Some Came Running (129 page)

The change took place in an astonishingly short space of time, actually—from the time he got out of bed which was the last week in March, to Easter which fell on April 17 in that year of 1949: about three weeks. In that time, he had become an entirely different man. Most of the time, he didn’t talk at all. Like all diabetics, he had taken to carrying cubes of sugar in his pocket all the time, upon Doc Mitchell’s advice, as insurance against insulin reaction. And also, there was always the possibility of diabetic coma should his insulin allowance fall too low, or should he eat and drink too much and forget to take his insulin. None of the others knew anything about any of this; all they knew about was the shooting; but the change in him was apparent to everyone, and the last vestige of the old unity in the house disappeared. ’Bama took to spending more and more time down at the farm with Ruth and his kids and Clint and his family, and Dave as well as all the others were thrown more and more upon their own devices. For Dave, this gradually came to consist of Ginnie Moorehead. But mostly, it seemed, for all of them, it consisted of the liquor: There was always plenty of liquor at the house; ’Bama saw to that. He himself was drinking even more now; it was almost as if he were deathly afraid of being caught sometime without a bottle at hand.

“What’s the matter with him?” Wally Dennis asked Dave once, after ’Bama had come in and gone up to his room without a word to anyone. “What’s happened to him since he got mixed up in that shooting scrape? Has he lost his nerve?”

Dave could only glare at him. “I’ll tell you one thing, kid,” he said tensely. “And don’t forget it: Whatever it is that’s happened to him—and it’s none of your business; and it’s none of mine—but whatever it is, he hasn’t lost his nerve.” He said it for the benefit of all of them, scattered around the kitchen, and no one of them would meet his eye and offer to take exception, even the sanguinary Dewey. But it appeared that nevertheless, the opinion voiced by Wally was the general consensus. “You, all of you, practically live off of him, drink his damned liquor, and then sit around and talk—over the whiskey he bought for you—about him losing his nerve. Well, I wouldn’t wipe my feet on the whole damned bunch of you!” He glared at all of them, ready to go to the mat with any one or even all of them. But, for the moment at least, his fury was too strong for any of them.

“And I’ll tell you something, kid!” he said to Wally. “You better learn something about nerve, kid; before you go shootin your mouth off about it.”

Wally did not say anything. He did not like being called “kid,” it showed plainly on his face, but he only looked down at his glass—filled with ’Bama’s whiskey—and then took a big drink of it. Wally had been having his own troubles lately, Dave had sensed it, although he did not know what it was.

“I’m sorry, Wally,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Wally said without looking up from the glass. “I guess I had it coming.”

Dave looked around at all of them. He had said his little piece. But it plainly hadn’t changed anybody’s opinion. He got his own martini and took it upstairs to sit with ’Bama in his room a while. It was a futile gesture. They really talked very little anymore, except for just superficial things. But he sat down anyway, holding his glass. There was a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels on the bedside table. And so he just sat, in silence. It was all he could do.

’Bama was reading the Alice A Bailey occult book,
Discipleship in the New Age
, and he glanced up in acknowledgment of Dave’s arrival and went back to the book. After a moment Dave cleared his throat. “You like that stuff?”

“What?” ’Bama said and looked over at him. Then he at the cover. “Yeah,” he said. “Very interesting.” Then he grinned that bitter grin. “I guess I’d like to believe it’s true.”

“That’s the way I feel,” Dave said. “I guess that’s why I distrust it. It’s always so easy to just believe something you want to believe. I distrust
myself.
”

“Yeah, I guess that’s how I feel,” ’Bama nodded, his head already back in the book.

“Why don’t you come over to Israel with me sometime soon,” Dave said, “and meet Bob and Gwen.” Then his stomach sank away from under him again at the thought of her. He hadn’t seen them since ’Bama had been shot.

’Bama dropped the book again, and grinned. “What for?”

“Oh, you could meet them,” Dave said awkwardly, “and talk to Bob maybe. He knows a lot. He’d be glad to talk to you.” But inside, the sick empty feeling in his stomach, he was hoping desperately now that ’Bama would not accept.

“No thanks,” ’Bama said, raising the book again.

