Some Came Running (75 page)

“My wife told me not even to come home, goddam you, James,” Jim cried.

“Now, goddam you, Jim,” James Frye boomed, “I didn’t drag you into a damned thing. Now damn it lay off of me and shut up your sniveling, or I’ll beat you half to death.”

“With what rock?” Jim taunted sneering.

“With no rock!” James Frye bellowed. “With these!” and he held up two fists that looked about as big as an ordinary man’s head.

“You scare me, James,” Jim sneered, and held up his own fists which were nearly as big.

“If yore a wise man, you’ll be scared,” the giant advised.

“Hah!” Jim Custis bawled. “When? Now?”

“Anytime!” Frye said.

They did not fight in the car. Both were obviously too considerate of their guests to do anything that might damage ’Bama’s car. Actually, they did not fight at the cabin until everything had been fixed up and the fire got to going. The cabin contained only a table and two chairs at one end, so they had practically the entire twenty by forty cabin for an arena. Two of the half-pints of whiskey had disappeared during the ride, and another one and a half vanished at the cabin before combat finally came. They all sat on the floor by the fire and drank the whiskey for a while; and here, as back in the car, the two things James Frye could not get over were how Dave had turned down such a good thing in Arlene, and the defection of his own new girlfriend in going to the party when he didn’t want her to.

“Goddam you, Jim Custis,” he bellowed finally, “I never wanted to get into this damned mess tonight, but you urged me.”

“
Me
urge
you
!” Jim cried. “
I
wanted to go
home,
James!
I’ve
seen your damned play already. But you were so damned hot to get out there and show off your celebrity friends! You used to be a man, James. Before you took to running around with these damned play makers!”

“And I’m still a goddamned man!” Frye bellowed at the very top of his tremendous voice. “Man enough to beat you to death! If
you
had a little more gumption and brains, you might even turn into a human being!”

“I’ll pull out yore beard, goddam you!” Jim roared.

They were both on their feet before the words had stopped ringing, and stood staring at each other in the red light of the fire. ’Bama, who with Dave had also gotten up, stepped in between them.

“You fellas give me yore knives,” he said and stuck out his hand. Without taking their rage-dulled eyes off of each other, both men reached in their pockets and pulled out pocketknives and let them clatter into ’Bama’s palm and ’Bama, taking them, retired to the two chairs at the end of the cabin with Dave and ’Bama put the remaining whiskey up on the window ledge where they could reach it, while the two Southerners, both of whom towered over ’Bama, who was a tall man, advanced upon each other as ominously as a black-ceilinged thunderstorm advancing over a town. Neither one made a sound for the full twenty minutes the fight lasted, except a grunt now and then or some wordless exclamation. They merely stood and battered each other until both exhaustion and the blows they absorbed had rendered both of them near unconscious.

To Dave, almost light-headed from fatigue and the whiskey, it was as if someone had turned the time back a hundred years as he watched these two huge men silently beating each other insensate in this hewn-log cabin by the flickering red light of a blazing fire. Every time one of them was knocked down, the whole cabin would boom and shudder, and the whiskey bottles would tinkle up on the window ledge.

All in all, it was a pretty fair fight. Neither attempted any defense or tried to evade any blows and at the end, after twenty minutes of it, both were still standing, wide-legged and with clenched fists, glaring at each other and breathing stentoriously when ’Bama stepped in and said, “What do you say we all quit now and have a drink of whiskey?”

“I’ll quit if he will,” Jim said.

“All right; so will I,” Frye said.

“But that don’t mean I’m givin up,” Jim said.

“Well, I ain’t giving up,” Frye said.

“All right, if you both want to go ahead, go on,” ’Bama said; “but I still say let’s have a drink of whiskey.”

“Okay,” Frye said.

“All right,” Jim said.

“And nobody’s quit,” ’Bama pronounced. He got the whiskey, and after they had had a drink, tears began to trickle down Jim Custis’s cheeks and he went to his uncle and put his arms around him. “I’m sorry, James,” he said. “Damn it all. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t do nothing like that to you for the whole damned world,” he sobbed.

“That’s all right,” the giant Confederate said, tears coming into his own eyes. “There, there. It’s all my fault. I started it.”

“I want to go home,” Jim wept. “I want to go home to my wife.”

