Puttering About in a Small Land

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “We’re going to take a trip East,” he said.

  “Back to Washington?”

  Grinning, he said, “No, not that far. To Arkansas.”

  She saw that he meant it.

  9

  On Friday, at the store, Pete Bacciagalupi said to him, “Boy, you’re all up in the air. What is it? Some hot deal cooking?”

  Roger said, “My kids coming home from school today.”

  The afternoon dragged on, hour by hour. He spent some time next door at the drugstore lunch counter, and some time in the basement with Olsen, going over service questions.

  When he went back upstairs he found Pete clearing off the counter. “I finally moved the twenty-one-inch bleached-oak Philco,” Pete said. His hand closed over Rogers shoulder and he turned him to face the back of the store. Without speaking, he nodded to point out the small side demonstration room. In the semi-darkness a man sat waiting, making no sound. “He showed up while I was busy,” Pete said. “It’s you he wants, naturally.”

  Going to the door of the room, Roger put his head in. The chair creaked as Jules Neame arose to greet him. The old man was in his shirtsleeves, smelling of perspiration and tobacco; he wheezed apologetically and in the darkness his gold tooth glinted as he smiled, excusing himself by raising his empty, helpless hands.

  “Mr. Lindahl,” Neame said.

  “Hi, Jules,” he said. “How’s it going?” The old man owned Neame Lawn Furniture & Garden Supplies, the store next door on the right.

  “You’re so busy,” Neame said. “I don’t want to bother you. I thought maybe you or your young fellow could give me a hand.” At the crucial words he fell into a defensive, ornate diction, an almost courtly manner of speech. “If another time would be better—” His hands sawed the air.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Roger said. “What is it?”

  They walked together the length of the store, to the doorway. Mr. Neame’s stomach wagged from side to side with each step; the top button of his trousers was undone and circles of wetness had spread out from his armpits, across his silk shirt. “A swing,” he said to Roger. “We can’t get it to the window.” His face still quivered with exertion and the deep flush had not left; in the display room he had sat recuperating.

  “Call me next time,” Roger said.

  “Well.” Mr. Neame put his hand to his cheek, hiding his face. “I hate to bother you, Mr. Lindahl.”

  In the lawn furniture store, Mrs. Neame stood by one end of the swing, panting and shaking. The old woman had been trying to drag the swing alone, while her husband went to get help. Seeing Roger, she smiled gratefully, straightened up, glanced at her husband. Jules took her place and Roger got hold of the other end; together they dragged the swing to the front window and got it in place. Mrs. Neame followed, wanting it exactly right but saying nothing; her husband waved her off as she started to point.

  “They’re heavy,” Roger said, when they had let go.

  “It certainly is wonderful of you, Mr. Lindahl,” Mrs. Neame said, “to let yourself be taken away from your own work to do something for us that we ought to be able to do on our own.” Both she and Jules were embarrassed; the two of them drew together, not knowing what to say to him.

  “Any time,” he said, but his heart had yet to get back to normal. His voice choked off and he remained silent a moment, getting out a cigarette and matches. As always, after he had carried some heavy object, a TV set or a stove or a refrigerator, his hands were white and his fingers stiff and streaked. He felt as if his hands were about to break loose from his wrists; he put them in his pockets, out of sight. At that, Jules Neame started with agitation; he disappeared into the back of the store, through the curtains, and then reappeared with a box which he held out to Roger.

  “Would you try a piece of Turkish Delight?” he said, urging the candy on him. “It’s the real thing; it comes from my sister. Take a couple of pieces.”

  Roger accepted two pieces, for Pete, who liked them. He returned to his own store and placed the Turkish Delight on the counter.

  “Thinks,” Pete said, biting into a piece. “What was it this time?”

  “Another lawn swing.”

