Chapter 10

Seth Williams lay on his back in his tiny room over the DGS grocery store. There was barely space for his iron-framed bed and a narrow table that held a hot plate and most of his belongings including the photo of his wife in a dime-store frame. His spare clothes were piled on the floor at the foot of his bed and his dirty clothes were heaped in a corner where they had lain for a couple of weeks. When that pile got big enough or too smelly to stand anymore, Bud pushed the clothes into an old potato sack and hitched a ride out to his mother's place to use the wringer washing machine.

The room was never dark because of the reddish light from the neon sign on the front of the store and the broken slats in the wooden blinds, and Bud lay looking at the stained paper on the ceiling and feeling sorry for himself.

Maybe I ought to join the army, he thought, and not wait for them to come and get me some day soon. Might be able to start all over like the guys that got the G.I. Bill after the war. Shoot, it's just two years. Then he thought about Korea and the newsreels he had seen of men freezing in the snow. He pulled his thin blanket up to his chin and shivered in his underwear.

The last five years had fled by so fast he had trouble figuring out what had happened. In high school, he had been a minor hero, a popular baseball player who had made second-string All-Met on a mediocre team and then become a state champion in the shot put. He had even dated some of the cheerleaders without Jeanne finding out and had been elected vice-president of his senior class. He had made the honor roll twice in the 10th grade and graduated with a C+ average. Of course, he hadn't really graduated, didn't walk across Leland's stage and shake the principal's hand, but that was another story; he had his diploma.

He closed his eyes and for some reason recalled Mrs. Oxley, the school's guidance counselor. She had talked to him about going to college and had encouraged him to enroll at the brand new junior college that had opened up in Bethesda right after the war.

He had investigated, talked to some people and looked at the old army barracks the college was using for a home. He might have gone, it was cheap enough, only about a hundred dollars a semester, but Ray Ryan offered him a good job at his body shop in Kensington, fifty dollars a week to start, and he could not pass that by. And then, before summer was over, he was married. And pretty soon, his wife was pregnant. Just one damn thing after another.

Ray put him to work masking and priming the finished bodywork while learning to use the tools when he wasn't busy with the spray gun. By the end of the first week, Bud was doing some body putty and sanding jobs, and Ray had patted him on the back when he handed him his pay envelope. Bud stood in the parking lot and counted out thirty-seven dollar and forty-four cents. He had never had that much money in his hand. He hitched a ride to the nearby Dew Drop Inn with a decent thirst and money in his pocket.

Before he started for home at about 11:30 that night with a buddy who was headed more or less in his direction, he had managed to spend almost twenty dollars on beer, pin-ball side bets, barbequed ribs and a messy blow job courtesy of one of the trailer trash women that hung around the noisy bar. She had tucked his five in the front of her dress as she knelt before him in the men's room and pulled down Bud's zipper.

In front of his father's store, Bud waved goodbye to his friend's taillights, walked to the back porch, felt the urge come over him and threw up in his mother's flowerbed. He wiped his mouth on his shirttail and went into the house and up the stairs as quietly as he could.

In the morning he ate his corn flakes even though his stomach was still churning, and his mother asked him if he had gotten paid. He nodded and held out his cup for some more coffee.

"We agreed on a dollar a day," she said. "So do you want to pay me now?"

Bud shook his head. "Let's start next week, Ma. I owe some guys a few bucks."

"All right," she said, "but next week it will be fourteen."

He nodded and tipped up his bowl to drink the sugered milk. "I'm going up to see Jeanne. Her Pa's got a job for me today, haying."

"You be nice to her," his mother said, "she's a good girl."

Bud borrowed his mother's old Dodge and headed north, looking forward to seeing his girlfriend and earning a few dollars. The Weston's big dairy farm was just outside Gaithersburg, and Bud arrived well before nine o'clock and found Mr. Weston in the shed tinkering with his Ford tractor.

"You done any haying, boy?" the big man asked when he looked up.

"Yessir," said Bud, "on our place, but that was horsedrawn."

"Well, this here's your standard four-foot bar, and I checked every damn blade. It's ready to go. Weather forecast's good for the next few days so don't waste time. This lever's the PTO and that one raises and lowers. And for crap's sake, watch out for stones and stumps."