I lay in the tub and heard a car drive up and knew that it was the Young Executive and knew that he would come in the front door and that the woman in the couch would get up and with a quick step and small, squared, gallant shoulders carry the old face to him like a present.
And, by God, he'd better look grateful.
Two hours later I was in my car and Burden's Landing was behind me, and the bay, and the windshield wipers were making their little busy gasp and click like something inside you which had better not stop. For it was raining again. The drops swung and swayed down out of the dark into my headlights like a bead portiere of bright metal beads which the car kept shouldering through.
There is nothing more alone than being in the car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for when you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place.
You ought to invite those two you's the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you's with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other.
But meanwhile, there isn't either one of them, and I am in the car in the rain at night. This is why I am in the car: Thirty-seven years before, about 1896, the stocky, sober, fortyish man, with the steel-rimmed spectacles and the dark suit, who was the Scholarly Attorney, had gone up to a lumber town in south Arkansas to interview witnesses and conduct an investigation for a big timberland litigation. It was not much of a town, I guess. Shacks, a boarding house for the bosses and engineers, a post office, a company commissary–all rising out of the red mud–and around them the stumps stretching off, and off yonder a cow standing among the stumps, and the scream of saws like a violated nerve in the center of your head, and in the air and in your nostrils the damp, sweet-sick smell of sawn timber.
I have not seen the town. I had never even set foot inside the State of Arkansas. But I have seen the town in my head. And standing on the steps of the commissary is a girl with yellow hair hanging in two heavy braids and with large blue eyes and with the hint of a delicate, famished hollow in each cheek. Let us say that she is wearing a lettuce-green gingham dress, for lettuce-green is nice, fresh color for a blond girl to be wearing as she stands in the morning sunlight on the commissary steps and listens to the saws scream and watches a stocky man in a dark suit come picking his way soberly through the red mud left by the last big spring rain.
The girl is standing on the commissary steps because her father clerks in the commissary for the company. That is what I know about her father.
The man in the dark suit stays in the town for two months transacting his legal business. In the evening, toward sunset, he and the girl walk down the street of the town, now dusty, and move out beyond the houses, where the stumps are. I can see them standing in the middle of the ruined land, against the background of the brass-and-blood-colored summer sunset of Arkansas. I cannot make out what they say to each other.
When the man has finished his business and leaves the town, he takes the girl with him. He is a kind, innocent, shy man, and as he sits beside the girl on the red plush of the train seat, he holds her hand in his, stiffly and carefully as though he might drop and break something valuable.
He puts her in a big white house, which his grandfather had built. In front of it is the sea. That is new to her. Everyday she spends a great deal of time looking at it. Sometimes she goes down to the beach and stands there, alone, looking out at the lift of the horizon.
I know that that is true, the business of looking at the sea, for my mother once, years later when I was a big boy, said to me, "When I first came here I used to stand down at the gate and just look out over the water. I spent hours doing it, and didn't know why. But it wore off. It wore off a long time before you were born, Son."
The Scholarly Attorney went to Arkansas and the girl was on the steps of the commissary, and that is why I was in the car, in the rain, at night.
I entered the lobby of my hotel just about midnight. The clerk saw me enter, beckoned to me, and gave me a number to call. "They been giving the operator prostration," he said. I didn't recognize the number. "Said ask for a party named Miss Burke," the clerk added.
So I didn't bother to go upstairs before calling, but stepped into one of the lobby booths. "Markheim Hotel," the crisp voice answered, and I asked for Miss Burke, and there was Sadie's voice saying, "Well, by God, it's time you got here. I called Burden's Landing God knows when and they said you'd left. What did you do, walk?"
"I'm not Sugar-Boy," I said.
"Well, get on over here. Suite 905. Hell has popped."
I hung the receiver up very deliberately, walked over to the desk and asked the clerk to give my bag to a bellhop, got a drink out of the lobby cooler, bought a couple of packs of cigarettes from the sleepy sister at the lobby stand, opened a package and lighted myself one, and stood there to take a long drag and look at the blank lobby, as though there weren't any place in the world where I had to go.
But there was such a place. And I went there. Quick, once I started.
Sadie was sitting in the outside room of Suite 905, over by the telephone stand, with a tray full of cigarette butts in front of her and a coronal of smoke revolving slowly about hr head of hacked-off black hair.
"Well," she said in the tone of the matron of a home for wayward girls from inside the smoke screen, but I didn't answer. I walked straight over to her, past the form of Sugar-Boy, who snored in a chair, and grabbed a handful of that wild black Irish hair to steady her and kissed her smack on the forehead before she could God-damn me.
Which she did.
"You have no idea why I did that," I said.
"I don't care, just so it isn't a habit."
"It was nothing personal," I said. "It was just because your name is not Dumonde."
"Your name is going to be mud if you don't get on in here," she said, and twitched her head in the direction of a door.
"Maybe I'll resign," I said in my whimsey, then for a split second, with a surprising flash in my head like the flash of a photographer's bulb, I thought maybe I would.
Sadie was just about to say something, when the telephone rang and she sprang at it as though she'd strangle it with her bare hands and snatched up the receiver. As I walked toward the inner door, I heard her saying, "So you got him. All right, get him to town here…. To hell with his wife. Tell him he'll be sicker'n she is if he don't come…. Yeah, tell him–"
Then I knocked on the inner door, heard a voice, and went in.
I saw the Boss in shirt sleeves, cocked back in an easy chair with his sock-feet propped on a straight chair in front of him, and his tie askew, and his eyes bugging out and a forefinger out in the air in front of him as tough it were the stock of a bull whip. Then I saw what the snapper of the bull whip would have been flicking the flies off of if that forefinger of the Boss had been the stock of a bull whip: it was Mr. Byram B. White, State Auditor, and his long bony paraffin-colored face was oozing a few painful drops of moisture and his eyes reached out and grabbed me like the last hope.