Whom Gods Destroy (3 page)

Now you've done it. Just keep talking and talking and finally you'll ruin everything.

“It was a wonderful game.” And she looks up at you and her eyes are soft and she's still smiling that gentle smile.

“I guess we could get Cokes,” you say. “We could go outside on the steps and drink them. It's pretty hot in here.”

So you do that. You get Cokes and go outside.

“It's a nice night,” you say, and then you think, God, that's a new opener for you! It's a nice night!

“The moon's just coming up on the other side of the river—see it?”

You say you see the moon. You say a lot of other things just as bright, and all the time you're wanting to put your arms around her and kiss her.

“It was a wonderful game,” Lola says again. “I shouted until I was hoarse in the last quarter.”

You begin to feel a little better. “If I'd known, maybe I'd have done better.”

“You did wonderfully, Roy. You won the game.”

There's nothing to be afraid of, you tell yourself. She's talking to you just as she would to anybody else. The thing is, you don't want her to talk to you the way she would talk to anybody else. You want it to be special. You want her to feel the way you feel. And you think, Maybe she does. She likes me. I can tell when somebody likes me.

An idea hits you then, and you say, “Are you going to college, Lola, when you finish high school?”

“Why, I suppose so, Roy. Why?”

“I think I'll go, too. I can get a scholarship if I want it. I want to study law or something.”

“I think that would be nice.”

“Maybe we could see each other there, if you go to State University. I'll be going out for football, probably.”

“Why, that would be nice.”

You're not sure just how it happened, but you have one arm around her now. And all the feeling inside you starts rushing up in your throat and you can't talk any more. You drop your Coke and put both arms around her, and you pull her against you so hard that you know you're hurting her, but you can't help yourself. You mash your mouth onto hers and time seems to stop. The world stops and waits. And for the first time in your life you feel good and clean and at peace.

When you release her, her eyes are wide and startled. Then suddenly she smiles and says, “My!”

You start talking then, and you can't stop. “Lola, I love you. I've loved you ever since I can remember, almost. I want to marry you—not right now, of course, but not too long off, either. I'm going to amount to something, Lola, you wait and see. They can't keep me on Burk Street if I don't want to stay there. I'll be a lawyer or something. Maybe a doctor, and you'll be proud of me, Lola.”

At first she just has that startled look, and that little half smile. Then abruptly, right in your face, she laughs.

She throws her head back and howls, and tears of merriment form at her eyes and run down her cheeks. She gasps for breath and holds her sides as if she's in pain, and then she starts all over again, howling and laughing.

You turn cold. Your insides sag like rock. “Lola!”

She gets her breath finally. “Oh, Roy!” she gasps, “You're the funniest thing!” And then she starts laughing again.

You start backing up, a step at a time, at first. Then you turn and try to slip away.

“Hey, Roy!” someone calls, and you know it's one of the team but you're too sick with shame to turn around. You walk faster, staying in the shadows, and the only thing you want is to get away from there. As far away as you can get. And then you hear the others coming out of the gym to see what all the excitement is about, and you hear Lola laughing, starting all over again.

“Lola, what on earth!”

Then, standing in the darkness, praying frantically to a God that you know won't hear you, you hear Lola gasp out, between spasms of laughter: “Oh, this is just too funny! Roy Foley—.Roy
Foley
just said to me...”

You don't hear any more. You turn blindly and run.

You don't sleep that night. You lie there drowning in an ocean of shame, and anger swells your chest and throat until you can't breathe. You beat the mattress with your fists, and you swear that you'll get even with her if it's the last thing you do. You'll be a lawyer, the best damn lawyer in the country, and you'll break her. You'll break her old man. You'll frame him somehow and send him to jail, and see how she likes that!

You think of a lot of ways to hurt her, but none of them are good enough. Damn her! Damn her! Goddamn her! And you curse yourself, too, because you know well that you haven't got the guts to face her again. There would be no college; there wouldn't even be a diploma from the high school, because you knew you couldn't face her.

And that's the way it is when you're young and your name is Roy Foley and you live on Burk Street. You try, but you can't win. So you run.

3

YOU WOULD THINK THAT fourteen years would be long enough to forget. I thought I
had
forgotten, but there it was, the same thing all over again. The shame was just as sickening as it had been fourteen years ago, and the hate and anger were just as sharp.

I went across the street and into the house again, and I guess I went absolutely crazy for a few minutes. I picked up a chair and slammed it against the wall, and I kept slamming it until there was nothing but splinters left. Then I pounded the walls with my fists and cursed. Foley, you're a phony, no-good sonofabitch! Oh, you were going to do great things! You were going to show her that she couldn't get away with treating you like that. A lousy fry cook in a crumby eight-stool hash house. Great God, you make me sick!

The rage finally burned itself out of its own violence and left me weak and gasping. I lay across the bed and tried not to think about it. Well, what do you do now, Foley? I knew I couldn't stay in Big Prairie. Sooner or later I would run into her, and what would I do then? Now that I had cooled off I knew that I didn't have enough money to take care of the funeral expenses. What would I say to her? Here's three-fifty, Lola. Thanks for burying my old man for me. I'll pay you the rest when I get a job.

I knew what I was going to do. I was going to run, just the way I had done before.

I went back to the salvage shop and called a taxi, then went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for it. I felt like I was just coming —out from under a long, hard drunk. My hands shook. The muscles in my legs had gone to milksop.

The taxi came finally, and I went back to the bus station and found out that it would be another hour before I could catch anything going west. So I checked the suitcase and started walking the streets to kill time just looking around.

