“Nobody’s here, Mr. Ganaway, just myself and Pinky.”
Ganaway signed and shoved the pad at him with some petulance. It looked like one of those things you attended to yourself, like getting a note renewed; when you had had trouble getting the loan in the first place. He watched Sam out of a corner of his mind, so to speak, as he wiped the table, swept the broken glass and several ice cubes into the pan, mopped up the floor; most of his mind was on how to plant it gently in the boy’s head that the interview was over and then, after giving him time to accept that, to rush away: Got to run. Sorry to go. Glad to have met you, son—
“You said something a minute ago about some big ideas you were having when that thing hit you,” just to let him talk about himself a minute, while Ganaway made arrangements with his leg muscles to get ready to lift him.
The young man smiled at his fingers rotating his glass modestly a few times. “They were just ideas. Not very ‘realistic,’ you might say. Not the sort of thing you would put any money in.”
It made Mr. Ganaway swallow a mouthful of air. Something about it had the peculiar rising tilt of “pay-off,” and he gave the ice in his chaser a careless stir with his first finger as he sometimes did after picking up a three-card draw one at a time and seeing the last one match the pair. “Well, that would depend, wouldn’t it?” not eagerly but wanting it understood that if this was a proposition the latch-string was on the outside.
“It was something about the change-over points.”
Ganaway called up a judicious nod and managed an “I see,” though he certainly did not.
“The point where water in the root becomes sap in the trunk, where the food you eat becomes the idea. The point where hypothesis changes over into dogma. Where the fish became the bird, where the vegetation became the coal.”
“Very interesting,” Mr. Ganaway told him, feeling a little dizzy.
“If you could isolate the exact point at which something apparently becomes something else you might be able to understand the most important change-over point of all. I mean the point where life apparently changes over into—”
“Just a minute now, son,” Mr. Ganaway broke in, sensing what the next word was going to be, mind leaping to his cap on the chair, to his car just outside, and in a strange arc of association to what he believed were his unrolled-up windows.
“—over into something else.”
“Excuse me a minute, young man, while I go roll up my windows,” glad to think his voice sounded something like his own; enough like it to make him want to give all this a businesslike windup, because Mr. What’s-his-name was about to see the last of J. W. Ganaway. “It would mean quite a capital outlay to handle those ideas the way they ought to be handled. Let me think about it for a few days—and nights—and get in touch with you. What’s your phone number, your extension at the Hospital?”
The young man shook his head with a quaint sort of dolorous smile, and Mr. Ganaway said quickly, “Well, you get in touch with me. That’s better anyhow. Call me at the office. That’s where I’ve spent my life.” He meant to say “spend my life” (more ahead-looking), the little stock pleasantry of business circles, and he considered correcting it, annoyed at the slip; but that would make it worse.
Then glancing again at the phone on the bar, which seemed to exert a magnetic pull on his eyes, the thought struck him there was no reason Sam shouldn’t make the call; forget the car, the windows, write on the back of his scorecard a line to Sam: go in the office, phone Veterans Hospital, send somebody right now to pick up one of their boys (underscoring “right now”).
He was looking about for Sam, who wasn’t behind the bar, when the young man said, “I might say this isn’t any reflection on your character, Mr. Ganaway. I’d like to be more explicit but it’s just about as inexplicable as the calculus of quarternions if you’ve never had algebra,” lifting back a shirt cuff with his first finger and glancing at his wrist.
For an instant Ganaway forgot the explanation he had hit on of the boy as escaped patient, his thoughts springing from the boy’s watch to a thought that made him quite unable to speak. He had been operated on fairly early in the morning and though he couldn’t recall precisely when he had come out from under the anesthetic he remembered a bedside clock that Bess had brought down and he was pretty sure now it had said about quarter to two because he remembered thinking his dinner time was not far off and he would certainly want no dinner that day; he had probably waked up a few minutes before that, maybe about one-thirty. He couldn’t refrain from leaning over to look at the wristwatch, and the young man said in an accommodating tone, “One twenty-four.”
