Daisy remembered entering the house after taking Prince for a walk and finding her mother seated beside the telephone looking grim and granite-eyed. “A wrong number,” Mrs. Fielding had said. “Some drunk.” And the contrast of the voice, as soft and bland as marshmallows coming out of that stone face, had reminded Daisy of something ugly which she couldn’t fit into a time or place. “Very drunk,” Mrs. Fielding had said. “He called me baby.” Later Daisy had gone to bed thinking not of the drunk that had called her mother baby, but of a real adopted baby that might someday soon belong to her and Jim.
“Why didn’t you phone me back, Daddy?”
“One call is all they allow you.”
“They?”
He gave a sheepish little laugh that broke in the middle like an elastic stretched too far. “The fact is, I’m in a bit of a pickle. Nothing serious, but I need a couple of hundred dollars. I didn’t want you to get involved, so I gave them a false name. I mean, you have a reputation to maintain in the community, so I figured there was no sense getting you mixed up in — Daisy, for God’s sake, help me!”
“I always do, don’t I?” she said quietly.
“You do. You’re a good girl, Daisy, a good daddy-loving girl. I’ll never forget how...”
“Where are you now?”
“Downtown.”
“In a hotel?”
“No. I’m in somebody’s office. His name’s Pinata.”
“Is he there, too?”
“Yes.”
“Listening to all this?”
“He knows it all anyway,” her father said with that sheepish little laugh again. “I had to tell him everything, who I was and who you were, or he wouldn’t have sprung me. He’s a bail bondsman.”
“So you were in jail. What for?”
“Oh, gad, Daisy, do I have to go into it?”
“I’d like to hear about it, yes.”
“Well, all right. I was on my way to see you, and suddenly I needed a drink, see? So I stopped in this bar downtown. Things were slack, and I asked the waitress to have a drink with me, just out of friendliness, you might say. Nita, her name was, a very fine-looking young woman who’s had a hard life. To make a long story short, suddenly out of the blue her husband came in and started to get tough with her about not staying home to look after the kids. They exchanged a few words, and then he began pushing her around. Well, I couldn’t just sit there and watch that kind of thing going on without doing anything about it.”
“So you got into a fight?”
“That’s about it.”
“That is it, you mean.”
“Yes. Someone called the cops, and the husband and I were hauled off to the pokey. Drunk and disorderly and disturbing the peace. Nothing serious. I gave the cops a false name, though, so no one would know I was your father in case the incident gets into the papers. I’ve already cast enough shame on you and your mother.”
“Please,” Daisy said, “don’t try to make yourself out a hero because you gave a false name to protect Mother and me. In the first place, that’s illegal when you have any sort of record, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” He sounded very innocent. “Well, it’s too late to worry about that now. Mr. Pinata isn’t likely to tell on me. He’s a gentleman.”
Daisy could well imagine her father’s definition of the word: a gentleman was somebody who’d just helped him out of a jam. Her own mental picture of Pinata showed him as a wizened, beady-eyed old man who smelled of jails and corruption.
“When I explained my situation to Mr. Pinata, he very kindly paid my fine. He’s not in business for his health, though, so of course I have to stay here in his office until I can raise the money to pay him. Two hundred dollars the fine was. I pleaded guilty to get the trial over with in a hurry. No sense in having to come up here from L.A. just to...”
“You’re living in L.A.?”
“Yes. We — I moved there last week. I thought it would be nice to be closer to you, Daisy baby. Besides, the climate in Dallas didn’t agree with me.”
It was the first she’d heard that he’d been living in Dallas. Topeka, Kansas, had been his last address. Dallas, Topeka, Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, St. Louis, Montreal — they were all just names to Daisy, but she knew that her father had lived in all of these places, had walked along their streets, searching for something that was always a few hundred miles farther on.
“Daisy? You can get the money, can’t you? I gave Pinata my solemn promise.”
“I can get it.”
“When? The fact is, I’m in kind of a hurry. I have to get back to L.A. tonight — someone’s expecting me — and as you know, I can’t leave Pinata’s office until I pay up.”
“I’ll come down right away.” Daisy could see him waiting in the office, Pinata’s prisoner, not a free man at all. He had merely changed jails and jailers the way he changed towns and people, never realizing he would always be in bondage. “Where is the office?”
She could hear him consulting Pinata: “Just where is this place anyway?” And then Pinata’s voice, surprisingly young and pleasant for an old man who’d spent his life hanging around jails: “107 East Opal Street, between the 800 and 900 blocks of State Street.”
Her father repeated the directions, and Daisy said, “Yes, I know where it is. I’ll be down in half an hour.”
“Ah, Daisy baby, you’re a good girl, a good daddy-loving girl.”
“Yes,” Daisy said wearily. “Yes.”
Fielding put down the telephone and turned to Pinata, who was sitting at his desk writing a letter to his son, Johnny. The boy, who was ten, lived in New Orleans with his mother, and Pinata saw him only for a month out of every year, but he wrote to him regularly each week.
Pinata said, without looking up, “Is she coming?”
“Certainly she’s coming. Right away. I told you she would, didn’t I?”
“What people like you tell me I don’t always believe.”
“I could take exception to that remark but I won’t, because I’m feeling good.”
“You should be. You’ve gone through a pint of my bourbon.”
“I called you a gentleman, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear me tell Daisy you were a gentleman?”
“So?”
“No gentleman ever begrudges a drink to a fellow gentleman in distress. That’s one of the rules of civilized society.”
“It is, eh?” Pinata finished his letter: Be a good boy, Johnny, and don’t forget to write. I enclose five dollars so you can buy your mother and your little sister a nice valentine. Best love from your loving Dad.
He put the letter in an envelope and sealed it. He always had a sick, lost feeling when he wrote to this boy who was his only known relative; it made him mad at the world, or whatever part of the world happened to be available at the moment. This time it was Fielding.
Pinata pounded an airmail stamp on the envelope and said, “You’re a bum, Foster.”
“Fielding, if you please.”
“Foster, Fielding, Smith, you’re still a bum.”
“I’ve had a lot of hard luck.”
“For every ounce of hard luck you’ve had, I bet you’ve passed a pound of it along to other people. Mrs. Harker, for instance.”
“That’s a lie. I’ve never harmed a hair on Daisy’s head. Why, I’ve never even asked her for money unless it was absolutely necessary. And it’s not as if she can’t afford it. She made a very good marriage — trust Mrs. Fielding to see to that. So what if I put the bite on her now and then? When you come right down to it...”
“Don’t bother coming right down to it,” Pinata said. “You bore me.”
Fielding’s lower lip began to pout as if it had been stung by the word. He hadn’t minded so much being called a bum since there was some truth in the statement, but he’d never considered himself a bore. “If I’d known that was your opinion of me,” he said with dignity, “I’d never have drunk your liquor.”