“Then she’s too easily impressed. That girl doesn’t know—”
“Enough, you fool!” said Mary McKenzie bitterly. “We’ve got a son who did his duty as he saw it and you’ve never let him forget that you think he’s a stupid, contemptible fascist. Your only son. So he doesn’t come here anymore. He won’t come here. Your opinion is just your opinion, Wallace — you can’t seem to get it through your thick head that other people can honorably hold different opinions. And a great many people do.”
“I—”
His wife raised her voice and steamed on. “I’m going to say this just once, Wallace, so you had better listen. Callie may marry Jake Grafton, regardless of our wishes. In her way she’s almost as pigheaded as you are. Jake Grafton’s every inch the man that Theron is, and he won’t put up with your bombast and supercilious foolishness any more than Theron does. Grafton proved that here tonight. I don’t blame him.”
“Callie won’t marry that—”
“You damned old windbag, shut up! What you know about your daughter could be printed in foot-high letters on the head of a pin.”
She shouted that last sentence, then fell silent. When she spoke again her voice was cold, every word enunciated clearly:
“It will be a miracle if Jake Grafton ever walks through that door again. So I’m serving notice on you, Wallace, here and now. Your arrogance almost cost me my son. If it costs me my daughter, I’m divorcing you.”
Before Callie could move from her seat on the steps, Mrs. McKenzie came striding through the study door. She saw Callie and stopped dead.
Callie rose, turned, and forced herself to climb the stairs.
2
After a miserable night in a motel near O‘hare, Jake got a seat the next day on the first flight to Seattle. Unfortunately, the next Harbor Airlines flight to Oak Harbor was full, so he had two hours to kill at Sea-Tac. He headed for the bar and sat nursing a beer.
The war was over, yet it wasn’t. That was the crazy thing.
He had tried to keep his cool in Chicago and had done a fair job until the professor goaded him beyond endurance. Now he sat going over the mess again, for the fifteenth time, wondering what Callie was thinking, wondering what she felt.
The ring was burning a hole in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at it from time to time, trying to shield it in his hand so that casual observers wouldn’t think him weird.
Maybe he ought to throw the damned thing away. It didn’t look like he was ever going to get to give it to Callie, not in this lifetime, anyway, and he certainly wasn’t going to hang on to it for future presentation to whomever. He was going to have to do something with it.
He had been stupid to buy the ring in the first place. He should have waited until she said Yes, then taken her to a jewelry store and let her pick out the ring. Normal guys got the woman first, the ring second. A fellow could avoid a lot of pitfalls if he did it the tried-and-true traditional way.
Water under the bridge.
But, God! he felt miserable. So empty, as if he had absolutely nothing to live for.
He was glumly staring into his beer mug when he heard a man’s voice ask, “Did you get that in Vietnam?”
Jake looked. Two stools down sat a young man, no more than twenty-two or — three. His left hand was a hook sticking out of his sleeve. His interrogator was older, pushing thirty, bigger, and stood waiting for the bartender to draw him a beer.
“Yeah,” the kid said. “Near Chu Lai.”
“Serves you right,” the older man said as he tossed his money on the bar and picked up his beer. He turned away.
Jake Grafton was off his stool and moving without conscious thought. He laid a heavy hand on the man’s shoulder and spun him around. Beer slopped from the man’s mug.
“You sonuvabitch!” the man roared. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“You owe this guy an apology.”
“My ass!” Then the look on Grafton’s face sank in. “Now hold on, you bastard! I’ve got a black belt in—”
That was all he managed to get out, because Jake seized a beer bottle sitting on the bar and smashed it against the man’s head with a sweeping backhand. The big man went to the floor, stunned.
Grafton grabbed wet, bloody hair with his right hand and lifted. He grabbed a handful of balls with his left and brought the man to his feet, then started him sideways. With a heave he threw him through the plate-glass window onto the concourse.
As the glass tinkled down Jake walked out the door of the bar and approached the man. He lay stunned, surrounded by glass fragments. The glass grated under Jake’s shoes.
Jake squatted.
The man was semiconscious, bleeding from numerous small cuts. His eyes swam, then focused on Grafton.
“You got off lucky this time. I personally know a dozen men who would have killed you for that crack you made in there. There’s probably thousands of them.”
Slivers of glass stuck out of the man’s face in several places.
“If I were you I’d give up karate. You aren’t anywhere near tough enough. Maybe you oughta try ballet.”
He stood and walked back into the bar, ignoring the gaping onlookers. The ex-soldier was still sitting on the stool.
“How much for the beers?” Jake asked the bartender.
“Yours?”
“Mine and this gentleman’s. I’m buying his too.”
“Four bucks.”
Jake tossed a five-spot on the bar. Through the now-empty frame of the window he saw a policeman bending over the man lying on the concourse.
Jake held out his hand to the former soldier, who shook it.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yeah I did,” Jake said. “I owed it to myself.”
The bartender held out his hand. “I was in the Army for a couple years. I’d like to shake your hand too.”
Jake shook it.
“Well,” he said to the one-handed veteran, who was looking at his hook, “don’t let the assholes grind you down.”
“He isn’t the only one,” the man murmured, nodding toward the concourse.
“I know. We got a fucking Eden here, don’t we?”
He left the bar and introduced himself to the first cop he saw.
It was about four o’clock on Monday afternoon when a police officer opened the cell door.
“You’re leaving, Grafton. Come on.”
The officer walked behind Jake, who was decked out in a blue jumpsuit and shuffled along in rubber shower sandals that were several sizes too big. He had been in the can all weekend. He had used his one telephone call when he was arrested on Saturday to call the squadron duty officer at NAS Whidbey.
“You’re where?” that worthy had demanded, apparently unable to believe his own ears.
“The King County Jail,” Jake repeated.
“I’ll be damned! What’d you do, kill somebody?”
“Naw. Threw a guy out of a bar.”
“That’s all?”
“He went out through a plate glass window.”
“Oh.”
“Better put it in the logbook and call the skipper at home.”
“Okay, Jake. Don’t bend over to pick up the soap.”
This afternoon he got into his civilian clothes in the same room in which he had undressed, the same room, incidentally, in which he had been fingerprinted and photographed. When he was dressed an officer passed him an envelope that contained the items from his pockets.