"I–I reckon not, Bob," I said. "But thanks, thanks a heap."
"That's all right, son. You change your mind, come on over. No matter what time it is."
Amy'd been taking in everything; impatient, curious. I hung up and slumped down on the bed, and she sat up beside me.
"For heaven's sake! What was that all about, Lou?"
I told her. Not the truth, of course, but what was supposed to be the truth. She clapped her hands together.
"Oh, darling! That's wonderful. My Lou solving the case!.. Will you get a reward?"
"Why should I?" I said. "Think of all the fun I had."
"Oh, well…" She drew away a little, and I thought she was going to pop off; and I reckon she wanted to. But she wanted something else worse. "I'm sorry, Lou. You have every right to be angry with me."
She lay back down again, turning on her stomach, spreading her arms and legs. She stretched out, waiting, and whispered:
"Very, very angry…"
Sure, I know. Tell me something else. Tell a hophead he shouldn't take dope. Tell him it'll kill him, and see if he stops.
She got her money's worth.
It was going to cost her plenty, and I gave her value received. Honest Lou, that was me, Let Lou Titillate Your Tail.
14
I guess I must have got to sweating with all that exercise, and not having any clothes on I caught a hell of a cold. Oh, it wasn'ttoo bad; not enough to really lay me low; but I wasn't fit to do any chasing around. I had to stay in bed for a week. And it was kind of a break for me, you might say.
I didn't have to talk to a lot of people, and have 'em asking damned fool questions and slapping me on the back. I didn't have to go to Johnnie Pappas' funeral. I didn't have to call on his folks, like I'd have felt I had to do ordinarily.
A couple of the boys from the office dropped by to say hello, and Bob Maples came in a time or two. He was still looking very pretty peaked, seemed to have aged about ten years. We kept off the subject of Johnnie-just talked about things in general-and the visits went off pretty well. Only one thing came up that kind of worried me for a while. It was on the first-no, I guess the second time he came by.
"Lou," he said, "why in hell don't you get out of this town?"
"Get out?" I was startled. We'd just been sitting there quietly, smoking and passing a word now and then. And suddenly he comes out with this. "Why should I get out?"
"Why've you ever stayed here this long?" he said. "Why'd you ever want to wear a badge? Why didn't you be a doctor like your dad; try to make something of yourself?"
I shook my head, staring down at the bedclothes. "I don't know, Bob. Reckon I'm kind of lazy."
"You got awful funny ways of showin' it, Lou. You ain't never too lazy to take on some extra job. You put in more hours than any man I got. An' if I know anything about you, you don't like the work. You never have liked it."
He wasn't exactly right about that, but I knew what he meant. There was other work I'd have liked a lot better. "I don't know, Bob," I said, "there's a couple of kinds of laziness. The don't-want-to-do-nothin' and the stick-in-the-rut brand. You take a job, figuring you'll just keep it a little while, and that while keeps stretchin' on and on and on. You need a little more money before you can make a jump. You can't quite make up your mind about what you want to jump to. And then maybe you make a stab at it, you send off a few letters, and the people want to know what experience you've had-what you've been doin'. And probably they don't even want to bother with you, and if they do you've got to start right at the bottom, because you don't know anything. So you stay where you are, you just about got to, and you work pretty hard because you know it. You ain't young anymore and it's all you've got."
Bob nodded slowly. "Yeah… I kinda know how that is. But it didn't need to be that way with you, Lou! Your dad could've sent you off to school. You could've been a practicin' doctor by this time."
"Well," I hesitated, "there'd been that trouble with Mike, and Dad would've been all alone, and… well, I guess my mind just didn't run to medicine, Bob. It takes an awful lot of study, you know."
"There's other things you could do, and you lack a lot of bein' broke, son. You could get you a little fortune for this property."
"Yeah, but…" I broke off. "Well, to tell the truth, Bob, I have kind of thought about pulling up stakes, but-"
"Amy don't want to?"
"I haven't asked her. The subject never came up. But I don't reckon she would."
"Well," he said slowly, "that's sure too bad. I don't suppose you'd… No, you wouldn't do that. I don't expect no man in his right mind would give up Amy."
I nodded a little, like I was acknowledging a compliment; agreeing that I couldn't give her up. And even with the way I felt about her, the nod came easy. On the surface, Amy had everything plus. She was smart and she came from a good family-which was a mighty important consideration with our people. But that was only the beginning. When Amy went down the street with that round little behind twitching, with her chin tucked in and her breasts stuck out, every man under eighty kind of drooled. They'd get sort of red in the face and forget to breathe, and you could hear whispers, "Man, if I could just have some of that."
Hating her didn't keep me from being proud of her.
"You trying to get rid of me, Bob?" I said.
"Kind of looks as though, don't it?" he grinned. "Guess I did too much thinkin' while I was laying around the house. Wondering about things that ain't none of my business. I got to thinkin' about how riled I get sometimes, having to give in to things I don't like, and hell, I ain't really fit to do much but what I am doin'; and I thought how much harder it must be on a man like you." He chuckled, wryly. "Fact is, I reckon, you started me thinking that way, Lou. You kind of brought it on yourself."
I looked blank, and then I grinned. "I don't mean anything by it. It's just a way of joking."
"Sure," he said, easily. "We all got our little pe-cul-yearities. I just thought maybe you was gettin' kind of saddle-galled, and-"
"Bob," I said, "what did Conway say to you there in Fort Worth?"
"Oh, hell"-he stood up, slapping his hat against his pants-"can't even recollect what it was now. Well, I guess I better be-"
"He said something. He said or did something that you didn't like a little bit."
"You reckon he did, huh?" His eyebrows went up. Then they came down and he chuckled, and put on his hat. "Forget it, Lou. It wasn't nothing important, and it don't matter no more, anyways."
He left; and, like I said, I was kind of worried for a while. But after I'd had time to think, it looked to me like I'd fretted about nothing. It looked like things were working out pretty good.
I was willing to leave Central City; I'd been thinking about leaving. But I thought too much of Amy to go against her wishes. I sure wouldn't do anything that Amy didn't like.
If something should happen to her, though-and something was going to happen-why, of course, I wouldn't want to hang around the old familiar scenes any more. It would be more than a softhearted guy like me could stand, and there wouldn't be any reason to. So I'd leave, and it'd all seem perfectly natural. No one would think anything of it.
Amy came to see me every day-in the morning for a few minutes on her way to school, and again at night. She always brought some cake or pie or something, stuff I reckon their dog wouldn't eat (and that hound wasn't high-toned-he'd snatch horseturds on the fly), and she hardly nagged about anything, that I remember. She didn't give me any trouble at all. She was all sort of blushy and shy and shamed like. And she had to take it kind of easy when she sat down.