It's Cold Out There Page 2

  She tried to control her reaction, but her knees were suddenly giving way, and she sagged against him.

  "That's right, isn't it?" he demanded.

  But she wouldn't answer. She just hung in his arms, wondering what he was going to do to her.

  "If you really want these books, I'll try to get you a set. I can probably get them cheap. You want them?"

  "All right," she said faintly.

  He kissed her again, then held her off and looked at her. "I've got to go. I've got to work. But I'll be back, you understand?"

  Again she wouldn't answer. She watched him gather up his printed material, some of it creased and wrinkled where they had lain on it, and stack it back into his case. He moved toward her, and she quickly turned her head, so his lips brushed her cheek this time.

  "I'll be back."

  She didn't watch him leave. When she heard the door close, she made an angry face. Let him come back. She'd have the police on him. He had raped her. He could go to jail for that. For years.

  She went to the kitchen and took her journal from the utility drawer, where she kept her pliers, screwdriver, hammer, her bills, and rare personal letters. Her journal was entered in a thick ledger intended for some form of accounting, and she seldom wrote in it anymore except to add to the list on the back page. It was to this list she turned now, glancing automatically at the name where the burden of her love still smoldered. She made her seventeenth entry, writing Encyclopedia Salesman, since she didn't remember JD's name. She wrote it just below Nathan Holleran, the most influential and important vice-president of the management company where Kristie had recently worked and, even more recently, been fired. Nathan had allowed it and just stood by and let them get her.

  Oh, you rat, she said over Nathan Holleran. You beautiful, lousy rat.

  She tried to call the General, but learned he was in the East. She left a message for him to call her on his return. The General would not only see her safely into a new job, but he would be the instrument of her loving revenge. The General she had handled very well.

  Restless now, she sat down to figure out how long her money would last and decided it would last another two weeks, which she knew meant ten days at the most. But, like Scarlett O'Hara, she decided to think about it tomorrow. She was confident that if she ever fell into a river, someone on a yacht would pull her out. It would never be a garbage scow.

  The phone rang, and she picked up the receiver uneasily.

  You dirty bitch, a sick greasy voice began like an armless and legless ball of prurient flesh moaning into the telephone, and it told her in the grossest possible terms what she had just had done to her and how she had felt about it. How does he know? she asked herself in real terror as her mind skittered wildly around the court registering the male faces to whom this voice might belong. He must watch her door day and night. Sweet Jesus, she prayed, who is it?

  JD ...

  . . . was stunned. He had turned a corner in his empty life and stumbled into a Chinese carnival. He was in love with Kristie Olson, whose name he knew only from her mailbox, and this is how he had known it would happen. How many times, sitting in the darkened prison mess hall, temporarily a theater, had he watched similar situations unfold between the huge gray figures on the screen above. In this primer he had studied women and had studied life. He knew the roles, and for his part he must sell.

  After copying Kristie's name from her mailbox, he decided to try Arnold Courtney Howe. Two women were standing talking, blocking the walk, and he recognized the larger one—Mrs. Haas, dressed now, and her face, girlish in comparison to her body, freshly made up. Her eyes met JD's, and she blushed. The other woman, years younger, was pretty and small, with a boyish shape, and she stood, arms folded beneath her breasts, the toe of one bright sandal behind the heel of the other.

  JD nodded and skirted around them, and he heard Mrs. Haas saying behind him, "It was just awful, Kathleen," and for a moment JD thought she was talking about his staring in at her, but then she continued, "and I don't know what I would have done without your help."

  The younger woman said, "That was nothing, Gloria." She laughed. "Someday you might find me in the same shape."

  "No, you're much too nice."

  "I'm not sure what niceness has to do with it."

  JD continued up the walk to twist the bell at Apartment H.

  "No one's home there."

  He turned and found Mrs. Haas watching him with an anxious expression. He nodded to thank her for the information, and at that moment the door opened. JD turned back and looked down into a wrinkled and yellowed face, the face of an old man whose eyes were somehow still boyish in sharp contrast to the thick white mustache, richly tarnished with amber nicotine stain, and the work-worn hand holding the half-open door. He wore a blue denim apron.