  “Your wife called,” Pete said. “While you were over there helping them move their swing.” He showed Roger a note he had made on the phone-pad. “She says she’s back from Ojai. She’ll call you again in a little while.” Munching, he said, “That’s nice up there. A lot of wealthy retired people.” He watched Roger stick the note in his pocket. “Old man Neame sure thinks a lot of you. You know, one of these days he’s going to have another heart attack right there in the store and fall dead into one of those swings.”

  At five-thirty, Virginia called again. “I’m home,” she said. “We just got back. Here’s Gregg.”

  Much noise in his ear, and then his son’s voice.

  “Daddy! You know what I did? I fell out of the window where I was at; I fell all the way down to the ground. And then—”

  Virginia replaced him at the phone. “He wasn’t hurt. It was the window of the tent they use.”

  “How does he seem to be?” Roger asked.

  “Fine. He certainly was glad to see me. He was waiting down by the parking lot. I’m glad I went along; I mean, I’m glad I didn’t just tell her to pick him up.”

  “How was the ride?”

  Virginia said, “Horrible. Worse than I remembered. But she zips right along. She goes almost as fast as you.”

  “Which way did you drive?”

  “I drove back. So she could handle the kids.”

  Roger said, “What do you think of her?”

  “They certainly were right.”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “She certainly is dumb.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I guess so.”

  “But she’s real sweet. I’ll talk to you later; Gregg’s running around the house pulling down the lamps. You’ll be home around six-thirty?”

  “That’s right,” he said. He hung up.

  “What’s the matter?” Pete said to him. “Didn’t they get home okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. He felt discouraged. “I’m going next door,” he said. “For a cup of coffee.” Leaving Pete in charge of the store, he set off for the drugstore.

  That evening, after they had put Gregg to bed, he said to his wife, “What do you mean? Why do you say she’s dumb? She didn’t strike me that way.”

  Virginia, seated on the couch in her robe, said, “She doesn’t hear anything you say, and when she does she doesn’t understand it; she gets it balled up until it makes no sense at all. Isn’t that what you’d call dumb?”

  “I think you’re all picking on her,” he said.

  “I just spent four and a half hours with her,” Virginia said. “Take my word for it.”

  He said, “Then you don’t think it’s going to work out?”

  “What do you mean? That has nothing to do with it.”

  “What’s the arrangement?”

  “She’ll drive the three boys back to the school this Sunday. Then we’ll go again together, next Friday.”

  Roger said, with bitterness, “If she’s so dumb, maybe you better not get involved.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “You’re asking her to do something for you, make a drive you’re afraid to make, and then you come home and sit around talking about how dumb she is. I call that hypocrisy. Don’t you?” He became more and more outraged. “Don’t you feel ashamed?”

  Virginia said, “You asked me what I thought of her.”

  That was true. “Let it go,” he said. “Forget it.”

  But he, himself, could not let it drop.

  “Did anything happen during the trip?” he asked, after an interval.

  “No,” Virginia said. She had picked up a magazine to read.

  “You’re sure?”

  Dropping her magazine, she said, “What’s the matt
er with you? What’s this all about?”

  He put on his coat, the older one with the missing button. “I’m going down to the store awhile.” Hanging around the house made him too restless; he could not remain. “I have to open up some table-model TV sets and get them tuned up for Saturday.”

  “Really?” She trailed after him sadly, to the front door. “What if Gregg wants you?”

  “For God’s sake,” he said irritably, “he’s only been away three days. I’ll see you later.” He shut the door after him. The porch light came on; she had switched it on for him.

  He got into the Oldsmobile, warmed up the engine, and drove back down to his closed-up store.

  Downstairs, in the service department, the fluorescent overhead lights were on. Olsen sat at the repair bench, still involved in his work. Beside him was a cardboard container of coffee and the leavings of a sandwich. His back was to Roger, a great streaked, grimy back, his bulging head, irregular, fringed with choppy gray hair, swung slightly, but he continued working. “Hi,” Olsen said.

