Authors: James Jones
“Women? What for?”
“Well, for the kicks, goddam it! and for the sex! what do you think. I thought we might take a couple the brassiere factory girls? How about taking that Ginnie Moorehead, for me, and Mildred Pierce for you?”
’Bama looked at him with unconcealed astonishment. “Whoa!” he said. “Now wait a minute. Just because you romped Old Ginnie last night don’t mean you can push her off on me for a trip to Florida.”
“How did you know I romped her?”
“Jesus Christ!” ’Bama sneered, “whoever didn’t see you take her out of Smitty’s last night knows all about it now because Ginnie herself’s done told everybody in town.
“‘My friend Dave Hirsh,’” he said, mimicking Ginnie’s dully poleaxed voice, “‘you know my friend Dave Hirsh, yes we was out last night’ then a giggle ‘you know, Dave Hirsh the writer, the brother of Frank Hirsh owns the jewelry store.’
“Look, I know yore new around here,” he said, “and don’t know the protocol, but you got to learn it. When you go out with Old Ginnie, you don’t take her out of Smitty’s in front of everybody, you make the date and meet her outside later.”
“Why?” Dave said. “You don’t do that with the rest of them?”
“No, but you do with Ginnie. That way, when she tells people she was out with you and how good or bad you were,
you
can always deny it and nobody’ll
know,
not for sure.
“And as for takin them to Florida, that’s out,” ’Bama said. “Why, hell, man! every secretary and nurse and ‘bachelor girl’ east of the Mississippi is going to be on vacation in Miami now lookin for some man. We should take them pigs
with
us?”
“All right,” Dave said, “okay. You’ve convinced me. I just—you know—I just felt sorry for her. And thought the trip might be a nice thing for her.”
“Shore!” ’Bama cried. “I feel sorry for a hawg strung up in a slaughterhouse, too, but I don’t take him to Florida with me.”
Dave said nothing. He still felt, though, that ’Bama was being a little too cold-blooded about another human being.
Even for ’Bama. After all, Ginnie Moorehead might not be much, but she was still a human being; and as a human being was entitled to a certain basic dignity and respect.
“Don’t you be listenin to nothin that that Ginnie tells you,” ’Bama cautioned. “I don’t think you know enough about women yet, Hollywood or no. Now I’ll go pick up my extra suit and hat and you pack whatever you want and I’ll come right back and pick you up.”
Then he was gone and Dave started to look around the room to see what he would pack, at two o’clock in the morning. It did not seem five minutes that he was back and then they were on the road, heading east out of town, the two of them sitting silent in the smoothly purring 1937 Packard, and ’Bama driving and wearing those dark-green glasses he always wore when he drove which had partial correction for long distance. “My eyes just ain’t quite good enough for fast driving. When yore drivin eighty-five and ninety, you got to be able to drive a quarter of a mile ahead at least.” His topcoat collar was up around his ears, and the still-immaculate pearl hat low over his eyes, and his gloved hands rested lightly on the wheel. In the back, only the one suit on a hanger with a toothbrush sticking up out of its breast pocket and the big square tan-and-brown Stetson hatbox on the seat attested to the fact that he was going someplace. Beside him sat Dave, looking out at the darkened houses in the dead part of the night.
It was just about then, as he sat there looking out at the town, that Dave had his strong sudden feeling of non-residency. Of being a man who had no roots here, and who had no regrets at leaving, and who more than halfway expected not ever to come back. His car he was leaving parked and locked on the street. More than half of his clothes, and all his books, and most of the rest of his worldy possessions still reposed in that miserable little hotel room—which, at ’Bama’s suggestion, he had paid the night man a month’s rent in advance for. And outside of that, outside of those things, nothing. His interest in the taxi service he did not count. If he never saw it again, it did not matter. What did any of it matter? Emotion seized him. He was more than three-fourths convinced that he would never come back here, and if he didn’t, who would give a damn? He did not say anything about any of this to ’Bama.
Out of all of it, he had made sure of one thing: His typewriter was packed. His new portable typewriter. It sat on the floor of the backseat, and inside the lid clipped at the top all the manuscript he had done to date. It wasn’t much, and it certainly wasn’t good, but it was his, by God. He was still a writer. ’Bama Dillert might be the best damn gambler in the world, but he was not a writer. Gwen French might be the greatest English teacher on earth, but she was not a writer. He was.
