In Milton Lumky Territory

  He said, “I intend to try.”

  “But that means buying Zoe out and giving up the three thousand,” Her need of retaining the cash stood out as a major factor in her thinking. Evidently now that the time had arrived to surrender it she simply could not do so.

  “Buy her out,” he told her. “As you were going to.”

  “No,” she said, but her voice wavered.

  He repeated, “Buy her out. We’ll give it a try. If I can’t make it support us, I’ll get a job and you can either sell out for what you can get, or you can operate it yourself. We’ll see when the time comes.”

  “Do you genuinely think you could make a profit? Right away?”

  “I think so,” he said, firmly enough to affect her; he made it clear to her that he had no doubts.

  “Suppose you’re wrong.”

  “We won’t die. We won’t starve. The worst that could happen is that you’d lose your equity. But as soon as I get a job we’d be self-supporting. We’d be like any married couple; we can easily support ourselves and Taffy on what I’d be making. And we have the house. Most people don’t have that. Even if it isn’t paid off. Don’t be so timid. Nobody starves in this country.”

  “I wish I had your confidence,” she said.

  “Give her the money,” he said again.

  “I’ll - think about it.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t think about it. Just hand it to her. We can drive over there now and give it to her now. Wake her up and stick it in her face. Where does she live?”

  “I’ll give it to her tomorrow,” she said, falling into obedience to his certitude.

  THAT NIGHT, in bed, she scrambled about until she was beneath him, clutching him with her knees and arms, with every part of her thin, smooth body. She wanted to go to sleep that way, but he found himself unable to sleep with her beneath him; she was too hard, top uneven a surface. Then she decided to see if she could spread herself out on top of him. She lay with her head on his chest, her arms around his neck, her legs within his. For a long time her pelvic bones pressed against him, but then at last she relaxed and fell into a doze. Around his neck her arms loosened. She had turned her head on one side, and her breath whistled down into his armpit; it tickled him and he still could not sleep.

  Anyhow, he thought, she’s asleep.

  The next he knew the alarm clock was ringing, and Susan was sliding from him to get up out of bed. She had managed to stay on him all night. As he pushed the covers back and arose from the bed he found himself stiff and aching all over. On his leg a dark bruise had formed. From the bony edge of her knee.

  8

  THAT MORNING, at the office, he sat down with Susan and kept at her until she telephoned Jack Fancourt and told him to come over. Then he made Zoe de Lima come down from her apartment. When he had the three of them together he prevailed on each of them in turn until at last Fancourt gave Susan the go-ahead. Her face stark with fear, she wrote out a check for three thousand dollars, blotted it, and passed it across to Zoe. The mood of the room was funereal.

  As soon as she had the check, Zoe nodded frigidly to them and departed.

  Fancourt said a few things, briefly glanced over various legal forms, and then he, too, left.

  At the desk, Susan said, “I feel as if some horrible calamity is just about to happen. I don’t even want to get up. I just want to sit.”

  He unlocked the front door, so that they would be in business.

  “A ceremony,” he said.

  “God,” she said. “Well, it’s done.”

  An hour or so later the phone rang. When he answered it he found himself talking to Peg Googer.

  “I hear you’re married,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  In the background, muffled voices simpered; no doubt she was phoning from her law office, and the other voices were her secretary pals.

  “I just can’t believe it,” she exclaimed. “It’s true, then? Well, congratulations. I’ll have to send you two a wedding present.”

  Her tone of voice did not appeal to him. “You can let it go,” he said.

  “It’s so incredible - you just met her. That night. This must be what you read about in stories.” She paused to stifle a giggle; at the other end of the phone a commotion interrupted her. He endured it, having no choice. “Listen now,” Peg said, “you two will have to drop by together, and we’ll have a party for you, a celebration.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you.”

  Again the stifled giggles. He said good-bye and cut her off in the middle of a sentence by hanging up the receiver.

  Goddamn stupid individual, he said to himself. It put him in a black mood, but he managed to work himself out of it. That’s one thing I don’t have to put up with, he decided. The innuendos of ignorant secretaries with their foul minds and their vicious, empty heads. Their dinky claques and foolishness to while away the work-day.

  What a difference between them and Susan … the contrast that he had been so conscious of that first night. The babbling infantile clerks, and then Susan, self-contained and grave, even a little dire-looking in her black sweater. But completely a woman. Completely remote from them all. Off on her own, brooding, but someone he could respect. Someone worthy of attention. And the deepest possible love.

  Now, at this moment, Susan labored away on a manuscript at the best of the several electric typewriters; she was putting something into stencil form.

  The time has come to get down to work, he said to himself.

  “Can you manage for awhile?” he said to her. “I want to go out.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a forced smile.

  He crossed the sidewalk to the Merc and drove off to visit a couple of contacts.

  Not much later he was back, with the car loaded full of Underwood and Royal portables and a vast mass of display material, including electric motor operated whirling platforms.

  “What I want to do,” he said to Susan, “is make this look like a place where a person can buy a typewriter. A new typewriter.” He began lugging the stuff into the store.

