The Three Roads Read online

  Having applied brilliantine to his hair, suntan powder to his face, deodorant to his armpits, he started to dress in a hurry. He’d got out of the habit of wearing an undershirt before he got in the money, so the first thing he put on was a brown wool sport shirt. It had cost him fifteen fish, no less, but after all a fellow’s wardrobe was kind of an investment. He felt he owed it to his looks to wear classy clothes. And some of his best pickups came when he was least expecting them. If you didn’t want to run the risk of passing up elegant chances it paid to be on the make twenty-four hours a day.

  He left the apartment building by the back door and took his car out of the garage in the alley. It was a Chevy coupé, the last prewar model, and the best thing about it was it was a souvenir from his hot-car days and hadn’t cost him a cent. It was a pretty sweet little job after he tore down the motor, and it still ran like a dream. Everything ran like a dream for him these days, with a car and an apartment of his own, and good contacts in more ways than one, and a roll that would choke a horse. Well, a small horse. He wasn’t so well heeled that another couple of centuries wouldn’t come in handy. After he had the folding money in his poke he’d decide about Nevada. It might be better business to stay right here in L.A. and keep an eye on Taylor. There was no telling what might break, and if he played it smart and careful he could end up sitting very pretty.

  The thought gave him such a lift that he was going fifty on Wilshire before he knew it. When he noticed the speedometer he slowed down abruptly to thirty. It wouldn’t do to be caught speeding. Lawbreaking was the one thing he couldn’t afford. He let fifteen or twenty cars pass him on the way downtown. Let the jerks stick their necks out, he was protecting his.

  He found a parking place off Round Street, just around the corner from the Golden Sunset Café. Unless he missed his guess Taylor would be turning up there. It was the place that West was anxious for him to stay away from, and what other reason could she have? Before he went in he cased the joint through the star-shaped window in the door. The bar was loaded, and most of the booths were full. But no sign of Taylor. Maybe he missed his guess. In a way it was a relief.

  He went in anyway and found an empty booth at the back. The smell of cooking grease from the kitchen reminded him that he was hungry. When the waitress discovered him he ordered a New York cut medium rare with French fried potatoes and a double order of onions, and a bottle of beer to drink while he was waiting—Eastern beer.

  Halfway through the steak he looked up and saw Taylor walking down the aisle between the booths and the bar. The guy was in uniform, and in any case he couldn’t forget that pan. He lowered his own face quickly. Not that there was a chance in a million that Taylor would know him. There was nothing to worry about at all. But he found that he couldn’t eat the rest of his steak. The food he had already eaten had taken on weight and hung in his stomach like a piece of lead.

  When he looked up again Taylor was sitting at the bar. All he could see of him was his broad blue back. Larry caught himself wishing that he and Taylor were alone in the room and Taylor’s back was to him like that and he had a gun in his hand. He felt he was in pretty deep and it would take something like a gun to get him out. He brushed the thought away, but it kept coming back and spoiling the fun he got out of being himself.

  chapter 10

  Bret discovered that he didn’t like people any more. He didn’t like the middle-aged men with brown alcoholic faces going in or coming out of bars. He didn’t like the sharp-breasted bobby-soxers chattering in gay circles, their eyes alert for autographs; or the older women like buxom birds in bright incongruous plumage. He didn’t like the brisk, young, hatless men with their shirts open at the necks, and both eyes like one cyclopean eye on the main chance. Above all he didn’t like himself.

  Though his uniform was heavy enough and the waning sun was still warm, he stood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and shivered with an immaterial chill. The high buildings and the roaring street and the quick inscrutable crowds appalled him. He had a shameful nostalgia for his hospital room, and then for Paula. The homesick pain turned into a headache that trampled on his skull like rubber wheels. The store windows blew in and out like flexible glass curtains, and the tortured air twisted and shrieked.

  An empty Yellow Cab stopped opposite him, and he hailed it. It was something he could get inside. The first thing he had to do was find a room for the night. He didn’t know for how many nights. Time and space had merged in an unreal continuum flowing past him in unnatural patterns. Tomorrow was Los Angeles, which nobody knew entirely and he knew hardly at all.

