He added, after a time, “I don’t dare hope she’ll divorce me. She doesn’t believe in divorce, but there’s a chance, maybe, if she can come to believe that it would be better for her, too. It would be, of course. She’ll never be happy living only to spite me. It’s funny about Elaine. I think that if she’d never married me she’d have been all right. She wouldn’t be so filled with vengeance and petty spite. Maybe even yet she will have some kind of decent life with a little softness in it.” A gust of wind blew a piece of newspaper against the windshield. It shivered there for a minute and then lurched wildly off down the street. “Where would you like to have breakfast?”
“Any place that’s open,” Ruby said.
They drove down Main Street. The sun had already risen and in the distance they saw the sheen of the ocean. But the town looked dead, parched by the hot wind. Along the curb were abandoned cars under a pall of dust. Two women were hurrying across the street heading into the wind, shielding their eyes with their hands. An old man sat on a bench at a bus stop, like a victim resigned to the sacrifice, his legs apart, his lunch pail resting on his stomach, his head thrown back with his neck ready for the knife. The old man moved, coughed, spat into the gutter. A cardboard box rolled down the sidewalk and a piece of ripped awning flapped against a store window. A painted sign swung in the wind, squeaking on its hinges. The supple palm trees leaned to the ocean, their fronds streaming out like seaweed, and the air was filled with a continuous rustling noise.
It wasn’t a very high wind, like the wind that came in from the ocean and blew the fog off the top of the mountains and cluttered the beaches with kelp and stranded starfish and pieces of tar from the underwater oil wells. Gordon liked the sea winds, they were natural, they suited the town. But the desert wind was an intruder, an alien from the other side of the mountain. Sometimes it hung around for days, like an unwelcome guest in the house who produced tension but must be tolerated. Gordon felt the tension in his hands as they gripped the steering wheel, and in his throat which seemed swollen and grimy.
Yet he was grateful to the wind, too. It was a good day to be leaving, a day when the town looked unnatural, squalid, hidden under scurf. He let his mind dwell, deliberately, on the things he didn’t like in the town. Over on Gioconda Street, where the highway bisected the town, lay the nucleus of the slum section. Here lived the Negroes, the Mexicans, and the remnants of what had once been a large Chinese community, in sagging shacks and chicken houses and barns. These slums were worse than anything he had ever seen even in the large cities. If they had existed in Chicago or New York, at least some attention might have been drawn to them, but here they were ignored. The rickety children played in the dirt on Gioconda Street and went to school when they had clothes and shoes to wear, or to the General Hospital if they got sick enough. The town bulged with doctors and elaborate clinics, but many of the residents of the slums felt that it was easier to die than to make the long trek out to the General Hospital and wait all day for a turn, only to be told to eat more eggs and T-bone steaks, take a long rest free from worry, go to Arizona, wear a custom-made truss, buy contraceptives, take vitamin pills. Every Saturday morning they came to Gordon’s office for free dental treatment and Gordon had come to dread this day in the week because he, too, had to give them impossible advice: If you could try to keep Susie off carbohydrates, Mrs. Haley. Sure, sure, Doc. Say, I still got this awful pain in my side and I been told I oughta have an operation on my insides but I got my cleaning jobs to do, I can’t take no time off with all those mouths to feed.
He forced himself to think of Mrs. Haley. When she first came to the office she had the holes in her teeth plugged with candle wax. She had all her children with her, for moral support, and Gordon had given them each a ride in the dental chair, two at a time.
Thinking of Mrs. Haley, he was sure that he hated this pretentious little town. It wore culture on its head like an ageing, kittenish dowager, wearing a picture hat with artificial roses, and needing a good hot bath.
He was glad to be leaving.
The only place they could find open was the lunch room across from the S. P. station. The counter was already half-filled with railroad men. They talked back and forth to each other and to the two waitresses. One of the men took a snapshot out of his wallet and passed it to the stout waitress.
“Gee whiz,” she exclaimed. “They’re cute! They’re as cute as bugs! You musta had a good-looking iceman.” She handed the picture to Ruby. “Pass it along, will you? It’s Joe’s twins.”
Joe’s twins were standing in a playpen wearing identical expressions of surprise.
“They are cute,” Ruby said. “Aren’t they, Gordon?”
Gordon glanced briefly at the picture and passed it on.
“They don’t like to have their pictures took,” Joe explained. “Maybe scared of the camera.”
“G’wan,” said the waitress. “You probably beat them. G’wan, admit it.”
“You’re a great kidder,” Joe said.
The waitress brought Ruby and Gordon some scrambled eggs. She had a good-natured, careless attitude that reminded Gordon of Hazel. He hadn’t, until that moment, thought of trying to get some money through Hazel. Hazel wouldn’t have any herself, not enough anyway, but if he gave her a check she might be able to cash it through George Anderson.
Without tasting his eggs, he went to the phone booth and dialed Hazel’s number.
12
George didn’t get up till noon on Sundays, and when the phone started ringing before eight he struggled out of bed, cursing.
“George? It’s Hazel. Are you all right?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you take things like last night kind of hard and I wanted to make sure you were feeling all right because I’ve got something important to ask you.”
“Ask ahead.”
“I need some money for a friend of mine. Today. Right now.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“You give me a pain,” George said.
“Listen to the deal first before you blow a fuse.”
“I’m listening.”
“Well, this friend of mine is going on a holiday. He intended to leave tomorrow but he’s got this chance to leave today and he needs five hundred dollars. He’s giving me a check and I’d like you to lend me the money so I can give it to him, and then tomorrow morning I’ll cash the check at the bank and pay you back. See?”
“It sounds damned peculiar. I can scare up the money, maybe, but why the complications?”
“Because. Will you do it, George?”
“No.”
“For heaven’s sake, why not?”
“If your friend wants five hundred dollars bring him over here. Then if he has an honest face and a reasonable balance in his bank book, I’ll cash a check for him.”
“No. It’s better the way I suggested.”
“Why?”
“Well, he has a joint account with his wife, see, and his wife doesn’t know yet that he’s going away. If the check’s made out to me I can be at the bank sharp at ten when the doors open, and if I see her there I can just push ahead of her.”
“Holy catfish.”
“That’s what he told me,” Hazel said, stubbornly. “If his wife suspects that he’s going away she might try and draw out all the money before this check can be cashed. Now do you understand?”
“It sounds like a perfect set-up for you to keep your nose out of.”
“Wait a minute, I want to close the dining-room door. I think Josephine and Harold are getting up.” There was a pause. “It’s all right now. They can’t hear.”