Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

  That afternoon Mrs. Samuels took Chris to a Disney picture. James dropped them off and was told to pick them up outside the theater at five o’clock. He wasn’t there when they got out and they waited patiently for fifteen minutes or so as the streets were often jammed up at that hour. At five-thirty Mrs. Samuels called home. Why, James had left shortly after four, Winnie said. He had been working on Chris’s salamander tank most of the afternoon. At a quarter to six Mrs. Samuels and Chris went home by cab. A number of police cars were in front of the house. In the maid’s room Winnie was thrashing on her bed having hysterics. After Mrs. Samuels’s call she had gone up to Chris’s room to be sure James wasn’t there. It was then she noticed that Chris’s little cash-register bank was gone. It was always on the night table by his bed. Then something had made Winnie go to the drawer where Mrs. Samuels kept her jewels. They were gone. Then Winnie looked through Mr. Samuels’s bureau. His diamond watch was missing, and his gold cuff links, and a sapphire ring and a lot of other expensive accessories. Winnie called Mr. Samuels and he said, “The skunk. Even takes the kid’s nickels and dimes and that’s the fellow who’s so nuts about Chris I can’t even fire him.” He told Winnie to look for his wallet in the back of the little drawer where he kept his links and handkerchiefs. The wallet was supposedly hidden. There was seven hundred fifty dollars in cash. Winnie ran up and looked. No, Mr. Samuels, that’s gone too! And your silk monogrammed shirts and your silk robe and oh, he just took everything, everything.… Mr. Samuels told her he was calling the police immediately and how in the hell could he take all that stuff with you in the house watching him, Winnie? Winnie sobbed and stammered as if it was she who had been caught doing this terrible deed. He—he was in and out of Chris’s room all afternoon fixing up that tank. He kept going in and out to the garage to get tools and things. I never dreamed, I didn’t think—Oh, Mr. Samuels, I feel as if I am going to faint.…

  “Don’t faint. Wait for the police. Tell them exactly what happened. And be sure and tell them what James looked like. That son of a bitch. I’ll be home as soon as possible.”

  Chris went up to his room without saying anything. James had not finished fixing up the tank for the salamander as he had promised. Now the poor salamander would probably die. He knew it would die. He wished he could go back to the mountains and put his shiny green water lizard back in its home stream. It made him feel nervous having to take care of the salamander without James. It didn’t seem possible that he was never going to see him again. The change hadn’t quite happened for him yet. James was still his friend and chum going to take him camping.

  He knew what an ordeal it would be when his father came home. “Goddamn it, now will you believe me? He was nothing but a bum, a cheap crook. I hope this will teach you not to be so goddamn trusting of everybody.”

  Chris didn’t come down for dinner that night. He couldn’t bear to hear all that from his father. He wished James had finished the salamander tank for him. It would have helped him get over it to watch the salamander swimming around the salamander tank. The salamander wasn’t moving around as fast as he was before. In the morning, he bet anything, the salamander would be a paler green and floating belly up in the bottle. He hadn’t even had a chance to name him and now he didn’t want to name him if he was going to die. He wondered where James was this minute. He wondered how James could stand being away from him. James had liked him so much. It was that darned girl, that crummy orange-headed sister of his. Or whatever she was.

  Impulsively Chris went over to James’s room and looked around. Yep, her picture was still there, over his bed. Winnie always told him he’d catch cold if he stood around after a bath without putting his pajamas on. He wondered how it happened that someone had taken her picture before she had a chance to put all her clothes on. Chris thought about that first time he had come up to James’s room. It was something to have a big friend of his own. It was something. Oh James James Jimmy how could you, how could you take my eight dollars and seventy-five cents I was saving up? I wanted to take it down to the bank that keeps people’s money and get a regular bankbook like my father. Chris felt like crying. His nose felt all itchy as if he was going to cry. Who would help him get grown up now? Who would teach him how to handle the Iggy Gonzalezes? He felt like crying but he didn’t cry because his friend James had taught him things. Taught him how to keep his left hand out. Taught him not to cry. It didn’t matter how many dollars James had taken. James had taught him things he would always remember.

