Some Came Running (76 page)

They had set themselves up an excellent routine. They would get up around eleven and ’Bama would take off almost immediately, leaving him the whole apartment to work in. Then Dave would brew himself a barrel of coffee and have at it—anywhere from four to six hours before he quit, sitting at the little desk in the corner sitting room where, when stumped, he could look out through the open windows at the people and the canal. When he had finished the story, he let ’Bama read it and was inordinately pleased when the gambler gave that it was very good and gave a really accurate picture of Southerners.

When he got back onto the novel, he found that it had changed, too. For the first time since he had started it a couple of months ago in order to seduce Gwen French, he found himself approaching it with excitement every day. Anywhere from four thirty to six in the afternoon, worn out and sweating profusely, he would quit and shower and dress and walk past the expensive facades of Collins Avenue and meet ’Bama at Winnie’s Little Club for a drink, where the bartender there after a couple of weeks had got to know them and especially had taken a shine to ’Bama. ’Bama had become a great favorite with the Runyonesque lower-level denizens of the beach and members of the professional gambling crowd that hung out at the Little Club who had never seen anything like him, and there was always someone to come over and jaw with them and offer to buy them a drink, a compliment which ’Bama, albeit in a friendly way, invariably declined, although he would always happily buy anyone else one. He would have spent his afternoon—morning, it was to them—at the track, playing the horses with that quite mathematical passion; or, if for any reason the horses weren’t running that day, he would go off somewhere in the afternoon by himself. They would have two or three drinks at the Little Club, ’Bama always anxious to know how the work had gone that day, and they would talk about how he himself had made out at the track, and then they would go off to one of the better restaurants, usually with a couple of vacationing bachelor girls they had made dates with. Sometimes they had dinner alone—for them, it was lunch—but very rarely.

’Bama had been absolutely right on the availability of women in Miami Beach. They were there from almost everywhere, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Birmingham, Memphis, Cincinnati; usually in pairs, sometimes in threes or fours, all of them secretaries or business girls come to spend their two or three week yearly vacations. Many of them were obviously looking for temporary romance, which they just as obviously hoped might become permanent, and away from home where they were not known they could easily afford to be much more seducible. Chic, well dressed, well groomed, obviously able to take care of themselves, they were all attractive although none of them ever had the beauty of face or the magnificent bodies of the more or less permanent chorus girls who drifted around everywhere; but, as ’Bama wisely suggested, it was a lot better to stick to the vacationing secretaries. They were a lot less mercenary, and it took a lot less money to entertain them; and besides, they could have almost any of the chorus girls or models they wanted from anywhere from twenty to fifty bucks, so why should they spend eighty bucks on taking them out for the evening?

No, the business girls were better. Here, too, Dave noticed, they set themselves up a pattern. Almost all of the bachelor girls could be made on the second date (if they couldn’t, you didn’t go back), and a great many could be made on the first date. Then they would be set up for anywhere from one to three weeks, depending on the length of the vacation and how much of it had already been spent when they met them. Then it would be back to the Bar of Music or the Five O’Clock Club at cocktail time to find another pair, and the process over again.

After they were once made, it would be a sort of a semi-marital bliss for the rest of their stay. After taking them to dinner, it would be out to the track again, or perhaps to some play or the fights, then a big supper somewhere and then home to whatever hotel the girls were staying in, never to their own apartment. ’Bama would always immediately veto anything which might interfere with Dave’s work on the morrow, and having two women in the apartment was one of these. He kept Dave almost as rigidly in training as an athlete. Obviously, a great deal of ’Bama’s pleasure in this friendship came from the fact that he was being on intimate terms with a writer and artist; and was helpful to him in his work.

’Bama was not above using this selling point about Dave’s being a writer on the more intelligent-looking ones, at first. But he soon stopped this. It was quite plain that all of them were much more interested by the fact that they were meeting professional gamblers.

