The Moth

20

The Mexicans were still playing cards that night when I went in the bunkhouse, and they didn’t even look up when I walked by. I sat watching them, and pretty soon a boy came in, son of a driver, and said Holtz wanted to see me. I went over to his house and he wanted to know what I had on next day. I said spraying as usual, and he said let it go. That time of year it wasn’t so important, and he’d put the Mexicans to leveling road for a while. I, he said, was to stand by a ditch-digging machine that was coming in, to put in a trench for pipe that was to be run over to a field where new trees would be put in whenever the nursery could deliver. “We’ve been digging our own ditches, but on a long one like this, I’ve decided to find out if it wouldn’t be cheaper to hire this fellow and his machine. I’ve got him by the day, though, and that’s where the catch comes in. If he’s broke down half the time, he’ll cost us more, time the job is done, than all the Mexicans I can hire. I want you there. The main trouble with those machines is they’re just one jam of toggle plates, and spite of hell they get fouled up with mud. Take a tank cart with a hand pump, and the first sign of trouble, clean him off. Keep him washed, and maybe we’ll get the goddam thing dug some time between now and Christmas.”

“Christmas? Three days ought to do it.”

“Then fine, take it away.”

I went back to the bunk, found the Saturday Evening Post under my pillow, opened it up to the story I’d started two days before, began reading where I’d left off. It seemed funny, here I’d had the most terrific week end of my life, anyway in the things it had done to me, after what I’d been through, and nobody even knew I’d been away. Everything was so much like it had been that I think I’d have wondered if I’d been away too, if it wasn’t for this thing drilling in the back of my head, this sense of shame over the fine way Branch had treated me and the lousy way I’d paid him back. All during the next three days, out there with Stelliger, the guy with the ditching machine, listening to him brag about how well he’s done with this thing and his bulldozer and his tractor and his shovel and his truck, I kept wishing I could have back the day that had changed everything, and yet knowing I couldn’t have resisted it, once the chance came to me. And I kept dreading Thursday night, when I knew Mr. Branch would be over, propositioning me about rehearsal that night, so we could work up something for Sunday that would be really good. And sure enough, right after supper there he was, over by the store, waving at me with a little grin on his face, and coming over. He apologized at the way he’d run out on me Monday, but said he knew of course his wife would get me home all right. Then he went back over it the swell time we’d had. He said Mr. White had been especially impressed with me, and not to be surprised if something was arranged for me, maybe with the same little independent refinery that backed up right behind Mrs. Branch’s property. I said swell, and wished he would go. Little by little he got around to it, and I could hear myself saying it in a shifty, two-bit way that I hated: that we were awfully busy that week, and I didn’t see how I could possibly help him out with the choir — but some other time, sure, some other time. He swallowed two or three times, and looked away quick. He was like most other hard-rock men, shy on the inside as a young girl, and I stood there with my hat off to him for it, and yet not able to say so.

He was hardly out of sight than there came the pop of a horn from the trees near the shop, and lights blinking on and off at me. I went over and she was at the wheel of her car. “I was looking for you, and then he drove up, and I had to get out of sight, quick. What did he want?”

“Choir.”

“And he came clear over here?”

“What do you want?”

“What do you think?”

“I’ve no place to take you.”

“I have, Jack, as it happens. Nothing but a cottage by the sea, or in plain English a beach shack. But a place — I can take you.”

I tried to tell her to go, that I was ashamed of what we had done, that I was through with her. No words came. Next thing I knew I was in the car with her and we were rolling through the trees. She kept on down 101 to a road that turned right, then ran over to the Long Beach traffic circle. From there she ran on down below Seal Beach. When she came to a concrete apron drifted over with sand, she turned in. We got out and she opened a garage door, got back in, ran the car inside, got out and closed the garage door. We climbed over the dune, that bulges up at that point in a way to make it look like the sea is higher than the road. On the other side of it were shacks. We turned into a little cement walk, she got a key out of her handbag, and opened a shack door. When we stepped inside it was stuffy, like it hadn’t been opened for some time. But after the wind from the sea it felt warm, and we were in each other’s arms, her mouth pressed hot against mine, almost before we shut the door. We stayed an hour. Then we had to leave, so she could take me to the ranch, drive home herself, and still be able to say she had been to a picture show. “... Which one? Do you happen to know?”

