Текст книги "A Spool of Blue Thread"

Автор книги: Anne Tyler

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“Good God, Linnie.”

“Let’s go up in the loft, I mean it. It’s more comfortable there; it’s got hay.”

He ignored her and headed for the rear of the barn, across creaky, straw-littered floorboards. She said, “I don’t know why you’re being so contrary.” She reached out in the dark, feeling for something and then yanking, and an overhead bulb lit up and pained his eyes. These people had electricity even in their outbuildings. He saw that he was standing next to a rusted plow. A thin slant of trampled-down hay was piled in the corner beyond. Linnie’s face looked all crinkly in the sudden brightness, and his did too, he supposed. She was wearing a dress that seemed a mite low in the neck to him. He was surprised her mother had allowed it; Linnie always made out that her mother was so strict. He could see the two mounds of her breasts swelling above the fabric, but it didn’t affect him. He pulled his Camels from his shirt pocket. “What’d you want to talk about?” he asked.

“You can’t smoke in here!”

He put the Camels away.

“Go ahead and say it,” he said.

“Say what?”

“Say what you brought me here to tell me.”

She drew herself up straight. “Junior,” she said, “I know why you’ve stopped meeting me. You’re thinking I’m too young for you.”

“What? Wait.”

“But age is just a date on a calendar. You aren’t being fair. You’re going by something I can’t help. And you can see that I’m a woman. Haven’t I acted like a woman? Don’t I feel like a woman?”

She took one of his hands and laid it above the U of her neckline, where the swelling began. He said, “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“I want to tell you that you’re being narrow-minded.”

“Shoot, Linnie,” he said. “You’re not in trouble?”

“In trouble! No!”

He didn’t know why she sounded so shocked; they hadn’t always been careful. But he felt such a weight lifting off him that he laughed aloud, and then he bent to set his lips on hers and his hand slid lower on her neckline, down inside it, where it didn’t seem she was wearing a brassiere although she surely could have used one. He squeezed, and she drew a sharp breath, and he pressed her back toward the corner of the barn and laid her down on the hay, not once taking his lips away. He kicked his boots off, somehow. He got free of his overalls and his BVDs all in one move. Linnie was struggling out of her drawers, and just as he reached to help her he heard … not words but a sort of bellow, like the sound a bull makes, and then, “Great God Almighty!”

He rolled over and scrambled to his feet. A skinny little stick of a man was lunging toward him with both hands outstretched, but Junior stepped aside. The man landed against the plow and hastily righted himself. “Clifford!” he roared. “Brandon!”

Junior had the confused impression that the man was trying out different names on him, but then from the direction of the house he heard another voice call, “Daddy?”

“Get out here! Bring a gun!”

“Daddy, wait, you don’t understand,” Linnie said.

But he was too busy trying to clamp his hands around Junior’s throat. Junior thought he should be given a moment to get his overalls back on; it put him at a disadvantage. He pried Mr. Inman’s fingers loose without much difficulty, but when he spun toward where his clothes lay the man grabbed hold of him again. Then, “Freeze!” somebody shouted, and he turned his head to find two boys standing in the doorway training Winchesters on him.

He froze.

“Hand me that,” Mr. Inman ordered, and the younger boy stepped forward and passed him his rifle.

Mr. Inman backed up just far enough to put the length of the rifle between himself and Junior, and then he cocked the lever and told Junior, “Turn around.”

Junior turned so he was facing the two boys, who seemed more interested than angry. They had their eyes fixed on his crotch. Junior felt the cold, perfect circle of the rifle muzzle in the dead center of the back of his neck. It prodded him. “Forward,” Mr. Inman said.

“Well, if I could just—”

“Forward!”

“Sir, could I just get my clothes?”

“No, you cannot get your clothes. Could he get his clothes! Just go. Get out of my barn and get off of my land and get out of this state, you hear? Because if you’re not two states over by morning I will set the law on you, I swear to God. I’ve half a mind to do it anyhow, except I don’t want the shame on my family.”

“But, Daddy, he’s half nekkid,” Linnie said.

“You shut up,” Mr. Inman told her.

He jabbed the rifle harder into the back of Junior’s neck and Junior lurched forward, sending a last desperate glance toward the crumple of his clothes in the hay. The toe of one boot was poking out from underneath them.