“Son,” Ganaway said hastily, wanting to hear the reassuring sound of his own voice and finding he had decided at some point he would play along with this screwball until Sam got back from wherever the hell he was, “I’m afraid you couldn’t have caught me at a worse time. A daughter getting married, another daughter graduating from school. My wife hasn’t the remotest notion how to take care of money. I’ve got a lot of new construction I have to watch over at the warehouse. I don’t see any way in the world I can get off now. Next year, maybe.”
“It’s practically never convenient.”
“Oh, I don’t know. There were times after the letter about Jim junior—”
“Yes, but they prefer it on the up-stroke, so to speak. If possible. It’s not always possible. This agreement of ours—”
“What agreement, son?” He was tired of it and he didn’t like to hear such words even out of a nut from the Hospital. “Have you got something there I signed? Some contract? Something that’ll stand up in court?”
The young man smiled a “Now, Mr. Ganaway!”
“How do you propose to prove I agreed to this thing if you can’t produce my signature?”
“We can do better than that, sir. We can produce the whole business.”
Mr. Ganaway glanced about among the tables for a call-bell he could bang for Sam but the nearest one seemed to be across the room on the bar. “How do you mean, son?”
“We can run off the whole episode for you, if you like—if you’ve forgotten. It’s right up there not very far. Won’t take more than a couple of minutes—”
“Never mind, never mind. I’ll accept your word for it.”
“I want you to be completely satisfied.”
“I said never mind!—Pardon my brusqueness, son. I don’t mean to be rude but it’s getting on to my dinner time and I’ve got to go.” He pulled in a deep breath with which he planned to get hold of Sam by a simple shout when, almost invisible in the shadow of the doorway to the locker room, he saw Sam’s face and the slightly paler face of Pinky the locker-room boy. Or rather he saw the whites of four fixed eyes.
He wiggled his hand aloft without, he hoped, too much show of impatience, and Sam said something to Pinky and started across the floor, Pinky standing back of the doorjamb looking after him. “Everything all right, Mr. Ganaway?”
“Certainly, certainly! Let me see your pencil.”
“You already signed, Mr. Ganaway.”
“Never mind. Let me see your pencil. And your pad. I want you to make a phone call.”
Sam glanced around at Pinky as he fumbled, but Ganaway hardly noticed it through his awareness that the young man had stood up and was putting on his raincoat, almost as if he knew what Mr. Ganaway was about and didn’t want to be taken back to the Ward.
It occurred to Mr. Ganaway he might let Sam go on and make the call, to save the hospital people from chasing hither and yon all over town, but after all that was their worry; if the boy was going to leave of his own accord, let him leave. When a pain in your chest passed its peak and started to subside you didn’t try to call it back. He laid the pencil-stub on the pad and politely stood up too, recalling that one of the basic functions of politeness was to speed the parting guest.
But the young man, fastening the belt of his coat, turned his left hand over and glanced at his watch, and Mr. Ganaway found himself for a second, willy-nilly, again in the moment when the boy had done that before; found his convictions of the boy’s identity change back into the ones he had had then. And when the boy approached the table, holding out his hand, instead of simply taking it in a hearty farewell Ganaway thought of the earlier voice in himself that had cautioned him it might be better not to touch the youth, if he could dodge the contact without hurting the boy’s feelings.
He turned his eyes to jabbing the scorecard in his pocket as if he hadn’t seen the hand, and having gone this far, on his feet and all, it seemed suddenly reasonable enough to go on through with it. “Excuse me, son, for having to rush out on you like this. My folks are waiting dinner on me.” He zippered up the front of his golf jacket (a present this Christmas from Bess), picked up his tweed cap and without pausing to put it on started out across the tile floor between the tables with eager strides.
Near the middle of the room it occurred to him he was leaving with unforgivable discourtesy and he turned half round and called, “Good-bye,” over his shoulder, waving the cap in a flourish of relief as his left shoe went from under him on an ice-cube, tumbling him backward and swinging the base of his head against a corner of the third table from the fireplace.
