End of the Tiger Page 6

  He explained the change in plans. She introduced him to her aunt, a small woman with nervous mannerisms. Erica wore a tweed skirt, a pale cardigan, and moccasins. She seemed a little uncertain and said she’d better phone Quent.

  “Why? It’s all arranged. Besides, he’s left already, probably.”

  She kissed her aunt, and Mack carried the big yellow bowl of potato salad out to the car. It was covered with waxed paper tied on with cord. He placed it carefully on the back seat, shut the door on Erica, then went around and got behind the wheel. She seemed subdued.

  “Great day for a picnic,” he said.

  “It certainly is. It might be a little cooler when we get higher.”

  “Not enough to matter.”

  She sat far over on her side of the seat. He drove through traffic as fast as he dared, watching carefully ahead for Quent’s car. He decided that if he saw Quent ahead he would slow down and turn into a gas station. After he got on thirty-one, he was certain that he was ahead of Quent. The big car rocked and leaned on the mountain curves.

  They had nothing to say to each other. When he saw the barn ahead, he glanced into his rearview mirror. The road behind him was clear. He passed the dirt road just beyond the barn. Erica turned suddenly and looked back. “Isn’t that the road? Quent told me.”

  “You misunderstood, honey. It’s the second road after the barn. Right up here.”

  “But I’m sure Quent thinks …”

  “If he doesn’t show up, we’ll go back and take a look.”

  The road ended at a small clearing he had seen before. He parked the car and turned off the motor. The cooling engine made ticking sounds. The wind made a soft sound in the leaves.

  “Let’s take a look around,” he said.

  “I’ll wait here in the car.”

  He opened the door on her side. “Come on. Let’s find a good place. Let’s be girl scouts, lady.” He grinned at her.

  She got out of the car, and he said, “That looks like a promising path.” He stood aside, and she went ahead, holding the branches so they wouldn’t slap him in the face. The path was resilient with pine needles. After a hundred yards it opened into a small clearing. There was grass, a large log.

  “This looks okay,” he said.

  “Let’s go back.”

  He sat down on the log and took out his cigarettes. “Here. Sit down and smoke and take it easy.”

  She took a cigarette. She didn’t seem to want to look at him. “Sit down, Erica. You make me nervous.”

  She sat on the log a good four feet away from him. She sat with her hand braced against the rough bark. He watched her and saw the quick lift of her breathing. He saw her moisten her lips nervously.

  He reached over almost casually and folded his fingers strongly around her wrist. She stopped breathing for a moment and then turned sharply toward him. “Mack! What’s the idea?”

  He chuckled and moved closer to her. She stood up. He gave a quick yank to her wrist, and she was pulled toward him, falling to her knees. He put his arms around her, and she was like a woman made of stone, unbreathing. And then he felt the sudden softness, the great shuddering breath she took. He kissed her and then looked calmly at her face, looked at the glazed scimitar eyes, at the broken mouth. He laughed somewhere deep in his throat and took her in his arms again.

  Afterward, he stood up and lit another cigarette. His hands trembled a bit. He looked down at her face, at the blue-dark hair spread wild against the grass of the clearing. Her eyes were tight shut. She was breathing deeply, and with each exhalation she murmured, “Darling … darling … darling.” It was a meaningless metronome sound, as soft as the wind in the leaves overhead.

  He sat on the log, watching her with a curious cold tenderness. After a time she opened her eyes and looked vaguely around, like a person coming out of deep sleep. She sat up, then knelt and brushed at the twigs and bits of grass that clung to her skirt. She stood up and looked at him without expression, then stepped over and sat beside him on the log, not close to him. She picked up her leather purse, took out a comb, and combed her dark hair carefully, looking straight ahead.

  “Cigarette?” he asked when she had finished.

  “Please.”

  He lit her cigarette and she looked at him over the lighter flame, meeting his eyes for the first time. She turned away, her shoulders hunched.

