The Natural

Roy thought this is how she sees him now that he is dead. She forgets how hopping sore she was at him after that time in bed with me.

But Bump was dead, he thought, dead and buried in his new box, an inescapable six feet under, so he subtly changed the subject to Gus.

“Gus?” Memo said. At first her face was expressionless. “Oh, he’s just like a daddy to me.”

He asked her in what way but she laughed and said, “That was a funny business you did with him in the Pot of Fire. How did you do all those tricks?”

“Easy. They had a magic act all laid out to go on. I walked into the guy’s dressing room and when they saw who I was they let me use his stuff just for the laughs.”

“Who showed you how to use it?”

“Nobody. I have done some different things in my time, Memo.”

“Such as what other ones?”

“You name it, I did it.”

“What you did to Max was a scream.”

A black cloud rolled like a slow wave across the moon. “It’s so strange,” she murmured, looking at the moving water.

“What is?”

For a time she didn’t speak, then she sighed and said she meant her life. “It’s been strange ever since I can remember except for a year or two — mostly the part with Bump. That was the good part only it didn’t last very long, not much of the good part ever did. When I was little my daddy walked out on us and I don’t ever remember being happy again till the time I got to go to Hollywood when I was nineteen.”

He waited.

“I won a beauty contest where they picked a winner from each state and she was sent to Hollywood to be a starlet. For a few weeks I felt like the Queen of the May, then they took a screen test and though I had the looks and figure my test did not come out so good in acting and they practically told me to go home. I couldn’t stand the thought of that so I stayed there for three more years, doing night club work and going to an acting school besides, hoping that I would some day be a good enough actress but it didn’t take. I knew what I was supposed to do but I couldn’t make myself, in my thoughts, into somebody else. You’re supposed to forget who you are but I couldn’t. Then I came east and had some more bad times after my mother died, till I met Bump.”

He thought she would cry but she didn’t.

Memo watched the pebbles in the flowing water. “After Bump I realized I could never be happy any more.”

“How do you know that?” Roy asked slowly.

“Oh, I know. I can tell from the way I feel. Sometimes in the morning I never want to wake up.”

He felt a dreary emptiness at her words.

“What about yourself?” she asked, wanting to change the subject.

“What about me?” he said gloomily.

“Max says you are sort of a mystery.”

“Max is a jerk. My past life is nobody’s business.”

“What was it like?”

“Like yours, for years I took it on the chin.” He sounded as if he had caught a cold, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

“What happened?”

He wanted to tell her everything, match her story and go her a couple better but couldn’t bring himself to. It wasn’t, he thought, that he was afraid to tell her what had happened to him that first time (though the thought of doing that raised a hot blush on his pan, for he had never told anybody about it yet), but about the miserable years after that, when everything, everything he tried somehow went to pot as if that was its destiny in the first place, a thing he couldn’t understand.

“What happened?” she asked again.

“The hell with it,” he said. “I told you about myself.”

He watched the water.

“I have knocked around a lot and been hard hurt in plenty of ways,” he said huskily. “There were times I thought I would never get anywhere and it made me eat my guts, but all that is gone now. I know I have the stuff and will get there.”

“Get where?”

“Where I am going. Where I will be the champ and have what goes with it.”

She drew back but he had caught her arm and tugged her to him.

“Don’t.”

“You got to live, Memo.”

He trapped her lips, tasting of lemon drops, kissing hard. Happening to open his eyes, he saw her staring at him in the middle of the kiss. Shutting them, he dived deep down again. Then she caught his passion, opened her mouth for his tongue and went limp around the knees.

They swayed together and he turned his hand and slipped it through the top of her dress into her loose brassiere, cupping her warm small breast in his palm.

Her legs stiffened. She pushed at him, sobbing, “Don’t touch it.”

He was slow to react.

She wailed, “Don’t, please don’t.”

He pulled his hand out, angrily disappointed.

She was crying now, rubbing her hand across her bosom.

“Did I hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“How the hell did I do that? I was nice with it.”

“It’s sick,” she wept.

He felt like he had had an icy shave and haircut. “Who says so?”

“It hurts. I know.”

She could be lying, only her eyes were crisscrossed with fear and her arms goosefleshed.

“Did you go to a doctor?”

“I don’t like them.”

“You ought to go.”

Memo ran off the bridge. He followed her to the car. She sat at the wheel and started the motor. Figuring she would calm down quicker this way he let her.

She backed the car onto the road and drove off. The moon sank into an enormous cloud-sea. Memo sped along the asphalt and turned at a fork down a hard dirt road.

“Put on the lights.”

“I like it dark.” Her white arms were stiff on the wheel.

He knew she didn’t but figured she was still nervous.

Dripping dark cloud spray, the moon bobbed up and flooded the road ahead with bright light. Memo pressed her foot on the gas.

A thundering wind beat across his skull. Let her, he thought. Whatever she has got on her mind, let her get it off, especially if it is still Bump.

He thought about what she had said on the bridge about never being happy again and wondered what it meant. In a way he was tired of her — she was too complicated — but in a different way he desired her more than ever. He could not decide what to say or do next. Maybe wait, but he didn’t want to any more. Yet what else was there to do?

The white moonlight shot through a stretch of woods ahead. He found himself wishing he could go back somewhere, go home, wherever that was. As he was thinking this, he looked up and saw in the moonlight a boy coming out of the woods, followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive. After fifteen seconds he was still there. Roy yelled to Memo to slow down in case he wanted to cross the road. Instead, the car shot forward so fast the woods blurred, the trees racing along like shadows in weak light, then skipping into black and white, finally all black and the moon was gone.

“Lights!”

She sat there stiffly so he reached over and switched them on.

As the road flared up, Memo screamed and tugged at the wheel. He felt a thud and his heart sickened. It was a full minute before he realized they hadn’t stopped.

“For Christ sake, stop — we hit somebody.”

“No.” Her face was bloodless.