“I saw it this afternoon.”

“On purpose? So you could be with me?”

“Yes, of course.”

That went on all fall and through the winter. It was one of those southern California Januaries where it’s spring right after New Year’s, and when she began picking me up Sundays as well as Thursday nights, she’d put on a red bathing suit and go splashing out in the surf. That made me nervous, because it was one more thing to make people take notice of us, but at least, peeping at her through the window while she was out there, it did give me a chance to get some kind of an idea what she looked like. That may sound funny, but getting a glimpse now and a flash then, mostly at night when we were both so nervous we could hardly draw our breath, I still thought of her mostly as a whisper in the dark. Well, she looked like some college girl in her little red trunks, red shoes, red hat, and red halter, and now that the sunburn was wearing off, she didn’t have so much of that coppery Aztec look. And her eyes, now they didn’t show up so funny, were more human too, and sometimes, specially when she’d keep looking at me while I was doing something around the place, soft, and warm, and pretty. And yet, right in the middle of them, was a light that never quite left them, and that was hard, and meant to take whatever it wanted, no matter who got hurt. She made it plain, morning, noon, and night, that she was taking me. I made it plain she wasn’t and we had a couple of fights about what a tramp she was. Once, when she came to the ranch, I refused to get in the car with her, and she stayed out there, by the shop, with her lights on and her elbow on the horn, till Holtz called an officer, and it wasn’t till he got there that she drove off. The other time I beat it out of the beach shack before she was dressed, and took half the night thumbing my way to the ranch. Both those times I missed her bad, every way there was but the right way. When she showed up after those fights, each time on a Thursday night, I was so glad I was ashamed of myself. “Listen, you big lug, I lie awake thinking about you. I — yen for you. You’re in my hair.”

“O.K., then. I can say the same.”

“You mean you love me, Jack?”

“I didn’t say so. Don’t get so excited. Yen.”

“How’d you like to go to hell?”

“On my way.”

“Jack — no!”

“Then watch how you talk.”

“All right, yen. But a lot? Yen, yen, yen?”

“Yeah, and yen.”

All that time, as I say, she kept looking at me, and I guess I liked it, anyway at first, but then I could see it wasn’t all yen. I’d ask her what it was about, and she’d laugh. But then one afternoon, when we were making a Sunday of it at the beach, she said: “Jack, wouldn’t that be funny if I’d been making the same mistake I made once in a poker game?”

“So you’re a gambler too?”

“I’ve done a good many things.”

“And what was this mistake?”

“I drew to a straight and filled a flush.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You sure?”

“Unless, holy smoke, it was a straight flush.”

“I found that out, when I was getting ready to throw up my hand. A flush wouldn’t have been one-two-three with what was against me. But then I looked again, and saw I had filled a flush and a straight.”

“Did you clean up?”

“Twenty-seven bucks.”

“And what’s that got to do with me?”

“When I drew you, I fell for your beauty.”

“My dimples. I remember.”

“But these last few weeks I’ve been noticing a look in your eye. And I’ve been listening to you talk. Especially about those big dynamos and things you studied in college. And I’ve been wondering if perhaps I shouldn’t have fallen for your brains. I decided, quite some time ago, that a smart dame would keep romance and business separate. I married business, and I guess it works — pretty well. I play around with romance, and I know that works — damned well. Do you hear me, Jack?”

“O.K., but what’s the rest of it?”

“I said it works damned well. What do you say?”

“So does a stink bomb.”

“That’s not nice.”

“Neither is it. Even if it does work.”

It was an hour, I guess, before she decided to go on. Then: “I’m trying to say, if you’d stop insulting me every minute, I had a hunch. Some weeks ago. Like the one I woke up to in the poker game. That maybe you’re a straight and also a flush — beauty and brains all in the same package. I mean, if you tried, you could make the business go damned well, too.”

“Meaning, on husbands, you want to switch?”

“Well?”

“No.”

“Jack, I’m sorry, but for me pretty well isn’t well enough. It has to be damned well or I’m not interested. For three years now that jerk has been trying to sell me something just as good. Telling me I shouldn’t get excited. That I should take it easy. That I should wait. That things are bound to get better.

