Elmore Leonard - The Big Bounce

He picked up a beer can, took two half steps, and threw it on a line into the brush.

“Nice arm,” Mr. Majestyk said. He was at the edge of his front lawn; Ryan hadn’t seen him come up.

“I used to have one. I don’t know where it went.”

“What’d you play?”

“Third mostly. Three summers in Class C. Then two summers I didn’t play because of my back. I tried out again in June; my back felt okay and I figured I could make it.”

“Yeah?”

“But just two years out of it, sitting around, made a difference.”

Mr. Majestyk grinned. “You feel it already. Just wait, buddy.” He looked up at the sky and said then, “It’s going to rain. When it starts to blow like that.”

Ryan looked up. “The sun’s out.”

“Not for long,” Mr. Majestyk said. “You might as well go into town and get the paint; you won’t be able to work outside.”

“What paint?”

“Paint. What do you mean, what paint?”

“How do I know what paint you’re talking about?”

“I’ll tell you,” Mr. Majestyk said. “How will that be?”

Dumb bastard. He was right about the rain, though. Ryan had the windshield wipers going before he was halfway to Geneva Beach. By the time he was in town and had found a place to park, the sky was overcast and the rain was coming down steadily.

There was more traffic for a weekday, more people with the same idea: in town because there was nothing to do. People, mostly kids and teenagers, running for stores and standing in the doorways, the cars creeping along and stopping double-parked to let them out or pick them up. It was funny how people didn’t like to get wet. Ryan walked, he didn’t hurry; and if he got wet, so what? What was wrong with getting wet?

He got the paint, then stopped in the drugstore for cigarettes, a bottle of Jade East, and the new issue of True . Coming out he saw the sky was clearing, brightening, with the sun beginning to show. He put the paint in the back of the station wagon, got in, and started the engine. A little sooner maybe, or later, he probably would have missed Billy Ruiz, but there he was coming toward the car, running hunch-shouldered and grinning. Billy Ruiz got in and slammed the door.

“Man, I thought you left!” He was touching the seat and the edge of the dashboard. “You got a car!”

“The guy I work for.”

“Work-where you working?”

“A place out the Beach Road.” Ryan hesitated, watching Billy Ruiz and seeing the surprise and the grin still on his face. “The Bay Vista.”

“Sure, I know where that is. You work there, uh?”

“Since yesterday.”

“Man, pretty soft.”

“I’m not staying there, I work there.”

“Yeah, with all that stuff walking around in the bathing suits, uh?” Billy Ruiz’s grin stretched wider. “Don’t tell me, baby.”

“It beats picking cucumbers.”

“Anything would beat it.”

“You almost got them in?”

“A few more days,” Billy Ruiz said. “They bring out these nice boys from Bay City and Saginaw as pickers yesterday? Christ, they can’t pick their nose. Half of them don’t show up this morning.”

“More work for you.”

“I got enough. Hey, you didn’t hear about Frank?”

“What’d he do now?”

“He got laid off.”

“Come on, you’re shorthanded.”

“I mean it. He’s been drunk all the time, you know, with the money? He don’t show up yesterday. He don’t come out this morning, so Bob Junior fires his ass and tells him to get out.”

“What’s he drinking for?”

Billy Ruiz frowned. “Because he’s got money, what do you think?”

“Dumb bastard.”

“Sure. Tell him that.”

“Did he go home?”

“He say his truck won’t make it to Texas.”

“All he’s got to do is get on a bus.”

“You can’t tell him anything, that guy.”

Ryan drove Billy Ruiz to the migrant camp-to the road leading into the camp-dropped him there and headed back to Geneva thinking about Frank Pizarro and his slick hair and his sunglasses and his big mouth. Frank Pizarro was a mistake. He’d remember him with all the other mistakes he had made and promised never to make again. It was easy to make promises, but, God, it was easier to fall into things.