  “So it was a dirty trick,” he said. “Go ahead. Rave.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said. Her voice had a faraway sound.

  “You must have something to say.”

  “I just feel … damn empty. It was probably a mistake. The whole plan. I thought … coming back here. I thought it would change things. God knows I tried hard. Back there too many people … know. When they know, there’s no defense.” She turned and looked at him again. “How did you know?”

  He studied his cigarette. The breeze whipped the smoke away. “I don’t know. An instinct. Little things. Signs and portents. You get a hunch and you follow your hunch. That deal of you shaking hands with him to say good night. That was a sort of a tipoff.”

  “It had to be that way.”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, God, if there was some way … something that could be cut or burned out of me. Mack, why didn’t you leave me alone, even if you guessed?”

  “I told you in the library. I feel almost like a father to the kid.”

  “I wouldn’t have hurt him! I wouldn’t have hurt him!”

  “Not this year, maybe. Then what goes on, honey? Some smart guy selling vacuum cleaners? A meter reader? Some drunk at a party? Don’t kid yourself.”

  “Stop,” she said faintly. “Please stop!” She held her hands over her eyes. The discarded cigarette was near her moccasin, smoke drifting in the grass.

  “Now you tell me you love the kid.”

  “I do!”

  “That’s good. Then you know what to do.”

  She lifted her head. “Or?”

  “That’s an unnecessary question, isn’t it?”

  She stood up. Her face was all at once slack, gray, older. “You did go right by where we should have turned, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “You’ve been so damn clever, Mack, haven’t you?”

  He stood up. “Sure. Old Mack. A big I.Q., darling. Let’s go.”

  Mack watched Quent carefully during the next few weeks. The days were growing shorter and cooler. Mack watched the slow inexorable change in his partner, watched the listnessness, the climate of the rejected. One evening, knowing that Quent had gone back to the office after dinner, Mack returned also, occupying himself with work that could have waited until the next day, knowing that there was no need, actually, to talk to Quent, yet feeling a strong compulsion.

  He wandered at last into Quent’s office. Quent looked up, and Mack saw the lean pallor of his face, the obscure sickness in his eyes.

  “Knock off and have a quickie?” Mack said.

  Quent stretched and yawned. “I guess so. Sure.”

  They walked side by side through the darkness to the brittle cheer of the Alibi and sat at stools at the quiet bar. When the drinks came, Mack waited and then asked quietly, “What’s the pitch on those wedding bells, Quent?”

  Quent’s smile was not a good thing to see. “You tell me, maybe. Erica’s going back east next week. She doesn’t seem to like it out here.”

  “You kids have a little scrap?” Mack asked.

  “I wish we had, Mack. I wish like hell that we had. Then I could figure it out. She just … cooled off toward me. Ever since that picnic it hasn’t been the same. As if she took a good second look at me and decided I wasn’t the guy after all. What the hell is wrong with me, Mack? What is it?” There was a certain taut desperation in his tone.

  “Don’t think that way, kid. That’s no way to think.”

  “What other way is there? Tell me that.”

  Mack knew there were no words. Nothing, after all, to say.
“Quent, it’s one of those things. Roll with the punch, kid. Couple of months and you won’t remember what she looked like.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s a big wide wonderful world, kid. And a good cigar is a smoke.”

  “You’re a good guy, Mack, and I know what you’re trying to do and all that, but it isn’t doing any good and it isn’t going to do any good, so let’s just drop it, shall we? Let’s just drop the whole thing. I don’t want to do any talking about it.”

  “Sure, kid. Sure.”

  Mack tried to talk shop, but it was flat. The air was stale. The drink didn’t taste right. Quent was trying to respond, but his eyes were dead. Mack kept wishing there was some way to explain. They finished the drinks. Mack paid, and they went out onto the dark street.

  “Want a ride, kid?” Mack asked.

  “Thanks. I think I’ll walk it.”