  Next afternoon there were big black headlines in the evening papers about the capture of James. He and his gun moll, it said, a prostitute and part-time extra girl by the name of Tommie King, had been apprehended in Calexico, near the Mexican border. They had ditched the gold petit-point town car and had stolen a Ford sedan. In the paper James talked a lot about the robbery, almost as if it was one of his sea stories. “It was the easiest job I ever pulled. I decided the first day to use the kid. Rich kids are dumb. They’re lonely, most of them, and that makes ’em dumb. Suckers for the big-brother pitch. This Samuels kid was as square as they come.”

  And then Chris read something that scared him so he felt his heart might choke up and stop beating. “I took the kid up in the mountains and started to tie him up and was going down and call his old man in Chicago and tell him I wanted fifty G’s to bring the kid back in one piece. But a storm was blowing up and I figured I’d have a hell of a time getting to a phone and back again. So I gave it up. When I heard I might get fired any minute, for taking off with the car for a night, I figured I better get mine quick while I still had a foot in the door. I pulled a gag about building a fish tank for the kid to …”

  It was a neat plan, James had boasted, and only a lousy turn of luck kept them from getting deep into Mexico and living off the fat. A hick cop, running him down for speeding, spotted his puss from an old post-office picture wanting him for some job way back. James had posed as a butler-chauffeur and driven off like this in quite a few different states.

  That night Chris had a terrible dream. He was tied to a tree in the mountains and it was raining, pouring salamanders, and James and that orange-haired sister or gun moll or whatever she was were on the front seat of the gold petit-point town-car coach driving straight at him. They were looking at each other and laughing and Chris let out a scream, a long, shrill, terrible scream.

  Mr. Samuels came running in. He sat on the edge of Chris’s bed. “Oh Daddy, Daddy,” the child cried out. Mr. Samuels hugged him. He had not held his boy to him like this in a long time. Perhaps years. He had been too busy at the studio. Chris was surprised to find himself in the arms of his father. He had avoided his father because he was so afraid of being scolded about the way he had loved and trusted James. It was too much for him, too much, and he sobbed and bawled like a baby.

  Sol Samuels felt guilty. Alma had just given him a good talking- to about his neglect of Chris and how this blow to the boy never would have happened if Chris hadn’t been so terribly in need of a father image.

  “Chris,” Mr. Samuels said, “tomorrow I’m going to take the whole day off from the studio. In the afternoon we’ll go to Gilmore’s and see the ball game.”

  Chris coughed and said all right. But he still couldn’t get out of his head how nice James had been to him. The nicest anyone had ever been. If only they hadn’t had so many things that James wanted, Chris tried to figure it out, maybe everything would have worked out all right. He just couldn’t believe everything James said in the papers. Any more than he believed every single bit of the rescue in shark-infested waters or the triumph over Jocko Kennedy in the Yellow Dragon.

  He peered in at the milk bottle standing on the deep window sill where the tank was supposed to be. The salamander was beginning to float toward the top and wasn’t working its arms and legs very much. Jimmy must have liked him a little bit. To do all these things with him. Chris squeezed hard to keep his eyes dry. Jimmy must have liked him just a little bit.

&nbs
p; THE

  RELUCTANT

  PILGRIM

  All week long young Obidiah Flagg worked the little farm his pa owned in Nottin’hamshire, but come Saturday the old man would spell him so he could go to town where he was apprenticed to a master carpenter. Scrooby, just the merest spit of a town it was, only it had two churches instead of the usual one like any respectable town, and that’s how Obidiah’s troubles began.

  Saturday nights after he got through working his trade, he’d sit himself down at the Sign of the Golden Cock and wet his whistle with a dram of ale. Only he never had more than a farthing or two, so moist is about all he could call it. But one fatal Saturday night he met up with a young friend of his from Austerfield in the next county, who was chock full of conviviality and generosity and general high spirits because he was celebrating the end of his apprenticeship.

