I held it for a minute, thinking, then stuck it in my back pocket and walked rapidly down to the library. I don’t know what I planned to do or what I meant to tell her, but none of it mattered because the library was dark and the chairs were up on the tables. I tried the knob anyway, but the door was locked.
The only two cars left at the faculty end of the parking lot were Danny Laverty’s Plymouth sedan and my Ford, the ragtop now looking rather raggedy. I could sympathize; I felt a bit raggedy myself.
“Mr. A! Wait up, Mr. A!”
It was Mike and Bobbi Jill, hurrying across the hot parking lot toward me. Mike was carrying a small wrapped present, which he held out to me. “Bobbi n me got you something.”
“Bobbi and
“We had to, man.”
I was moved to see that Bobbi Jill was crying, and pleased to see that the thick coating of Max Factor had disappeared from her face. Now that she knew the disfiguring scar’s days were numbered, she had stopped trying to conceal it. She kissed me on the cheek.
“Thank you so, so,
And they probably wouldn’t. That was a good thing. It didn’t make up for the locked and dark library, but yes — it was a very good thing.
“Open it,” Mike said. “We hope you like it. It’s for your book.”
I opened the package. Inside was a wooden box about eight inches long and two inches wide. Inside the box, cradled in silk, was a Waterman fountain pen with the initials GA engraved on the clip.
“Oh, Mike,” I said. “This is too much.”
“It wouldn’t be enough if it was solid gold,” he said. “You changed my life.” He looked at Bobbi. “Both our lives.”
“Mike,” I said, “it was my pleasure.”
He hugged me, and in 1962, that is not a cheap gesture between men. I was glad to hug him back.
“You stay in touch,” Bobbi Jill said. “Dallas ain’t far.” She paused.
“I will,” I said, but I wouldn’t, and they probably wouldn’t, either. They were going off into their lives, and if they were lucky, their lives would shine.
They started away, then Bobbi turned back. “It’s a shame you two broke up. It makes me feel real bad.”
“It makes me feel bad, too,” I said, “but it’s probably for the best.”
I headed home to pack up my typewriter and my other belongings, which I reckoned were still few enough to fit into no more than a suitcase and a few cardboard boxes. At the one stoplight on Main Street, I opened the little box and looked at the pen. It was a beautiful thing, and I was very touched that they had given it to me. I was even more touched that they had waited to say goodbye. The light turned green. I snapped the lid of the box closed and drove on. There was a lump in my throat, but my eyes were dry.
Living on Mercedes Street was not an uplifting experience.
Days weren’t so bad. They resounded with the shouts of children recently released from school, all dressed in too-big hand-me-downs; housewives kvetching at mailboxes or backyard clotheslines; teenagers driving rusty beaters with glasspack mufflers and radios blaring K-Life. The hours between 2:00 and 6:00 A.M. weren’t so bad, either. Then a kind of stunned silence fell over the street as colicky babies finally slept in their cribs (or dresser drawers) and their daddies snored toward another day of hourly wages in the shops, factories, or outlying farms.
Between four and six in the afternoon, however, the street was a jangle of mommas screaming at kids to get the hell in and do their chores and poppas arriving home to scream at their wives, probably because they had no one else to scream at. Many of the wives gave back as good as they got. The drunkadaddies started to roll in around eight, and things really got noisy around eleven, when either the bars closed or the money ran out. Then I heard slamming doors, breaking glass, and screams of pain as some loaded drunkadaddy tuned up on the wife, the kiddies, or both. Often red lights would strobe in through my drawn curtains as the cops arrived. A couple of times there were gunshots, maybe fired at the sky, maybe not. And one early morning, when I went out to get the paper, I saw a woman with dried blood crusting the lower half of her face. She was sitting on the curb in front of a house four down from mine, drinking a can of Lone Star. I almost went down to check on her, even though I knew how unwise it would be to get involved with the life of this low-bottom working neighborhood. Then she saw me looking at her and hoisted her middle finger. I went back inside.
