Джо Горес: Come Morning

He moved toward the phone. The only difference was that Runyan didn’t know it yet.

The skinny rat-faced clerk dropped the receiver so it bounced and jerked on its silver flex, jerked a thumb at it, and went down the hall toward the room with OFFICE over the door. Runyan picked it up.

“Runyan.”

A grating unknown voice, its owner probably not as tough as he thought but still plenty tough, said, “Who was the bitch picked you up outside Q today, asshole?”

The guy looking in the condo window. Had to be. He said, “My parole officer.”

“Don’t get fucking cute with me, Runyan. We been waiting eight years, we don’t get our cut, you’re fucking dog meat.”

Runyan’s heart plummeted. That damned Cardwell! He said, “Who’s ‘we’? You got a mouse in your pocket?”

“I told you not to get cute, asshole. You don’t even know which way to look.”

He hung up. Runyan put his forearm against the wall as he used to do against the bars of his cell, pressed his forehead against it, thinking. Just a Tenderloin hotshot with a long memory? Or somebody Jamie Cardwell had been in it with?

You don’t even know which way to look.

Sure he did. Time to dig Jamie out of his rathole.

The Veterans Administration Assistance Division was in a big new pile of metal and prestressed concrete on Main near the Rincon Annex. Runyan went through dark-glassed revolving doors behind a regal black woman whose hair was corn-rowed over to one side and hanging down in front of her shoulder. Her beauty brought Louise so sharply into Runyan’s mind that a wave of physical desire swept through his body like a chill.

Four minutes after the office opened, Runyan was sitting across from a bureaucrat named Harrold, who had a face like a dill pickle and jockied one of a twin row of desks stitching their way down the big barren room. There was a large red number 4 beside Harrold’s name plate.

Runyan used the Okie twang of a lifer he’d worked with in the dry-cleaning plant his first year at Q.

“Me an’ Jamie Cardwell, we go ’way back to Nam together. I know he’s drawin’ partial, so I come to get his address off you.”

Taking great pleasure in the fact, Harrold told Runyan frostily that their records were confidential. He would have made a good prison guard, Runyan thought. The kind who’d been such a bastard all the way through that he was all buddy-buddy on your release date, because he didn’t want you going out and buying a cheap rifle with a good scope on it once you were free.

Runyan tipped back his chair and stared at a corner of the ceiling. “Tet offensive of ’sixty-eight, it was,” he said in a faraway voice. “We was short, hadn’t but a week left ’fore we was to be rotated home.” He brought down his gaze to the dill-pickle face. “Gut shot.”

Harrold’s Adam’s apple worked, twice. “Gut... shot?”

“Cong with one a them AK-forty-sevens the slopes made — you remember them, the kind with them little bitty wire stocks an’ the banana clips. Stitched old Jamie right across the gut like a sewing machine.” The front legs of his chair hit the floor with a bang, and Runyan was on his feet, leaning over Harrold with a fierce expression on his face. “His guts would of fell right out there on the ground if he hadn’t got drug out right quick.”

“I... I see...”

“Like shit you see!” yelled Runyan, veins bulging in his neck. “ I drug him out!”

James (Jamie) Cardwell lived in the 1700 block of Kirkham Street, had an unlisted number, and worked out of the PG&E Division Offices at 245 Market, reading gas and electric meters.

Louise was staying in a fancy chain hotel two blocks from Fisherman’s Wharf. The sprawling unitized four stories of rough-cut wood and tan stucco and red metal trim took up an entire block across Mason from the old Longshoreman’s Hall. There was under-the-building parking and a lobby opening off an ornately cobbled, bisecting alley.

Louise was alone at a table for two, drinking coffee and eating sweet rolls and reading the morning Chronicle . On her table was a stem vase with a single red rose. Runyan, 15 minutes early, faded back from the doorway without being seen, turned, and collided with a florid-faced man wearing a plaid suit that made him look like an auto seatcover. Pinned to one lapel was a big round button, IT’S A SELLABRATION!

Runyan excused himself and went across the lobby with its clusters of small round tables separated by brass-rail dividers, pinning IT’S A SELLABRATION! to his own lapel. He drummed impatient fingers on the wood parquetry check-in counter until a clerk came.

“Graham, Two-Four-Three, my wife left the key for me.”

The harried clerk returned empty-handed. “Looks like she forgot, Mr. Graham...”

Runyan pushed blood into his face, turning it crimson. “Just how the hell am I supposed to—”

“I’ll get you a duplicate, Mr. Graham.” His voice tried to be hurried and soothing at the same time.

Over the bed was an indifferent original of Fisherman’s Wharf, the artificially bright colors laid on with a palette knife. Behind it, nothing. In the closet, only clothes with labels from chain stores or boutiques meaningless to Runyan. The suitcase was empty, its sweaters and pantyhose and lingerie in the dresser, the cosmetics case nearly so, its contents on the vanity. A Smith-Corona electric portable and several manila folders were on the table under a hanging fake-Tiffany lamp.

One folder was marked CONVICT BOOK and held newspaper clippings (none about Runyan), notes, and a scratch pad with BAD TIME slashed across it in felt-tip, circled and with several exclamation points behind. Runyan felt momentary pleasure before reason told him she would do the same if it were a con.

In a folder beside the typewriter was a newly typed story titled Assault on the Citadel .

Every day we are forced to retreat further into the citadel. The enemy does not advance steadily, so many yards a day. He has to fight harder than that for his territory. Foot by foot. Inch by inch.

Runyan lowered the manuscript. A retired army general, whose only family was a daughter, fighting a losing battle against senility. The citadel was his reason. Louise’s father, maybe?

Pops, behind the huge old rolltop in his study, a banty rooster of a man with silky white hair and a kindly, pleasant face which had grown more stern with his years as a circuit judge. The shelves jammed ceiling high with lawbooks, in one corner the rack of hunting rifles shared by him and Runyan. Pops, leaning forward, creaking his swivel chair.

“Remember, boy, you can do things you can’t walk away from.”

Drunk driving? Assault? Runyan couldn’t remember what had occasioned the lecture. Three years later, when Pops died, he’d had to break out of the honor farm to attend the funeral. It was then that the court had given him the option: state prison or service in Vietnam. He’d taken Nam. And done a lot of things since that had only proved the old man right.

With a wave of repugnance, he thrust the story away. Why couldn’t they just have a day of discovery together — each other, his freedom — instead of creeping around her room and snooping her belongings, full of suspicion and paranoia?

It only took an act of belief and affirmation on his part. Didn’t it?

Louise wore wide-wale cords and a puff-shouldered sweater under her Icelandic wool jacket. Runyan had a heavy Navy wool watch sweater under his windbreaker; but Pier 39 was thronged with tourists woefully underdressed for a San Francisco summer. A little black boy appeared beside their reflections in a shop window, dancing and throwing punches at his image.