Free Ice-Cream Headache by James Jones Page B

looked around the gayness of the kitchen. “Listen. I’m sorry about the tablecloth. Sorry. I shouldn’t of done it, I guess. I shouldn’t of come here with them.”
    “No, George. You shouldn’t.”
    “You know what I love about you, Sandy girl? You’re always so goddam stinking right.”
    “I just do what I have to,” Sandy said.
    “Sandy,” George said. “You don’t know what it was like, Sandy.”
    “No,” she said. “I guess I don’t.”
    “You goddam right you don’t. And you never will. You’ll never be …”
    “I can’t help the way I’m made.”
    “Yes? Well I can’t neither. The only thing for us to do is turn it over to the United Nations. Its their job, let them figure it out.”
    Tom Hornney came back to the door. “Come on, for Christ sake. Are you comin or aint you?”
    “Yes goddam it I’m comin. I’m comin and I’m goin.” George limped swingingly over to the countertop and grabbed a bottle.
    Tom stepped inside the door. “Listen, lady,” he said. “What the hells a leg? The thing a man wants you dames will never give him. We’re just on a little vacation now. I got a trucking business in Terre Haute. Had it before the war. There’s good money in long-distance hauling, and me and George is goin to get our share. We got six trucks and three more spotted, and I know this racket, see? I know how to get the contracks, all the ways. An I got the pull. And me and George is full-time partners. What the hells a leg?”
    George set down the bottle and came back, his right leg hitting the floor heavy and without resilience. “Tom and me is buddies, and right or wrong what we do we do together.”
    “I think thats fine, George,” she said.
    “Yeah? Well then, its all all right then, aint it?”
    “Listen, lady,” Tom said. “Someday he’ll build another house’ll make this place look sick, see? To hell with the respectability if you got the money. So what the hells a leg?”
    “Shut up,” George said. “Lets go. Shut up. Shut up, or I’ll mash you down.”
    “Yeah?” Tom grinned. “I’ll take your leg off and beat you to death with it, mack.”
    George threw back his head, laughing. “Fall in, you bum. Lets go.”
    “George,” Sandy said. She went to the countertop and came back with a nearly full bottle. “Take it with you.”
    “Not me. I got mine in the car. And I got the money to buy more. Whisky never bothers me. Fall in, Tom, goddam you.”
    Tom slapped him on the back. “Right,” he said. And he started to sing.
    They went out of the house into the steaming chill February night. They went arm in arm and limping. And they were singing.
    “Si-n-n-g glorious, glorious,
    One keg of beer for the four of us,
    Glory be to God there’s no more of us,
    ’Cause…”
    Their voices faded and died as the motor started. Tom honked the horn once, derisively.
    Sandy Thomas stood in the door, watching the headlights move away, feeling the need inside, holding the bottle in her hand, moisture overflowing her eyes unnoticed, looking backward into a past the world had not seen fit to let alone.
    Tomorrow she would change the tablecloth, the red and white checkered tablecloth. And it was not her fault.

Secondhand Man
    I spent the summer of 1945 in the Smokies, and it was there that I heard first of Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender. Originally it was about a cracked-up veteran trying to pull himself together by living by himself in the mountains (where he learns of the surrender), but somehow was always too sentimental and never worked. In 1948 I rewrote it as it is now, changing the character, adding the wife, and drawing on a couple I knew in Illinois. Reading it over I find I still like it but nobody ever wanted to publish it.

I
    W HEN THE DOCTOR TOLD Larry and Mona Patterson he thought Larry should spend the summer in the mountains and suggested the Great Smokies, neither Larry nor Mona had even the vaguest idea of what it might be like there, and neither of