John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

He looked at me as though he smelled something bad.

“Mr. Pell, Mrs. Pell considers your offer to be unsatisfactory.”

I had offered ten thousand cash for a cancellation of the alimony agreement. This was a poker game we were playing. They were bucking aces backed.

“What does she want?”

“We feel certain you could manage to scrape up thirty thousand, Mr. Pell.”

I yawned. I made it a nice big juicy yawn. “I guess it’s ten thousand or nothing. I’m retiring. No more work for Simon Pell.”

Marj worked her fingernails like a cat. “If I take the ten, you’ll go right back to your job, damn you!”

“And if you don’t take it, I’m through working. Why should I work just so you can get half? You were a dope. You should have taken a property settlement instead of that silly fifty-percent business, Marj. You’re over a barrel and you know it.”

“We can’t force him to work, Marjorie,” Charles Hanneman said.

Marj switched tactics. She leaned across Hanneman’s beefy thighs and laid her moist eyes and cream of raspberry lips against my little gray soul. “You’re making things so dreadfully difficult, Sim, darling.”

“Gosh,” I said, “I thought you were having fun. A nice train ride like this. You and the majestic Mr. Hanneman. It gives you such a cozy excuse, you know.”

She chopped to my face with those claws. I got a coat sleeve in the way, and she broke one nail back to the quick.

Charles Hanneman said floridly, “I don’t care for those implications, Pell.”

I swallowed the remains of the bourbon and waved for more. I said, “And you, sir, should smarten up. Missy, here, is a playmate for men, not boys. She walks in an aura of dangling scalps. She’s a gun-notcher. She’s a pelt-stretcher. Why don’t you trot home to the wife and kiddies, Mr. Hanneman? Your wife probably senses the phoniness of your excuse for this trip anyway.”

He rose to his full height, towering red-faced. He clenched his fists. “Stand up, sir!”

I smiled at him. He made the mistake of reaching with both hands for my new lapels. I put a hoof in his midriff and snapped my knee straight. The Hanneman bulk moved backward toward the waiter bringing my drink. In the narrow space, the waiter did a pass with the tray that would have pleased a matador. He watched Hanneman bounce off the doorframe and land on hands and knees on the rug. Then he served my drink with a special flourish and a white-toothed grin.

Hanneman grunted and stood up and clamped both hands over his kidneys. He wore the expression of someone listening for something. It had happened so quickly that the other people in the lounge car looked at the poor man who had tripped and fallen. Up the line, a perfect hood type in a sharp suit with the face of a depraved weasel watched alertly. Too alertly. As though he knew too much of the score.

Hanneman crouched behind a facade of upright dignity. “I shall not stoop to your level, Pell,” he said. He turned and strode off.

Marj stood up. She wears clothes that pretty up the merchandise, though the merchandise is such that it would make a flour sack blush. She gave a flaunt and twitch of her hips that melted ice in the drinks all down the line.

“You dirty little monster,” she said in that musical sand-throated gargle.

She tilted off on her mission of mercy to soothe the back-wrenched ego. I glanced up the lounge. The hood type’s nose was back in his scratch sheet. Up the line was an empty seat by a cornflower blonde. The petaled eyes drifted across my face with a sensation like butterfly wings. She looked like the kind who wants to talk baby talk and is smart enough not to.

I trotted up and sat beside her. She smelled the grandma’s garden.

I breathed deeply and said, “Hah!”

The blue eyes were sly. “What’s with the ‘Hah’?”

“It’s a substitute. I get tired of an opening wedge about weather, or how slow the trains are, or do you live in California. Hence the Hah.”

“Hah to you too. Now where are we?”

“Launched on my favorite hobby. Hacking at attractive females.”

“Hack away, MacDuff. You’ll just dull your little hatchet. The girl is armor-plated. I’ll angle you for a free dinner and then pat you on the head. I never get tight and I’m not impulsive, and I’ve got four brothers, every one of them over six feet.”

“Round one coming up. I just got back from Nam. I haven’t talked with a girl like you for many long months. My name is Simon Pell.”

“I just got back from Hawaii, and you’ve never talked to a girl like me, and my name is Skipper Moran. End of round one.”

“You must have read Thurber. The war between the sexes.”

“Nope. Just another Sweet Briar graduate. Fencing Three is a compulsory course.”

Then we laughed and began to get on well. So I drank two more than enough; and then we ate, and then we drank some more; and then, as promised, she patted me on the head and went off to bed, leaving my tentative kiss planted firmly in midair.

I trudged back to my little bedroom, whupped for the nonce. Marj was waiting outside my door. “Please may I come in, Sim? I have to talk to you.”

Her underlip was out like a candy shelf and her eyes looked like a stoked furnace.

I opened the door and waved her in. Courtly. Controlled. She had changed clothes. Where do they get that line about a “simple print dress”? Maybe the print was simple, but the dress was pretty complex. It had to be complex. It had a job to do. It had to fit like the hide of a speckled trout, play give-and-take with varied sinuosities, and still manage to make the package look like a lady.

She sat on the little padded shelf seat that folds down out of the wall beside the closed door. I sat on the unmade bed. She looked at me until smoke drifted out of my ears.

“We had something, Sim. Where did we lose it? How did we lose it?”

“Our pockets were picked, maybe?”

“Be serious, Sim. I’m serious. I’m dreadfully serious. You stopped loving me, Sim.”

“I’ve always hated crowds, honey. I got out when it started to look as if I was going to have to stand in line.”

“Don’t be cruel, Sim. Don’t throw that up to me. I’m weak. I know I’m weak. I don’t know how I could have done that to you.”

“You’re weak like the Kremlin.”

“I know why you say such dreadful things to me, Sim,” she said softly. “It’s because I hurt you so dreadfully. You’re striking back.”

I smiled at her. “When they flew me to Japan, there was a nurse there. A little bitty thing with a face like a hopfrog and a figure like a milepost. She smelled of anesthetic and walked so heavy she kept shaking the bed. I would rather spend five minutes with her than ten lifetimes with you, darling.”

She shut her eyes and her lips went taut. I guessed she was mentally counting to ten. She got it under control and stood up dramatically, spreading wide her arms. The simple little print cooperated nicely. She said, “Do I mean nothing to you, Sim?”

She moved closer to me, she and her perfume. I knew her, knew exactly how she looked in shadow or sunlight or under a two-hundred-watt bulb.

“Aren’t you getting a little hippy, Marj?” I asked her solemnly.

She pivoted and tried to spoon out my right eye with her thumbnail. I stood up and hammered her twice with the heel of my hand. Her eyes went blank and her knees wobbled. She sat down hard. Panting. And then she started to cry.

“Okay,” I said. “Now that we’ve had our little drama, get to the point.”

She looked at me. Now she was herself. Chrome steel and broken glass. “I’ve got to have money. Quickly.”

“How much and what for?”

“Thirty thousand dollars. I pay it or go to prison. I did something silly.”