He stayed away from her for a month. But then, swallowing his pride, making excuses to himself, he went back to the drive-in again. He got a date with her for two weeks away, and she didn’t even seem to realize it had been a month since she had seen him. She acted as though he were someone she had just met and wasn’t very interested in.
She didn’t seem to care whether she went out with him or not. She never noticed, or if she noticed, did not care, whether he was angry or not. But he took her out more and more often and finally she promised him she would always see him on Saturday night. He saw her other nights too, whenever he could, but Sunday night was reserved for someone else. Sunday was reserved for someone else or for the field or for herself, he could never find out which, and he was too proud to ask.
At first, except for kissing him good night, she would not let him touch her. He was tempted to force her, but something stopped him. He realized that if he did, he would have lost completely, and not only would he have lost, he would have admitted his defeat. She would not go to his room, and after being rebuffed he did not ask her again. When finally she let him have her, it was in the car, letting him undress her and sitting close to him, white and long-legged and perfect, her face dark in the shadow of the eucalyptus trees. And he had almost told her then. He almost told her how he felt, that he had been a fool, that he wanted to marry her.
But he did not, for even then she was punishing him. She was completely passionless. She might have been made of white marble; even when she helped him put the crumpled blanket under her hips, even holding him to her with the strong arms he remembered, she was completely passionless. And when he was trembling and unsure of himself and lost, she guided him with hands that might have been old at this when he was first hearing of it in the dirty-boy talk behind the gym in school and at the CCC camp. The whore he had had once in Fresno who smoked a cigarette all the while, had not been this insulting, and afterward when he reviled and cursed V, she took that too, with the same emotionless understanding with which she had taken him.
And with that came the jealousy. From that time on there was the black, rotten jealousy that he was not the only one; the being sure, the wondering who. From that time on there was the jealousy and the strain of keeping from V the fact that he was jealous, that he cared that he was not the only one, the humiliation of knowing he could not keep it from her, and this doubled because he was sure it must be known to others that she was public property, and so he must face down the humiliation and hide his jealousy from his friends, not knowing if they knew, wondering what they thought, wondering what they said about him among themselves.
He wondered too if they considered V a whore. He wondered if they blamed him for making her one. But he saw the hypocrisy of his own thinking that he must save her from this. He wanted to have her, not to save her. Maybe the saving was part of the having, but he wanted all of her, not just her body once a week. He wanted her to belong to him again.
To make it worse, Ben had come back. Ben had to see what he had made of V. Ben would be hearing the stories and rumors about her he himself had never heard but knew must be going around. Ben would see she had learned the ropes and how well she had learned them, and would hold him responsible. And Ben would see what she was doing to him.
It had been raining lightly the night V told him she was going out of town for the weekend and wouldn’t be able to see him on Saturday night, and immediately a picture came into his mind of V and a faceless man, a man he hated as he had never hated anyone in his life. Who, he wondered desperately; who? They were sitting in the roadster in front of her apartment house, the street was wet and blackly shining, and there were wide, shining pools of yellow on the curbs below the streetlights. The air smelled of rain.
Finally he said, “Going up and see your old man?”
V shook her head.
He was glad he had thought to mention her father, and he said, “You ought to go see the old guy, V. Tell him how you’re getting along. I’ll bet he gets lonely out there.”
She didn’t say anything. She turned the mirror toward her, opened her purse and took out her comb and lipstick. Jack watched her paint her mouth. Who, he wondered; who? He wanted desperately to know, but just as desperately he didn’t want her to know it mattered to him.
“What’s your Sunday night boy going to say?” he asked. “He’ll be pretty hard up by next week, won’t he?”
She turned toward him. She was combing her hair and her mouth looked black in the darkness of the car. “Why do you have to say things like that?”
“Hell, it’s so, isn’t it? I get mine Saturday nights, he gets his Sunday, and the rest of the week you kind of spread it around.”
“Does it make you feel any better to think that?”
“Sure,” he said. “Share the wealth.” He puzzled over the phrase, wondering where he had picked it up. Someone was always saying it—Red was. He scowled and said quickly, “No use being a hog.”
She looked at him. She made a face as she combed through a snarl.
“Say,” he said. “Who is this Sunday night boy, anyway? Maybe we ought to get together this weekend.”
V leaned forward to turn on the radio. After a moment music blared, then was muted and fuzzy as she tuned it down. The music crackled with the electricity in the air.
Jack took a deep breath. He knew he was talking too much but he couldn’t stop himself. “Maybe there isn’t anybody on Sunday nights,” he said. “Maybe you’re just putting one over on me. Why don’t you ever go out with anybody I know, so I can check up?”
