Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“You shouldn’t treat me like that,” she said.

He took a step toward her. She backed away. “I’m going. But you’ll be sorry if you treat me like that.”

She put on her shoes and a tan polo coat. He followed her into the living-room. “Don’t be like that, Fran. I told you it was business. I might have to go to Nevada for a couple of weeks.”

“It’s nothing to me,” she said from the doorway, and added in a sweet and ugly voice: “Give her my love.”

Listening to her footsteps go down the hall to her own apartment, he shrugged his shoulders. Fran had the idea that it was another woman, and there was no use arguing with a dame. It was another woman, all right, but Paula West was no she of his. West had a little too much class for him, not just the surface class that was his meat, but the kind that went way down out of sight like an iceberg and chilled you off at ten paces. She had quite a bit on the ball too, but it wasn’t bright of her to tell him to keep his nose out of the Golden Sunset. He hadn’t been near it for months, but now that he had a reason not to, that was exactly the bistro he was going to frequent.

He flung off his dressing gown and went into the bathroom to shave. He didn’t have one of those three-way mirrors for looking at his profile, but by peering out of the corners of his eyes he caught a three-quarters view. He liked the way his chin jutted out from his neck in a clean line. Greek, but definitely. Not Greek like in the restaurant business, but like on monuments. They called him Adonis on the posters when he fought in the semifinals in Syracuse, and he’d looked the word up in the big dictionary in the branch library. His hair was light and wavy too, just like the picture of the monument in the dictionary.

Having applied brilliantine to his hair, suntan powder to his face, deodorant to his armpits, he started to dress in a hurry. He’d got out of the habit of wearing an undershirt before he got in the money, so the first thing he put on was a brown wool sport shirt. It had cost him fifteen fish, no less, but after all a fellow’s wardrobe was kind of an investment. He felt he owed it to his looks to wear classy clothes. And some of his best pickups came when he was least expecting them. If you didn’t want to run the risk of passing up elegant chances it paid to be on the make twenty-four hours a day.

He left the apartment building by the back door and took his car out of the garage in the alley. It was a Chevy coupé, the last prewar model, and the best thing about it was it was a souvenir from his hot-car days and hadn’t cost him a cent. It was a pretty sweet little job after he tore down the motor, and it still ran like a dream. Everything ran like a dream for him these days, with a car and an apartment of his own, and good contacts in more ways than one, and a roll that would choke a horse. Well, a small horse. He wasn’t so well heeled that another couple of centuries wouldn’t come in handy. After he had the folding money in his poke he’d decide about Nevada. It might be better business to stay right here in L.A. and keep an eye on Taylor. There was no telling what might break, and if he played it smart and careful he could end up sitting very pretty.

The thought gave him such a lift that he was going fifty on Wilshire before he knew it. When he noticed the speedometer he slowed down abruptly to thirty. It wouldn’t do to be caught speeding. Lawbreaking was the one thing he couldn’t afford. He let fifteen or twenty cars pass him on the way downtown. Let the jerks stick their necks out, he was protecting his.

He found a parking place off Round Street, just around the corner from the Golden Sunset Café. Unless he missed his guess Taylor would be turning up there. It was the place that West was anxious for him to stay away from, and what other reason could she have? Before he went in he cased the joint through the star-shaped window in the door. The bar was loaded, and most of the booths were full. But no sign of Taylor. Maybe he missed his guess. In a way it was a relief.

He went in anyway and found an empty booth at the back. The smell of cooking grease from the kitchen reminded him that he was hungry. When the waitress discovered him he ordered a New York cut medium rare with French fried potatoes and a double order of onions, and a bottle of beer to drink while he was waiting – Eastern beer.

Halfway through the steak he looked up and saw Taylor walking down the aisle between the booths and the bar. The guy was in uniform, and in any case he couldn’t forget that pan. He lowered his own face quickly. Not that there was a chance in a million that Taylor would know him. There was nothing to worry about at all. But he found that he couldn’t eat the rest of his steak. The food he had already eaten had taken on weight and hung in his stomach like a piece of lead.

When he looked up again Taylor was sitting at the bar. All he could see of him was his broad blue back. Larry caught himself wishing that he and Taylor were alone in the room and Taylor’s back was to him like that and he had a gun in his hand. He felt he was in pretty deep and it would take something like a gun to get him out. He brushed the thought away, but it kept coming back and spoiling the fun he got out of being himself.

Bret discovered that he didn’t like people any more. He didn’t like the middle-aged men with brown alcoholic faces going in or coming out of bars. He didn’t like the sharp-breasted bobby-soxers chattering in gay circles, their eyes alert for autographs; or the older women like buxom birds in bright incongruous plumage. He didn’t like the brisk, young, hatless men with their shirts open at the necks, and both eyes like one cyclopean eye on the main chance. Above all he didn’t like himself.

Though his uniform was heavy enough and the waning sun was still warm, he stood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and shivered with an immaterial chill. The high buildings and the roaring street and the quick inscrutable crowds appalled him. He had a shameful nostalgia for his hospital room, and then for Paula. The homesick pain turned into a headache that trampled on his skull like rubber wheels. The store windows blew in and out like flexible glass curtains, and the tortured air twisted and shrieked.

An empty Yellow Cab stopped opposite him, and he hailed it. It was something he could get inside. The first thing he had to do was find a room for the night. He didn’t know for how many nights. Time and space had merged in an unreal continuum flowing past him in unnatural patterns. Tomorrow was Los Angeles, which nobody knew entirely and he knew hardly at all.

As he crossed the street to the waiting taxi, the traffic bore down on him from two directions like past and future impinging on the present. But the analogy was wrong. Time moved in a closed circle like a race track. He kept repeating himself in every lap. He was caught in a closed circle that only death could open. Game called on account of suicide.

“Where to?” the driver said.

“Do you know the Golden Sunset Café?”

“The place on Round Street? There’s a Golden Sunset Café on Round Street.”

“I guess that’s it.”

They drove across the city through white Chirico vistas, stark in the washed-out evening light, which led the eye only to other vistas like them. He felt relieved when they reached the older downtown section of slums and semi-slums. It was more human than the vast suburban wasteland, if only because a generation of men had lived there and died unwillingly. The headache still whined in his head like rubber tires, but they were receding. When the taxi let him out on Round Street he felt light-bodied and eager.

In each of the Venetian-blinded windows a sign in red neon script advertised cocktails. A painted sign over the door said: “Golden Sunset Chicken-Fried Steak and Jumbo Shrimp.” He passed through the imitation-leather swinging doors into a roomful of people he liked better than the people at Hollywood and Vine. The evening had hardly begun, or perhaps the afternoon had not yet ended, but nearly all the stools along the bar were occupied. The people at the bar, most of them of indeterminate age and income, sat over their drinks in attitudes that were almost prayerful, though the café was noisier than any church. Blood brothers by virtue of the alcohol in their veins, he thought, they prayed to the god of the bottle for a brief, immediate heaven on earth; and the alcohol was transubstantiated into the stuff of dreams. He felt like an interloper whose presence had to be explained, but nobody paid any attention to him. A flashy young man in a back booth looked up from his plate as if he were going to hail him, but looked down quickly.