  As he crossed the street to the waiting taxi, the traffic bore down on him from two directions like past and future impinging on the present. But the analogy was wrong. Time moved in a closed circle like a race track. He kept repeating himself in every lap. He was caught in a closed circle that only death could open. Game called on account of suicide.

  “Where to?” the driver said.

  “Do you know the Golden Sunset Café?”

  “The place on Round Street? There’s a Golden Sunset Café on Round Street.”

  “I guess that’s it.”

  They drove across the city through white Chirico vistas, stark in the washed-out evening light, which led the eye only to other vistas like them. He felt relieved when they reached the older downtown section of slums and semi-slums. It was more human than the vast suburban wasteland, if only because a generation of men had lived there and died unwillingly. The headache still whined in his head like rubber tires, but they were receding. When the taxi let him out on Round Street he felt light-bodied and eager.

  In each of the Venetian-blinded windows a sign in red neon script advertised cocktails. A painted sign over the door said: “Golden Sunset Chicken-Fried Steak and Jumbo Shrimp.” He passed through the imitation-leather swinging doors into a roomful of people he liked better than the people at Hollywood and Vine. The evening had hardly begun, or perhaps the afternoon had not yet ended, but nearly all the stools along the bar were occupied. The people at the bar, most of them of indeterminate age and income, sat over their drinks in attitudes that were almost prayerful, though the café was noisier than any church. Blood brothers by virtue of the alcohol in their veins, he thought, they prayed to the god of the bottle for a brief, immediate heaven on earth; and the alcohol was transubstantiated into the stuff of dreams. He felt like an interloper whose presence had to be explained, but nobody paid any attention to him. A flashy young man in a back booth looked up from his plate as if he were going to hail him, but looked down quickly.

  In the aisle between the bar and the plywood booths a very old man was performing a shaky two-step, in approximate time to a scratchy jukebox version of Sentimental Journey. Bret stepped out of his way and let him totter by, isolated and supported by the dream of youth that glazed his pale old eyes. He couldn’t remember hearing the tune before, but its soft blue chords made counterpoint with the distant whining loneliness in his head.

  He could understand the loneliness that had driven Lorraine to this place. Among the few things he knew about her he remembered that she loved crowds and jukebox music and the moist merriment of bars. The pain of remembering her was so intense that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her in one of the booths hunched over her drink as he had seen her more than once, with her chin resting on her hand and her dark hair swinging forward over her temples like loosely folded wings. There was a dark-haired girl in the second-last booth who might have been Lorraine until she turned to give him a once-over. He was disappointed and repelled by her harsh black eyes and carnivorous mouth; grateful too that the faces of the dead came back only in dreams.

  At the rear end of the bar, beside the steamed window in the kitchen door, he found an empty stool. A large man, whose dirty white apron bulged out over his belly like a maternity garment, came to serve him.

  “Scotch and soda?” Until he opened his mouth he hadn’t realized how much he wanted a drink.

&n
bsp; “We got no bar Scotch since the war.” The bartender spoke with a heavy accent, underlining his words with his thick black eyebrows. “You want Black and White out of the bottle? Cost you sixty-five.”

  “Make it Black and White.”

  This man with the Central European accent couldn’t be James P. Rollins. Rollins was an English name, or Irish. Maybe Rollins was the bartender at the other end of the bar, the dark thin fellow with side-burns that made his face seem narrower than it was.

  When the big man brought him his change he left a dime on the counter and nodded toward the dark young man. “Is his name Rollins?”

  “Naw, that’s Rod. Jimmie ain’t in tonight, it’s his night off.”

  “You don’t know where I can find him?”

  “Not at home, I know that. Jimmie goes home to sleep. Just stick around, Mister. He comes in all the time on his night off. Gets a discount on his drinks, see? I don’t do that myself. Never come near the place only when I got to, to work. I got a wife and family, that’s the difference. Three kids I got, two boys, gonna be big like their old man.” He thrust out his stomach in a gesture of exultant fatherhood.

  “Good. What does Rollins look like?”

  “Little guy. Curly hair. Bumpy nose, he broke it once. Just sit here, and I’ll tell you when he comes in. By eight or nine he comes usually. You just wait.”

