"Yeah, I do," McCoy said.
"What I should have done," Dutch said, "is had him follow me in the truck. You want to run me back by the station? Could you find your way back here again?"
"Why don't you take my car?" McCoy said. "I've got no place else to go."
"You got a car, Kenny?" Anne-Marie asked, surprised.
"He's got a goddamned LaSalle convertible, is what he's got," Dutch said.
She looked at him in surprise.
"You been doing all right for yourself, I guess," she said.
"I've been doing all right," McCoy said.
"I'll put it up on the rack, and grease it," Dutch said. "And then have the kid works for me, you saw him, Mickey, wash it."
"Thank you," McCoy said, and tossed him the keys.
Dutch Schulter returned a few minutes after six, as soon as the night man came on at the station. McCoy was glad to see him. Anne-Marie was getting on his nerves. She was a goddamned slob. He had to tell her to change the diaper on the older kid; he had shit running down his leg from under his diaper.
The sink was full of unwashed dishes. McCoy remembered that, come to think of it, his mother had been sort of a slob herself. Many of the times the old man had slapped her around, it had started with him bitching about something being dirty.
She told him she would really rather make his supper herself. When Dutch returned with his car, she said, he could take her down to the Acme and she would get steaks or something; but she didn't mean it, and McCoy didn't want to eat in her dirty kitchen, off her dirty plates.
She asked him if he had been to see "Daddy," and he told her no. And she told him she hadn't seen him either. He had been mad at her since she left the convent (and boy, could she tell him stories about what went on in that place!); and after she had married Dutch, outside the church and all, it had gotten worse.
Dutch was a good man, she said. She had met him when she was working in the Highway Diner on the Bethlehem Pike after she left the convent. He had been nice to her, and one thing had led to another, and they'd started going out. Then they got married and started their family.
McCoy did the arithmetic in his head, and decided she had the sequence wrong: She and Dutch started their family, and then got married. The old man could count, too, which might be one of the reasons he was pissed-off at her.
How dare she embarrass Past Grand Exalted Commander Pat McCoy of the KC? She not only leaves (or gets kicked out of?) the convent, but she gets herself knocked up by some Dutchy she meets slinging hash at the Highway Diner.
Dutch came home with the LaSalle all greased and polished, then took a bath and got dressed-up in a two-tone sports coat and slacks. Anne-Marie had on a too-tight spotted dress with a flowery print. They loaded the kids in the car and went looking for someplace to eat.
Anne- Marie said the food in the 12th Street Bar Grill was always good, and they didn't ask an arm and a leg for it. McCoy knew she was less concerned with good food and saving his money than she was in going where the old man would be hanging out so he'd see them together all dressed-up, and him driving a LaSalle.
"I saw a place on the way into town, Norristown Tavern… Inn… that looked nice," McCoy said.
"They charge an arm and a leg in there," Anne-Marie said.
"Yeah, they do, Kenny," Dutch agreed. He did care, McCoy decided, what it was going to cost.
"What the hell, I don't get to come all that often," McCoy said.
When they were in the Norristown Inn, in a booth against the wall, Anne-Marie looked up from trying to force a spoonful of potatoes into the boy and whispered, "There's Daddy."
Good ol' Pat McCoy was at the bar, with a sharp-faced female, her hair piled high on top of her head, her lipstick a red gash across her pale face… obviously the second Mrs. Patrick J. McCoy.
McCoy thought it over, and when they were on their strawberry shortcake, he got up from the table without saying anything and walked to the bar.
"Hello," he said to his father.
His father nodded at him. The second Mrs. McCoy looked at him curiously.
He's not surprised to see me, which means that he saw me at the table with Anne-Marie and Dutch. And didn't come over.
"You're home, I see," McCoy's father said.
"About ten days ago."
McCoy's father moved his glass in little circles on the bar.
"Learn anything in the Marine Corps?" McCoy's father asked.
That told his new wife who I am. Now she doesn't like me either.
"I learned a little," McCoy said.
"So what are you doing now, looking for a job?"
"Not yet."
"Maybe the Dutchman'll give you one pumping gas," his father said. He laughed at his own wit and turned to his wife for an audience. She dutifully tittered.
"Maybe he will," McCoy said, and walked back to the table.
"What did he say?" Anne-Marie asked.
"Not much," McCoy said.
He told himself he was being a prick when the bill came and he got mad that Anne-Marie had ordered one of everything on the menu. He'd offered to take them to dinner; he shouldn't bitch about what it cost.
He told Anne-Marie and Dutch that he had to go back to Philadelphia, so he couldn't stay over on the foldaway bed. But he promised to write. Then he dropped them at their row house. Before he left, he asked for Tommy's address.
They were obviously pressed for dough, and he considered slipping Anne-Marie fifty bucks "to buy something for the kids," but decided against it. She'd already started moaning abut how hard it was to make it with two kids on what Dutch brought home from the Amoco station. If he gave her money, she would be back for more.
He didn't return to Philly. He never intended to. Though he wasn't on leave, he didn't have to go back or make the reveille formation or anything. Lieutenant Fogarty had pointedly told him that no one was going to be looking for him around the platoon, and that if he didn't want to use up his leave time, he could sack out in the barracks whenever and check in with the first sergeant every couple of days.
He just wanted to get away from the row house and the stink of baby shit and cabbage.
He stopped outside of town, put the roof up, then drove to Bethlehem and checked into the Hotel Bethlehem. It wasn't the Bellevue Stratford, but it was nice, and when he went down to the dining room in the morning, they had breakfast steaks and corned beef hash on the menu. He ordered it up, fuck what it cost.
Tommy lived in a rooming house, a great big old rambling building built on the side of a hill. He wasn't there, of course; but the landlady, a big pink-cheeked Polack woman told him he could probably catch him at the walk bridge over the railroad tracks when his shift was over, and that if he missed him there, he could find him at the Lithuanian Social Club.
He drove around town. He saw Lehigh University and, just for the hell of it, drove inside. There really wasn't much to see. He was disappointed, and wondered why. What had he expected?
He went back to the Hotel Bethlehem, and checked out. When the eight-to-four shift let out, he was standing at the end of the bridge over the railroad tracks hoping he would be able to spot Tommy.
Tommy spotted him first. Tommy had changed so much he had let him walk right by him. But Tommy saw him out of the corner of his eye, and came back-even though the last fucking person in the fucking world he expected to see was his fucking brother on the fucking bridge wearing a fucking suit.
They went to the Lithuanian Club, and drank a lot of beer. Once Tommy told the guys his fucking big brother was a fucking corporal in the fucking Marines, it was all right with them despite the fucking suit that made him look like a fucking fairy.
The Lithuanian Club reminded McCoy of the Million Dollar Club in Shanghai. Not in looks. The Lithuanian Club was a dump. It smelled of beer and piss. But the Million Dollar Club was the place where Marines went because they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but get drunk when the duty day was over. And that's all the Lithuanian Club was, too, a place where the enlisted men from the steel mill went because there was no place else to go when they came away from the open hearths, and nothing to do but get drunk.