The Man Who Lost the Sea (34 page)

She thought then that he might come in, but instead he crouched there. There was a long—to Eloise, an interminable—wait. Then a taxi pulled in from the road and turned to stop next to the other car. Jody straightened up and began trotting up the drive. The ugly man leaned his elbows on the lower edge of the taxi driver’s window—he had to bend nearly double to do it—and began speaking to him. Of course she could not hear a word, but the ugly man and the driver seemed to be laughing. Then the ugly man reached in, slapped the driver cheerfully on the shoulder and stood back. The taxi started up, backed around and pulled out of the drive. Jody, seeing this, for the second time made a U-turn and scuttled back to his hiding place behind the hollyhocks. He looked very little like a man who was overanxious to meet some thugs.

Eloise moved closer to the window in order to see him better, for he was almost straight down beneath her. Perhaps he caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, or perhaps some sixth sense … anyway, he glanced up, and for a moment looked more miserable than a human being ought, caught like that—chagrined, embarrassed. Then, visibly, he began to grow angry again; it began with her, she could see that. Then he wheeled and marched up the drive like a condemned man ascending the scaffold. The ugly man opened the right front door of his old sedan, and Jody got in.

For a long time Eloise Smith stood in the window, kneading her elbows and frowning. Then, slowly, she went downstairs and began to write a letter.

Smith’s posture of pugnacious defiance lasted from the turn-around to the private road he shared with Pollard. Once out of sight of the
house, he slumped unhappily into the corner of his seat and stole a quick glance at his captor.

The man was even bigger, and considerably uglier, in daylight than he had been in the dark. He said, “I sent away your taxi. He didn’t mind. He’s an old buddy of mine.”

“Oh,” said Jody.

He watched the scenery go by, and thought of how gentle the man’s voice was. Very soft and gentle. Into this Jody Smith built vast menace. After a while he said sulkily, “This going to cost me another hundred?”

“Oh gosh no,” said the ugly man. “You bought a round trip. Where do you want to go?”

Cat-and-mouse, thought Jody. Trying to get my goat. “Got to get my car at the Elks’ Hall.”

“Okay,” the man said, nodding pleasantly. Deftly, he spun the wheel, turning into what Smith prided himself as being
his
short cut to the Hall. Obviously this creature knew the roads hereabouts.

They came to the built-up area, slid into an alley, crossed two streets and turned sharp right into the crunchy parking yard at the Elks. There were two other cars there; one Smith’s, the other obviously the caretaker’s, for the doors stood open and the old man was sweeping the step.

Timidly, Smith touched the door handle. The ugly man sat still, big gnarled hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead. Smith opened the door and said, “… well—” Then, incredulous, he got out. The ugly man made no attempt to stop him.

Smith actually got two paces away from the car before sheer compulsive curiosity got the better of him. He went back and said, “Look, what about this money? You don’t really expect me to pay a hundred dollars for that ride.”

“I don’t,” said the big man, “Gorwing, I guess he does.”

“Gorwing. Is that the little ape that—”

“He’s a friend of mine,” said the giant, not loudly, but just quickly. Smith dropped that tactic, and asked, “You work for him?”

“With, not for. Sometimes.”

“But you’re doing the collecting.”

“Look,” said the ugly one, suddenly, “Gorwing, he wants sixty per cent of that money. Well, I wouldn’t let him down. For me, I don’t want it. Now, how much did he get off you last night?”

“Twenty-one.”

“From sixty is thirty-nine. You got thirty-nine bucks?”

“Not on me.” Astonished, he looked at the grotesque face. “Tell me something. What would you do if I wouldn’t give you another penny?”

The man looked at his gnarled hands, which twisted on the wheel. “I guess I’d just have to put it up myself.”

Smith got back in. “Run me over to the bank.”

The man made no comment, but started his engine.

“What’s your name?” asked Smith as they stopped for a light a block away.

“George Noat.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll go to the police?”

“Nope.”

Smith recalled then, forcefully, what Gorwing had said: “I got a witness and you haven’t.” He imagined himself trying to explain what had happened to a desk sergeant, who would be trying to write it all down in a book. Outrageous, certainly—but he had gotten into the car of his own free will, he had agreed to pay.

“How did you happen to come along when you did last night?”

“Just driving by.”

Smith found the answer unsatisfying, and he could not say why. He said, sulkily, “Friend or not, I’ve got to say that your Gorwing is a bandit.”

“No he ain’t,” said George Noat mildly. “Not when all he does is get things people really need. You really need something, you pay for it, right?”

“Yes, I suppose you—”

“And if you need something, and a fellow delivers it, nobody’s getting robbed.”

At that moment they came to the bank, and the subject was lost.

Jody Smith lived with the letter for a long time.

Now Jodham Swaine Smith was a man of independent means—this was the phrase with which on occasion he described himself to himself. His parents had both come from well-to-do families, but Smith was two generations—three, on his mother’s side—removed from the kind of fortune-getting that had gotten these fortunes; latterly, it had become the Smith tradition to treat the principal as if it did not exist, and live modestly on the interest.

Independent means. Such independence means all Four Freedoms plus a good many more. Small prep schools—in small towns and with, comparatively, small fees—gray as Groton, followed by tiny, honored colleges on which the ivy, if not the patina, is quite as real as Harvard’s, make it possible to grow up in one of the most awesome independencies of all, the freedom from Life. In most cases it takes but six or so post-graduate weeks for trauma and tragedy to
set in, and for the discoveries to be made that business is not necessarily conducted on the honor system, that the reward for dutifully reporting the errors of the erring gets you, not a mark toward your Good Citizen Button, but something more like a kick in the teeth, and finally, that the world is full of people who never heard of your family and wouldn’t give a damn if they had.

