Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [144]
“All right,” Jack said. “Go ahead.”
“I won’t offer you any money.”
“No. Don’t. I’d take it if you did. Look, all I’m good for is fighting. You know? Do you want to fight me? Would that be okay?”
“No. I won’t fight you.”
“Is there anything I could say that would make you fight me? Anything I could call you that you couldn’t take?”
“No. Nothing. I’m sorry.”
“Then that’s it.”
“I guess so.”
After Bronson left, Jack reached over and picked up his glass of whisky. He did not feel as bad as he should have. He sat there for a long time, watching the cars go by outside, sipping at Bronson’s good Irish whisky.
EPILOGUE
On the Beach at St. Tropez
1963
Myron Bronson sat under the beach umbrella waiting for his bridge partners to come in from their boats. It was very hot and sticky, and even with his sunglasses on, he had a slight sinus headache. The heat and the late afternoon sun gave the water a bronze look, and the clusters of white boats sat without reflection on the tame water. Billy was playing with some other children down the beach, and Bronson watched with pleasure. Billy’s curly hair was almost white from constant exposure to the sun, and his body was tanned almost black. He looked like a little Dane. Bronson thought about his own outdoor childhood in the Rockies and on the Utah desert, and again he wondered if it was not time to go back to America. If they went back now, Billy could start in the fall, at a public school. It would be difficult for him at first—already he spoke more French than English—but Bronson was confident that Billy’s good nature and his beauty would see him through the first hard weeks of re-Americanization. Bronson wanted Billy to grow up in America, in the West. Some day, when Billy was old enough, he was going to learn who his real father was, and Bronson wanted him to be able to understand. He did not want Billy to despise, or, even worse, feel sorry for his real father.
Bronson was sixty years old, and he was beginning to expect that he would die before Billy grew to manhood. He would sometimes wake up at night and feel it all slipping through his fingers. In all his life, he was beginning to understand, he had learned only two things: how to earn money, and how to enjoy himself. There had always been a cheap streak in him, a yearning for the fashionable, the flashy, the hip; and he had learned how to turn this to his advantage, to use it for his pleasure instead of as a source of guilt. Well, that was something. But it was not enough. What he really wanted was to endure, to live forever. It was the penalty you paid for living for pleasure, for yourself. You lived so beautifully that when you came to die...
But Billy. He hoped Billy would grow beyond him. Of course, right now he was just a sweet little boy, and it was silly to worry about his future so much.
Still, it sometimes made him bitter to think that his Billy would grow up in a world where one man’s chances of survival were no better than the next man’s; where for the first time in history the rich were not protected. Bronson knew he had “no right” to hate this, but he hated it anyway. Yet he could not help admitting to himself that he got a spiteful sense of pleasure out of it, too. Mankind, after millennia of struggle, finally perfects a weapon long enough, sharp enough, to stab through all the massed ranks of infantry privates and slice its way into the fat bellies of the generals. But perhaps Billy would be one of the generals or the politicians, or just another of the flabby rich, the cigar dropping from his mouth as he first comprehends that the shelter isn’t deep enough, the air not pure enough, the food supply not big enough, to outlast this final poisoned, burnt-out, earthly suicide. And then again, perhaps Billy will be still a child, and Myron Bronson will have to hold him while he dies....
A huge man wearing a tiny bathing suit emerged from the water, dripping and shaking himself. He walked up the beach toward Bronson’s table. He was one of the bridge