BIFF—HIS given name was Bedford—was darker than Jimmie. His hair was straight, a few shades from black, and he had large brownish eyes. The irises were not all brown but part greenish and part yellowish. His mother called them hazel. He was a huge, husky youngster with an overlarge head. He looked as if his basic design had been a pile of various-sized boxes. He was the archetype of a fullback—although he had played end for three years on the team of State University.
He lay on the table in the emergency room of the hospital, smoking a cigarette.
When Jimmie came in he was looking at the ceiling, blinking his eyes. The pupils of his eyes were contracted—he’d been given morphine—and his mouth had relaxed into an unaware, shadowy smile, as if he were immersed in a fantasy that had nothing to do with what was happening around him. Around him, in fact, there was no activity whatever. An intern stood against a glass cabinet with an expression of patient expectancy. Biff’s family was draped here and there in positions of anguish. Sarah and her mother, in the proper mien of horror, kept glancing down at the pool of blood on the tile floor. Mr.
Bailey was looking out the window at a wall, his shoulders high, with an admission of grief, and a proud proclamation of courage.
It was Biff’s smile, Jimmie knew, that corroborated his inner assurance. Jimmie didn’t like that smile—slick, catlike, pleased. They didn’t see Jimmie, at first. They didn’t see him because he wore soft-shod heels, and because they were not yet in the habit of expecting to see him, and because they had other things to hold their attention.
Biff’s eyes became conscious of something at their peripheral range, and the smile on Biff’s lips vanished even before he turned his head: Biff wiped it out. He substituted a small twist of pain. He said, weakly, “Hello, there, Jim.”
His older brother spoke quietly, too, but strongly. “Hello, Biff! How’d it happen?”
The other Baileys chimed in.
“It’s about time you arrived!”
“Where on earth have you been?”
“We called the plant! Twice!”
Jimmie ignored them. He bent over his brother. “What you got there?”
Biff breathed a little—to show breathing was difficult. “Oh, nothing much.”
“Nothing much!” his mother shrilled.
Mr. Bailey said sternly, “He’s broken some ribs, Jimmie. Both legs. Maybe hurt internally. The surgeon’s taking forever to get here! We arrived”—he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes ago!”
“Who’d you hit?” Jimmie asked.
“Another car. Hit me. Rolled me—twice, I think. I was going across Stetson.
Didn’t see it coming. His lights must have been off. The guy was doing about eighty. I didn’t have a chance! I’d already stopped, for the sign. It was my fault, partly, in a way. I should have seen him even if he had no lights, I suppose—”
“How’s the other guy?” Jimmie asked.
Biff looked startled.
Mr. Bailey said, “It was clearly a piece of reckless driving on the other man’s part.
Biff crept out of the side street—and was smashed into!”
Jimmie nodded. In his mind’s eye he could see his brother, at the end of a day of helpless rage at having to be in the army, driving along the dusky side street, slowing at some distance from the stop-line, and hearing the high whine of an approaching car. A car coming illegally fast. Jimmie could imagine his brother’s face. It would go slack and sullen—and then convulse with purpose. His brother’s car would not turn, cautiously, in the path of the oncoming car. It would shoot out, in high, the motor racing, and scarcely turn at all—making an unavoidable obstacle on the road. The other car-brakes grinding, wheels sliding—would strike at an angle. It wasn’t an attempt at suicide, exactly. It wasn’t, even, a conscious effort at self-mutilation. But some such thing, in a more shadowy form, had motivated Biff. He had entertained for one paroxysmal instant the thought, I’ll get hurt—and then they can’t take me! In the next instant he had been getting hurt.
Jimmie knew that such “accidents” were shockingly common. But deliberateness could not be proven. No jury would recognize escapism as a punishable motive.
Sometimes the author of such an accident would confess the impulse—long afterward.
Sometimes a psychiatrist would uncover such an impulse in a patient. Mostly, however, smashups like Biff’s were attributed to related factors, such as high speed, or to “pure accident”—a phrase which, excepting for coincidences in time, is a pure lie.
Such things had been in Jimmie’s mind as he had walked to the hospital. To review them, to confirm them by Biff’s appearance and behavior, took seconds only.
Jimmie let himself smile as if with a sudden thought.
