Джон Макдональд: More Good Old Stuff

She walked off into the night. But the night was lonesome. The sky was an immeasurable distance away and she felt small, futile, purposeless. Everything seemed to be going wrong. If only Jay could send her a note, or glance at her, or arrange to speak to her. But every time he looked in her direction his face was cold and his eyes were hard.

She wandered into the part where the tables and soda fountain were. Jonas Bright sat in a wooden rocker, his shoulders slumped.

He smiled up at her and said, “I’m sure glad, honey, that you aren’t running around with that fancy-clothes fella anymore.”

She glared at him for several seconds and then walked aimlessly out into the night. Ben and her dad were fools, both of them. In some funny way they were jealous of Jay Kelso. Jealous because his clothes were nice and he had nice manners and was a perfect gentleman. And his dark eyelashes were long. And his lips were hard and demanding. She felt a deep warm tumult inside her as she thought of his lips and his arms.

Then like an angry child, she bent over, picked up a stone and hurled it out across the highway. She remembered all the bad words she had ever overheard, and she said them under her breath. She went back to her room and stretched out across her bed, her chin propped in her palms. What could he be thinking of, going out with that hag? That silly, simpering hag!

The feeling of excitement had been growing for a full week, and this time there was something completely different about it. She had fallen so completely into her assumed part that she really thought she was Betty Oliver.

She looked at Jay. He was cupping his hands around the flame from his lighter, and the orange-red light threw his cheekbones into sharp relief, deepened the hollows in his cheeks.

Yes, Jay Kelso had created a puzzle. Not in himself, because she knew all too well exactly what Jay Kelso was. She had seen many of them. Flagrant little men strutting around in gay plumage, hard and selfish, unbelievably greedy and cruel. A most despicable little man. Yet there was something so pathetic about his swaggering and his strutting, something so forlornly second-rate about his tin-plate veneer, that he oddly touched her heart, as no man ever had.

A plucked little chicken of a man trying to be masterful, sophisticated. His clothes were in horrid taste, she knew. His manners were frightfully obvious. And he was full of a deadly seriousness as far as using proper English was concerned.

All in all, a very amusing little man. And obvious. She guessed from the way he licked his lips when he had to pay a check that he was close to the end of his small hoard of money. And pretending to be such a big shot.

Such a second-rate little person should have revolted her, she knew. And yet she wanted to cradle his head in her arms, hold him close and soothe him — tell him that she knew the wide world and he could cease his frantic struggling that got him nowhere.

She wondered if it could be some misshapen form of love.

He must be at least thirteen years younger than I, she thought. At least. Maybe more.

She smiled in the darkness. Jay Kelso had been quiet for a long time. She knew that he was going over in his mind the words he had planned.

Abruptly he laughed. “A pretty funny thing has happened to me, Betty,” he said, a nervous note in his voice.

“Yes, Jay, dear?”

“You remember I told you how I was having my employees make their own decisions while I was gone? Well, I got a letter yesterday from the man I left in charge. He has my power of attorney. He got a line on a big deal and sunk all the working capital into it. I didn’t bring along as much as I should. I was wondering if you’d trust me with a little until I got word that the deal has gone through and the bank account is back to where it should be.”

“Why, of course, Jay! How much do you need?”

“Oh, a few hundred ought to carry me over all right.”

“Will five hundred do?” She grinned inwardly as she saw him suck hungrily on his cigarette.

“Fine. That is, if it won’t put you out.”

She knew how it would work. He would take the five hundred and be very attentive and spend quite a bit of it on her — and then he would come to her, very excited and yelling about the big deal that his man in charge was pulling off, only they needed just a few more thousand to grab the property options necessary. Just a few thousand. And then she’d never see Jay Kelso again.

She said, laughing, “Goodness, Jay. You’ve kept me so busy that I haven’t gotten around to opening up a bank account down here. I’m carrying far too much cash on me. You might as well take the five hundred right now. Hold your lighter over here so I can see into my purse.”

It was sort of a nasty little trick to play on him, she thought. She unsnapped the white leather purse, held it so that Jay couldn’t help seeing it. She held open the red leather wallet, fingered off four hundreds and two fifties, crumpled them and handed them to him. “Here you are, Jay, dear,” she said casually.

His hand shook as he snapped off the lighter. Hoarsely he said, “You certainly carry the cabbage — er — carry a great deal of money around with you.”

The same small demon that had inspired her to show him the large wad of cash made her say, “Oh, money is the least of my worries. I could just as easily have loaned you five thousand — or fifty thousand.”

When she said the last figure, he started as though a pin had been jabbed into him. Quickly he recovered control. “I don’t need quite that much,” he said, laughing. But his laugh was hollow.

She was filled with secret amusement. The smell of money was to him like sunshine and rain to a growth of weeds. It expanded him, made him luxuriant.

And she noted, as he pulled her roughly into his arms, that it gave him a new sense of mastery. She tilted her piquant face up and prepared herself to give a timeworn imitation of interest.

It was as though a tiny fire, a strange fire never before experienced, burned deep inside her; growing, finally bursting through the cold artifice, shattering the layer of indifference.

Never before had she experienced such a feeling.

She pulled herself away from him, suddenly frightened of herself more than of him. Her cheeks were hot — partly with anger, because up until that moment she had been the dominant party, the superior being, amused at this tiresome little man. And suddenly he was dominant, his teeth glowing whitely in the darkness as he smiled at her, as he sensed her confusion.

It was with shame that she heard her own disordered breathing, and she stilled it with enormous effort. Her voice sounded rusty and old as she said, “Don’t you think we ought to head back?”

“Sure thing.” He started the motor, turned out into the road, and she heard him humming under his breath as he drove rapidly back toward the Court...

Long after she was alone in her cabin she still walked restlessly back and forth, from the bureau to the bed, her hands clenched in fury. She fought to regain her feeling of power, of amused condescension. At this late date was she to fall into a sticky emotional trap like any schoolgirl?

At last she lay exhausted on the bed, defeated, abject. She knew that this emotion which had struck her down was stronger than her will. She wanted nothing more than to be with Jay Kelso for every hour of every day. And it was impossible to think of his dying, to think of a world where he did not exist. After weeping, she laughed — softly and without humor.

Jay Kelso felt that he was rapidly approaching the biggest opportunity of his life. He stood outside his cabin in the darkness, and fingered the crisp texture of the bills in his pockets. The taste of the liquor he had just drunk from the opened bottle was raw on the back of his tongue.