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“But Mr. Jameson, I...”
I walked faster, ran up the second flight, unlocked my door. I stepped inside and quickly undressed in the dark. I was pretty well pooped.
“Marshal?”
I jumped straight up in the air, my pants in my hand, asked, “Who's there?”
“It's me, Marsh... Mary Jane.”
I found the light cord and there was Miss Kraus in my bed, holding the covers up to her chin. Soon as she saw me, she began to weep.
“What... what are you doing here?”
“Please don't scold me,” she said, through fat tears. “I didn't have anybody else to turn to. You see, I didn't expect to be... fired and I'd bought some dresses last week and now... now I don't have any money. I didn't know what to do, so I came here, told the landlord I was your sister, and he let me wait in your room.” She really began to weep. “Marsh, I waited and waited... and I'm so upset and... well... I just went to sleep.”
I sat down on the bed, feeling so sorry for her I could cry myself. I patted her soft blonde hair, said, “It's all right. Just take it easy.”
“You must think I'm awful to be in your bed... but I've had such a wretched day. Marsh, I don't know what I'm going to do!”
“First thing to do is get some shuteye. I'll sleep in the chair. Tomorrow I'll get you some money and you'll be okay.”
“I couldn't take money from you. Oh that horrible Mr. Barrett!”
“Stop bawling, the money will be a loan,” I said, not even thinking where I'd get money. All I could think was we made a silly tableau—Mary Jane weeping into the sheet and me sitting there in my shorts.
I got up, told her, “Go to sleep and we'll talk about it in the morning. Don't worry.”
Taking one of the pillows, I tossed it on the one big chair, realized I'd put it on her clothing. As I started to take her dress and stockings from the chair, Mary said, “Oh no, I'll sleep in the chair. It's your room,” and she jumped out of bed.
She was wearing one of my sport shirts, and it just reached her hips and she looked very young and inviting— and like a barber-shop calendar. For a short moment we stared at each other, then with a little cry she was in my arms.
The rest of the night was kind of messy. Mary Jane did a great deal of crying and I kept telling her over and over to rest. At some point in the early morning hours, she whispered, “Marsh, we've done a terrible thing. We are going to be married, aren't we?”
I felt all warm and sorry for her, and a little dazed. Kissing her, I said, “Yes,” and she hugged me and went to sleep.
When we went down for breakfast around noon, the agent made some snide cracks and I damn near socked him. So we moved to another room in the next block, as man and wife. While Mary Jane went back to her room to get her bags—and pay her rent—I took the subway over to Brooklyn.
Kimball greeted me with, “Marsh! What a nice surprise. I...”
“I got a surprise, all right, listen.” When I finished telling her what had happened, she shook her head, said, “You poor sucker. You don't have to marry her.”
“I want to, she's a lost kid.”
“She's hooking you. And she isn't a kid, she's twenty-three. I checked her age for Barrett.”
“You pimp for him too?”
She stared at me for awhile, her eyes hurt. I said, “Sorry, I didn't mean that,' Marion but... Oh hell, all right, maybe I am merely sorry for her, but she isn't sophisticated, doesn't know the ropes, floundering like a lost puppy and...”
“You feed a puppy, not marry her.”
“Kimball, I promised to marry her and I'm going through with it. I'll feel lousy if I don't.”
“Okay, Marsh, thanks for telling me.”
“I didn't come just to tell you, Marion. I've got to find a job, but pronto. Neither of us has a dime. You know people, can pull strings. I feel like a heel asking you, but can you help me?”
“See what I can dig up tomorrow. If you need any cash...”
“We have enough for a few days.”
Kimball squeezed my hand. “Call me tomorrow, around noon. And I'm sorry, guess I got you into this, sort of...”
“I'm walking in with my eyes open.”
“I hope so. And I really hope it works out. Call me before noon.”
Mary Jane and I were married on Monday, at the license bureau. Kimball not only got me a job with a big real estate company, but wangled two weeks' salary for both of us from Barrett.
Mary found another steno job and for awhile things went smoothly. Living in one room with two salaries, we had more spending money than before, and during the summer we spent a week with her folks—they ran a small store upstate.
