I don’t really like liquor, but all afternoon I lay in bed and drank, trying to get up some interest in what was going to happen to me, and by six o’clock I had a bellyful of booze, but I didn’t any more give a damn than I had before. I shaved and washed up, and walked over to the International for dinner. As I walked through the bar it fell quiet as a church, and in the dining room I don’t think there was one person that wasn’t watching me as I went to my table. There was something about the way they acted that told me things were going on that I didn’t know about, and still it seemed to me my whole insides were made of lead. I was due for work at eight, and at a quarter of I stopped in the lobby for a cigar, then started down the street.
As I turned the corner of C for the Esperanza I noticed men standing all up and down the boardwalk on the other side, like they were waiting for something. Then, on my side, I noticed not one human being was in sight. I had the boardwalk to myself as far as the Esperanza, but in front of that Raymond Brewer was walking, with Red Caskie beside him, and two other men following behind.
I stopped. From things being said on the other side I knew they had spotted me. I don’t know if I felt scared, or how I felt. Since killing that man I hadn’t felt anything, except some horrible sense of guilt, and for the rest of it just this vacant pain. I stood there, trying to make myself go on. My feet wouldn’t move. I turned around, started back to Union. “Well, that yellow son of a bitch.”
I climbed up Union to B and walked home. But when I felt in my pocket for my key, a rifle shot popped down the street and raw splinters jumped out of the front door, where it was lit up by the gaslight on the corner. I drew and turned as quick as anybody ever did, but there was nothing there but brick. I looked at every doorway and window, but couldn’t see anything. I went inside and clumped up the long board tunnel to the floor where the rooms started. Mrs. Finn came out of the front parlor. “What was the shooting, Roger?”
“I couldn’t see.”
“Was it intended for you?”
“It might have been. Your door got ventilated.”
“Don’t you think it would be safer for you — just so they can’t keep track so easy where you are — if you moved somewhere else?”
“No I don’t.”
“I’ll have to have more for your room.”
“How much more?”
“Instead of six dollars I want ten.”
“All right.”
I went in the room, lit the lamp, and started to undress. Then I figured the lamp was a little too much of a good thing, if anybody happened to be watching, so I blew it out. Then I felt around in the dark for my pint of wheat, and had the last drink out of it. Then I lay down on the bed. I lay there quite a while, without dressing or undressing, except pretty soon I took off my coat. I tried to be ashamed I had run out on Raymond Brewer, and to be afraid of Renny, if he was the one that had shot at me. I couldn’t get up any interest about either one. They didn’t seem real and they didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. And then all of a sudden I was off that bed like I had shot up on springs and pulling the door shut after me. If it was imagination I didn’t know, but it seemed to me I had seen something coming through that window, from the sidewalk. I took a chair from the landing, jammed it against the door, and went down to the street. Mrs. Finn was looking at me from the landing as I went downstairs with no hat, no coat, and no gun. When I started to undress, I had hung it where I had always hung it, on the bedpost, so it was less than a foot from my head. But when I jumped, I didn’t have it.
On Taylor Street, up from the Enterprise, was a miners’ hangout, and I went in there and ordered beer. But from the way they acted when I came in, I knew some of them had been in the crowd in front of the Esperanza, and when a couple of them went out, it was no trouble to figure what they were up to, and that wasn’t so good. Because by then I had figured out pretty well why I had been acting like I had, which was a pretty funny way to act when you stop to think about it, because up to then I had faced a few slugs, and while I own up I was just as scared as anybody, I claim I wasn’t a hell of a sight scareder. The thing was, Brewer meant nothing to me, and Renny didn’t, and Biloxi didn’t. But Morina did, and no matter who hollered I was yellow, I had to face her, and tell her what I had done, and why I had done it. And yet she was on her way to San Francisco, and couldn’t get back for a week, and here I’d got myself in a hole where if I didn’t do something pretty quick I wouldn’t even live through the night.
The sergeant came in, the one that had talked to Brewer and got called down for forgetting that getting rich for your country is more important than fighting for it. He gave the miners the old recruiting spiel, about how wonderful the army grub is, and how the new uniforms have just come in, and how good-looking they are. He let them feel of the one he was wearing, to see what fine wool it is. And then I thought of the United States Government, and how it doesn’t let its soldiers get killed until the proper time comes. “Well, Bud, where do you take these rookies of yours, after you get them?”
“First we bed them down in our recruiting office in Gold Hill, in a back room we got, then when we get a bunch we take them to San Francisco.”
“That back room, is it under guard?”
“That’s not for a soldier to worry about.”
“I want to know.”
“There’s a sentry out there.”
“Then let’s go.”
And an hour later, when I sat on the edge of a bunk with the stuff they’d given me, I knew I was as low as I could get, that I would put this uniform on, instead of the one that was mine, for the sake of one more look at something that had brought me nothing but misery since I’d seen her. And next day, when Raymond Brewer saw me with a squad in dungarees, and laughed at me, and I did nothing about it, for the first time in my life I felt yellow.
“Duval?”
“Yo.”
“Visitor.”
She was out there in the dark, still in her travelling dress. I could feel a drawstring tighten around my stomach as I went over to her, because I knew my piece by heart, but I didn’t know what hers was, or whether it was engraved on a bullet. But when I got to her, it looked like there were two drawstrings out there, the tightest one around her face. It was all twisted, like she was in pain, and it was hard to remember she’d ever been pretty. She took hold of me and looked in my eyes, like she was trying to see in them something she had to find out about. It was quite some time before she spoke, and when she did it was in a whisper. “You did it, didn’t you, Roger?”
“Who do you think did it?”
“I know it was you, but tell me.”
“I killed that bastard, I meant to kill him, and I’ll kill any other bastard you sell yourself to, and if there’s just one more bastard I’ll kill you.”
“Kiss me, Roger.”
“...What?”
“I never knew there was any such feeling as this.”
“The only feeling you get is from money.”
“Not like this. That you’d kill him. For me.”
I held her tight and kissed her, and she didn’t kiss like she had in Sacramento, when she always seemed to be laughing at me, but in a hot, hungry way, with tears in her eyes. “I can’t pass this night without you, Roger.”