“I guess we all better go home,” James Frye said. “And these gentlemen want to be gettin on down the road to Miami, anyway. We’ve held them up long enough with our damned craziness.”

“We’re all right,” ’Bama said. “We’re fine. Here’s you guys’ knives back.” Both of them thanked him profusely, and when ’Bama got the car turned around, they went out and got into it, Jim still weeping in the back alone, James Frye in the front with ’Bama and Dave. Frye had a beautiful black eye and the skin was torn on the side of his cheekbone; and Jim had an inch-long cut in one eyebrow and one ear that was swollen nearly double, and both of them had numerous knots and contusions all over them.

“You have to turn left up here,” Frye sighed. As they drove along he talked. The play would be closing soon, he said. He would degenerate right back into the way he used to live, reading books from the college library and chasing the local pigs and his goddamned wife and farming. It was a hell of a prospect.

“God knows what we’ll do then,” he said.

As if in answer, from the backseat, Jim Custis cried out, “Go home! That’s what! Just take me home to my wife,” he said. “You talk too much, James.”

“I guess he’s right at that,” Frye said, and went on talking about The Play. It had been the most wonderful experience of his entire life. For the first time, he had learned what art and creativeness really were. And then suddenly, he quoted several lines from Lanier’s
The Marshes of Glyn,
fingering his beard sadly.

Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,—

Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,

Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,—

Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves . . .

God, James Frye said, wasn’t it awful to have to go home? No matter what we did, or didn’t do, no matter how we tried to evade it, in the end there always came that time when we had to go home.

It was a symbol of life, by God, he said. Slowly, as he talked, the confidence he had exhibited in the afternoon came back to him and with it the supreme vainness about himself that went with it. “You know, the trouble with me was I was born just about a hundred years too late. I should of been born before the Secession. Then I would have died in the war, and I’d have been all right, happy.” He paused a moment. “I’m a goddamned Rebel, that’s what I am! You nigger lovers from the North, you can’t tell me a nigger’s better’n a white man! I’m a white man, and a goddamned Unreconstructed Rebel! No damn nigger’s as good as a goddamned white man! Here’s where I get out,” he said. “That’s my house right over there.”

’Bama stopped the car. And Dave, who was dead for sleep but could not sleep as long as he found himself around the tremendous violent vitality of this man, and who had read for years about the evil portents of such men who made such statements, found that he was smiling. There wasn’t anything evil about it at all, or even dangerous really. It was just a simple idea. James Frye might, if forced, carry it to fire and sword, and if pressed, even his own life. But it was still just a simple idea; erroneous, sure; but no more erroneous or evil than a lot of other simple ideas. And instead of feeling his spine chill and a sense of evil sweep over him, he only felt protective toward this man.

“You don’t hate Negroes, do you?” he said, grinning in spite of himself.

“Hate them?” James Frye said, looking startled. “Hell, no. Why should I hate them? That wasn’t what I said.”

“Did you ever think of tryin writing yourself?” Dave said.

From behind the beard came a sort of muffled wry smile. “Oh sure,” James Frye said. “I’ve thought about it. But I don’t think I could ever do it. Not well. I think I’d be too inclined to make myself out too much of a hero. You know what I mean?” He opened the car door and got out. “Well, maybe I’ll see you boys again some time,” he said. “But I don’t suppose so. You’ll get Old Jim here home all right, won’t you?” he said.

“Just take me home to my wife,” Jim Custis moaned from the backseat, “I want my wife,” and commenced to weep again.

“We shore will,” ’Bama said through the open door.

“Then I’ll say no more,” James Frye said, and shut the door. As they drove on off they could look back and see him standing in the road, the moonlight catching silver lights in his long hair and his beard. He waved once and turned toward his home.

He was the kind of people Dave had always had an affinity for. The kind of people, as Old Van Loon had said once in his
Life of Rembrandt
, who would lie, and cheat, and fight, and whine, and die in the gutter, but who were always in the end just what they were. And Dave loved them just as much as Old Van Loon did.

In the moonlight, the white gravel road was very long and they wound in and out of the dark slashes of pine for what seemed forever. Occasionally, they passed houses, unlighted and dark, but these obviously housed only the dead, if they housed anything at all. Once or twice in the backseat, Jim cried out, “Please take me home to my wife!” and then burst into a fit of weeping. Finally, they reached the blacktop highway and turned left.

