In Milton Lumky Territory Page 11

“Like a French movie,” he said.

  “Now you see, I never would have thought of that,” she said. The suds had begun to depart. She stirred them around and they departed even more quickly. “They don’t last,” she said.

  “You should have gotten in while it was filling.”

  “Oh really? I always wait. I’m afraid I’ll get burned.”

  “Can’t you work the taps with your toes?”

  “Oh my god, what a morbid idea. How bizarre. Like a monkey.”

  All his adult life, while bathing, he had operated the taps with his toes, getting in as soon as there was enough water to cover him. Just enough so that he did not come in contact with the bare porcelain.

  “There’s one difference between men and women,” he said.

  “If that’s what you do, keep it to yourself.” Her hair had been tucked up into a plastic cap, and that, too, was different. And she scrubbed her back with a long-handled brush, and her nails with a small nylon brush. Amazing, he thought. So many differences in such a simple event as bathing.

  For half an hour she remained in the tub soaking. He had never stayed in more than a few minutes. When the water got cold, he always hopped out. But she simply sat up, turned the hot water back on, and ran enough of it to rewarm the tub.

  “You’re not afraid now,” he said. “Of getting burned.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  After she had bathed she dried herself and then wrapped herself up in a white towel the size of a rug. Stepping into woven slippers, which she had brought back from Mexico City, she walked from the bathroom to the bedroom, where she had left all her clothes neatly arranged on the bed.

  “Maybe I won’t dress,” she said. “We’re about ready to go to bed anyhow, aren’t we?” She had him go into the kitchen and see what time it was; the clock in the bedroom had stopped. The time was eleven-thirty, and he reported that to her.

  “It’s up to you,” he said. The trip from Reno had not tired him, much; after making the drive so often he had no complaints about air travel.

  “I’m emotionally exhausted,” she said, standing in her white robe, still damp from the tub. “But I feel like doing something crazy.” She tugged aside the window shade. “It’s a dark night. I feel like running out in the backyard with nothing on.”

  “There’s not much in that,” he said. “Especially after a bath. And you’d get your Asian Flu back.”

  “True,” she said. “But I do want something. Is there anything to eat? Let’s eat something. Can you cook?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I hate to cook. I’m no good at it at all. Fix something to eat,” she said coaxingly, but with overtones of firmness.

  Finally he went into the kitchen and inspected the canned and frozen food. “How about some shrimp dipped in beer batter?” They still had a can of beer from those he had brought that first day.

  “Swell,” she said, seating herself at the kitchen table in her robe, her hands folded expectantly. “I’ll let you fix it; I’ll enjoy the luxury of having someone to do things for me.”

  So he fried the shrimps in the batter and served them to her, and to himself. ‘

  “Bruce,” she said, as they ate, “I’m frankly not certain what your legal relationship to the office is. It was mine - I mean, my share of it was mine - before we got married.

  “It’s still yours,” he said, aware of that and having no desire to dispute it.

  “But,” she said, “as it expands you’ll acquire an equity in it. It won’t just be as if you worked there as an employee. It’ll become joint property. I should have Fancourt tell me the law, for your sake as well as mine. I want you to have an equity in it. In fact, I’ve been thinking of having him write up the tide so that you stand as co-owner. I’d do it like this: I’d give you the three thousand as a gift, outright, with no strings, and you’d buy Zoe’s half interest, and acquire equal title with me.”

  “Hell no,” he said, horrified.

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t earn it. All I want to do is build it up into something.”

  “But that makes you just an employee, who draws a fixed salary each month, for his work.”

  “That’s okay. I’m office manager. In charge.” In charge, he thought, of my wife and myself. There aren’t very many people to manage. But, he believed, Susan would allow him to make the business decisions: she had already shown that she wanted to lean on him.

