Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [135]
So when she blew up at last he was not surprised, just hurt and guilty.
He had come home from work and Sally happened to be up. She was learning how to knit and it had turned out to be more challenging than she had suspected, and she was on the couch knitting something bright green. She would never tell Jack what she was working on, but it looked like a sweater or something for Billy.
He plopped himself down in his easy chair and picked up the book he had been working his way through: The Hamlet by Faulkner. After a while he got up and went into the kitchen for a can of beer, and then came back. In a few minutes, he snickered. He had a habit of snickering when he read something he liked, and snorting when he read something complicated or stupid. This time he was snickering at some woolly deal of Flem Snopes’s, when Sally cried, “What the fuck is this!”
“Huh?” He looked up at her, wide-eyed. It was hard to pull himself up out of Yoknapatawpha County.
Her eyes were blazing at him. “You’ve got some whore’s lipstick all over your mouth!”
Jack rubbed his mouth guiltily, trying to remember. Oh, yes. The barmaid had kissed him when he gave her a fifty-cent tip. “It was nothing,” he said. “Some barmaid.”
“No wonder you don’t go to bed with me any more,” she shouted. “You’ve got some whore barmaid fucking you!”
“Do you really believe that?” he asked angrily.
“I’ll bet you sat yourself down and decided it was time you had yourself a mistress. You cheap hood. I’m leaving in the morning. Nobody does that to me.”
“And nobody has. Goddam it. She kissed me, I didn’t kiss her. I gave her a tip, that’s all. Christ!”
It was one of those arguments that nobody ever wins. She accused him of throwing their money away. He denied it. She accused him of slopping up beer after work every night. He refused to answer her. She called him every dirty name she could think of, and he replied that she ought to know. Eventually, she got up and went to the telephone and called Myron Bronson. Jack went in and took the instrument out of her hand and hung it up. She slapped him. He walked away from her, plopped back down in his chair, picked up his book and beer can, and pretended to go back to his reading. She went into the bedroom and packed. Then she unpacked. She came back and asked him, “Was it really a barmaid?”
He bit off the sharp answer and said, “Yes. It was nothing. Really.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It was my fault,” he said.
“I just imagined a lot of things.”
“I don’t blame you.”
But they did not make love that night, or the next night, or the next, because unfortunately it was her period, and by the time her period stopped she was gone. She took the baby with her.
Twenty-Four
Not long after Sally left him Jack was released from parole, and with a shock he realized he had been out of San Quentin three full years. He had been out for longer than he had been in. He wanted to celebrate, but there was no one to celebrate with. He did not want to go down to Vesuvio’s and entertain the lushes with his release from parole. They were fun to talk to, but they would not understand this. He had called Myron Bronson, of course, right after Sally left, really hoping she had gone to him, because at Bronson’s Jack was certain the baby would get good treatment. But Bronson did not know where she was. Jack knew Bronson wouldn’t lie to him. He even volunteered to help Jack look for her, but Jack said he would not do that; when she was ready, she would come home. He was not sure he believed it; he was not even certain he knew why she left.
He decided he would have to celebrate his release alone, and so he