Masters of Noir: Volume 2

I Don’t Fool Around by Charles Jackson

Tonight Lynette McCaffrey was wearing a short red skirt that seemed all torn and jagged around the edge, like fringe; and when George Burton, watching through the open window, looked more carefully, he saw that it was fringe. Above the skirt was a thin blouse that you could see through, and above that, a small close-fitting hat of silver straw, with her brown curls bunched out below the curling brim. On her feet were flat sandals, the kind that children used to wear. He had never seen a fringed skirt before, or sandals on a girl her age, or a hat at the Yacht Club dance. As if her beauty alone was not enough to set her apart, it was like Lynette McCaffrey to wear something different, to create a new style, to get herself looked at and talked about. George Burton followed her around the floor with his eyes, and hoped that it was love.

The small orchestra from the city was playing Hindustan and she was dancing with Arthur Wallace again. Art had on white flannels and a blue double-breasted jacket with shining brass buttons. The flannels were certainly his own, because he had been wearing them all summer long at the Saturday night dances. George Burton said aloud, “Damn Dad anyway,” feeling a momentary burst of anger that frightened him.

He looked around quickly to see if anybody had heard. There was no one. He was alone on the raised edge of weather-beaten planks that ran alongside the Clubhouse to the broad pier fronting the bay. But if his father had only let him borrow his white flannels, which fitted perfectly all right if he tightened the belt enough, he might have had a chance with a girl like Lynette McCaffrey.

The music ended with a matched crescendo of piano and banjo, and Lynette and Art strolled from the floor toward the open doors at the bay end. She did not applaud, as the other girls did, and when Art Wallace saw how indifferent she was, he arrested his palms in midair and didn’t applaud either. She reached into a side pocket of Art’s jacket and drew out a pack of cigarettes. Right in front of everybody she put one in her mouth and tilted her face up for a light. Then, with the cigarette hanging from her lip in the most wonderful way, she passed through the doors and out to the pier.

George Burton had never felt so lonely, but he was not, except for one brief moment, really unhappy. He loved from afar, and merely to look on was enough. In fact he was almost happy. He waited for, and appreciated, each new feeling of exaltation; and when these came, he felt a strong new sense of being older, aware that he was experiencing himself in a way that he never had before. But Lynette was out of sight now, so after another minute he moved along the raised beam toward the open pier.

It was a marvelous August night, cool and clear, and there was a yellow moon hanging over the bluff at the far end of the bay, right over that part of the Bluff where his parents’ cottage was. He heard the wash and slap of the small waves against the pilings beneath the wharf, and he saw the gently swaying night lights, and their bobbing reflections, on the sailboats anchored offshore. Several couples stood around in the light that streamed from the Clubhouse, waiting for the band to start up again. Then he found Lynette McCaffrey.

She was seated on the flat top of one of the low iron posts at the edge of the pier. Four or five fellows hovered about her admiringly, but George knew they were thinking far more of themselves and the figures they cut than they were of her; not one of them could begin to appreciate how marvelous she was. He edged closer to listen, but not near enough, he thought, to be seen. He heard her say, “Just look at that moon.” Then, in the most matter-of-fact tone, as if she had been merely commenting on the weather, she added: “It’s as yellow as piss” — and George Burton fell in love for good and all.

Lynette McCaffrey was the new girl that summer. Her family was from Cleveland, and she not only thought, but said openly, that Parsons Point was dead. What on earth was there to do in a dump like this, why didn’t somebody put some life in the old place, where were all the mean men? — things like that. It had never occurred to George Burton before that the Point was dead, but he accepted the idea at once. Well, not really. It was dead for her — how could it help being? — but with a girl like Lynette McCaffrey around, it was far from dead for him.

For almost a month, now, every single day had been different, and better, than last year, because of the certainty and promise that sometime or other before nightfall, he would run into Lynette McCaffrey not once or twice but several times: sailing on the bay, having a soda at Mike’s, climbing the steep path to her cottage on the Bluff (and not leaning forward in the effort, as nearly everybody else did), sunning herself in a yellow or red or green bathing suit on the pier where the Wrinkle came in (actually swimming was for kids), or, dressed in a fresh new frock in the late afternoon, sauntering down to the post office below the Bluff to get the evening mail. When they met, he always waited for her to speak first, and she always did. “Hi, Georgie,” she said, in the most democratic fashion. He hated being called Georgie by anybody, but when she said it, somehow it became her own special name for him, private and intimate as if it were something between them, a kind of secret that was his and hers together.