“Well, it was just an idea,” Dave said, feeling relieved, but wishing now, a little guiltily, that he had accepted, for his own good. “Well, I guess I’ll go on back downstairs,” he said lamely.

“See you,” ’Bama said, head still in the book.

Dave nodded from the door and then went on slowly down the stairs, and in the darkened hallway Ginnie Moorehead met him, and he put his arms around her.

And that was the way it went. One time ’Bama would be icily, totally unapproachable; and the next time as flighty as a virgin on stilts, petulant, even querulous.

Dave, who still remembered that weird night he had heard Lois Wallup weeping, could only watch and helplessly do nothing. It was only one more of that steadily increasing series of mishaps. Only this time it was something more than just a minor mishap. It was a major calamity. Not only to ’Bama himself, but to all of them. But why had it come just now? It had been in progress back almost a year and a half ago when he met them; perhaps ’Bama had actually already had the diabetes then. But why had it happened just now? Why right after Raymond Cole had died? after Mildred Pierce had got married? after he himself had quit with Gwen? Was all this only superstition in his own mind? Only a reaction to his own guilt? He could not escape a feeling that in some way it all tied in together: the three incidents, and now this.

The old life—the life that he had so unconsciously moved into when he first met ’Bama that first day he was in Parkman—that life he loved, that old life, that pattern, was breaking up, and he was watching it. All that remained was for the people to move on into new spheres, away from each other, and for the house to rot and fall down, and the garden in the vacant lot to grow back up in weeds, then it would all be gone. Change. Inexorable change. What had caused it? What was the answer? He had stood and watched it disintegrate all about him, and inside him, too. All that remained was the disposal of the ashes: the interment. He had never in his life, despite all the whiskey the tall gambler drank, seen ’Bama actually drunk. Now he began to see him drunk increasingly. Eyes glazed, his movements and speech slow and thick, but always able to walk without staggering. He even played poker that way, something he would never have done before.

Was he himself, Dave, somehow personally responsible for all of this? Had he, by entering into the life of this group, caused it in some way to fall all apart? What if he had never come back to Parkman at all? Perhaps ’Bama would never have contracted the diabetes at all? Or was all this only the haunted imaginings of some unnamed guilt in him? All his life, it seemed, he had been just an onlooker, a sort of outsider. He had never participated; he had never
acted.
Only when he was violently in love with some woman or other, did he ever really
act
—and even then his actions never extended far enough beyond his immediate vicinity to affect any other person. Bob French had said a writer
should
be an onlooker, a nonparticipant: a sort of physical and emotional recording machine, without personality, without opinions. But was Bob right? Would not such a man be just a sort of emotional and spiritual octopus, sucking the vital energy out of everyone he came in contact with? Or again, was this just his own obscure guilt? that guilt that every human in the world today seemed to suffer from?

Where did it come from, this new guilt in everyone? And what was its purpose? If there was really a definite evolution, as Bob claimed, where did this great vague guilt fit into it? Or was it just that it came from your mother beating you when you were a kid? just mechanically came from that, augmented by all the toilet-training of civilization which instilled such a feeling of filth that you wound up constipated, mentally and emotionally constipated? Well certainly wasn’t emotionally constipated. If anything, he had diarrhea of the emotions. And all he could do was sit, feeling somehow vaguely that it was his fault, and watch Old ’Bama fall apart.

Dave himself—in spite of his protracted furies of work the past six or seven weeks—had only come up with about twenty-five pages of finished manuscript in all that time. Most of what he had written in his extended furies, he had gone back over later and in a fit of despair decided to throw out. And what was left he wasn’t even sure was any good. He had not been over to see Gwen with any of it, and when he tried to pull himself back into the old, slow, methodical routine he failed miserably. Only when he worked himself up into an emotional frenzied fury could he work at all, burning out of him his worries and fears; otherwise his mind was too full of both Gwen and ’Bama to concentrate at all. And the work done this way was not nearly as good. It plainly lacked discrimination. And even his furies of energetic anger were now weakened by what had happened to ’Bama.

