In Milton Lumky Territory

  “I don’t know,” his father said, tapping her on the knee. “Just settle down.” To Bruce he said, “Is that her out in the car?”

  “Is she out there?” his mother cried, springing up and running to the window. “How did you know she was out there?” she asked his father.

  His father answered in his slow way, “I heard the car stop so I looked out to see who it was stopping.”

  “Bring her in,” his mother said, starting toward the door. “What’s her name?”

  “Don’t you go and get her,” his father ordered.

  “Yes,” his mother said. Opening the door she started out onto the porch.

  “Come and sit down!” his father said loudly.

  She returned, flustered and red-faced. “Why did you leave her out in the car?” she asked Bruce.

  “He’ll tell you,” his father said.

  “She’s feeling carsick,” Bruce said.

  “Tell her to come inside and lie down,” his mother said.

  “I want to talk to you first,” Bruce said. “I’m not bringing her in her until you swear on the Bible not to say anything mean to her.”

  “Nobody is going to say anything mean,” his father said.

  “I’m not bringing her in here until you both make up your minds to do what you ought to do and not what you feel like doing,” he said. “If you say anything mean to her, I’ll leave and you won’t see either of us again. I’ve thought it over and I’m sorry but I don’t feel like having you give her a hard time.”

  His father said, “He’s right.”

  “Yes,” his mother agreed. “Well, do we get to see her?”

  Bruce said, “She’s older than I am.”

  “How much older?” his mother said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” his father said. “If Bruce married her that’s what you better concern yourself with. It’s not up to you to decide.”

  “Ten years,” Bruce said. “She’s thirty-four.”

  His mother began to cry.

  “Ten years is a lot,” his father said, with gravity.

  “Now I’ve told you,” Bruce said.

  They both sat unhappily, collecting their emotions.

  “What did you want to discuss with us first?” his father asked.

  Bruce said, “I want to see what financial shape you’re in these days. Look,” he said. “You sent Frank to college but I had to go to work right after high school; in fact I worked while I was in high school. What about a wedding present?”

  “We’ll give you a wedding present,” his father said.

  “I don’t mean a ten-dollar bill,” Bruce said. “We need thousands of dollars, six or seven thousand.”

  His father nodded, as if that seemed perfectly natural to him.

  “I wanted to ask you first before I brought her in,” Bruce said. “It’s for me, so it has nothing to do with her. It’s so I can get started in business.” He told them a little about the store. They both listened, but he doubted that they understood. They were too numbed. Too taken by surprise. “I can’t fool around about it,” he said. “I can’t take time to be polite; we have to have it right away. I want to get it now, before I bring her in.” His voice had risen until he was shouting at them; they sat driven back against their chairs, not interrupting him. . He had successfully intimidated them, which was the only way he could hope to get it. He talked on and on and they listened; he explained the whole thing to them and then he pounced on them demanding, “You sent Frank to college; it’s time you did something for me, and this is the time I really need it.” He ignored the fact that Frank had won one scholarship after another. “What do you say?” he said.

  His father said, “We always intended to help you when you made up your mind what line you wanted to go into.” He spoke with dignity.

  “Good,” Bruce said, delighted; he had beaten them. By the sheer weight of his voice he had made them accept what he said; he had gotten past their natural frugality and common sense. “Now, what can you do for me?” he said. “Look, I want to bring her inside; she’s getting cold out there and I told her I’d be back in a couple of seconds.” He leaped up and paced about urgently, forcing his impatience onto them.

  His parents dithered in their desire to fix things up. His father sat down in the dining room and began searching ponderously for his check book; his mother ran upstairs for a fountain pen. A moment later he had his father’s check for one thousand dollars, and his parents were telling him that they wished they could give them more. His mother, weeping again, wanted only to see Susan; she had no interest in the money. His father muttered apologetically that maybe later on, when he had a chance to take a look at the bonds he had downtown in his bank deposit box, he might be able to add something to it.