The heavy purring Packard passed off of the end of the brick pavement and onto the concrete highway, and then the last of the houses were left behind. Eyes a little moist, Dave wondered if he would ever see this place again and doubted if he would, and said he did not care.
When they rode up onto the bridge heading for Terre Haute, Israel was all dark below them on the right, except for the few streetlights. Dave looked down at it with fiery eyes. If he ever did come back to this goddamned place, it would only be because he had not given up on that goddamned Gwen French woman yet. He did not take to defeat as easily as a lot of people—especially, Gwen French—thought, he thought, and stared down through the blackness, trying to see the house, as if he hoped that by the very power of his outrage and hurt he could penetrate with his eyes right through to where she lay, and cause her to turn uneasily in her sleep.
At the moment, he had never loved anybody so much in his life.
Then they were across the bridge and following the river road, where Route 40 ran north to Terre Haute, and everything suddenly dropped away from Dave almost as if Parkman and Israel and Gwen never had existed and he had never stopped off there on his way home to Hollywood from Chicago. All that was behind, spun out of existence by the spinning tires of ’Bama’s Packard while at the same time they spun into existence new places and existences up ahead.
They would, ’Bama had said, get on US 41 at Terre Haute and take it south as far as Nashville, but after that he was not so sure; he had heard 41 wasn’t in such good a shape now after the war. At Terre Haute, they made the turn south onto 41, and ’Bama began that smooth acceleration that was like a gentle hand on your chest pushing you back into the seat. By the time dawn had seeped itself down through the leaden winter sky some three hours later, they had passed Madisonville, Kentucky, and were well on their way to Hopkinsville and Nashville, an average mileage of a little over sixty miles an hour. And all of it driven with no apparent strain or pushing.
To Dave, for whom driving had always been a sort of nerve-racking chore, the kind of driving ’Bama did was almost unbelievable. After daylight, as if in some way the advancing light itself released him from some vow of silence, ’Bama began to talk more. In answer to a question of Dave’s as to whether he had ever driven this road before, he admitted that he had and began to expound on the art of highway-driving—as opposed to race-driving. During the trip, he came back to it from time to time, and in the rest of the thirty hours it took them to get to Central Florida, Dave learned more about driving than he had learned in the rest of his whole life all put together.
He had (’Bama said, while the speedometer needle hovered between eighty and ninety) driven this road—at least that part from Terre Haute to Nashville—three or four different times both ways since the war, in going back down to Birmingham. But that made no especial difference in how fast he drove, which was governed by several things, he explained: first, the natural terrain of the country—how flat or hilly it was; second, the age of the road itself—the older the road, the sharper the curves; and third, the amount of traffic—heavy traffic naturally slowed you down. He would have driven this road, today, just as fast if he had never been on it. He was, Dave saw, obviously flattered by Dave’s interest.
“Y’see, in the first place,” he elaborated, “road-driving and race-driving are completely different because of two main things. One is that in road-driving there are cars coming the other way. The other thing is the relative speeds of the vehicles that are goin the
same
way: In road-driving, you may be goin ninety and the car ahead of you thirty-five; in race-drivin all the cars’re going pretty much the same speed. Well, those two things changes all the problems a driver has to face. And consequently, the problem of passing—in road-drivin—becomes of much more importance. In road-drivin, you have three objects moving, you and the car yore goin to pass, and the car moving toward you. Y’see? While now in race-drivin, you completely remove one of those three objects; namely, the car comin toward you. Why, you must lower yore percentage of mishaps from just passin alone by—my God, I don’t know how much—seventy-five percent at least.”
The more he elaborated, the more he began to sound like some kind of a mathematician. It was obvious that he had made an almost scientific study of the subject in his own mind.