It was dark in the yard, but the bulb above the back door of the house lit him clearly, he could tell, because the people crowding out on the stoop all gasped and murmured – women and a couple of men and a whole bunch of children, all ages, their eyes as round as moons, the little boys nudging one another.

It was a blessing to leave the circle of light and step into the deep, velvety blackness just beyond. With one last jab of the rifle muzzle, Mr. Inman came to a halt and let Junior stumble on by himself.

He hadn’t walked barefoot since he was in grade school. Every stob and pebble made him wince.

Next to the Inmans’ yard it was woods, the scrubby kind thick with briers to snatch at his bare skin, but that was better than the open road, where headlights could pick him out at any moment. He found himself a middling-size tree that he could stand behind, close enough that he could still see pieces of the Inmans’ lighted windows through the undergrowth. He was hoping for Linnie Mae to come out eventually with his clothes.

Gnats whined in his ears and tree frogs piped. He shifted from foot to foot and swatted away something feathery, a moth. His heartbeat got back to normal.

Linnie didn’t come. He supposed they had locked her up.

After some time he took his shirt off and tied the sleeves around his waist with the body of the shirt hanging down in front like an apron. Then he stepped out from behind the tree and made his way to the road. The ground alongside it was stony, so he walked on the asphalt, which was smooth and still faintly warm from a day’s worth of sun. With every step, he listened for the sound of a car. If it was the Moffats’ car, he would need to flag it down. He could already picture how the twins would snicker at the sight of him.

One time he heard a faint hum up ahead and he saw a kind of radiance on the horizon. He ducked back into the bushes just in case and kept a watch, but the road stayed empty and the radiance faded. Whoever it was must have cut off someplace. He returned to the pavement.

If the Moffats did come, would he recognize their car in time? Would he mistake another car for theirs and get caught by strangers without his pants on?

This was the kind of fix that the men he worked with told jokes about, but when he tried to imagine talking about it ever, to anybody, he couldn’t. To begin with, the girl was thirteen. Right there that put a different light on things.

Sawyer Road took so long to show up, he started worrying he had passed it. He could have sworn it was closer. He crossed to the other side of the pavement so he’d be sure not to miss it, although the other side was low-growth fields and he would be easier to spot there. He heard a fluttering overhead and then the hoot of an owl, which for some reason struck him as comforting.

Much, much later than he had expected, he came across the narrow pale band of Sawyer Road and he turned onto it. The gravel was vicious, but he had stopped bothering to mince as he walked. He trudged heavily, obstinately, taking a peculiar pleasure in the thought that the soles of his feet must be cut to ribbons.

He hoped Linnie had found a way out of the house by now and was standing in the yard calling “Junior? Junior?” and wringing her hands. Good luck to her, because she was never going to lay eyes on him again as long as she lived. If only she hadn’t noticed that he’d been caught without his overalls on, he might have been able to forgive her, but “Daddy, he’s half nekkid!” she’d said, and now whatever little feeling he might have had for her was dead and gone forever.

He didn’t know what time it was when he finally hit Seven Mile Road. He walked in the very center, where the asphalt was smoothest, but his feet were so shredded by then that even that was torture.

When he reached home the sky was lightening, or maybe he’d just turned into some kind of night-visioned animal. He nudged a sleeping dog aside with his foot, opened the screen door and stepped into the close, musty dark and the sound of snoring. In the bedroom, he shucked off the shirt tied around his waist and felt his way to the chifforobe and dug out a pair of BVDs. Stepping into them was the sweetest feeling in the world. He sank onto the rumpled sheets next to Jimmy and closed his eyes.

But not to sleep. Oh, no. His whole walk home he had been longing for sleep, but now he was thoroughly, electrically awake, watching vivid pictures flash past. The party guests gawking on the stoop. His skinny white legs with no pants on. Linnie’s witless face and her dropped jaw.

He’s half nekkid!

He hated her.

During his first months in Baltimore, those pictures could make him wince and snap his head violently to one side, trying to shake them out of his brain. Gradually, though, they grew fainter. He had other things to think about. Just making his way in the world, for instance. Figuring out how it all worked. Adjusting to the unsettling look of the horizon in these parts – the jumble of low, close buildings wherever he turned, the lack of those broad-shouldered purple mountains rising in the distance to give him a sense of protection.