“Anyway, Biff, you’re out of the army!”
The younger man’s eyes moved slowly toward Jimmie and held with faint surprise. “So I am. Funny. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“For a few weeks, anyhow,” Jimmie said, watching the eyes. They did what he had expected. They dilated with alarm and widened further with rage—for the time between fingers naps. Then they were blank again. They moved toward Mrs. Bailey.
Biff had said he “hadn’t thought” about being out of the army. That—and his eyes—were the final clinching proofs. If it had been an honest accident Biff would have thought of his delivery at once—and admitted it. Whooped about it. Crowed over it. But Biff had prepared that little disavowal—for the first person who reminded him that his misfortune was not untinged with good luck.
Mrs. Bailey, realizing that Biff’s gaze was resting on her and that he vaguely wanted something done or said, crossed the room to Jimmie’s side. “You mustn’t make him talk so much! He’s in agony!”
“I’m all right,” Biff protested. His voice grew weaker. There was a tremor in it.
“Jim, old kid. I’m sorry I socked you this morning.”
“It’s okay. Forget it.”
“I want you to know I’m sorry—that’s all. I’ll be getting the old whiffaroo pretty soon, and Doc Cather will be going over me, and if the works slip—anyhow, I want you to know.”
Jimmie nodded. He was looking straight at Biff. Biff looked away.
Mrs. Bailey was streaming tears.
Mr. Bailey blew his nose, sumptuously.
Sarah said shrilly, “Why isn’t the doctor here! Why isn’t anything being done! He may even be—right here before our eyes!”
Mr. Bailey said, “Quiet, Sarah. He’ll be along any minute. The intern says Biff’ll keep the way he is, a while.”
Sarah began to bawl.
Jimmie walked closer to his brother. His grin was amiable, only a little bit sardonic. “Your pretty puss is unscratched, anyhow!”
“I must have thrown my hands over my face at the time. A protective reflex. I dunno….”
Then the surgeon arrived. He was dressed in white and he walked fast, like a man entering from the wings, for an act. “Well!” he exclaimed. “What have we here?” Jimmie thought it was close to tops for asininity.
Mr. Bailey said, “My son’s pretty badly hurt, Doctor Cather. It goes without saying, of course, that no expense is to be spared. Specialists from Chicago, New York, by air—if they can help you in any way. Everything!”
The surgeon was grinning at his patient. Biff grinned back. His mother said, “Money doesn’t mean a thing, doctor!”
Then the surgeon said something that revised Jimmie’s opinion of him. It made Jimmie think that he was probably a whacking good surgeon. “Oh, I’ll send you a stiff bill, Mrs. Bailey. Never worry about that!” He took the hem of the blanket that covered Biff. “You folks better run along while I have a look. Come back after dinner. Say around nine, ten o’clock.”
Jimmie glanced at the intern. He had not in any way noticed the man until then.
The intern was stepping forward to help the surgeon. It ran through Jimmie’s mind that the intern was a shrewd-looking duck, with wide, apperceptive eyes, the pointed nose of the curious, and an air about him of knowledgableness. Jimmie also thought that he’d been standing there, watching everything, all that time. As the intern began a swift, technical explanation of his findings, he winked at Jimmie….
Supper began mordantly. For one thing, Mrs. Bailey was weeping steadily. For another, the food was overcooked-caked and dry. Mrs. Bailey kept apologizing for her tears.
“He’ll be all right,” Sarah said. “He’s tough. Tough as Jimmie—almost.” Her blue gaze met Jimmie’s violently—and he wondered why.
“We must eat,” Mr. Bailey said earnestly. “We’ll need our strength.”
Jimmie was eating right along. In fact, he found himself hungry. That surprised him. He had been through a lot that day. For a mere Midwestern town, Muskogewan was unreasonably productive of excitement.
“The poor boy!” said Biff’s mother. “The poor, poor boy!”
“Popinjay, that doctor,” said Mr. Bailey. “Wonder if he’s as good as his reputation?”
“Where were you?” Sarah asked bluntly of Jimmie.
“Me? Working.”
“They said you left the factory about five. They said a dame drove you away.”
“That was a British spy,” Jimmie answered calmly.