“Well, yore main problem in road-drivin is passing. You ain’t going to find many curves yore goin too fast to make—not if you know anything at all about drivin. But anytime yore across that black line in the other lane, yore in
danger,
see? But what do most of yore drivers do when they pass some car? The damned fools edge out real slow, then actually slow down when they’re goin around the bastard! and edge back in like they were scared to death. What they ought to do is get out there fast, get around him, and get back in. As long as yore on yore own side of the road yore not in too much danger, except from damfool drivers—which is nearly all of them. Now, course in race-drivin, you don’t have none of that.”
“Did you ever do any race-driving?” Dave asked.
“Oh no,” ’Bama said. “Hunh-unh.” He grinned. “I’ve shore seen an awful lot of them though.”
Dave had once again that feeling of what an almost scientific study of driving ’Bama had apparently made for himself. He had gone at it, apparently, in the same systematic way he had gone at his gambling, separating it all into categories then approaching all of these with the cold-blooded practical rationality of a trained logician. Apparently, he did that with just about everything. Including people, Dave thought, not quite so admiringly, and thinking of poor dumb Ginnie. Then he remembered how he himself had jumped all over ’Bama about Gwen French.
“Listen,” he said, “I want to tell you something.”
“What’s that?” ’Bama said without taking his eyes from the road.
“Well,” Dave said, “it’s this. I think I owe you an apology. For insultin you up there in the room before we left. I was pretty nasty, I guess.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” ’Bama grinned. “I figured I had it comin. I didn’t have no business stickin my nose in yore business.”
“Well, it wasn’t so much that,” Dave said.
“I know. You was mad. But it still wasn’t my business,” ’Bama said. After a moment, then, he suddenly let up on the gas and the Packard began to slow. “Now look there. Show you something. See that car up ahead?”
Dave looked, and saw a misshapen vehicle at least a quarter of a mile ahead of them, just cresting a hill. “Yeah? Why?”
“You notice anything funny about it?” ’Bama said.
“Well, no. It didn’t look like a car. A truck, maybe?”
“It was a tractor. Tractors travel anywhere from ten to twenty five miles an hour. That’s why I’m startin to slow up now, soon as I see it. I don’t want to run up on it, see?”
“Oh,” Dave said, feeling witless, and then he watched as the slowing car began to run up more and more slowly on the tractor; by the time they reached it, they were doing slightly less than forty, and still moving up. The road ahead was clear for a mile at least. Two car lengths in back of it ’Bama swung out, gunned the Packard, passed, and swung back in, and had the big Packard back up to ninety before the tractor was out of sight behind them.
“Y’see what I mean?” ’Bama said, sliding his gloved hands back and forth on the wheel. “That’s a principle you can always follow: Anytime you see something up ahead that don’t look completely like another passenger car, start slowin as soon as you see it. Until you know what it is and how fast it’s goin—you slow. See?”
Dave nodded. “Yeah. I see.”
“You notice I never used my brake,” ’Bama said. “Not atall. A perfect driver never uses his brake. Not for nothing. Except maybe like at stoplights after he’s already slowed. But we ain’t none of us perfect drivers. The brakes there only so that when you’ve made a mistake—or the other guy has—it can be used to get you out of some jam. That’s all it’s for. See?”
“I’ll remember,” Dave said. He realized he was being taught.
’Bama gave him a quick grin and turned back to the road without saying anything. But after that, whenever some other similar situation occurred that caused him to use some little trick of driving, he would carefully explain it, laying out just what he was doing and why.
At one place, for instance, he passed a slow-moving car up near the crest of a hill. There was no no-passing zone, so he was not breaking any law, but still to pass so was against all orthodox theory, and he explained very carefully why he did it. Ordinarily, to pass in such a way was dangerous, he said. But in this instance—and he pointed it out to Dave—he could see over the crest the top of the second car ahead. As long as he could see it, and also could see no oncoming car in the other lane, he knew it was safe to pass.
He was full of such little pointers, simple enough when called to your attention but things Dave would never have thought of himself. The more of these little things he brought out, the more Dave was amazed at all the things about driving he had never seen. ’Bama also made other comments, from time to time, but these comments were on the things and society of people that they saw. ’Bama had no more respect for people in general than Dave did (and, Dave thought, a lot less for people in particular). These comments were not made with the eager enjoyment he had when he talked about driving; these comments were made with sardonic disgust and caustic scorn.