Dave himself let ’Bama handle all the seductions. ’Bama handled them so skillfully, and Dave was wise enough to know that he apparently lacked some prerequisite and essential quality which ’Bama had in abundance. They discussed this once, over their afternoon drinks at the Little Club. “A man has got to not care,” ’Bama explained, “whether he makes them or not. I mean,
really
not care. Because an act isn’t good enough; women know instinctively whether yore actin or not. You got to convince them you don’t give a damn if you make them, and the only way you can do it is really to believe it. Otherwise, they will know they can already handle you
without
giving in.

“Now, I don’t mean you have to make them think you don’t care for them at all. You don’t see me insultin them like that, do you? No, what you have to do is make them believe that if they don’t put out yore goin to move on to one who will, but at the same time, make them feel that if they
do
give in to you, you could fall madly in love with them. That way, you see, they feel they have somethin to gain. Because that’s really all they want: to make you fall madly in love with them.”

Whether ’Bama’s theory was accurate or not, his use of it in practice worked out admirably. Of course, all this was costing them a good deal of money. ’Bama always treated the bachelor girls royally; he never stinted when it came to entertaining them. This, of course, helped to cut down their bankroll. ’Bama could occasionally shore it up with winnings at the track, but more often than not, he lost, although this did not bother him in the slightest. But there was always a poker game handy somewhere, where they could repair and win themselves enough to carry them another two weeks. The strange occult winning streak at poker was still with them here, although it could not be made to work for anything else than poker. For that matter, they did no other gambling, except the horses and the dogs. But at poker they won—so consistently so that they began to be enviously recognized up and down the joints of the lower beach by all the denizens.

It was in many ways a very enviable life, and Dave could have just gone right on living it indefinitely. His novel was coming along well, so much so that for the first time he actually believed that someday he might finish it. He was, for the first time since he could remember, suffering no acute unnerving loneliness to drive him into Walpurgis Night escapades. In fact, the only thing wrong anywhere as far as he could see was the fact that he was putting on so much weight from so much good food and lack of exercise. But even this didn’t bother him.

’Bama, of course, who ate tremendously when he did eat but as often as not ate little or nothing, gained no weight at all. He still slept with his whiskey bottle and hat beside his bed and still got up in his underwear in the morning reaching for both. He had bought himself three new summer suits, all made to order by an expensive tailor on Lincoln Road and cut to the style and cut of his old suits, but outside of these, he had changed not at all.

As far as Dave was concerned, they could have gone right on, living this life for the rest of both of their own. But there never had been any doubt that ’Bama intended eventually for them to return to Parkman. He was not the least bit flattered or impressed by the status they had acquired on the beach, or by his reputation as the “Tall Drawl,” a genu-ine character. Once every week or two, he would send a postcard home to his wife, which generally read “Everything fine. I’m fine. How is everybody there?” but never bothered to put a return address on it; and finally at a ritzy antique shop on Alton Road he found the kind of potbellied iron pot and teakettle he was looking for and shipped them home to her via express collect because as he explained they took better care of things sent collect. As far as he was concerned, Miami Beach was not a damned bit different or more romantic than Parkman or Terre Haute and he was, Dave reflected, probably right.

Only once did they ever discuss Dave’s reluctance to go back to Parkman, and that was one afternoon sitting in the dimness of Winnie’s Little Club over their drinks. It was not any attempt on Dave’s part to put pressure on him to stay, but Dave had had an exceptionally good day working on the novel and he suddenly burst out excitedly that he wished they never had to go back.

“Why not?” ’Bama countered, eyeing him, and Dave went on to try to explain why, floundering badly. Mostly, it was because he was doing so much more and better work here, he said. Back there, it would be the same thing it had been before. The miserable, cheap little room at the Douglas; and the terrifying loneliness that went with it. Somehow loneliness was always much more terrifying when you were living cheaply and had no money, Dave thought, had ’Bama ever noticed that?

