Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

The congressman looked up from his accounts. If he had heard a word of the discussion, or any discussion for the last ten years, for that matter, he didn’t show it. “Okay,” he said, “it all comes out even. Evelyn, you won three hundred and fifty-five dollars and fifty cents. Mr. Grimes, you won twelve hundred and seven dollars. Everybody else get out their checkbooks.”

While the losers were finding out how much they owed, there were the usual jokes, directed at Hale, for bringing a ringer, me, into the game. Evelyn Coates made no jokes. There was no hint in the way anyone else talked that anything like an argument had just taken place.

I tried to look offhand as I put the checks into my wallet. Luckily, they were all on Hale’s Washington bank. He endorsed them for me so that I wouldn’t have any trouble cashing them.

We all left together, and there was a jumble of good-byes as the congressman and the columnist got into a taxi together. The lawyer took Evelyn by the arm, saying, “You’re on my way, Evelyn, I’ll drop you.” Hale was inside getting a pack of cigarettes from the machine, and I stood alone for a moment watching the lawyer and Evelyn Coates walk off into the darkness of the parking lot. I heard her low laugh at something he had said as they disappeared.

Hale drove silently for a little while. “How long do you plan to stay in town?” he asked, as we were stopped for a light.

“Just until I get my passport. Monday, Tuesday…”

“Then where?”

“Then I’ll look at a map. Somewhere in Europe.”

He started the car with a jerk as the light changed. “God I wish I was coming along with you. Wherever you’re going.” The intensity in his voice was disturbing. He sounded like a prisoner speaking to a man who was about to be freed in the morning. “This town,” he said. “Total swamp.” He turned a corner recklessly, the tires squealing. “That miserable, smooth, molasses-talking Benson bastard … It’s a lucky thing you’re not in the government…”

“What’re you talking about?” I was really honestly puzzled.

“If you were – in the government, I mean – by Monday night, somebody in your department – higher in your department – would get a little poison in his ear about you.”

“You mean because of what I said about voting and changing uniforms, that stuff?” I tried not to sound incredulous, as though I were really taking him seriously. “Actually, I hardly meant it. I was joking, or, anyway, half-joking.”

“You don’t joke in this town, friend,” Hale said somberly. “At least not in front of guys like him. I’ve been trying to get him out of the game for six months and nobody’s got the guts to do the job. Including me. You may have been joking, but he for sure wasn’t.”

“At one point in the evening,” I said, “I was on the point of saying I’d hang around till next Saturday.”

“Don’t. Blow. Blow as fast as you can. I wish to hell I could.”

“I don’t know how it works in your department,” I said, “but can’t you ask for an assignment someplace else?”

“I can ask,” Hale said. “That’s about as far as it would go.” He fumbled at a cigarette. “They have me pegged as unreliable in the service, and they’re making sure they can keep an eye on me twenty-four hours a day…”

“You? Unreliable?” It was the last thing I’d ever guess anybody would think about him.

“I was in Thailand for two years. I sent you a letter. Remember?”

“I never got it, I’ve been moving around a lot…”

“I wrote a couple of reports that didn’t exactly go through channels.” He laughed bitterly. “Channels ! Sewers. Well, they yanked me – politely – and gave me a nice office with a beautiful secretary and a raise in salary and some memos to shuffle that you might just as well paper the walls with. And the only reason they’re being so kind to me is because of my goddamn father-in-law. But the message was clear – and I got it. Be a good boy or else … God! ” He laughed again, a harsh, croaking sound. “When I think that I celebrated when I found out I passed the Foreign Service exam! And it’s all so senseless – those reports I wrote … I was patting myself on the back – the intrepid truth-seeker, the brave little old truth-announcer. Christ, there wasn’t anything in those pages that hasn’t been spread over every newspaper in the country since then.” He scraped his cigarette out savagely in the ashtray on the dashboard. “We live in the age of the Bensons, the smooth poison-droppers, who know from birth that the way up is through the sewer. I’ll tell you something peculiar – a physiological phenomenon – somebody ought to write it up in a medical journal – I have days when I have the taste of shit in my mouth all day. I wash my teeth, I gargle, I get my secretary to put a bowl of narcissus on my desk – nothing helps…”

“Jesus,” I said. “I thought you were doing great.”

“I put on a good act,” Hale said lifelessly. “I have to. I’m a dandy little old liar. It’s a government of liars and you get plenty of practice. Happy civil servant, happy husband, happy son-in-law, happy father of two… Ah, Christ, why am I letting it all out on you? I imagine you have troubles enough of your own.”

“Not at the moment,” I said. “If it’s so bad, why don’t you quit? Go into something else?”

“Into what?” he said. “Selling neckties?”

“Something would be bound to turn up.” I didn’t tell him that there might be a job open as a night clerk in New York. Take a few months off and look around and…

“On what?” He made a derisive sound. “I haven’t a penny. You saw how we live. My salary’s just about half of it. My sainted father-in-law kicks in the rest. He nearly had apoplexy when I got sent home from Asia. He’d burn the house down over my head if I told him I was quitting. He’d have my wife and the kids back living with him in two months after I went out the door… Ah, forget it, forget it, I don’t know why I suddenly went off the handle like this. That sonofabitch Benson. I see him multiplied by a thousand every time I come to work in the morning. What the hell – I don’t have to play in that poker game anymore. At least that’ll be one Benson I won’t have to talk to.” He laughed softly. “Maybe if I’d won tonight, I’d be telling you what a great life it is right this minute in this dandy little old town of Washington.” He was driving more and more slowly, as though he didn’t want to be left alone or have to go home and face the concrete facts of his wife, his children, his career, his father-in-law. I wasn’t so anxious to get to my hotel room either. I didn’t want to put on the light and look at the telephone on the bedside table and fight down the temptation to pick it up and ask for Evelyn Coates’s number.

“I wonder if you’d do me a favor, Doug?” he said, as we neared my hotel.

“Of course.” But even as I said it, I made strong mental reservations. After the conversation in the car, I didn’t have any inclination to get mixed up more than was absolutely necessary with the life and problems of my old college buddy, Jeremy Hale.

“Come out to dinner tomorrow night,” he said, “and somehow get onto the subject of skiing and say you’re thinking of going skiing in Vermont the first two weeks next month and why don’t I join you?”

“I don’t think I’ll even be in the country by then,” I said.

“That makes no difference,” he said calmly. “Just say it. Where my wife can hear it. I have some time coming to me and I can get away then.”

“You mean you have to make excuses to your wife if you want to…?”

“Not really.” He sighed, at the wheel. “It’s more complicated than that. There’s a girl…”