  "Can I help you, sir?" he asked.

  JD threw a puzzled glance at Mrs. Haas, then turned and began working this prospect. He managed to hand him the "free" gift certificate and mention the encyclopedias.

  Mr. Howe nodded with massive solemnity. "Yes, sir, fine books. Wonderful books. The storehouse of all knowledge."

  "Dad"—JD heard Mrs. Haas behind him—"whatever it is, you don't need any."

  The old man squinted spitefully. "Gloria, I didn't raise you up to have you turn around and start treating me like a child. I'm still the best judge of what I need, and you and that man of yours should realize just how it is your bread gets buttered."

  "Yes, Dad," the woman said reluctantly.

  Mr. Howe turned back to JD, his face brightening, and JD found himself remembering the men in jail who had been so lonely they had been willing to talk to anyone from the outside world, even ministers and social workers—and even policemen. He felt a trickle of hope beginning in the parched springs of his optimism. Damn, he thought, this old mother might actually buy these books just because he's been told not to.

  "I'm Arnold Courtney Howe." He introduced himself. "Arnold Courtney Howe the Second," he added lovingly. "Won't you come in?"

  JD entered and found an apartment laid out something like Kristie's, but the furniture was all dark and cold. The shades were drawn, and the light was deeply stained with an amber glow, but the light was good enough for him to make out the unframed prints that crowded every foot of wall space. The subjects were boats, and even JD was able to see they were poorly drawn. In some the boats drifted eerily a few feet above the water, and in others, through some cosmic warp, they appeared to be merging with the sun, which was itself setting with furious banality.

  "You like them?" Arnold Courtney asked, eyes eager.

  "Yeah, they're great," JD lied.

  "Let me give you one. Pick one, any one, and it's yours."

  JD made a choice at random, and while Arnold Courtney removed it from the wall, JD looked around with some vague idea left over from his indoctrination that he was determining whether Arnold Courtney could afford the books he had to sell. He noticed a heavy table against the wall, where something was covered with a sheet. The sheet was thrown carelessly, obviously quickly, perhaps to hide what was on the table. At one point the sheet had hitched up in a large fold to disclose a stack of paper, bill-sized and green, but of a green too pale to be that of money.

  "Here you are," Arnold Courtney said, and JD stared at the print, wondering what he would find to do with it. He stood holding it.

  "Thank you," he said at last.

  "It's nothing. Just an old man's way of amusing himself." But the pride in Arnold Courtney's voice undermined this expression of modesty, and he went on to tell how he made the prints on his own press in his garage, and how .. .

  JD tried to switch the conversation to encyclopedias, but he quickly learned that Arnold Courtney loved to talk. He was swiftly and tangentially led from encyclopedias to education, from education to British schools, from British schools to Arnold Courtney's own school, and JD hadn't read enough as a boy to recognize that this was also the same improbable school atten
ded by Tom Brown and other fictional English schoolboys. Then for fifteen minutes they planted rubber in Malaya and stalked a particularly large tiger who had had the effrontery to eat Arnold Courtney's dog.

  "Look," JD interrupted, "I've got to try to sell these books."

  Arnold Courtney looked at him reproachfully. "I was going to buy them."

  JD swallowed heavily. "You were?" He yawned with nervous pleasure and realized that his armpits were wet. "I can have them delivered to you tomorrow, and all you pay down today is twenty-five dollars."

  "Twenty-five dollars," Arnold Courtney repeated and made a tentative gesture at his hip pocket. JD's heart sank. "I'm not sure—" Arnold Courtney began, and this time he got his wallet out and, holding it so JD couldn't see, he peeked into it. "I'm not sure I have that much cash."

  "Well," JD said and stopped. The two men sat looking at each other.

  "How much is this set in all?" Arnold Courtney asked.

  "One hundred and twenty-five dollars if you pay cash," JD recited dully.

  "Good. Excellent. I just happen to have a check close to that amount. Took it in on a debt and haven't got around to cashing it. You don't mind?"

  "Hell no."