By the end of the year our marriage began to wear. I still felt sorry for her, and at times we had some fine moments. But Mary Jane whined a lot, and if she was young and sweet, she was also dull and boring. I collected rents and didn't even look at a paint-brush.
That Christmas Pearl Harbor happened and we forgot about ourselves and in February I was number seven in my draft board and got my greetings and we had quite a tender scene when I went off.
They sent me to Fort Dix, over in New Jersey, and the only true feeling I had about things, aside from a faint feeling of patriotic duty, was one of relief, of being free from Mary.
Logan was alone. He walked down the alley with a long, springy stride. I don't know why I kept thinking he still didn't look like a private detective. More like a salesman, or a young bank clerk.
When he saw me he slowed down a little, smiled as he said, “Lose your baggy tweeds? And your height? My, you've grown a lot of hair.”
“Forget that phone talk, Logan,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “Guess I'm overcautious.” My hand dropped into my pocket, on the gun—all very casually—as he came around the back of the house. I felt of my other pockets with my left hand, asked, “Got a cigarette?” He was less than three feet from me.
He dug into his breast pocket, held out a crumpled pack: I took one, put it in my mouth—all with my left hand.
“Thanks, I have a match,” I said. I had a firm grip on the gun only... I got it half out... forgot about the clumsy long target barrel. The damn thing was stuck in my pocket—would only come partly out!
Logan dropped the pack of butts, his eyes went big. He came at me as I backed away, still tugging at that lousy, clumsy gun. Suddenly I yanked it out and...
He was lightning fast. I think I saw the bright burst of flame from his hip before I felt the bullet... felt as though I'd been smacked across the belly with a baseball bat. The force of the slug knocked me down.
For a moment, when the shock got me, I didn't even know I was hit, thought I'd stumbled backwards. My gun fell from my hand. I tried to sit up... and then... at the same time I heard the sharp, clear sound of the shot, the hot terrible pain—this awful, awful pain—cut into my guts and the blood came squirting out of my shirt, down my legs.
For a long second the pain was so intense, so complete, I couldn't breathe or see. Then he came into view, his gun still in his right hand. He carefully kicked my gun away, went over and picked it up.
We stared at each other for a long time. His face was pale and his eyes puzzled. He asked, “What the hell is this? What you throw a gun on me for? Who the hell are you?”
CHAPTER THREE
ONE OF THE CORNY JOKES you heard in the army was: “You never had it so good.”
That was pretty true for me, I got more than my share of breaks in the army. At the start I remained at Fort Dix for nearly three months. Guys were being shipped out on all sides of me, but my name was never called. Our regiment, company, battalion, or whatever we were, was made up of a small permanent cadre of several enlisted men, all “old” army men, meaning they had been in six months or a year, and a Captain Drake, a dapper little man about thirty-five years old. His uniform was always sharply pressed, he walked with an inflated strut, spoke with a drawl, and happily was rarely seen. I was made a barracks orderly, meaning after morning inspection I had nothing to do for the rest of the day.
On week-ends I came in to New York and saw Mary Jane, and one day I walked into Kimball on Lexington Avenue and she made a fuss over my being in uniform and bought me a fine wrist-watch on the spot.
I was taking things easy, doing a lot of sketching of the various faces in camp, plenty of reading, and soaking up hours of sack time. For the first time in my life I had no worries about rent or food, and the army showed me the fallacy of this goosing finger of fate we call ambition. I mean, a joker hustles and wears the correct clothes and puts up a big front to impress his boss—and zowie, the army calls him and all that energy is wasted because now he's merely another buck-ass private under a non-com who happened to be called a few months before our joker-buddy. So he bucks like hell for stripes in the army, brown-noses everybody in sight, and maybe by the time the war is over, he has sergeant stripes and then—zowie, they discharge him and he's a nobody civilian again and has to start the apple polishing all over again. Now I don't mean a guy shouldn't try to get ahead—but not too hard, should make that his whole life. You push so much, you never get a chance to enjoy life, and one day you'll push yourself into the grave and they'll shovel dirt on your face and on your tombstone they'll chisel, Where Did It All Get You?
