Some Came Running Read Online Free Page A

them.
    Along roads and streets no longer plainly marked, amongst courthouses and buildings turned into grass grown piles of masonry, filled with the rotting records of an entire civilization, gone.
    And, in Germany, it was not hard to believe it completely. Here it was a little harder.
    At such times, it was not too difficult to believe that a man of his own years if he learned to throw a knife and taught himself the intricacies of archery he could plan ahead upon someday making himself chief of the Wabash Valley, or even chief of all Illinois.
    Except the man was always too lazy. And he wasn’t getting any younger, either. He was getting noticeably older, in fact. Getting bald and until the Army took him and worked it off him had been getting rounder with the unhealthy fat of eating and drinking too much. The comforts. It appeared to be a toss-up, which would outlast the other, he thought, the world or the man.
    But either way, the man would lose. Lose the bodies of women, lose the physical health, lose the witty intelligence, lose all the great loves the man might have had.
    That seemed to be what the emotional progression always ended up at. All his life, he thought, he had been afraid of getting syphilis. Well, it was a wild, weird, melancholy thing, when it took him, and the only thing to do was wear it out. Probably thinking about all the cripples was what had brought it on.
    Still holding the bottle, he left the window and went into the bedroom to the closet and from one of the sidepockets of the B-4 bag fished out his books. There were five, all Viking Portables. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wolfe—the five major influences his sister, Francine, had called them. She had sent them to him in Europe one by one as they came out.
    Dave grinned. Sister Francine. It was her address he had put on the hotel register. It was she he had been living with—and largely off of—in Hollywood when he got drafted. She was a good old gal, but she just couldn’t get over being an English teacher. It had given her an abnormal love for literature, she had to feel that what she did was important.
    Well, a lot of people labored under that self-delusion. He grinned derisively at the five major influences, the biggest mark of his time spent with her—what was it? eleven, almost twelve years. Off and on.
    Nevertheless, the sight of the five books there on the dresser, their pages swelled with too much reading, their covers warped from too many barracks bags, really touched him deeply. He had dragged them halfway across Europe, they had seen a lot of country with him.
    Affectionately, he arranged them between hotel water glasses for bookends and then, still holding the bottle from which he had not drunk yet, went back into the other room to the windows. Freddy was just coming back around the corner carrying a paper sack. Dave watched him go in under the marquee, feeling a strange sense of loss for that imposed fatherhood he had suffered in the 3615th QM Gasoline Supply Company. When the knock came on the door, he went over and opened it.
    The clerk set the ice bowl down on the table and immediately reached for his pocket.
    “They didn’t give me a deposit slip. They wrote it down in a bank book. It’s in the slot.”
    He looked at Dave questioningly.
    Dave nodded and went through the motions of opening the checkbook and checking the amount because he knew that was what the other wanted. Freddy appeared satisfied and handed him his change.
    “I had to get the whiskey,” he said.
    “That’s fine,” Dave said, and handed him back a five-dollar bill.
    “Thanks,” the clerk said. He stuck it in his pocket.
    “Do you want another drink?” Dave said.
    “Well, I might have just one.” His face was already liquor-flushed, and he did not look like a tough ex-vet anymore. Nowhere, that is, except for that one icily dispassionate, bright blue old soldier’s eye that some Army doctor had stuck in his face by way of