His mother raised her voice. “Don’t make jokes!”
“All right. It was a gal that works at the plant. She offered me a ride home.”
Sarah became alert. “But she didn’t drive you home!”
“Where did you go?”
“Guess!”
Sarah said, “Some roadhouse, I bet.”
“That’s exactly right. Olga—her name is Olga, and she’s a Hungarian spy, really—drove me to the Four Flamingoes. We had saki —that’s rice wine—with some cousins of the Emperor of Japan who work around here as butlers—” he looked up somberly—“Pardon the slur, Westcott, on an honorable profession—”
Mrs. Bailey said, “How can you two—? When—” Sarah said, “Is she pretty? And what’s her name?”
“Dinah,” said Jimmie. “She’s black. An Abyssinian spy—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said his father.
“Anyhow,” his sister observed, “you feel pretty good.”
Jimmie suddenly realized that he did feel pretty well. He could not, for the life of him, figure out why. Certainly he was not taking any excessive pleasure out of Biff’s revenge on himself. Certainly he had not grown so cold toward his family in two days that he enjoyed seeing them suffer. But he felt an unmistakable rise of his spirits.
He let them rise while his parents and his sister sank into a fresh morass of silence. Presently his mother whispered, “Right now, he might be—!”
“Steady!” said her husband.
Jimmie said, half reassuringly, half in protest of the morbid anticipations of his mother, “Oh, he’ll be all right. You could see that, by his face. That intern said so too.
He’s the kind who know their onions.”
“I suppose you”—his mother said hotly—“are a bit of a surgeon yourself! Along with all your other intellectual accomplishments! I suppose you could tell, from a glance, that Biff was perfectly all right!”
“Some,” Jimmie said quietly. “I’ve seen a lot of people hurt, you know.”
Nobody answered that. Sarah kept glancing at her brother with intentness. She was thinking. Her face slowly showed conclusion—illuminating conclusion; when it did, Jimmie said, “All right. What is it?”
“You think,” Sarah said, “that Biff brought on that accident on purpose, to skip being drafted! It amuses you—in a nice, fiendish way!”
Jimmie was startled. Her conclusion was accurate. Evidently, she had been wondering about his behavior at the hospital; and the selfsame theory had skipped through her own mind, and she had instantly fitted it upon him. The Baileys, he thought, were equipped with subtle minds—when they wanted to use them subtly. He wondered what he should say to Sarah—and he was staring at her lazily while he tried to make up his mind—when his father spoke for him.
“Sarah! I don’t want you to say anything like that again—ever! Jimmie was darned fine with Biff just now!”
Sarah said, “You’ve considered the possibility, too, Dad!”
“Sarah!!!” That was Mrs. Bailey.
Mr. Bailey, meanwhile, was facing his daughter and growing red. “What kind of a contemptible piece of perverted nonsense is this, daughter! Biff did no such thing.
Jimmie thought no such thing. No such foul idea ever touched my own mind! I’ve noticed several times recently that you have a taint of evil-thinking, though—like your mother’s mother. You watch that, Sarah!”
A fraction of Sarah’s black hair was immaculately made up in a flattened pompadour that stood out over her forehead like a segment of a fat, flat snake. The remainder billowed down her back in a Nubian cascade. When she swung her head about quickly, which she did often, her back hair flared like a dancer’s skirt, and her pompadour wobbled. It was alluring—under the proper hat. Au naturel, it was grotesque.
The rest of Sarah was handsome enough. An inexperienced young woman. A highly untamed young woman. That combination meant—she would get the experience, someday. Just as her mother had. And, like her mother, she would probably have an experience which was mostly confining and arbitrary, so her taming would consist of a shift of her libido to clubs, civic improvement, national affairs, and, no doubt, the rabid avoidance of international entanglements.
Jimmie smiled. “Withdraw the subject, Sarah. It’s out of bounds, anyhow. Biff’s hurt worse now than he’d ever have been in any training camp!”
That statement was not an argument. Nevertheless Mr. Bailey accepted it as conclusive. “Exactly!” he said, with a warm look at his son. It was the first warm look Jimmie had received from his father since the one that had been bent upon him at the station. Mr. Bailey was well disposed to people who helped him rationalize his way out of difficult situations.