At some point, it occurred to him that it was highly unlikely Mr. Inman would have set the law on him. As the man had said himself, he didn’t want to shame his family. All Junior would have needed to do was keep out of the way for a while, and maybe partake in a fistfight or two if he chanced to be in the wrong place. But this realization did not cause him to pack up and go home. For one thing, he found it surprisingly easy to put his family behind him. His mother was the one he had cared about, and she had died when he was twelve. His father had turned mean after that, and Junior had never been close to his brothers or his sister, who were all considerably older. (Had he, in fact, just been looking for any excuse to get away from them all?) But what was even more important: by then he had discovered work. Prideful work, the kind that makes you eager to get out of bed every morning.

When he’d asked after Trouble’s whereabouts in the lumberyard that day, it had been in the back of his mind that maybe he’d get a job with him. Trouble had always struck him as interesting. He took his wood so seriously. In fact, his nickname was no accident: the mere appearance of his truck in the lumberyard would bring good-natured groans from the men, because they knew he would want to study each and every board as if he were looking to marry it. It shouldn’t have any knotholes, any chewed-off ends or unsightly grain. (That was the word he used: “unsightly.”) He built fine furniture, was why. He used to work at a factory in High Point but he quit in disgust and set up in Parryville, where his wife’s people were from. And he’d more than once told the men in the lumberyard that he’d a good mind to strike out from Parryville, too, and go up north where there was more of a market for his kind of product.

So when Junior walked over to his brother-in-law’s house the morning he left home (wearing his lace-up church shoes that made his battered feet hurt even worse), he asked if they could stop by the lumberyard on their way out of town. All he got at the lumberyard was a mention of Baltimore, but that would have to suffice. He climbed back into the truck and they drove to the gas station on Highway 80. “Tell the family I’ll send them a postcard once I know where I’m at,” he said when he got out. Raymond lifted one hand from the steering wheel and then pulled back onto the road, and Junior went into the station to look for somebody heading north.

He had a paper sack with two sets of clothes inside and a razor and a comb, and twenty-eight dollars in his pocket.

But he should have realized Trouble wouldn’t want to hire him. Trouble liked to work alone. (And probably lacked the money for a helper, anyhow.) After Junior had spent two days tracking his shop down, the man didn’t offer him so much as a drink of water, although he was civil enough. “Work? You mean lumberyard work?” he asked, all the while keeping his eyes on the drawer-front he was beveling.

Junior said, “I had in mind something that takes some skill. I’m good at making things. I’d like to make something that I could be proud of afterwards.”

Trouble did pause in his beveling, then. He looked up at Junior and said, “Well, there’s a house builder in these parts who seems to me real particular. Clyde Ward, his name is; I sometimes make cabinets for him. I might could tell you where you would find him.” He also suggested Mrs. Davies’s boardinghouse as a dwelling place, which Junior was glad to hear about because he’d been staying at a sailors’ hotel down near the harbor where they expected him to sing hymns every evening.

After that, he never saw Trouble again. But he rented a room at Mrs. Davies’s, in her three-story house in Hampden that must once have belonged to a mill owner or at least a manager, and he went to work for Clyde Ward, the most exacting builder he had ever come across. It was from Mr. Ward that he learned the great pleasure of doing things right.

He did send his family a postcard, eventually, but they never wrote him back and he didn’t send another. That was okay; he didn’t even think about them. He didn’t think about Linnie Mae, either. She was a tiny, dim person buried in the back of his mind alongside that other person, his past self – that completely unrelated self who went out carousing every weekend and spent his money on cigarettes and fast girls and bootleg whiskey. The new Junior had a plan. He was going to be his own boss someday. His life was a straight, shining road now with a clear destination, and he supposed he ought to thank Linnie for setting his feet upon it.

12

LINNIE’S FIRST ACT in Baltimore was to get them both evicted.

During the night, Junior had awakened twice – the first time with his heart racing because he sensed the presence of somebody else in the room, but then he found himself in the armchair and thought, “Oh, it’s only Linnie,” which came as a relief, under the circumstances; and the second time when he was jolted upright from what he believed was a dreamless sleep by the sudden realization that when Linnie had said she was of legal age now, she had probably meant legal marrying age. “She’s like a … like one of those monkeys,” he thought, “twining her arms tight around the organ grinder’s neck.” That time, he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep for hours.

