Росс Макдональд: Trouble Follows Me

“There’s barely a trace of canine in my nature.”

She withdrew her eyes, and because I wanted them back I changed my tack:

“How long have you been out here?”

“Just a few months. Five and a half.”

“Are you from Ohio, Michigan, or Illinois?”

“Your ear’s pretty good. I lived in Cleveland. What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“I’ll have to leave at the end of this dance.”

“Let me drive you over. I can borrow Eric’s jeep.”

“That would be nice. I haven’t seen Eric or Sue for quite a while, though. Maybe they’re out in the garden.”

While Mary went upstairs to get her coat, I searched the first floor for Eric and Sue. They weren’t on the dance-floor, they weren’t in the darkened dining-room, though other couples were. I walked clear around the house on the verandah, but I couldn’t find them. The night was very dark. There was a full moon, but almost opaque clouds showed where it was only by a faint glow. Cascades of lights were twinkling far up the hills, but the dark clouds which squatted heavily and eternally on Oahu’s peaks loomed against the sky like a dismal fate.

I decided against searching the garden, because it would be embarrassing. There were soft voices among the flowers, and shadowy double shapes both vertical and horizontal.

When I found Eric eventually, he was by himself. He was sitting on an upturned wastebasket in a corner of the men’s head, nursing a dying bottle of bourbon. The damp glitter in his eyes had frozen into glassiness. His thin lips were loose and purplish. His torso was lax and wavering. There were individual drops of sweat oozing from his hairline onto his blank forehead. Once or twice I had seen men drunker, but they were not able to sit up.

“Sue’s gone away and left me,” he said in a muffled singsong. “She went away and left me all alone. She’s a hellish woman, Sam. Don’t ever get mixed up with those little dark babies. They’re deadly nightshade. You can’t get over ’em.”

I wasn’t enjoying the conversation, and didn’t want to keep Mary waiting. “Will you lend me your jeep? I should be back in an hour.”

He found the key after a laborious exploration of his clothes. “Take it away, Sam. I don’t know where you’re going and I don’t care.”

“You’d better go upstairs and lie down.”

“Don’t want to lie down. Sit here until the cows come home. Here with the writing on the wall. Lovely writing on the wall, expresses my sentiments.” He chanted several four-letter words. “There’s my sentiments. Bloody but unbowed. A jug of wine and thou beside me singing in the urinal.” He giggled.

I went away from his unhappy nonsense and got to the lobby in time to be waiting when Mary came downstairs. She looked a little pale and tense.

“Is Sue up there?”

“No. I thought she might be lying down in the powder-room. She drank too much before supper. But there’s nobody there.”

“She probably went home. Eric’s in bad condition. I found him in the john.”

“Perhaps she did. I’ll call from the studio.”

It was a five-minute drive to the broadcasting station. When we got there Mary left me on a folding chair in the darkened audience room, and went to phone. She came back in a minute and said in a worried voice:

“She isn’t at home, at least not yet. I hope she didn’t pass out somewhere.”

“She’ll turn up,” I said.

“I still have a few minutes before the broadcast. Would you like to look at the record library? Or would you rather stay and listen to them?”

She moved her head towards the glassed-in broadcasting room. Five or six Hawaiians wearing rather dirty leis were playing ukuleles, steel guitars, and a bull fiddle. The current tune was Blue Hawaii.

I said: “I think I can tear myself away from all this exotic glamor.”

She led me down a dark passageway to a door which she unlocked. She found the switch and turned on the lights in the record library. It was a high-ceilinged narrow room completely lined with shelves which were filled with records. She showed me the various sections: the classics, the semi-classics, the new popular hits, the stand-bys which never grow old, the transcribed programs from the big American chains, and a set of big discs on which complete Armed Services programs were recorded.

I saw a record I knew, took it off the shelf and handed it to her. “Play this.”

She put the record on a turntable. It was Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, the organ version. We stood together and listened to the lilting melancholy music which Waller had squeezed out of an organ in Paris years ago. I half-turned toward her, impelled by the powerful sexuality of the music. Perhaps she recognized my intention. She said in a brisk technical way:

“Any questions?”

When the record was finished, I said: “I did a little broadcasting when I was in college. They used to be pretty strict about timing our scripts. How do you time record programs?”

“It’s easy enough with the one-disc programs. They’re already timed when we get them. And some of the ninety-sixes and hundred-and-twelves are standardized.”

“Ninety-sixes?”

“Ninety-six turns to a record. They go around ninety-six times. The ones that are specially made for broadcasting are standardized so that you can measure the time right on the record. They send us a little ruler with them, laid out in units of time instead of inches.”

“That means that the speed of the turntable must be standardized too.”

“That’s right. But the ordinary platters which Sue and I mostly use aren’t standardized. The grooving may even vary from one side to the other, depending on the kind of music.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Whether the music is high or low. It’d take too long to explain. You can always time a record by playing it ahead of time, of course. But often we just trust to luck. If we have to fill in at the end we can always let the theme-song run through twice instead of once. It isn’t as if we were on a national hookup.”

She glanced at an electric clock in a corner of the room. It was ten minutes after nine. “I’ve got to leave you now.”

“Can I help you carry the records, or anything?”

“Oh, no thanks. They’re already in by the mike. We’ve got a boy, a little Chinese, who takes them in in a cart.”

She turned out the lights, locked the door, and left me at the entrance to the soundproof room. I listened to the broadcast through the loudspeaker in the audience room. Her voice was deep for a woman, and steady, the only kind of female speaking voice that sounds well over the air. She went in for quietly kidding her audience, more by inflecting her voice than by what she said.

I gathered that she had fan-mail. Most of the records she played were requests. I began to compose a fan-letter to her in my head. Though her low voice flooded the room when she spoke, vibrating in every corner, she seemed very remote behind the plate-glass partition. Very remote and desirable. Before I had put into the letter all the things I wanted to say, the broadcast was over.

“All set to go back?” I said when she rejoined me. “It’s only half an hour till curfew.”

“I have a curfew pass, on account of the midnight broadcasts. I don’t want to go home till I make sure Sue is all right.”

“She’ll be all right. I may have to carry Eric up the gangplank, though.”

When we got back to Honolulu House the party was at its climax. One of the officers had joined the orchestra and was tearing off hot licks on a clarinet as high as a kite. A fat jiggling woman was dancing in the middle of the floor, snapping her fingers and letting out periodic squeals. A weaving ring of men and women, which included Halford and Mrs. Merriwell, was dancing around and around her. Two or three indefatigable couples were jitterbugging at their own end of the room, leaping and whirling in mad silent ecstasy. Other couples were leaving.