Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [21]
Julian smiled. Do you think if I leave and he curses me out, it d be all right if I came back then?
Her face became a little angry. Listen, Mr. English, I don t want to stick my two cents in this one way or the other. It s none of my affair. But I want to tell you this much. Harry Reilly is a sore pup, and there isn’t anything funny about it when he gets sore.
Okay. Well, thank you.
All right, she said. She did not go to the door with him. He did not look back, but he knew as well as he could know anything that Harry Reilly was watching him from an upstairs window, and probably Mrs. Gorman was watching with him. He drove home, parking the car in front of his house, and went inside. He took as long as he could with his hat and coat, scarf and arctics. He walked slowly up the stairs, letting each step have its own full value in sound. It was the only way he knew of preparing Caroline for the news of Reilly s refusal to see him, and he felt he owed her that. It would not be fair to her to come dashing in the house, to tell her by his footsteps that everything was all right and Reilly was not sore, only to let her down. He sensed that she had understood the slow steps. She was in bed, the dazzling light coming in the windows from the west, and she was reading a magazine. It was The New Yorker, and not the newest one. He recognized the cover. It was a Ralph Barton drawing; a lot of shoppers, all with horribly angry or stern faces, hating each other and themselves and their packages, and above the figures of the shoppers was a wreath and the legend: Merry Xmas. Caroline had her knees up under the bedclothes, with the magazine propped against her legs, but she was holding the cover and half of the magazine with her right hand. She slowly closed the magazine and laid it on the floor. Did you have a fight with him? she said. He wouldn’t see me. Julian lit a cigarette and walked over to the window. They were together and he knew it, but he felt like hell. She was wearing a black lace neglig?that he and she called her whoring gown. Suddenly she was standing beside him, and as always he thought how much smaller she was in her bare feet. She put her arm inside his arm, and her hand gripped the muscle of the arm. It s all right, she said. No, he said, gently. No, it isn t.
No, it isn t, she said. But let s not think of it now. She moved her arm so that it went around his back under the shoulder blades, and her hand moved slowly down his back, along his ribs, his hips and buttocks. He looked at her, doing all the things he wanted her to do. Her reddish brown hair was still fixed for the day. She was not by any means a small girl; her nose rubbed under his chin, and he was six feet tall. She let her eyes get tender in a way she had, starting a smile and then seeming to postpone it. She stood in front of him and kissed him. Without taking her mouth away she pulled his tie out of his vest and unbuttoned his vest, and then she let him go. Come on! she said, and lay with her face down in the pillow, shutting out everything else until he was with her. It was the greatest single act of their married life. He knew it, and she knew it. It was the time she did not fail him. V It was dark when Al Grecco bundled up, preparatory to starting his lonely drive to the Stage Coach. He bought cigarettes and chewing gum. He regretted that there was no one to see him getting into Ed Charney s coop. He liked doing that, driving away alone, in that car, before the muggs who hung around the Apollo. It showed them how he stood with Ed, compared to them. It was an eighteen-mile drive, with a dozen tiny coalmining patches to break up the stretches of lighted highway. The road was pretty good, but Al told himself that if he was any judge, it would be drifted again before he got home. In the patches the snow was piled high on each side of the streets. He counted only six persons in all the patches between Gibbsville and Taqua, the next fairly big town, fourteen miles from Gibbsville. That showed how cold it was. In all the houses in the patches the curtains were down, and the hunkeys, the schwackies, the roundheaders, the broleys regional names for non-Latin foreigners probably were inside getting drunk on boilo. Boilo is hot moonshine, and Ed did not approve of it, because if the schwackies once stopped drinking boilo, they would drink his stuff. Still, there was nothing to do about it. But it was cheating, in a way, for the schwackies to be celebrating Christmas; they celebrated Christmas all over again on January 6, Little Christmas. In each patch there was one exception to the curtained windows of the houses; that was in the doctor s house. There was a doctor in each town, living in a well-built house, with a Buick or a Franklin in front of the house. More than once Al had found it a good thing to know, that the doctors usually kept one car in front of the house either the Buick or Franklin, or the Ford or Chevvy. More than once Al had drained gasoline from the doctors cars, and never once had been caught. He tore along the highway, clipping off the fourteen miles to Taqua in twenty-one minutes. His best time was twelve minutes, but that was in the summer, with a load of white alcohol. Twenty-one minutes tonight wasn