The Man Who Almost Blew His Top

For Daniel D. Hunter it had been such an incredible beast of a Thursday that he wondered why he hadn’t broken into tears of pure frustration.

At quarter to six, after the rest of the office staff had left, he hung his coat over his sticky arm, plopped his straw hat onto the back of his head and glared at the grill which would have filled the office with cool air all day — if the air-conditioning system hadn’t, broken down in mid-morning.

One of the bigger clients had gone elsewhere, his secretary had been weepy all day, old Gunnison had given him an entirely unwarranted chewing-out, the new assistant was definitely not working out, the carbon of an important letter could not be located, and he felt stale, old, tired and fumbling.

All day he had baked in the brass bowl of the city. The air-conditioning would not be working again until Monday. Monday was an incredible distance away.

He checked the lock on the main door and plodded down the hallway to the elevators. He rang, and nothing came. The blind fury came so quickly that it frightened him. He wanted to kick the wall, smash things, stomp on his hat. The sudden flood of adrenalin made his heart pound, made his hands shaky, his knees weak. These fits of rage seemed to be coming more frequently lately.

And why not, he thought. You had to keep the pressure valves screwed down tight all day. Wear a brave smile while Gunnison chewed you, look calm and happy while they filled your back with knives.

The elevator came. The girl operator looked limp, heat-beaten.

“Where the hell were you?” he snarled, the anger flooding back again.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and turned her back. Her plump shoulders sagged. He felt a sudden remorse, but it was too late to say anything to her.

Just the way it was at home, lately. Growling at Ruthie for no reason at all. Yammering at the kids. Getting to be a damn grouch. If they didn’t understand it, they’d better make an effort. The office was no picnic. Not lately. And he was the one who had to come down here into the city every day and make the hillside house possible, and the food and the clothing and the fun. He was the one who had to come down here and get old too fast, and get nerves that jingled like broken doorbells.

Nine to one there’d be some kind of mess at home, too. Some trouble between Ruthie and the kids. Or some party he had forgotten, when all he wanted to do was get out of the sticky clothes, make some tall cold drinks, and put a chair out on the shaded part of the terrace where there might be some sort of a breeze.

The gray sedan had been in the sun all day, locked tightly. The door handle was almost too hot to touch. He opened the door and rolled down the windows and went around and did the same on the other side, but there was no breeze in the enclosed lot to air the car out. The moment he got behind the wheel, he could feel the sweat popping out all over him.

The starter grunted the motor over and over and over and it did not catch. He heard the alarming sound of the battery weakening, slowing down — the futile grinding noise. Again he thought he would break into tears. He wailed a moment and tried again. It caught this time, and he breathed a deep sigh of relief. At least, he was too late for the worst part of the evening traffic. One small blessing.

He opened the scoop windows and drove as fast as he dared, with the hot baked air swirling in at him, giving him a lesser degree of discomfort. The car needed a motor tune up. His shoes pinched his feet. There was a rash of prickly heat on his chest.

At last he came to the bridge, crossed out of the city limits, and headed the car up into the hills, feeling the faint change of the air. The steering wheel was still uncomfortably hot.

He glanced in the rear-vision mirror and saw a black sedan crowding his bumper. The ready anger came back again. The damn fool. Couldn’t be more than a foot away from him. This was a dangerous piece of road. Suppose he had to stop quickly.

Anger made his breathing come fast again. And he saw the black car swing out to pass. In his anger he stepped hard on the gas pedal. It wasn’t a good place to pass.

The other man stepped on it, too, and as the cars came even, Daniel Hunter bellowed out at the other driver, “You damn fool!” And he saw a flash of red apoplectic face, heard a similar roar of rage, tom away by the hot wind. He vaguely recognized the man as someone he had met at Rotary, a man who worked in the city and lived up here in the hills, too, with perhaps an equal burden of mortgage and the dreadful monotony of daily commuting.

The black car started to cut in ahead of him, cutting it too close, and Daniel saw the red pick-up truck booming down at them around the curve ahead. The sudden danger destroyed anger, and Daniel braked quickly to let the black car in. The black car made it barely in time and the pick-up whistled by, horn beeping of fright and outrage.

But the black car had gone off onto the shoulder. Daniel fought in spirit with the other man to bring it back. It swerved back onto the highway, out of control, and Daniel’s tires were screaming on the pavement as he glanced back and saw that the road behind was empty, thank God.

The black sedan, in ominous slow motion, went across the road and up a steep bank and for a little time it hung ludicrously in the air, silhouetted against the cobalt sky. He went by it, on the shoulder himself, fighting his own car to a dead stop, hearing a drawn-out jangle and crash and roar of impact. He got out of his car.

The sedan lay on its side across the ditch, one wheel still spinning. Daniel started blindly across the road toward it, then jumped back as another car came droning around the curve and braked hard as the driver saw the car in the ditch.

Daniel ran across the highway. The man had been thrown out. He lay face down in the ditch a dozen feet from the car, his legs up the slope at an awkward angle. Two other people came running from the other car. Together they all eased the man into a better position. The than was breathing heavily, and already the whole side of his face was becoming discolored.

