Braden’s answer to that was a remark in the nature of obscenity, and the conversation between the brothers was over, it was permanently finished.
Alone in his tower that night, Gewinner opened a window and stood there listening to the faint, perpetual hum of activity at The Project. It moved through the air like the purring of some giant cat that never slept nor changed its menacingly crouched position.
For the first time in his life, as best he could remember, Gewinner thought about good and evil. It seemed to him that he knew, coldly, abstractly, which of the two was which, and also knew which of the two it would suit him better to serve in whatever way it was possible for him to serve it.
He felt a vibration in himself like a countervibration to the one that came from The Project.
I’m being silly, he thought. All I’m here for is to blackmail Mother and Braden into giving me back my travel expenses. What has good and evil got to do with that?
But he stayed at the window and the feeling of two dueling vibrations continued. Hmmm went The Project. Hmmm went Gewinner. And it seemed like an equal conflict, it gave him the sort of strength that a barefooted Hopi, treading bare ground in a dance, is said to draw up out of the blazing dark core of the earth.
Billy Spangler was a very moral guy and he would not have enjoyed his work or gotten nearly so much satisfaction out of the success of the drive-in if he had not been able to think of it as being in its own humble way a part of The Project. It really was in a way. Certainly most of its trade, by far the preponderance of it, came from people directly employed at The Project, and then, of course, virtually everybody and everything else in the town of Gewinner was at least obliquely associated with the Great New Thing. Spangler ran the drive-in as though he was operating a part of The Project, which was not difficult since he was close enough to the outer periphery of The Project’s intricate bell system to be apprised of all the changes of shifts the moment that they were effected. When the night shift came on at eight thirty Spangler sent two of his girls home and kept only one on the job, at time and a half, one girl and a colored delivery boy with a bicycle who could carry the occasional calls for hot coffee up to guards who were posted at various points about the key entrances to the grounds. The commissary of the main plant remained open all night so that employees within the buildings did not need to call the drive-in for coffee but the guards could not leave their posts and they preferred their coffee brought in from Billy Spangler’s drive-in because the coffee in the commissary was a chronic joke. That’s commissary coffee, people would say to Billy when they wanted to tease him, and Billy was very proud of his own coffee. It pleased him to let people know that he lost money on his coffee, he made it so good. A fresh brew of it every hour regardless of how much was still left in the big old electric urns. I throw out more coffee than them drive-ins on the highway make, he would say. I guess it costs me money to serve coffee here, but that’s O.K. The best is none too good for the boys down there at The Project.
All this was said so heartily and believed so genuinely that the boastfulness was as lovable as a small boy’s. Everybody loved Billy, they thought he was full of fun and a really good Joe. But don’t shit around with him, though, especially not any nigger, because ole Billy has got a load of TNT in that left arm of his, and his wiry build is a hell of a lot more powerful than it looks with clothes on.
Billy had done some amateur wrestling on the Monday night shows that the veterans’ organization used to put on at the old Armory building, now torn down and being rebuilt much bigger, and those that had seen Billy wrestle those nights would never forget how he whipped off that purple silk robe with “Billy’s Drive-in” inscribed on it and. Wow, what a build, holy Jesus, you felt like shouting the instant it was uncovered!
This evening Billy Spangler was alone at the drive-in with a new girl whom he had nicknamed Big Edna, not because she was really big but because it happened that one of the other two girls was also named Edna and was so petite that she barely missed being a midget.
