More Good Old Stuff by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald [MacDonald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780394538983
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf
Published: 1984-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Night Is Over

There was something infinitely irritating about the puffed, water-wrinkled hands of the man behind the bar. He was wringing out a rag with soft ineffectuality, humming a nasal tune that had been beaten to death by the jukeboxes.

Walker Post stifled the impulse to snarl at him. It was pointless. You can’t climb a man because you don’t like his hands, or you don’t like the tune he hums. He hadn’t been in that particular bar before. A quiet neighborhood spot, drowsing in the heat of an early July afternoon. One other customer, an old man with a ragged yellow beard, sat at a table and sweated in the sun that came in the wide window. Walker Post realized that he was holding himself tense and rigid on the barstool. His shoulder muscles hurt. He made himself slump and forced his eyes away from the bartender’s hands. He swallowed the last inch of rye and water and slid the glass down toward the bartender. He looked across at his own face in the blue-tinted mirror behind the bar. It’s so hard to look at your own face and know what you look like, he thought. What do I see? Dusty hair and pale gray eyes and lips that are thin. Thick shoulders and a sullen look around the mouth and chin. New lines from the corners of my nose to my mouth. The hair has gone back a bit further. A wrinkled and soiled collar. What am I and where am I going and why don’t I give a damn?

There had been people who had given a damn. Four years ago when he had been twenty-seven, when he had married Ruth, she had given a damn. His mother had always cared. Faulkner, the drafting-room chief, had cared, once upon a time.

He realized that going back to work for Faulkner had been a mistake. They had all been so kind and had tried to be so understanding. He shuddered, remembering the soft touches of their hands on his shoulders. It had been so unreal to stand and see the January snow piled so deeply across the trim new graves of Ruth and his mother. He had brushed the snow away so he could read the dates on the stones. Nineteen forty-six. The paper had used the term “common disaster.” Sure. It was a disaster and they seemed to be common enough. He could crawl up seven beaches with his eyes clouded with cold sweat and his fingers slipping on the gun and the grit of fine sand in his teeth, while Ruth skids the car through the side of a bridge.

It had been a reflex going to work for Faulkner again in January. He had been used to it. He had thought it would give him something familiar to hold on to. It hadn’t worked. Where is the point in drawing fine clear lines on white paper while the spring sun melts the snow on the soft earth near the stones? He had known he was being careless—his work had been sloppy.

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