361 - Donald E. Westlake [2]
The hell with it, I wasn’t even an airman any more. I was a civilian now. I’d forgotten.
It was the Brighton Beach stop of the Brighton Beach Line. Coney Island was three stops to the left, end of the line. Manhattan was forever to the right. By the time I got the suitcases up the stairs, I was tired. I got two tokens, just in case, and went out on the platform.
There were some kids on the train, maybe fourteen years old, writing on the posters and screaming about it. I kept looking out the window, down at the neighborhoods. After a while it was all crummy residential—stone buildings, four and five stories, lots of windows, baby carriages and old kitchen chairs and Baby Ruth wrappers on the sidewalk. Then it went down into an open trench, and there wasn’t anything to see. The kids got off at a stop called Newkirk. Then a little later it went underground all the way, and I read the ads above the windows. There was one I couldn’t believe; a drawing of a hand with spread fingers, and surprinted over that in green block letters belch. Underneath, it said something was three times faster with stomach gas.
The train went over the Manhattan Bridge, with cars and trucks along a roadway right beside us. I felt like in a picture in a kid’s geography book, and there’d be a DC-3 flying overhead and a tugboat underneath the bridge, and down at the bottom there’d be three lines of talk about transportation.
On the other side, it went underground again, and I took out the paper with the address Bill’s wife had given me. I’d thought Bill was coming into town to get me, but when I called to check, his wife told me no, Bill was up at Plattsburg on a fleet sale deal with some trucking company, so Dad was coming down. She gave me the address of the hotel.
That was yesterday I’d called. It felt funny talking to her. My brother’s wife. I’d never even met her. He’d met her himself six months after I got sent to Germany, and they got married eight months later. They were almost two years married now, and I’d never even met her.
Three years was a hell of a long time. I knew that now, in my bones.
Her name was Ann.
The paper said the hotel was at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 52nd Street. The Weatherton. I got up and looked at the map down at the other end of the car. There was a Lexington Avenue Line, and it made a stop at 51st Street. That looked like the one.
I traced things out with my finger, figuring out where I was. I should change at Union Square for the Lexington Avenue Line.
It was the second stop after the bridge. I wandered around, looking at signs, carrying the suitcases, people bumping me. Then I saw a sign that pointed the way out, and I took it. The hell with it. Upstairs on the street, in the sun again, I waved at a cab and told him, “Lexington Avenue and East 52nd Street.”
It was seventy-five cents on the meter. I gave him a dollar, and a bellhop took my suitcases in. There was a green awning out over the sidewalk, and a doorman in green and gold.
I told the guy at the desk that I’d come to join my father, Willard Kelly, Sr. Two bellboys and half a dollar later I was at the door of his room. “I’ll knock,” I told bellboy number two. “This is a reunion.”
“Yes, sir.” He pocketed the quarter and went away.
I knocked on the door, and Dad opened it. He grinned at me and said, “Ray. You son of a gun.”
I grinned back till my cheeks hurt. I went into the room, with the suitcases on the ends of my arms, and he punched my shoulder and said, “You wrote you were gonna make Staff Sergeant. How come? You goofed up?”
I’d made Airman First with minimum time-in-grade all the way. There’d been time left on the enlistment for me to make Staff. Only I’d made it clear I wouldn’t re-enlist. There’s no sense wasting a rocker on a short timer. “I made civilian instead,” I said.
“By God, Ray,” he said, “you look great. You’re taller, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think so. Wider, maybe.”
“My God, yes. Look at the shoulders on the kid. Listen, wait till you