Only once during that six or seven weeks from when he had last seen Gwen did he take anything over to Israel to show her; and that one time was just the same as the time before: She was just as embarrassed and distant as she had been before. She read the manuscript—as did Bob—she thought it was good, and said it seemed like a very little for so long a time. Bob had had an answer from the new story “The Peons” that he had sent in; the lady-editor at NLL had bought it for the same price as “The Confederate,” five hundred dollars, and was going to use it in the fall collection. She thought it was even better than “The Confederate,” though she did wish he would try sometime to write about more
normal
people. Bob gave him the check and he put it in his pocket. It meant so little to him that he carried it around in his pants a week before he discovered it again and deposited it in the bank with the other. And he did not go back to Israel after that; it was just too painful. All he did was just hang around the Parkman house and watch what was happening to ’Bama. The increasing change in ’Bama was utterly unbelievable.

One day when just the two of them were sitting alone in the kitchen, talking over how their poker percentages were still dropping, ’Bama suddenly began to talk about himself. Most probably it was talking about the money that did it. (They were at the place now, ’Bama had said, where it was nearly fifty-fifty: They were only winning slightly more than they were losing.) And it was perhaps this that started him to talking about his own finances. Anyway, he suddenly launched into how he was going to leave everything after his death. At first, he was very cool about it.

“The farm’s all in Ruth’s name anyway, you see,” ’Bama said in that cold, precise voice that was always him at his best. “She’ll have the four hundred acres, and both houses, and all the stock; and what’s more, she’ll know how to take care of it. That’s what she likes. So her and the kids, and Clint and Murray and the others, will all be more than adequately taken care of. In addition to that,” he said, “there’s a good bit of cash there, already in her name. About thirty-five percent of everything I’ve won in the last three years since I got out of service, Ahve turned over to her. She’ll—” his voice wavered a moment, and he paused, “she’ll be a really wealthy widow. She’ll be able to marry again, and just about pick her own choice, with all that.” Again, suddenly, his voice wavered, and he drew a deep breath. And Dave sat helplessly and watched him bat his eyes. ’Bama, iron ’Bama, was actually blinking tears back out of his eyes! And it embarrassed Dave. “She’ll—” he said, “she’ll—be worth sixty or seventy thousand, all told. There’ll be enough to send all three kids to college if they want to go. And, what’s more important, all that’s in her name. No matter what happens to me, or how much I might happen to throw away, I would never be able to touch that. No matter how I—” This time, he could not blink fast enough, and the tears threatened to overflow. “No matter how I fall apart. No matter how I crap up or what happens to me.” ’Bama blinked and swallowed heavily and his lower lip was trembling. He was looking over Dave’s head at the wall. “So—that’s—all taken care
of,
” he said, his voice going up to a higher pitch on the last word. And two big, wet tears ran out of his eyes and down his face, slowly, almost hesitantly, as if—Dave thought—they were breaking new ground where no trail had ever gone before.

Dave did not know what to say. Embarrassedly, he merely sat, trying desperately to keep his face from screwing itself up with what he felt.

“I don’t know what’s gettin into me,” ’Bama said, more calmly; “I’m skitterish as a damn heifer anymore.” He wiped his face off with his hand. “Now,” he said and cleared his throat. “About you. I can let you have five thousand any time you want it, Dave.”

“What the hell would I want your money for?” Dave cried. “You ain’t going to die tomorrow! That doctor said five or
ten
years, for Christ’s sake! And Doc Mitchell said maybe even longer!”

“Well, you may wind up needin it,” ’Bama said, and again his voice quavered. “And any time you want to break up housekeepin here, it’s perfectly all right with me. I’ll understand.”

“What the hell would I want to do that for!” Dave cried.

“Well, you probly will, before long,” ’Bama said. “And I just want you to know it’s okay with me.” He sounded as if he was going to go on, but then he stopped. He looked down to where his glass of whiskey sat as if for a moment he didn’t know what it was. Then, suddenly, he picked it up and drained it and holding the glass drew his arm back like a pitcher about to uncork his fast ball.

Don’t do it! Dave wanted to shout: You’ll regret it! You’ll be ashamed you did afterwards! But he couldn’t say anything, he could only sit and look. What
right
had he to say anything?