This Big Edna, as Billy called her, was the country girl who had served the coffee to Gewinner Pearce that morning, and she had been shaking with nervousness ever since the awful scene had occurred. Every once in a while her eyes would turn red, and she would slip back into the powder room and come out a minute later looking pale and determined. Billy treated her gently. He wondered if this was her time of the month because otherwise he didn’t understand why she took the little occurrence so damn serious. It didn’t really have anything to do with her, it was just something that happened between him and Mr. Pearce’s eccentric brother which was going to be all straightened out tomorrow. Mr. Pearce had told him it would be, and had reaffirmed his approval of the drive-in and of Billy Spangler and everything else about it so warmly that the two men had fawned on each other like a pair of lovers. And Billy Spangler had repeatedly assured Mr. Braden Pearce that he wasn’t really injured and that it didn’t matter a bit and he wanted him to just forget the whole thing and he was mad at himself, now, for mentioning a little occurrence like that to him. It was just that he hated to think there might ever be any source of misunderstanding between the drive-in and those wonderful folks that had leased the property to him. And Billy knew by the way that Braden Pearce’s car swarmed into the grounds of the Pearce estate that he was going to raise holy hell with the eccentric brother who lived in the gray stone tower of the residence. That was all taken care of.
But the new girl. Big Edna, continued to shake over it. Now she was still shaking. Perhaps he should not have kept her on tonight. He worked the girls in rotation. That is, he worked them overtime in rotation, and this night it was Big Edna’s turn to work overtime but he should have considered her sensitive feelings and let her go home. He wondered why he didn’t send her home now. It would be surprising if there were as many as two more customers at the drive-in between now and closing time at midnight. Gewinner was a town where serious people (except for a freak or two like Braden’s brother, who sometimes patrolled the streets, empty and dimly lit, in the convertible Caddy till three or four in the morning as if he were looking for a pickup) went to bed early and got up with the chickens. Those were the sort of hours The Project encouraged its employees and families of employees to keep, and sometimes a man would be quietly dropped from the rolls for no other reason than that he was known to be around town on week nights or late hours. The Project deserved and got from its men that kind of complete dedication, Billy Spangler knew that, and nobody respected it more than he did.
Billy Spangler was conscious of the great social changes that were now in the air. He felt the glorious warm wave of the new religiousness and he had made a bigger contribution than he could afford to the erection of a new Methodist church which was to have a swimming pool and badminton courts in the basement and an auditorium that looked like a somewhat glorified economics classroom. Reform was a mighty good thing and had been a long time coming. It had taken The Project to give everybody in town that serious, dedicated feeling that made them all like so many cells of one great uplifted being. This was a swell way to be and it was no doubt the way toward which the whole progress of mankind had always pointed. It was certainly the ultimate goal of The Project that all the world population of friendly Caucasians were going to have churches like that under the benignly paternal sponsorship of The Center. “The Center” was the new word, rather like a code word, for the immediate locality of The Project. Yes, there were going to be churches like that all over the world, once the great new principle was established and by God and by Jesus everybody was going to have to pitch in and do his bit like Billy Spangler was doing. No more fuck-offs like the sissy Pearce brother. Not here in this country or anywhere in any other country. It’s all right to talk about tolerance and individual rights and all of that sort of business but you got to draw a line somewhere. If you give a man too much rope he will hang himself and it was the business of a Christian community dedicated to a Great New Thing to make
sure that everybody had just enough rope to keep from being too conscious of confinement and at the same time not enough to tempt the weak ones or the ones that were a little unsettled to self-indulgent excesses of any description.
So Billy Spangler sat on the end of the counter and watched the new girl, Big Edna, putting the apple pie slices, left over from the day’s business, back into paper cartons so that they could be picked up by the bakery and resold at a discount and Spangler get credit on them. This required a little bending over and each time the girl bent over she flushed a little. She had a brassiere on but not a tight one and her breasts were a good deal bigger than her age and maidenhood seemed to call for. Although Spangler did not talk dirty, sometimes the phrases of his rough boyhood would come into his mind, such as “a pair of ripe boobies.” A pair of ripe boobies, he said to himself as he watched her, and the girl cleared her throat and flushed before she spoke to him as if the words in his mind had been spoken aloud.
Now what do I do with these here boxes? she asked him.
He told her just to leave them there on the counter. The bakery boy would pick them up at opening time in the morning.
