A Stranger in My Grave Page 4

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  When I die, part of me will still be alive, in you, in your children, in your children’s children. . . .

  It was 2:30 when Daisy arrived home. Stella met her at the front door looking so flushed and lively that Daisy thought for a moment she’d got into Jim’s liquor cabinet.

  “Some man’s been trying to get hold of you,” Stella said. “He’s called three times in the last hour, kept telling me how urgent it was and when was I expecting you back and the like.” It wasn’t often that any excitement occurred out here in the sticks, and Stella was determined to stretch it out. “The first two times he wouldn’t give no name, but the last time I just up and asked him, who is this calling please, I said. I could tell he didn’t want to give it, but he did, and I got it written down right here on a magazine with a number for you to call.”

  Across the top of a magazine Stella had printed, “Stan Foster 67134 urgent.” Daisy had never heard of any Stan Foster, and she thought either the caller or Stella had made an error: Stella may have misunderstood the name, or Mr. Foster might be wanting to get in touch with a different Mrs. Harker.

  “You’re sure of the name?” Daisy said.

  “He spelled it out for me twice: S-t-a-n—”

  “Yes. Thanks. I’ll call after I change my clothes.”

  “How did you get so soaking wet? Is it raining even in the city?”

  “Yes,” Daisy said. “It’s raining even in the city.”

  She was in the bedroom taking off her clothes when the phone started ringing again. A minute later Stella knocked on the door.

  “It’s that Mr. Foster on the line again. I told him you was home, is that all right?”

  “Yes. I’ll take the call in here.” Throwing a bathrobe around her shoulders, she sat down on the bed and picked up the phone. “This is Mrs. Harker.”

  “Hello, Daisy baby.”

  Even if she hadn’t recognized the voice, she would have known who it was. No one ever called her Daisy baby except her father.

  “Daisy baby? You there?”

  “Yes, Daddy.” In that first moment of hearing his voice again, she felt neither pleasure nor pain, only a kind of surprise and relief that he was still alive. She hadn’t received a letter from him for nearly a year, though she’d written several times, and the last time she’d spoken to him was three years ago, when he called from Chicago to wish her a happy birthday. He’d been very drunk, and it wasn’t her birthday. “How are you feeling, Daddy?”

  “Fine. Oh, I’ve got a touch of this and a touch of that, but in the main, fine.”

  “Are you in town?”

  “Yes. Got here last night.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I called you. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother. I asked for you, but you were out. She recog­nized my voice and hung up, just like that, wham.”

  Daisy remembered entering the house after taking Prince for a walk and finding her mother seated beside the telephone look­ing grim and granite-eyed. “A wrong number,” Mrs. Fielding had said. “Some drunk.” And the contrast of the voice, as soft and bland as marshmallows coming out of that stone face, had reminded Daisy of something ugly which she couldn’t fit into a time or place. “Very drunk,” Mrs. Fielding had said. “He called me baby.” Later Daisy had gone to bed thinking not of the drunk that had called her mother baby, but of a real adopted baby that might someday soon belong to her and Jim.

  “Why didn’t you phone me back, Daddy?”

  “One call is all they allow you.”

  “They?”

  He gave a sheepish little laugh that broke in the middle like an elastic stretched too far. “The fact is, I’m in a bit of a pickle. Nothing serious, but I need a couple of hundred dollars. I didn’t want you to get involved, so I gave them a false name. I mean, you have a reputation to maintain in the community, so I figured there was no sense getting you mixed up in—Daisy, for God’s sake, help me!”

  “I always do, don’t I?” she said quietly.

  “You do. You’re a good girl, Daisy, a good daddy-loving girl. I’ll never forget how—”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Downtown.”

  “In a hotel?”

  “No. I’m in somebody’s office. His name’s Pinata.”

  “Is he there, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listening to all this?”

  “He knows it all anyway,” her father said with that sheepish lit­tle laugh again. “I had to tell him everything, who I was and who you were, or he wouldn’t have sprung me. He’s a bail bondsman.”

  “So you were in jail. What for?”

  “Oh, gad, Daisy, do I have to go into it?”

  “I’d like to hear about it, yes.”

  “Well, all right. I was on my way to see you, and suddenly I needed a drink, see? So I stopped in this bar downtown. Things were slack, and I asked the waitress to have a drink with me, just out of friendliness, you might say. Nita, her name was, a very fine-looking young woman who’s had a hard life. To make a long story short, suddenly out of the blue her husband came in and started to get tough with her about not staying home to look after the kids. They exchanged a few words, and then he began pushing her around. Well, I couldn’t just sit there and watch that kind of thing going on without doing anything about it.”

  “So you got into a fight?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “That is it, you mean.”

  “Yes. Someone called the cops, and the husband and I were hauled off to the pokey. Drunk and disorderly and disturbing the peace. Nothing serious. I gave the cops a false name, though, so no one would know I was your father in case the incident gets into the papers. I’ve already cast enough shame on you and your mother.”

  “Please,” Daisy said, “don’t try to make yourself out a hero because you gave a false name to protect Mother and me. In the first place, that’s illegal when you have any sort of record, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” He sounded very innocent. “Well, it’s too late to worry about that now. Mr. Pinata isn’t likely to tell on me. He’s a gentleman.”

