The thing had come that he had expected and known would come and that he had waited all one fall for in Madrid and he was already making excuses not to go to it. Spending the time he had with the children had been a valid excuse and he knew nothing had been planned in Spain until later. But now it had come and what was he doing? He was convincing himself there was no need for him to go. It is liable all to be over before I can get there, he thought. There is going to be plenty of time.
There were other things that held him back too that he did not understand yet. They were the weaknesses that developed alongside his strengths like the crevices in a glacier under its covering of snow, or, if that is too pompous a comparison, like streaks of fat between muscles. These weaknesses were a part of the strengths unless they grew to dominate them; but they were mostly hidden and he did not understand them, nor know their uses. He did know, though, that this thing had come that he must go to and aid in every way he could, and yet he found varied reasons why he did not have to go.
They were all varyingly honest and they were all weak except one; he would have to make some money to support his children and their mothers and he would have to do some decent writing to make that money or he would not be able to live with himself. I know six good stories, he thought, and I’m going to write them. That will get them done and I have to do them to make up for that whoring on the Coast. If I can really do four out of the six that will pretty well balance me with myself and make up for that job of whoring; whoring hell, it wasn’t even whoring it was like being asked to produce a sample of semen in a test tube that could be used for artificial insemination. You had an office to produce it in and a secretary to help you. Don’t forget. The hell with these sexual symbols. What he meant was that he had taken money for writing something that was not the absolute best he could write. Absolute best hell. It was crap. Goose-crap. Now he had to atone for that and recover his respect by writing as well as he could and better than he ever had. That sounded simple, he thought. Try and do it some time.
But anyway if I do four as good as I can do and as straight as God could do them on one of his good days (Hi there Deity. Wish me luck Boy. Glad to hear you’re doing so good yourself.) then I’ll be straight with myself and if that six-ply bastard Nicholson can sell two out of the four that will stake the kids while we are gone. We? Sure. We. Don’t you remember about we? Like the little pig we we we all the way home. Only away from home. Home. That’s a laugh. There isn’t any home. Sure there is. This is home. All this. This cabin. This car. Those once fresh sheets. The Green Lantern and the widow woman and Regal beer. The drugstore and the breeze off the gulf. That crazy at the lunch counter and a ham and egg sandwich on rye. Make it two to go. One with a slice of raw onion. Fill her up and check the water and the oil please. Would you mind checking the tires please? The hiss of compressed air, administered courteously and free was home which was all oil-stained cement everywhere, all rubber worn on pavements, comfort facilities, and Cokes in red vending machines. The center line of highways was the boundary line of home.
You get to think like one of those Vast-Spaces-of-America writers, he said to himself. Better watch it. Better get a load of this. Look at your girl sleeping and know this: Home is going to be where people do not have enough to eat. Home is going to be wherever men are oppressed. Home is going to be wherever evil is strongest and can be fought. Home is going to be where you will go from now on.
But I don’t have to go yet, he thought. He had some reasons to delay it. No you don’t have to go yet, his conscience said. And I can write the stories, he said. Yes, you must write the stories and they must be as good as you can write and better. All right. Conscience, he thought. We have that all straightened out. I guess the way things are shaping up I had better let her sleep. You let her sleep, his conscience said. And you try very hard to take good care of her and not only that. You take good care of her. As good as I can, he told his conscience, and I’ll write at least four good ones. They better be good, his conscience said. They will be, he said. They’ll be the very best.
So having promised and decided that did he then take a pencil and an old exercise book and, sharpening the pencil, start one of the stories there on the table while the girl slept? He did not. He poured an inch and a half of White Horse into one of the enameled cups, unscrewed the top of the ice jug and putting his hand in the cool depth pulled out a chunk of ice and put it in the cup. He opened a bottle of White Rock and poured some alongside of the ice and then swirled the lump of ice around with his finger before he drank.
They’ve got Spanish Morocco, Sevilla, Pamplona, Burgos, Saragossa, he thought. We’ve got Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and the Basque country. Both frontiers are still open It doesn’t look so bad. It looks good. I must get a good map though. I ought to be able to get a good map in New Orleans. Mobile maybe.
He figured it as well as he could without a map. Saragossa is bad, he thought. That cuts the railway to Barcelona. Saragossa was a good Anarchist town. Not like Barcelona or Lérida. But still plenty there. They can’t have put up much of a fight. Maybe they haven’t made their fight yet. They’d have to take Saragossa right away if they could. They would have to come up from Catalonia and take it.