  “I’ll go get her,” Bruce said, as if he had now been released. He strode out onto the porch; his parents accompanied him as far as the steps and stood fearfully as he opened the car door.

  Susan said, “I feel better. Are those your parents?” She could see them on the porch. “I wish I didn’t have to go in, but I guess I have to.” Carefully holding her skirt down, she slid across the car seat; he held the door open and she stood up beside him, holding her purse and gloves, preparing herself.

  “We won’t stay long,” he said to her as together they climbed the steps to the porch.

  “It leans,” she said.

  “It always did. It won’t collapse.” He took her arm. The porchlight had been turned on, and in the uneven glare Susan’s face took on a mottled cast. His parents, on the porch above them, peered down in a state of near hysteria; he had never seen anyone so deeply affected by the sight of anyone else. As soon as Susan reached the porch - she moved as slowly and regularly as possible - his mother seized her and propelled her inside. That was the last he saw of them for some time, but their voices, from different parts of the house, remained audible.

  His father, accompanying him indoors, said, “Nobody would have any idea that she’s older than you.”

  That was not true, but he felt it to be well-meant. “Her name’s Susan,” he said. And then, for the first time, it struck him that possibly one or both of his parents might have met her back when she had been his teacher; there had been PTA meetings - I wish I had thought of it before, he thought, because now it was too late. “We can’t stay long,” he said.

  “How did you happen to meet her?” his father asked.

  He gave him a meager account.

  “Then she’s from Boise,” his father said, pleased. “Not Reno.”

  If they find out that she was my fifth grade teacher, he thought, they’ll probably want the thousand dollars back. At that, he laughed.

  In the kitchen his mother was showing Susan a set of hideous ornate dishes that a friend had sent her from Europe, and Susan was exclaiming at their beauty. He began to feel a little more relaxed.

  ON THE DRIVE BACK HOME he stopped in downtown Boise at a drugstore, telling Susan that he wanted to pick up cigarettes. What he actually bought was a box of envelopes and some three-cent stamps. He put the check into an envelope and addressed it to himself and Susan, stuck a stamp on it, and gave it to the clerk to mail for him.

  “What was your parents’ reaction to me?” Susan asked several times on the trip.

  “We’ll see,” he said. He had not told her about the check.

  “How do you mean, ‘We’ll see’?”

  “If they liked you,” he said, “they’ll express it concretely. With people like that, old-fashioned rural people, there’s nothing to interpret. They’ll give you their reaction; you’ll know.”

  “I wondered,” she said. “Because I couldn’t tell a thing. Your mother was sweet and upset and he was polite, but I couldn’t tell how much they meant it.”

  The next day the envelope with his father’s check arrived at the store. He opened it and showed it to Susan.

  “See?” he said. “They approve.”

  Transfixed, she said, “Bruce, it s
aves our lives. Look what you can get at dealer’s cost with that.” It brought about a genuine change in her morale; for the rest of the day she planned and schemed and considered an infinite number of future solutions. “What grand people they are,” she said to him. “We should write to them or even go back out there and thank them personally. I feel so odd - but I guess it’s all right to accept it.”

  “Sure it is,” he said.

  “Why don’t I call them on the phone and thank them?”

  He said, “Let me do it.”

  WITH THE THOUSAND DOLLARS CASH he was able to assure the loan from the bank. It came through at the end of the month; now he had twenty-five hundred dollars with which to buy goods to sell. But he still did not know what to buy. He put the money into an account that would draw four percent interest, and the interest on the total was not much less than the interest due on the fifteen-hundred dollar bank loan.

  But I have to find a warehouse full of something soon, he realized. Or borrowing and begging this money will have been a mistake. As of now we’re making nothing; we’ll have to start dipping into the account to pay our monthly bills.

  Maybe I’ll wind up using the money to meet the monthly payments due on the loan. That would be a novel way of doing business.

  By now he had scouted the Boise area and found nothing. To Susan he said, “I think I’ll have to get out on the road.”