  After that he cleared the second-hand machines from the display window, scrubbed the window clean with Dutch cleanser and hot water, dried it with rags, and then produced cans of quick-drying enamel and began to paint the wood a bright, pastel color.

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll set up a display,” he told Susan.

  On the phone he got in touch with a painting outfit and rented a paint sprayer, power-operated paint-removing equipment, ladder, and in addition he contracted to buy paint. He drove over and picked it all up himself. Wearing old clothes he began to scour off the old paint from the ceiling and walls. Flakes of old paint poured down on the floor and desks and second-hand machines. It did not matter, since he intended to modernize with the new plastic surfacing materials.

  “Can I help?” Susan asked.

  “No,” he said. “You keep on mimeographing.”

  “If I can,” she said, retiring to a corner out of sight.

  “I want to get hold of a sign,” he said.

  With nervousness she said, “Did you buy all these portables?”

  “No,” he said. “They’re on consignment. I don’t expect to sell very many; I just want to show people that we’re in the business of selling typewriters.”

  While resting up from the paint-removing, he phoned around and got estimates on neon signs. In the end he decided to wait until he had gotten hold of a franchise or two; possibly he could split the cost with a manufacturer. And in that fashion he would get a bigger sign.

  After they closed up at six, both he and Susan painted. He drove out to the house and picked up Taffy, and she hung around while the two of them worked. They knocked off at eight o’clock for dinner, and then they resumed. Susan began gradually to gain vigor.

  “This is fun,” she told him, wearing an old torn smock that had belonged to Zoe. Paint streaked her face; she had tied her hair up in a dishtowel, but paint
had gotten onto her arms and neck. “It’s very creative.”

  “It’ll make the place newer,” he said.

  With a small camel’s hair brush Taffy did the fine edging. In school she had picked up experience along that line. The idea of staying up late appealed to her; they let her help them until ten o’clock and then Bruce drove her and Susan home and returned, alone, to resume work. He kept at it until two-thirty.

  It makes a difference, he said to himself, surveying what he had accomplished.

  The next morning he drove down early and began on the display. By nine o’clock, when Susan appeared, he had finished it.

  “How does it look?” he said.

  “Just wonderful,” she said, standing in her coat and gazing around the place, entranced and wide-eyed.

  Having finished the window display he set off in the Merc to shop for the counter material. He picked up a synthetic knotty pine; the material came in rolls, like veneer, to be glued on. Then he took a long look at cash registers. Too expensive. But he compromised on a receipt-writer that made three copies. Money would have to continue to be kept in their change-drawer.

  All afternoon he glued and tacked away at the counters. When he finished, they had before them a new counter.

  “I can’t believe it,” Susan said.

  These new plastic synthetic wood veneers are great stuff,” he said. He then figured out how much it would cost to glue the veneer to the entire interior walls. Too expensive. So he got out his paint brushes and resumed the painting of the walls.

  The last item that day consisted of buying and setting up an all-night spotlight for the window. It lit up one gold-colored portable. That, and the whirling platform, remained on all night.

  “Costs money to keep it on,” he admitted to Susan, “but it acts as a night light. It casts a glow into the store, so if anybody’s inside robbing us, the police can see him.”

  The new colors that he had painted the walls and ceiling made the store much lighter. And they gave the illusion of greater size. The walls and ceiling appeared to recede.

  “We just got ourselves some free space,” he told Susan.

  As they walked out to the car he told her that tomorrow he wanted to lay nylon tile on the floor. He knew where he could pick it up wholesale.

  “Isn’t that - and all this other - going to set us back a lot?” Susan asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “What else do you intend to do?”

  “I want to make changes in the front,” he said. “But that’ll take professional carpenters. “I’ll let that go until we’re wealthy. Maybe later on this year. And I’m going to dump all the junky old dogs. The used machines. Those damn old Underwood 5 models that you’re trying to sell for fifteen dollars. They’re not worth the space they occupy. You have to figure the value of me space. In a store this small, space is worth quite a bit. You can plaster and paint and buy new fixtures, but you can’t create space.” That reminded him that he wanted to see about new overhead lights, the soft fluorescent kind.

  “I hope we don’t go bankrupt,” she said. “Just buying paint.”

  “We’ll go bankrupt buying things to sell,” he told her. That was the big thing. Something to sell.

  God damn it, he thought, I’ve got to get something I can sell!

  ARMED WITH THE STORE’S BOOKS - he affirmed it to be a store, now, and not an office - he showed up at the Idaho Central Bank, Boise Branch, and opened discussions about a loan.

  After several hours of discussion the bank informed him that all things considered, they possibly could advance the store a long-term loan of two thousand dollars. It would take at least a week to approve it. But very possibly it would eventually go through.

  He left the bank in a happy frame of mind.

  That evening he arranged for a babysitter to take care of Taffy. He drove Susan out along the county road that brought them eventually to the farmhouse in which his parents lived. The bumpy drive made Susan a little carsick. When at last they parked, she said, “Could we sit for a while? Before we go in?”

  He said, “I want to go in first anyhow.” He had not told his parents about his marriage.