George Burton was going on seventeen, and he had heard that Lynette was almost two years older. But because he was as tall and nearly as grown-up looking as she was, he hoped nobody had told her how young he was. The fellows she hung around with were all her own age and pretty sophisticated, which was why he didn’t like to talk with her in their presence — their snappy line always showed him up — and this was also why he avoided joining the little group around her now. But suddenly, to his astonishment, thrill, and a funny feeling in his stomach something like stage fright, Lynette called out to him in the dark: “Why Georgie Burton, what are you doing skulking around in the shadows like a — like I don’t know what?” And while the fellows laughed, she added: “Come on over here where you belong!”

It was wonderful. Lynette McCaffrey had said it herself; and as he went over and stood beside her, he felt that maybe he did belong. Then the music started up, Lynette reached out a hand toward Hank Van Duser, and let herself be pulled to her feet. “I promised Van this one, but Georgie, will you dance the next one with me? I haven’t danced with you once all summer. Not once! Here, take my cigarette...” George Burton took her cigarette between thumb and forefinger and Lynette moved off toward the lighted dance floor arm in arm with Van.

The small orchestra was playing Oh Gee, Say Gee, and George stood there on the dark wharf holding the cigarette. Everybody else had gone in. He looked at the cigarette. It was a gold-tipped Violet Milo rapidly getting shorter and shorter, now, as it burned down to the end. In a few seconds he would have to throw it away, and he didn’t want to do that. Of course he didn’t expect it to last all through the dance, till Lynette and Hank came back out again, but he wanted to keep it as long as he could. Finally he held it up to his lips, took a small short puff, then dropped it over the side of the pier into the water. Because of the music, he did not hear the tiny hiss it must have made as it hit the water.

The moon, rising higher over the Bluff at the far end of the bay, was getting smaller now, and it was also paler, whiter, no longer the color that Lynette had said it was — said in a way that nobody else on earth, certainly no other girl, would have described it. Her word had almost taken his breath away, but it had been exactly right, and he was filled with admiration for her originality and daring. The thought of dancing with her, actually holding her in his arms at last, right in front of all the other fellows, was a thought almost too much to bear; and he hoped he could bring it off in a casual fashion, or at least that it would look that way.

He stood there listening, waiting, and now the piano was going it alone, accompanied for the moment only by the drummer, who slapped the big drum softly with a pair of wire flyswatters which gave off a whispering, swishing sound, just right for the piano solo. He looked through the open door into the brightly-lighted Clubhouse and saw Lynette, her head in its silver straw bonnet resting on Hank Van Duser’s shoulder, gazing up into Van’s face as they moved slowly around the floor. He could have watched her forever. It was almost as good as the dream that was to be realized any minute now.

The tune came to an end and Van and Lynette and a bunch of others sauntered out onto the dark pier again.

She looked for and found him sitting on the iron post where she had sat. She came up to him at once and placed her two hands on his shoulders in the friendliest, the most affectionate gesture in the world. His heart swelled with pride as he saw how the other fellows noticed. She said, her voice a breathless thrilling stage-whisper, so personal, so intimate, almost like a kind of lovemaking: “Georgie honey, I’ve made a ghastly mistake. I could simply kill myself. Van reminded me that I promised the next dance to that fool of a Freddie Vincent, and then after that it’s Art Wallace again, and then Van, and — that’s the way it goes, kid. So listen, honey, why don’t we do this? Next Saturday night I promise to save you two dances for just you and me alone. I’m just as sorry as I can be, I’m simply crushed and heartbroken. But I’ll make it up to you next time, Georgie, honest and true.”

The word honey struck him to the heart, but he said, “Why sure, that’s okay, I understand, don’t give it another thought.” He avoided looking at the other fellows standing around, and concentrated on Lynette’s face alone, giving her a smile that he hoped looked all right and that she could see, and the others could see too, in the half-dark of the wharf. Immediately, then, Lynette fell into an animated conversation with the fellows standing around, and he heard her make fun of that silly little orchestra from the so-called city — (“Do they actually have the gall to call themselves a dance orchestra, and my word, why don’t they play something that isn’t about a thousand years old!”) — and he heard the fellows laugh. It was so like Lynette; it was all part of that wonderful outside world she came from, the great world of the future, far away from Arcadia and Parsons Point.