And I’ve listened to him. Owning property that should make me rich, that could mean something if it was handled right, I’ve stood by and watched it go from bad to worse, until it’s a mess. My wells are pumping less all the time, and in a few years they’re going dry. And yet I have to keep this miserable shack, when with smart work I could have a real place at Pebble Beach, all because a damned jerk—”

“That jerk is a swell guy.”

“A jerk is a jerk.”

“If he says wait, I’d bet waiting does it.”

“I want what I want when I want it!”

“Who sang that was a basso named—”

“Shut up... You going to spray fruit all your life?”

“I didn’t start my life spraying fruit, and I don’t expect to end it that way. But just at the moment, until I see where I’m coming out, I’m doing it. I booted the beans into the fire just once too often, I’m sorry to say, and the way I paid for it I hope you never find out, because I’m not going to tell you. But at that, compared with the onion-hoeing I see most of them doing, and the lousy grand operas some of them are singing, and all the other stuff that’s being done by guys too proud to spray fruit and too dumb to do anything else, my job suits me fine.”

“Jack, I’m talking about big things.”

“You’re not talking about anything that I can hear.”

Now I was myself again, quite a few things had come back, and one of them was the twist in me that made me blow my top when somebody was trying to make me do something I didn’t want to do. And I was finding out things about cold heart. As long as it’s a toy, it can be as childish as anybody, and roar, or kick slippers through the window, or whatever. But when it really sees something it wants, it can wheedle, wait, and watch you for the right time, the right night, and the right place. She let me run down, and when it got dark lit the grate, so we sat there in the blue light from the gas. Then she made coffee and opened some chili con carne. When I said it was time we got started back to the ranch, she got up meek as pie, handed me my tie, and helped me on with my coat. I’d got some new clothes, and she said they looked swell.

But when we got to the Long Beach traffic circle, instead of cutting inland she kept on through Long Beach, and pretty soon turned to the right, into a small narrow street. And then all of a sudden we were in oil, with the reek of it everywhere and derricks all around us, thick as trees. “You like that smell, Jack?”

“Would anybody?”

“You would. For one thing it speaks to your damned machinist’s soul. And for another thing you’ve got brains enough to know it comes from the guts of the earth, and turns wheels and things, and is important.”

“It’s pretty terrific.”

“Couldn’t you say so?”

“I could, if it wasn’t a build-up.”

“For what?”

“The big switcheroo.”

“You’re damned right it is.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

“I generally get what I go after.”

There are no street lights in an oil field, and we rolled along pretty slow, through gray tanks, gray pipes, gray pumps, and gray steam. But then, ahead of us, was a string of lights going straight up, in the air, and when we got nearer I could see they were hanging from a derrick. “Now I’m excited, Jack. That’s a new well going down.”

“They work on Sunday?”

“Sunday, Monday, every day, three shifts twenty-four hours around the clock. They have to keep going. If they didn’t, if they broke it off for any length of time, the cuttings would settle in the mud, they’d have to clean out their hole, and they’d lose hours and hours.”

“Mud? What’s that for?”

“It’s pumped through the drill.”

“Oh, to cool it.”

“And carry away the cuttings from the formation. It’s pumped out then.”

“Didn’t they ever try water?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if I could think of it they could think of it. Maybe water’s too thin to carry all that sand and grit and shale away with it.”

“Yes, I think that was the trouble.”

When we got near she cut over, straight across lots, and then we could see the drill crew, five or six of them, in slickers and hard composition hats, all around the rotary table, that was turning in the middle of the derrick floor, a few feet above ground level. They waved her back, but she kept looking them over, and pretty soon spotted one she knew, and spoke to him. He recognized her and said something to the driller, who craned around at us from the levers he had hold of, that were connected with a big drum that had cable spooled on it, and regulated the feed to the bit. He nodded and waved us over and we got out and climbed up there. “We’re putting on a new drill in a couple of minutes, if you want to see it done. I’d stand over by that rathole if I was you. We’re setting pipe on the other side.”

