Some Came Running (89 page)

“I guess so,” Dave said. “If I can just stand it that long. For a couple of days.”

“Shore you can,” ’Bama nodded. “Hell, maybe you be back to work tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Dave said. “Well, I’ll go back up and get into some clothes, then. And then, I’ll come down and help you.”

“All right,” ’Bama nodded. “I’ll be right here, ol’ buddy.”

“What do you suppose makes me get like this?” Dave said.

“Well, I reckon you feel guilty,” the tall man said, “don’t you reckon? Because you ain’t gettin yore book done.”

“That’s what it is, of course,” Dave said. “But—”

“Go on and get dressed,” ’Bama said, grinning. “And cut the crap.”

It was, of course, exactly as he’d said. Within a week, everything had settled down. Dave was back hard at work on the combat novel and doing little heavy drinking, and the routine of nightly gambling at the different lodges and the pea-pool games at the Ath Club had stabilized themselves into regularity, and what was more important that strange occult way of consistently winning held firm. Dewey and Hubie, and Wally Dennis, showed signs of beginning to hang out at the house regularly, and Dave and ’Bama went halves on buying a Ping-Pong table at McMillan’s Sporting Goods in Terre Haute for the basement. Their meals they ate either at Ciro’s or the one uptown restaurant, or else out at the Nite Owl in the West End business district. The food was not as good as in Miami Beach, naturally, but it was probably a good thing, because Dave just as naturally began eating less. He did not, however, seem to lose any weight. Almost nobody—excepting Dewey and Hubie, and Wally—was invited to the house. The house had become sort of their sanctuary—as soon as the housewarming party was over. Especially for Dave.

Only one thing, really, was very much different from the way everything had been down in Miami Beach, and this was the noticeable absence of vacationing bachelor girls. Any bachelor girls or career girls in Parkman—and in Terre Haute—were not on vacation now here at home; they went out of town for that. And what was more, they were in towns where they were known, and lived, and where many had husbands, and they were obviously not going to be spending the night with any gamblers.

He himself, Dave, found that he missed them keenly; but it didn’t bother ’Bama. The tall Southerner seemed to be just as happy with any of the brassiere factory girls or the drunken haggard Terre Haute barflys. Once in the first week, after they moved in, they had made the rounds of all the low-class Terre Haute joints and brought a couple of these home with them, and it appeared that this, too, would stabilize itself into routine.

It was ten days after the housewarming party, when Dave had worked himself back into feeling good about his book, that he finally made his first trip over to Israel to the Frenches. He had not forgotten Wally’s comment the night of the party—Wally had said that he
thought
Gwen wanted to see him—and, in fact, it had added considerably to Dave’s savoring of his coming triumph. This trip to Israel, this time, he had become increasingly convinced, was going to be
the one.
This time, he was going to have everything playing on his side. The love affair that he had been working for over six months to bring about, was going to be accomplished at last, when he took “The Confederate,” and the two hundred pages of his novel, over there to her. There was no reason why she, who had loved so many other men, would not love him, too—and this time sincerely. She already did love him. He could sense it. And when she saw the work he was doing—that would finish it.

Naturally, then, it would be sheer foolishness to go over there until he was mentally ready. And the only way he could be mentally ready was to work, to
write
himself back into a confident, proper state for it.

The book itself, by the end of the first week in the house, was already back in that state where it had been during the last two months in Miami. It was alive. The people in it were real people for him.

What he had done was really a very simple thing. He had taken a typical infantry company, of typical green men well trained. And he had set them ashore on D-day and followed them through the European campaign, and in fact had them up to around St Lo now.

