Some Came Running (115 page)

That Dewey, Raymond thought thinking about the Legion and the old guys and the new guys and their wars. He laughed and took another drink as the car bounced along the track. That Dewey sure was a rough one. By God, he had sure broken his goddamned nose, by God! And he was just as smart as he was rough. He had been right about the war, too. Of course, Raymond was right, too: The war
was
sad. When guys got killed and all. But it was more happier than it was sad. Of course, you were scared of getting killed, and you hated to see your buddies get it; but you were shooting Japs all the time, and you were living out in the open, with your gun and your C rations. Raymond had never been healthier in his life than he had during the war. And that wasn’t all of it—because in between campaigns, you got to go back to New Zealand or Australia where everything was wide open and there was plenty of women and liquor, and then off you’d go to a new campaign again. Hell, yes! War wasn’t sad at all. Old Dewey was right, all right. He was a smart one, all right. Raymond laughed softly to himself and took another drink.

Suddenly, he slammed on the brakes. Now how the hell did that tree get there? He must have got off the track and into some damned field. Now what do you think of that? Oh, Raymond took the low road, and almost hit a tree. Oh, you take the high road, and I’ll take the low road. Hell, yes! Laughing softly to himself, he corked the bottle and lay down in the front seat, thinking about Dewey and how he had broke his damned nose, and laughing happily for himself and Dewey. He’d get out of this old field tomorrow. Suddenly, he wished Dewey was here with him and they were getting drunk together, then they could talk about all the things they used to do together when they were kids. That Dewey. He sure had one hell of a fine left jab. Hell, yes! Closed his eyes up tighter’n a drum. He couldn’t see a thing.

It was Hubie who phoned them up the news. The farmer who had found him had called the sheriff, and the sheriff had just now brought the body in. Everybody uptown was talking about it.

“Where’s Dewey?” he said. “I got to find Dewey before somebody else tells him.”

Neither Dave nor ’Bama had the slightest idea where he was, but it was not long after that that the two of them came walking in from town. It was clear from the look on Dewey’s face that Hubie had already told him.

“I never should have made him give up,” Dewey said, staring at them, his blue eyes bright with pain. “I should have quit, when he couldn’t see anymore.”

“I keep tellin him that that didn’t have nothin to do with it,” Hubie said. “Hell, I’ve seen Raymond make Dewey give up two dozen times; and I’ve seen Dewey make him give up at least that many. I keep tellin him, but he won’t listen to me. You guys tell him.”

“Hubie’s right,” ’Bama said. “I’ve seen both of you make the other one give up. That didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

Dewey would only shake his head disconsolately. “I should never have made him admit he’d had enough.”

The four of them sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee, since nobody—excepting only Dewey—much felt like having a drink, talking about Raymond, holding a sort of private wake as it were, interspersed with long periods of silence. Into these silences, Dewey would every so often say his one single, painful sentence, shaking his head, “I never should have made him give up.”

And equally often, at other moments, he would start up, and say vaguely, “I think I’ll have a drink.” But one or another of them would always talk him out of it. They managed to keep him from drinking anything for almost two hours. But finally, he simply told them all to go to hell and would not be brooked any longer.

“Goddam it, I’m going to have a drink!” he insisted, his blue eyes blazing. And when nobody refused him flatly, he got himself a bottle and set it on the table and proceeded to get blind staggering drunk. By now, Wally Dennis had heard the news and come down to join them, and the four of them sat up with Dewey while he drank. Finally, he took his bottle and went off alone into the front room and lay down on the couch, saying almost nothing except his one haunted sentence over and over again: “I never should have made him give up.”

Later on in the day, some of the women began to arrive: Doris Fredric, Lois, Hubie’s girl, Martha. Lois went in alone and tried to soothe him, but Dewey only cursed her savagely and told her to leave him alone. Finally, between all of them, they got him upstairs into one of the bedrooms, still hugging his bottle—a new one, now. He did not weep, or show any other emotion, except to curse them when they tried to make him stop, and tell them over and over that he should never have made Raymond admit he was whipped. He stayed drunk for two whole days until the funeral, unbathed, disheveled, not even taking off his clothing he dozed in, wandering around the house disconsolately. But when it came time for his brother’s funeral, he came out into the kitchen, a gaunt spectral broken-nosed and red-eyed shape, and announced that he was ready to go.