If they could keep the Madrid-Valencia-Barcelona railway and open up Madrid-Saragossa-Barcelona and hold Irún it ought to be all right. With stuff coming in from France they ought to be able to build up in the Basque country and beat Mola in the north. That would be the toughest fight. That son of a bitch. He could not see the situation in the south except that the revolters would have to come up the valley of the Tagus to attack Madrid and they would probably try it from the north too. Would have to try it right away to try to force the passes of the Quadarramas the way Napoleon had done it.
I wish I had not been with the kids, he thought. I wish the hell I was there. No you don’t wish you hadn’t been with the kids. You can’t go to everyone. Or you can’t be at them the minute they start. You’re not a firehorse and you have as much obligation to the kids as to anything in the world. Until the time comes when you have to fight to keep the world so it will be O.K. for them to live in, he corrected. But that sounded pompous so he corrected it to when it is more necessary to fight than to be with them. That was flat enough. That would come soon enough.
Figure this one out and what you have to do and then stick with that, he told himself. Figure it as well as you can and then really do what you have to do. All right, he said. And he went on figuring.
Helena slept until eleven-thirty and he had finished his second drink.
“Why didn’t you wake me, darling?” she said when she opened her eyes and rolled toward him and smiled.
“You looked so lovely sleeping.”
“But we’ve missed our early start and the early morning on the road.”
“We’ll have it tomorrow morning.”
“Give kiss.”
“Kiss.”
“Give hug a lug.’
“Big hugalug”
“Feels better,” she said. “Oh. Feels good.”
When she came out from the shower with her hair tucked under a rubber cap she said, “Darling, you didn’t have to drink because you were lonesome did you?”
“No. Just because I felt like it.”
“Did you feel badly though?”
“No. I felt wonderful.”
“I’m so glad. I’m ashamed. I just slept and slept.”
“We can swim before lunch.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m so hungry. Do you think we could have lunch and then take a nap or read or something and then swim?”
“Wunderbar.”
“We shouldn’t start and drive this afternoon?”
“See how you feel, daughter.”
“Come here,” she said.
He did. She put her arms around him and he felt her standing, fresh and cool from the shower, not dried yet, and he kissed her slowly and happily feeling the happy ache come in him wher
e she had pressed firm against him.
“How’s that?”
“That’s fine.”
“Good,” she said. “Let’s drive tomorrow.”
The beach was white sand, almost as fine as flour, and it ran for miles. They took a long walk along it in the late afternoon, swimming out, lying in the clear water, floating and playing, and then swimming in to walk further along the beach.
“It’s a lovelier beach than Bimini even,” the girl said.
“But the water’s not as fine. It doesn’t have that quality the Gulf Stream water has.”
“No I guess not. But after European beaches it’s unbelievable.”
The clean softness of the sand made walking a sensual pleasure that could be varied from the dry, soft, powdery to the just moist and yielding to the firm cool sand of the line of the receding tide.
“I wish the boys were here to point out things and show me things and tell me about things.”
“I’ll point out things.”
“You don’t have to. You just walk ahead a little way and let me look at your back and your can.”
“You walk ahead.”
“No you.”
Then she came up to him and said, “Come on. Let’s run side by side.”
They jogged easily along the pleasant firm footing above the breaking waves. She ran well, almost too well for a girl, and when Roger forced the pace just a little she kept up easily. He kept the same pace and then lengthened it a little again. She kept even with him but said, “Hi. Don’t kill me,” and he stopped and kissed her. She was hot from the running and she said, “No. Don’t.”
“It’s nice.”
“Must go in the water first,” she said. They dove into the surf that was sandy where it broke and swam out to the clean green water. She stood up with just her head and shoulders out.
“Kiss now.”
Her lips were salty and her face was wet with the seawater and as he kissed her she turned her head so that her sea wet hair swung against his shoulder.
“Awfully salty but awfully good,” she said. “Hold very hard.”
He did.
“Here comes a big one,” she said. “A really big one. Now lift high up and we’ll go over together in the wave.”
The wave rolled them over and over holding tight onto each other his legs tight around hers.
“Better than drowning,” she said. “So much better. Let’s do it once more.”
They picked a huge wave this time and when it hung and curled to break Roger threw them across the line of its breaking and when it crashed down it rolled them over and over like a piece of driftwood onto the sand.
“Let’s get clean and lie on the sand,” she said and they swam and dove in the clean water and then lay side by side on the cool, firm beach where the last inrush of the waves just touched their toes and ankles.
“Roger, do you still love me?”
“Yes, daughter. Very much.”
“I love you. You were nice to play.”
“I had fun.”
