Free Some Came Running by James Jones Page A

doctor’s wife, minus the doctor’s savings. He proceeded to settle down in Parkman again. He moved in on the other side of town and went back to his welding, and he and his lawful wife never spoke to each other again.
    Up to then, they had been an ordinary family of an ordinary welder who did not get drunk over ordinarily much.
    He remembered the night they finally realized he was missing. Frank called them all in while their mother remained alone in her bedroom, they sat down around the kitchen table, and Frank said we must never ever mention this to Mother again, we must never mention his name again, he is dead, he no longer exists by the Grace of God and our own ingenuity, we will make out, it will probably kill her, and that was when Francine said scornfully nuts! to both counts and Frank said all right it’s going to be embarrassing and who’s going to be making the money? It looks like I am, and you take it or leave it. Frank was then a senior in high school. So was Francine, since they were twins.
    So they never mentioned it, or him, again even when he came back to town. It was as if he really did no longer exist even when they saw him on the street. It never seemed to bother him. Nothing did. He was already Old Man Herschmidt. The only time he was ever mentioned that he could remember was when he himself was packing up and preparing to leave and Frank said, Like father, like son! Frank was then already married and his wife pregnant, the daughter of the man who owned the cheap notion-semi-jewelry store he worked for which he later developed with his own blood into exclusiveness and was already having his own girlfriends on the side. Like father, like son! he told him with some little ruefulness and gave him the five dollars.
    The girl herself was a nice enough girl. A country girl. Who had filled out at thirteen and been bewildered by it since she discovered (probably by accident) that she liked sex when she hadn’t ought to. The three of them, all seniors and all good buddies, had been serving her night after night, but her father decided on him because Frank owned a prosperous business, prosperous at least by the standards of New Lebanon, Dark Bend River farmers, which the other two seniors also were.
    He himself had lost his own virginity in the eighth grade. And wasn’t that about the time Frank had changed the family name?
    The eighth grade was also the year that Francine, no longer able to suffer the continuing embarrassment that Frank had warned of, left town on her own and began putting herself through teacher’s college, wasn’t it?
    God, how it jumbled and tumbled out no continuity. How long had it been since he’d thought about it? And only those three main threads to give it any semblance of reason at all!
    The old man was back, of course, by the time he left and he had gone up to see him on his way out of town, but then he hadn’t had nerve enough to go in. So he stood outside and looked in through the grimy window at the alien figure in the dark-glassed mask holding the torch and went away without either speaking or the couple of bucks he might have been able to milk him for, not because he was afraid or hated to speak to him he had spoken to him many times since he got back, but because he was embarrassed to be leaving town in disgrace.
    His mother had said with her laboriously acquired religious sorrow, only: You have sinned, son, sinned very bad, but God will forgive you if you ask him to write me often you’re my son.
    Christ the things you think of.
    A year with that carnival.
    Another with circuses.
    And no meaning anywhere.
    Except to work up from hammerhead to peewee gandy dancer, assistant to a seller of cheap novelties. More money for more broads. He learned to short change fairly well. And, of course, he drew upon that material later for those short stories.
    The meaning of meaning.
    After that, he traveled the South with a magazine subscription gang, where his short-changing ability