  Arnold Courtney hurried over to the table with the sheet on it and came back snapping a check in his hands. He seemed proud of it and passed it to JD with a small flourish.

  "There you are, sir."

  The check was made out to a J. F. Byrnes in the amount of $127.50 by the Weber Insulation Company. JD turned it over. The back was blank.

  "Well," Arnold Courtney said mildly, "Jim neglected to endorse it." He pulled a pen from the narrow pocket in the bib of his apron and, taking the check, signed J. F. Byrnes in an elaborate and old-fashioned hand. "There. And no one the wiser."

  "Shouldn't you endorse it too?" JD asked, remembering a particularly grim section of his indoctrination entitled "Dealing with the Check."

  "Oh, no—well, I hardly could now, could I? I shouldn't imagine it would make any difference to the bank."

  "No, maybe not, but—I don't have any change on me. I owe you two-fifty. Can I bring it by tomorrow?"

  "No need, no need at all. Please accept that as a small tip."

  JD frowned. "A tip?"

  "Just add it to your commission."

  "Okay." JD folded the check and put it away. Then he placed the print in his sample case, and Arnold Courtney, seeing the preparations for departure, started talking again. He offered to show JD his shop, but JD refused. "I have to work," he said.

  "Yes"—Arnold Courtney nodded to approve the value of work—"a man's reflected in his work, isn't he?" His face emptied, and with his bright liveliness gone, Arnold Courtney looked very old and used up.

  "Thank you," JD said sincerely, thinking of his commission.

  "Oh, I should thank you," Arnold Courtney said absently. "Wonderful books. A privilege to own them." He brightened a little. "You might try Grover Alexander across the way. In Apartment B. He's an artist, too."

  "Thanks. I will." They shook hands gravely.

  As JD was going down the walk he passed Hugo Haas. The man seemed familiar to JD in a way he couldn't understand. He was certain he had never seen him before this morning. Haas looked even angrier than he had when he had tried to slam the door in JD's face.

  GROVE …

  . . . like Kristie, slept on toward noon. Unlike Kristie he wasn't out of work but fortunate enough to be able to work when he felt like it. He had never, not once in his life, felt like working in the morning. The intensity of his reluctance to get up had forged a hard core of ambition in an otherwise relaxed and amiable man.

  Now his doorbell dingdonged him into resentful consciousness and sounded again to roll him reluctantly out of bed and send him shuffling, canted like a veteran lush, until he stumbled against the front door and eased it open. Leaning on the jamb, he shaded his eyes against the hearty and somehow simpleminded glow of the noonday sun and took in enough of JD's appearance to realize that it wasn't anyone he knew. He blinked resentfully.

  "Yeah?" he asked, and didn't really listen until he heard "free gift certificate." Then he winced with a coward's instant reflex. The last "free gift certificate" he had been so hapless as to accept had cost him over ninety dollars for merchandise he hadn't wanted, couldn't use, and hated the sight of.

  Grove squinted out at JD, recognizing him, now too late, as the enemy. He was in grave danger of ending up with several of whatever it was this big idiot sold, even if it were funeral lots or vibrator chairs.

  "Yes ... Yes ..." he murmured, wondering why it was so difficult for him to say "No." A firm "No," close the door, and that would be the end of it, but it was too easy for Grove to put himself in the sweating shoes of the people who came to stand outside his door.

  Numbly he put his hand out and felt the "free gift certificate" slipped into his unresisting fingers. Now, I've gone and done it. Now, I've taken the lousy thing. Then he heard with great clarity ". . . the Universal Encyclopedia in twenty-four volumes."

  "I've got the Britannica," he said, grinning with relief.

  "What?"

  "I've already got the Encyclopedia Britannica. I'm sorry."

  But JD wouldn't give up. "The Universal Encyclopedia is supposed to be much better than all those other sets, and besides—"

  "Really, no thanks. I'm sure your set's a good one."

  "The best on the market."

  "I'm sure it is."

  JD stared glumly for a moment, then shrugged and said, "It's probably mickey-mouse. Thanks anyway for listening to me." He turned on his heel.

