Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

In the aisle between the bar and the plywood booths a very old man was performing a shaky two-step, in approximate time to a scratchy jukebox version of Sentimental Journey . Bret stepped out of his way and let him totter by, isolated and supported by the dream of youth that glazed his pale old eyes. He couldn’t remember hearing the tune before, but its soft blue chords made counterpoint with the distant whining loneliness in his head.

He could understand the loneliness that had driven Lorraine to this place. Among the few things he knew about her he remembered that she loved crowds and jukebox music and the moist merriment of bars. The pain of remembering her was so intense that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her in one of the booths hunched over her drink as he had seen her more than once, with her chin resting on her hand and her dark hair swinging forward over her temples like loosely folded wings. There was a dark-haired girl in the second-last booth who might have been Lorraine until she turned to give him a once-over. He was disappointed and repelled by her harsh black eyes and carnivorous mouth; grateful too that the faces of the dead came back only in dreams.

At the rear end of the bar, beside the steamed window in the kitchen door, he found an empty stool. A large man, whose dirty white apron bulged out over his belly like a maternity garment, came to serve him.

“Scotch and soda?” Until he opened his mouth he hadn’t realized how much he wanted a drink.

“We got no bar Scotch since the war.” The bartender spoke with a heavy accent, underlining his words with his thick black eyebrows. “You want Black and White out of the bottle? Cost you sixty-five.”

“Make it Black and White.”

This man with the Central European accent couldn’t be James P. Rollins. Rollins was an English name, or Irish. Maybe Rollins was the bartender at the other end of the bar, the dark thin fellow with side-burns that made his face seem narrower than it was.

When the big man brought him his change he left a dime on the counter and nodded toward the dark young man. “Is his name Rollins?”

“Naw, that’s Rod. Jimmie ain’t in tonight, it’s his night off.”

“You don’t know where I can find him?”

“Not at home, I know that. Jimmie goes home to sleep. Just stick around, Mister. He comes in all the time on his night off. Gets a discount on his drinks, see? I don’t do that myself. Never come near the place only when I got to, to work. I got a wife and family, that’s the difference. Three kids I got, two boys , gonna be big like their old man.” He thrust out his stomach in a gesture of exultant fatherhood.

“Good. What does Rollins look like?”

“Little guy. Curly hair. Bumpy nose, he broke it once. Just sit here, and I’ll tell you when he comes in. By eight or nine he comes usually. You just wait.”

“Rock and rye, Sollie,” somebody shouted halfway down the bar.

Bret flipped the quarter in his hand onto the bar. Smiling and bowing, Sollie picked it up and bustled away.

Bret looked at his watch. It wasn’t seven yet. He settled down to wait. When he had finished his Scotch he ordered another. By the time he finished his second the strong whisky had begun to soften and subdue his melancholy. The gilt-framed mirror behind the bar was like an archaic proscenium through which he watched the tragic life of the world. An aging woman with inexorably corrugated gray hair stood just inside the door in a tight flowered dress, searching the room with weary, myopic eyes. Somebody’s mother, he thought in burlesque sentimentality, looking for her erring husband or her wandering son. The aging Hero watching for Leander drowned in his nightly Hellespont of gin. Or Penelope the floozie, loverless after all these years, seeking the lost Odysseus to show him the results of her Wassermann test. A little man in dungarees, who had been sitting beside Bret, slid off his stool and jerked his head at the woman. They sat down together in a booth below the frame of the mirror.

A man in the uniform of a chief petty officer had climbed onto the empty stool and ordered a rum-and-Coke. In the mirror Bret saw that the chief was watching him over the rim of his glass. He avoided the keen little eyes, having no desire to talk.

The chief spoke to him anyway, abruptly but not irrelevantly if you knew the Navy mind. “They tried to make an officer out of me, but I wasn’t having any, and I can’t say now I’m sorry. I had a chance to make warrant, but I went to the captain and told him I didn’t want to be an officer, I didn’t want the responsibility, and I wouldn’t feel at home in the wardroom. He put up an argument, but I wasn’t having any, and that was that. I went on eating in the chief’s mess, best food on the ship.”

“That’s the way it was on our ship,” Bret said.

He didn’t want to talk to the broad-faced man, but there was no way out. One thing an officer shouldn’t do was snub an enlisted man, and though the war was over and he’d been out of action for a long time, he was still aware of the obligations of his uniform and felt he owed some return for the privileges of rank. When the bartender brought the chief another rum-and-Coke, Bret insisted on paying for it and ordered himself another Scotch. It was his fourth, and he was beginning to feel it. It worried him a little, but the worry was soon submerged in the good feeling the drink induced. After all he hadn’t had a drink in a long time, and he could expect to feel it. That was what it was for.

“You were on a ship, eh?” the chief said.

“For a couple of years. A jeep carrier.”

“My name’s Mustin.” The chief thrust out a thick hand.

“Taylor’s mine. Glad to know you.”

Their handshake had some of the aspects of a hand-crushing competition, and Bret caught the inference. Mustin figured he was tougher than any officer, but he’d be glad to be shown.

“I was on an AKA myself,” he said, “the last year of the war. Before that, a can. Right now I’m over at the Island, and if that shore duty holds out for two more years I got nothing to gripe about. Two more years I retire. I was ambitious once, but when I found my level I had sense enough to stick to it.” He called the bartender and ordered two more.

Bret looked into his face and saw, as if under a magnifying lens, the harsh lines in the weather-beaten skin, the rum-washed eyes, the tired flesh relaxing on the neck beneath the powerful chin. They earned their retirement after twenty years, he thought. If they enlisted young enough they could retire at forty, but they were old men after twenty years in that iron world. Twenty years of beating around the bars and cat houses that fringed the shores of the two oceans. The old chiefs all looked the same: heavy, hard, shrewd, and somehow lost.

“Women are as crazy as hell,” the chief said. After years of Navy bull sessions Bret found the abrupt transition as natural as speech itself. “Take the wife of a friend of mine for instance. He’s a chief, too. Been all over the world, from Shanghai to France, and thought he knew his way around. Married this girl in Boston six years ago, and right now she’s driving him nuts. When he got reassigned to the Pacific he brought her out here to live, and they got a little house in Dago, out in Pacific Beach beside the bay. This was before we got into the war, and for a long time he got home every night. Then when they sent the ship out, she was on the pineapple run, and he got to see his wife every two or three weeks. She was a good faithful wife, a religious girl too, but he told me she was passionate as hell. Not that he had any objections to that. He felt good about the deal.

“After Pearl Harbor, his ship got ordered to the South Pacific. She kept writing to him practically every day, but about a year after he left she sent him a letter that knocked him for a loop. It turned out she was all right when he was seeing her regular, but it was just too bad when she was on her own. She’d taken down her pants for somebody else, see, and she felt so awful about it, being a religious girl, that she just had to tell him. So she wrote and told him.