Yet for those few who are enabled by, on the one hand, the effortless accumulation of dividends, and on the other, an absence of personal talent or ambition that might be challenged, it is possible to slip into a surrogate of man’s estate in its subjective aspects hardly different from the weatherproof confines of the exclusive neighborhood, the private school and the honored and unheard-of college. Jody Smith was one of these few.

Not that he didn’t face the world, just as squarely and as valiantly as he had been taught to do. But it happened that, all unknowing, he gave the world nothing worth abrading, and the world was therefore, as far as he could know, a smooth place to live with. In no sense did he withdraw from life. On the contrary, he sought out the centers of motion, and involved himself as completely as possible with the Elks, the Rotary, the Lions, and the Civic Improvement League. Strangely enough, these gatherings, filled as they were with real people, gave him no evidence of the existence of a real world. Jody Smith was always available for the Thanksgiving Dance Committee and Operation Santa Claus, but did not submit himself, and was somehow never proposed, for any chairmanship. In a word, he wasn’t competition for anyone.

And he had gravitated to that same strange other- or no-world in what might laughingly be called his business. He was a philatelist. He ran small classified advertisements in the do-it-yourself and other magazines on a contract basis, and handled the trickle of mail from his little den at home. He made money at it. He also lost money at it. In the aggregate, he probably lost more than he made, but not enough to jeopardize his small but adequate and utterly predictable income.

He had, from time to time, wanted this or that. He had never for a moment
needed
, anything. Eloise, for example—he had wanted
her, or perhaps it was to be married to her, but he hadn’t needed to. She helped him with his business, typing out some of the correspondence from form letters he had composed, and moistening stamp hinges. But he did not need her help. He did not need her.

Not even when she left. For a while. Weeks, in fact. And even then at first it was want, not need, and even then the want was to create some circumstance that would make her realize how wrong she had been. Then the wants widened, somehow. The television and the stamp hinges seemed after a time to be inadequate to fill the long evenings or to occupy the silence of the house. When no hand but his own moved anything about him, his hat would not go of itself into the closet but remained on hall tables where he himself had put it. And, where at first he had rather admired himself for his cookery, for he was a methodical, meticulous, and, as far as cookbooks were concerned, obedient person, he began slowly to resent the kitchen and even the animal beneath his belt which with such implacability drove him into it. It seemed to him a double burden—that he should have to put in all that time before a meal, and then have nothing ready until he prepared it himself. To do things in order to make lunchtime come seemed ultimately enough, more than enough, for a man to be burdened with. Then to have to do things to make the lunch itself seemed an intolerable injustice.

These matters of convenience—and lack of it—grew into nuisances and then, like the pebble in the shoe, like the inability to turn over even in the most comfortable of beds, into sheer torture.

The breaking point came, oddly enough, not in the long night hours with the empty bed beside his, nor in some dream-wracked and disoriented morning, but in the middle of an otherwise pleasant afternoon. He had just received the new Scott’s catalog, and wanted to compare something in it with the 1954 edition. He couldn’t find the 1954 edition, and he called out:

“Eloise—”

The sound of his own voice, and of her name, made something happen like the tearing of a membrane. It tore so completely, and with such suddenness and agony, that he grunted aloud and fell back on the couch. He sat there for a moment weaving, and his mouth
grew crooked and his eyes pink, and there came a warning sting at the very back of the roof of his mouth that astonishingly informed him, as it hardly had since he was nine years old, that he was about to cry.

He didn’t cry, beyond once whimpering, “Eloise?” in a soprano half-whisper; then for a long time he sat silent and stunned, wondering numbly how such a force could have remained coiled so tightly within him, undetected.

When he could, he began to take stock. It was a matter of weeks—six of them, seven—since she had left, and not once had he examined his acts and attitude. He had done nothing about locating her, though in that department there was little to be done—he simply did not know where she was. Her only relative was an aging mother in a rest home out West, and she certainly had not gone there. He had not destroyed her letter, but he hadn’t reread it either, nor thought about its contents. He hadn’t wanted to think about these things, he now knew. He had thought … he hadn’t
needed
to.

He needed to now, and he did. The letter gave him nothing at first but a feeling—not quite anger—more like a sullen distaste for himself. And one more thing, slightest of handholds—she apparently, somehow or other, knew George Noat.

And, on that slender evidence, he tore out of the house and got into his car.

Nothing was the way it should be. The trail was not obscure. The taxi-driver—Noat had said he was “an old buddy”—told him immediately where Noat and his business were, and there were no obstacles to his finding the place—it was within three blocks of the Elks’ Hall. The fact that never once in Elks or Lions or Rotary had he heard Noat’s name was only surprising, not mysterious: such establishments as the Anything Shoppe look back, not forward, and are not found on the lists of forward-looking organizations.

It was only in the subdued light of the shop(pe), with the old-fashioned spring-swung doorbell still jangling behind him, that Jodham Swaine Smith realized that, though intuition and evidence had brought him here, they had not supplied him with the right thing to
say. “Mr. Noat!” he bleated urgently, and then dried up altogether.

The proprietor glanced up at him from his work, and said easily, “Oh, hi. Give a hand here, will you?”

Annoyed, which was uncharacteristic of him, and simultaneously much more timid than he ever remembered being, Jody Smith edged around the counter. Noat was squatting before an inverted kitchen chair, painted flat red, with a broken spoke and a split seat-board. “Just grab holt here,” he invited. Smith took the legs as indicated and squeezed them together, while Noat drove in corrugated fasteners. “Nothing wrong with the chair,” said Noat philosophically between hammer blows. “It’s people. People busted this chair. As for fixing it, if people had sense enough to have four arms like this thing has four legs, why, I wouldn’t have to call on my neighbors. You like people?”