  Obidiah and his friend from Austerfield drank enough ale to float the county of Nottin’hamshire out to sea, and came morning, they felt as if they were floating right along with it. It seemed as if they hadn’t been sitting there any time at all when the church bells began pounding in their ears and the sun shining into their eyes. “Hellsfire if it ain’t time to keep our appertment wi’ the Lawd,” said Obidiah, feeling saintly and virtuouslike, the way only a man with one too many tucked under his belt can, and somehow he managed to find the entrance to the church on the corner, though it was circling around him so fast he had to make a leap for the doorway as it went by.

  He dozed through the sermon as usual, waking up just in time to groan Amen with the rest of the flock, and thought no more about it till the middle of the week when his pa stopped him right in the middle of his milking and said, “Son, how come ye let ye’self get mixed up with this darn fool Seprytist crowd over t’ Scrooby?”

  “Seprytists?” said Obidiah. “I don’t know what ye’re talkin’ about, Pa.”

  “Don’t ye be addin’ lyin’ to yer other sins,” Pa said, mad as a hornet. “I know where you was Sunday mornin’, worshippin’ in that infarnal Seprytist church they be fixin’ t’ run out o’ town.”

  Then Obidiah got to thinking how it was a mite harder to fall asleep this time than usual on account of the preacher having some blood in his veins. And all of a sudden it smacked him in the face like the tail of his cow. “Moly Hoses!” Obidiah said. “The Devil take me if I didn’ go and sit me down in the wrong church!”

  “He’ll take ye all right if ye keep on with yer heretical ways, an’ no mistake,” said Pa. “The Church o’ England was good enough fer Great-grandpa, for Grampy Flagg ’n’ fer me, so I reckon it’s good enough fer you.”

  Well, Obidiah didn’t think much about it at the time, but his pa’s warning seemed to stick in his craw. Because next Sunday he couldn’t seem to keep his shoes from leading him right back into that darn Separatist church. He couldn’t exactly explain why. Just plain old-fashioned orneryness, maybe.

  But once he got inside he had a terrible time getting his rest. When they all closed their eyes for the opening prayer, he was drifting off pretty good when he felt a tug on his sleeve and a girl sittin’ next to him was waking him up.

  “You mus’n’ pray so long, Brother,” she was saying to Obidiah. She was a big, strapping girl who looked as if the Lord started out to make a plough horse and then changed his mind halfway through. She had a large, always-smiling round face and big snowy white teeth the Lord was so proud of he stuck them out good and proper so everybody would be sure and see them.

  She kept looking at Obidiah out of the corner of her eye now and then so he couldn’t help but listen to what was going on. It seemed that the regular minister, Reverend Robinson, had been locked up in the gaol with the debtors and the pickpockets. And Deacon Brewster, a curly white-haired little fellow who had taken over the service for him, was all het up about how Reverend Robinson was a religious martyr like the early Christians and Joan of Arc and folks like that. “ ’Tain’t right fer one man to force his way o’ worshippin’ God on another,” he was saying, “an’ ’tain’t right fer the Church to be messin’ around with the State nuther.” The way he looked on it, all people were equal before God, and that went fer His Majesty and the whole royal caboodle.

  Well, those were strange idees, Obidiah was thinking to himself. He had never given the subject much thought before, but why should the good Lord specially care what kind of a house you choose to worship Him in, long as you keep Him in mind? Same as a brewery doesn’t care what the shape of the mug is you drink their brew from, as long as you drink it down.

  In the midst of all that heavy thinking, Obidiah must have dozed off again without knowing it, because all of a sudden he was awakened with a terrible start when the front door burst open and in ran a captain of the King’s Rifles with a bunch of redcoats with their muskets ready as if they were charging into battle instead of church. This captain ran straight down the aisle and up to the altar, grabbed Deacon Brewster by the collar and shouted, “I arrest ye and yer flock, in th’ name of our most dread sovereign, James the First, King of England, Scotland, Ireland an’ etcetery an’ etcetery!”

  And the next thing Obidiah knew, they had flung him into the gaolhouse, just as if he were one of those Separatists himself.

  “Maybe this is the Lord’s way of letting our reverend finish the service,” said Deacon Brewster, and they all fell on their knees and swore to God that all the persecuting in the world wouldn’t stop them from worshipping Him the way their conscience told them to. Well, Obidiah liked to think of himself as a stubborn cuss, but he could see right off he was just a reed in the wind alongside of them.