  “You have complete authority down there,” she said, nodding her head slowly up and down. “You’ll be able to sign for things, and order things, and sign checks, and write up ads for the newspaper and so on. But you know - it’s hard for me to realize it - all our money has to come out of that place. It isn’t like it used to be; I could simply live on Walt’s earnings when the office lost money. It’s got to support two adults and one grammar school child. Two and a half people. That means it’s got to net something like five thousand a year minimum, no less.”

  ‘That would be only about four hundred a month,” he said.

  “We’ve never netted four hundred a month. In all the time we’ve operated it. You know, all of a sudden I have cold feet.” She put down her fork. “It scares me. Real panic.”

  He sat down next to her and put his arms around her, but she sat as stiffly as she possibly could. “Remember that you hired me because you considered me an expert,” he said. That seemed remote, the original business relationship between them in which she had wanted him because he worked as buyer for a large and successful discount house.

  “But you’ve never managed a place,” she said.

  That chilled him, hearing her talk like that. As if no matter what she said, about anything at all, she could in the next breath take it back, unsay it, force them to start over again at the bottom and therefore perhaps arrive at a different conclusion altogether.

  “We settled that,” he said. “That’s water under the bridge. You presumably made up your mind, so I won’t discuss it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You have to keep me from backtracking; I know it’s one of my fundamental weaknesses. Everybody says so. I tell them something, and then next day I get worried and I forget I said it.”

  “I know I can run the office,” he said shortly, “so we can drop the subject.”

  She appeared genuinely contrite.

  While he was putting the dishes into the sink, she said from the table, “Let’s go somewhere. To a cocktail lounge or somewhere. I got spoiled down in Reno. I keep wanting to rush right out and have a big time. We do have something to celebrate.”

  “What about Taffy?”

  “If we’re only gone a little while she won’t wake up,” Susan said.

  This sort of business being new to him he said, “What if she does?”

  “She won’t,” Susan said.

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He dried his hands. “Better put on something, though.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom. After some equivocation she decided on a plain dark suit. “Will this do?” she asked.

  Putting on a sports coat he told her yes it would do, and then they sneaked out of the house to the Merc. Soon they had parked in the gravel before a highway cocktail lounge and cafe. As they stepped out and up onto the long porch, he said. “Wouldn’t it be a typical blow if they asked to see my identification.”

  “You mean they might think you were too young to buy a drink?”

  “Yeah,” he said, as lightly as possible. But he wanted to prepare her in advance; it occasionally still happened.

  “Then we’d leave,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “I’d show them my identification. I’m not too young.” Or don’t you grasp that? he thought with some irony.

  The waitress served them without comment. The place seemed quiet and warm, with no noisy people. In fact there was virtually no one there except themselves. They seated themselves in a booth at the back, away from the jukebox. Presently, however, a man a
nd woman entered, both of them obviously travel-weary. They seated themselves at the bar, and as they drank their drinks they laid out a map of Idaho and Utah and began arguing in sharp, accusing voices.

  “They’ve been on the road,” Bruce said.

  “Yes,” she said, indifferently.

  The couple, middle-aged and well-dressed, could not decide which route to take across Oregon. There were three routes in all. The waitress and the bartender had never driven any of them, so they were no help.

  “I’ll go talk to them a second.” Bruce said. He got up and walked over to the bar. “I’ve driven the middle one,” he said to the couple, who stopped talking and gratefully listened. “Route 26. I’ve never been on 20, but they tell me it goes over a lot of desert. 26 is mostly through forest. It’s fine. Very little traffic, and some nice towns, and the scenery is terrific.”

  “What about 30?” the man asked.

  “The only part of 30 I know is through Idaho,” he said, “and it’s lousy. But all the roads in Idaho are lousy.”

  “We found that out,” the woman said. “We thought we’d try going across Idaho instead of Nevada this time, and we’ve lived to regret it. I’d take 40 or 50 across any time, in preference to 30. It’s like a goat trail, up the sides of canyons - and all the awful construction work. We’re completely worn out.”

