John D. MacDonald
Run the Man Down
1
The flimsy front door opened with a squeak and shut with a reverberating slam. Tommy, irritated at being trapped in the highchair too long, banged on the tray with his spoon and glared at her. Carol Ann said softly, “One minute, honey bun. That big man is home.” She turned up the gas under the pressure cooker, met Big Tom at the kitchen door. Her heart ached at the lines of weariness in his face and with her arms around him, she felt the leaden exhaustion of his body.
“They kept you a long time, darling,” she said.
He smiled in a tired way. “Every day on Robertson’s squad is just like Sunday on the farm. Nothing to do but work. I think I’m too tired to eat.”
He sat at the table in the cramped kitchen and Tommy crowed with delight, tried to express his approval of having his father home by bashing him with the sticky spoon.
“Hmm,” Tom said. “Offensive type. With the beef on you, we’ll have to use you in the line.”
“Say good night to your father,” Carol Ann ordered.
Tommy made a few strangled gurgling noises. Big Tom rumpled the silly blond hair, said, “Shove off, squarehead.” Carol Ann took Tommy out of the highchair and into the bathroom.
The pressure cooker started to chuckle and she called to Tom to turn off the gas under it. From his chair at the kitchen table he could reach the stove easily.
She made quick work of Tommy, tucked him in his crib, kissed him and snapped out the light. When she went into the kitchen, Tom had his elbows on the table, his face on his hands. His dark blond hair was still damp from the locker-room shower.
He didn’t stir until she put his plate in front of him, sat down opposite him. Then he smiled at her as he unfolded his napkin.
“A little on the beat side, darling?” she asked.
“Beat like a Dutch pudding. Every man with two left feet gets a bid to come to Carvel. Robertson’s answer is to run us through the plays a couple of hundred thousand times. If I’d run in a straight line, I’d be in Chicago.”
“How does it look for Saturday, Tom?”
“We ought to take ’em. The word is that their line is only two deep and by the second half we ought to be making yards.”
He ate listlessly, and she saw that his big brown hands trembled with fatigue. She chattered gaily about life in “the barracks”. Their small apartment was in the middle of what was called “Uncle Sugar Village”, and the partitions were so thin that they could hear the private life of the married students on either side of them. She knew that it was no time to bring up the most recent blow to their budget, the insurance premium that they had both forgotten, the final notice that had come in the afternoon mail.
After he finished dinner, he pushed his chair back, glanced at his watch. “Poppa is off to keep the home fires burning,” he said.
“Hurry back, darling,” she said, and forced herself to smile.
The little apartment was quiet after he had gone. She did the dishes quickly, went to the desk and studied the budget again. Tom was making his rounds of the oil furnaces in the campus buildings. Ten stops. He had to check the fuel level, the flame and the water pressure at each stop. She knew that it would take him close to an hour.
When he was due back, she put the bills in the back of the check book, slipped it into the bottom drawer of the desk.
The walk in the night air had seemed to revive him a little; his face didn’t look as tired. He sat in the big chair in the twelve-by-twelve living room, put the plywood board across the arms of the chair and pulled the books off the shelf beside him.
She loved him very much. He was a big man, rangy and strong, with quiet strength and good humor in his deep-set eyes. He had been raised on a fertile, prosperous Indiana farm. When he was fourteen, the farm had been “dusted out” and the memory of the poverty that followed was the bitterest thing in his life... and the urge that drove him.
They had met during the war and had been married three weeks before he had gone overseas. On one of their last few nights together, his voice hoarse with sincerity, he had told her his dream.
“Honey, after this war is over, one of the most important things in the world will be food. Food is just another way of saying good land. I’m going to come out of this war and go to college. And I’m going to be one of the guys who are going to see that our land isn’t wasted. I want to learn the chemistry of the soil, and about erosion and how to save the greatest wealth this nation has. I saw what happened to my folks. It killed my dad. It doesn’t have to happen, you know.”
She looked up from her magazine, saw his eyes intent on the lecture notes. Yes, he was fighting for his dream. And the fighting was hard and bitter. Little Tommy had come along. They had needed an extra source of income. The university was willing to provide jobs for the top football players. Tom got fifty a month for checking the oil furnaces every night.
That fifty, plus the G.I. Bill, gave them one hundred and seventy a month. His share of his mother’s maintenance was twenty-five a month. The hundred and forty-five was dangerously little. Care for Tommy would cost as much as she could earn, so there was no point in her working.
On the basis of his work on the freshman team, Tom Lamar had made the squad the second year, had justified his position by a style of play that was outstanding. In this, his third year, he was team captain.
And Carvel, more than any other school in the country, could provide him with that knowledge of the soil which he wanted.
The budget was a cruel and inexorable thing. The printed words in the magazine faded and she saw the neat columns in her mind. Sixty for food. Forty for rent. Eleven for utilities. Fifteen for insurance. Those deductions left the magnificent sum of nineteen dollars a month to cover clothes, medical care, entertainment, toothpaste, razor blades, dry cleaning, and, of course, emergencies.
The gas bill was unpaid, and there was one hundred and fifty dollars still unpaid on the doctor bills. Twenty-two owing to the dentist. One dollar and ninety cents to the drugstore. And before the end of the month, she would have to start charging groceries.
And it was her job to stay bright and gay. The cheerful little wife. Everything is just ducky, darling. We are getting along beautifully. Tommy needs new shoes. You’re almost out of socks. I have one pair of stockings left. Things are lovely.
She glanced over and saw that he had fallen asleep over the books. His head was slumped to one side, and he was breathing through his open mouth. His brown hands rested on the open pages of the notebook.
She walked quietly over, touched his shoulder. He mumbled in his sleep, then jumped. “Huh? Oh! Guess I dropped off.”
“I guess you did. Bed for you, Mr. Muscle. Come on. Up!”
He held his hand out to her. She grabbed it and tugged. He pulled her down, held her tightly. Then he got up and his walk as he went to the bedroom was like that of a drunk. He was drugged with the need for sleep. But she knew what he would do. He’d set the alarm for six, get in an hour and a half on the books before he had to go to class.
By the time she crawled in beside him, he was in the deep sleep of exhaustion.
Carvel’s average season record was four wins and five defeats. The schedule was always tougher than it should have been. Carvel belonged to the borderline of commercialized college football. The alumni groups did a lot of scouting and various alumni scholarships were set up. Usually the first team was all composed of boys who went to Carvel because they had been sought out and urged to go there.
But about half the second team and two-thirds of the rest of the squad were on an ‘amateur’ basis.