Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“This buddy of mine, his ship was operating in the Solomons then, and on top of his worry about his job this thing about his wife damn near drove him out of his head. Couldn’t he forgive her? she says in her letter – she’d never do it again. She didn’t want to do it that time, but she was drunk and she didn’t know what she was doing till after, when she woke up in bed with this guy in his hotel room. He thought about it for a couple of weeks and talked it over with some of his buddies, and finally he got a grip on himself and wrote her a nice, decent letter. He said he felt like hell about the business, but he was never one to cry over spilt milk, and since she said she’d never do it again he guessed he’d have to swallow it and forget it as well as he could. A couple of months after that he got her answer. She said he was the best husband in the world, and all that crap, and she was going to spend the rest of her life trying to live up to him. Crap!”

“Maybe she meant it,” Bret said. He felt sympathy for the woman. “One slip doesn’t prove anything.”

“Maybe one slip doesn’t. But I didn’t give you the pay-off yet. How’s about another drink?”

“It’s my turn.” Though the story was interesting and he wanted to hear the end of it, a violent impatience was rising inside him. He resented being made the confessor at third hand of a sinner he had never seen, the depository of a monstrous moral problem of which he wanted no part. But he accepted the drink and the rest of the story that went with it.

“It was another year or so before my friend got home and then it was only for five days. His wife was wonderful to him, he thought. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him, and at the same time she was more religious than ever, going to Mass every bloody day, and stuff like that. He figured that the Church had straightened her out or something had, and that he’d done the right thing when he stuck by her. He went out again for another eighteen or twenty months and went through six or seven invasions, and she kept writing to him every day and telling him how much she loved him and what she wouldn’t give to have him home with her in bed. In the spring of ’45 he got his orders to shore duty and came home for keeps. His wife was waiting on the dock, and as soon as he took one look at her he knew that something was wrong. Wrong isn’t the word. She hardly got him home before she told him that she’d done it again, she couldn’t help herself. He was kind of under a strain, hadn’t had any sleep since the ship left Pearl, and he gave her a swat across the face. She went to pieces then and came crawling to him on her knees, begging him to forgive her for her sins. ‘Sins?’ he said. ‘How many times, for Christ’s sake?’ ‘Fifteen or sixteen times,’ she said. But she said she only loved him, and she swore to Jesus that if he’d keep her on, she’d be a good wife to him for the rest of her life now that he was home. The hell of it is he still loves her in a way, and he can’t stand the idea of her opening up for a gang of lousy draft dodgers when he was at sea. When he looks at her he can’t help seeing a bitch, and he’s honestly afraid that he’ll get so mad sometimes that he’ll beat her to death. What’s a man to do, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know,” Bret said. “What would you do?”

Mustin’s little eyes shifted and looked away. “We can have another drink.”

Over his sixth Scotch – or was it his seventh? – Bret considered the problem. He hated Mustin and his sordid story, yet he was as fascinated by it as if it had been a parable whose hidden meaning applied to his own life. Swayed heavily by the alcoholic pulse that was rising and falling in his brain, his imagination saw with hysteric clarity the pipes of sewage that branched like infected veins through all the streets of all the cities, the beast with two backs crying its rut in a thousand undomestic bedrooms, the insatiable appetite of female loins and the brutal meat that fed those blind, adulterous mouths. For the second time that day he felt the black wind blowing him toward extinction and the grave, that barren womb which feared no violation and threatened no second birth. A dead man, the fœtus of the grave, futureless and untormented by even the first pricks of consciousness, merged carelessly with the filth and trash of generations, without a history or a thought to disturb the long serenity of blankness, the timeless gestation of the final dust. Because he wished himself dead he ordered and drank a double Scotch, and another, and another. They gave him back his desire to live, but turned his inward loathing outward.

He turned to Mustin, who had been silent for some time, and said: “This friend of yours with the unfaithful wife, has he been faithful to her?”

Mustin’s face registered shock, as if Bret had named an unfamiliar obscenity. “Hell, no! He’s been in the Navy all his life. He doesn’t play around when he’s at home, but when he pulls into Panama or Honolulu, naturally he takes it where he can get it.”

“What’s bothering him then?” Bret said roughly.

“You don’t understand, Lieutenant.” Mustin leaned toward him in his earnestness. “You don’t get the situation. He married this girl in 1940 and thought he was getting a pure girl – you know, a virgin. Then when he’s away fighting for his country she turns out to be nothing but a two-bit floozie. Worse than a two-bit floozie, without even the two-bits to show for it.”

“You mean while he’s away fighting for his country and incidentally picking up all the tail he can get on the side.”

“What the hell!” exploded Mustin. “I’m a man, ain’t I? A man’s got a right to expect his wife to be pure, even if he isn’t.”

“Is this your wife we’re talking about?”

Mustin lowered his eyes. “Yeah. I didn’t mean to tell you.”

“And you want my opinion on what you should do?”

“I don’t know.” Mustin’s voice was thickened by alcohol and resentment. “You don’t understand the situation. You never had a wife, did you?”

“That’s none of your goddam business!” Bret cried. “I understand the situation well enough. You want to take it out on your wife for the rest of your life for doing what you’ve always done. Go home and tell her you’re sorry.”

The chief’s broad mouth worked and spat. “To hell with you, Lieutenant! You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know more than I want to. You forced your story down my throat and asked for my advice.”

“And what kind of advice did you give me? You can stick it!”

“Don’t talk like that to me.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t I?” The chief’s face was red and malevolent now, pushing closer and closer like an expanding balloon. “You’re no officer of mine, and I say thank God for that! If that’s the kind of ideas they teach you in a college I’m goddam glad I never set foot in one! Goddam college graduates pretending to be officers in a man’s navy–”

In a movement that he neither intended nor controlled, Bret placed his open right hand against the angry face and pushed it backward.

“Hey there, cut that out now!” Sollie the bartender began to climb over the bar.

Mustin went down heavily on his back and got up with his shoulders hunched and his fists extended. “Come on and fight like a man, you friggin’ coward!” The sentence was punctuated by a blow on the side of the head which sent Bret reeling. He came back to attack the red face behind the fists, as if it represented all the unspoken hatred of enlisted men for officers, and all the venereal sin of all the ports.

A left jab to the cheek and a right cross to the side of the jaw put Mustin on his back for the second and last time. Bret stood over the fallen man, pleased to see the blood on his face. He heard a sound in the air behind and over his head, but it was too late to duck. A hard blow jolted the back of his head and split the room into many tiny fragments. It must have been a bottle, he thought as his knees buckled and he fell forward onto the floor. Then the black wind blew out the fluorescent lights.