Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [11]
She began to scream.
Lights were jerking up and down along the ditch. It was a pickup coming over the uneven ground, the man who was sometimes building the lone house and a high school girl named Fern who worked at the golf course. They had the windows up and, turning, their lights swept close to the horse but they didn’t see him. They saw him later, coming back in silence, the big handsome face in the darkness looking at them dumbly.
“He’s saddled,” Fern said in surprise.
He was standing calmly. That was how they found her. They put her in the back—she was limp, there was dirt in her ears—and drove into Glenwood at eighty miles an hour, not even stopping to call ahead.
That wasn’t the right thing, as someone said later. It would have been better if they had gone the other way, about three miles up the road to Bob Lamb’s. He was the vet but he might have done something. Whatever you said, he was the best doctor around.
They would have pulled in with the headlights blooming on the white farmhouse as happened so many nights. Everyone knew Bob Lamb. There were a hundred dogs, his own among them, buried in back of the barn.
AMERICAN EXPRESS
It’s hard now to think of all the places and nights, Nicola’s like a railway car, deep and gleaming, the crowd at the Un, Deux, Trois, Billy’s. Unknown brilliant faces jammed at the bar. The dark, dramatic eye that blazes for a moment and disappears.
In those days they were living in apartments with funny furniture and on Sundays sleeping until noon. They were in the last rank of the armies of law. Clever junior partners were above them, partners, associates, men in fine suits who had lunch at the Four Seasons. Frank’s father went there three or four times a week, or else to the Century Club or the Union where there were men even older than he. Half of the members can’t urinate, he used to say, and the other half can’t stop.
Alan, on the other hand, was from Cleveland where his father was well known, if not detested. No defendant was too guilty, no case too clear-cut. Once in another part of the state he was defending a murderer, a black man. He knew what the jury was thinking, he knew what he looked like to them. He stood up slowly. It could be they had heard certain things, he began. They may have heard, for instance, that he was a big-time lawyer from the city. They may have heard that he wore three-hundred-dollar suits, that he drove a Cadillac and smoked expensive cigars. He was walking along as if looking for something on the floor. They may have heard that he was Jewish.
He stopped and looked up. Well, he was from the city, he said. He wore three-hundred-dollar suits, he drove a Cadillac, smoked big cigars, and he was Jewish. “Now that we have that settled, let’s talk about this case.”
Lawyers and sons of lawyers. Days of youth. In the morning in stale darkness the subways shrieked.
“Have you noticed the new girl at the reception desk?”
“What about her?” Frank asked.
They were surrounded by noise like the launch of a rocket.
“She’s hot,” Alan confided.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
“Intuition.”
“Intuition?” Frank said.
“What’s wrong?”
“That doesn’t count.”
Which was what made them inseparable, the hours of work, the lyric, the dreams. As it happened, they never knew the girl at the reception desk with her nearsightedness and wild, full hair. They knew various others, they knew Julie, they knew Catherine, they knew Ames. The best, for nearly two years, was Brenda who had somehow managed to graduate from Marymount and had a walk-through apartment on West Fourth. In a smooth, thin, silver frame was the photograph of her father with his two daughters at the Plaza, Brenda, thirteen, with an odd little smile.
“I wish I’d known you then,” Frank told her.
Brenda said, “I bet you do.”
It was her voice he liked, the city voice, scornful and warm. They were two of a kind, she liked to say, and in a way it was true. They drank in her favorite places where the owner played the piano and everyone