When they left Jim Custis out at his house, he hardly bothered to say goodby and made a beeline for the darkened front door. ’Bama waited a minute to see if he was going to be locked out, but the door was not locked and he disappeared inside.

“Well, what do you want to do now?” Dave said. “Go somewhere and bed down?”

“Christ, no,” ’Bama said. “All I want is to get back out on the road. I’ve had all of this place I can stand for one session.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall asleep driving?”

“No; I’m wore out all right, but I ain’t sleepy. I just want to get going.”

“That’s just about the way I feel,” Dave said. His heart was pounding in his chest, in a sort of protest at the strain that had been put on it. He was so totally exhausted that even to move his arm he felt might burst his heart, but he was not sleepy. His whole mind was almost feverishly excited over his story “The Southerners,” which he had tentatively titled it, and over what Jim Custis and James Frye had given him for it. They had filled out the missing link in it: He had had the story and the theme and even the plot—but he hadn’t had any Southerners to go in it. He would use Jim Custis and James Frye. And somehow he would have to work some kind of a damned folk play into it, so he could use that beard and long hair Frye wore for his part as the Confederate sergeant. Then something clicked in his head: the Confederate. “The Confederate”—there was your title! The twentieth-century Confederate, the Confederate of 1948! The very use of the word for a story set in the present gave it an added twist and power, and added all sorts of implications. The thought was enough to send a chill of creativeness rippling up Dave’s spine and bring near tears to his eyes.

James Frye had a lot of things he could write about, but he would never do it himself. Well, he, David Herschmidt, would do it for him, and make people see it for him. The story would not be in a bar, it would be laid at the play; and the drinking would be done from half-pint bottles; and the knife fight would be between James Frye and Jim, and they would kill one or the other; and himself the Northerner, transposed to the mild mannered little director of the play from Cincinnati, would be the uncomprehending and horrified narrator. Christ, what a story it would make. The dying Jim Custis weeping and calling for his wife. Dave sat and thought about it, his mind racing, as ’Bama drove on out the road that led to Daytona where they would hit Route 1.

“You know, this damned road wasn’t the best road we could of took,” ’Bama said; “I don’t know why I took it.” He mused a moment. “Guess it was just fate, hunh? Well, what do you think of yore Southerners now?”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” Dave said. “I’ve got an idea for a short story out of it that I want to write as soon as we get to Miami.”

He did not remember when he fell asleep. But when he awoke it was to find the Packard parked in the driveway of a roadside park between the barbeque oven and a picnic table, and ’Bama sprawled back under the wheel with his hat over his eyes, asleep. The gambler had finally had to give it up. While he waited for him to wake, he got out and sat at the picnic table and made notes on the story in pencil, pleased that none of the excitement about it had left him. When ’Bama finally woke, he had already finished his notes and after a leak and a walk around the little park they got back in and started on, stopping at the first little town for some breakfast.

They reached Miami shortly before noon. Dave had never been there before, but ’Bama had, and knew his way around, and drove straight across the Venetian Causeway to the beach. It was all very exciting and alive, with all the different kinds of palm trees and the Spanish-type buildings and you could smell the salt in the air. He drove straight to Forty-first Street and then to a little green and cream-colored hotel near the canal where he had once stayed before, and where he engaged a corner suite of three rooms overlooking the canal. And with the aid of half a bottle of whiskey, they each went to bed and slept the rest of the day and all that night, and then Dave went to work.

It took him almost seven weeks to write the story. By that time, it had become a sort of novelette, one of stories whose awkward length made them almost unsaleable to any magazine. But he couldn’t have done it any shorter—not and got what he wanted to get—and anyway he didn’t care. For the first time for years, he had done something he could really be proud of, something he knew was good. But this time, there was some new added element in the pride that had never been in it before and that he could not name but only sort of dimly feel. It wasn’t sureness, and it wasn’t confidence (hell, he never had that). He felt like a badly battered, tough old veteran who had served in so many battles of the human ego, and had the wounds to prove it, that one more didn’t matter. Maybe, instead of confidence, it was just merely lack of over-confidence that he felt. Anyway, whatever it was, he knew that “The Confederate” was good—perhaps the first really
good
thing he had ever written—but instead of feeling high and cocky he only felt relieved and grateful. After he finished it, he copied it up in duplicate on his typewriter and put one copy away in his suitcase and the other in his typewriter case and went back to his novel.