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“Well,” I said inanely, “what are you up to?” I fished out a cigarette to give myself something to do.
“Oh, not a helluva lot really, Dan. I’ve been workin’ down the block at the trailer sales place and helping Sloane at his pawnshop now and then. You remember him, don’t you? It’s a real good deal for me because I can take what he owes me out in merchandise, and it don’t show up on my income tax. Margaret’s workin’ in a dime store, and the trailer’s paid for, so we’re in pretty good shape.”
“How’s the Old Lady? You heard from her lately?” It had to get around to her sooner or later. I figured I’d get it out of the way.
“Mom? She’s in Portland. I hear from her once in a while. She’s back on the sauce again, you know.”
“Oh, boy,” I said with disgust. That was really the last damned straw. My mother had written me this long, tearjerker letter while I was in Germany about how she had seen the light and was going to give up drinking. I hadn’t answered the damned thing because I really didn’t give a shit one way or the other, but I’d kind of hoped she could make it. I hadn’t seen her completely sober since I was about twelve, and I thought it might be kind of a switch.
“You and her had a beef, didn’t you?” Jack asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Not really a beef,” I said. “It just all kind of built up. You weren’t around after Dad died.”
“Naw. I saw things goin’ sour long before that. Man, I was in Navy boot camp three days after my seventeenth birthday. I barely made it back for the funeral.” He jittered the cigarette around in his hands.
“Yeah, I remember. After you left, she just got worse and worse. The Old Man hung on, but it finally just wore him down. His insurance kind of set us up for a while, but it only took her a year or so to piss that away. She was sure Mrs. High Society for a while though. And then, of course, all the boy-friends started to show up—like about a week after the funeral. Slimy bastards, every one of them. I tried to tell her they were just after the insurance money, but you never could talk to her. She knew it all.”
“She hasn’t got too much upstairs,” Jack agreed, “even when she’s sober.”
“Anyway, about every month, one of her barroom Romeos would break it off in her for a couple of hundred and split out on her. She’d cry and blubber and threaten to turn on the gas or some damned thing. Then after a day or so she’d get all gussied up in one of those whorehouse dresses she’s partial to and go out and find true love again.”
“Sounds like a real bad scene.”
“A bummer. A two-year bummer. I cut out right after high school—knocked around for a year or so and then wound up in college. It’s a good place to hide out.”
“You seen her since you split?”
“Couple times,” I said. “Once I had to bail her out of jail, and once she came to where I was staying to mooch some money for booze. Gave me that ‘After all, I am your mother’ routine. I told her to stick it in her ear. I think that kind of withered things.”
“She hardly ever mentions you when I see her,” Jack said.
“Maybe if I’m lucky she’ll forget me altogether,” I said. “I need her about like I need leprosy.”
“You know something, little brother?” Jack said, grinning at me, “you can be an awful cold-blooded bastard when you want to be.”
“Comes from my gentle upbringing,” I told him. “Have another belt.” I waved at the whiskey bottle.
“I don’t want to drink up all your booze,” Jack said, taking the pint. “Remember, I know how much a GI makes.”
“Go ahead, man,” I said. “Take a goddamn drink. I hit it big in a stud-poker game on the troopship. I’m fat city.” I knew that would impress him.
“Won yourself a bundle, huh?”
“Shit. I was fifteen hundred ahead for a while, but there was this old master sergeant in the game—Riker his name was—and he gave me poker lessons till who laid the last chunk.”
“How much you come out with?”
“Couple hundred,” I said cautiously. I didn’t want to encourage the idea that I was rich.
“Walkin’ around money anyway,” he said, taking a drink from the pint. He passed it back to me, and I noticed that his hands weren’t really clean. Jack had always wanted a job where his hands wouldn’t get dirty, but I saw that he hadn’t made it yet. I suddenly felt sorry for him. He was smart and worked hard and tried his damnedest to make it, but things always turned to shit on him. I could see him twenty years from now, still hustling, still scurrying around trying to hit just the right deal.
“You got a girl?” he asked.