“I’ve been out with someone you know,” V said. “You didn’t like that, either.”
“Ben?” he said, and tried to laugh. She must mean Ben, he thought. He knew she’d been out with Ben. She’d made sure he knew. He wondered if she’d been out with Petey Willing, or Harry. But Harry would have told him. Then he thought of Red, and he began to swear.
He told himself she wouldn’t do that. He knew she hated Red as much as he did. She wouldn’t go out with Red; but the thought sickened and obsessed him. He saw Red’s thick, obscene body and V’s long white one. He almost sobbed aloud.
“By Christ, if you did,” he said, and stopped. Something in his voice made V’s face jerk toward him. “I’d kill you if you ever went out with Red!” he said hoarsely. “I’d…”
“What?” she said.
“I say I’d kill you!” and he was too shaken to look at her any longer. “Both of you,” he said.
“I’ll go out with whoever I want to. You don’t own me.”
“I’m telling you. Don’t you ever let Red…” The words turned to thick wool in his mouth and he almost gagged on them. He wiped his hand across his eyes.
V said, “Jack, you know I…”
“Get out,” he said. He reached across her and flung open the door.
He felt her hand on his leg and her voice was strange and tender. “Jack, I’m just going up to see…”
He slapped her hand away. “Get out!” he shouted. She got out and the door slammed shut as the car shot away from the curb.
He almost fought with Red the next day. It would have been all right if Red had let him alone, for he had come to his senses quickly. He knew he had been crazy to think such a thing. But Red would not let him alone; Red would never let go of anything like that, and he wouldn’t take it from Red. He could take the kidding, except Red’s kidding, because he hated Red.
He did not know why he hated Red, except that something had started the time he, instead of Red, had been given a new Adams grader, and it had been building up ever since. And with his kidding and his jeering laughter, Red had slowly come to symbolize the whole degradation of what V had done to him; that there were others who had her besides himself; that he wasn’t good enough to satisfy her; the admission to himself of what he felt for her when she was so indifferent. But if Red had only let him alone, the fight would not have been inevitable.
Red would not let him alone, and they fought, and Red was killed. Afterward he knew that in a way it was not his fault; he tried again and again to tell himself it was not. He tried to blame it on V. He tried to blame it on Red for picking the fight, and then for insisting on running the cat and tampers when he was groggy. He tried to blame it on Ben and Harry for letting him. But in the end he always had to blame himself. He had not wanted to stop hitting Red. Hitting Red, he was hitting back at V, and he had not wanted to stop. He had stopped only when his strength was gone.
He drove up to the timekeeper’s shack, jumped off the grader, and without checking in, got in his car and drove home. He had to hold the wheel and shift gears with his left hand. His right hand was broken; he could feel the bones grate together when he pulled at the two middle fingers.
In the room he packed his shaving kit, his suit, three shirts and a handful of shorts, scribbled a note to Ben that he had gone to join the Navy, and left for Los Angeles. He didn’t look back as he passed through the southern outskirts of Bakersfield on the tree-lined highway that pointed straight toward the mountains to the south, his head bent forward to escape the punishing wind.
He didn’t let his right foot up from the floorboards until the mountains separated him from the San Joaquin Valley, and in Glendale a police car pulled him over and he was given a ticket for speeding. He tore it up. He sold his car to a used-car dealer for one hundred and twenty-five dollars and went to a doctor to get his hand set.
The doctor said it would be two weeks at least before the hand healed and he could enlist. He found a room in an expensive hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, and for the first three nights he whored and stayed drunk, and slept all morning and most of the afternoons. Then, suddenly, he was through with that forever.
For the next week he lay on his bed all day and read detective magazines, rising only to eat when he was hungry and to go to a movie at night. And while he was reading, or eating, or seeing a movie, or trying to sleep, he thought about what he had done.
There were two charges that lay on his conscience like unpaid bills. It was the start of the stack. He had seduced V. He had made her what she was and what she might become. And out of that and because of that he had killed a man. Red was dead because of the action and reaction between V and himself. And V’s part in it had been only the reaction. His was the original action that had set it all off. His was the responsibility.
There it was. It pressed down on him. Even when he cursed and explained and reasoned and rationalized and exonerated himself, it was with him. It pressed down on him, and each day it grew heavier. When he could stand the thinking in the sterile hotel room no longer, he stripped the cast from his hand, cleaned off the tape marks with lighter fluid, and went down to enlist in the Seabees. Perfect physical shape, they said.