  “Hi,” Roger said. “How come you’re still working?”

  “I don’t know. You’re paying me.” The basement roared with noise from the radio Olsen had before him; he lowered the volume a trifle. The room smelled of his perspiration. He was a long-armed artisan, surly and individualistic, one of the last of his species. In his own crabbed, taciturn manner, he was an excellent radio repairman. He took responsibility for his work. Nobody knew how old he was; he looked at least fifty. He came, he had told them, from Utah. His clothes were always sloppy and ragged; between the buttons of his shirt the dark hair of his stomach could be seen. The only trait about him that Roger could not stand was his habit of spitting into the wastebasket.

  “How long have you been here?” Roger said.

  “I’m marking it down.” Olsen pointed at the sweaty, bent imitation-leather notebook in which he recorded his hours. “Look in there if you want.”

  “You goddamn repairmen,” Roger said. Anyhow, he was glad of Olsen’s company.

  Olsen grinned his broken, misshapen grin.

  “How about a beer?” Roger said.

  “You’re standing?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” Reaching up, Olsen shut off the bench. The hum and sputter and racket died, the meters and dials switched to no-reading. Unhooking his legs from the stool, Olsen clambered down, stretched, fastened his trousers, spat into the waste-box at the end of the bench, and then lifted his coat from the nail he had driven into the support beam of the wall. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Together, the two of them sat at the bar down at the corner, drinking Budweiser beer from bottles. The jukebox played a Johnny Ray record. A few workmen and businessmen and one middle-aged blonde in a furpiece sat talking or meditating. At the rear of the bar two men played shuffleboard. The counters knocked now and then. A gas heater sizzled; the bar was pleasant.

  “You got troubles?” Olsen asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why aren’t you home?”

  He did not feel like answering. “I’m down at the store setting up TV sets,” he said.

  “Like hell you are,” Olsen said.

  Raising his head, Roger said, “What kind of troubles am I supposed to have? I’ve got a paying business; I’ve got a wife and a kid. My health is reasonably good. I’ve got no particular problems.” He drank his beer, resting his arms on the surface of the bar.

  “I’m married too,” Olsen said, after a long period of time. “I got no kids but I got a fair-to-middlin job. Even though the guy I work for is a horse’s ass. But I’m not home. I’m down in the service department at nine o’clock in the evening.” He turned his head sideways and scrutinized Roger.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Roger said.

  “Nothing.” The bloodshot eyes shifted about. “I was just wondering something.”

  “Say it”

  Olsen said in his grating voice, “How long’s it been since you’ve had a piece of tail?”

  “It depends on what kind you mean,”

  “You know what I mean.” Olsen put his thumb into his beer and then lifted it up to examine it. “I don’t mean your front parlor.”

  “Two years,” Roger said. In 1950, on New Year’s Eve, he had gone to bed with a girl that he met at a falling-about, drunken party. Virginia had got offended at something and had gone home early, leaving him alone.

  “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you.”

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  Olsen shrugged. “That’s what’s wrong with a lot of guys. They fall sick without it. What you get at home don’t count.”

  “I don’t agree,” Roger said. “You ought to be at home where you belong.”

  The broken smile returned. “You’re saying that because you don’t know where you can lay your hands on any.”

  “No,” he disagreed. “I mean it.”

  “Aren’t you glad for what you got two years ago?”

  “I wish I hadn’t,” he said. Afterwards, he had felt remorse, and he had never done it again, or even tried to. “What’s the point of getting married? How about your wife? You approve of her cheating if she wants to?”

  “That’s different,” Olsen said.

  “Sure,” Roger said. “The double standard.”

  “Why not?” Olsen said, “It’s natural for a man to play the field. It’s just as natural for a woman to not. If my wife cheated on me I’d kill her. She knows that.”

  “Do you cheat?” Roger asked.

  Olsen said, “Every chance I get. Every chance.” He put on a righteous expression, a grim, elevated thing.