  “Rock and rye, Sollie,” somebody shouted halfway down the bar.

  Bret flipped the quarter in his hand onto the bar. Smiling and bowing, Sollie picked it up and bustled away.

  Bret looked at his watch. It wasn’t seven yet. He settled down to wait. When he had finished his Scotch he ordered another. By the time he finished his second the strong whisky had begun to soften and subdue his melancholy. The gilt-framed mirror behind the bar was like an archaic proscenium through which he watched the tragic life of the world. An aging woman with inexorably corrugated gray hair stood just inside the door in a tight flowered dress, searching the room with weary, myopic eyes. Somebody’s mother, he thought in burlesque sentimentality, looking for her erring husband or her wandering son. The aging Hero watching for Leander drowned in his nightly Hellespont of gin. Or Penelope the floozie, loverless after all these years, seeking the lost Odysseus to show him the results of her Wassermann test. A little man in dungarees, who had been sitting beside Bret, slid off his stool and jerked his head at the woman. They sat down together in a booth below the frame of the mirror.

  A man in the uniform of a chief petty officer had climbed onto the empty stool and ordered a rum-and-Coke. In the mirror Bret saw that the chief was watching him over the rim of his glass. He avoided the keen little eyes, having no desire to talk.

  The chief spoke to him anyway, abruptly but not irrelevantly if you knew the Navy mind. “They tried to make an officer out of me, but I wasn’t having any, and I can’t say now I’m sorry. I had a chance to make warrant, but I went to the captain and told him I didn’t want to be an officer, I didn’t want the responsibility, and I wouldn’t feel at home in the wardroom. He put up an argument, but I wasn’t having any, and that was that. I went on eating in the chief’s mess, best food on the ship.”

  “That’s the way it was on our ship,” Bret said.

  He didn’t want to talk to the broad-faced man, but there was no way out. One thing an officer shouldn’t do was snub an enlisted man, and though the war was over and he’d been out of action for a long time, he was still aware of the obligations of his uniform and felt he owed some return for the privileges of rank. When the bartender brought the chief another rum-and-Coke, Bret insisted on paying for it and ordered himself another Scotch. It was his fourth, and he was beginning to feel it. It worried him a little, but the worry was soon submerged in the good feeling the drink induced. After all he hadn’t had a drink in a long time, and he could expect to feel it. That was what it was for.

  “You were on a ship, eh?” the chief said.

  “For a couple of years. A jeep carrier.”

  “My name’s Mustin.” The chief thrust out a thick hand.

  “Taylor’s mine. Glad to know you.”

  Their handshake had some of the aspects of a hand-crushing competition, and Bret caught the inference. Mustin figured he was tougher than any officer, but he’d be glad to be shown.

  “I was on an AKA myself,” he said, “the last year of the war. Before that, a can. Right now I’m over at the Island, and if that shore duty holds out for two more years I got nothing to gripe about. Two more years I retire. I was ambitious once, but when I found my level I had sense enough to stick to it.” He called the bartender and ordered two more.

  Bret looked into his face and saw, as if under a magnifying lens, the harsh lines in the weather-beaten skin, the rum-washed eyes, the tired flesh relaxing on the neck beneath the powerful chin. They earned their retirement after twenty years, he thought. If they enlisted young enough they could retire at forty, but they were old men after twenty years in that iron world. Twenty years of beating around the bars and cat houses that fringed the shores of the two oceans. The old chiefs all looked the same: heavy, hard, shrewd, and somehow lost.

  “Women are as crazy as hell,” the chief said. After years of Navy bull sessions Bret found the abrupt transition as natural as speech itself. “Take the wife of a friend of mine for instance. He’s a chief, too. Been all over the world, from Shanghai to France, and thought he knew his way around. Married this girl in Boston six years ago, and right now she’s driving him nuts. When he got reassigned to the Pacific he brought her out here to live, and they got a little house in Dago, out in Pacific Beach beside the bay. This was before we got into the war, and for a long time he got home every night. Then when they sent the ship out, she was on the pineapple run, and he got to see his wife every two or three weeks. She was a good faithful wife, a religious girl too, but he told me she was passionate as hell. Not that he had any objections to that. He felt good about the deal.