He turned at the Shore Road and at the last second turned left again at the first block and came up behind the IGA store. There were so many cars in the parking lot he had to drive in to get a look at the throwaway stack of boxes and cartons near the door. And when he saw it, it was a pile of boxes like any pile of boxes. It could have been the same pile that was here Saturday-except that he didn’t see a red Stroh’s beer case.

Driving out the Beach Road, he kept thinking about the beer case, wondering about it, until he told himself to either do something about it or forget it, but quit thinking. He couldn’t trace an empty beer case that had been thrown away two days ago, so forget about it. What he couldn’t forget completely was Frank Pizarro. He shouldn’t have ever let him get close. He should have known Frank Pizarro the first time he ever saw him. It wasn’t a good feeling to have something hanging over you. Something you shouldn’t have done but did.

Or something you should have done but didn’t. He remembered it as soon as he saw the girl from No. 5.

He had put Mr. Majestyk’s car in the garage and was walking up the lane behind the cabanas to his room when he saw the girl and remembered it. She was backing out of her carport, edging out, in her shiny tan Corvair. Then she was looking right at him, waiting for him to reach her.

“I wondered-I thought you were going to fix my window.”

He wouldn’t have remembered her if she had not been coming out of No. 5. She was dressed up: white beads, a white beaded clip in her hair, sunglasses with white rims and little pearls, made up and dressed up, sweater and purse on the seat next to her.

“The window,” Ryan said. “Listen, I haven’t forgotten. I got tied up.”

“Do you think tomorrow?”

“First thing.”

“Well not too early. I am on vacation.” She laughed.

“Anytime you say.”

“Fine, then.” She hesitated. “Can I give you a lift? I’m going into Geneva.”

“I just got back.” She didn’t look bad. About third string, but not really bad dressed up.

“Well, then, thank you,” Virginia Murray said and backed out a little more, slowly, before finally pulling away.

What was she thanking him for?

The back door to No. 5 and the window that was supposed to be stuck were right there. Ryan looked at the window, not closely but from a few feet away. He walked off toward his room.

Later on he went up the road to the A & W Drive-In for cheeseburgers and root beer and then played a couple of rounds of Putt-Putt golf. The redhead from No. 9 was there with her little girl, the woman in tight slacks and big white earrings and a band in her hair. She looked pretty nice, but Ryan let her go; he didn’t like the idea of the little girl there. By the time he got back to the Bay Vista, it was after eight. A couple of men were on the patio smoking cigars and some kids were playing shuffleboard, but most of the people were inside now, playing cards or putting kids to bed. He thought about stopping in to see Mr. Majestyk, but then he thought, What for? So he went to bed with True , the Man’s Magazine. He read “The Traitor Hero France Forgave,” skipped “The Short Happy Life of the Kansas Flying Machine,” and got partway through “Stalin’s $10 Million Plot to Counterfeit U.S. Money” before he said the hell with it and picked up his sneakers and went out.

HE LIKED BEING ALONE. Not all the time, but when he was alone, he liked it. He liked it now with the surf coming in and the wind stirring in the darkness. He could be alone on a beach anywhere. The houses back up in the trees were dark shapes that could be the huts of a village. The boats lying on the beach could be sampans used by the V.C. The word was they had brought in a load of mortars and automatic weapons, Chicom supplied by the Chinese, and he was on a one-man recon patrol up north of Chu Lai somewhere; get in and chart the V.C. ammo dumps and radio positions to the fleet sitting five miles out in the stream. It was funny people were afraid of the dark. What some guys did in the war, Underwater Demolition or the Special Forces guys, moving through the jungle at night with an M-16 and their faces black, one false step and you’ve got a pungi spike up your behind. And some people would be afraid to be out here. If you could buy the nerve to sneak up on people who were waiting to kill you, then it wasn’t much to sneak up on people who were afraid of the dark. It was funny, but it was also a good thing people were afraid of it.