“Deeply devoted to Callie Wells. Seriously considering marriage. But at the moment—” He paused, his face gray. “At the moment, sorry to say — very sick.”
Henry’s eyes widened and he waved at Callie. “Get a pan,” he said.
She jumped, then ran to the sink for the chili pan and brought it over. George vomited. When he was through, they got him into the lean-to room in back and stretched him out on a blanket on the rug. He fell asleep at once. Henry kneeled beside him, patting his shoulder as he would a child’s, shaking his head.
“Why do people do things like that?” Callie said. She stood in the doorway, her head leaning back on the frame and her eyes narrowed. The white of her blouse stood out sharply against the pale red neon glow on the diner window behind her.
“That’s what love does to a man,” Henry said, meaning it as a joke but getting the tone wrong. He got up. He knew well enough that love was not George’s trouble. If somebody else had been there instead of Callie it would have been somebody else that George admired very much. Callie said, “Pah.”
He seated himself on the edge of the bed feeling old as the world. George Loomis looked dead, lying on the floor with the steel brace on his boot sticking out below the bottom edge of the cover. He looked as if he’d fallen there from a great height. Callie’s face was drawn to a half-wince as though she could barely stand the smell.
A kind of excitement began to rise in Henry Soames’ stomach. It was important, all at once, that Callie understand the confused and complicated emotions he’d never been able to find words for even to himself. He pulled at his right hand with his left and rocked toward her a little. “George Loomis is a fine boy,” he said. Then, in confusion, “And Wil-lard’s a fine boy, too. And you’re a fine girl, Callie.” She watched with her head drawn back a little, eyebrows lowered. And then suddenly he was babbling, telling her — and though it enraged him, he couldn’t stop — about how his mother had hated his father, about old man Kuzitski’s sister, about darkness and the sound of rain in his childhood. The words came out every which way, jumbled poetry that almost took wing but then pulled down into garble and grunt, and he got to his feet and went to her and closed his hands on her arms, hissing at her, his eyes full of tears, until, abruptly, her eyes wide, she pulled away. They stood still as two trees, hardly breathing.
“I’m sorry,” he moaned, covering his face with his clenched fists.
She didn’t move or speak for a long while. Then she said, keeping her distance, “You’d better get some sleep, Henry.”
He went back to the bed, careful not to step on George, and sat down again, as miserable as he’d ever been in his life. “I meant,” he said after a deep breath, “that people—” He let it trail off.
She stood silent, watching him as if from far away. Then she said, “Here, I’ll help you off with your shoes.”
“Don’t trouble,” he said, grieved at having made her feel she was partly to blame, or grieved because he’d made a fool of himself and had left her no way to get free from him except by a gesture of charity, the kind of gift one gives to cripples. But she ignored him and came to kneel between him and the inert George Loomis. Her collar was low, open, and he could see the slight blue-white curve of her breasts. When she glanced up and saw that he was looking at her a paleness came to her cheeks and she raised one hand instinctively to her collar. He shifted his gaze to his own huge belly and said nothing, pushed to the final humiliation.
She sat back on her heels and said, “Is that better?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You mustn’t let me keep you this late again. I can’t tell you—”
“It’s all right,” she said. Her lips formed an angry pout, but the anger seemed to have nothing much to do with him. It was as though she too, at sixteen, was growing old.
He seemed to stare at her for several minutes, meeting her eyes, but then he realized she was gone. For a moment he wasn’t quite sure she’d been here at all. In his mind he saw, all at once, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wells eyeing a nervous, stoop-shouldered trucker who wanted to marry their daughter. And he could see the glee of old man Cathey, when the service was over, kissing the bride — a dear-old-family-doctor, not a JP kiss. Henry pulled off his shirt, then sat in nothing but his trousers, trying to rearrange the words and gestures into something that would express his huge, jumbled thoughts. He clenched his fists, struggling to keep her from kneeling in front of him again in his memory. But the memory changed for the worse. In his dreams that night the Soames in his blood rose again and again like a gray-black monster out of a midnight ocean: He dreamed of himself in bed with her, misusing her again and again violently and in ungodly ways. Then, disgusted with himself, his chest burning, he found himself half-sitting on his bed with sunlight in his room and the sound of birds. George Loomis sat against the wall across from him, his eyes tight shut, both his hands clinging to his head. He opened his eyes for an instant, then snapped them shut again.
“People are no damn good,” George said.
Henry could hear the churchbell ringing very faintly, far away, at the New Carthage Salem Baptist Church.
“Oh, well,” he said, shrugging, sagging where he stood. He thought about it, or thought about things in general, then sighed and nodded. “Ah, well,” he said.
9
Willard Freund had found out about some fool contest, first prize a thousand dollars. By God he knew as much as anybody, he said, about customizing cars. He had to read Henry the contest rules in the magazine, and he had to show him the drawings he’d done this afternoon. They went to the lean-to room in back, and Henry sat down on the side of his bed and closed his eyes, listening to Willard read. Willard read slowly, like a man reading nothing but headlines or a lawyer stressing the importance of every phrase. When Henry would look at him, frowning a little, trying not to seem too skeptical, Willard would lean over the table farther, reading more slowly and insistently than before. It went on and on, stipulation on stipulation, and Henry’s mind wandered to when he’d been Willard Freund’s age. Old hollyhocks and the yellow brick houses of Putnam Settlement, over by the mountain, rose rectangular and dull in Henry’s mind. People he’d known a long time ago came back to him, and people who’d been younger then, still full of life. There was his father, huge and motionless as a boulder down in the bottom of a gorge, and Doc Cathey, parchment-skinned, grinning, swinging his serpentine walking stick, squinting over his cheekbones. There was Callie’s mother, soft and white and bosomy in those days, and Willard’s father, sly and casual, drawing out the faults of a holstein while arithmetic clicked behind his fat-lidded eyes. They’d had great hopes in those days. There were important things to do.
“Damn it, Henry, it’s a natural,” Willard said. “Christ, they’ve ruled out all the real competition. No pros, no relatives of GM or Fisher or anybody that counts! And look!” He spread out his drawings and Henry got up and went over to the chair across from Willard. He adjusted his glasses and drew the nearest of the drawings to him. A needle-nosed, wing-fendered car, high in back, tortuously drawn on yellow paper.
“I thought you wanted to drive, Willard,” Henry said.
“Hell’s bells, I could drive to the moon and back on a thousand dollars.” He jabbed at the paper with one squared, big-boned finger. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Willard,” he said. “God knows I don’t know much about designing cars.”
“What do you think, though?” He was squinting, his cheek muscles tensed, watching Henry’s face.