“My God! You can’t go lookin like that!” Hubie pleaded with him. “Why don’t you stay here? I’ll stay with you. Or Lois will.”

“Sure; I will,” Lois said.

“I’m going!” Dewey said.

“Well, at least let us get you cleaned up,” ’Bama said. “You look like the wrath of God now.”

“No!” Dewey said. “I’m going like I am! To hell with it!” He paused, and peered at them drunkenly. “I never should have made him give up,” he said.

All of them tried to reason with him, but Dewey was indomitable. So in the end, they bundled him up into one of Dave’s topcoats and, drunk, disheveled, gaunt-faced, red-eyed, and unshaven, they half-carried him to Raymond’s funeral, arriving en masse and sitting down at the back, a loyal delegation of the town bums, so to speak, true to their own.

“Raymond would have liked it better this way, anyway,” Dewey hiccupped brokenly.

The funeral was in the dinky little Church of Christ, Saved, out in the east end which Dewey’s mother belonged to, and their entrance there and Dewey’s appearance made a lot less of a furor than it would have at, say, the Episcopal or the Methodist churches. These were people who were not unused to the idea of a man getting wildly drunk to relieve his pain at a funeral. The sermon was preached by the thin elderly Church of Christ, Saved, pastor; and it was not very long. Mostly, the pastor dwelt upon Raymond’s war record. There wasn’t very much else for him to dwell upon. Afterwards, Dave and ’Bama supported Dewey to go up for the traditional last look at the corpse. Dewey stared down at it for a moment, his blue eyes wild, then he walked on quietly. He insisted on going out to the cemetery, too, and stood hatless in the cold between Dave and ’Bama in Dave’s topcoat, and when that was all over, he shook hands politely with the pastor, and then they took him home. After a couple of more days of drinking ’Bama’s whiskey, during which somebody was with him most of the time, he allowed himself to be gradually sobered up.

His eyes bloodshot but clear, he came out into the kitchen and ate the first food he had eaten in almost five days. “What the hell,” he croaked, his new, malevolent face snarling at them from behind the sideways, knotted nose. “There ain’t nothing left in this town anymore, anyway. There never was much. Let’s you and me go back and join the Army again, Hubie,” he said to his sidekick. “What do you say? That’s where we belong anyway. The damned Army’s the only home we ever had.”

Hubie, who was sitting across the table from him, merely laughed. “The goddam Army was never no home to me,” he said. But six months later, after hashing and rehashing it over and over again and arguing and cursing each other, out of their new bitterness, as they worked less and less and drank and talked more and more—finally, that was what they did—leaving their two girlfriends callously to their own devices. But before that happened, a lot of other things had happened, too.

Dave, who had watched the whole sequence of events concerning Raymond from the position of sort of an innocent bystander, in between his more and more numerous visits over to see Gwen, found he could not overcome a vague disquieting feeling—which he was sure all the others felt, also—that somehow or other they all had somehow failed Raymond. Certainly, he knew that Dewey felt it—although Dewey never mentioned his brother again after he sobered up after the funeral. Certainly, too, from that time on was when everything began to go bad: From the time that Mildred Pierce married, and Raymond Cole died, which was, of course, also the time that he himself had given up finally on Gwen, the centrifugal force that seemed to hold them all together had begun to dissipate and fail. And a long time afterwards, he came to believe that if Dewey and Hubie had never gone back to the Army, he himself would never have married Ginnie Moorehead.

Because after all, Dave thought, all that time, Wally was still running around with and sleeping with the Junoesque Rosalie Sansome, wasn’t he? and he hadn’t married her, had he?

W
ALLY
F
RENCH
D
ENNIS
had no intention of marrying Rosalie Sansome. He had no intention of marrying anybody. The Christmas vacation with Dawnie had proved that to him. Whatever qualms he may once have had over her going away to school, he had been completely absolved of them during her Christmas vacation home from Western Reserve.