  “To where?” she said. “You mean a long trip?”

  “Maybe to L.A. Or to Salt Lake City. Or Portland. Some place where I can find something warehoused. I can’t let that money sit.”

  He began to make calls long-distance, trying to scout something in advance.

  TWO DAYS LATER he had the Merc entirely lubed and checked over, its tires rotated, and then, with a suitcase in the trunk, he set off by himself on Highway 26, going west into Oregon and California.

  9

  THE FIRST STRETCH of driving brought him entirely through Oregon and into the northern-most part of California. Turning south he passed through Klamath Falls, through the border station, and then made the difficult drive past Mount Shasta and along the twisting grades near Dunsmuir in the deepest part of the lumber country, with lakes and fast-moving water always within sight.

  Early in the morning he left the mountainous lumber country and came out onto furiously-hot flat valley farmland. Worn out, he pulled off the road at the first motel.

  The motel amounted to nothing more than shack-like cabins facing one another in two lines, with gravel strewn about, and giant century plants at the office door. In a pair of lawn chairs a middle-aged couple slept, shaded by a beach umbrella. Several cars had pulled off the road and parked. He saw and heard a few children scratching in the dust in the shadows by a cabin porch.

  However, he had already shut off his motor. After haggling with the motel owner he made his regular deal: use of the cabin for a period of eight hours for a dollar and a half. His tenancy did not entitle him to bathe, or to get into the bed, but he could wash his face, use the hand towel but not the bath towel, lie on the bed without throwing back the covers or touching the sheets, and naturally he could make use of the potty. At eight in the morning he locked up his car, entered the badly-ventilated cabin, and lay down for his nap.

  At four in the afternoon the owner woke him. A number of cars had begun to show up, and the cabin was needed. He collected his watch, which he had taken off, and his shoes, and padded groggily outside into the still-blinding sunlight. As soon as he was out, the owner’s wife hurried in with a fresh hand towel and soap.

  “Any place around here I can eat?” he asked the owner, a short balding cross-looking man.

  “There’s a coffee shop and gas station about ten miles farther on,” the man said, striding off to greet a Plymouth full of people that had come crunching over the gravel toward the motel office.

  Bruce got back into his car, started up the engine, and drove back onto the road.

  When he spied the coffee shop he drove up to the pumps of the gas station, told the attendant to fill the tank, and, leaving the car there, jogged across the highway to the coffee shop. While he ate a meal of meatloaf with gravy, canned peas, coffee and berry pie, he watched the attendant checking the water and tires and battery.

  Lighting a cigarette he sat at his empty plate, conscious of his loneliness.

  The all-night drive had not given him any pleasure. The glare of oncoming headlights had bothered him more than usual. And the straining, hour by hour, to stay awake and see each of the reflector-posts that indicated bends. He had played the car radio all night, hearing mostly static and indistinct snatches of popular tunes from stations too far off to be identified. They floated in and out. Faint voices of announcers, speaking from other states, selling products for stores that he would never see.

  And of course he had run over a variety of running shapes, some of them rabbits, some possibly snakes and lizards. And just at sunup two brilliantly-colored birds had flitted directly in front of him and then vanished. Later, at a gas station, when he had raised the hood, he had found both birds dead and crushed at the bottom of the radiator. He had been unable to avoid any of the things he ran over, and that depressed him. He could not drive the highway without killing one small animal after another. And the number of already-dead animals, flattened out on the pavement ahead of him, exceeded all count.

  At night, on the highway, he passed through closed-up towns in which not a single light had been left on. Those towns alarmed him. No persons, no motion. Not even cars parked at the gray-dark shops. The gas stations empty and deserted, too; a terrible sight for the driver to see. But sooner or later a lit-up gas station put in an appearance, often with one or more giant diesel trucks parked nearby with motors on, the drivers inside the cafe eating roast beef sandwiches. Spot of yellow light, with jukebox going, washroom standing door-ajar, gleaming white tiles and bowl, paper towels, mirror. Entering, he had washed his face, and looked out past the open door, at the lumber forest. At the flat blackness outside the washroom. How lonely it all was. How silent.