  Daisy could well imagine her father’s definition of the word: a gentleman was somebody who’d just helped him out of a jam. Her own mental picture of Pinata showed him as a wizened, beady-eyed old man who smelled of jails and corruption.

  “When I explained my situation to Mr. Pinata, he very kindly paid my fine. He’s not in business for his health, though, so of course I have to stay here in his office until I can raise the money to pay him. Two hundred dollars the fine was. I pleaded guilty to get the trial over with in a hurry. No sense in having to come up here from L.A. just to—”

  “You’re living in L.A.?”

  “Yes. We—I moved there last week. I thought it would be nice to be closer to you, Daisy baby. Besides, the climate in Dallas didn’t agree with me.”

  It was the first she’d heard that he’d been living in Dallas. Topeka, Kansas, had been his last address. Dallas, Topeka, Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, St. Louis, Montreal—they were all just names to Daisy, but she knew that her father had lived in all of these places, had walked along their streets, searching for something that was always a few hundred miles farther on.

  “Daisy? You can get the money, can’t you? I gave Pinata my solemn promise.”

  “I can get it.”

  “When? The fact is, I’m in kind of a hurry. I have to get back to L.A. tonight—someone’s expecting me—and as you know, I can’t leave Pinata’s office until I pay up.”

  “I’ll come down right away.” Daisy could see him waiting in the office, Pinata’s prisoner, not a free man at all. He had merely changed jails and jailers the way he changed towns and people, n
ever realizing he would always be in bondage. “Where is the office?”

  She could hear him consulting Pinata: “Just where is this place anyway?” And then Pinata’s voice, surprisingly young and pleas­ant for an old man who’d spent his life hanging around jails: “107 East Opal Street, between the 800 and 900 blocks of State Street.”

  Her father repeated the directions, and Daisy said, “Yes, I know where it is. I’ll be down in half an hour.”

  “Ah, Daisy baby, you’re a good girl, a good daddy-loving girl.”

  “Yes,” Daisy said wearily. “Yes.”

  Fielding put down the telephone and turned to Pinata, who was sitting at his desk writing a letter to his son, Johnny. The boy, who was ten, lived in New Orleans with his mother, and Pinata saw him only for a month out of every year, but he wrote to him regularly each week.

  Pinata said, without looking up, “Is she coming?”

  “Certainly she’s coming. Right away. I told you she would, didn’t I?”

  “What people like you tell me I don’t always believe.”

  “I could take exception to that remark but I won’t, because I’m feeling good.”

  “You should be. You’ve gone through a pint of my bourbon.”

  “I called you a gentleman, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear me tell Daisy you were a gentleman?”

  “So?”

  “No gentleman ever begrudges a drink to a fellow gentleman in distress. That’s one of the rules of civilized society.”

  “It is, eh?” Pinata finished his letter: Be a good boy, Johnny, and don’t forget to write. I enclose five dollars so you can buy your mother and your little sister a nice valentine. Best love from your lov­ing Dad.

  He put the letter in an envelope and sealed it. He always had a sick, lost feeling when he wrote to this boy who was his only known relative; it made him mad at the world, or whatever part of the world happened to be available at the moment. This time it was Fielding.

  Pinata pounded an airmail stamp on the envelope and said, “You’re a bum, Foster.”

  “Fielding, if you please.”

  “Foster, Fielding, Smith, you’re still a bum.”

  “I’ve had a lot of hard luck.”

  “For every ounce of hard luck you’ve had, I bet you’ve passed a pound of it along to other people. Mrs. Harker, for instance.”

  “That’s a lie. I’ve never harmed a hair on Daisy’s head. Why, I’ve never even asked her for money unless it was absolutely nec­essary. And it’s not as if she can’t afford it. She made a very good marriage—trust Mrs. Fielding to see to that. So what if I put the bite on her now and then? When you come right down to it—”

  “Don’t bother coming right down to it,” Pinata said. “You bore me.”

  Fielding’s lower lip began to pout as if it had been stung by the word. He hadn’t minded so much being called a bum since there was some truth in the statement, but he’d never considered him­self a bore. “If I’d known that was your opinion of me,” he said with dignity, “I’d never have drunk your liquor.”

  “The hell you wouldn’t.”

  “It was a very cheap brand anyway. Ordinarily I wouldn’t demean myself by touching such stuff, but under the stress of the moment...”

  Pinata threw back his head and laughed, and Fielding, who hadn’t intended to be amusing, watched him with an aggrieved expression. But the laughter was contagious, and pretty soon Fielding joined in. The two of them stood in the dingy little rain-loud office, laughing: a middle-aged man in a torn shirt with dried blood on his face, and a young man wearing a crew cut and a neat dark business suit. He looked more as if he dealt in gov­ernment bonds than in bail bonds.

  Fielding said finally, wiping the moisture from his eyes with a soiled handkerchief, “Ah, how I dearly love a good laugh. It takes the kinks out of your mind, straightens out your thinking. There I was, getting all fussed up over a few little words, a few silly lit­tle words. And you, what fussed you up so suddenly?”