The red Ford passed me, making about forty-five miles an hour right through the middle of town. I'd just stepped off the curb and he missed me by about six inches, and I thought, The sonofabitch, I hope he gets himself killed! Then, while I was still looking, the Ford screeched under tramped brakes, then made a U turn right in the middle of the street and came back toward me. It was a new convertible, but the top was up because the day was sharp.

I jumped back on the curb and started to yell, but then I saw the girl sitting next to the driver. Her hair was long and so blonde that it was almost white. Her mouth was as red as an open wound. She wasn't beautiful—she was a long way from that—but there was something witch-like about her, and once you looked at her it was hard to take your eyes away.

“Roy,” the driver called. “By God, it's Roy Foley!”

I saw the driver for the first time. He was a heavy-set guy with eyes that were pale and vaguely weak-looking, and mousy hair that was beginning to get thin on top. He had the flushed, slightly puffy face of a heavy drinker. The first thing I thought was, How did a pig like that get a girl like that? The red convertible explained part of it, I guessed. Then it hit me who he was and it almost floored me.

I gouged in my mind for his name, and then I had it. It was Sid Gardner. He was from Burk Street, just like I was, and he was one of the dumbest guys I had ever known. But he had that new car and that girl.

By the time I got it all figured out I was over pumping his hand, and he looked tickled to death to see me.

He turned to the girl and said, “Vida, this here's Roy Foley. He was the sweetest damn running back you ever saw.”

“Not without you making the holes for me,” I said. I had him pegged now. He had been a guard or a tackle, as well as I could remember. The girl looked at me and smiled as though it was a debt that had to be paid.

“By God,” Sid said, and then he remembered something and got serious. “Say, I heard about your old man. That's too bad.”

There was nothing much I could say to that, so I nodded.

“Look,” Sid said, “why don't you climb in? I've got to take Vida home, then I've got some running around to do, but that won't keep us from talking.”

“Well—”

I was thinking about the bus that would be pulling out in less than an hour, but I was calmer now and not so anxious as I had been back on Burk Street. Anyway, I still hadn't got over the shock of seeing an ordinary Burk Street punk looking so rich. There were two things I knew, he hadn't done it by working and he hadn't done it with brains. Then, how?

I made up my mind right then to find out, if I could. There would be other buses.

The girl, Vida, looked vaguely annoyed as she moved over to the middle of the front seat and I got in. Sid put the car in gear.

The longer we rode the more I remembered about him and the better I understood him. Sid Gardner was one of those men who never grow up and never forget. He was still Burk Street, even with his red convertible and expensive-looking girl, and he would never forget that, either. But it would never bother him.

He drove north from town, where the new residential district had grown away from the river. I expected him to let Vida off at some apartment house, because it looked like that kind of setup to me. It shook me when he pulled up in the driveway beside a rambling new brick house. And it dawned on me then that Vida was his wife. A dumb guy like that with a new car, a big house, and a wife like Vida. God!

But maybe he wasn't so dumb at that, because he could see what was going on in my mind after we let Vida out and started back toward town.

“Not bad for a Burk Street boy, huh?” he said, grinning.

“That's just what I was thinking.”

“You don't look bad yourself, Roy. You look like you've been doing all right.”

I thanked God then that I had one good suit. “I can't complain,” I said, and hoped Sid would let it go at that for now.

Then he pulled the convertible into a side street and began to check a list of names that he'd taken out of his breast pocket.

“What's this?” I said.

He looked kind of puzzled. Then he laughed. “Hell, I keep forgetting you've been away. But, with your old man and all, I guess election day doesn't mean anything to you. This,” he explained, nodding at his list of names, “is a list of every good church-going voter in this precinct, and it's my job to see that they get to the polls and vote.”

“Vote for what?”

“For prohibition,” he grinned. “Boy, you've got a little bit of catching up to do! Look, how do you think I can afford these things I've got? By working in a salvage shop on Burk Street? Hell, no! I can afford them because I'm a bootlegger.”

That jarred me for a minute. I'd had the notion that bootlegging had gone out with the Volstead act about twenty years ago. But then I remembered that Oklahoma was one of the two states still hanging on to prohibition, and something about that struck me as being funny. There was no other place in the world, probably, where Sid Gardner could have made a living, but here he was, raking it in.

I laughed and said, “Well, I'll be damned.”

“You see now why I've got to work to get these voters to the polls?”

“Sure, you've got to keep the state dry or you go out of business. But why pick on the church-going voters?”

He looked at me as though I were feeble-minded. “Why, they're the ones that vote dry.”

I lay back in Sid's glossy new car and howled, feeling better than I had felt for a long time.

“Why, hell, I even took Vida down to vote,” he said. “This is hard work. It's impossible to buy a pint of whisky in Big Prairie County today—until the polls close, that is. All us bootleggers are working to get the vote out.”

That hit me just right and I started laughing again.

I forgot all about that bus I was supposed to catch. Sid had planted the seed, and now the idea was growing, growing faster than weeds in a rose garden. I knew then that I wasn't going to leave Big Prairie, after all. If Sid could get all this, I could get more. A lot more. And there was one other thing I knew. I would see Lola again. And when I did, I would be ready for her.

After I made up my mind, Sid couldn't have shaken me even if he had wanted to. But he didn't want to. He wanted to talk about all the old days on Burk Street and the fights we'd had and the football team, and I listened to every word as if it were the Gospel. And in between, we'd pick up the voters and take them to the polls—nobody but church members, the solid citizens of the community.