There was more than two hours to wait before the dance would be over at twelve and the Wrinkle would take them back home across the bay to the Bluff. When Freddie Vincent came and took her off to the dance floor, George Burton got up and went back along the weather-beaten planks beside the Clubhouse to the dirt road in back. He walked slowly down the dark lane to the brightly-lighted street where the bowling alley was, and the hot dog stand and the cheap dance hall that the nicer people didn’t go to. He bought himself a hot dog and stood outside the dance hall looking in. It was one of those ten-cents-a-dance places, where you could go, girls as well as men, without escorts or a proper date. He watched the couples toddling around the floor. Some of the girls were pretty enough, but they were working girls for the most part, and there wasn’t one of them in the whole place who had what Lynette McCaffrey had. What that was, he couldn’t have said. It was a mysterious something that he had never before found in anyone else, and he knew it was love, all the more so because of his hurt.

Keenly he felt his unhappiness, and he knew that all these strangers in the street, all these callous people who never felt anything, could not possibly know what he was feeling, or, if they did know, understand. It was something he himself had not felt before, ever, and he believed that there could not be many others in this world who had ever felt it, either. It was special and delicious and painful all at once, he knew that it set him apart, and he felt both lonelier and bigger, more capable of feelings, than anybody else had ever felt.

It was life, in short. Oh, there was no fun in being so vulnerable, so much more sensitive than other fellows, but wasn’t that part of love, didn’t it go with falling in love, could a man have one without the other — didn’t it come from being more aware and susceptible to life than the common herd? He turned away from the dancing gay throng so ignorant of the deeper finer things, and wandered off alone toward the upper end of the Point, hugging his misery to himself...

Finally he heard the three deep notes of the Wrinkle whistle, which meant that the boat was leaving for the Bluff in five minutes. He hurried back.

The lights on the pier had been turned on, and a dozen or more couples who had been at the Yacht Club dance were crowding around for the trip home. The Wrinkle was a small narrow steamer, hardly bigger than a big launch, with a brightly-lighted cabin lined on both sides with a continuous leather-cushioned bench and an open deck above with a single bench athwart the steamer just in front of the small glassed-in place where the pilot stood at the wheel. By the time the final whistle blew, everybody was on board, the engines started up with a deep whine, the propeller churned the water at the stern into a noisy swirling foam, and they were off.

Lynette McCaffrey, her legs crossed and one sandalled foot swinging, sat between Art Wallace and Hank Van Duser. She was smoking a cigarette against all the rules of the Wrinkle; while the engines were in motion, smoking was not even permitted on the upper deck, much less inside in the cabin. Blowing directly onto their backs and necks, a chill wind streamed into the open windows as the boat gathered speed, colder in a way, because nobody was dressed for it, than a winter wind — the kind of chill wind that blows across the water on a summer midnight. Some of the girls huddled against their partners’ shoulders, and the fellows put their arms around them. There was a great deal of laughter and lively talk, tossed back and forth among the passengers, but it all rang hollow and false in George Burton’s ear. Feeling out of it, wanting to be alone, he got up and turned toward the ladder-like steps that went up to the open deck above. Just as he began the climb, Lynette called out:

“Georgie! Don’t go up there, kid. You’re probably all sweaty after the dance and you’ll catch your death.”

“I’ll be all right,” he answered casually over his shoulder, and disappeared above.

He sat down on the bench in front of the pilot’s cabin and folded his arms. It was wonderful the way she had said “sweaty”; every single one of the silly girls he knew would have said “perspiration.” He was not a bit sweaty, of course, because he had not danced a single dance; but all the same, in a minute or two he began to be very cold. He sat there in the night wind shivering as if with a chill, and he thought of what Lynette had said about catching his death. He hoped he would. She had warned him, and he had ignored her warning. He hoped she would remember this, a few days from now, and remember, too, how he had gone up to the upper deck just the same, as if he just didn’t care...

The Wrinkle was out in the middle of the bay now, and he saw the lights on Garfield and Cedar Island far off on one side, and a few lights still showing in the long row of cottages that lined the narrow sand bar between the bay and Lake Ontario. The bar shone palely in the moonlight, outlined against the expanse of the lake beyond, bright and wide in the moonlight like the open sea; it was like a reef or magic atoll of the South Seas, and he murmured: “Yon palm-fringed incandescent coast...” The bar was only a piddling strip of gravelly sand strung with a lot of cheesy shacks that passed for cottages and a few moth-eaten cottonwood trees, but the effect was all right...

