want it when I go. But if something happens so that I have to leave suddenly, I want you to give it to her. It doesn't have any key.”
“Do you think they'll find you up here?” I said. “They must want you awfully bad.”
“What do you mean?” Jackson said.
“I don't mean anything. Not a thing.”
“I'm not in trouble with the police, if that's what you're thinking.”
I wasn't thinking about the police. I was thinking about those scars on his back and the windows of the Buick. But I didn't say that.
“I'll get rid of this now,” I said.
I left Jackson to finish dressing and I went up in the attic and hunted around until I found a place that the box fitted pretty well and then I came back down again. He wasn't in the bedroom, so I went on downstairs and he was out in the front yard looking down over the meadow and stooping sometimes to pick a stone off the grass and throw it across the road. I went out to tell him when it was time to come in and eat.
Jackson talked a lot during the meal, and from what he said he must have had a lot happen to him during the years that Ruth was growing up. He said that he had been a music publisher and a contractor, among other things, but somehow I got the impression that Jackson had been none of those things he mentioned for any longer than he had to. Most of the things he spoke about sounded vaguely like promotion schemes of one kind or another.
Jane caught his eye, too, and he was careful to be very nice to her, but it wasn't easy to tell whether she liked him or not. She answered all of his questions, but she didn't volunteer any information about herself, and it seemed to me that she was just a trifle stiff with him.
Ruth listened to everything that he had to say, but she seldom asked him a question, and she never asked him about something that he hadn't already brought up himself. When the meal was over she got me to one side while Jackson was playing at domesticity by helping Jane clear the table.
“There's one thing I'd like to know about him,” she said. “Do you suppose he's married again? I'm afraid to ask?”
“I'm pretty sure he's not married,” I said. “He'd have said something about it to me.”
“What did he talk to you about?”
“Nothing. He showed me the bullet wounds he got in the war.”
“He likes Jane. I hope he doesn't make a mess of that. You know, he seems all right.”
I said I had some work to do, and I went upstairs and after a while I saw Jackson and Ruth walking together outside. It had just grown dark enough for me to have the light on while I worked when Ruth came up and said that her father had suggested that we go out someplace.
“Why don't you go with him?” I said. “You haven't said anything to each other yet. Jane and I can keep each other company.”
“I want you to come,” she said. “We'll take Jane too. I suggested that road house they advertise on the radio. I don't think Jane was ever in a place like that.”
So she went to tell Jane and I changed my clothes and went downstairs to find Jackson sitting on the steps of the front porch. I sat down with him and he offered me a cigar that I didn't want and we watched the fireflies coming out in the grass and we talked about the city of Baltimore until Ruth and Jane came out.
The Buick had been souped up plenty. If you knew anything at all about cars you couldn't help noticing it. Jackson watched me out of the corner of his eye to see if I knew about it.
“Why didn't you have them put wings on it too?” I said to him. “What will it do?”
“I don't know,” he said. “They wouldn't test it for me, and I've never had a chance to find out.”
It was a forty mile drive to the place where we were going, but it didn't seem like that or anything like it. The road was clear almost all the way and Jackson drove it as though he went over it every day. Once we ran into what looked like trouble when we met a car that was passing a truck on a hairpin. Jackson took the shoulder to get out of the way, and I didn't think we'd get around the second turn after that, but he kicked the car into a wide skid that brought us around as cleanly as I've ever seen it done.
“I suppose you learned to do that in the contracting business?” I asked him.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Listen,” I said, “I learned that sort of stuff when I was in another business.”
When I was a high school punk I was doing an eighty mile run every night, with a pocket full of tacks and the rear brakes of the car set so that anybody who got too close was lucky if he just went into the ditch. And I knew that you don't learn to drive the way Jackson did in driving school.
“Do you mean you ran moonshine?” Jackson asked. “A bright young fellow like you?”
He said “hmmmph,” and we didn't say anymore about that, and after a while we got to this place that was called the Silver Slipper.
Jane, as I said, had never been in a place like that before, and she found it all very exciting. Jackson said that every girl of her age should have drunk champagne, and so that was what we drank all evening. The show they put on there was pretty bad, and we had arrived just at the beginning of it, but Jane liked it so much that we all pretended to think it was fine. I think that, more than having a good time ourselves, we were all interested in seeing that Jane enjoyed herself. When the show was over I danced with Jane and Ruth danced with her father and then Ruth and I danced and Jackson and Jane went on the floor together.
“He's a good-looking man, isn't he?” Ruth asked. “He doesn't look very much older than you do. Not old enough to be my father.”
“I guess he takes pretty good care of himself,” I said.
“Why do you say it like that? You act as though you thought he was a gunman.”
“I didn't say he was a gunman. I don't know what he is. He hasn't told me.”
“Whatever he is, I'll bet he's good at it. They look good dancing together.”
I glanced over at them. Jane was wearing one of Ruth's dresses that was not a very good dress for her as far as the color went and that did not show off her shape the way it would have Ruth's, but it wasn't bad, and it was cut low enough so that when we were sitting at the table the front of it practically shouted that she was wearing nothing beneath it. She was dancing very close to Jackson in a way that was just on the borderline of propriety.
“By the way,” I said, “Jane asked if she could sleep in our room tonight. She seems to get spooked up at night. I don't suppose she can with him here, though.”
“Do you think I'm going to let that change anything? If he doesn't like the way I do things he can go on back to wherever he came from.”
“I thought you two got along all right.”
“We do, so far. But it's a little late for me to commence playing the dutiful daughter, don't you think?”
When that dance was over Ruth took Jane's arm and they walked to the door marked “Powder Room,” and Jackson started to talk about Jane. What he really wanted to know was whether or not she was a lay, and, more particularly, if she would let him screw her, but he couldn't get around to saying what he meant. I strung him along, partly because I didn't know the answer to at least half of what he wanted to know, and he finally caught on to the fact that I was pulling his leg and shut up about Jane.
“That boy's a nice drummer,” he said next.
Jackson surprised me that time. The kid was pretty good, but I was surprised that a man like Jackson should recognize it, because he was just quietly lifting the band stud he wasn't throwing his sticks into the air or doing any of the other absurd things that people like to see.
“Do you like that stuff?” I said. “That music?”
“I was a booker for a while. That was in Albany.”
“Wait a minute.”
I went up to the stand and waited until the band had finished the set. What they were playing was very noisy and over-arranged, and when it was over everybody on the floor applauded and some of the youngsters of the kind who run the smart columns on the college papers whistled.
“Jesus, that number stinks,” said the nearest sax man.
The fellow who ran the band half stood at his piano seat and bowed at the people and moved his lips. The whistling grew louder.
“You lousy bastards,” the leader said very pleasantly and quietly. “Oh, you dirty lousy bastards.”