  “It’ll be better,” he said. “Once you get into Oregon.”

  The man asked, “Do you live around here?”

  He started to answer, No, I live down in Reno. But that was not true, now. “I live here in Boise,” he said. “I just moved up here.” He added, “I just got married.”

  The man and woman had noticed Susan, and now they both turned to wave politely at her and say congratulations.

  The waitress, overhearing, went to the bartender, conferred with him, and then brought a tray of drinks for Bruce and Susan. “Wedding present,” the bartender said, from where he sat on his high stool.

  “Thanks,” Bruce said. He felt embarrassed.

  “What’s your wife’s name?” the woman asked.

  He told her, and the man said that their names were Ralf and Lois McDevitt and that he was in the trout fly game. His company manufactured lures for fishermen.

  Bruce invited them to join him and Susan, and they did so. The four of them chatted and joked for a time, although it seemed to him that Susan did not enter in, much; she answered politely, but she volunteered very little and her voice remained low, without luster. And she did not appear to be following the conversation.

  Ralf McDevitt asked him what business he was in, and he told him that he and Susan operated a mimeographing and typing service. And then he added that he wanted to change what was now an office doing a service into a store selling merchandise. For a long time he and McDevitt discussed retail buying and selling. He told McDevitt about the chain drugstore across the street, and the dime store, and the Japanese portable that Milt Lumky had talked to him about. Once, he noticed that Susan was frowning at him. Evidently she did not approve of him talking so openly about business, so he switched the conversation back to driving and me various highways. That remained a topic for at least half an hour. In that conversation Susan took no part at all.

  “We better get going,” he said, deciding that she was tired.

  The McDevitts congratulated them again, shook hands with him, gave them their address in California, and then Bruce and Susan said good night and left the cocktail lounge. There, near his Merc, the McDevitts’ dirt-stained Buick was parked, with a water bag dangling from the rear bumper, bugs by the thousands dead and dying on the hood, windshield, front bumpers and fenders, and, inside the car, piles of luggage.

  It made him conscious of the road. Here they stood, at the edge of the highway that crossed to the coast, into ‘and out of one state after another. Mile after mile of it… in the night darkness he could see only a few hundred feet of it. The rest vanished. But he sensed it as he walked by the McDevitts’ car.

  And he could smell the hot, thinned motor oil that had begun to leak out of the crankcase of the car. It had gone so far, had gotten so hot and been in use so long, that oil now coated the entire underside of the motor.

  Years had gone by before he had learned what that smell was. The smell appeared only when the repeated combustions had broken the oil down and nearly destroyed it; carbon had formed on the valves, and scale on the pistons, sediments had sunk down and been expelled from the crankcase through the breather pipe, and the watery crap that remained had been blown out past the oil-seal at the end of the crankshaft, to fly out at the clutch housing in the form of a spray that gradually, hour after hour, became mixed with dust and road grime and bodies of bugs and rock fragments and older oil from previous cars, and the smell of tires, and the smell of the entire car, its metal and rubber and lubrication and fabric, even the smell of the driver and passenger who had been sitting in their seats ever since sunup, getting out only to use the restrooms at gas stations and to eat at roadside diners and to ask instructions in roadside bars and to see what was making the peculiar noise on sharp curves. To Bruce, the smell had a dark nauseating undercurrent. It meant that a motor had been used and overused, and would have to be rebuilt or at least overhauled, given new rings, especially new oil rings, because oil was being forced out under the pressure that built up in the crankcase, but at the same time he thought of that motor wearing itself out on the mountain grades, in the Sierras, and on the long stretches of the desert that got it hotter and hotter; the motor had not broken, it had been worn out doing what it had been built to do. It had worn out over seventy thousand miles of road. Twenty-five times across the country …

  “What on earth possessed you to rattle on to them about out personal business?” Susan said curtly, as they entered the Merc. “I could hardly believe my ears.”

