John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

At any moment he expected to get word that Bob Morrit was dead.

The elevator took them back up to the twelfth floor, and he walked with the guest star to the stage. He looked up and saw Bob Morrit standing, talking with the band leader. Somehow Jimmy Hake kept smiling, kept walking. Not dead yet. Not dead yet, but soon.

He forced himself to go over, grin at Bob and say, “Not many changes in the script, boy.”

“Good. About ready to roll?”

“Just about.” He glanced up at the big clock. The studio audience was hurrying in, struggling for seats. Jimmy Hake turned and gave them his famous smile, a wave of his hand.

He looked back just in time to see Bob Morrit pull up his cuff, glance at a bare wrist, and then grin. “Habit, thy name is Morrit.”

Jimmy Hake’s voice sounded hoarse. “Where — what happened to your watch?”

“That fine absentminded wife of mine. I set the alarm for ten after and strapped it on her so she wouldn’t miss the show this time. Hey, you better get on the ball and start warming up the studio audience, Jimmy.”

Jimmy Hake walked with leaden steps toward the front of the stage. A routine done so many times. Automatic. He did not know what he was saying. But he could hear their laughter, see their open mouths. The smile muscles of his cheeks were tight.

Everything was lost. Anna instead of Bob. Anna instead of Bob. Anna will die.

He looked back over his shoulder. Three minutes to eight. Thirteen minutes for Anna to live.

They gave him a signal. One minute to eight. Eleven minutes before Anna died. What could he do about it? Leave the studio? He couldn’t get to Bob’s apartment in fifteen minutes. How could he explain, even if he could get there in time?

“... that man with no future, a sad past, and no presence — Jimmy Hake!”

He shook his head. The printed idiot boards wavered so he could not read them. On the air. On camera. Twenty million viewers.

He licked dry lips. Ad lib it, Jimmy. You can’t read what it says and you can’t remember.

“I’m trying to get up the courage to read the jokes my writers made up for me.” They laughed. That was a good sign. He realized he was throwing the timing off. But still he couldn’t read the words. He glanced over to the side. Bob’s face was white. He was biting his lips. The rest of the cast had odd expressions.

Suddenly it was unbearable that Anna should die. She had eight minutes to live. No. Seven minutes.

He looked directly into the red-lighted camera. His voice was thin and tight. “A matter of life and death. To anyone in the Foster Apartments on Wilshire. Go to apartment Six-B right away and take a gold watch from the wrist of Mrs. Robert Morrit. A matter of life and death—”

His throat tightened up and no more words would come.

It had been the only answer. The only way to save Anna from death. They would have nothing on him. He could quit. Go away. Retire. Nobody would prosecute.

The studio seemed to swing around him as though he were standing in the center of a garish phonograph record.

Suddenly he was in a corridor. Bob Morrit had him by the lapels and was shaking him. Bob’s lips were drawn back from his teeth and his eyes were wild.

“What were you trying to say, Hake? What is this all about? Answer me, you rubber-nose comic! You fat little fake! What about Anna?”

Jimmy Hake fought for self-control. He was alone with Bob for a moment. “I had to do it. I... fixed the watch so it would kill you. I wanted Anna. I’m... I’m quitting the business.”

Bob slowly dropped his hands to his sides, and his eyes went dead. His voice was as dead as his eyes. “So you fixed everything up.”

“Yes, Bob,” Jimmy Hake said eagerly. “I must have been crazy. I... I couldn’t let her die.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“No. Why?”

“It’s twelve after eight, Jimmy. Twelve after.”

Bob walked heavily away from him, turned, and said, “You better start running, Jimmy. You acted funny. As soon as you said Foster Apartments, the control booth took you off the air.”

Jimmy Hake stood alone in the corridor.

His wide lips were still spread in the automatic, lovable smile that had made him famous.

Wearing the same smile, he walked toward the window at the end of the corridor.

He walked with the comic, jerky little shuffle he had learned thirty years before.

The gooks were coming through the rice. I could see it moving, and there was no wind. I cursed Beldan, out at point, and I couldn’t move. A heavy automatic weapon started a slow cadence. Chaw-pah, chaw-pah, chaw-pah!

I did the only thing I could do: I woke up. Slick with sweat. Panting. The automatic weapon was the beat of steel wheels on the rail joints. Beldan was long dead. Maybe I was dead too. A bedroom, they called it. A moving coffin on wheels. Aluminum and stainless steel, boring a roaring hole in the afternoon.

I looked out. Flatland, a lot of horizon. A gray, baked ranch moved by in forgotten grandeur. I lay there, feeling rested in spite of the violent end of my nap, and scratched my naked chest while I conjured up a vision of bourbon in the lounge car. Taller than tall. Colder than cold.

I washed my face in my private little sink, put on some of the nice new San Francisco civilian clothes, and admired myself. Oh, you hollow-eyed veteran, you! Same face that I’d taken to Nam. Smug and bland. I looked like a prosperous young account executive from a New York agency. Which I had been, they tell me. But it didn’t seem right that I should look like that now.

Funny thing. The Marines get stuffy about whether or not you have toes. They said, “Captain Pell, you have lost your toes in the service of your country. You are obviously no good any more. No toes. Goodbye, and muchisimas gracias.”

The shoes were tricky. When you walk, your toes bend and give you a little spring. When you don’t have toes, they put the spring in the shoe. A steel one. So I went springing down to the lounge car, bourbon-minded.

Marj, my ex-wife, was sitting on the left as I entered. Hanneman, her dignified beefy lawyer, sat cozily beside her.

Marj opened her sweet, moist, musky lips. “You dirty stinking welcher,” she said melodiously.

I smiled. “Enjoying the choo-choo ride?”

Hanneman smiled stiffly. “Sit down, please,” he said. “I’m still sure we can make some arrangement.”

He’d been saying that ever since we all got on the train. I sat down and waited. You know. Eager expression. Avid. Boy listening to smart gentleman.

“You can’t talk to that,” Marj said to him.

“Please, my dear,” he said, patting her hand. “Please.”

So I said, “Gosh, Mr. Hanneman, I don’t know why she’s so sore. I’m the one who should be sore. She tricked me into standing still for the divorce, and then she nibbled the judge into giving her fifty percent of all my future earnings. Now she’s mad because I went off fighting the Communists and all she could collect was half my base pay.”

“You dirty stinking welcher,” Marj said, wetting her slightly redundant lip line.

“See?” I said. “See, Mr. Hanneman? Now she’s sore because I’m not going back to work. She wants me in there knocking off my seventy-five thousand like before. She’s like a fight manager, trying to put a poor tired pug back in the ring. I’m a crippled veteran. They’re giving me a very small amount of disability money for the rest of my life. That isn’t earnings, so she can’t have half of it. With what I’ve saved, I’m going to build a shack in the tropics and lie on my back for the rest of my life. Can’t a man retire, Mr. Hanneman?”