Slam the Big Door Read Online Free PDF Page B

of that, so you married it. All right. I’ve got nothing against you marrying it.”
    “That’s nice to know. I needed your approval.”
    “Get nasty. At least it’s a change.”
    “It’s been five years. People change.”
    “Not this much.”
    “I guess I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
    “All of it none of my business, eh?”
    “Relax, Mike. You’re down here to relax. Soak up the sun. Have some laughs. Get drunk. But stay off my back.”
    “You’ve got bad nerves, Troy. Worse than mine.”
    “There isn’t any rule says you’ve got to know everything about everything.”
    “With me it’s a habit. Like finding out this big Horseshoe Bay Estates of yours is sour.”
    Troy stared at him. “Who says so!”
    “Nobody did. It was a shot in the dark. You just confirmed it, boy.”
    “Maybe a week is long enough. Maybe that’s all the rest you needed.”
    “I’ll stick around a while, thanks.”
    “Goddamn it, Mike!”
    “Let’s drop it. When you get off this remote kick you’re on, and realize I might have some ideas—maybe even good ideas—about what’s chewing on you, look me up. I’ll probably be on the beach. Let’s drop it for now. Brief me on that pair over there.”
    Troy scowled at him for a few seconds, and then shrugged. “That’s the Claytons. Rex and Tracey.”
    “A very loving couple.”
    “He loves her and she loves anybody. I got to go find some aspirin.”
    During the next hour Mike had some dull talk with some dull people. When he was free he built a third drink and took it back to his pleasant guest room. He stretched out on the bed and thought about Troy. Friendship was one of the great variables. Like everybody is in their own little row-boat, with no oars, and the currents move you around. With some people it’s worth paddling with your hands to keep the rowboats side by side. With others neither of you have to work because you’re caught in the same current anyway. It had been like that with Troy. And he suspected it still was, if Troy would stop being remote. With Troy it wasn’t like other interrupted friendships—where you get back together again with great expectations and find out you’re a couple of strangers. Either you grew in different directions, or one stood still and the other one grew.
    He was cynic enough to know that Troy could never entirely forgive him for that New York mess. Nobody can conquer all the subconscious resentment against a man who sees him at his hopeless, helpless worst, and drives off the dogs and gets him back on his feet.
    He remembered how it was in New York. New York had to be put into historical perspective, because it was a part of a lot of things that had gone before.
    After the war Mike had tried to continue with the column. It meant good money. But a lot of things went wrong. The syndicate was small and couldn’t afford to invest in a promotion to make Mike Rodenska a peacetime success. The bookings began to dwindle. A bunch of the best wartime columns were published in book form, and didn’t sell enough to make the advance. And the labor of tapping out the columns had become more than labor. It was misery. Mauldin and Hargrove were having the same problem—and probably Pyle wouldn’t have found it too easy either had he managed to miss his rendezvous on Iwo Jima. Actually Mike hungered to be back as a member of the working press. Doing a column seemed too remote—almost phony. Buttons wanted him to do what would make him happiest.
    And so, by the middle of 1946, Mike and Buttons and Micky and Tommy moved into an elderly rented house in West Hudson, unpacked the cartons with gypsy efficiency, and Mike went to work at Guild minimum for the ancient, honorable and somewhat self-important West Hudson Leader, covering City Hall, County Courthouse and police, doing assigned Sunday features and a three-a-week op. ed. column on purely local matters, happy as a flea on a large hairy dog.
    Three months later, quite by accident, he