  Pinata glanced briefly at the letter on his desk. “Nothing.”

  “Moody, are you?”

  “Moody, yes.”

  “Are you Spanish or Mexican?”

  “I don’t know. My parents didn’t stick around long enough to tell me. Maybe I’m Chinese.”

  “Fancy that, not knowing who you are.”

  “I know who I am,” Pinata said distinctly. “I just don’t know who they were.”

  “Ah yes, I see your point. A good point, too. Now take me, I’m exactly the opposite. I know all about my grandparents and great-grandparents and uncles and cousins, the whole damn bunch of them. And it seems to me I got kind of lost in the shuffle. My ex-wife was always telling me I had no ego, in a reproachful way, as if an ego was something like a hat or pair of gloves which I’d carelessly lost or misplaced.” Fielding paused, squinting up his eyes. “What happened to the girl’s husband?”

  “What girl?”

  “The waitress, Nita.”

  “He’s still in jail,” Pinata said.

  “I think she should have bailed him out, let bygones be by­gones.”

  “Maybe she prefers him in.”

  “Say, Mr. Pinata, you wouldn’t by any chance have another pint of bourbon around? That cheap stuff doesn’t stay with you.”

  “You’d better get cleaned up first, before your daughter arrives.”

  “Daisy has seen me in worse—”

  “I’m sure Daisy has. So why not surprise her? Where’s your tie?”

  Fielding put up one hand and felt his neck. “I guess I lost it someplace, maybe at the police station.”

  “Well, here’s a spare one,” Pinata said, pulling a blue-striped tie from one of his desk drawers. “A client of mine tried to hang himself with it. I had to take it away from him. Here.”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t happen to like the idea of wearing a dead man’s tie.”

  “Who said he’s dead? As a matter of fact, he’s selling used cars a couple of blocks up the street.”

  “In that case I suppose there’s no harm in my borrowing it for a while.”

  “The bathroom’s down the hall,” Pinata said. “Here’s the key.”

  When Fielding returned, five minutes later, he had washed the dried blood off his face and combed his hair. He was wearing the blue-striped tie, and his sports jacket was buttoned to hide the tear in his shirt. He looked quite sober and respectable for a man who was neither.

  “Well, that’s an improvement,” Pinata said, wondering how soon it would be safe to let him have another drink. The old drinks were wearing off fast now, Pinata could tell by the jerky movements of Fielding’s eyes and the nervous whine in his voice.

  “What difference should it make to you, Pinata, how I look in front of my own daughter?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking of her.” No, that’s a lie. I was thinking of Johnny and how I never want him to see me in the same shape Daisy has seen, and will see, her father.

  It was mainly for the sake of the boy that Pinata kept himself in very good condition. He swam every day in the ocean in the sum­mer, and in the winter he played handball at the Y and tennis at the municipal courts. He didn’t smoke and seldom drank, and the women he took out were all very respectable, so that if, by some miraculous stroke of fate, he should ever meet Johnny acciden­tally on the street, the boy would have no reason to be ashamed of him or his choice of companion.

  But it was difficult, living for a boy he only saw for a month out of each year, and the days were often hard to fill, like a jug with a hole in the bottom. His work, though, saved him from self-pity. Through it he came in contact with so many people in so many and various stages of despair that by comparison his own life se
emed a good one. Pinata wanted to remarry and felt that he should. He was afraid, however, that if he did, his ex-wife might seize the occasion to go to court and try to have Johnny’s yearly visits curtailed or stopped altogether; she begrudged the time and effort the visits cost her and the disruption they caused in the life of her new family.

  Fielding was at the window, peering down into the street. “She should be here by this time. Half an hour, she said. Isn’t it more than that already?”

  “Sit down, and relax,” Pinata said.

  “I wish this damn rain would stop. It’s making me nervous. It’s enough of a strain on me having to face Daisy.”

  “How long is it since you’ve seen her?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. A long time anyway.” He had begun to tremble, partly from the drinking he’d done, partly from dread of the emotional experience of seeing Daisy again. “How should I act when she gets here? And what the hell will I say to her?”

  “You did all right on the telephone.”

  “That was different. I was desperate, I had to phone her. But listen, Pinata, there’s no real reason why I should have to see her, is there? I mean, what’s to be gained? You can give her a mes­sage for me. Tell her I’m O.K. and I’m working steady now, at the Harris Electrical Supply warehouse on Figueroa Street. Tell her—”

  “I’ll tell her nothing. You’re going to do the talking, Fielding. Yourself personally.”

  “I won’t. I can’t. Be a sport for chrissake and let me out of here before she comes. I give you my word that Daisy will pay you the money I owe, my solemn word—”

  “No.”

  “Why not, in God’s name? Are you afraid you won’t get your money?”

  “No.”

  “Then let me go, let me out of here.”

  “Your daughter’s expecting to see you,” Pinata said. “So she’s going to see you.”

  “She won’t like what I came up here to tell her anyway. But I felt I ought to tell her. It was my duty. Then I got cold feet and went into that bar to warm them up a bit, and—”