—? What the
hell
are you talking about?”

“You don’t know about
them?”

“I haven’t got any.”

“They’re right under your shoulder blades, on each side. I didn’t notice them till you made that crazy bet with Dasso, and I could see them, where you were swimming around down there. I thought at first it was water, the way it dapples in the sunlight, but today, when you were heaving that line, there they were again, the cutest things. Right—here—”

“Take your hands away.”

“Why should I?”

“The circumstances.”

“What do you mean, circumstances?”

“Hot pants, cold heart.”

I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, on account of what was running through my head—not about her, but the church, and the singing I’d done, and the crazy twenty-four hours I’d had, with jokes, and a little liquor, but mostly guys slapping me on the back, telling me I was swell. I guess that sounds silly, that a little of that kind of thing could take me so high, but not to somebody that spent two years on the road, and divided the world with the rats. It meant so much to me I kept going back over every little thing that had happened, and thinking what I might have said, swell gags that would have made everybody laugh. Around about daybreak I must have dropped off, because what woke me was the sound of voices downstairs, men’s voices, pitched low, and the smell of coffee. Then, just after sunlight began to shine in the room, there were footsteps outside, the roll of a garage door, and the sound of a car. It was out on the road before the door slammed shut. I lay there, inhaling the cool air from outside, and feeling good, I could smell the morning in it, like I could when I was a kid. And then all of a sudden my heart began to pump, because I knew why that was: what a summer of food, drink, and sleep couldn’t quite do, a little sociability had. It was back, what I’d worked for, hoped for, prayed for. I wasn’t a thing any more, I was a man.

Then hammers began going in my head. There hadn’t been any woman’s voice down there, and that meant she was still in bed, on the other side of the partition from me, not ten feet away. I knew I had to get out of there. I jumped up, dived in the bathroom, and shaved. I stepped in the shower, turned on the warm water, and let it splash over me. The back of the shower was black marble, and I could see reflections in it. Then it seemed to me they moved. I turned and caught my breath. She had on red shoes, red cap, and red enamel on her fingernails, but the rest was pure copper. If that was all, I think I might still have thrown her out. But she closed her eyes, and her lashes lay out on her cheek, like an angel in some old painting. I folded her in my arms.

T
HE MEXICANS WERE STILL
playing cards that night when I went in the bunkhouse, and they didn’t even look up when I walked by. I sat watching them, and pretty soon a boy came in, son of a driver, and said Holtz wanted to see me. I went over to his house and he wanted to know what I had on next day. I said spraying as usual, and he said let it go. That time of year it wasn’t so important, and he’d put the Mexicans to leveling road for a while. I, he said, was to stand by a ditch-digging machine that was coming in, to put in a trench for pipe that was to be run over to a field where new trees would be put in whenever the nursery could deliver. “We’ve been digging our own ditches, but on a long one like this, I’ve decided to find out if it wouldn’t be cheaper to hire this fellow and his machine. I’ve got him by the day, though, and that’s where the catch comes in. If he’s broke down half the time, he’ll cost us more, time the job is done, than all the Mexicans I can hire. I want you there. The main trouble with those machines is they’re just one jam of toggle plates, and spite of hell they get fouled up with mud. Take a tank cart with a hand pump, and the first sign of trouble, clean him off. Keep him washed, and maybe we’ll get the goddam thing dug some time between now and Christmas.”

“Christmas?
Three days ought to do it.”

“Then fine, take it away.”

I went back to the bunk, found the
Saturday Evening Post
under my pillow, opened it up to the story I’d started two days before, began reading where I’d left off. It seemed funny, here I’d had the most terrific week end of my life, anyway in the things it had done to me, after what I’d been through, and nobody even knew I’d been away. Everything was so much like it had been that I think I’d have wondered if I’d been away too, if it wasn’t for this thing drilling in the back of my head, this sense of shame over the fine way Branch had treated me and the lousy way I’d paid him back. All during the next three days, out there with Stelliger, the guy with the ditching machine, listening to him brag about how well he’s done with this thing and his bulldozer and his tractor and his shovel and his truck, I kept wishing I could have back the day that had changed everything, and yet knowing I couldn’t have resisted it, once the chance came to me. And I kept dreading Thursday night, when I knew Mr. Branch would be over, propositioning me about rehearsal that night, so we could work up something for Sunday that would be really good. And sure enough, right after supper there he was, over by the store, waving at me with a little grin on his face, and coming over. He apologized at the way he’d run out on me Monday, but said he knew of course his wife would get me home all right. Then he went back over it the swell time we’d had. He said Mr. White had been especially impressed with me, and not to be surprised if something was arranged for me, maybe with the same little independent refinery that backed up right behind Mrs. Branch’s property. I said swell, and wished he would go. Little by little he got around to it, and I could hear myself saying it in a shifty, two-bit way that I hated: that we were awfully busy that week, and I didn’t see how I could possibly help him out with the choir—but some other time,
sure,
some other time. He swallowed two or three times, and looked away quick. He was like most other hard-rock men, shy on the inside as a young girl, and I stood there with my hat off to him for it, and yet not able to say so.