  Grove watched after him, vaguely offended by the salesman's disloyalty, offended that all the hawkers who so glibly wasted his time didn't even believe in what they had to sell. JD had reached the central walk and was standing there, looking both ways like a baffled animal. That one, Grove thought, had better hit back for the farm.

  He closed the door and walked flat-footed, no longer on a slant, into the bathroom. He leaned on the washbasin, and after a brief glance at his face he studied his tongue in the mirror. He took no pleasure from his face. It was round and bland, still slightly swollen with sleep. A tongue, he decided, was a silly and grotesque thing to be carrying around in his mouth, and he resolved to be rid of it so he could install something useful like an ashtray or a change holder.

  The chill and hostile blue of the fluorescent tube above the mirror depressed him. Surgery light, morgue light, cop-and-social-worker light—it made his face look as if it should be attached to a case history. A man trapped and isolated in one of society's barren and clinical deserts. Why was he alone? The blunt truth, which he could sometimes admit, was that when people thought of other people, they somehow forgot him. He was, in most senses, an extra man, a spare part. To be used in case of emergency.

  He thought fleetingly but vividly of Kristie and then turned his mind firmly to other things. While he was shaving he found a cartoon idea in his mind, and it was the first he had thought up entirely on his own in several weeks. The drawing would show a father attaching a jug of bottled water and a Dixie cup dispenser to the headboard of a baby's crib. Mild, very mild, but it would stand without a caption. He grinned and shuffled a little in what he imagined was a dance step.

  After breakfast he began to rough out the idea. He drew plump, short-necked people with big, soft-looking noses and round eyes and eyebrows that angled up to suggest a chronic uneasiness. One character had come to seem the essence of the type, and Grove's best work centered around this living malaprop, who always stood, bland and faintly puzzled, pinned by his wife's incredulous scorn in the middle of some surrealistic goof. His chronic state was one of innocent perversity—he put the milk outside and the cat in the icebox, pulled flowers and left weeds, and appeared among his wife's bridge guests in his underwear, looking for the glasses he was already wearing. He was instantly victimized by dogs of any size. Small children regarded him with wary hostility, larger children with go
od-natured contempt.

  Grove was fully aware of the element of self-portraiture in his creation. He finished the "rough," viewed it without either approval or satisfaction, and slipped it into a manilla envelope already addressed to a magazine likely to buy family humor of so gentle a stripe. He decided to drive to the shopping center. There were several magazines he wanted to buy.

  He stepped outside and found Kristie lying in the sun. She was on her stomach, arms folded beneath her head. Her eyes were closed, and the straps of her halter were unfastened to leave her back bare to the sun. Grove experienced an immediate flicker of lust. It was the second time in recent days he had noticed Kristie home when she would have ordinarily been working. He went to stand over her.

  "You trying to crash the leisure class?"

  Kristie started, her eyes snapping open. "Oh," she said, "it's you."

  "Yes," Grove answered mockingly, "only me."

  Kristie smiled. "You needn't put it like that. It's a pleasure to see someone nice."

  "You mean harmless."

  "Maybe. I wonder if anyone's really harmless. Anyway, I'm not at leisure. I'm unemployed."

  "No kidding? I thought you were the fair-haired girl over there at Trans-Western?"

  "There's no such things as a fair-haired girl in a man's business. I found that out. They thought I was worth eighty-five dollars a week; I thought I was worth a great deal more and I pushed too hard. Then someone I'd depended on let me down, and everything began to come apart. As a woman I was disturbing to have around, since I was doing the work of three supervisors. So why should they have me around?" Kristie smiled bitterly. "Technically I was discharged for coming in late over three times in one month. Three times! That was the biggest joke. I was late one hundred and seven mornings in the last five months. It was virtually my privilege by custom. Suddenly they discover I come in late. Just when they need something to hang me with."

  Grove remembered Kristie's boasting that she had one of Trans-Western's vice-presidents in her pocket—her expression had been "my little vice-president"—but he didn't suggest that this man could easily have had her fired once he tired of her. He smiled sympathetically and asked, "What are you going to do now?"