Free Collected Stories of Carson McCullers by Carson Mccullers Page B

bottle. "Does it relieve you any?" she asked with slow calm. "I hope that times like this—"
    She felt his body stiffen and, like an aggravating child, he interrupted her words with a sudden burst of unmelodic humming.
    She eased her thighs from beneath his head and stood up. The room seemed to have grown smaller, messier, ranker with smoke and spilled whiskey. Bright lines of white weaved before her eyes. "Get up," she said dully. "I've got to pull out this darn couch and make it up."
    He folded his hands on his stomach and lay solid, unstirring.
    "You are detestable," she said, opening the door of the closet and taking down the sheets and blankets that lay folded on the shelves.
    When she stood above him once more, waiting for him to rise, she felt a moment of pain for the drained pallor of his face. For the shades of darkness that had crept down halfway to his cheekbones, for the pulse that always fluttered in his neck when he was drunk or fatigued.
    "Oh Marshall, it's bestial for us to get all shot like this. Even if you don't have to work tomorrow—there are years—fifty of them maybe—ahead." But the words had a false ring and she could only think of tomorrow.
    He struggled to sit up on the edge of the couch and when he had reached that position his head dropped down to rest in his hands. "Yes, Pollyanna," he mumbled. "Yes, my dear croaking Pol—Pol. Twenty is a lovely lovely age Blessed God."
    His fingers that weaved through his hair and closed into weak fists filled her with a sudden, sharp love. Roughly she snatched at the corners of the blanket and drew them around his shoulders. "Up now. We can't fool around like this all night."
    "Hollowness—" he said wearily, without closing his sagging jaw.
    "Has it made you sick?"
    Holding the blanket close he pulled himself to his feet and lumbered toward the card table. "Can't a person even
think,
without being called obscene or sick or drunk. No. No understanding of thought. Of deep deep thought in blackness. Of rich morasses. Morrasses. With their asses."
    The sheet billowed down through the air and the round swirls collapsed into wrinkles. Quickly she tucked in the corners and smoothed the blankets on top. When she turned around she saw that he sat hunched over the chessmen—ponderously trying to balance a pawn on a turreted castle. The red checked blanket hung from his shoulders and trailed behind the chair.
    She thought of something clever. "You look," she said, "like a brooding king in a bad-house." She sat on the couch that had become a bed and laughed.
    With an angry gesture he embrangled his hands in the chessmen so that several pieces clattered to the floor. "That's right," he said. "Laugh your silly head off. That's the way it's always been done."
    The laughs shook her body as though every fiber of her muscles had lost its resistance. When she had finished the room was very still.
    After a moment he pushed the blanket away from him so that it crumpled in a heap behind the chair. "He's blind," he said softly. "Almost blind."
    "Watch out, there's probably a draught—Who's blind?"
    "Joyce," he said.
    She felt weak after her laughter and the room stood out before her with painful smallness and clarity. "That's the trouble with you, Marshall," she said. "When you get like this you go on and on so that you wear a person out."
    He looked at her sullenly. "I must say you're pretty when you're drunk," he said.
    "1 don't get drunk—couldn't if I wanted to," she said, feeling a pain beginning to bear down behind her eyes.
    "How 'bout that night when we—"
    "I've told you," she said stiffly between her teeth, "I wasn't drunk. I was ill. And you would make me go out and—"
    "It's all the same," he interrupted. "You were a thing of beauty hanging on to that table. It's all the same. A sick woman—a drunk woman—ugh."
    Nervelessly she watched his eyelids droop down until they had hidden all the goodness in his eyes.
    "And a