I don’t know why I did it; there was no idea or plan in my mind. But I reached over and wiped my hand through the dust on a step, and when I saw her come out of the washroom I started back that way. “I got some of it, too,” I said, holding out the hand.
There was a window in the washroom, all right, as I’d thought there would be. It was closed and locked with an ordinary latch on top of the lower sash. Before I washed my hands I reached over and took hold of the latch and unlocked it.
4
Why not? In this world you took what you wanted; you didn’t stand around and wait for somebody to bring it to you. I sat on the side of the bed stark naked in the sweltering night, listening to Umlaut beget Frammis in an age-cracked voice on the other side of the wall, and thought how easy it would be. There’d be ten or fifteen thousand dollars or maybe more lying around in that comic-opera bank for a man with nerve enough to pick it up. And you could get away from the rat-race for a long time with that kind of money, with a brown-eyed girl on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean, sailing a catboat and going fishing off the reefs and drinking Cuba Libres where it’s always afternoon.
Why kid myself? I wasn’t a salesman. And I couldn’t go back to sea, if I wanted to. I wasn’t getting any younger, and another whole year was down the drain. I’d quit two jobs and got fired from three, and I’d had to get out of Houston in a hurry after a brawl with a longshoreman over some turning-basin chippy. We tore up a lot of the fixtures in a cheap beer joint by the time the thing became general, and somewhere in the confusion the longshoreman had his jaw broken with a bottle of Bacardi rum. It wasn’t just an isolated incident, either; life was just a succession of jams over floozies of one kind or another.
It had been a little over a year now since the night I’d got back to the States after eleven months of that monotonous tanker shuttle between the Persian Gulf and Japan, with a four-hundred-a-month allotment to Jerilee, to find she’d shoved off with the bank account and some boy friend she’d forgotten to tell me about. I tore my second mate’s ticket into strips and flushed it down the can in a Port Arthur ginmill and for a while I seemed to have some purpose in life, but after I’d had time to think it over a little I quit looking for them and threw away the gun. It wasn’t worth it. She was just another bum in a succession of them, the only difference being that I’d been married to her.
On the other side of the wall they were piping Noah over the rail and getting ready for the rain. Sweat ran down my face and I thought about the bank to keep from thinking of that Harshaw woman. Keep her weight down! She could quit leaning it against me. But what about the bank?
It wasn’t so simple, if you stopped to think about it. When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time. Who ever won all the time? Yeah, but the thing which always trips ‘em is association with other criminals, and I don’t know any, talkative or otherwise. An amateur’s got a better chance than the pro because nobody knows him and he hasn’t got any clippings in the files. I lay there for hours, thinking about it.
The next day was Saturday. Harshaw was across the street at his desk in the loan office all morning and at noon when they closed it, he came over and said he was going fishing for three days down at Aransas Pass.
“I’ll be back on Monday night,” he told Gulick. “If you run into any snag making out papers for sale, you can always get hold of Miss Harper.”
We didn’t sell anything. The town was jammed with the usual Saturday-afternoon crowd, but nobody was looking for a car. I prowled morosely around the lot and wondered what Gloria Harper did when she wasn’t working. Just before we closed, the telephone rang. I answered it.
“Mr. Madox?”
I recognized the voice. So she didn’t go with him, I thought. “Yes. Madox speaking.”
“This is Mrs. Harshaw. I know you’ll think I’m an awful pest, but I wonder if I could ask another favor?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Mr. Harshaw has gone fishing, and he promised me a car off the lot while he was gone with ours, but he forgot to bring it home. I wonder if you’d drive it out for me when you close up?”
“Sure. How do I get there?”
“Go down Main Street to the bank and turn right. It’s about three or four blocks beyond the edge of town. There are a couple of cross streets, I think, and then a filling station on the left. The next block is big oak trees on both sides of the street, and only two houses. Ours is the two-storey one on the right-hand side.”
“Check,” I said. “Which car is it?”
“He said there was a Buick. A coupe.”
“Yes. It’s still here. I’ll bring it out.”
“There’s no hurry. Any time after you close up. And thanks a lot.”
It was around six when we locked up the cars and the shack. I told Gulick where I was taking the coupe, and left my own car on the lot. The place wasn’t hard to find, after I’d threaded my way through the double-parked congestion of Saturday-afternoon Main Street. Beyond the filling station she had spoken of, the road swung a little to the right as it entered the oaks. The house itself was back in the trees and had a big lawn in front and a gravel driveway running back beside a hedge of oleanders. It was a smaller copy of the old-style southern plantation house, with a columned porch running across the front and down one side next to the drive. I stopped by the side porch and got out. It was secluded back in here, partly cut off as it was from the street, with long shadows slanting across the lawn.
“Hello,” she said.
I glanced around, but didn’t see her until she opened the screen door and came out on to the porch. She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass. She was bare-legged and wearing wedgies with grass straps, and her toenails were painted a flaming red. I don’t know anything about women’s clothes, but still I was conscious that she jarred somehow. The teenage dress didn’t do anything for that over-ripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks.
“Oh, hello,” I said. “I left the keys in it.”
“Thanks. It was sweet of you to drive it out for me.”
“Not at all.”
“How about a drink before you go?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
I followed her inside. The Venetian blinds were half closed in the living room and a big electric fan oscillated like a slowly shaking head on the mantel above the fireplace. She stopped and faced me, and again I could feel that faint strain in the air.
“Bourbon and water?”
“That’s fine.”
“Push some of those magazines out of the way and sit down. I’m sorry the place’s in such a mess.” She turned to go, and then stopped and added, as if it was an afterthought, “I gave the girl the week-end off, to visit her folks.”
She went out. It was hot in the room, even with the fan going, and I was conscious of a deep quiet, unbroken except by the whirring of the fan blades and now arid then a tinkle of ice against glass out in the kitchen. I lighted a cigarette and put the match in a tray. It was heaped up and overflowing with butts smeared with lipstick. Movie and confession magazines were scattered over the sofa and lying on the floor, and I could see the rings left by highball glasses on the coffee table. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse.
She came back in a minute with the drink, and I saw she’d refilled her own. She sat down in the big chair across from me with her legs stretched out and the toes of the wedgies touching each other, and looked at me with her chin propped on her hand.