Beverly seemed to be crying. Danny licked his dry lips.
“Hey — ma petite chou-fleur... No need to cry. You know your Danny’s a survivor...”
She stood up and leaned her face down close to his. The fragrance of her perfume washed over him. She was smiling through her tears.
“Damn you, Danny,” she said in a soft voice, “I could just about kill you for—”
“Somebody just about did,” said Danny.
And went back to sleep. Realizing, with wonder, that he dearly loved his little partner Beverly. Wasn’t that strange?
O’B parked his car and got out, stood beside it, listening to the two guitars. Dueling guitars. Hardly. Sounded like somebody was learning chords.
John Little was sitting on an upended wooden apple box in the middle of the empty room, stroking slow chords from his guitar. Facing him on another apple box was a kid of about 12, guitar in hand. Trying to reproduce those chords.
John Little laid aside his guitar. “Hi, Red,” he said. He stood up. “Lesson’s over, Jimmy.”
The boy gave him a $5 bill. When he had gone with his guitar, Little lifted up his apple crate. There was a half-empty bottle of bourbon under it. He handed his guitar to O’B.
“John, if there was any way—”
“Hell, man, I’m the one hasn’t paid for it.”
O’B put the guitar on the backseat, drove away. It had clouded up on his way out; now it had started to rain. Half a mile down the road, he used a logging track to turn around.
John Little’s house was dark, though the fog and drizzle made it like late afternoon. Carrying the guitar, O’B clumped back into the unlit living room. Little was sitting on his apple crate with his bottle. “They cut the power today,” he said.
O’B handed him the guitar. “You’d already skipped out when I got here this morning,” he said. John Little strummed, sang:
He paused to thrust the whiskey bottle at O’B. O’B said, “Shit!” in a disgusted voice, “no good deed ever goes unpunished.” And took a long drink, and fell off the wagon.
John Little strummed his guitar, they sang together:
Dan Kearny went up the walk and knocked at the door. As he waited for it to be answered, he looked around. The place wasn’t very well kept up. The grass was shaggy, the hedges unkempt. The house, a rather pleasant pale lemon California bungalow, needed to be scraped and repainted. The cherry tree in the corner of the yard still awaited its spring pruning — due in February and here it was May.
Which all went to show that the man of the house was a careless homeowner and a lousy husband to boot.
The door was opened by a small, vivacious, dark-haired woman, ten years younger than Kearny’s 52. He felt an unaccustomed and suspicious moisture at the corners of his eyes.
“Goddammit, Jeannie,” he said, his voice coming out a bit gruffer than he had intended because of the unexpected tears on his cheeks. “We gotta talk.”
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Daniel,” she said gravely, and opened the door wider so he could pass through into his home.