Free Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw

Free, my head lolling from side to side, the sweat all over, the music wailing from my throat, drums, violins, French horn, triangle, as the bull watches with intelligent interest, bemused, hung by his horns to the rafters, his front legs, neatly slung over the top of the door, front row in the balcony.
    I am singing the chorus of “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” for the third time when I sense that the man behind me has turned and no longer has his face averted. I have to see the man’s face, I have to say, “Oh, friend, don’t die with your head averted —” and for a hundredth of a dream I look away from the appreciative, placid eyes of the bull, to know the face of my partner.
    Then the bull moves, the door trembles…
    These are the dreams of the Roman night
    He awoke.
    The room was dark and quiet and no light came in through the cracks in the shutters or through the split between the curtains. The curtains rustled softly in a light breeze.
    He lay tight between the sheets, cold with the sweat of the dream, on the lip of death. He had the feeling that if the dream had gone on a moment more he would have seen the man’s face and that the face would have been that of the drunk who had hit him earlier that night. In another room in Rome the drunk was snoring, smiling in his sleep, content with the night’s work.
    Why bulls? Jack thought. I haven’t been in Spain for three years.
    He sat up and turned on the light and looked at the clock on the table beside the bed. It was four fifteen. He reached for a cigarette and lit it. He rarely smoked and he hadn’t smoked in the middle of the night for many years, but he had to have something to do with his hands. He was surprised that his hands did not shake as he held the match.
    He sat on the edge of the bed, his bare feet touching the hotel carpet, thinking about his dream, still in the presence of death. It missed me that time, he thought. It will get me the next.
    The horned lion, he remembered, the white cow.
    The Presence in the room. It was no good, being alone with it, at four fifteen in the morning, and a cigarette was no weapon against it. He looked at the telephone and thought of calling his wife in Paris. Only what could he say to her? I have had a bad dream. Mother, Mother, I have had a bad dream in my Roman crib, and next time the horns will get me.
    He thought of the oceanic confusion of the Italian telephone system and the high irritated voices of the operators in the Paris central and the erratic ringing in the apartment on the quai and his wife getting out of bed and going out into the hall where the telephone was, frightened, with the dead light of dawn at the windows. He gave up the idea of telephoning.
    He looked at the rumpled bed and thought of sleeping. Then he gave up the idea of sleeping.
    Walter Bushell, he remembered, Carrington, Carr, McKnight, Myers, Davies, Swift, Ilenski, Carlotta Lee. The movie that night had called the roster of the past and he was confronted by names that had sunk away in his memory, confronted by the shapes and voices of people who had died or failed or become famous or who had disappeared from sight.
    The Night Watchman will whisper the roll call, on a scratched sound track.
    The dead, the missing, the wounded, the replacements, the fit for duty, appropriately dressed, wearing all decorations. Star with bar, the celluloid cross, the canceled check, the toupee, the pancake, the iron wreath of immortelles. Andrus First Corps (or was it the Second or Third or Ninth?), sometimes called Royal’s Foot, the survivors of the crossing of the Los Angeles River, drawn up on the sound stage, at parade rest.
    All present and unaccounted for.
    The heroes first, those Who Had Made the Supreme…
    Carrington. Dressed in a black suit and a black tie, philosophic, judgelike. Dead in Berlin, several years ago, on location, working on a picture (in all the papers—it had meant eighteen days of re-shooting, an extra cost of $750,000). A