Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

“She was lonely, but she would have been that anywhere. She was where she deep-down belonged, whether it was better or worse for her to belong there. She never regretted it. She would be sad sometimes, and she would wonder what happened to that man in Baltimore, and to that baby…”

In another voice she said, “Somewhere along the way it gets determined just what a person is, and for the rest of his life he’s stuck with it. Whoever else he may try to be is just play-acting. I guess you know you’ll have to go, Chip.”

“I know.”

“I guess you knew it all along.”

“I guess I did.”

“Once you got to do something, there’s nothing but to do it. Tonight is better than tomorrow. You’ll take my car.”

“I can’t—”

“It’s no use to me. I haven’t driven it myself in ten years. It’s almost as old as you are. I don’t guess it has as many miles on it, though. You can drive, can’t you?”

“I have a license. I’ve used the Reverend’s car a couple of times on errands.”

‘This has a stick shift. You know how to work it?”

“In a sort of academic way.”

“You’ll get the hang of it. I’ll make the registration over to you. Oh, now, it’s not so much. A 1954 Cadillac, what would I get selling it? Not even an antique yet. That star of yours will guarantee against a ticket anywhere in the state, and by then you’ll be comfortable driving it. I let the girls use it. It runs all right. It’s still a Cadillac. Always will be, old as it gets.”

I said, “Lucille.”

“You want to take her along?”

“I don’t know.”

“She would go.”

“I know. I keep feeling I ought to take her.”

“You could take her with you. But she’d never really be with you. No more than you could stay here. Listen to me. You can hurt her now quickly or spend fifty years killing her by halves. Because whether you stay here or take her with you one thing is sure, and that’s that she will never complete you. And you would never tell her that but she would always know, and never know why.”

I swallowed.

“The Sheriff will get a report and he’ll tell her about it. You had an accident on a road out of town. You were driving my car, and you were in a wreck and were killed, and the body was shipped north for burial with your parents.”

“The Sheriff—”

“Claude will tell her that. He’ll get that report.”

“How?”

“From me.”

“Oh.”

“Claude Tyles knows all a man has to know about who you have to be whether you want to or not. Sometimes what you have to do is stay. Not in a place, necessarily, but with a person. He had to, and he did, and he knows. For my part, I’ll see she gets the baby taken care of. Whichever she wants, having it and then getting shut of it or just getting shut of it. If she’s even pregnant in the first place, which we’re none of us sure of. Chip?”

“What?”

“You can feel as guilty as you want to, but all it is is foolishness. What the two of you had was good for the two of you. Nobody can ask more than that. It’s no kindness to take something good and keep it going when it’s no good no more. She had a beautiful young romance and her lover died. Why, you’ll be more in her memory than you ever could have been in her life.”

She gave me a couple old suitcases of hers. I packed everything and put the suitcases in the trunk. I went back to say goodbye to her and she looked as though she wished I hadn’t.

“You send me a card from time to time. Just so I’ll have an idea of where you’re at. No need to sign it or the snoops at the Post Office’ll have something to talk about. I don’t get that much mail,” she said. “I guess I’ll know who it’s from.”

There was a stretch of time then when nothing happened you would want to read about. I didn’t do much but drive, and I didn’t work too hard at that, either. I would push the old Cadillac until I came to a town that looked decent enough and pick out one of the large Victorian houses with a sign in front that said TOURISTS OR ROOMS or something of the sort. They would generally be run by a widow living alone, or two old maids, or a widow and her old maid sister, and the rooms were clean and comfortable and only cost two or three dollars a night, which was less than half what the cheapest motel would charge. Sometimes they included breakfast, or sold it to you for something ridiculous like fifty cents.

I stayed in so many of those places I have trouble remembering which was which. They were all the same in so many ways. There would always be a small portable television set, and it would be the only piece of furniture in the house that was less than thirty years old. There was usually a spinet piano in the parlor that no one had played in almost that long, and if I stayed more than a night the woman would ask wistfully if I played the piano, and would be sad to hear that I didn’t.

“No one ever does,” she would say. “I suppose I ought to sell it for all the use it is, but I cannot bear to, Mr. Harrison. I just cannot bear to sell that piano.”

If they all sell them all at once, the market for second-hand pianos is going to collapse overnight.

There were always framed photographs on the piano, and on the carved sideboard in the hallway. You could tell the frames were silver because they were usually slightly tarnished. And there was generally a vase of cut flowers on the sideboard next to the photographs, and there were potted plants all over the place. The plants were usually green and healthy.

Sometimes there would be a cat or a dog. More cats than dogs, all in all. The cats tended to keep to themselves. The dogs tended to be very small, and bark a lot, primarily at me.

I couldn’t tell you just how many houses like this I stayed in, or how much time I spent this way. I wasn’t very much involved in time, for some reason. I would be very conscious of the time of day because as soon as it was nine or ten at night I could go to bed and not think about anything until it was time to get up the next morning. But I didn’t bother with days of the week, or what month it was, or that sort of thing. I didn’t read newspapers or look at television. I knew there was a whole world out there but I didn’t want to think about it. I had a bath every night and put on clean clothes every morning and when my clean clothes began to run short I did a load of wash in my current landlady’s washing machine. Some of them didn’t have washing machines of their own but knew a neighbor who would let me use theirs.

Sometimes I stayed one night and then left, I particularly if there was a yipping dog in the house, or if there were other boarders. If I felt like staying, I would have a look around the house for something that needed fixing. Usually I didn’t have to look very hard because the woman would apologize for whatever it is.

“You’ll have to forgive the appearance of that room because it needs repapering, Mr. Harrison”… “The boy who used to do my yard work was drafted into the Army last month, Mr. Harrison, and I just can’t keep up with my rose beds”… “I don’t know how this house can go another year without painting, Mr. Harrison, but I had a man out to give me an estimate and, land, the price he asked!”

I changed a lot of faucet washers and replaced a lot of broken panes of glass. I cleaned out some basements and mowed and reseeded lawns and trimmed shrubbery and hauled trash. I patched plaster, which wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and I put up wallpaper, which was. In Columbia, Missouri, I painted a whole house without falling off the ladder once. I guess that summer of apple-picking was valuable.

That was for the woman who hadn’t known how the house could go another year without painting. She told me this at breakfast, and it was a breakfast that came free with my three-dollar room rent, and it was such a good breakfast and such a clean comfortable house that I figured I wouldn’t mind spending another week or two there.