The family drove down to the hospital promptly at nine. Jimmie walked. His insistence on walking was becoming a sort of insult to his family. But he went on insisting. “Only eight blocks or so,” he said. “I’ll make it—never fear.”
The family had gone in by the main entrance. But Jimmie, when he reached the hospital, went around to the emergency entrance, where the ambulances were unloaded.
He heard laughter down a corridor and he walked toward it. The intern who had been in the receiving room was kidding a nurse. On Jimmie’s appearance, the nurse smiled once, prettily, and hurried away.
“My name’s Bailey,” Jimmie said.
“Yes. I know. Mine’s Heiffler. Your brother’s fine.”
“I thought he would be. Were you there for the operation?”
Heiffler nodded. “I assisted the assistant. Cather’s good, you know. Damned good.
Too, good, for this burg. He likes it here. Why—I can’t imagine. I’m from Chicago.
Siddown.”
Jimmie sat. “Tell me the details.”
Heiffler reached for one of Jimmie’s cigarettes. “Compound fracture of both femurs. Set, now. Take traction. Three ribs busted. Both ankles more or less sprained.
Internal organs present and accounted for. No damage. Shaken up, bruised, contused, cut on knees. Shock—well, you can’t be sure. Some, anyway. Took ether perfectly. Asleep now. No lasting harm at all—to his body.” The intern’s brown eyes burned at Jimmie.
“Oh?”
“I rode the bus. Answered the call. Picked him off the street.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Semi.”
“Say anything?”
“He was laughing.”
“Laughing, eh.”
“Has your family talked to the cops?”
“No,” Jimmie said.
“I did. They left here a while ago. Kind of hard accident to explain. Clear road, good visibility, no traffic except your brother waiting on the stop street, and this dinge whizzing through on the boulevard.”
“Colored man, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“He hurt?”
“Killed. Deader’n hell. His car looked like an accordion.”
“Have his lights on?”
“You can’t ask him,” the intern answered petulantly. He regarded Jimmie a moment. “The sarge says the reflectors were warm, though. What he could find of ’em.”
He hesitated again. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I noticed how you questioned him—”
Jimmie said, “Yeah.”
“Nice kids, this generation! Brave, dependable, responsible, calm, sane, intelligent—wonderful!”
“You belong to it. You ought to know.”
“I’m a poor kike who worked my way through medical school after working it through college! I like people—decent ones—and I like medicine! I don’t like people that murder other people just because somebody is going to take away their candy!”
Jimmie smiled a little. “Maybe I can chivvy that lad into the army, someday, yet.
Maybe—maybe— he’ll payoff.”
“He won’t get in the army!”
“He will if I make him,” Jimmie answered fiercely.
“No. There’ll be a report of all this. You know. Nothing that your family, or the draft board, will ever see. Something only the army will see. A couple of army doctors, anyhow. They’re trying hard to weed out the screwballs, this time, before they demand any hard work from ’em. Your brother’ll be sent to camp, maybe, by the local board. He’ll come back—without knowing why.”
Jimmie thought for a while. He smiled again. “That might do him a lot of good.”
“I doubt it. It might. You’re just back from London, I hear.”
“Yesterday.”
“Can they stand another blitz—all winter—if they get it?”
“I hope so.”
“I don’t give a damn what you hope. What do you think?”
“I hope so. Y ou ought to know something about people’s ability to take it where they live.”
Heiffler chuckled. “You’re a pretty sound egg, Bailey—considering your brother!”
“He could have been sound.”
“Mmm. Environment—”
“That colored man—have a family?”
“Five kids. A wife. She came here looking for him, about eight. The police don’t hurry to notify those people.”
“I’d like her name and address.”
The intern wrote it down, after searching in a file. “How much steam has Hitler got left?”
Jimmie shrugged. “Does it matter?”
There was a pause. “I see what you mean.”
“Still, it would be worth a lot to American character, I think, if every city and town in the country was bombed once. Just once. Be a big rebirth of fundamental qualities. Cheap—at the price. As I heard a woman say last night, ‘We kill more people with cars than the British lost to bombs—and we don’t get upset!’ It’s a happy thought, Heiffler—especially on this occasion. Good night.”