The rathole was an open pipe, sunk down in the ground, that they drop the Kelly in, as they call it, when they’re changing bits. We stood over there, and sure enough, they began coming up with the pipe. A guy went up to what they call the fourble board, that platform you see, about two thirds the way up on all oil derricks, and the guys on the ground began pulling out pipe. The traveling blocks would go up with a stand of pipe, and grab it with a tongs. Then with what they call a cathead they’d break the joint, spin it out with the rotary table, and when it was free, lift it out with a spring hook. Then the derrick man, the one on the fourble board, would guide it behind the fingerboard, as they call it, a rack that holds the pipe, one stand beside the other, as they take it out. Then another section of four would come up, and another and another. So fast I could hardly believe it, they had that pipe out, four thousand feet of it, by my figuring, a new bit on, and the pipe going down in the hole again. The bit was one I’d never seen, though I’d read about it. It had three pinions, with teeth in them, that rolled around and cut the rock, and in the middle of them was a hole that the mud circulated through, to pump out drill cuttings between drill pipe and casing. It made the bit I had smithed up, for the road quarry that time, look like something used by Indians ten thousand years B.C. She explained it all to me, as well as she could, and as soon as the rotary table was going again, so they were making hole, the driller came over and explained it, and in between, the roughnecks explained it. Everybody explained it, and I couldn’t help eating it up. I could have stayed there all night.

When we left the well, she took a different road, that led up a hill, and pretty soon she stopped. We got out, and she led me up a rise, past a cemetery, to a plot that had half a dozen wells on it, with one or two pumps going, but with the derricks removed. She explained that a wooden derrick is generally left standing, as there’s not much it can be used for anywhere else, but the steel ones get taken down and put up again. All the well needs, from then on, she said, is a Christmas tree, so there’s no use wasting valuable steel. The Christmas tree is an attachment for the control of natural flowing oil wells. She showed me one, and from the number of gauges and valves on it, all of them round and most of them different colors, you could see how it got its name. When pressure eases off, so they have to install pumps, the Christmas tree is taken away. I got the flashlight from her car, and climbed down into concrete pits and over pipes and through shed doors, and she answered my questions, pretty well, I’ve got to say for her. Then, after a while: “You know what place this is, Jack?”

“Yours, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

“Where’d you get it, if I may ask?”

“From my father.”

“I remember now, Mr. Branch mentioned it, that first day I met him, when he gave me a lift. But he said something about your uncle, too.”

