Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [35]
“Once or twice,” Jack said. “Down through Laredo and that’s about all.”
“What have you been doin with yourself all this time?”
“Well, you know.”
Denny waited a few moments, but Jack did not say anything more, so he laughed. “Well, yeah.”
“I been boxing,” Jack admitted. “Southwest circuit, Los Angeles. I just quit.”
“Hey, no kidding? A fighter?”
Jack nodded and drank some of his beer. He did not add that he had also bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid furnished rooms, pretended the vacuum was freedom, wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream. He just sat and smiled at Denny and saw what time had done to him and wondered, now comfortably, why he was so bothered by time. It happens to everybody this way, he thought, we sit here and get older and die and nothing happens.
“Listen,” Denny said. “This is great. I got a couple of chicks on my back; picked up one of them and the other come along, and we’re all stuck together. You can take the other chick, okay? What’d be greater?”
“Too much,” Jack admitted. He felt something coming loose inside him, and he decided that he was glad it was going away. This would be much easier. There would be time to think.
Denny’s hotel room had one double bed and a very small single bed over in the corner. Sitting on this Jack could look down at the crowds of people on Turk Street, eddying around the entrances to theaters, clubs, hot-dog palaces, magazine stands, barbershops. He had a barrel-shaped thick hotel glass half full of whiskey in his hands, and Denny was spread-eagled on the double bed, thumbing through a comic book. There were comic books all over the room, and girls’ clothes piled on both chairs, dripping off onto the thin carpet. Packages, empty sacks, wadded string, yellow-orange cheeseburger wrappers were on the floor and under the beds, and in the corner beyond the small bed Jack was on were the torn halves of the room’s stock Bible among the dust motes.
How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.
All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn’t make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn’t make sense either.
Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don’t know enough to know why. Sitting in another lousy hotel room waiting for a couple of girls you’ve never seen before to do a bunch of things you’ve done so many times it makes your skin crawl just to think about it. Things. To do. That you dreamed about when you couldn’t have them. When there was only one thing, really, that made you feel good, and now you’ve done that so many times it’s