  Mack’s car was in the opposite direction. He stood and lit a cigarette and watched Quent until he had turned the corner and the sidewalk was empty. He wondered why thinking of Erica should make him feel older, feel a little worn around the edges. Hell, a blind man could have sensed it. That was the trouble with Erica. The kid was well out of that deal. He’d get over it. It was something you had to keep telling yourself. The night wind cut through his topcoat, and he shivered. Marie expected him. As he walked slowly toward his car he decided that this was a night for going home. A little warm milk. Call Marie in the morning from the office. This was a night for going home and going to bed and hoping sleep would come quick before your mind started roaming around that squirrel cage.

  Long Shot

  It was a chilly evening at the Orange Lane Dog Track, and the crowd was thin. The cool wind tore away the brass notes of the band so that the music came across the infield in fragments. There were another four minutes before the windows would close for the seventh race. I was at one of the five-dollar win-place-show windows. Joe Stack, the manager, had moved me up from the two-dollar show window, where I had started. Lately he had been hinting about moving me back to the money room. We got along well. He had decided I was steady.

  It makes a good deal for anybody in school, as I am. I’m in my senior year. The track pays you fifteen a night to work behind the windows. If he put me in the money room, I’d start drawing down twenty.

  He moved up beside me and looked at the ticket numbers and said, “Slow night.” He saw the book I had open on the shelf under the window. “What’s that?”

  “Math quiz tomorrow.”

  He shrugged and yawned. Then he moved a little closer and lowered his voice. He pitched it so low that Dave Truelow on my left and Stan Garner on my right couldn’t hear him. Particularly Garner. “Johnny, you see anything like I asked you?”

  “Not a thing, Joe.”

  “Keep looking,” he said, and moved casually away. The minutes were running out, and we began to get some business. The dogs had been shut in the starting boxes. I had no business when the buzzer sounded, so I shut the window. I heard the zing of metal on metal as the bunny came around the track, and heard the roar as the race started. I yawned. I tried to look at the book again, but I kept thinking about Stan Garner. It wasn’t up to me to tell Joe Stack that Garner was roughing the customers. He didn’t do it often. Just when it seemed safe.

  There are a lot of ways to do it. Stan Garner knew most of them. Drunks are the easiest. A drunk puts down a five and wants a two-dollar ticket. Stan counts off the change as three, four, five. But he counts the ticket as three so that the drunk moves off with two dollars in change and his two-dollar ticket. On a windy night like this one, if a drunk bought with a ten, Stan would fast count him out about six dollars and hold it down and say, “Watch the wind, sir.” The drunk would shove it in his pocket and wobble off toward the track.

  Sometimes Stan would wink at me. He said to me once, “Get what you can, Johnny. The customers will rough you if they get a chance. You have to use the angles to stay even.”

  Joe Stack was putting me on the spot trying to get me to inform on Garner. I felt no moral responsibility toward Stan Garner. He is a stocky, smiling little guy, crooked all the way through. He’ll never go into crime in a big way. But he’ll never be honest when he can be crooked. I didn’t worry about Stan.

  I did my worrying about Dave Truelow, who has the window on my left. Dave and I were friends in the beginning. We applied for the jobs and got them on the same day. We’re both seniors at the University. We stopped being friends a month ago when I took it on myself to tell him that he was making a bad mistake playing out of the box.

  Here is the way it works. When you report in, you are given a money box. If you’re just selling, there may be only fifty or seventy-five dollars in it. As you sell your tickets you put the money in the box. Every once in a while someone from the money room will stop around and take out a few hundred and give you a receipt to put in the box. After the last race you have to be able to total out. The money you started with, plus total ticket sales off the machine, less cash and receipts on hand. The management has no objection to our buying a ticket for ourselves now and then. Those tickets are supposed to be purchased with money out of your pants, not out of the box. Sometimes when an owner steps up and makes a good bet just before race time, the information will go all the way down the line, and nearly everybody will buy themselves a ticket.

  There’s no harm in that if the gambling bug doesn’t bite you. But when it bites you and you start playing out of the box, hoping to make out before checkup, then you can be in trouble.

