“What, Connie?”
“If this time you’d called me Mrs. Mulaney, I’d give you a hit right in the head. You got an instinct for those things, haven’t you?”
“For what?”
“For what to call people to get the right effect.”
“Do I seem to plan everything that carefully?”
“No, dear. You do it cute. I’m old enough to be your mother. You know that?”
“That’s a lie!”
“Not if I was from Kentucky, believe me. I don’t know if I’d want a son like you. It would scare me, a little.”
“Why would it scare you?”
“You’ve got all your ducks in a row. That’s an old expression.”
“It may look it to you, Connie, but believe me, my ducks are scattered around every which way.”
She peered at him. “What’d I want to say to you anyhow?”
“I guess you’re telling me I’m tricky.”
Her white hair looked slightly unkempt. The drinks had sagged her face. “Y’know, dear, there’s a new kind of people in the world,” she said. “Can’t understand them. Smooth quiet people. Exactly so many drinks. Right clothes and right car and right opinions. Don’t you get bored with yourself?”
“Doesn’t everybody, Connie?”
“Me? Four kids married, three grandbabies. I don’t get bored with me. Or Jesse.” She leaned closer and looked at him with a slurred challenge. “You know I still like to go to bed with him? You young ones, you think there’s something nasty about that, don’t you?” She patted her stomach. “Stayed nice for him. As nice as I could. You know what it is, dear? It’s... it’s a giving sweetness. It’s cozy. It’s like saying all the years are right. Will you have that, when you’re an old hulk like my Jesse?”
“I hope so.”
“I’m still his best girl. That’s a good thing... isn’t it?”
“It’s a good thing, Connie.”
“Ah, how well I know him, Floyd! How well! He wants to be a tricky son of a bitch. He wants to be cute too. But it doesn’t work for him. He’s trying something now. Do you know that? I do. I don’t know what it is, but he feels guilty about it. It could have something to do with you. He’s scared of you, dear. We both are. You’re one of the new kind of people.”
“I don’t want you to feel like that.”
“You watch out for my Jesse. What was I saying to you? There was something I wanted to... oh, it’s him and Jud telling lies to each other as if everything was all right. I love him. I told you that, didn’t I? But he has to keep tearing himself apart, because no one will tell him. I shouldn’t talk to you. But it’s in your hands, isn’t it? You could be my son, and it’s in your hands and nobody knows what you’re thinking. I shouldn’t say these things to you. I’m an old drunken woman, and I don’t know how to handle the new people. I say the wrong things. Hell with it. So I can say the wrong things to you. What’ll happen to my Jesse?”
“I don’t know, Connie.”
She looked at him with a great intensity. “What’ll you say should happen? The new kind of people never tell you anything. It all comes out later on punch cards. You got the guts to tell me?”
He looked out across the ramps and terraces, the pools and plantings. The sun was low, and the slant of its golden light accentuated the tan of the few who were left, the last ones who were leaving. The pale flanks of the hotel structures rose toward the graying sky. His heart felt like a stone, but somewhere within him was a pride without mercy.
“I don’t know what they’ll do,” he said, making himself look directly into her eyes. “But I’ll report what I believe. That’s what I’m paid for. I’ll say that due to the seniority policies of AGM, he got about three big steps higher than he could have gone on merit. I’ll say the job he holds is so far beyond his capacities, he makes wild swings in the dark. I’ll say that the whole structure, personnel, policy, recruiting, control methods, needs a complete revamp, and it will be facilitated by getting him entirely out of the picture as soon as possible.”
She looked at him and tried to speak, moistened her lips and tried again. “I... I’ve known that. He has too, I think.” She brought her hands up to her face and sat with her chin lowered.
“He won’t be told that way,” Hubbard said.
“Did I have to be told that way?”
“Maybe I was wrong, Connie.”
She dropped her hands and snuffled once. “Oh, you couldn’t be wrong, dear! You new people are always right. There’s always a reason. It’s never evident in the beginning.” Her face twisted. “You know what I miss? Kindness. There used to be a lot of it around. When there weren’t any reasons for it, I guess. But now it’s a different kind of thing. You don’t want kindness from somebody who won’t bring their own troubles to you. Because if it goes just one way, it’s like pity. It’s like social workers or something. We’ve got to find our way through a maze, and you people look down through the glass and turn the current off and on to sting our feet, and you smile at us when we come out right.”
“Connie, it isn’t like that.”
She gave him a smile almost of triumph. “But that’s the way it feels, dear. To us. So what the hell difference does it make how it feels to you? There’s a chart someplace where you can look Jesse up, and there’s a footnote to turn to page seventy-eight, paragraph four, and there I am. You see, dear, if it kills him, there’s nothing I can do to you. Nothing.”
Jesse and Jud Ewing came strolling toward them, laughing at a joke. Jesse said, “Well, honey, we bombed them all, and you too, it looks like, and the party is over. What have you been bending Floyd’s ear about?”
Hubbard felt sudden tension. “Oh, I’ve just been rambling on and on, boring Floyd with stories of the old days.”
“It’s been very interesting,” Hubbard said.
“Well, let’s all get prettied up, and we’ll see you in the suite, Floyd. You drop in too, Jud.”
Mr. and Mrs. Mulaney headed off toward the hotel.
Ewing said, surprisingly, “I was so damn bad off in love with her a whole damn lifetime ago.”
“You were?”
“I worked for him in Nashville. I was single, and I used to get asked over for dinner. She was beautiful then, in that way they have when you can tell they’re going to stay beautiful until the day they die. Without her, Jesse would still be making sleeper jumps and lugging a sample case. I married twice, pretending I was marrying her, but those things don’t work out. And do you know something? This is the first time in thirty years I ever saw her get tight. Jesse always did enough drinking for two.”
“She’s a fine woman, Mr. Ewing.”
Ewing gave him a long shrewd look. “But there comes a time when finally there just isn’t any last string left on the bow. See you around, Mr. Hubbard.”
Hubbard picked up his towel, lotion and sunglasses and followed slowly. Waiters moved through the dusk light, picking up glasses, moving furniture back where it belonged. A muscular boy was folding the trampolines and hooding them for the night. Sweeping crews were moving across the sun cot area. Other crews were vacuuming the pools. The outdoor bars were closing.
It was easy, Jan, he said to himself. Nothing to it. Like falling off a log. Like falling off the top of a sixty-foot log. Why, with the edge on my little hatchet, I could shave with it.
Eight
Rooms 852 and 854 were interconnecting, but the door was closed and locked between them when Dave Daniels led Fred Frick into 852 and shut the door.
“Now we’ll have a nifty little drink,” Dave said.