He did not know what exactly had happened to her—to Dawn. It was not something he could point to with his finger and say: This is what she is doing to me. It wasn’t like that at all. If it had been, he would have felt a lot easier about all of it, and would have had a much surer sense of control. But instead, he was not even sure he was not imagining all of it; and (by analyzing himself shrewdly) he came to the conclusion that because of this, there existed in him this certain uneasy guilt caused by a reasonable doubt. That, of course, placed him in an untenable position: Maybe he was wrong about her, he would find himself thinking. The result was, he would repeatedly find himself trying desperately to reach her, to break through that invisible wall—while she, aloof, uninvolved (quite unlike himself) merely remained indifferent and untouched.

And yet he was not imagining it. He knew he wasn’t, and he was pretty sure Dawnie knew it. Take sex, for instance. Last summer, in the first throes of their ecstatic love affair, Dawnie had been just as keen on all of it as he had.

But now it was entirely different, and all that was gone. He had slept with her just exactly three times during Christmas vacation; and each time it was the same: In a word: she submitted. And if she enjoyed it any herself, she gave no signs. He suspected that, in fact, she did enjoy it; physically, at least; and that she deliberately did not let on, because she knew how much it would have meant to him. But he could not even prove that.

Wally was well aware that all of this had started back in September, when he had refused to take off to New York with her, and he was more or less convinced that this was her own way of making him pay for it. After all, it had started right away after that had happened. It bespoke a tremendous compliment to the depth of acumen of her female instincts.

But what a way to live! Now that he had had it occur in his own personal experience, Wally could penetrate through to the hearts of a number of marriages and love affairs he had followed but had never been quite able to understand what was wrong with them. Great God! Women who, when they could not get you to do exactly every particular thing they demanded of you, simply went cold on you in bed, their instincts telling them what to do so thoroughly that they never even had to think about it consciously and so were able to keep their purity of motive intact and secure. Until such time as you gave in and humbly accepted your defeat, when they would probably suddenly become warm again—until some other disputed ground arose. He had learned a whole hell of a lot about women since this had happened, and was already planning how he could incorporate it into the main love affair and ending of his book. But as for living that way with some damned woman or other, the hell with it!

The very thought of what she had done infuriated him beyond saying. Obviously, the only defense he had was to go cold on her in return himself. And after the first time she pulled it after coming home for Christmas, that was what he had done. It had not, however, seemed to do much good. She was just as far away and distant as ever. And so you had the spectacle of two people going to bed together in this most intimate relationship two humans could have, and doing it as if they were two total strangers, and what was more didn’t care. It was not only ridiculous, it was boring, and actually almost unpleasant as well.

Finally, on the third occasion—which for other, totally different reasons was sexually exciting for Wally; though it probably wasn’t for Dawnie at all—he had blown his lid completely, and told her off. It made one of the pleasantest experiences of his life.

They were down at his house when it happened. His mom had decided to go up to Chicago and visit her sister there, so he had had the house to himself; and two days after she was gone, after first going up to West Lancaster and dancing and having a few beers on his swiftly dwindling fellowship money, he had brought Dawnie back down to the house.

They had fixed coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen and had a couple more beers while Dawnie talked on and on about her playhouse-workshop stuff at Reserve, and then they had gone—after some insistence on his part—upstairs to his room to go to bed. That—the fact that he had her there in the house and had the run of it—was not what made this last time so sexually exciting for him. Or maybe partly it was. But the main thing that excited him was that he was sleeping with her in his own bed, where twice before he had slept with Rosalie Sansome, and thus was getting even with her (without her knowing it, of course). Twice before on separate occasions, when his mom had gone off somewhere, he had sneaked Old Rosalie down to the house for a party in his own bed. And now he was doing the same thing to Dawnie, and in so doing, was putting himself one up on her, was getting revenge, for her coldness ever since he had refused to take her off to New York. He had not started off to do that, but now that the thought had occurred to him, he was glad. And it was both strange and startling how excited it made him.