  What a lousy business, Roger thought to himself. He drank his beer. I know it isn’t right. But that has nothing to do with it. “Love is more important than marriage,” he said to Olsen. “A man gets married because of love; isn’t that so?”

  “In some cases,” Olsen said, going along with him.

  “Then love is first.” He pointed his finger at Olsen, who gazed down remotely. “You have to think about love as the primary thing. Marriage just grows out of it; love leads the way. In China they marry without love; they never even see each other before they’re married. That’s just like breeding cattle; isn’t it? That’s the difference between man and an animal; man falls in love, and if you don’t go in the direction that love points then you’re acting like an animal, and what the hell are you alive for? You tell me that. Are you alive just to work and eat and reproduce?”

  “I see that,” Olsen said, “but how can you be positive when you’re in love? Maybe all you want is a piece of tail. That isn’t the same; you can be in love and not want to go to bed with her, in fact maybe that’s how you know you’re really in love; you don’t want to go to bed with her, you don’t want to sully her. If a man really loves a woman he honors and respects her.”

  “There’s nothing disrespectful about sex,” Roger said.

  “Sex is unfair to the woman. It robs her of her virginity. That’s the most precious possession a woman has. Would you want to do that to a woman you loved? I’ll bet you’d kill some guy that violated a woman you were in love with; you’d castrate him for doing that. I think if you really love a woman you’re supposed to protect her. A woman don’t get nothing out of sex. Most women hate it. They submit to it to please the man.”

  “That’s a lot of bull,” Roger said. “A woman enjoys it as much as a man.”

  “Only a certain type of cheap woman,” Olsen said violently. “A real lady you could love and be proud of and would want to marry wouldn’t enjoy it, and she wouldn’t let you do it to her; I’ll tell you that. You find a woman that’ll go to bed with you and I’ll show you a bum.”

  “Even after marriage?”

  Olsen picked at a blister on his thumb. “That’s different. There has to be kids. But it’s a sin to have sex outside of marriage. We weren’t meant to have marital relations except for the production of children.”

 
“I thought you said you got it every chance you had.”

  Olsen glowered at him. “That’s none of your business.”

  “There’s nothing degrading about sex,” Roger said. “If you didn’t think there was there wouldn’t be.”

  “Do you have a sister?” Olsen said. “Answer me that; do you have a sister?”

  “You talk about it being a sin,” Roger said, “and then you sneak off and cheat on your wife. You sure are mixed up.”

  Setting down his beer, Olsen said, “You better not talk disrespectfully to me. Even if you are my boss. You’re a swell guy and all that, but you better not talk disrespectfully to me, especially where my wife is concerned. I don’t allow you to talk about my wife, even though you are a good friend of mine and I think a lot of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Roger said. He stuck out his hand, and after a prolonged moment, Olsen shook it.

  “You’re just riding for a fall,” Olsen said, “when you talk like that.” He picked up his beer and in a mood of deep sternness gulped it down. Roger returned to his own beer. After that neither of them said much. When they left the bar and returned to the store, Olsen descended to the service department, leaving Roger alone.

  Going into the office he sat in the darkness, watching cars and people beyond the locked front door of the store.

  What a mess, he thought to himself.

  The time was nine-thirty. Not so late, he decided. He put on his coat, left the store without saying good night to Olsen, and got into his car. Very soon he was driving out to San Fernando.

  At a Standard Station he parked and looked in the phone book for the address. Two Charles Bonners were listed, but he remembered the street name; Virginia had mentioned it. Getting back into the car he drove up to the Bonner house and parked in front of it, with his engine and headlights shut off.

  The house looked like those around it, a small, recently-built one-story California ranch-style house, with a wide garage, a single pepper tree in the front yard, a picture window which showed drapes and faint light. In front of the house the red Ford station wagon was parked. Under the dull streetlight the car looked gray.