Seven by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald [MacDonald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471913372
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Quarrel

After knowing crazy Kaberrian seven years at least, last Sunday I got my first good look at him. In the park. I would have walked by the bench except he said, “Hey! You! Noonan!”

So I stopped and the way I looked at him made him laugh, and from the laugh I knew it was crazy Kaberrian sitting there in the sunshine with a girl in a green suit. The laugh was the same. Everything else had been changed. With that twelve or so pounds of shiny curly black hair chopped away and shaved away, underneath was a very ordinary-looking type person, like the uptown subways are full of five evenings a week, like come and take away things people don’t make a payment on.

Always he had all those odds and ends of clothes fastened with string, the jump boots, wrapped sandwiches stashed here and there, little signs pinned on about how to live, and always in a couple of pockets those plays of his, such a terrible mimeograph job nobody could read them but him. I had not seen him in months, and this type in the store-window suit and shined shoes was not the crazy Kaberrian I would never see again, I knew.

I put my nose level with his, five inches away, and shook my head and wanted almost to cry. “A sell job,” I said. “A fink-off. You squared it, huh, baby?”

So they both laughed, just as if there wasn’t any guilt at all, him and the pretty little basket in her green suit, and Kaberrian said, “Noonan. You got Buckley aboard?”

“Like forever.”

“Noonan, this is Ellie. Noonan, Ellie should meet Buckley.”

Buckley was napping in the side pocket. I got him out and he blinked in the sunlight. He is gold color. A truly Great Mouse, and she put her hand out and Buckley didn’t freeze up so I put him into her hand. No flinch, no baby talk, no kissing noises. She just said, “Hi, Buckley,” and stroked the top of his head with a thumb and gave him back and I put him back in his pocket and pretty soon heard the little crackling as he got going on one of the peanuts. So then the Ellie basket looked at her watch and gave Kaberrian a little housewifey smacko and went off, and he looked dreamy as he saw her depart, and it is worth admitting that she walked very girl in every way.

“Museum,” he explained. “Front desk. She drew the Sunday trick this week.”

I sat down beside him and said, with maybe a little creak in my voice, “What happened, Kaberrian? What happened to you?”

So he told me he got married. He told me they had an apartment, even. He told me he had a job. In a store. Selling high-fidelity schlock. Tape recorders certainly. Those years crazy Kaberrian spent trying to use tape recording to make accidental plays the way painters get accidental paintings, he learned enough he could tell Ampex which way to go.

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