I looked up from my drink as if it didn’t matter and as if she were anybody else, and as if I were a pretty jaded type (which, to tell the truth, I was) and said, “How you been doin’ . . . with the ponies, I mean?”
“All right,” she said.
I’d expected something else. I don’t know what. But the “all right” sounded good, though.
I was about half-gone on the wine and felt I owned the world, including the blonde.
“I used to be a jockey,” I told her.
“You’re pretty big for a jock.”
“210, solid muscle,” I said.
“And belly,” she said, looking right above my belt.
We both kinda laughed and I moved closer.
“You want the winner of the first race? To kinda start you off right?”
“Sure,” she said, “sure,” and I just felt that big hip-flank touch the upper side of my leg a moment and I felt on fire.
I smelled perfume, and imagined waterfalls and forests and throwing scraps to fine dogs, and furniture soft as clouds and never awakening to an alarm clock.
I drained my drink. “Try six,” I said. “Number six: Cat’shead.”
“Cat’shead?”
Just then somebody tapped me. I should say—rapped me on the back of one of my shoulder blades.
“Boy,” this voice said, “get lost!”
I stared down into my drink waiting for her to send this stranger away.
“I said,” the voice got a little louder, “run along and play with your marbles!”
As I stared down into my drink I realized it was empty.
“I don’t like to play marbles,” I told the voice.
I motioned to the bartender. “Two more—for the lady and myself.”
I felt it in my back then: the sure, superior nudge of a peerless and no doubt highly efficient automatic.
“Learn,” said the voice, “learn to like to play marbles!”
“I’m going right away,” I said. “I brought my agate. I hear there’s a big game under the grandstand.”
I turned and caught a look at him as he slid into my seat, and I’d always thought I was the meanest-looking son of a bitch in the world.
“Tommy,” I heard her tell him, “I want you to play a hundred on the nose for me.”
“Sure. On who?”
“Number six.”
“Number SIX??”
“Yes: six.”
“But that stiff is 10 to 1!”
“Play it.”
“O.K., baby, O.K., but . . .”
“Play it.”
“Can I finish my drink?”
“Sure.”
I walked over to the two-dollar win window.
“Number six,” I said, “once.”
It was my last two dollars. . . .
Six paid $23.40.
I watched my horse go down into the Winner’s Circle like I do all my winners, and I felt as proud of him as if I had ridden him or raised him. I felt like cheering and telling everybody he was the greatest horse that had ever lived, and I felt like reaching out and grabbing him around the neck, even though I was two or three hundred feet away.
But I lit a cigarette and pretended I was bored. . . .
Then I headed back to the bar, kind of to see how she took it, intending to stay pretty far away. But they weren’t there.
I ordered a double backed by a beer, drank both, ordered up again and drank at leisure, studying the next race. When the five-minute warning blew, they still hadn’t shown and I went off to place my bet.
I blew it. I blew them all. They never showed. At the end of the last race I had 35 cents, a 1938 Ford, about two gallons of gas, and one night’s rent left.
I went into the men’s room and stared at my face in disgust. I looked like I knew something, but it was a lie, I was a fake and there’s nothing worse in the world than when a man suddenly realizes and admits to himself that he’s a phony, after spending all that time up to then trying to convince himself that he wasn’t. I noticed all the sinks and pipes and bowls and I felt like them, worse than them: I’d rather be them.
I swung out the door feeling like a hare or a tortoise or something, or somebody needing a good bath, and then I felt her swinging against me like the good part of myself suddenly coming back with a rush. I noticed how green her dress was, and I didn’t care what happened: seeing her again had made it O.K.
“Where’ve you been?” she said hurriedly. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“What the hell is this?” I started to say, “I’ve been looking—”
“Here comes Tommy!” she halted me, and then I felt something in my hand and then she walked out, carefully, slowly to meet him. I jammed whatever it was into my pocket and walked out toward the parking lot. I got into my car, lit my next-to-last cigarette, leaned back and dropped my hand into my pocket.
I unfolded five one hundred dollar bills, one fifty, two tens, and a five. “Your half,” the note said, “with thanks.” “Nicki.” And then I saw the phone number.
I sat there and watched all the cars leave, I sat there and watched the sun completely disappear; I sat there and watched a man change a flat tire, and then I drove out of there slowly, like an old man, letting it hit me, inch by inch, and scared to death I’d run somebody over or be unable to stop for a red light. Then I thought about the nickel I’d thrown away and I started to laugh like crazy. I laughed so hard I had to park the car. And when the guy who’d changed his flat came by I saw his white blob of a face staring and I had to begin all over again. I even honked my horn and hollered at him.
Poor devil: he had no soul.
Like me and one or two others. I thought about Carl Larsen down at the beach rubbing the sand from between his toes and drinking stale beer with Curtis Zahn and J.B. May. I thought about the dollar I owed Larsen. I thought maybe I’d better pay it. He might tell J.B.
Unpublished
Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb
He felt tremendously bored and disgusted; his back ached from being in bed all morning. He folded the paper and threw it into the cubbyhole behind his desk. He tried the second best thing: he got up and opened all the drawers, took the papers out, and spread them on the bed. Sometimes on things you started and couldn’t finish, sometimes you took two or three things like that, put them together, and by knocking off the edges you could get an unusual story—they’d never know, they’d think it was the same thing straight through. As long as the lines had blood in them. . . . Sometimes you could take all the lines that had blood in them . . . or you could get away from subjectiveness by making the musician a barber, and your lines of bemoaning would be forgiven because they’d think it was he