Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [28]
everything else until he was with her. It was the greatest single act of their married life. He knew it, and she knew it. It was the time she did not fail him. V It was dark when Al Grecco bundled up, preparatory to starting his lonely drive to the Stage Coach. He bought cigarettes and chewing gum. He regretted that there was no one to see him getting into Ed Charney s coop. He liked doing that, driving away alone, in that car, before the muggs who hung around the Apollo. It showed them how he stood with Ed, compared to them. It was an eighteen-mile drive, with a dozen tiny coalmining patches to break up the stretches of lighted highway. The road was pretty good, but Al told himself that if he was any judge, it would be drifted again before he got home. In the patches the snow was piled high on each side of the streets. He counted only six persons in all the patches between Gibbsville and Taqua, the next fairly big town, fourteen miles from Gibbsville. That showed how cold it was. In all the houses in the patches the curtains were down, and the hunkeys, the schwackies, the roundheaders, the broleys regional names for non-Latin foreigners probably were inside getting drunk on boilo. Boilo is hot moonshine, and Ed did not approve of it, because if the schwackies once stopped drinking boilo, they would drink his stuff. Still, there was nothing to do about it. But it was cheating, in a way, for the schwackies to be celebrating Christmas; they celebrated Christmas all over again on January 6, Little Christmas. In each patch there was one exception to the curtained windows of the houses; that was in the doctor s house. There was a doctor in each town, living in a well-built house, with a Buick or a Franklin in front of the house. More than once Al had found it a good thing to know, that the doctors usually kept one car in front of the house either the Buick or Franklin, or the Ford or Chevvy. More than once Al had drained gasoline from the doctors cars, and never once had been caught. He tore along the highway, clipping off the fourteen miles to Taqua in twenty-one minutes. His best time was twelve minutes, but that was in the summer, with a load of white alcohol. Twenty-one minutes tonight wasn’t bad. But he gave up trying to make time from Taqua to the Stage Coach. Too many turns in that road, and all uphill. You come to a fairly steep hill on that stretch, you climb the hill and think you’re set, but then you find it s only the beginning of the real hill. Once you get on top of the hill it is only a few hundred yards to the crossroads, which is where the Stage Coach is built. If you want to you can go on and climb some more hills, because the Stage Coach is built on a plateau, one of the coldest places in Pennsylvania. There has been an inn on the site of the Stage Coach as long as there has been a road. It was one of those things that had to be. Anyone who climbed that hill in the old days had to rest his horses and get a toddy for himself. And motorists liked to pause there for the same reason. It was a natural place to stop traveling. A wrought-iron coach-and-four, six feet long over all, hung from a post in front of the inn. The Stage Coach was only two years old, still new as Gibbsville things went, and Ed was making improvements all the time. A business acquaintance of Ed s in New York had sent Ed a fat, rosy-cheeked young man to do the decorating. The young man had been driven once back to New York by the practical jokes of the boys, but Ed gave out the word to leave him alone, so the pansy came back and did a very good job of the Stage Coach. People from the cities often commented on the Stage Coach, how surprising it was to see such a really nice place in all that coal-region squalor. Ed, of course, owned the place, but it was run by Foxie Lebrix, who had been headwaiter in one of the big New York hotels which one he never would say. Foxie was a strong, bulky Frenchman, about fifty-five years old, with white hair and a black mustache. He could tear a deck of cards in half, or break a man s jaw with a single punch.