  He thought, Once you get used to spending your nights with someone else, men you are sunk for this. Once you learn how it feels to wake up and see another face near yours. And have another person flop over against you in the early hours of dawn when the room gets cold. It’s more than sex. Sex is over with in a few minutes. This is peaceful, and it goes on as long as you have her lying with you. It puts an end to an awful thing; it starts something better than anything else in life.

  It changes everything, he thought. Spreads out and covers every kind of event.

  That was something he had not expected or known about. Sleeping a night now and then with a girl had no relationship with it. His anticipation of what it would be like with Susan had fallen short of the actuality. It had a much greater hold on him than he would have expected. That nine or ten days could completely change him, his views and preferences, affecting even this, his sense of driving, his feel of the road …

  After his meal he picked up his car and continued the drive on down California to the Bay Area. He arrived late at night, crossed the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, found an underpass that took him off the freeway, and at last reached Market Street. He parked and got out, feeling shaky but excited.

  Something about Market Street had changed. He walked along the well-lit sidewalk, past the towering noble movie houses, and then he realized what it was. The clanking old streetcars had gone. Instead, buses shot quietly along at the curb.

  Hands in his pockets he strolled in the direction of the waterfront. When he reached First and Market he began to notice small shops that sold Army surplus pots and clothing and shoes, so he crossed to the other side and started back. At Fifth and Market he wandered off onto one side street and then another, seeing all the different small shops, some prosperous and some not. After an hour or so he found himself staring at a display of tape recorders and cameras and typewriters, among which was a small aluminum portable th
at he had never seen before. The brand name was Mithrias. Presently he noticed a cord hanging out of the back. The thing was electric. And he could make out a belt disappearing from the carriage inside to the motor, so it had an electric carriage return. Nothing on it stated that it was an import, but he recognized it as the Japanese portable Milt had told him about.

  The tag could be partly read. He read it, but it gave ordinary information, in acceptable and idiomatic English. But he knew that this was the Japanesse machine. His instincts, his talent, told him.

  The store, of course, was shut. But he did not have to know any more than this; the machine, to some extent, had been distributed in the Bay Area. Someone had jobbed it to this retailer. Naturally San Francisco and Los Angeles would be the most likely spots to find it, since the machines would come in by ships and these were ports. As were Seattle and San Diego. But the retail trade was higher, here.

  A glance told him that this was not a regular outlet for typewriters. He saw no popular lines represented, and no display material. This was simply an enterprising small merchant who stocked a bit of this and a bit of that, from microscope sets and fancy fabrics to rocks that glowed in the dark, mother of pearl cigarette lighters and redwood wall planters. Something on the order of a gift shop, with an emphasis on metals, glass, and plastics, rather than bric-a-brac.

  That raised his hopes. The Mithrias people hadn’t yet worked out their franchise arrangement, or they hadn’t been able to call back the machines already sold. Either way, the machines had gotten out of ordinary franchised outlets. No reason on earth why he couldn’t buy on the same terms as any retailer. Of course, he would have to figure out how to transport them to Boise. But he wouldn’t need very many.

  Unless, he thought, I want to make it an all-or-nothing buy. Pick up as many as I can get. Make only a few dimes on each one, advertise with spotlights and free gardenias and sound trucks.

  A one-cent sale. Buy an electric portable for such-and-such, get a second one for a penny.

  But he still had to discover a warehouse of them, and one which the owner wanted to dump. His best bet would perhaps be - not in San Francisco or in L.A. - but in a smaller town in-between, where a local jobber had tried to do in his town what had been done elsewhere. An in-between town like Bakersfield, where perhaps an outlet of some chain drug company or department store or supermarket had been given a quota of them but hadn’t made its sales.