LITMIR.BIZ

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there one named Cindy?"

      He frowned and thought and shook his head. "No Cindy I know of. Either of those other two would have made him a good wife. Ruthie is still around town, still single. Judy got married and moved away. El Paso, I think. Either one of them would have made him a better wife than the one I got stuck with. Eloise. He talk about her?"

      "He mentioned her a few times."

      "She's gone."

      "I know. Fitz told me."

      "Lovely little Eloise. Two-faced bitch. While you're around, stop in again any time. We'll have a nice little chat. I'm usually here. Hell, I used to have a lot of other things to do. Zoning board. Chamber of Commerce. Rotary. Always on the run. Always busy. Now I have a lot of time. All the time in the world."

      I was dismissed. I walked back through the narrow store to the street door. The clerk leaned against one of the counters near the front, picking his teeth with a match. It felt good to get back out into the sunlight. The cheap liquor had left a bad taste in my mouth. It was too early to go after the car. I went into the nearest bar I could find and ordered an ale. It was a dark place, full of brown and violet shadows, with deer antlers on the wall and some dusty mounted fish. Two elderly men played checkers at a corner table. The bartender was a dwarf. The floor was built up behind the bar to bring him up to the right height.

      I sipped the ale and thought about Fitz, about my own unexpectedly violent reaction that had been made ludicrous by his superior strength. I had not thought that I cared enough. It was a long time since camp. But he had brought it all back. The time with him had not been pure fiasco, however. I sensed that I had won a very small victory in the talk that had followed the one-sided fight. He was not certain of where I stood, how much I knew. The talk with George had canceled that small victory. George puzzled me. There was a curious under-current in his relationship with Fitz, something I could not understand.

      Bartenders are good sources of information. I sensed that the little man was watching me, trying to figure out who I was. I signaled for a refill. When he brought my glass back from the beer tap I said, "What do people do for excitement around this town?"

      He had a high, thin voice. "Stranger in town, are you? It's pretty quiet. Saturday night there's things going on here and there. Not much on a weekday. There's some that drive all the way to Redding. There's gambling there, but it's crooked. Then it's easier to meet women there than here. You a salesman?"

      I needed a quick answer and I suddenly remembered something that Fitz had said to give me my gimmick, ready-made, and reasonably plausible. "I'm working on a book."

      He showed a quick interest. "Writer, are you? What's there here to write about? Historical stuff?"

      "No. It's a different kind of a book. I was taken prisoner in Korea. Some of the boys died there, boys I knew. This book is a sort of personal history of those boys. You know, the way they lived, what they did, what they would have come back to if they'd lived. One of them is from this town. Timmy Warden."

      "Hell, did you know Timmy? My God, that was a shame. There was a good kid."

      "I've been talking to his brother, George, just down the street."

      The little man clucked and shook his head. "George has just plain gone to hell the last year or so. He and Timmy had a pretty good setup too. Couple of good businesses. But then George's wife left him. Then he got word Timmy was dead. It took the heart out of him, I guess. He's got about one tenth the business he used to have, and he won't have that long if he keeps hitting the bottle. Buck Stamm's girl has been trying to straighten him out, but she's wasting her time. But that Ruthie is stubborn. I tell you, if Timmy had made it back and if he'd waited until now, he'd have a long uphill fight. George has been selling stuff off and piddling away the money he gets. Lives in a room at White's Hotel. Gets drunk enough to be picked up every now and then. For a while there they'd just take him home because he used to be an important man in this town. Now they let him sober up in the can."

      One of the old men playing checkers said, "Stump, you talk too damn much."

      "Watch your game," Stump said. "Get some kings. Let smart people talk in peace, Willy."

      He turned back to me and said, "How do you figure on writing up Timmy?"

      "Oh, just the way he lived. Where he was born. Interview his schoolteachers. Talk to the girls he dated."

      Stump glanced at the checker players and then hunched himself over the bar and spoke in a tone so low they couldn't hear him. Stump wore a sly smirk as he talked. "Now I wouldn't stand back of this, and it isn't anything you could put in your book, but I heard it from a pretty good source that before Timmy took off into the army, he and that Eloise Warden were a little better than just plain friends. Know what I mean? She was a good-looking piece, and you can hardly blame the kid, if she was right there asking for it. She was no good, anyway. She took off with a salesman and nobody's seen or heard from her since."

      He backed away and gave me a conspiratorial smile. "Of course, George wouldn't know anything about it. Like they say, he'd be the last to know."

      "Are there any other relatives in town, beside George?"

      "Not a one. Their daddy died six or seven years ago. George got married right after that. Then the three of them, George, Timmy, and Eloise stayed right on in the old Warden place. George sold that this year. Man named Syler bought it. He chopped it up into apartments, I hear."

      I talked with him for another half hour, but he didn't have very much to add. He asked me to stop around again. I liked the atmosphere of his bar, but I didn't like him. He was a little too eager to prove he knew everything, particularly the unsavory details.

      When I got back to the garage a little after three my car was ready. I paid for the work. It ran smoothly on the way back to the motel south of town. Once I was in my room with the door shut I reviewed everything that had happened. Though I had told my lie about writing up Timmy on impulse, I couldn't see how it could hurt anything. In fact it might make things a good deal easier. I decided that I'd better buy some kind of pocket notebook and write things down so that my story would stand up a little better.

      There was no reason why Timmy and the others like him shouldn't be written up. I remembered that a magazine had done the same sort of thing with the progressives who refused repatriation. So why not the dead. They would be more interesting than the turncoats, who, almost without exception, fell into two groups. They were either ignorant and very nearly feeble-minded, or they were neurotic, out-of-balance, with a lifelong feeling of having been rejected. The dead were more interesting.

      My one abortive attempt to find Cindy had failed. Using the cover story of writing up Timmy, I should be able to find her. From what Timmy had said, she was a girl who would know of a special hiding place. And the money was there.

      Unless Eloise had taken it. I was puzzled by Fitz's insistence that she hadn't taken it.

      When I went back into town for dinner I bought a notebook in a drugstore. At dinner I filled three pages with notes. I could have filled more. Timmy had talked a lot. There hadn't been much else to do. I went to a movie, but I couldn't keep my mind on it. The next person to talk to was Ruth Stamm. I could see her the next morning.

      But back in the motel room I took another look at Ruth Stamm. I took her picture out of the back of my wallet. Tomorrow, Friday, I would see her for the first time in the flesh. I had looked at this picture a thousand times. Timmy had showed it to me in camp. I remembered the day we sat with our backs against a wall in watery sunshine and he took the picture out and showed it to me.

      "That's the one, Tal. I didn't have sense enough to stay with her. That's the good one, Tal. Ruthie Stamm."

      They had taken my papers away from me, including the shots of Charlotte. I held the picture of Ruthie Stamm, turning it toward the pale sunshine. It was cracked but none of the cracks touched her face. It was in color and the colors had faded and changed. She sat on her heels and scratched the joyous belly of a blond cocker while she laughed up into the camera eye. She wore yellow shorts and a halter top, and her laughter was fresh and good and shared.

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