“Want to see a picture of her?”
“I’d love it, really.”
He took out his wallet and held it under the edge of the table to make the selection of a picture. He was grinning inside with anticipation. He carried a little folder of color photographs. He looked through them quickly, Betty in that Dior thing in front of the enormous fireplace. Betty and the kids the day the Mercedes was delivered, with the big ranch house in the background. He decided on the one of the barbecue, with Betty and the kids, and the planes parked off the strip near the horse barn, and the flamboyant bar under carnival canvas. He held that one, relishing her embarrassment, and looked across at her, and saw in her eyes an unexpected look of both warmth and vulnerability.
So, not knowing why, he put those pictures back and dug into the wallet and found the one he had carried for so long. A black and white one, creased and cracked. Only one kid, the first boy. A toddler. Betty, in faded jeans, leaned smiling against the corral fence, squinting into the sun, with nothing in the background but the drab contour of the land. He handed that picture to Gloria.
“She’s pretty, John. And she looks awfully nice.”
As she handed it back her flight was announced. He walked out with her into the white heat of the sun, and he stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, hat tilted forward over his eyes, and watched her climb the stairs and turn at the top and wave good-by, a dark slim handsome woman, smartly dressed, hurrying back into her fabulous life, tense and brittle and just beginning to be aware of her own discontent.
After her flight left, he sauntered back to the repair apron and found them bolting the cowling back in place. After the takeoff he sat and looked west at the hill county, and the silvery loops of the Guadeloupe River. He felt a deeper contentment within himself. The last buried regret was gone. The dark Gloria of Riverside was now a poised and superficial stranger.
He decided he would tell Betty about meeting her, tell Betty tonight as they sat on the terrace under the starry night. And in telling her, he would be telling her something else, something beyond words. He knew Betty would understand about the picture.
The Fast Loose Money
As soon as I came in the house, Marie knew something was wrong. I guess it showed. I had a faraway feeling, where you have to stop dead and remember where it is you usually hang your hat, as if you’ve never been in the house before. And when you go to change your shoes, you sit on the edge of the bed and look down at them and you can’t make up your mind which one to untie first.
She followed me into the bedroom and said, “What’s wrong, Jerry? What is it?”
“Go away,” I told her. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t bother me.”
She put on her hurt face and sniffed at me and went away. I could tell her any time. It was going to be a ball. After I changed, I went out the back door, and Marie said, “Where you going now?”
“Over to see Arnie.”
“You know he isn’t home yet. He won’t be home for a long time. You know that.”
“So I’ll wait.”
“When do you want to eat?”
“I don’t want to eat.” She sniffed again, and I let the screen door bang. It was a warm night. About nine o’clock. I generally get into the city about noon, and I check the three lots and work them, and then I make the night deposit and then I come home. Arnie can quit when he feels like it too, and he’s usually home about eleven.
So I went over into Arnie Sloan’s back yard and sat in one of those beach chairs he keeps out there, rain or shine. I guess his wife, Janice, saw me out there, and she came out and said, “What you doing, Jerry?”
“I thought I’d hang around and wait for Arnie.”
“He won’t be here for a long time.”
“When he gets home, tell him I’m out here,” I said, and she knew from the way I said it I didn’t feel like making conversation with her, so she went back into the house. I could see her in the kitchen for a while, and then the kitchen lights went out.
It was a warm night. I could hear somebody’s hi-fi turned way up, and hear the summer bugs. It made me think of all the times Arnie Sloan and I have sat out in his back yard and gabbed. A lot of the time we’ve had long, friendly arguments about which one of us really has it made. It’s pretty much a toss-up, I guess. You take my deal. I’ve got long-term leases on three good parking lots down in the city. The JT Parking Corporation. JT for Jerry Thompson. Marie and I own the stock. The books are always in apple-pie shape. I could stand an audit any time. I draw enough so we can live the way we do. And once in a while we cut out a little dividend for ourselves. But if you play by the rules, you’re a sucker.
Every parking ticket is in serial sequence. You come in to park, the boy puts the IBM time stamp on the back of the office stub and the one you walk away with. The office stub goes under your windshield. When you come back, the boy stamps the ‘out time’ and collects your cash money. So, on each lot, you can check the file of stubs in serial sequence and know just how much dough came in, and how much to enter on the books for that day. The way I work it, I got two sets of serial sequence tickets. So: I feed in say fifty dupe tickets on one lot. When I cash up the lot, I set those aside and figure out what the take on them was. Say it turns out to be sixty bucks. Once I’ve destroyed the dupe tickets, that sixty bucks is loose money. It goes in my pocket, and from there it goes in the wall safe in my closet at home. Who can check loose money?
There’s a way they can check on you if you’re stupid. You start spending that loose money and living too good, and you can get checked. So what you do is live off your book income, and spend the loose money where it doesn’t show. On trips — things like that.
Arnie says his deal is better. He owns a little piece of a midtown restaurant. It’s one of those fancy expense-account places, where lunch can run you twenty-five bucks a head if you want it to. Arnie is head waiter and does a lot of the buying. He gets a cash kickback on the buying, and he gets fat tips. He declares maybe half the tips, but the rest is loose money, and he handles it the same way I do. We arrange to break away at the same time, and when we take the girls to Cuba or the Bahamas or Mexico, we have a ball. I guess we both average ten to twelve G’s a year loose money.
But most of the time we talk about the war. War II. That’s where I met Arnie. I was a sergeant in C Company of the 8612th Q.M. Battalion stationed at Deladun, a rail junction about thirty-five miles north of Calcutta. We had warehouses there and plenty of 6x6 trucks, and it was a soft deal. Go load stuff off the Calcutta docks, check it in, warehouse it, then either ship it north by rail, or run priority items by truck to Dum Dum Airfield for air transportation, or turn it over to a Q.M. truck company.
Arnie Sloan came to us out of the replacement depot, and I couldn’t figure him at first. A very slick guy who wore tailored uniforms and kept his mouth shut. I had a lot of things going on the side, so I had to keep my guard up in case he was an I.G. plant. I could figure he wasn’t a stupe like most of the G.I.’s in that outfit. We took it very easy with each other until finally we both knew the score. We were both hungry, and for hungry guys that station was paradise.
Just take a small item for example. You lift three bottles or four out of a case of liquor ration for officers, then drop what’s left from the top of a stack fifteen feet onto a cement floor. Who is going to fit the glass together and find out how many bottles were in there? And a bottle would bring fifteen or twenty bucks in Calcutta any time.