Short Stories: Five Decades by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online

dollars. The money it cost to keep a man going in his losing fight against age.
    The automobile. Nine hundred dollars. A nine-hundred-dollar check looked very austere and impressive, like a penal institution. He was going to go off in the automobile, find a place in the mountains, write a play. Only he could never get himself far enough ahead on Dusty Blades and Ronnie Cook and His Friends. Twenty thousand words a week, each week, recurring like Sunday on the calendar. How many words was Hamlet? Thirty, thirty-five thousand?
    Twenty-three dollars to Best’s. That was Martha’s sweater for her birthday. “Either you say yes or no,” Martha said Saturday night. “I want to get married and I’ve waited long enough.” If you married you paid rent in two places, light, gas, telephone twice, and you bought stockings, dresses, toothpaste, medical attention, for your wife.
    Flacker plays with something in his pocket. Dusty’s hand shoots out, grabs his wrist, pulls his hand out. Buddy’s little penknife, which Dusty had given him for a birthday present, is in Flacker’s hand. “Flacker, tell me where Buddy Jones is, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” A gong rings. Flacker has stepped on an alarm. Doors open and the room fills with his henchmen.
    Twenty dollars to Macy’s for books. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought . How does Dusty Blades fit into the Main Currents of American Thought?
    Ten dollars to Dr. Farber. “I don’t sleep at night. Can you help me?”
    “Do you drink coffee?”
    “I drink one cup of coffee in the morning. That’s all.”
    Pills, to be taken before retiring. Ten dollars. We ransom our lives from doctors’ hands.
    If you marry, you take an apartment downtown because it’s silly to live in Brooklyn this way; and you buy furniture, four rooms full of furniture, beds, chairs, dishrags, relatives. Martha’s family was poor and getting no younger and finally there would be three families, with rent and clothes and doctors and funerals.
    Andrew got up and opened the closet door. In it, stacked in files, were the scripts he had written in the last four years. They stretched from one end of a wide closet across to another, bridge from one wall to another of a million words. Four years’ work.
    Next script. The henchmen close in on Dusty. He hears the sounds of Buddy screaming in the next room …
    How many years more?
    The vacuum cleaner roared.
    Martha was Jewish. That meant you’d have to lie your way into some hotels, if you went at all, and you never could escape from one particular meanness of the world around you; and when the bad time came there you’d be, adrift on that dangerous sea.
    He sat down at his desk. One hundred dollars again to Spain. Barcelona had fallen and the long dusty lines were beating their way to the French border with the planes over them, and out of a sense of guilt at not being on a dusty road, yourself, bloody-footed and in fear of death, you gave a hundred dollars, feeling at the same time that it was too much and nothing you ever gave could be enough. Three-and-a-third The Adventures of Dusty Blades to the dead and dying of Spain.
    The world loads you day by day with new burdens that increase on your shoulders. Lift a pound and you find you’re carrying a ton. “Marry me,” she says, “marry me.” Then what does Dusty do? What the hell can he do that he hasn’t done before? For five afternoons a week now, for a year, Dusty has been in Flacker’s hands, or the hands of somebody else who is Flacker but has another name, and each time he has escaped. How now?
    The vacuum roared in the hallway outside his room.
    “Mom!” he yelled. “Please turn that thing off!”
    “What did you say?” his mother called.
    “Nothing.”
    He added up the bank balances. His figures showed that he was four hundred and twelve dollars overdrawn instead of one hundred and eleven dollars, as the bank said. He didn’t feel like adding the figures over. He put