“My father and uncle came here from Ohio, all hot to go in the oil business, and my uncle persuaded my father that the future of oil was in the selling end of it, not the production. They’d had romantic dreams, you see, as the papers were full of the boom out here, and they had some money they got from selling the hardware store they had run, back in Toledo. But then my uncle got to reading about the gold boom, back in the fifties, and how Mark Hopkins had made so much money, not from sluicing gold, but from selling shovels and boots and bacon to those who were sluicing it. He sold my father on the idea of garages, to sell the oil, or filling stations, as they’re called now, instead of wells, to produce it. So my father had to give up all his fine dreams, and try to get interested in these coal-oil sheds, as he called them, and presently he sent for my mother and me. And we had hardly got to Los Angeles when my mother caught cold in the miserable damp hotel my uncle had found, and it went into pneumonia, and she died. And my father arranged to bury her, as he thought in Tropico, as Glendale was called then, on the hill that’s now Forest Lawn Cemetery. But where the procession came was this hill, Signal Hill, as it’s now called. It was pretty forlorn, and my father hated to leave her here in the little cemetery we passed on the way up. He took it pretty hard, and after a while he decided that forlorn or not, he wanted to be near her, so he bought a lot, and almost every night we’d come to it, and stand looking over her grave and the ocean, and imagine what it would be like when we got the house built and began living in it, as at least he’d have his memories. My uncle was against it, but by that time nobody paid much attention to what he was against, as the filling stations weren’t located right for the way the town was growing, or anyhow most of them weren’t, and nothing that he touched had gone right. And then on Signal Hill they struck oil. So instead of building a home on it we drilled, right here on the land you’re standing on. And my uncle couldn’t get over it that in this way, almost as though God had taken a hand in it, my father had got what he wanted. My uncle messed things up, though, before he died, as usual. My father was for selling the stations and putting the money in this little refinery back of us, that had just been built then, and had cost too much, and could be had, cheap. He said when we knew what we were going to do with our oil, then would be time to go ahead on wells. But my uncle was frightened at something with any size to it, or anything except the peanut way he always wanted to do business. He insisted we get some wells down first, so we had money coming in, and then see about branching out. So that’s what he did, and had to borrow even more money from the bank than we would have had to do to take over the refinery. And the more oil we pumped, the cheaper we had to sell it to the pipeline companies, and to get gas for the stations, the dearer we had to buy it back. It was just a squeeze. At that time nobody knew what an integrated company was, but that’s what they call it now, and that’s what my father, just on instinct, wanted — a company that produces its own crude, manufactures its own gas, lube oil, fuel, and asphalt, and sells in its own outlets. But we bumbled along, and always it seemed if we could just get one more well we could break through. Then my uncle died, and a few months after him, my father, and they’re buried there, beside my mother. Then the bank ran things awhile, and after I came of age I ran it, with a little assistance from the bank, or anyhow the bankers. That’s where I got my ideas about men, in case it interests you, and maybe I’m wrong, but nothing’s come up to prove I am, yet. We had some wild parties, but the squeeze went on, exactly the same. And then, on the last well that was drilled, with money from the bank, I began seeing quite a little of the contractor. And it seemed, from the way he talked, that he might know what should be done. So in a soft moment, I married him. And just for a little while, we were headed somewhere, or that’s what he said. One more well, and we’d have that margin, that safe extra income, that would make it possible for us to talk deal to the refinery. So that’s what we’re doing now, getting ready for another new well — letting contracts for the derrick, for the cement, for everything except the drilling, because of course we do that ourselves because we used to be in the business and can do it cheaper, and in addition to that can give a lot of old pals jobs. So there’s the bank, just where it always was except it’s holding new paper for the old notes we paid off, and there are the wells, getting a little older each year, and here I am, not getting any younger that I notice.”

“Does anybody?”

“It’s a mess just the same. And if all that wasn’t bad enough here, now there’s the allocation.”

“The—? Did you mention it?”

“I don’t say it wouldn’t have worked, the safe and sane policy, though it reminds me a lot of my uncle. But then came the price wars, after the depression got started, with everybody pumping oil like mad, and selling it for what they could get. So of course that would damage the field, by lowering gas pressure. So after the election, in connection with the blue eagle there was all kinds of talk, and they were allowed to do some regulating. It’s all supposed to be voluntary, but they tell you what you can pump just the same... Twelve hundred barrels a day! For my six wells! When they’re capable of yielding three times that! Is that fair, now I ask you? What good is a new one going to do me if that’s how it’s got to run? And — he makes me perfectly furious with the attitude he’s got toward it.”

“What attitude?”

“... Maybe that’s where you come in.”

“If I come in. What are you hinting at?”

“Suppose there was all kinds of undercover stuff going on. Suppose not everybody believed in this blue eagle. Suppose quite a few people said it was nothing but a blue buzzard? Would you pay too much attention to this allocation stuff? Just how much do you believe in ethics?”

“You mean, would I sell it bootleg?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

“No.”

“I never noticed you so terribly honest.”

“Oil and wives are different.”

We started climbing down, and at the cemetery she turned in, walked over, and after a little way, stopped. I saw her drop something on a grave. It was chalk white, and I was pretty sure it was one of the geraniums that grew in a bed in front of the shack, something quite a few people have, as it’s one of the few flowers that’ll grow near the sea. It crossed me up, as usual, that mixed in with the hundred-per-cent bad was something good. She came back and I gave her arm a little pat. She took my hand in hers and we went back to the car. “Will you think it over, Jack? Because if you’d take it over now, before we get started on that new well—”

“I won’t take it over.”