“No,” ’Bama said, “can’t say as I have.” His look was a little puzzled, as if he either did not know what loneliness was, or else accepted loneliness as such a foregone conclusion he could not see what it had to do with it. “But, hell,” the Southerner went on, “if you was to go into that poker pardnership with me like we’ve talked about, and quit that damned worthless job with Frank, you’d have enough money. You could get you back that apartment in the Parkman and live as high as we’ve been livin here.”

Perhaps so, Dave thought. But there was more to it than that. It had something to do with the way they were buddying around together here. They complemented each other. And more important, ’Bama kept him from flying off the handle with his wild-ass crazy stunts he pulled in an effort to escape from that terrifying loneliness that always dogged him, and always hurt his work.

“Well, that’s easy to fix,” ’Bama said. “We’ll just rent ourselves a house when we get back.”

“Do what?”

“Shore,” he said. “There’s plenty of houses around town we could rent or lease. Probly, we’d better lease one. So they can’t throw us out later if we happened to throw a wild party or two.” He thought for a moment, his eyes squinted. “Old Judge Deacon could fix it for us,” he said at length. “Old Judge and me are old buddies,” he grinned. “Well, come on. If we’re going to pick them two broads up, we better get to moving.”

This conversation occurred almost two months before they left Miami, and after that ’Bama referred back to its decision a number of times. Once Dave got acclimated to the idea, the thought of it left him feeling heady and excited, not only because of the life they would live, but also because of the work he thought he might be able to get done. He had already begun to contemplate doing a novel about Parkman.

And so Dave sat back and waited, working and living up the high life and getting fatter, and no longer feeling depressed about going home. He knew ’Bama well enough by now to know that when the tall Southerner had got a genuine bellyful he would just get up some morning and say it was time to go.

And that was just the way it happened. One morning, he got up and put on his hat and socks and poured himself a small glass of Jack Daniels Black Label and wandered out in his underwear into the sitting room where Dave was already making coffee in the kitchenette and sat down with the whiskey and said, “Well, I guess we’ve about wore this here place out, don’t you?”

They had left in December with the remnants of a dying snowfall still on the ground, and they were returning in May when everything had been turned a fresh vivid green. They had left this country as two strangers more or less on friendly terms, but they were returning as intimates whose common stock of shared experiences had welded them into this incongruous friendship that was so taken for granted now that it was no longer even thought about or mentioned. A friendship that had begun, and was to embrace, the most productive period of Dave Hirsh’s life.

Dave happened to be driving as they rounded the long curve east of the river and the towers of the Israel bridge hove into sight and beyond it, five miles away across the bottoms, the hill where Parkman perched. Excitedly, he eased down on the accelerator, wanting to get there, and he knew that he no longer gave a damn what Frank and Agnes and the rest of this fossilized town thought or said or did.

And more important, he knew he no longer cared at all what Gwen French did or didn’t do. This feeling lasted about two weeks—or to be precise, until the first time he saw her.

I
T HAD NOT BEEN UNTIL
Dave failed to show up for Christmas that Gwen had begun to think there was anything amiss about him not turning up for work at his brother’s taxi service. She was hoping he had quit. It was ridiculous enough, if he was so idiotic as to let Frank talk him into putting all his money—that he could have lived on while he wrote his book—into some stupid business venture; but to go to work in the damned place, that was even worse! All that really mattered was his book, and Gwen could not help but feel that the job at the taxi service was solely an evasion of the issue on Dave’s part because he was afraid he could not write the book. So she was really glad to hear he had not turned up for work.

But when he did not come over Christmas, and then as the holidays passed on into New Year’s, and he still did not come, she began to wonder if it were not something else that had happened. Her own Christmas party she had given Christmas Night so as not to conflict with the party Agnes and Frank were giving that day. What she had expected was that Dave would come over Christmas Eve and, having no place much else to go, stay the night.