Free Some Came Running by James Jones Page B

immediately endeared him to his boss. He quit after three weeks because he was no good, he could not convince himself that they ought to buy magazines and hence could not possibly convince them, but he would not confess this because he hated to admit to anyone, especially the boss, that he was an abysmal failure at so simple a thing in which the boss, an ignorant man who could not even read, succeeded so brilliantly.
    Once, for a short period, he had dealt blackjack in Kansas City while he and a buddy worked a short con game for a few damn few bucks on the side. But this did not last. He, who still had his morbid dislike of being disliked, came out of it with a hundred bucks cash clear, this ambition to be a big gambler as distinguished from con man, and his ex-buddy’s undying disdain.
    With this hundred, and two suitcases full of the meaning of meaningless or should I say the meaninglessness of meaninglessness? all right, two suitcases full of clothes, he moved in on Sister Francine teaching high school English in Greater Los Angeles.
    Ha wonder what ever happened to Sister Francine?
    He had been there before. But this time, when he fell in love with an educated girl named Harriet Bowman who would not sleep with him, he moved there permanently.
    All his life he had been horrified at the indifference the rest of the human race showed him. Even as a small boy, he was constantly shocked at the way people went about as if his existence meant nothing at all. Long before he ever fell in love, he would wake in terror in the middle of the night from the awareness that nobody loved him enough to sacrifice everything for him.
    So when love came, man it was really something!
    He did not know if he loved her because she was educated, or because she would not sleep with him; but he decided it was because she basically was such a wise, good, sweet, kind person. It was his first great love. He was deeply thrilled by the violence of his own emotions. He was also often discomfited. But he even enjoyed this, too. When he was drafted in 1943, nine years later, she still would not sleep with him.
    She was, in fact, married, was she not? To a lawyer. A lawyer who did not belong to, and had not ever even been introduced to, Francine’s circle.
    Because in order to be near her, he himself had had to associate with Francine’s circle of artist and intellectual friends, of which the educated girl Harriet Bowman was what you might say an inactive member. She was of the type who did not have to read, talk, or think, she just sat on her magnet and let it attract, knowing with a sure generations-old instinct that the world was full of iron filings, and that everyone admired her for her brains. This was what he fell in love with. He was an iron filing. Ergo.
    So, he associated. That was how he met George Blanca. How he met Kenny McKeean. How he started writing. And how he met that other guy: I don’t remember, Wally French Dennis said, who was now dead in the war.
    Why remember? Trees to you, Joyce Kilmer, trees! Alan Seeger dead behind some disputed barricade. Do you know what my dog’s favorite song is? He was getting bitter, really bitter. That was bad. Be glibly bitter, literarily bitter, bon motly bitter. Okay. But don’t be really bitter, don’t do your remembering really bitter. That’s no good. My, but the streets were deserted, weren’t they?
    He remembered him as he was then. He believed her a virgin. And nothing would convince him otherwise, though no one had ever suggested she was not. But his ego just couldn’t stand the thought that she had been slept with before and could still resist him so stoutly. It really became a sort of polemic argument with the then him, he remembered. And as far as she was concerned, he never resolved it.
    Francine, who had given up prose for poetry, helped him write several poems to her, one of which he even liked well enough to keep (still had it), which he read her. God, no one would ever know how he