For two or three weeks she kept it up, with a lot of talk about how she was just as fed up with two-timing as I was, and wanted to ring down on it, and get started in some kind of decent way, but couldn’t, with that well about to start, because if that got under way before she had the showdown she’d have to let him go through with it anyway. After a while she quit talking about it, but one Monday night she was over, and it turned out the well had started, and as it took all of his time she could get out any night now. We went down to the shack, then on the way headed for Long Beach. I was nervous, and kept begging her to watch where she was going, for fear we’d run into somebody. She found a place on top of Signal Hill, not far from the refinery, and peeping around the bubble tower we could see Branch with two or three guys, poking around with a flashlight. “The rig-builder has just set the concrete for the four derrick corners, and Jim has to see how the work is done.” After that, every night we’d have a look, and almost sooner than you could believe it they were putting up steel, and then it was in place, and the crown block was up. She tried again, to get me to take over, and said she had money, a lot of money, that was mine if I’d only say yes. I kept telling her I knew nothing about oil, but that just made her beg harder. One night, when we parked, we could hear the rotary table, and see the white helmets under the lights. They were drilling.

Two or three nights after that we went to the shack, and she cried, then lay in my arms without saying anything. After a while she went out in the kitchen and lit the gas and put on the kettle. In a minute I went out to keep her company, and we stood around a few minutes in the dark. Then, just as she was reaching for the coffee, a car door slammed on the other side of the dune. She looked out and then cut the gas. “Oh, my God, Jack. It’s my husband — and Dasso!”

“Well — you asked for it.”

“Why in the world didn’t I think of it? It’s about two miles closer to the well than the house is, and — Jack, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t much care.”

That wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. I hated the whole damned business, but not like I hated the idea of facing Branch. Maybe I’d got to a certain point, but if there was still any way to duck a showdown, I’d take it, so when she grabbed me and pulled me in the living room and shoved me in a closet that had been built in one corner to hold rods and tackle, I went as fast as she did, and held my breath maybe a little tighter. It seemed funny to be jammed in there with her, half of me scared to death, the other half full of the same creepy feeling she always gave me, of wanting her.

Outside, they were knocking the sand off their shoes on the walk, then the key clicked in the lock and they were inside and a light was shining through the crack. Branch said sit down, he’d rustle something up in a minute, and went in the bedroom, where the liquor cabinet was. In the living room, there was scraping and bumping and moving around, and I don’t think Dasso was doing a thing but looking at the pictures of Branch catching fish, but he sounded like a whole troupe of acrobats practicing the double front. Then Branch was back, and they seemed to be pouring a drink, and for a minute or two neither of them said anything. Then they began talking about the well and Branch said he was quite satisfied with the way it was going, and said Dasso ought to take quite some credit to himself. Dasso said it was going all right and they had another drink. Then all of a sudden Dasso said: “Well, goddam it, who said it was going all right? It’s going the best of any well I’ve seen put down, and maybe it’s something yours truly had a little to do with, but mainly it’s the big boss, a guy named Branch. A well’s like everything else, it goes in exact proportion to how you plan it And this one’s been planned right, believe me. Everything’s been taken care of, from the right crew to the right geological report to the right contracts to the right equipment. If we’re drinking to me, we better hoist one to you while we’re about it, and make it a good one.”

“O.K., then. Drink out.”

“Drink out yourself.”

“I’ve still got a little.”

They got around to number three in due course, but not until she almost choked on the dust in there, and had to squeeze on my hand till I thought the nails must be drawing blood to keep from coughing. Pretty soon I heard her breathe: “Thank God,” and you could tell from the scraping and bumping that had started again that the drinking was over and Branch and Dasso were ready to go. And then I heard Dasso say: “Jim.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“What’s the window doing open?”

“Well — you put it up... Didn’t you?”

“Did I?”

“Or — maybe I did.”

“Did either of us?”

There was a long time when nothing was said, and then: “Jim, were you ever shadowed?”

“Not that I know of.”

“I was once. On that forged title case, over at Santa Fe Springs. It had hardly started before I knew it, and I didn’t know how... Jim, I got a funny feeling we’re not alone.”

“Come on, have another drink.”

“No, I mean it.”

“Well, for God’s sake, let’s have a look.”

“O.K., let’s.”

She felt like some violin string, tuned to the point it breaks, and all over the place were footsteps, and then they stopped. Then: “Dasso, you’re seeing things. There’s nobody here.”

“O.K. If I can put a little water in it, I’ll have that other drink.”

“Help yourself.”

The kitchen door squeaked, and in hardly a second it squeaked again. Then Dasso said: “Jim.”

“Yeah?”

