When she came in, followed by the bellhop with the bags, she certainly looked prettier than ever. “Well, Charley,” she said, when the bellhop had gone out, “this sure is the cream de la cream… You must have hit oil.” After she’d run all around the rooms she came back and snuggled up to him. “I bet you been giving ’em hell on the market.” “They tried to put somethin’ over on me, but it can’t be done. Take it from me… Have a drink, Margo… Let’s geta little bit cockeyed you and me, Margo… Christ, I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
She was doing her face in the mirror. “Me? Why I’m only a pushover,” she said in that gruff low tone that made him shiver all up his spine.
“Say, where’s Cliff?”
“Our hatchetfaced young friend who was kind enough to accompany me to the meeting with the lord and master? He pulled out on the six o’clock train.”
“The hell he did. I had some instructions for him.”
“He said you said be in the office Tuesday morning and he’d do it if he had to fly. Say, Charley, if he’s a sample of your employees they must worship the ground you walk on. He couldn’t stop talking about what a great guy you were.”
“Well, they know I’m regular, been through the mill… understand their point of view. It wasn’t so long ago I was workin’ at a lathe myself.”
Charley felt good. He poured them each another drink. Margo took his and poured half of the rye back into the bottle. “Don’t want to get too cockeyed, Mr. A,” she said in that new low caressing voice.
Charley grabbed her to him and kissed her hard on the mouth. “Christ, if you only knew how I’ve wanted to have a really swell woman all to myself. I’ve had some awful bitches… Gladys, God, what a bitch she was. She pretty near ruined me… tried to strip me of every cent I had in the world… ganged up on me with guys I thought were my friends… But you just watch, little girl. I’m goin’ to show ’em. In five years they’ll come crawlin’ to me on their bellies. I don’t know what it is, but I got a kind of feel for the big money… Nat Benton says I got it… I know I got it. I can travel on a hunch, see. Those bastards all had money to begin with.”
After they’d ordered their supper and while they were having just one little drink waiting for it, Margo brought out some bills she had in her handbag. “Sure, I’ll handle ’em right away.” Charley shoved them into his pocket without looking at them. “You know, Mr. A, I wouldn’t have to worry you about things like that if I had an account in my own name.” “How about ten grand in the First National Bank when we get to Miami?”
“Suit yourself, Charley… I never did understand more money than my week’s salary, you know that. That’s all any real trouper understands. I got cleaned out fixing the folks up in Trenton. It certainly costs money to die in this man’s country.”
Charley’s eyes filled with tears. “Was it your dad, Margery?”
She made a funny face. “Oh, no. The old man bumped off from too much Keeley cure when I was a little twirp with my hair down my back… This was my stepmother’s second husband. I’m fond of my stepmother, believe it or not… She’s been the only friend I had in this world. I’ll tell you about her someday. It’s quite a story.”
“How much did it cost? I’ll take care of it.”
Margo shook her head. “I never loaded my relations on any man’s back,” she said.
When the waiter came in with a tray full of big silver dishes followed by a second waiter pushing in a table already set, Margo pulled apart from Charley. “Well, this is the life,” she whispered in a way that made him laugh.
Driving down was a circus. The weather was good. As they went further south there began to be a green fuzz of spring on the woods. There were flowers in the pinebarrens. Birds were singing. The car ran like a dream. Charley kept her at sixty on the concrete roads, driving carefully, enjoying the driving, the good fourwheel brakes, the easy whir of the motor under the hood. Margo was a smart girl and crazy about him and kept making funny cracks. They drank just enough to keep them feeling good. They made Savannah late that night and felt so good they got so tight there the manager threatened to run them out of the big old hotel. That was when Margo threw an ashtray through the transom.
They’d been too drunk to have much fun in bed that night and woke up with a taste of copper in their mouths and horrible heads. Margo looked haggard and green and saggy under the eyes before she went in to take her bath. Charley made her a prairie oyster for breakfast like he said the English aviators used to make over on the other side, and she threw it right up without breaking the eggyolk. She made him come and look at it in the toilet before she pulled the chain. There was the raw eggyolk looking up at them like it had just come out of the shell. They couldn’t help laughing about it in spite of their heads.
It was eleven o’clock when they pulled out. Charley drove kind of easy along the winding road through the wooded section of southern Georgia, cut with inlets and saltmarshes from which cranes flew up and once a white flock of egrets. They felt pretty pooped by the time they got to Jacksonville. Neither of them could eat anything but a lambchop washed down with some lousy gin they paid eight dollars a quart for to the colored bellboy who claimed it was the best English gin imported from Nassau the night before. They drank the gin with bitters and went to bed.
Driving down from Jax to Miami the sun was real hot. Charley wanted to have the top down to get plenty of air but Margo wouldn’t hear of it. She made him laugh about it. “A girl’ll sacrifice anything for a man except her complexion.” They couldn’t eat on the way down, though Charley kept tanking up on the gin. When they got into Miami they went right to the old Palms where Margo used to work and got a big ovation from Joe Kantor and Eddy Palermo and the boys of the band. They all said it looked like a honeymoon and kidded about seeing the marriagelicense. “Merely a chance acquaintance… something I picked up at the busstation in Jax,” Margo kept saying. Charley ordered the best meal they had in the house and drinks all around and champagne. They danced all evening in spite of his game leg. When he passed out they took him upstairs to Joe and Mrs. Kantor’s own room. When he began to wake up Margo was sitting fully dressed looking fresh as a daisy on the edge of the bed. It was late in the morning. She brought him up breakfast on a tray herself.
“Look here, Mr. A,” she said. “You came down here for a rest. No more nightclubs for a while. I’ve rented us a little bungalow down on the beach and we’ll put you up at the hotel to avoid the breath of scandal and you’ll like it. What we need’s the influence of the home… And you and me, Mr. A, we’re on the wagon.”
The bungalow was in Spanishmission style, and cost a lot, but they sure had a good time at Miami Beach. They played the dograces and the roulettewheels and Charley got in with a bunch of allnight pokerplayers through Homer Cassidy, Senator Planet’s friend, a big smiling cultured whitehaired southerner in a baggy linen suit, who came round to the hotel to look him up. After a lot of talking about one thing and another, Cassidy got around to the fact that he was buying up options on property for the new airport and would let Charley in on it for the sake of his connections, but he had to have cash right away. At poker Charley’s luck was great, he always won enough to have a big roll of bills on him, but his bankaccount was a dog of a different stripe. He began burning up the wires to Nat Benton’s office in New York.
Margo tried to keep him from drinking; the only times he could really get a snootful were when he went out fishing with Cassidy. Margo wouldn’t go fishing, she said she didn’t like the way the fish looked at her when they came up out of the water. One day he’d gone down to the dock to go fishing with Cassidy but found that the norther that had come up that morning was blowing too hard. It was damn lucky because just as Charley was leaving the dock a Western Union messengerboy came up on his bike. The wind was getting sharper every minute and blew the chilly dust in Charley’s face as he read the telegram. It was from the senator: ADMINISTRATION PREPARES OATS FOR PEGASUS. As soon as he got back to the beach Charley talked to Benton over longdistance. Next day airplane stocks bounced when the news came over the wires of a bill introduced to subsidize airlines. Charley sold everything he had at the top, covered his margins and was sitting pretty when the afternoon papers killed the story.