Very soon after that a traffic patrol car was parked near by, red lights flashing, a massive belted trooper controlling traffic. The ambulance came quickly. Daniel could hear it a long way off. He watched them put the man in the back of the ambulance. He could see the man’s shoes and socks. He had a pair of socks just like that. Same color and clocks and weave. The man’s wife and Ruthie had probably bought them at the same store. There was something terribly meaningful about the socks. Meaningful and pathetic.

Daniel walked over to the trooper. It felt like being summoned from the back of the classroom, being forced to walk up to the teacher’s desk.

“Officer, I was right behind him, when it happened. He just passed me. He went out of control after he passed me.”

“Name and address, please.”

Daniel gave him the information.

“How fast was he going?”

“I’d guess about seventy. But... you see, I made him go seventy to get by me.”

The trooper gave him a curious look. “What do you mean?”

“He was riding my tail. It made me sore. I speeded up. I... get sore pretty easy, I guess.”

“He passed you on a hill approaching a curve at seventy, and you think it was maybe your fault, Mister?”

“I guess he got sore, too.”

The trooper gave him a remote look. “Skip it, Mister. Temper kills a lot of people. He’s luckier than most. He just gets a nice long rest. Well contact you if we need more information. Go on home now.”

Daniel D. Hunter went home to his hillside house. His hands still felt trembly. He stopped in the driveway and left the motor running and got out and took Jill’s bicycle out of the way, then drove into the garage and turned off the motor. As he got out of the car Jill came hurrying out, quite pale and nervous.

“Daddy, Mom saw you moving the bike. I’m terribly sorry. Really I am. I know I promised and I just plain forgot, I guess.”

He looked at her for a moment and saw how tautly she stood there, as though ready to flinch or duck. He saw himself in her eyes, and it was not at all pretty. Not a good thing to see, to come home to. Not when you could remember the scene the last time. And Jill’s tears.

“It’s okay, kitten,” he said. He rumpled her hair. She looked puzzled for a moment, then kissed him shyly, and they went together into the kitchen.

It seemed to Daniel as though he had been given some new dimension of vision, of perception, and he saw Ruthie look at them both with a taut quickness, with a tension around her mouth. And he saw her mouth relax then into a quick smile in which there was considerable relief. Ruthie looked trim and cool in cotton, and he guessed that she was fresh from a shower.

“I bet it was terrible down there today, darling,” she said, with quick kiss, and a tentative squeeze of his arm.

“Brutal. I want to get these clothes off. The air-conditioning isn’t fixed yet.”

“I laid some cool things out, dear. And there’s a Collins in the icebox all made. Do you want it now, or after your shower?”

“After, I guess.” He went back to the bedroom, and felt his face grow hot as he remembered his usual routine about the drinks she fixed for him. Too strong or too weak. Too tart or too sweet. Not cold enough. Wrong glass. This one would be right. This one would be perfect.

He had finished his shower and he was running a belt through the loops of the slacks when she came to the door, paused, then came in and handed him his drink.

“Thanks,” he said and tasted it.

“Is it all right?” she asked with a touch of anxiety.

“Fine.”

“Dan, Tod isn’t back yet. He went swimming with the Dillon kids. I called up. He was just dressing to come home. He forgot to watch the time.”

She took a half step backward, and her eyes were watchful. He felt the sharp annoyance with the boy, and he fought it silently and felt it recede. “A day like this, if I was in the water, I’d stop clock-watching, too.”

And he saw her look a bit startled, and then suddenly relieved.

She joined him later for his second drink on the terrace. They all ate out there, with Jill helping her mother serve. They sat and watched the storm coming down the valley, and felt the freshening of the wind.

It felt good to him to be with them without the usual tensions in the air, without the wariness, the continual threat of explosion. It was as though he, too, had been a victim of a grouchy stranger who had once lived with them.

He knew it wouldn’t be that easy, that the rages would come back. But he knew that it was necessary to fight against them.

The storm hadn’t hit yet after the kids had gone to bed. He sat with Ruthie on the terrace. It was night, and the fresh breeze kept the summer insects away. They watched the distant lightning and heard the murmur of far-off thunder.

Then he tried to tell her. He knew he wasn’t telling her very well. It was pretty disjointed, and it was all curiously entangled with the socks that had happened, by merest chance, to be like his, and the sagging shoulders of the young elevator girl, and the look in Jill’s eyes. She sat, invisible in the darkness, not interrupting him.

And at last he finished, a bit lamely. “All the tension down there... all the intrigues and maneuvering for position... I was using them as a sort of built-in excuse... and using you people, my own people, as whipping posts or something.”

After a long time she said, quite softly, “I don’t exactly know what to say, Dan. You’ve made it rough. But... you see, not too rough. Not ever too rough. Because we all love you anyway.”

“Anyway? Is that a way to be loved?”

“Maybe it isn’t the best way. But it was there. The love. Because even Tod and Jill understood why.”

“Because you told them?”

“I don’t think I really had to. But I tried to explain.”

He lighted a cigarette. “It will be better. I promise you that. Ruthie.”

“That will make it better for all of us.”

“One thing. Why didn’t you ever... make me see what I was doing?”

“A person has to see himself.”

He reached over in the darkness and found her hand. They sat quite still for a long time. Thunder banged much nearer. Tomorrow it would be cooler in the city. The weekend was coming. Quiet weekend in a hillside house. He heard her yawn. It was a nice sleepy relaxed sound. And it was contagious.