“We do have fun don’t we.”
“It’s been lovely all day.”
“We only had a half a day because I was a bad girl and slept so late.”
“That was a good sound thing to do.”
“I didn’t do it to be good and sound. I did it because I couldn’t help it.”
He lay alongside of her, his right foot touching her left, his leg touching hers and he put his hand on her head and neck.
“Old head’s awfully wet. You won’t catch a cold in the wind?”
“I don’t think so. If we lived by the ocean all the time I’d have to get my hair cut.”
“No.”
“It looks nice. You’d be surprised.”
“I love it the way it is.”
“It’s wonderful short for swimming.”
“Not for bed though.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’d still be able to tell I was a girl.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m almost sure. I could always remind you.”
“Daughter?”
“What, darling?”
“Did you always like making love?”
“No.”
“Do you now?”
“What do you think?”
“I think that if I had a good look both ways down the beach and there was no one in sight we’d be all right.”
“It’s an awfully lonely beach,” she said.
They walked back along the sea and the wind was still blowing and the rollers were breaking far out on the low tide.
“It seems so awfully simple and as though there were no problems at all,” the girl said. “I found you and then all we ever had to do was eat and sleep and make love. Of course it’s not like that at all.”
“Let’s keep it like that for a while.”
“I think we have a right to for a little while. Maybe not a right to. But I think we can. But won’t you be awfully bored with me?”
“No,” he said. He was not lonely after this last time as he had nearly always been no matter with whom or where. He had not had the old death loneliness since the first time the night before. “You do something awfully good to me.”
“I’m glad if I really do. Wouldn’t it be awful if we were the kind of people who grated on each other’s nerves and had to have fights to love each other?”
“We’re not like that.”
“I’ll try not to be. But won’t you be bored just with me?”
“No.”
“But you’re thinking about something else now.”
“Yes. I was wondering if we could get a Miami Daily News.”
“That’s the afternoon paper?”
“I just wanted to read about the Spanish business.”
“The military revolt?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
“Sure.”
He told her about it as well as he could within the limitations of his knowledge and his information.
“Are you worried about it?”
“Yes. But I haven’t thought about it all afternoon.”
“We’ll see what there is in the paper,” she said. “And tomorrow you can follow it on the radio in the car. Tomorrow we’ll really get an early start.”
“I bought an alarm clock.”
“Weren’t you intelligent? It’s wonderful to have such an intelligent husband. Roger?”
“Yes, daughter.”
“What do you think they will have to eat at the Green Lantern?”
The next day they started early in the morning before sunrise and by breakfast they had done a hundred miles and were away from the sea and the bays with their wooden docks and fish packing houses and up in the monotonous pine and scrub palmetto of the cattle country. They ate at a lunch counter in a town in the middle of the Florida prairie. The lunch counter was on the shady side of the square and looked out on a red bricked court house with its green lawn.
“I don’t know how I ever held out for that second fifty,” the girl said, looking at the menu.
“We should have stopped at Punta Gorda,” Roger said. “That would have been sensible.”
“We said we’d do a hundred though,” the girl said. “And we did it. What are you going to have, darling?”
“I’m going to have ham and eggs and coffee and a big slice of raw onion,” Roger told the waitress.
“How do you want the eggs?”
“Straight up.”
“The lady?”
“I’ll have corned beef hash, browned, with two poached eggs,” Helena said.
“Tea, coffee, or milk?”
“Milk please.”
“What kind of juice?”
“Grapefruit please.”
“Two grapefruits. Do you mind the onion?” Roger asked.
“I love onions,” she said. “Not as much as I love you though. And I never tried them for breakfast.”
“They’re
good,” Roger said. “They get in there with the coffee and keep you from being lonely when you drive.”
“You’re not lonely are you?”
“No, daughter.”
“We made quite good time didn’t we?”
“Not really good. That’s not much of a stretch for time with the bridges and the towns.”
“Look at the cowpunchers,” she said. Two men on cow ponies, wearing western work clothes, got down from their stock saddles and hitched their horses to the rail in front of the lunch room and walked down the sidewalk on their high-heeled boots.
“They run a lot of cattle around here,” Roger said. “You have to watch for stock on all these roads.”
“I didn’t know they raised many cattle in Florida.”
“An awful lot. Good cattle now too.”
“Don’t you want to get a paper?”
“I’d like to,” he said. “I’ll see if the cashier has one.”
“At the drugstore,” the cashier said. “St. Petersburg and Tampa papers at the drugstore.”
“Where is it?”
“At the corner. I doubt if you could miss it.”