“That kettle’s hot.”

There was the longest silence I ever heard, then the front door opened, and footsteps sounded outside, going around the house, but of only one person. How long we stood it I don’t know. We just stood there and stood there and stood there. After a while her hand tightened on mine, and then loosened. Then her breath began to come in gasps. I knew she’d pass out if I didn’t do something. I opened the door.

He was facing us, in one of the beach chairs on the other side of the gas log. When she staggered out of there, he sat like a stone. But when he could see who I was, he jerked up on his elbows for maybe a second, like he could hardly believe his eyes. Then he leaned back. But he didn’t only lean. He shriveled into his clothes, so that what had been a big man seemed small.

She sat on the table, and poured a spoonful of liquor into one of the glasses, drank it, and shivered. I sat down somewhere. It was a long time before anything was said, and then he said: “This is why you wouldn’t sing for me?”

“I guess so, Mr. Branch.”

“And it started then, that Sunday?”

“Yes.”

He turned to her: “Hannah, why didn’t you tell me?”

“How could I?”

“But — there’s nothing you can’t tell me.”

“Would I stab a knife into you?”

“But I think you’ve forgotten, it was what we said. I told you if ever there came anything you were to tell me. There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive you, Hannah — except not being frank with me. That makes me feel — all alone — left out of your life. I don’t know anything to do about it.”

“I’m sorry, Jim.”

It came to me they weren’t acting like a man and his wife. They were acting like a father and his child. Instead of taking her by the throat, or me by the throat, or somebody by the throat, he was reasoning with her, being noble, or whatever it was. And she, instead of roaring around and asking what he was going to do about it, was acting meek and sorry and lowly, like some kid that played hooky from school. I said: “Can I say something to you two people?”

Neither one of them said anything, but I kept at it: “Never mind what I have to do with this. You know when you’re a heel or you don’t. But as to how things were before I got here, all I can say is that I think Hannah turned to you, Mr. Branch, at a time when she was pretty low about her father, and that what she reached for, even if she didn’t know it, wasn’t a husband, but somebody to take the place of her father, and that’s why—”

He cut me off: “We’ve been all over that.”

“Yes, Jack. Naturally.

“You mean you knew it?”

They didn’t answer me, and then she began talking to him: “It all seemed so simple, Jim, and so wonderful, the way you said it. My father was gone, and you wanted to be a father to me, and take care of me, and see that no harm ever came — and you did. How could I try to tell you you didn’t? You did everything you said you’d do, but you were a little late. I looked like a little girl to you, and some ways I was, but there were other ways you didn’t know about. There were those years in college, and the years right after — and then I wasn’t a little girl any more. I was a wild dame, looking for a good time, and plenty grown-up. Oh, I was honest enough. I wanted our life the way we said, and I felt saintly, the way a woman ought to feel. But when I was alone, I’d want to be wild again, and then — I popped off one day, that’s all. It’s not Jack’s fault. At least he wouldn’t keep on wearing a surplice, and singing for you. You’ve got to say that for him.”

“I haven’t chided him... or you.”

He poured himself some liquor, and I thought he drank it off pretty quick. Then he had some more. Then he asked her if her car was here, and when she said it was in the garage, he said he and she could take that and Dasso would drive me to the ranch, then gave her a little pat and said it was time they were getting home. She didn’t move. He said it again, with all kinds of explanations about how of course he would forgive her, and more of the same, until my teeth began to go on edge, though I wanted her to make it up with him. She still didn’t hear him, then started to cry. He started to cry. I wanted to cry. He poured himself another drink and drank it, then had another and another. Then Dasso was there, tapping him on the shoulder, saying come on, the new shift was coming on, they’d have to go. He got to his feet, picked up the bottle, drained the last of it, tried to set it down, and missed. I picked it up, put it on the table. He picked up the cork, put it back in the bottle. It took him five minutes. Then he went reeling to the door, Dasso’s arm around him.

When I heard them drive off I lit the gas, went out in the kitchen and made coffee, and made her drink some. Then I put her to bed. I spread a blanket over her. I found a blanket for myself, wrapped it around me, and camped in a chair. When the sun came up, she was asleep, but I was still sitting there, trying to figure where I was at with my life, if any.