All These Condemned

Chapter Seventeen (Joseph Maleski — Afterward)

Roy Carren dropped me off at Shattocks’ Pine Tree Restaurant. It’s just down the road from the barracks. By then it was eleven o’clock in the morning. Sunday morning. I watched him drive down the road. Slow. I felt like somebody had peeled the skin off my face and stuck it back on again, using too much glue. When I rubbed my jaw I felt the whiskers. I felt real strange. It made me remember a time when I was a little kid. I had to go to a Halloween party all dressed up funny in the daylight. I had to go alone with everybody laughing at me. All the grown-up people.

I went on into the restaurant. On Sunday they serve a big breakfast and serve it up until noon. Usually I sit at the counter. But as soon as I got in the door and saw them all looking at me, I knew that if I sat at the counter they were going to start asking all those questions. Usually I don’t mind all that. I guess maybe I sort of like knowing what has gone on. Like with a bad accident on the main route or something. I go in and they ask me about it and I tell them. But I could see they wanted to know all about the drowning and those people and all, and I just didn’t want to talk about it. So I turned and went on over to one of the booths and slid in and hiked the holster around so the gun wasn’t digging into me.

I guess I didn’t look so friendly. Benny, from the garage, came over to the booth sort of uneasy and stood about four feet away and said, “Guess it was kind of a mess out there, that guy going crazy and everything, eh?”

I gave him a look and nodded and picked up the menu and opened it, even though I knew I was going to have what I always have on Sunday when I go in there. Sunnyside up with ham and a double order of toast with the wild strawberry jam Mrs. Shattock makes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him stand there and then go away.

I looked at the menu but I didn’t see the printing there. I kept seeing that crazy one, and me moving in slow motion while he stuck that thing in the woman’s head. Roy told me a hundred times I couldn’t have risked a shot, and even if I had, I couldn’t have squeezed it off fast enough, but it’s a thing you remember and wonder about.

Janey Shattock came over and stood by me. I looked up at her and tried to grin at her like always, but it didn’t work right.

“The usual, Janey,” I said, and my voice was too loud. It was as though the other people in the place weren’t talking the way they always do. And there didn’t seem to be the usual noise coming from the kitchen. They seemed to be looking at me as if I was some sort of a freak or something.

She brought my order after a while and I said, “Bring yourself some coffee and sit down, Janey.”

She did. She sat across from me. I looked at her and I knew she wasn’t going to ask any questions. I said in a low voice, “It was bad and I can’t talk about it yet.”

“I know by looking at you it was bad, Joe,” she said.

It was only after I started eating I knew how hungry I was. She was quiet, the way I wanted her to be. She’s a strong girl. She’s big, and I thought when I glanced across at her that she really isn’t plain. She isn’t pretty and she isn’t plain either. Maybe handsome, if you can call a girl that.

And I felt ashamed all of a sudden. Ashamed of me. Ashamed of Joseph Maleski. Because this is what I have been doing: dating Janey and not liking some things about her. Like how her hands are sort of rough and red-knuckled, and she all the time hides them in her lap when you’re out with her. And how, unless she has just washed her hair, there’s a little kitchen smell in it, because they serve a lot of fried stuff and she’s in and out of the kitchen all day.

What did I want? My God, one of those females at the place where I’d spent the night? What the hell was I? I kept eating and looking at her in a new way. There I’d been dating her, and not liking the things that meant she was a good kid because the family had it tough getting the place going good, and she worked like a dog.

Being with her, it made me feel good and clean, like I had already taken the shower I was going to take before I hit the sack. I finished and pushed the plate away and she poured my coffee cup full again and put the pot down and started to pull her hand back into her lap, but I grabbed it. I held her hand tight. She got red and I knew they were looking at us and I knew it was Sunday morning.

I wanted to kid around. I wanted to give her some kind of a line like I always do. But I sat there like a big dummy and I held her hand hard and I said, “Janey.” A great line that is! Lots of laughs.

My eyes began to sting like I was a little kid again. I let go of her hand and she put it in her lap. And I couldn’t even look at her any more. I walked all the way to the barracks before I remembered I had walked out without even paying.

When I hit the sack I was hoping when I woke up all those people would be like people in a dream. Not real and alive and warm. Like Janey. Like Janey and me.