It was a very simple structure. It was, in fact, the pattern for just about every damned combat novel. But it was right there that the similarity ended. There were no heroes in this combat novel, and there were no bums. And there was no horror. At least, not in the book or the people. The horror would be in the readers—shocked horror. There was, in this combat novel, only a motley collection of human men, men as human beings really were—and like any such collection, when viewed honestly, they were wonderful material for satire and irony and ridicule and laughter. But the reader wouldn’t laugh; because their life in combat was no more brave or fine, or possessed of any other human virtue, than their life at home would have been. Vain, foolish, pompous, these were the brave men who were fighting a war because their government forced them to, and they had to, or else lose all their material possessions, and worse yet, become unrespectable to their peers, and who would come home afterwards and become “veterans” and tell the young men how to fight the next war, while in their hearts they were secretly glad the young men would do it and not them, they were too old. In short, laughable (but unpitiable) fools—and each one of them was David Herschmidt, who could look back on one of the most foolish lives of any of them, but who would no more admit it than they would.

One of the scenes he was especially proud of was one in which two of the characters are talking to another man who has been seriously wounded, and trying to get him to let the two of them flip for an exceptionally fine combat knife he has, since he won’t need it anymore. (He had first got the idea from listening to Wally talk about the Randall knives.) The wounded man is already frightened, and his feelings are hurt because he thinks they don’t really care about him at all, only his knife. But he, the wounded man, is in a position where he can’t chide them, not if he wants to appear a brave man instead of a sissy. So the argument finally resolves itself into the form of a moral argument. The two buddies point out to the wounded man that it is hardly right for him to be selfish and want to keep his knife, especially since he obviously can never use it in combat anymore, whereas one of them could. And if he did happen to die, it would make a nice parting gift to one of his pals. The wounded man has no real moral rebuttal for such an argument, so he is forced to take refuge in the statement, which none of them believe, including himself, that he doesn’t think he is so badly wounded that he won’t get back into combat anymore. Meanwhile the fire is getting heavier all around them. In the end, the wounded man gets to keep his knife since they can hardly take it off him bodily, and after he gets back in the hospital it is stolen off him by a hospital medical corpsman, as Dave’s own knife had been after he himself was wounded.

There was, he remembered after he had written the scene, a similar incident in the “boots scene” in
All Quiet on the Western Front.
So he got the copy from the city library and looked it up. But when he did, he saw that he need not have worried; Remarque used the scene strictly for pathos. Another thing, the scene in
All Quiet
took place in the hospital where the men were out of immediate danger; his own scene was in a road ditch under fire, and the acquisitiveness of all three participants is still strong enough to stand it; and it was humorous; there was no pathos in it at all.

And that damned punk kid, Wally Dennis, he though triumphantly. Competition, Dawnie said? Competition, hell! That young kid was going to have to go a long way, and live a long time, to even be in the same league with this book! He could hardly wait to tell Gwen what he had worked out, and have her read what he had done and especially his prize scene.

And, hell! Not to mention “The Confederate”! Christ, he had forgotten all about it, thinking about the book.

And quite suddenly, he knew it was the time to go. Everything was moving along just right, and with all the volume of work he had here to show her, it couldn’t go wrong this time. If he didn’t make it with her this time, he was willing to admit that he never would. But he
knew
he would. Unable to sit still, he got up to gather all the stuff to take her.

But then he made himself sit down, and breathe deep. He didn’t want to go over there in this electric state. He knew he was too forceful when he was like this. He decided he had better mix himself a couple of good stiff martinis first, before he went. That would let him down. While he drank them, he gathered up the stuff: the original of “The Confederate;” the nearly two hundred pages of the novel, still rough draft and penciled all over; and the sheaf of notes on how to develop and it, all together in a manila folder. He was proud of it.

He left ’Bama a penciled note on the hall table: “Gone over to Israel for a while, be back when I get back.” With a last look around the house, he shut the door behind him and went out to the little Plymouth.

It was almost dark when he approached the bridge, and Dave thought again of what an important part memories and past emotions played in all our lives. The high bridge loomed up above him, catching the last light of the sunk sun. Down below, the town was already in darkness. Both had strong emotional connotations for him, the emotional residue of past times he had seen them.