“Had one,” I said. “She sent me one of those letters about six months ago.”
“Rough.”
I shrugged. “It wouldn’t have worked out anyway.” I got a little twinge when I said it. I thought I’d pretty well drowned that particular cat, but it still managed to get a claw in my guts now and then. I’d catch myself remembering things or wondering what she was doing. I took a quick blast of bourbon.
“Lotsa women,” Jack said, emptying his beer. “Just like streetcars.”
“Sure,” I said. I looked around. The furniture was a bit kidscarred, and the TV set was small and fluttered a lot, but it was someplace. I hadn’t had any place for so long that I’d forgotten how it felt. From where I was sitting, I could see a mirror hanging at a slant on the wall of the little passage leading back to the bedrooms. The angle was just right, and I could see the rumpled, unmade bed where I assumed he and his wife slept. I thought of telling him that he might be making a public spectacle of his love life, but I decided that was his business.
“What’d you take in college anyway?” Jack demanded. “I never could get the straight of it out of the Old Lady.”
“English, mostly,” I said. “Literature.”
“English, for Chrissake! Nouns and verbs and all that shit?”
“Literature, Stud,” I corrected him. “Shakespeare and Hemingway, and all that shit. I figured this would be the issue that would blow the whole reunion bit. As soon as he gave me the “What the hell good is that shit?” routine, he and I would part company, fast. I’d about had a gutful of that reaction in the Army.
He surprised me. “Oh,” he said, “that’s different. You always did read a lot—even when you were a kid.”
“It gives me a substitute for my own slightly screwed-up life.”
“You gonna teach?”
“Not right away. I’m going back to school first.”
“I thought the Old Lady told me you graduated.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m going on to graduate school.”
“No shit?” He looked impressed. “I hear that’s pretty rough.”
“I think I can hack it.”
“You always were the smart one in the connection.”
“How’s your beer holding out?” I asked him, shaking my empty can. I was starting to relax. We’d gotten past all the touchy issues. I lit another cigarette.
“No sweat,” he said, getting up to get two more. “If I run out, the gal next door has a case stashed away. We’ll have to replace it before her old man gets home, but Marg ought to be here before long, and then I’ll have wheels.”
“Hey,” I called after him. “I meant to ask you about that. I thought your wife’s name was Bonnie.”
“Bonnie? Hell, I dumped her three years ago.”
“Didn’t you have a little girl there, too?”
“Yeah. Joanne.” He came back with the beer. I noticed that the trailer swayed a little when anyone walked round. “But Bonnie married some goof over at the Navy Yard, and he adopted Joanne. They moved down to L.A.”
“And before that it was—”
“Bernice. She was just a kid, and she got homesick for Mommie.”
“You use up wives at a helluva rate, old buddy.”
“Just want to spread all that happiness around as much as I can.” He laughed.
I decided that I liked my brother. That’s a helluva thing to discover all of a sudden.
3
A car pulled up outside, and Jack turned his head to listen. “I think that’s the Mama Cat,” he said. “Sounds like my old bucket.” He got up and looked out the window. “Yeah, it’s her.” He scooped up the empty beer cans from the coffee table and dumped them in the garbage sack under the sink. Then he hustled outside.
They came in a minute or so later, Jack rather ostentatiously carrying two bags of groceries. I got the impression that if I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have bothered. My current sister-in-law was a girl of average height with pale brown hair and a slightly sullen look on her face. I imagine all Jack’s women got that look sooner or later. At any rate Margaret didn’t seem just exactly wild about having a strange GI brother-in-law turn up.
“Well, sweetie,” Jack said with an overdone joviality, “what do you think of him?”
I stood up. “Hello, Margaret,” I said, smiling at her as winningly as I could.
“I’m very happy to meet you, Dan,” she said, a brief, automatic smile flickering over her face. She was sizing me up carefully. I don’t imagine the pint and the half-full beer can on the coffee table made very many points. “Are you stationed out here at the Fort now?” I could tell that she had visions of my moving in on them as a semipermanent houseguest.
