Beggarman, Thief Read Online Free PDF Page B

care of him, she had told Dwyer. She wondered if Rudy or anybody else would be capable of it.
    Dwyer came back with the whiskey. The first drink was beginning to take effect. She felt dreamy, remote, all problems misty, removed. It was a better way to feel than the way she had been feeling recently. Maybe Jean, with her hidden bottles, knew something useful to know. Gratefully, she took a sip from the new glass.
    Dwyer looked different, somehow troubled as he stood there, leaning against the rail, in his clean white jersey and chino pants, the comical protruding teeth that had burdened him with his nickname, chewing on his lip. It was as though he had decided something, something difficult, while he was alone in the saloon pouring the drinks. “Maybe I oughtn’t to say this, Mrs. Burke …”
    “Gretchen.”
    “Thank you, ma’am. But I feel like I can talk to you. Rudy’s a fine man, I admire him, you couldn’t ask for a better man to have on your side in the kind of situation we’re in now—but he’s not the sort of man a guy like myself can talk to, I mean really talk to—you understand what I mean?”
    “Yes,” she said, “I understand.”
    “He’s a fine man, like I said,” Dwyer went on, uncomfortable, his mouth fidgeting, “but he’s not like Tom.”
    “No, he’s not,” Gretchen said.
    “Wesley’s talked to me. He don’t want to have nothing to do with Rudy. Or with his wife. That’s just natural human nature, wouldn’t you say, considering what’s happened?”
    “I’d say,” Gretchen said. “Considering what’s happened.”
    “If Rudy moves in on the kid—with the best intentions in the world, which I’m sure Rudy has—there’s going to be trouble. Awful trouble. There’s no telling what the kid will do.”
    “I agree with you,” Gretchen said. She hadn’t thought about it before but the moment the words had passed Dwyer’s lips she had seen the truth of it. “But what’s to be done? Kate’s not his mother and she has her own problems. You?”
    Dwyer laughed sadly. “Me? I don’t know where I’ll be twenty-four hours from now. The only thing I know is ships. Next week I may be sailing to Singapore. A month later to Valparaiso. Anyway, I ain’t made to be anybody’s father.”
    “So?”
    “I been watching you real careful,” Dwyer said. “Even though you didn’t take no more notice of me than a piece of furniture …”
    “Oh, come on now, Bunny,” Gretchen said, guilty because almost the same thought had passed through her mind just a few minutes ago.
    “I’m not sore about it and I’m not making any judgments, ma’am …”
    “Gretchen,” she said automatically.
    “Gretchen,” he repeated dutifully. “But since it happened—and now, staying here with me and letting me gab on—I see a real human being. I’m not saying Rudy ain’t a human being,” Dwyer added hastily, “only he’s not Wesley’s kind of human being. And his wife—” Dwyer stopped.
    “Let’s not talk about his wife.”
    “If you went up to Wesley and said, fair and square, right out in the open, ‘You come along with me …’ he’d recognize it. He’d see you’re the kind of woman he could take as a mother.”
    A new idea in the process of natural conception, Gretchen thought, sons choosing mothers. Would evolution never cease? “I’m not what you might call a model mother,” she said dryly. The thought of being responsible in any way for the lanky, sullen-faced, silent boy with Tom’s wild genes in him frightened her. “No, Bunny, I’m afraid it wouldn’t work out.”
    “I thought I’d give it a try,” Dwyer said listlessly. “I just don’t want to see Wesley left on his own. He’s not old enough to be left on his own, no matter what he thinks. There’s an awful lot of commotion ahead for Wesley Jordache.”
    She couldn’t help smiling a little at the word “commotion.”
    “Pinky Kimball, that’s the engineer on the Vega,” Bunny went on, “he’s the