They’ll be sorry, he said to himself, a few days from now or next week, maybe, when he didn’t turn up at the dance — though of course the news would get around long before then. They’d remember a lot of things about him and tell each other that he was a pretty darn nice guy after all and wish they had paid more attention to him while they had the chance. At the end of the season Lynette McCaffrey would go home to her set in Cleveland and tell them all that though Parsons Point was just a dump where there was nothing to do at all, where you simply went crazy sitting around all day doing nothing, there was one of the most wonderful fellows there that she had ever known in her life and before she got a chance to know him very well, the most terrible thing happened — it had plunged the whole place into the most awful gloom... He gazed across the dark racing waters of the bay and thought: Next week all this will be the same, all this will be here, and I will not...

When the Wrinkle pulled in at the wharf below the Bluff and they all piled out, he waited till the last passenger had left the cabin before he climbed down the ladder and got off. In the moonlit dark he heard the cries of “So long” and “See you tomorrow” as the group broke up and the fellows took home their dates. Then he started up the steep path of the Bluff alone, careful to hang back so that he would not overtake those who were walking slowly on, arm linked in arm, ahead of him.

He came in through the back door of his parents’ cottage and reached overhead for the string of the kitchen light. By now he really was sweaty, his shirt was sticking to his back under the tweed jacket, and he was chilled through and through. On the white oilcloth of the table he found a note in pencil from his mother, written on one of those oblong cards found in Shredded Wheat packages and held down by a saltcellar so that it wouldn’t blow away in the breeze that came in strong through the screen door:

“Be sure and empty the ice pan and this time don’t forget!!!”

He smiled sadly to himself. What did his mother know — what did anybody know — of what had been happening to him this night, what he had been through and what he was feeling in his heart...

When he went out to his cot on the sleeping porch, which was open on three sides to the cold night breeze, he found that his mother had left his pajamas for him beside the pillow and turned the blankets down, ready for him to get in. An idea came to him. He stripped off the blankets and even the sheet, rolled them up in a great bundle and fired them into a corner of the porch; then he fired his pajamas after them. He would sleep raw tonight and really catch that death, just as Lynette McCaffrey had said he would. He started taking off his clothes.

But when he got down to his B.V.D.’s, it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t nice to go to bed naked, not when he was in love. If it had been just any old tramp, that would have been a different thing; but if he was going to do this because of a girl like Lynette McCaffrey, it wouldn’t be quite decent for them to find him in the morning lying there without a stitch on. He got on the bed in his underwear and lay flat on his back with his arms folded under his head and gazed off into the freezing night. He made every effort to lie rigid and stiff as a ramrod but it was difficult, because his body was shaken again and again by shudders of chill. But he refused to accept his physical feelings; he recognized only feelings far different, deeper, and truer. He had heard about mind-over-matter and he concentrated intensely on his emotion and his thoughts. Now another line of poetry sprang unpremeditated into his head and with a melancholy satisfaction he thought it was the most wonderful thing that had ever been thought or said in the world — why, it was as if it had been written for him alone:

Suddenly he was wakened out of a deep sleep by a violent shaking that was not of the cold. He rolled over and sat up, startled. His mother stood there beside the cot, her hand on his shoulder, scolding him unmercifully.

“George Burton, are you out of your mind! What’s the big idea of going to bed on a night like this without a blanket over you or even a sheet, for heaven’s sakes? And my stars, sleeping in your underwear — are you crazy?” Scolding away, she fished up the roll of blankets and sheet from the corner of the porch, shook them out and spread them over his cot, tucking him carefully in on all sides. He didn’t say a word to her but he was very grateful and surprised at himself all the same, as he was just about dying of the cold and he didn’t think he could stand it another minute.

“Goodness knows how long you’ve been lying there exposed to the world like that — do you realize it’s after two o’clock in the morning? Good thing for you, young man, that I got up to see if you were in! Really, George Burton, you’re simply not to be trusted at all...”

When she had gone back to her own room, he lay there with the blankets wrapped up tight and warm around his neck. He was asleep before he had time to think, almost before he had time to realize that above every other person on earth he hated Lynette McCaffrey...

In the morning he knew he would find her sunning, alone, on the pier. There was a small spur of pride in him as he told himself how he had finally seen through her. He was sure now that she had led him on, and that she had nearly made him kill himself.

“... To cease upon the midnight with no pain,” he quoted to himself again. But it would be broad daylight now, and he didn’t suppose it would be absolutely painless...

He went up to meet Lynette McCaffrey with no weapon but his hands, and he didn’t even give a thought to what must inevitably come after.