The trouble was, after a time I got restless at Dix. I dropped in to see Captain Drake, gave him a clumsy salute, asked if my records had been lost or something. He said, “Jameson, you're a Kentucky boy and ah'm from the South, too. Figured ah'd rather have you getting these soft jobs around here than any of these here Northern boys. Sick to my belly with talking to Jews and wops and micks. About a year or so, they'll throw mah can out of here and ah'll take you with me. All right with you, boy?”
“Yes, sir. Only—well there is a war on. I sort of feel useless here.”
“You got spunk, son. But ah let you go and sure as shooting you'll be shipped to the infantry. Know you don't want that. Boy, what were you doing in civilian life?”
It was a good thing I wasn't drunk on PX beer at the moment—one more “boy” and I might have socked his skinny jaw. I said, “I was an artist—advertising art.”
Drake was impressed, said, “See what I can do for you, Jameson.”
I cinched the deal by giving him a pen-and-ink drawing of himself. A week later I was sent out of Dix on a one-man shipping list, stationed at Lexington Avenue and 46th Street. I was part of a special-service outfit that made posters. We had a chicken officer who must have got a rake-off from the shoe polish companies. We had to march along crowded Lexington Avenue, trying to look like soldiers, and all the people staring at us as though we were. I felt more of a fraud than in Dix. It was very frustrating.
Also, I was seeing Mary Jane every night and I wanted to get away from her. Poor Mary was at least working in a defense plant in New Jersey and I didn't want to be a tin soldier. I casually mentioned to the first looey who was our CO. that I didn't think the war effort was really dependent upon whether we shined our damn shoes or not. Two days later I was back in Dix and out the same night on a troop train heading for Fort Benning, Georgia.
Infantry basic wasn't as rugged as football training and it felt fine to get into shape again. But one morning when they had us hitting the dirt—running and throwing ourselves on the ground—breaking the fall by digging the butt end of our rifles into the hard earth—I took a heavy fall and had a headache that scared hell out of me.
On sick call I told the doc about having had a concussion and they took X-rays and stuff. To my surprise I was soon on my way to an artillery outfit in Kansas where I worked at painting camouflage. It was interesting work and I learned a lot about blending colors. Most of the fellows were artists and I became pals with Sid Spears, who'd been studying sculpture when he got his greetings.
Sid was a tall, thin fellow with a sensitive Jewish face, but he'd been a college boxer and for some unknown reason his skinny frame packed a hell of a wallop. The two of us became a jerky goon squad; we made a good combination—Sid so thin and me so short. We'd get a little liquored up in some dive, start talking a lot of high sounding “art” talk—which was bait for characters who thought wearing a uniform made them rugged, entitled them to make snide cracks about us being “ball-bearing Wacs, charging over the top with fixed paint-brushes.”
It was stupid fun, Sid flooring guys with one punch and me tackling them if he didn't floor them, or throwing them against the walls.
Sid and I came to New York together on leave and had a good time at his place. I wasn't going to see my wife, but I felt like a bastard and finally spent my last two days with her.
After nearly two years in Kansas we were all shipped to Camp Patrick Henry in Newport News, Virginia, I called Mary J. and she bawled over the phone and then I was jammed on a Victory ship for a slow and pleasant crossing of the Atlantic, spent some weeks hangings around Oran in North Africa, sketching the Arabs and the ruined tanks. Then Sid and I and four other fellows were flown to London, and after D-Day, we followed the real soldiers into Paris, lived at a small hotel on Place Clichy, worked eight hours a day drawing maps, making scale topographic models of future battlegrounds.
Of course Paris was terrific and Sid had been there in 1935 and seemed to know a lot of people on the so-called Left Bank. He introduced me to a huge old man with a flowing white beard named Bonard. Bonard liked nothing better than to tell us about the old days of the Left Bank and the Montmartre—as he smoked our cigarettes and took our rations home. He was a sculptor and “home” was a large, dirty old barn on the outskirts of Paris which was also his studio. He had a few heads and small figures around, and I don't think he'd touched any clay in years, but I began fooling around with clay and right away I knew I'd found my medium—this was what I wanted to do. Sculpting was far more satisfactory, more creative than working with paints and brushes. When you made a statue of a woman, by God, there it was—nothing on flat canvas, but something you could touch and handle and feel proud of, as though you had almost created life.
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