  I shouldn’t have tried to give Dave a lecture. He knew that I knew he was playing out of the box. But even before that, our personal relationship had become tense because of a girl named Joanne Jamison.

  Her father is an owner and trainer. During the season they travel from track to track. She and her father and mother travel and live in a big house trailer. An employee named Arn drives the pickup truck that pulls the big dog trailer. They have a nice string. Dave and I both fell for Joanne at the same time. She is button-sized, with blonde hair like silk, and big dark eyes and lashes and brows. She always seems to be half laughing at you. She likes nice things and nice places to go. She is content with a hamburger and a drive-in if that’s all you can swing. But she is more contented—and shows it—when you can have drinks at the Tampa Terrace and dinner at Ybor City. She is fun to be with. She sparkles.

  As I said, it is a good job to have when you are in school. I had my courses arranged so I could work the matinees on Wednesday and Saturday. That way I could make a hundred and five dollars a week during the season and still keep up reasonably well in the classes. At least I wasn’t falling too far behind.

  But it is not such a good job when you start competing for Joanne. The money seemed to melt away too easily. And money is the pulse of the track. Gambling is the only reason for the existence of the track. Money beats in the air like a drum you can’t quite hear. If that drum beat gets in your blood, then it can be a very bad job indeed. If you check out short, the management can be very very difficult. Perhaps the atmosphere is emotionally unhealthy. Without trying to sound too moral, I can say that it is only unhealthy if you have the streak of weakness that permits you to cheat. I had honesty hammered into me right from year one. I wasn’t capable of forcing myself to play out of the box, and I guess that was what Joe Stack had sensed and what made him anxious to help me along.

  I knew Joe Stack was being devious. I knew he had guessed that my friend, Dave Truelow, had been playing out of the box and had been lucky at it. So he told me to watch Garner. I don’t know what he was trying to prove, or what he thought I would do. Dave had gotten the inside track with Joanne. His grades were in pretty bad shape. He was beginning to act jumpy. I knew all I had to do was tell Joe Stack that Dave was playing out of the box regularly. Joe would fire him. He wouldn’t be able to wine and dine Joanne, and she would have to be content with my more meager date money. But I couldn’t do that. />
  After the races were over, I saw that Dave checked out with no difficulty. From the way he glanced at me I guessed he had had a pretty good evening. Joe, as usual, gave me a ride back to the campus after the armored car had been dispatched. As we drove out by the empty parking lot Dave passed us in the small used convertible he had bought. The top was down, and I saw Joanne beside him, some sort of white net affair over her pale hair. It hurt to see her going out with him. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  “I wonder if Dave gets any sleep at all,” Joe said.

  “He gets some.”

  “How is he doing at the school?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You aren’t as friendly with him as you used to be. Break up over the girl?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Nice-looking girl, Johnny. Nice expensive little item.”

  I was glad he didn’t continue it. I was glad he dropped it right there. After I was back in my room, it took time to get my mind riveted to the math book. Joanne kept getting in the way. I could see her walk, and see the way her mouth curved when she smiled.

  We had a huge crowd on Friday night. It was the kind of evening the Chamber of Commerce claims Florida has all the time. Colored spots played on the infield fountains. The dogs ran hard in the white glare of the floodlights. The windows were busy. It was a bustling, good-humored crowd, with heavier money than usual.

  When we had a breathing spell after the fourth race, and I had over four thousand worth of receipts in my box, Stan Garner winked over at me and said, “Davey is ailing.”

  I glanced at Dave. He was looking straight ahead. His color was bad, and his face looked sweaty. I looked back at Stan Garner and raised one eyebrow in question.

  “He went heavy on Dancing Ann. Maybe four hundred worth.”

  Dancing Ann had been hit and rolled on the first turn. I whistled softly. I hadn’t been keeping track of anything outside my own window. Garner is the type who can work hard and keep his attention on ten different things at once.