In the morning he woke up late feeling thirsty but cheerful. After breakfast he checked out of the hotel and drove around the town a little. It made him feel good to pack his own bag and get into the front seat and drive his own car.
The town had a cheerful rattletrap look in the sunlight under the big white clouds and the blue sky. At the lunchroom next to the busstation he stopped to have a drink. He felt so good that he got out of the car without his crutches and hobbled across the warm pavement. The wind was fluttering the leaves of the magazines and the pink and palegreen sheets of the papers outside the lunchroom window. Charley was out of breath from the effort when he slid onto a stool at the counter. “Give me a limeade and no sweetnin’ in it, please,” he said to the ratfaced boy at the fountain.
The sodajerker didn’t pay any attention, he was looking down the other way. Charley felt his face get red. His first idea was, I’ll get him fired. Then he looked where the boy was looking. There was a blonde eating a sandwich at the other end of the counter. She certainly was pretty. She wore a little black hat and a neat bluegrey suit and a little white lace around her neck and at her wrists. She had an amazed look on her face like she’d just heard something extraordinarily funny. Forgetting to favor his game leg Charley slipped up several seats towards her. “Say, bo, how about that limeade?” he shouted cheerfully at the sodajerker.
The girl was looking at Charley. Her eyes really were a perfectly pure blue. She was speaking to him. “Maybe you know how long the bus takes to Miami, mister. This boy thinks he’s a wit so I can’t get any data.”
“Suppose we try it out and see,” said Charley.
“They surely come funny in Florida… Another humorist.”
“No, I mean it. If you let me drive you down you’ll be doing a sick man a great favor.”
“Sure it won’t mean a fate worse than death?”
“You’ll be perfectly safe with me, young lady. I’m almost a cripple. I’ll show you my crutches in the car.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“Cracked up in a plane.”
“You a pilot?”
Charley nodded. “Not quite skinny enough for Lindbergh,” she said, looking him up and down. Charley turned red. “I am a little overweight. It’s being cooped up with this lousy leg.”
“Well, I guess I’ll try it. If I step into your car and wake up in Buenos Aires it’ll be my bad luck.”
Charley tried to pay for her coffee and sandwich but she wouldn’t let him. Something about her manner kept him laughing all the time. When he got up and she saw how he limped she pursed her mouth up. “Gee, that’s too bad.” When she saw the car she stopped in her tracks. “Zowie,” she said, “we’re bloomin’ millionaires.”
They were laughing as they got into the car. There was something about the way she said things that made him laugh. She wouldn’t say what her name was. “Call me Mme. X,” she said. “Then you’ll have to call me Mr. A,” said Charley.
They laughed and giggled all the way to Daytona Beach where they stopped off and went into the surf for a dip. Charley felt ashamed of his pot and his pale skin and his limp as he walked across the beach with her looking brown and trim in her blue bathingsuit. She had a pretty figure although her hips were a little big. “Anyway it’s not as if I’d come out of it with one leg shorter than the other. The doc says I’ll be absolutely O.K. if I exercise it right.”
“Sure, you’ll be great in no time. And me thinkin’ you was an elderly sugardaddy in the drugstore there.”
“I think you’re a humdinger, Mme X.”
“Be sure you don’t put anything in writing, Mr. A.”
Charley’s leg ached like blazes when he came out of the water, but it didn’t keep him from having a whale of a good appetite for the first time in months. After a big fishdinner they started off again. She went to sleep in the car with her neat little head on his shoulder. He felt very happy driving down the straight smooth concrete highway although he felt tired already. When they got into Miami that night she made him take her to a small hotel back near the railroad tracks and wouldn’t let him come in with her. “But gosh, couldn’t we see each other again?”
“Sure, you can see me any night at the Palms. I’m an entertainer there.”
“Honest… I knew you were an entertainer but I didn’t know you were a professional.”
“You sure did me a good turn, Mr. A. Now it can be told… I was flat broke with exactly the price of that ham sandwich and if you hadn’t brought me down I’d a lost the chance of working here… I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
“Tell me your name. I’d like to call you up.”
“You tell me yours.”
“Charles Anderson. I’ll be staying bored to death at the MiamiBiltmore.”
“So you really are Mr. A… Well, goodby, Mr. A, and thanks a million times.” She ran into the hotel. Charley was crazy about her already. He was so tired he just barely made his hotel. He went up to his room and tumbled into bed and for the first time in months went to sleep without getting drunk first.
A week later when Nat Benton turned up he was surprised to find Charley in such good shape. “Nothin’ like a change,” said Charley, laughing. They drove on down towards the Keys together. Charley had Margo Dowling’s photograph in his pocket, a professional photograph of her dressed in Spanish costume for her act. He’d been to the Palms every night, but he hadn’t managed to get her to go out with him yet. When he’d suggest anything she’d shake her head and make a face and say, “I’ll tell you about it sometime.” But the last night she had given him a number where he could call her up.
Nat kept trying to talk about the market and the big reorganization of Tern and Askew-Merritt that Merritt was engineering but Charley would shut him up with, “Aw, hell, let’s talk about somethin’ else.” The camp was all right but the mosquitoes were fierce. They spent a good day on the reef fishing for barracuda and grouper. They took a jug of bacardi out in the motorboat and fished and drank and ate sandwiches. Charley told Nat all about the crackup. “Honestly, I don’t think it was my fault. It was one of those damn things you can’t help… Now I feel as if I’d lost the last friend I had on earth. Honest, I’d a given anythin’ I had in the world if that hadn’t happened to Bill.” “After all,” said Nat, “he was only a mechanic.”
One day when they got in from fishing, drunk and with their hands and pants fishy, and their faces burned by the sun and glare, and dizzy from the sound and smell of the motor and the choppy motion of the boat, they found waiting for them a wire from Benton’s office.
UNKNOWN UNLOADING TERN STOP DROPS FOUR AND A HALF POINTS STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS
“Instructions hell,” said Benton, jamming his stuff into his suitcase. “We’ll go up and see. Suppose we charter a plane at Miami.” “You take the plane,” said Charley coolly. “I’m going to ride on the train.”
In New York he sat all day in the back room of Nat Benton’s office smoking too many cigars, watching the ticker, fretting and fuming, riding up and down town in taxicabs, getting the lowdown from various sallowfaced friends of Nat’s and Moe Frank’s. By the end of the week he’d lost four hundred thousand dollars and had let go every airplane stock he had in the world.
All the time he was sitting there putting on a big show of business he was counting the minutes, the way he had when he was a kid in school, for the market to close so that he could go uptown to a speakeasy on Fiftysecond Street to meet a hennahaired girl named Sally Hogan he’d met when he was out with Nat at the Club Dover. She was the first girl he’d picked up when he got to New York. He didn’t give a damn about her but he had to have some kind of a girl. They were registered at the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Smith.