“Well,” I said, “not really what you’d call stationed here. I’m being discharged here is all. As soon as they cut me loose, I’ll be moving back up to Seattle.” I wanted to reassure her without being too obvious.
She got the message. “Well, let me get this stuff put away and then we can talk.” She pulled off the light coat she was wearing and draped it over one of the kitchen chairs.
I blinked. She had the largest pair of breasts I’ve ever seen. I knew Jack liked his women that way, but Margaret was simply unbelievable.
“Isn’t she something?” Jack said, leering at me as he wrapped a proprietary arm about her shoulders. The remark sounded innocent enough, but all three of us knew what he meant.
“Come on, Jack,” she said, pushing him off. “I want to get all this put away so I can sit down.” She began bustling around the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers. The kitchen area was separated from the living room by a waist-high divider, so we could talk without yelling.
“Dan just got back today,” Jack said, coming back and plunking himself on the couch. “He’s been in Germany for a couple of years.”
“Oh?” she said. “I’ll bet that was interesting, wasn’t it, Dan?”
“It’s got Southeast Asia beat all to heck,” I said.
“Did they let you travel around any—I mean visit any of the other countries over there?”
“Oh, yeah. I visited a few places.”
“Did you get to London at all? I’d sure like to go there.” Her voice sounded a little wistful.
“I was there for about ten days on leave,” I told her.
“I never made it up there,” Jack said. “When I was with the Sixth Fleet, we stayed pretty much in the Mediterranean.”
“Did you get to see any of the groups while you were in London?” Margaret persisted. She really wanted to know; she wasn’t just asking to have something to say.
“No,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that groups weren’t particularly my thing. She might think I was trying to put her down.
“My wife’s a group-nut,” Jack said tolerantly. “That one cabinet there is stacked full of albums. Must be twenty of the damn things in there.”
“I dig them,” she said without apologizing. “Oh, Jack, did you get the kids to bed OK?”
“All fed, bathed, and tucked in,” he told her. “You know you can trust me to take care of things.”
“Patsy’s been getting a little stubborn about going to bed,” she said. “She’s at that age, I guess.”
“I didn’t have no problems,” Jack said.
“Are you guys hungry?” she asked suddenly. Woman’s eternal answer to any social situation—feed ’em. It’s in the blood, I guess.
“I could eat,” Jack said. “How about you, Dan?”
“Well—”
“Sure you can,” he insisted. “Why don’t you whip up a pizza, Mama Cat? One of those big ones.”
“It’ll take a while,” she said, opening herself a beer. She turned on the overhead light in the kitchen. She looked tired.
“That’s OK,” he said. “Well, Dan, what are you going to do with yourself now that you’re out?” He said it as if he expected me to say something important, something that would impress hell out of Margaret.
“I’ll be starting in at the U in October,” I told him. “I got all the papers processed and got accepted and all by mail. I’d have rather gone someplace else, but they were going to bring me back here for separation anyway, so what the hell?”
“Boy, you sure run rampant on this college stuff, don’t you?” He still tried to use words he didn’t know.
“Keeps me off the streets at night.” I shrugged.
“Dan,” Margaret said. “Do you like sausage or cheese?” She was rummaging around among the pots and pans.
“Either one, Margaret,” I said. “Whichever you folks like.”
“Make the sausage, sweetie,” Jack said. He turned to me. “We get this frozen sausage pizza down at the market. It’s the best yet, and only eighty-nine cents.”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“You ever get pizza in Germany?” Margaret asked.
“No, not in Germany,” I said. “I had a few in Italy though. I went down there on leave once.”
“Did you get to Naples?” Jack asked. “We hauled in there once when I was with the Sixth Fleet.”
“Just for a day,” I said. “I was running a little low on cash, and I didn’t have time to really see much of it.”
“We really pitched a liberty in Naples,” he said. “I got absolutely crazed with alcohol.” We drifted off into reminiscing about how we’d won various wars and assorted small skirmishes. We finished the pint and had a few more beers with the leathery pizza. Margaret relaxed a little more, and I began to feel comfortable with them.