And then she said. Will that be all, Mr. Spangler?
Yeah, said Billy, you can change out of your uniform now if you want to, honey.
She flushed deeper than ever and nodded her head a little. Then she turned her back to him and self-consciously rooted in her purse for the key to the girl’s washroom where the girls left their clothes when they changed. Each of the girls had a key and there were only three of them. Big Edna could not seem to find hers in the purse and he could see her getting sort of panicky about it as she rooted around and still did not locate it. The trouble was that she had too much junk in the pocket-book. She was piling it all on the counter and Billy Spangler had to laugh at her back as he saw all the stuff she had in it, almost the whole cosmetic counter of a five-and-ten, right down to the little two-bit bottle of scent with a colored sweet pea on it. Billy laughed at her back but kept his eyes on her ass most of the time while she was continuing the frantic search for the key. If those gabardine slacks had been a half size smaller, by God, Big Edna could not have gotten into them with a shoehorn, and that was no lie. Billy got up off the counter, slid down off it, rather, and crossed gently over to Big Edna and laid his big hand on her shoulder, for he now perceived that the girl had started crying again, and he said to her gently, Now, honey, you got to stop getting so upset over nothing. That key is in there and if you wasn’t so nervous you could find it. Now look here, now. Put all that stuff back in. Yep, that’s the ticket, honey. Now give it to me and you go in the gents’ room and wash your pretty little face and have a smoke and when you come back I’ll have that little door key in the palm of my hand. You want to bet me?
Billy did not mean to let his hand slide down the girl’s back, but sometimes a hand does something like that without any plan to. It did. It slid right down her back and onto the curve of her hips and underneath was a softness and a heat that seemed to transfer itself directly from that locality on her body to the frontal equator of his. And now Billy Spangler was the one who felt embarrassed and ill at ease. He flushed and turned his back on Big Edna and returned to the end of the counter with the now tightly packed pocketbook in his hand while she stood there as if she had struck roots in the position she had been in when his rebellious hand had made the inadmissible breach of consideration. For the hand of Billy Spangler had just now violated one of his firmest principles of conduct, which was never to take advantage of any opportunity that seemed to be offered by a female employee.
In Billy’s defense it ought to be noted that he was a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor and had not been to bed with a girl since weeks ago when the Public Relations Committee at The Project had given little Eula Mayberry her train fare home. Eula had been the last survivor of the once thriving industry of prostitution which was one of the things that The Project had cleaned up in its drive to make the community worthy in every respect of the Great New Thing of which it was now The Center. Billy was planning to marry as soon as he found the right girl but in the meantime he didn’t want to run the risk of getting mixed up with a wrong one because there is nothing that can bitch up a man’s whole life worse than an unwise marriage can. There was ample evidence in Billy’s life of the appeal that he had for bad women, and Billy believed that there were just two kinds of women, the good and the bad kind, and somehow it seemed like it was the bad kind that took the biggest interest in Billy. It seemed like he couldn’t come near one of them kind of women without their reaching a hand out or trying to make him do it.
Well, it just wouldn’t do. Billy had ambitions and matrimony was a definite part of his ambitions. He was going to find him a good little girl on a social level that was distinctly higher than his own had been. Maybe he’d have to wait four or five years for that to happen. Maybe it would not happen until after he had opened two or three more driveins and was an absolutely unmistakably up-and-coming young potentate of the commercial and social scene. But it was going to happen, it was bound to come. Patience and Spartan fortitude were required in the meantime, and incidentally it was necessary to allow himself to jerk off once a week in order to keep himself from going around all the time with a half-erection in those white pants to make the customers snicker. Tonight was the night for him to practice that melancholy little act of abasement and it made him sort of sweetly sad inside just thinking about it, knowing how much sweeter and better-feeling it was to do the other thing, which there were so many wonderful chances to do. But The Project called for men with characters of rock. And Billy thought of himself as being a part of The Project, still a humble part of it, but one that was on the right track to arrive someday, through humility and obedience and Spartan control of himself, at a position of far greater eminence and much closer to The Center than he now was.
