We stood by the window watching the Buick turn slowly in the narrow road and swing into the drive.
“What do I think of him?” I said. “What the hell can I think of him? It was you who talked to him.”
“His name is Jackson,” she said. “I mean, that's the name he's been using. I think we ought to call him that too. I think that's what he wants. He hinted at it.”
“All right, his name is Jackson. What's his racket? What does he do?”
“I didn't find that out,” Ruth said.
“It isn't our affair anyway.”
Ruth moved away from the window. She sat down and pushed a soggy cigar around in the ashtray with a match.
“It's awfully queer, having him show up this way. I think I liked it better when I didn't know him.”
“If you don't like him you don't have to have him around,” I said. “He'd go away if he thought you didn't want him around. I know that.”
“It isn't that, she said. “It isn't that I don't like him. Only, now that he's real, I can't have my dream any more.”
“Did you expect him to be something different from what he is?”
“That isn't exactly it either. It's like visiting Niagara Falls. If you know what I mean.”
“I wouldn't call him a disappointment.”
“He's coming back.”
Jackson had his coat over his shoulder and was carrying a couple of good looking leather bags. He stood holding them and looked in the doorway. Ruth got up.
“Bill, will you show my father the bedrooms? I want to help Jane.”
She went out of the room. I took one of the bags, and Jackson and I went upstairs.
“There are three empty,” I said. I don't suppose it matters which one you use.”
We went into the first one we came to. “This one looks all right,” said Jackson. “I guess it's all right.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Don't go yet. I'd like to talk to you.”
I sat on the bed and watched him opening drawers and closing them and putting things away. He moved with a quick, springy step, and it wasn't hard to imagine him on a tennis court or in a gymnasium.
“I want to talk to you,” he said.
“You said that.”
He hung his coat over a chair and took off his tie and started to unbutton his shirt. Then he seemed to remember something, and he went to one of the bags and got an odd shaped bottle out of it.
“I don't know whether I should admit it or not,” he said. “Personally, I like vodka.”
He had some paper cups in his bag, and we drank the vodka from them. Jackson set his cup on the dresser and took off his shirt. He waved a handkerchief under his arms.
“That was a hot drive today,” he said.
“I think there's time for a shower,” I said. “I'll get you some towels.”
“Wait just a minute.”
He put on slippers and a robe and followed me. I got the towels and went into the bathroom with him. I turned down the toilet seat and sat there with the bottle of vodka and the cups and we shouted to each other over the noise of the shower.
“She's a remarkable girl, isn't she?”
I said yes, she was remarkable, and I poured myself some more of the vodka. Jackson was lathering himself and being careful not to get soap into his hair or to get his hair any more wet than he absolutely had to.
“Where did you meet her?” he asked me.
What he meant was where did a heel like me happen to meet a nice girl. That was all right. Tell him.
“In a whore house.”
The soap rattled around in the tub and finally stopped. Jackson shut off the shower and sat on the wall seat.
“What the hell was she doing in a whore house?” he said.
“It was a pretty good whore house. I played the piano there, with a glass of beer on top and the cigarette burns on the bass keys, and everything but the derby hat.”
“God damn it!” he said. “I don't care what you were doing there. What was she doing there?”
“She was learning all about life. She wanted to see what a whore house was like, and some boys she was with took her there to show her. Princeton boys. It was really a high class place.”
Jackson swore and turned the shower back on. He washed all of the soap away and then covered himself with it again.
“Do you think it's all right?” he said. “My staying here, I mean?”
“It's all right with me. I guess you're doing O.K.”
“She didn't say anything? Because if I thought she didn't want me to stay, I'd go now.”
“Do you want some of this?” I asked.
Jackson drank with the water running down his back and over his shoulders, and when he had finished the liquor he held his cup under the shower for a chaser.
“I suppose you're wondering who I am,” he said. “What I do, and why I haven't showed up all this time and so on.”
“I haven't said so.”
The water of the shower was pretty cold by now, and Jackson was slowly turning pink all over, but he acted as though he was used to it.
“If I wondered anything,” I said, “it was why you decided to show up at all. Or, for that matter, why you pay any attention to her.”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, do you suppose it would make any difference to her what I happened to be? Would it matter to her if I were-oh, say, a safe cracker?”
“That sounds pretty childish,” I said. “Are you a safe cracker?”
“No. Is there any more vodka?”
When he got out of the shower and started to dry himself I saw his back and the three marks on it. They were white, and they looked as though the skin had been pulled up and knotted at those places. Jackson glanced over his shoulder and saw me looking at him.
“One of them is still in me,” he said. “They were afraid to operate because it was so close to the heart. I can tell when it's going to rain.”
Then he showed me the spot under his arm where one of the bullets had come out. There was a hole big enough to put your thumb into.
“Isn't that a hell of a place to have them? In your back?” he said. “I always have to explain how they happened to get there. It was an accident.”
“Some accident,” I said. “Three of them.”
“It was Berlin. One of the boys got a little crazy when we weren't sent home after the war was over. A lot of the men didn't like that job, you know. I happened to be an officer, and that's how it happened.”
“How did it really happen?” I said. “You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.”
Jackson pretended that he couldn't hear me over the noise of the shower that was still running. He turned off the water and we went back to the bedroom and he put what was left of the vodka away in one of the drawers.
“There's something I want to ask you.”
“I'm still here,” I said.
“If she says anything about me. If it sounds as though she wanted me to get out I want you to tell me about it as soon as it happens.”
“That's easy enough,” I said.
“There's something else, too.” He got a black tin box out of one of his bags and stood holding it. “God damn it,” he said, “How do I know you're all right?”
“You don't,” I said. “I'm not asking you to think I'm all right.”
“I guess I'll have to do it,” he said. “I don't see any other way to do it.”
He threw the box on the bed beside me. “Stick that up your ass or in the attic or anyplace,” he said. “I may