Even so, he rose early, both out of natural inclination and because there was always a rush for the bathroom in the mornings. He dressed and went to shave, and then he came back to the room and tapped the sharp peak of Linnie’s shoulder. “Get up,” he said.

She rolled over and looked at him. He had the impression that she had been awake for some time; her eyes were wide and clear. “You can’t stay here while I’m at work,” he told her. “You have to go out. There’s a girl comes upstairs to clean in the mornings.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.” And she sat up and drew back the covers and swung her feet to the floor. She was wearing a nightgown that would have worked better in the summer, a thin white cotton petticoat-thing that barely covered her knees. It was the first time he had seen her out of her winter wraps, and he realized she had changed more than he had first thought. She might still be too thin, but she had lost her coltish gawkiness. Her calves and her upper arms had more of a curve to them.

When she stood up he turned away from her so as not to see her dressing, and he went over to the bureau. A tin oatmeal canister sat on top; he opened it and took out the loaf of store bread that he kept shut away from the mice. Then he raised the window sash and reached for the milk. “Breakfast,” he told Linnie.

“That’s your breakfast? Doesn’t your landlady give you breakfast?”

“Not me. Some of the others, they can afford to get their three squares here but I can’t.”

He shut the window and uncapped the milk bottle and took a swig. (It was something of a pleasure to show off how handily he dealt with adversity.) Then he held the bottle toward Linnie, still carefully not looking at her, and he felt her lift it out of his grasp. “But what about in hot weather?” she asked. “How’ll we keep the milk from souring when it’s hot?”

We? He felt that organ-grinder panic again, but he answered levelly. “In hot weather I switch to buttermilk,” he said. “Can’t much go wrong with that.”

The milk bottle jogged his elbow and he took it and passed her a slice of bread in exchange, keeping his face set stubbornly toward the window where the smoke stood up from the chimneys outside as if it were too cold to drift. Tonight he should bring the milk in; he didn’t want it freezing solid.

Linnie Mae was unclasping her suitcase now, by the sound of it. Junior folded his own slice of bread into quarters to get it over with quicker, and he took a large bite and chewed doggedly, listening to the rustles behind him. Then he heard the click of the door lock and he wheeled around. She was grasping the doorknob to turn it; he lunged past her and threw himself in front of her. It startled her, he could tell. She drew back as if she thought he might hit her, which he wouldn’t have, but still, it was just as well she knew he meant business.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked her.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“You can’t. Someone’ll see you.”

“But I need to pee, Junior. Bad.”

“The café down the street has a bathroom,” he said. “Get your coat on; we’re leaving. I’ll show you where the café is.” She was wearing what looked like a summer dress, belted and short-sleeved. Didn’t they have winter back home anymore, or what? And on her feet were those same high-heeled shoes. “Put on warmer shoes, too,” he said.

“I didn’t bring any warmer shoes.”

How on earth did her mind work? “Come on the way you are, then,” he said. “It’s too risky to use the bathroom here; it’s six men deep in the mornings.”

She took her coat from the closet and put it on so painstakingly that it seemed she was bound and determined to irk him, and then she lifted her purse down from the closet shelf. Meanwhile, Junior set the milk back outside, and then he hunched himself into his jacket and went over to the bed. The suitcase lay there wide open, brazen as you please, and he closed it and bent to slide it underneath the bed, way back toward the wall. After one last look around the room, he said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

He peeked out the door first, making sure the hall was empty. He motioned her out ahead of him and locked the door behind them, and they walked the length of the hall and down the two flights of stairs without encountering anyone. They crossed the foyer, which was the most dangerous part, but the parlor door stayed shut. Junior heard the clink of china and he smelled coffee. He wasn’t one for coffee himself but the smell always made him long for some – or just for people eating breakfast together, a slant of morning sunlight across the tablecloth.

Out on the sidewalk, the cold air at first seemed a blessing. (The third floor always collected the heat.) Junior came to a stop and pointed toward the intersection with Dutch Street, where the sign for the café was plainly visible. “But what if it’s not open yet?” Linnie asked him. She was no longer bothering to keep her voice down, although they were standing right under Mrs. Davies’s parlor window.

“It’ll be open. This is a workingmen’s neighborhood.”

“And after that, what? Where will I go?”

“That’s your business,” he said.

“Can’t I come with you to where you work? I could help out, maybe. I know how to hammer and saw some.”

