He read the headlines on the papers in the rack and the lead articles down as far as the fold in the paper, his face squeezed shut, pouting. There was no news. There was never any news, merely the palaver those in power released to the fat, happy masses: a new artificial lake for their motorboats, a new skirt length from the change-mongers. His eyes filled with tears. From somewhere behind him came Christmas music.
He went into the men’s room and looked in the mirror, then, after thinking about it first, washed his face and parted his hair with his fingers. They could have known what train he’d be on if they’d thought, or if they knew their own son at all; they could have known even that he’d forget to wire ahead. It was all very well to say, “Never mind, no harm done.” None had been done: He could phone from here and wait for them to come in the morning (his father driving king-like through the darkness, holding the big gray Cadillac to the center of the road, and let anybody approaching from the other direction watch out). Or he could hitchhike. No harm. It sounded calm and grown-up. But there was harm. Hypocrites, he thought again, more angrily, more defensively (he knew) than before. All the same. … His father had bought every decent milker from Ben Wolters’ barn, getting them dirt cheap because Ben was hard up, and when they were driving the loaded cattle truck home he’d laughed and said, “That poor devil don’t even know I cleaned him out!” Willard had said, “I do, though, don’t I,” squinting like Roy Rogers. He’d been fourteen then. His father had looked at him and grinned, then looked back at the road. A little farther on he’d said, “It was him or me, Willard.” Willard thought now, six years too late to say it: Never. From the minute the two of you were born it was never you, only him. Then he thought: And me. Nicked in the balls from the beginning.
And now again (meeting his eyes in the mirror) he was thinking sadly of his own son, nicked too, from before he was born, as though the old man had thought it out beforehand and set it all up. But too late now to worry about the child. Too late to worry about the mother either, not that she needed it. He swallowed and blinked hard, angry that tears had ambushed him. She’d done fine for herself, Callie had. Had somehow talked fat old Henry Soames, bad heart and all, into marrying her — by crying, maybe, or by walking into his bedroom naked, or maybe by telling her father old Henry was the one. He’d never have believed she was capable of it, three years ago; which showed how incredibly innocent he’d been. He’d thought he himself was the calculating one: He’d been tortured, lying in his bed at night, each time he left her, thinking simultaneously how beautifully innocent and good she was and what a bastard he was himself, teasing her on little by little, unable to stop himself, vile but at least knowing he was vile, believing in the goodness that was out of his reach — except that that wasn’t true; all lies; all he ever told himself, he thought, was lies. He’d never known, right to the last minute, whether what he wanted was just to make her or to marry her. She was the third, but the only virgin, the first one there’d been any question about. A question he’d never really answered, in fact, until after he’d heard she was marrying Henry Soames. He’d had to leave for school, which gave him a chance to put off deciding, and pretty soon the thing was decided for him and he saw how lucky he’d been — for once in his life. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Callie Wells had turned calculating. That happened, the minute a girl got pregnant. It was instinct, maybe. But was it possible Callie had been calculating all along? (Norma Denitz had said, “You fool, Willard, she planned the whole thing! She took you because she was chasing a bigger fish. A sick old man with money.” “I don’t believe it,” he’d said; but he did believe it, or anyway believed it for that brief moment Norma had laughed. “Hah! Male ego. If men believed the truth about women it would be the end of cohabitation.” She was wrong about that, though. He knew the truth about Norma Denitz. He meant nothing to her—“a good lay,” she said, “ships smashing in the night.” But he stayed with her. He might even marry her someday, if she got her neuroses straightened out.)
And yet Henry was no fool. Was his part, too, calculation? Was it possible that Henry himself had set it all up, hiring her at the diner when he didn’t need help — maybe even knowing she was making it with Willard? — keeping her working there late sometimes, watching every minute with his little pig’s eyes, pecker itching, as Norma claimed? He’d gone up to Henry’s place almost every night, once. To work on the jitney or to sit in the lean-to room in back and talk. His mother had distrusted it, had felt, vaguely, disgusted by it, and when Willard understood what she had in mind he was furious. “He’s a good man,” he’d said fiercely. “He wants someone to talk to, and argue with. Nothing but that.” She’d pretended to be convinced, but never again could Willard be thoroughly convinced himself. “No one over thirty is seriously concerned with ideas,” one of his instructors had said. “Ideas are either toys or tools — ways of passing the time, or ways of getting things.” Surely that was a lie.
It came to him what it was that made his stomach churn as he drew closer to home. He was going back to the land of his innocence, the sunlit garden where all those years he had believed, in spite of everything, in parental love, the goodness and innocent virtue of girls, or at any rate of certain girls, the possibility of unselfish friendship. He was going back knowing it was perhaps all bullshit, and, for all his fear that it might be bullshit, he was going back expecting to find it still there, and holy.
He decided to hitchhike. He would give the old man no advantage, no chance to speak of how he’d driven half the night through ice and snow et cetera, like a postman, no chance to whine about Willard’s forgetting to wire. Cold as it was, nobody would bother to stop for him but the drunks and fairies. Because hitchhikers could be dangerous, like any stranger. The drunks would stop because they were stupid, the fairies because they had an angle. All right.
He took a bus to the city limits and waited.
2
When Willard woke up the car was warm, moving very slowly. The radio was playing softly, Christmas music by an orchestra. The odd scent was still there, like a funeral. The man was bent forward, gripping the steering wheel with both hands tightly. There was light, curly hair on the backs of his fists. They were passing through a town. The streets were deserted and white, and the snow streaking toward the windshield made it impossible to see from one block to the next. Willard hugged himself, his legs clamped together, and watched streetlamps and dimly lighted store windows loom into sight one after another. From time to time the car floated for an instant, as it seemed, coming onto ice. Wreaths hanging over the middle of the street came into sight overhead and then vanished behind the car roof, unlighted and morose. Here and there there were parked cars along the curb, drifted-in, half-buried. Then they were out in the country again, passing unlighted farms and high, blowing drifts.