  “Mule-stubbornest critters I ever see in m’ life,” he thought to himself.

  After prayers he was sitting there in a corner, wishing he’d have stayed put in the King’s Church where he belonged, when that big draft horse of a girl who was sitting next to him in church come over and started up a conversation. It turned out her name was Silence, but if that’s what she stood for, Obidiah decided, he’d hate to meet up with a biddy named Talkative. Why, Silence could take a simple topic of conversation like “ ’Tis a nice mornin’,” and work it up into a regular two-hour discourse.

  “Well,” she said, “I just had to come over and tell ye how happy it makes me to see young fellers like yourself joining our movement of their own free will.”

  “I’m feared ye be barkin’ up the wrong tree, gal,” said Obidiah. “I ain’t no Seprytist and I ain’t j’inin’ nothin’ that’s goin’ to get me into no trouble nuther.”

  “Seems kind o’ late to be thinkin’ on that,” Silence said.

  “Not to my way o’ lookin’ on it,” said Obidiah. “Ye don’t catch me on the same hook twice. If I ever git out o’ here, I’m stayin’ away from ye Seprytists like ye had the leprosy.”

  “I’m sorry to hear on’t,” said Silence, “ ’cause we be fixin’ to pick up and go to Holland, where they say we can worship Him as we’ve a mind to. I was kind of hopin’ you’d be comin’ along. A carpenter’d come in handy, like as not.”

  “Don’t be wastin’ yer breath,” said Obidiah. “Who wants to live among all them Dutchmen, away over on t’ other side o’ the channel? No siree. Goin’ t’ town ’n’ back is travelin’ enough for me.”

  “Well,” said Silence, “if ye don’t have the true religion, it’s no use trying to talk it into ye.”

  Only just like a woman, that’s exactly what she proceeded to do until finally the gaoler came to his rescue by unlocking the gates and letting out all but the leaders who had to stand trial.

  “Serves ye good and proper,” said Obidiah’s pa when he saw him come running home with his tail between his legs. “Nex’ time mebbe ye’ll listen to yer elders when they try to tell ye what’s good fer ye and what ain’t. I never thought I’d live to see the day when the Flagg family had to live down the name o’ havin’ a Purytin among ’em.”

  “The Reverend Robinson, he says he ain’t ashamed o’ bein’ called Puryt
in,” said Obidiah. “He says he’ll bear the scorn of his enemies on his shoulders like it was a cloth o’ gold. He says there’ll come a time when to call a man a Purytin won’t be name-callin’ at all but a word to be proud on.”

  “Stuff ’n’ nonsense,” his pa said. “Wait a spell and see if this whole Seprytist business don’t blow away quicker’n leaves in November.”

  Obidiah hated like thunder to give in to anybody, but he had to admit his old man was talking sense. Being a stubborn, independent cuss is all fine and dandy, he thought to himself, but when you have to go clear over to Holland to keep on being one, it seemed to him that’s going a mite far.

  So he kept his nose to the grindstone and did extra chores after dark to make up for the terrible disgrace Pa said he had brought down on the family name, and by the time Saturday comes around, he’s forgotten all about those Separatists and the pickle they had gotten him into.

  Innocent as a newborn lamb, he came whistling into the shop of Mr. Hatfield, with the proud sign MASTER CABINET MAKER & JOINER over the door, and what did he see but Bobby Bailey, the freckle-faced lad from the next farm, standing in his place and wearing his apron.

  “Good mornin’, Mister Hatfield,” said Obidiah. “A regular squire you be comin’, what with two ’prentices and all.”

  “Two?” said Mr. Hatfield, looking down at Obidiah over his bay window as if young Flagg was apprenticed to the Devil instead of him and had sprouted a red tail and a pair of horns. “Only one apprentice here, the way I look on’t. One apprentice and one ex-apprentice.”

  “Ex-apprentice?” Obidiah said. “Are ye foolin’, Mister Hatfield? Mean to say my work ain’t been satisfac’ry?”