“That is a bad idea,” he said.

“Or just wait in your car, then! I can’t stay out in the cold all day.”

She was standing too close to him, lifting her face to him. He could actually feel her warm foggy breath and smell the sleepy smell of it. Her hair had a frowsy, uncombed look and her nose was pink.

“You should have thought of that before you came,” he said. “Go sit in the train station or something. Ride the streetcar up and down. I’ll meet you out front of the café a little after five.”

“Five!”

“Then we’ll talk about your plans.”

He could tell from the way her forehead cleared that she thought he meant their plans. He didn’t bother setting her straight.

The work he was doing that week was for an elderly couple in Homeland, flooring an unfinished attic and changing a louvered attic vent into a window. He had found it the way he found most work these days: driving out to one of the better-off neighborhoods and knocking on people’s doors. In his glove box he kept the letter of reference Mr. Ward had written for him when Ward Builders had had to shut down, but people generally took Junior’s word for it that he knew what he was doing. He made a point of wearing clean clothes and shaving daily and speaking respectfully and trying his best to watch his grammar. Then once he had a job lined up, he would drive off for whatever materials he needed; he had a credit arrangement with a builders’ supply in Locust Point. He would return with the Essex loaded down like an ant beneath an oversized breadcrumb. Best decision he’d ever made was buying that Essex. Lots of workmen had to transport their materials on the streetcar – pay the extra fare for their lengths of pipe or lumber and enlist the conductor’s help in roping them to the outside of the car – but not Junior.

This particular job wasn’t very interesting, but it was a good deal more useful than the hand-carved mantels and built-in knickknack shelves of his days with Mr. Ward. The couple’s grown daughter was moving back home with her four children and her husband, who had lost his job, and the attic was where the children would sleep. Besides, Junior knew that sooner or later, things were bound to get better. Folks in these parts would be wanting their mantels and their knickknack shelves once again, and then his would be the name that came to mind.

People in Homeland could often be clannish, but this couple acted friendlier and some days the wife called up from the bottom of the attic staircase to say that she was leaving a little something for his lunch. Today she left an egg sandwich cut on the diagonal, and he ate one half but he wrapped the other half in his handkerchief to take back to Linnie. Even though he was desperate to get shed of her, it wasn’t all bad knowing that somebody somewhere was waiting for him.

Junior hadn’t had much luck with girls in Baltimore, to tell the truth. Girls up north were just harder. Harder to figure out and harder-natured, both.

So he knocked off from work a tiny bit early, more like four thirty than five.

He found a parking spot just half a block past Mrs. Davies’s – one advantage of getting home at this hour. As he was maneuvering into it he chanced to look back toward the boardinghouse, and what should he see but that floppy old-fashioned felt hat and Linnie Mae beneath it, wrapped in a huge denim jacket, sitting on Mrs. Davies’s front steps as bold as brass. He didn’t know which was more upsetting: that she’d show herself in public like that or that she’d managed to get hold of her hat, which she had not been wearing that morning, and the jacket that hung in the back of his closet waiting for warmer weather. How had she done that? Had she gone back to the room? Had she picked his lock, or what?

He slammed the car door getting out, and she looked his way and her face lit up. “It’s you!” she called.

“What in hell, Linnie?”

She stood up, clutching the jacket tighter around her. She was wearing her coat underneath. “Now, Junie, don’t get mad,” she said as soon as he was closer.

“You were supposed to wait at the corner.”

“I tried to wait at the corner, but there isn’t any place to sit.”

Junior took hold of her elbow, not gently, and steered her away from the steps to stand in front of the house next door. “How come you’re wearing my jacket?” he asked her.

