Lawrence Block - No Score

A happy man, obviously.

But that’s not exactly right, either, because I wasn’t really contented, because I didn’t have what I wanted. I was settling for less, that’s what I was doing. I was having little off-in-left-field climaxes with Aileen when what I really wanted to do was slide into home plate. I was getting by in a dumb job when I really wanted to get ahead. And no matter how comfortable that couch was when Aileen was on it with me, and no matter how often that happened, sooner or later I would have to be bothered by the way things were going.

On Memorial Day, a veteran sold me a poppy. He stuck that poppy into my hand just as neatly as I had learned to stick the yellow cards into the jerks’ hands, and I took it like any other jerk, only I couldn’t just drop it on the ground and keep walking. Or maybe I could have done this, but then he would have been within his rights if he brained me with his crutch. I gave him a quarter and he said something about the Last Of The Big Spenders. I stuck the stupid poppy in my buttonhole. That way at least I didn’t have to buy another one.

But when I walked another block, it hit me that I was more a cripple than the guy who sold me the poppy. I don’t know how I made the connection. It came in one quick flash and once I had it I couldn’t let go of it. I kept seeing myself with a leg missing, lurching through life like that.

And I couldn’t stick around with an image like that in my mind.

I waited until the weekend was over. The Sunday paper was filled with want ads, and I bought it and sat in a diner and went through it, and I found what I wanted. It wasn’t a job with a future, either, but it was one that would take me out of Chicago, and I had enough sense to know that I couldn’t stay in Chicago if I wanted to get out of the tender trap I was in. I had to travel, and then I could concentrate on Getting Ahead and all the rest of it.

Monday was a work day, but I took a long lunch hour, and during that lunch hour I went over and applied for the job. And got it. (No big deal — you had to have two heads or something for them to turn you down. They were easier to get into than the Army. More later.)

And Monday night, after old Gregor went night-night, I did everything possible to score with Aileen. I tried to break those silly rules of hers and get something straight between us once and for all, and as usual it didn’t work. I had more or less fixed up a game in my mind, making a bargain with myself that if I laid her I would stay in Chicago but if I didn’t I would go. I gave it the old Upper Valley try and when it didn’t work I took Aileen’s motherly advice to behave myself and be a good boy and make sweet love with her. I got on top of her and rubbed the two of us together in a way we had both grown to enjoy no end. I made sweet love all over her stomach and she danced off to wash away the sweet love I had made, and she pecked my cheek and told me I was her sweet baby and to sleep tight, and she went into her bedroom and got back in bed with the State Street Shutterbug.

I got dressed in the dark and put my extra clothes and stuff in a paper bag. I thought about leaving a note, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t either hopelessly corny or slightly nasty, and I didn’t want to be either. I told myself I would write her a letter someday. You can tell yourself things like that as often as you want and it doesn’t cost you a thing.

I sat up all night in different crummy diners, drinking so much coffee that I kept shaking and peeing and shaking and peeing. I was downtown in plenty of time to catch my ride in the morning, and when our car left the city limits of Chicago it wasn’t even noon yet.

So that was three months, and my $27.46 had turned into $191.80, which is better than it could have done through The Miracle Of Compound Interest. And I had spent more time on third base than Ron Santo.

That toddling town.

When i rang the doorbell, the chimes played the first two bars of a hymn. I couldn’t tell you which one. I stood there patiently, wanting to ring it again but holding off, and eventually I heard the pitter-patter of little old feet. I timed myself so that I was whipping off my little blue-visored cap just as she was opening the door.

She wasn’t the girl of my dreams. When you are young enough and horny enough (like me, Chip Harrison, for instance) you can’t even open a Coke bottle without hoping there will be a beautiful girl in it. And on this job I kept waiting for the time one of the doors would be opened by a Neglected Young Housewife, or a Wanton Suburban College Girl Home From School, or an Off Duty Whore. And instead the doors kept being opened by women who stopped thinking about sex the day Hayes beat Tilden.

This one must have gone to school with Tilden’s grandmother, from the looks of her. She was a tiny wrinkled little lady with bright eyes the color of frostbitten lips. Her face cracked into a smile.

She looked up at me and said, “Yes, young man? You’ve come for the bake sale donation, haven’t you?”

I said I was afraid I hadn’t, and I went into a little explanation of who I was and why I had turned up on her doorstep. While I talked I held my cap in both hands and squeezed it in and out of shape. I didn’t do this because I was nervous. That’s just the way it was supposed to look, because according to old Flickinger the more nervous and earnest you seemed the more trustworthy you were, at least as far as old ladies were concerned.

It was hard to look nervous without doing the little bit of business with the cap, because I actually delivered my set piece without even paying attention to what I was saying. I might as well have been a record player. While my mouth got all the words out, my mind thought about how little this woman had in common with the girl of my dreams, and that I might have guessed as much, because nymphomaniacs don’t go out of their way to have chimes that play hymns — at least most of them don’t — and while I didn’t recognize that tune, it certainly wasn’t “Roll Me Over in the Clover.”

“—free inspection with no obligation whatsoever,” I finished up, and gave my cap a final twist, and hung my head just the littlest bit, because you couldn’t go overboard and look too pathetic or you got tons of warm milk and cookies shoved down your throat.

“Rowrbazzle,” she said.

That seemed like a funny thing for anybody to say, let alone Tilden’s grandmother here, but then of course I saw that she wasn’t the one who said it. It was her cat. He was standing next to her, and he was as big for a cat as she was small for an old lady. He was built like a Siamese, with a blackish brown coat and horrible yellow eyes. I always liked cats, but then they had always said sensible things like Meow. This was the first one that had ever said anything like Rowrbazzle within my hearing and I wasn’t sure just how I felt about it. It put me off stride a little, if you really want to know.

“Now just one moment, young man,” she said.

The woman this time. “You wait right here, and I won’t be a minute. You wait now.”

I waited. So did the cat. Now would have been a good time for me to step inside and let the screen door close behind me, which was the recommended procedure at this stage of the game. Whoever had worked up the recommended procedure had never met a cat that said Rowrbazzle. I stayed where I was, and old Rowrbazzle stayed where he was, and the screen door was the Demilitarized Zone.

Then the old lady came back, and I slapped my smile back in place and whipped off my cap again, and then I noticed what she had in both her little liver-spotted hands.

What she had was an old dueling pistol that was almost as big as her dippy old cat. Her hands were shaking, and the pistol was bobbing up and down like a red red robin, and it was pointing at me, and it looked as though it might go off at any moment.