Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

Mary caught me watching her and, with the impersonal cattiness of women, whispered: “Isn’t that hat a fright?” It was. It was large and haphazardly plumed. The whole woman was a fright. But the man next to her didn’t seem to think so. He looked sideways at her frequently with naïve interest.

At first glance, his interest in such a woman was the most noticeable thing about him. His plump, uncertain joviality, his carefully cut and thinning hair, his healthy shoulders becoming infiltrated by fat, his thick silk ankles crossed in front of him, his severely pressed and already crumpling grey pin-stripe suit, and his expensive and passionate tie announced: I am a successful American business man. His hands were large and hard-looking, indicating that he had once worked with them. He wore a handsome ruby ring, indicating that he would never work with them again.

The train trembled and came to life, jerked two or three times and began to move, and the successful American business man took his cue.

“It’s great to get under way, isn’t it?” he said to the object of his interest. “I thought we were never going to get going.”

“Me either,” she replied. “California here I come.”

“You live in California, do you?”

“More or less. Mostly more. Do you?”

“No, I can’t say I do. I have business interests there, take me down there two or three times a year. But I’ve never been able to stay long enough to get sick of it.”

“What business are you in?”

“Well, I have investments in various types of enterprise. Oil, for one thing. As a matter of fact, oil is getting to interest me more and more.”

He talked about the oil business.

Without a man to talk to, Rita estimated me, was challenged by Mary’s glance, dropped her eyes demurely, soon became restless again. She tapped a small neat foot on the rug, and puffs of dust rose up like smoke from little distant explosions.

“Don’t fidget,” said Mrs. Tessinger, without raising her fine eyes from Mademoiselle.

The morning wore on, and no one appeared to man the bar. The suburbs of Chicago fled backwards into merciful oblivion. The quick, monotonous rhythm of the train’s movement worked into my consciousness and beat there like a tiny extra heart. I began to get the feel of travelling, the slow excitement of escape.

After Bessie Land’s death every Detroit scene had a thin margin of nightmare, every Detroit building had a sub-basement of horror. I had told myself that I was going south to look for Hector Land, but I knew I was also running away from a city which had turned ugly in my eyes, and a problem that had become too tough.

One thing alleviated my feeling that I was evading responsibility, the fact that the FBI was working on the case. Hefler had attended the inquest on Friday, and had told me enough to assure me that it wouldn’t end there. He already had investigators at work on Black Israel, and while they were gathering their facts it was just as well to let Bessie Land remain officially a suicide.

I tried to convince my conscience that I had done and was doing what I could. Still, my sense of relief told me that I was running away. But it was soon borne in upon me that my running was as effectual as that of a squirrel in a wheel or a whippet on an endless oval. Wherever I went the rats had tunnelled under the streets. I thought I was taking a trip for the hell of it, but I found out that I was being taken for a long ride.

The first call for lunch brought me out of my thoughts. “I haven’t been a very brilliant companion recently,” I said to Mary.

“So what? I like you when you don’t talk, maybe even better.”

“I want to be loved for my eloquence alone.”

“No man ever was. Come on, we’d better get in line before it gets too long.”

Standing in line behind her I blew on the back of her neck and said: “Anyway, the things I want to say to you couldn’t be said with people looking on.”

She responded with the least pressure of her shoulder against my chest. The morning, which had seemed rather dismal, became a success, and the thought of the fun we were going to have on the trip went to my head like wine. The hangover from a wine jag is the worst there is.

An old lady directly in front of Mary turned around to look at her and, finding her appearance sympathetic, said: “Isn’t this an outrage, making us stand in line for lunch like this? I declare, if I had known it was going to be like this, I’d never have left Grand Rapids!”

“There are a lot of troops moving these days,” Mary said.

“Well, you would think the government would make some arrangement for people that pay their way.” The old lady noticed my uniform and became silent. Mary looked back at me with a quick smile.

“It used to be a real pleasure to eat on a diner,” the man behind me said. “Now I eat what I can get and call myself lucky. After all, there’s a war on. Isn’t that right, sir?”

It was the fat man in the oil business. I turned to acknowledge the question and saw that the woman in the flame-colored blouse was with him. Perhaps he was a faster worker than he looked.

The line slowly moved up to the diner, and we ended up at a table for four, with Mary and me on one side, and the oil man and his companion on the other.

“My name’s Anderson,” he said, reaching across the table to constrict my hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Ensign.”

“Drake is the name. This is Miss Thompson.”

“And this is Miss Green,” Anderson said.

Miss Green displayed teeth which were a little too good to be true, and said in a light bantering way: “So you two aren’t on your honeymoon, after all. The way you looked at each other I thought maybe you were on your honeymoon.”

Mary blushed and said, “We’re just friends.”

“Oh, well, you’re young yet,” Miss Green said surprisingly. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

“It’s us older folk that have to gather us rosebuds while we may,” Anderson said. “Isn’t that right?”

Miss Green laughed without meaning and lit a carmine-tipped cigarette with an automatic lighter. The tremor of her hand made the flame flicker steadily like a candle in a light draft. Something intangible about her reminded me of hospitals, and I wondered if she had a serious disease.

“I suppose you’re on leave, eh, Mr. Drake?” Anderson said. “I envy you young men the experiences you’re having in this man’s war.”

“Yes. I was in the South Pacific for a year.” I looked at him more closely. He wasn’t so old. In his middle forties, perhaps. But it was hard to tell about a face like that, plump and pleasant with unintelligently boyish blue eyes.

“That’s one of the things I like about a train journey,” Miss Green said. “You’re always meeting new people, and I never get tired of meeting new people.”

“Neither do I,” Mary said, with a shade of irony in her tone. “Trains, ships, street-cars and buses are great places for meeting new people.”

“Also funicular railways and houseboats,” I said.

Miss Green wasn’t so dull as she’d seemed at first. She let out a laugh which ended in a fit of coughing. Between gasps she said, “Don’t forget the subway.”

“One of the finest things about America is the way Americans make friends so easily,” Mr. Anderson said. “Some of the most interesting contacts I ever made are people I met on trains, people I never saw before and will never see again. How about that, Mr. Drake?”

“Yes,” I said.

We had a mediocre lunch enlivened by a good deal of such conversation. When we made our way back to the club car Mr. Anderson and Miss Green were still with us. He seemed to have taken a liking to me, and I learned with a sinking heart that he was going all the way to Los Angeles.