“Well,” she said, “it’s like this. First I went into the café to use the bathroom, but they said I couldn’t on account of I hadn’t bought anything. So I told them I’d be buying a hot chocolate after, and then I sat with that chocolate and sat with it; I’d take a little sip only every thirty minutes or so. But they were real inhospitable, Junior. After a time, they said they needed my stool. So I left, and I walked a long ways, and this one place I found a slat bench and I sat a while, and this old lady and me got to talking and she told me there was a breadline three streets over; I should come with her because she was going; you had to get in line early or they would run out of food. It was not but ten or ten thirty but she said we should go right then to hold our places. I said, ‘Breadline!’ I said, ‘Charity?’ But I went with her because I figured, well, anyhow it would be someplace warm to sit. So we stood in that line it seems like forever; all these people stood with us, and some of them were children, Junior, and I lost all feeling in my feet; they were like two blocks of ice. And then when time came for the place to open, you know what? They wouldn’t let us inside. They just came out on the stoop and handed each of us a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, two slices of bread with a hunk of cheese in between. I asked the old lady with me, I said, ‘Don’t they let us sit down anywhere?’ ‘Sit down!’ she said. ‘We’re lucky enough to have something to put in our stomachs. Beggars can’t be choosers,’ she said. And I thought, ‘Well, she’s right. We’re beggars.’ I thought, ‘I have just stood in a breadline to beg my lunch from strangers,’ and I started crying. I left the old lady and walked I-don’t-know-where-all eating my sandwich and crying, and I didn’t have a notion where I was anymore or where the café was that I was going to meet up with you in front of, and that sandwich was dry as sawdust, let me tell you, and I wanted a drink of water and my feet felt like knives. And then I looked up and what did I see? Mrs. Davies’s boardinghouse. It looked like home, after all I’d been through. And I thought, ‘Well, he told me the girl came to clean in the mornings. And it’s not morning anymore, so—’ ”

Junior groaned.

“—so I walked right in, and it was so warm and toasty in the foyer! I walked up the stairs with no one to see me and I went to your room and tried to open the door but it was locked.”

“You knew that,” Junior said. “You saw me lock it.”

“Did I? Well, I don’t know; I must have been distracted. You hurried me out of there so fast …‘Well,’ I thought, ‘okay, I’ll just sit in the hall and wait. At least it’s warm,’ I thought, and I sat right down on the floor in front of your bedroom door.”

He groaned again.

“And next thing I knew, it was ‘Awk!’ I think I must have fallen asleep. ‘Awk!’ I heard, and there was this colored girl standing over me, eyes as big as moons. ‘Miz Davies! Come quick! A burg-ular!’ she screeches. When she could clearly see I was dressed nicely. And Mrs. Davies heard and came running, came clattering up the stairs out of breath and ‘Explain yourself!’ she says. I was thinking since she was a woman, maybe she’d have a kind heart. I threw myself on her mercy. ‘Mrs. Davies,’ I said, ‘I’ll be straight with you: I’m up from down home to see Junior because the two of us are in love. And it’s so cold outside, you wouldn’t believe, so blessed cold and all I’ve had all day is a little hot chocolate and a breadline sandwich and one sip of milk from Junior’s windowsill and a slice of his store-bought bread—’ ”

“Lord God, Linnie,” Junior said in disgust.

“Well, what could I say? I figured since she was a woman … wouldn’t you think? I thought she might say, ‘Oh, you poor little thing. You must be chilled to the bone.’ But she was ugly to me, Junior. I should have guessed it, from that dyed hair. She said, ‘Out!’ She said, ‘You and him both, out! Here I was thinking Junior Whitshank was a decent hardworking man!’ she says. ‘Why, I could have got way higher rent from someone who’d take his meals here, but I let him stay on out of Christian spirit and this is the thanks I get? Out,’ she says. ‘I’m not running a brothel,’ and she flips up this ring of keys hanging on her belt and unlocks your door and says, ‘Pack all your things, yours and his both, and get out.’ ”

Junior gripped his forehead with one hand.

“Then she stood right there like I was some sort of criminal, Junior, watching every move while I packed. Colored girl standing next to her with eyes still big as moons. What did they think I would steal? What would I want to steal? I couldn’t find any suitcase for you and so I asked real polite, I said, ‘Mrs. Davies,’ I said, ‘do you think I might borrow a cardboard box if I promised to bring it back later?’ But she said, ‘Ha! As if I’d trust you!’ Like a little old cardboard box was something precious. I had to pack your things in a tied-up pair of your overalls, for lack of anything better.”

“You packed all I owned?” Junior asked.

“All in this big lumpy tied-up hobo bundle. And then I had to—”

“You packed my Prince Albert tin?”

“I packed every little thing, I tell you.”

“But did you pack my Prince Albert tin, Linnie.”

“Yes, I packed your Prince Albert tin. Why’re you making such a fuss about it? I thought you smoked Camels.”

“I don’t smoke anything nowadays,” he said bitterly. “It costs too much.”