Actually, he saw a multitude of bridges and towns. The bridge he had crossed and town he had passed when he left for Florida, and looked down from, trying to pick out her house in the night, was a darkly unhappy bridge. But the bridge he’d crossed when they had returned from Florida had been a brightly confident and triumphant bridge. The bridge he crossed going to and from Terre Haute was a nothing, a means to get to an end. But this bridge now, and this town, that he approached on his way to Gwen’s, were both happy and unhappy; and it could not help but influence his mood somewhat. Underneath his forcefulness, and confidence, a kind of gentle melancholy settled in him.

The trouble with memories was that, while they enhanced all the happy acts connected with them, they also equally enhanced the unhappy. But you never learned
that
until
after
you’d been in love—really deeply in love.

Probably nobody in the world would ever believe he was in love with her, he thought. He guessed he didn’t act like it. He slept with other women. He did this and that. He kept her dangling over here for what?—almost three weeks? But what was love? Was it what Frank and Agnes—whom, he was suddenly sure, were very much in love—had? Was it what Wally and Dawn—whom, he was suddenly sure, were very much in love also—had? Was it what ’Bama and that wife of his—whom, he was also suddenly sure, were very much in love—had? Or what all those other paired couples in the world had? or thought they had? Love, he guessed, if you wanted to grasp at a definition, was the insuperable desire to make another given party love you more than they wanted to make you love them. And more than that, make them
prove
it. And infatuation, then, conversely, would be the very same thing when the desire was not completely insuperable, and could be got over. And when it couldn’t, we called it love. Well, he knew he could never get over his, ever. Heavily, he turned onto the cutoff down into Israel, glad he didn’t have to look at that damned bridge anymore, and trying to get his supreme confidence back.

Well, there was one damned thing for sure. The stuff he was bringing to show her was damned good. And she would know it. That helped to bring some of the lost confidence back.

Gwen met him at the ground-level side door after he knocked. Her rawboned, masculinely feminine face was shockingly like it had always looked. In six months of remembering it, he had slurred its detail.

“Oh!” she said, “Dave. Well, come on in,” she smiled and stepped back.

“Hello, Gwen. How are you?” he heard his own voice say.

“Fine! fine!” He followed her on up into that kitchen. There might have been just a suggestion of restrained hurt feelings in her voice and on her face, but there was that old native eager life-interest in her eyes, too. “I’m just fine,” she said. “And how are you? Won’t you come and sit down?”

“Hey,” he said, “what the hell? You’re treating me like a stranger.”

She looked suddenly flustered. “Oh! am I? Well, I didn’t mean to be. Come on and sit down.” Then she laughed and shook her hair back. “Can I fix you some coffee?”

“Where’s Bob?”

“Out.”

“Sure, I’d love some coffee,” he said and went on down to the massive old table and sat down, displaying his armload of manuscript on top of it prominently.

“You’ve put on a lot of weight,” Gwen said, from the stove.

“Christ! Everybody I see tells me that,” Dave said. “I guess I’m going to turn out to be another Balzac or Stendhal. I guess I’ve just been living good.”

“You enjoyed your trip to Florida, then?” she said.

“Oh, you know about that?”

“Oh yes,” Gwen smiled. “And about the house you and your gambler friend have taken. By the way, I suppose you know: I have your clothes and things from the hotel all over here. Also,” she said, with that almost-embarrassed little laugh, “there’s a few little Christmas presents that some of us got for you, lying around here someplace.”

Dave felt such a sudden, sick twinge of pain in his stomach that perforce, like the explosive grunt of a man hit in the solar plexus, he muttered, “Ahhh, Gwen!” before he could stop himself. He had had no idea that he had hurt her so terribly. If he had, he would never have gone. And yet, strangely, with that knowledge of her hurt all of his former forcefulness and confidence came flooding back in a wave of elation, and he felt both powerful and protective. If he had hurt her, she must love him; God! he wouldn’t hurt her for the world.

She was standing and looking at him from the stove, with that open little smile, and he covered quickly for his grunted exclamation.

“Say!” he said cheerfully. “Aren’t you going to ask me what the hell it is I’ve got here?”