  “That’s fine with me,” she said. She had put on white gloves and a hat; very dressed-up, with much lipstick, she had the same dramatic aura that he had been so taken with, that first night. But her cheeks had a hollowness, and lines had formed under her eyes. Beyond any doubt she did need a rest.

  “There’re a few things I want to discuss with them first,” he said. He kissed her, got out of the car, and walked up the gravel and dirt shoulder to the gate.

  Here it was again, the tall gray ancient farmhouse, with dry soil around it, the weeds and geraniums growing out of the bare brown earth. No lawn. No green to speak of, except the ivy growing over me fence and around the gate. On the front porch a row of flower pots had in them indistinct clumps of growth. And he saw a wicker chair, and a plantstand on which lay a stack of Reader’s Digests.

  Imagine having been born in a run-down building like this, he said to himself, as he opened the gate.

  Off in the back a dog whooped noisily. He saw yellow light behind the window shades of the front room. And he could hear the boom of a TV set. Parked near me tumble-down garage was the same rusting, useless carcass of a 1930 Dodge; he had fooled around in it as a child.

  I lived here while I attended Garret A. Hobart Grammar School.

  The basement windows had cobwebs behind then; one showed a crack, which had been stuffed with a rag. So his father did not sleep down there any longer, now that both he and Frank had left. No doubt his father slept upstairs in one of their rooms.

  His father had slept during the day, arising at ten o’clock at night, pushing up the trap door and appearing so that he could shave and eat and set off for his job. During the day he slept under their feet, beneath the floorboards. With the quart jars of apricots and the lumber and wiring.

  In the morning, home from work, his father smacked off me white dust covering him; his job at the Snow White Bakery kept him buried elbow-deep in flour. Then, in the basement, he involved himself in another white dust: plaster dust, from his eternal puttering about with new partitions. He intended to make the basement into several rooms, to create a separate apartment with bath and bowl which he would rent out. The war had stopped his supply of materials. Outside the house, along the driveway, rolls of wire and heaps of beaverboard gathered bird excretion, rust, and rot. Sacks of cement became wet and sank into corruption that allowed tiny weeds to sprout within them. In the basement, before he retired at two in me afternoon, his father sawed away, filling his lungs with sawdust. He patiently breathed in wood dust, flour, plaster dust, and, in the summer, dust and weed-pollen from the fields.

  Bruce, standing on the path, saw in the evening darkness that the apricot trees by the back door had died. Thank God, he thought. Nobody had ever used the apricots; the thousands of jars of them down in the basement would never be opened. As a kid he had lugged jars outdoors and hurled rocks at them, bursting them in showers of sticky juice and glass. That had brought the hornets. In summer, the pools of apricot juice had become a buzzing swamp, wriggling with the yellow backs of the hornets. Nobody had dared go within yards of them.

  Up the steps, now, to rap on the front door. Under his feet the boards of the porch sagged; the entire porch leaned. At one time, years ago, the house and porch had been painted a battleship gray. Now the house had chipped and peeled until the boards themselves showed through, strips of yellowish brown beneath the gray.

  He lifted back the metal knocker and let it bang.

  The door opened and there stood Noel Stevens, his face smeared with day-old beard, in his suspenders, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He admitted Bruce without comment. His father, heavy and inert, lifted his hand and silently beckoned to Brace’s mother, who was in the kitchen. To Bruce, his father had always looked like a workman from the turn of the century, the massive honest not-too-bright Swed
ish hodcarrier or plumber who had arrived and gone directly to Minnesota and had never learned the language or visited any of the cities. The man’s face was wide, shiny except for the cheeks and chin, with a long nose bent or broken in the center, and fleshy. The skin, below his eyes, showed many craters that were faintly brown, almost like liver spots.

  “Well … by golly,” his father said. His reddish hairless hand appeared, and Bruce took it.

  From the kitchen his mother appeared. The tiny, tanned, clever, churchy face beaming at him, the bright eyes. Here, in her own house, she wore plain clean clothes that he identified with the rural people, the small-town Idaho people. She smiled up at him, and her grayish, transluscent false teeth, the color of a celluloid comb, caught the light and sparkled.

  “Hi,” Bruce said, his hand still clasped in his father’s flat wet limp palm and fingers. “How have you been?”

  “Fine,” his father said, letting go of his hand at last and reseating himself in his deep armchair; the springs twanged under him.

  His mother caught hold of him and fastened her mouth to his cheek; it happened so fast that she had sprung back before he could stir. “How nice to see you!” she cried. “How’s Reno?”

  “I’m not living in Reno any more,” he said. He seated himself, and she did so, too. They both watched him expectantly, his father’s face dull, his mother’s merry and kindly, catching every move he made, every word he said. “I’m living up in Boise. I got married.”

  “Oh!” his mother gasped, wincing, shocked. His father remained unstirred.

  “Just the other day,” he said.

  His father still did not respond.

  “I don’t believe it,” his mother wailed.

  To her, his father said, “He wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t true.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t believe it. Who is she?” she demanded, to first one of them and then the other.