Some Faces in the Crowd by Budd Schulberg Read Free Book Online

York Journal and the Daily News while the Times and the New York Trib were writing polite editorials suggesting that Lonesome go home to Riddle for a while and rest up from international affairs.
    One night, it must have been around three in the morning, I was enjoying one of those deep Caribbean sleeps, with the fresh warm air blowing in from the sea, when I heard someone knocking on my door. “Telayphone, pleece, long deestance.” I jumped up and threw a robe around me and hurried down to the desk phone in the lobby. I was scared to death it was my old man. He hadn’t been very well. But it wasn’t my father. It was Lonesome Rhodes. “Lonesome, how did you know where I was staying?” That was easy, he had seen the card I had sent my assistant from Veradero and he had simply gone down the list of hotels. “Marshy,” he said, “how soon can you get back to New York? You’ve gotta come back right away.”
    “Hah,” I said, “or should I say haw?”
    “No kiddin’, I need ya bad, Marshy girl, I need ya real bad.”
    “What’s happened, England declare war on you?”
    “Those limey bastards. The hell with them. You shoulda heard me tonight—I really gave Churchill a piece of my mind. If there’s any war declarin’ t’ do, I’m the one who’s gonna do it. But I’ll come to that in a minute. That’s not why I need ya, Marshy. I need ya to live with me.
    “You and I and the drum-majorette—that will be cozy.”
    “Mary-Mae, she’s no good, Marshy. She’s nuthin but a good-for-nuthin’ little tramp, Marshy. I just kicked her little ass right the hell out of here. The hell with her. It was you I wanted all the time, Marshy. I can’t live without you.”
    “Then I’m afraid your days are numbered, Larry,” I said.
    “Please, Marshmallow. I’m on my knees. Right here in front of the telephone. I’m on my knees.”
    “If you had some white gloves you could sing ‘Mammy,’” I said.
    “There’s a window right behind me. If you don’t promise you’ll come back on the next plane I’ll jump out the window tonight.”
    “Oh, jump,” I said.
    “You don’t believe me,” he said. “You think I haven’t got the guts. Well I’ve got the window open right now, what do you think of that? And I swear to God I am gonna use it if you don’t promise to catch the next plane back.”
    “Lonesome,” I told him, “listen. I found someone down here. The first one who’s made sense to me since I got out of school. It’s serious. I have a feeling it’s going to work.”
    “Oh Jesus,” Lonesome was blubbering, “what’ve I done that everybody should be against me? I won’t be able to live if some bastard takes you away from me. I’ll jump. I’ll jump. I wanna die.”
    I thought of all the three A.M . alarms I had answered. I thought, This is a poker game and all the money is in the pot now and now is the time to call him. There was a terrible curiosity in me to see what would happen if I didn’t come running. If this time I stood my own ground. I had made it too easy for him. He was an extreme personality from his shoelaces to the careless lock of hair over his forehead, and I had cushioned it for him all the way. I had toned down the views that would have made him sound like a sweet-talking Father Coughlin, and I had provided a line of emotional continuity between ex-wives and models and new wives and assorted tramps. I had been home plate, or rather the locker room where you ease up after the game, win or lose. And I had been the little cog of efficiency without which the great streamlined express breaks down. Lonesome Rhodes had been my career, my Frankenstein, my crime.
    “So jump, jump,” I said. “Get out of my life. Get out of everybody’s life.”
    “Okey-doke,” he shouted. “If you tell me to do it, I’ll do it. It’ll be your fault.”
    “Jump, jump, jump,” I couldn’t stop saying, in a broken rage. I would never forgive him if he did, and of course I could never