“You sound like an ad for door-to-door shoe salesmen.”
“I’m not kidding, I’m serious, I mean it,” Vince said, meaning it.
“Really?”
“Sure,” Vince said. “The world is waiting for me. Maybe I’ll do some traveling. Paris, Rome, Berlin. The Mysterious Orient. The South Seas. Latin America. All over the globe, challenging chances await earnest young men.”
“You’re not kidding,” his father said, glowing.
“Nope.”
“You’re serious,” his father said, beaming.
“Right you are.”
“You mean it,” his father said, bursting with pride. “My boy. My son, out for glory. A chip off the old block, that’s what you are. I should have known it the minute you sold the car for six hundred dollars. You’ve got a head on your shoulders, Vince. A real head.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I’m proud of you, Vince. Really proud. Where are you going? Any ideas?”
“I’m not sure, Dad.”
“Of course,” his father said. “Of course. Got to feel your way around. Got to see which way the wind is blowing. Got to keep both feet on the ground, your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel, all that. Hell of a position to get any work done in, but you’ll manage.”
“Right.”
“When do you figure on leaving?”
“Well,” Vince said, “I was thinking of getting started tomorrow morning.”
“That’s pretty soon, Vince.”
“I know, but—”
“But you’re one hundred percent right, boy. No time like the present. Can’t let the grass grow under your feet. You know what they say about rolling stones. Don’t gather any moss. But who wants moss? Right?”
“Right.”
“Better let me tell your mother,” Vince’s father said. “You know how mothers are. Probably be all upset that her boy is leaving her. That’s the way mothers are. They sort of carry on about things like that. A tendency they have.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“She’ll probably cry,” his father said.
She did.
Vince’s father didn’t get enthusiastic too often, but when he did, his enthusiasm was contagious. Before she quite knew what was happening, Vince’s mother agreed that Vince should go out into the cruel world. She wasn’t quite sure why she thought so, but she was the type of woman who had most of her decisions made for her. She was a fine woman, a good mother and all that, but Vince’s father was the real brains of the family.
Which didn’t say too much for the family.
It worked out, though. Before too long, Vince had a suitcase packed and a wallet full of money. He still had most of the hundred and a half from the car, plus a little extra left over from the Saralee episode, plus the extra hundred his father pressed on him as a going-away present. When morning came, he was on his way to the bus depot. And when the bus left, he was on it.
The bus was bound for New York. That seemed like a good place to start. He had to avoid the hotel where he was known as James Blue, but in a city the size of New York that shouldn’t be too hard to do. He also had to avoid Rhonda, who lived in New York, but the chances of running into her seemed pretty small. And if he did see her, he could always cross the street. It wouldn’t be much trouble.
The bus moved along, the wheels churning, and Vince hummed softly to himself. The crap he had fed his father had been, strangely enough, partly true. He felt like a pioneer, a Forty-Niner heading for gold in California. Not many pioneers rode the bus, he knew, but times were changing. It was a brand-new world, a brave new world. His world.
The sun was up and the roads were clear. The bus went along at a good clip and Vince could hear the wheels singing a little song to him. He couldn’t make out the words, but it was a cheerful, optimistic little song and he was happy.
Modnoc faded off into the distance. New York was ahead of him.
Nine
Well, now, the best laid plans of mice and men, of mouse and man, of moose and Mau Mau, mink and marigold, as the trite and true old phrase doth say, often go astray.
Well, there was New York, and here came Vince, roaring down from the upstate foothills like a one-man tidal wave, like a timebomb ready to go off in any girl who got in his way. Well, and then here was New York and here was Vince, in the middle of Manhattan with a suitcase in his hand and a gleam in his eye. Well, and then there was New York, and where was Vince?
Vince was in Boston.
The tale of how Vince ricocheted and rebounded, how he was bank-shotted off the biggest city in the world and basketed in Boston, is one of those long sad stories without even a happy ending to make it all worthwhile. Or much of any ending at all, except that he went to Boston.
It started with the Port Authority Terminal where the bus emptied, Vince with it. He went out to the street, which was Eighth Avenue, with 41st Street to his left and 40th Street to his right. So he turned left, having had seventeen years of not going right and not wanting to change things at this late date, and a block and a half with the suitcase brought him to 42nd Street, which is the hub of half-a-dozen very strange worlds, most which Vince had no interest in.
But he had to turn right now, because the bright lights were off to the right, and there was nothing off to the left but some more street and the river, and he was too young for the river. So he turned right, in spite of himself, and lugged the suitcase toward the milling people and the flashing lights.
And a girl walked by him, crying her pretty blue eyes out.
“Hey!” That was Vince, and he said it again: “Hey!” And dropped the suitcase and started back and touched her on the arm and said it again. “Hey. What’s the matter?”
“He’s a bastard,” the girl said, and went right on weeping. A good-looking girl she was, what the pulp-writers call class, and she was wearing a short-sleeved, full-skirted, pale blue dress of the kind that’s too expensive for Saks to carry, and she had a nice young body like Spring and soft blonde hair that had been molded by the loving touch of a professional hairdresser, and even though she was weeping and strolling down 42nd Street past midnight, she had the look of lots of money, of Newport money and Palm Beach money, of private estate money and private girl’s college money.
Vince took all this in while he was saying, “Who’s a bastard?”
She stopped walking then, but she didn’t stop weeping, and when she turned to face Vince, he saw that all that loveliness had been callously flawed by a swift right to the eye. And not too long ago either, because the swelling hadn’t yet finished and the skin around the eye was only just beginning to darken. But she was going to wake up in the morning with the kind of shiner that looks cute on boys of ten but distinctly out of place on girls of twenty, particularly rich young girls who look like Spring.
“Archer is,” she told him, which was the answer to his question, but he’d already forgotten all about that question and instead said, “Hey! Who hit you?”
“Archer,” she said again, still crying. And started walking again.
“Hey, listen!” Vince cried. He had done a number of things in his young life, but the attempted destruction of beauty hadn’t been among them, and the stirrings of a brand-new indignation was causing a flurry in his chest. “Hey, listen!” he cried. “Where is this guy? He can’t do a thing like that to you!” He was trotting along after her, and glanced back once at his suitcase, sitting in the middle of the empty sidewalk, then trotted on because suitcases always come second after beauty.
“He’s a bastard,” she said again, and the word seemed as out-of-place on her lips as the shiner did on her eye.
“Listen!” Vince cried, caught up in the romance of the thing. “Tell me where he is! Tell me where he is, and I’ll take care of him for you!”