  He said, “The man’s in the trout fly business. He doesn’t even live here in town; they’re passing through. What possible harm could it do?” He had prepared himself for her accusation; he saw it coming.

  “The first rule of business is that you keep your affairs to yourself,” she said, still fuming.

  “No harm was done,” he said.

  “It’s the idea of it. What was it, the drinks? Is that why you rattled on and on? I almost got up and walked out; I would have, but I didn’t on your account.”

  They drove in silence for a time.

  “Are you going to do that continually?” she asked.

  He said, “I’ll continue to do what I feel is best.”

  “I don’t see how -” She broke off. “Anyhow, it’s done. But I hope you have better sense in the future.”

  “What’s wrong?” he said, aware that something deeper was involved.

  “Nothing,” she said crossly, stirring about fitfully, unable to get comfortable. “You certainly enjoy talking about cars and driving, don’t you? I thought you and he would never stop. It’s so late. Don’t you realize that Zoe won’t be down to open up tomorrow - we have to get there ourselves!”

  “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re tired. Calm down.”

  Suddenly, with a harsh stricken cry, she blurted out, “Listen, I’m not going to give Zoe the money. I still have it; I’m going to keep it and keep her as half-owner.”

  He felt as if he had lost control of everything around him; it was all he could do to keep driving the car. The familiar steering wheel felt in his hands as odd as if it were alive. It spun free of him, and he grabbed it back.

  “I just don’t have what it takes,” she said, in a chanting, gasping voice. “I can’t do it; I’m sorry. I really am sorry. If I don’t give her the money then it’s all off. She stays on whether she wants to or not. I know I can back out; as long as I haven’t actually turned the money over to her. I asked Fancourt that originally. But that doesn’t affect you.” She swung around in his direction; in the darkness her eyes gleamed frantically. “You’ll still manage the place; I know Zoe won’t object.”


  He could think of nothing to say. He drove.

  “It wouldn’t keep us alive,” she said. “We can’t take the chance - don’t you see, it would have to start supporting us right away, because we don’t have any money. And we would never be able to lay in any stock to sell. Do you have any money?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Can you get any?”

  “No,” he said.

  “We can’t do it,” she said, with finality so bleak and bitter that he felt more sorrow for her than anything else.

  “If Zoe stays on,” he said, “you can be sure it won’t support us. Isn’t that true?”

  “But we’d have the three thousand,” she said. “That’s what keeps preying on my mind. Once I give it to her, it’s gone forever. See? We’ll keep the three thousand; we’ll have that, and then the place won’t have to support us.”

  “Not for awhile, at least,” he said.

  Susan said, with no warning, “Bruce, let’s give up the place. Why not? Zoe can have it. We’ll offer to sell it to her, for whatever she wants to pay. Maybe for a monthly payment. How much were you making at that discount house?”

  With difficulty, he said, “About three-fifty.”

  “That wouldn’t be enough, but with the three thousand we could get along until you were earning more, and I could do some manuscript typing in the evenings. Can you get your job back?”

  For reasons unknown to him he told her the truth. “Yes,” he said.

  “Let’s do that.” She had the urgency of a child. “Let’s move down to Reno. I thought it was glorious down there. The air is much healthier down there, isn’t it? That’s why you moved down; I remember, you told me. I forget when. It’s an excellent place to bring up a child; it’s so clean and modern. Very cosmopolitan.”

  “That’s right,” he admitted.

  “How would you feel?” Sitting beside him she yearned for him to say he’d like it fine. Her posture, her tension, begged him to agree.

  “You change your mind too often,” he said.

  “Bruce,” she said, “I have to be sure of a means of support. I know you’re talented, and you know how to buy and sell, but it’s too much of a gamble. This has nothing to do with you; it has to do with how much capital we can raise, and the business itself. It’s a bad business. I know. I’ve been in it for several years; you haven’t.”