Billy Spangler could not keep his mind on what he was supposed to be doing with the girl’s pocketbook, which was looking for the lost key. Piece by piece and very, very slowly he removed the contents from the pocketbook but even if he had come across the key it is doubtful that he would have noticed it. All the while he was listening. He heard the girl undressing in the gents’ washroom which was right back of where he was standing, and then he heard her put the toilet seat down and then he heard the flow of her urination and he wondered, if she had the rag on, if she were going to change it in there. But of course she wasn’t going to. How could she? In the girls’ washroom they had a Kotex dispenser but there was nothing but paper towels and toilet tissue in the men’s. He wondered if she would have forgotten about that and have to try to put the old one back on or pad herself down there with toilet paper or coarse paper towels. But of course if she was that absent-minded she would probably have flushed the old one down the toilet when she finished peeing. Now he heard her finish and the toilet flush and if she had actually made that mistake she would now be about to realize it. Billy Spangler listened. He just couldn’t help it. He stood there waiting and listening with her dusty, sweet-smelling pocketbook in his hand and even the pocketbook seemed to smell of the young girl’s darkly crimson incubative condition.
And then Billy Spangler moved to the gents’ room door. A great flow of air or water seemed to have swept him toward it—and the door, too—it pushed the door open, and there she was in the very condition in which his vivid intuition had shown her, naked from the waist down, a hand containing a wad of tissue paper clapped over the blond-haired groin and her face contorted with the beginning of tears. Billy heard himself saying out loud to her, but very softly. There, there, there, don’t cry, you mustn’t cry, baby! And the hand that he now put on her was made out of steel. His knees felt a thud as they hit on the concrete floor but after that he didn’t feel anything that wasn’t the plushy feel and heat and smell and taste of the sobbing girl’s body.
The following morning Billy Spangler fired her. It was very, very clear to him now that Big Edna was
the bad kind of girl. He did not believe that she had lost the key. He wasn’t took in by that story. She was a country girl but she knew what she was up to when she pretended to be so scared and nervous, and not if he lived to be a thousand years old would he ever get over the dreadful degradation of what she had got him to do. He was not mean to her. This was not his way of doing a thing. He gave her a full week’s pay, although she had only worked three days and a night, and he asked her if that was enough to get her back home to the hill town that she had come from the week before. He said good-bye to her nicely, even shook hands with her and said. Honey, what you should do is go and have a talk with the minister of your church. Tell him your problem. Always go to a man with the light of God in him when you get tempted by your animal nature. He said that to her in all sincerity and kindness because it was now completely apparent to Billy Spangler that it had been the animal nature of the girl, her devil, that had perpetrated the terrible misdeed, not his, not any part of his nature, for Billy knew that he had been brought to Jesus six years ago by an army chaplain in the jungles of Wangtsee.
When Billy turned around from the telephone over which he had just inserted an advertisement for a new girl in the Courier-Times, he saw that the tall young man who had entered behind his back and taken a seat at the counter was the Pearce boy, Gewinner, the one that had been responsible for yesterday’s trouble.
The two men looked at each other. Billy felt his own face turning as cold and set as the face of the man sitting down, and he did not try to prevent himself from assuming a hard expression because he felt it was called for. Nevertheless he had to remember that this fellow was at least nominally a member of the Pearce family that had leased him the land on which the drive-in was built. Outside Billy saw the car of Braden Pearce waiting and the fine younger brother himself at the wheel of it, with an escort of two motorcycle cops standing by. Billy knew what had happened. Braden Pearce had compelled his brother to come here and make an apology to him for what had happened. Braden had literally dragged him over to make the apology and the restitution now coming up. So then Billy Spangler relaxed himself a little. He let the hard expression slip down from his face and he took a seat beside Gewinner and told the girl at the counter to give him some coffee.