He was hardly out of sight than there came the pop of a horn from the trees near the shop, and lights blinking on and off at me. I went over and she was at the wheel of her car. “I was looking for you, and then
he
drove up, and I had to get out of sight, quick. What did he want?”

“Choir.”

“And he came clear over
here?”

“What do you want?”

“What do you think?”

“I’ve no place to take you.”

“I have, Jack, as it happens. Nothing but a cottage by the sea, or in plain English a beach shack. But a place—I can take you.”

I tried to tell her to go, that I was ashamed of what we had done, that I was through with her. No words came. Next thing I knew I was in the car with her and we were rolling through the trees. She kept on down 101 to a road that turned right, then ran over to the Long Beach traffic circle. From there she ran on down below Seal Beach. When she came to a concrete apron drifted over with sand, she turned in. We got out and she opened a garage door, got back in, ran the car inside, got out and closed the garage door. We climbed over the dune, that bulges up at that point in a way to make it look like the sea is higher than the road. On the other side of it were shacks. We turned into a little cement walk, she got a key out of her handbag, and opened a shack door. When we stepped inside it was stuffy, like it hadn’t been opened for some time. But after the wind from the sea it felt warm, and we were in each other’s arms, her mouth pressed hot against mine, almost before we shut the door. We stayed an hour. Then we had to leave, so she could take me to the ranch, drive home herself, and still be able to say she had been to a picture show. “... Which one? Do you happen to know?”

“I saw it this afternoon.”

“On purpose? So you could be with me?”

“Yes, of course.”

That went on all fall and through the winter. It was one of those southern California Januaries where it’s spring right after New Year’s, and when she began picking me up Sundays as well as Thursday nights, she’d put on a red bathing suit and go splashing out in the surf. That made me nervous, because it was one more thing to make people take notice of us, but at least, peeping at her through the window while she was out there, it did give me a chance to get some kind of an idea what she looked like. That may sound funny, but getting a glimpse now and a flash then, mostly at night when we were both so nervous we could hardly draw our breath, I still thought of her mostly as a whisper in the dark. Well, she looked like some college girl in her little red trunks, red shoes, red hat, and red halter, and now that the sunburn was wearing off, she didn’t have so much of that coppery Aztec look. And her eyes, now they didn’t show up so funny, were more human too, and sometimes, specially when she’d keep looking at me while I was doing something around the place, soft, and warm, and pretty. And yet, right in the middle of them, was a light that never quite left them, and that was hard, and meant to take whatever it wanted, no matter who got hurt. She made it plain, morning, noon, and night, that she was taking me. I made it plain she wasn’t and we had a couple of fights about what a tramp she was. Once, when she came to the ranch, I refused to get in the car with her, and she stayed out there, by the shop, with her lights on and her elbow on the horn, till Holtz called an officer, and it wasn’t till he got there that she drove off. The other time I beat it out of the beach shack before she was dressed, and took half the night thumbing my way to the ranch. Both those times I missed her bad, every way there was but the right way. When she showed up after those fights, each time on a Thursday night, I was so glad I was ashamed of myself. “Listen, you big lug, I lie awake thinking about you. I—yen for you. You’re in my hair.”

“O.K., then. I can say the same.”

“You mean you love me, Jack?”

“I didn’t say so. Don’t get so excited. Yen.”

“How’d you like to go to hell?”

“On my way.”

“Jack—no!”

“Then watch how you talk.”

“All right, yen. But a lot? Yen, yen, yen?”

“Yeah, and yen.”

All that time, as I say, she kept looking at me, and I guess I liked it, anyway at first, but then I could see it wasn’t all yen. I’d ask her what it was about, and she’d laugh. But then one afternoon, when we were making a Sunday of it at the beach, she said: “Jack, wouldn’t that be funny if I’d been making the same mistake I made once in a poker game?”

“So you’re a gambler too?”

“I’ve done a good many things.”

“And what was this mistake?”

“I drew to a straight and filled a flush.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You sure?”

“Unless, holy smoke, it was a
straight
flush.”

“I found that out, when I was getting ready to throw up my hand. A flush wouldn’t have been one-two-three with what was against me. But then I looked again, and saw I had filled a flush
and
a straight.”

“Did you clean up?”

“Twenty-seven bucks.”

“And what’s that got to do with me?”

“When I drew you, I fell for your beauty.”

“My dimples. I remember.”

“But these last few weeks I’ve been noticing a look in your eye. And I’ve been listening to you talk. Especially about those big dynamos and things you studied in college. And
I’ve
been wondering if perhaps I shouldn’t have fallen for your brains. I decided, quite some time ago, that a smart dame would keep romance and business separate. I married business, and I guess it works—pretty well. I play around with romance, and I know that works—damned well. Do you hear me, Jack?”