  “After Pearl Harbor, his ship got ordered to the South Pacific. She kept writing to him practically every day, but about a year after he left she sent him a letter that knocked him for a loop. It turned out she was all right when he was seeing her regular, but it was just too bad when she was on her own. She’d taken down her pants for somebody else, see, and she felt so awful about it, being a religious girl, that she just had to tell him. So she wrote and told him.

  “This buddy of mine, his ship was operating in the Solomons then, and on top of his worry about his job this thing about his wife damn near drove him out of his head. Couldn’t he forgive her? she says in her letter—she’d never do it again. She didn’t want to do it that time, but she was drunk and she didn’t know what she was doing till after, when she woke up in bed with this guy in his hotel room. He thought about it for a couple of weeks and talked it over with some of his buddies, and finally he got a grip on himself and wrote her a nice, decent letter. He said he felt like hell about the business, but he was never one to cry over spilt milk, and since she said she’d never do it again he guessed he’d have to swallow it and forget it as well as he could. A couple of months after that he got her answer. She said he was the best husband in the world, and all that crap, and she was going to spend the rest of her life trying to live up to him. Crap!”

  “Maybe she meant it,” Bret said. He felt sympathy for the woman. “One slip doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Maybe one slip doesn’t. But I didn’t give you the pay-off yet. How’s about another drink?”

  “It’s my turn.” Though the story was interesting and he wanted to hear the end of it, a violent impatience was rising inside him. He resented being made the confessor at third hand of a sinner he had never seen, the depository of a monstrous moral problem of which he wanted no part. But he accepted the drink and the rest of the story that went with it.

  “It was another year or so before my friend got home and then it was only for five days. His wife was wonderful to him, he thought. There wasn’t anything
she wouldn’t do for him, and at the same time she was more religious than ever, going to Mass every bloody day, and stuff like that. He figured that the Church had straightened her out or something had, and that he’d done the right thing when he stuck by her. He went out again for another eighteen or twenty months and went through six or seven invasions, and she kept writing to him every day and telling him how much she loved him and what she wouldn’t give to have him home with her in bed. In the spring of ’45 he got his orders to shore duty and came home for keeps. His wife was waiting on the dock, and as soon as he took one look at her he knew that something was wrong. Wrong isn’t the word. She hardly got him home before she told him that she’d done it again, she couldn’t help herself. He was kind of under a strain, hadn’t had any sleep since the ship left Pearl, and he gave her a swat across the face. She went to pieces then and came crawling to him on her knees, begging him to forgive her for her sins. ‘Sins?’ he said. ‘How many times, for Christ’s sake?’ ‘Fifteen or sixteen times,’ she said. But she said she only loved him, and she swore to Jesus that if he’d keep her on, she’d be a good wife to him for the rest of her life now that he was home. The hell of it is he still loves her in a way, and he can’t stand the idea of her opening up for a gang of lousy draft dodgers when he was at sea. When he looks at her he can’t help seeing a bitch, and he’s honestly afraid that he’ll get so mad sometimes that he’ll beat her to death. What’s a man to do, Lieutenant?”

  “I don’t know,” Bret said. “What would you do?”

  Mustin’s little eyes shifted and looked away. “We can have another drink.”

  Over his sixth Scotch—or was it his seventh?—Bret considered the problem. He hated Mustin and his sordid story, yet he was as fascinated by it as if it had been a parable whose hidden meaning applied to his own life. Swayed heavily by the alcoholic pulse that was rising and falling in his brain, his imagination saw with hysteric clarity the pipes of sewage that branched like infected veins through all the streets of all the cities, the beast with two backs crying its rut in a thousand undomestic bedrooms, the insatiable appetite of female loins and the brutal meat that fed those blind, adulterous mouths. For the second time that day he felt the black wind blowing him toward extinction and the grave, that barren womb which feared no violation and threatened no second birth. A dead man, the fœtus of the grave, futureless and untormented by even the first pricks of consciousness, merged carelessly with the filth and trash of generations, without a history or a thought to disturb the long serenity of blankness, the timeless gestation of the final dust. Because he wished himself dead he ordered and drank a double Scotch, and another, and another. They gave him back his desire to live, but turned his inward loathing outward.