"She well now?"
"We think so."
"Get her down here, man!"
I shook it again. "Give her the two more days. And it just
might--might--and then--"
"You didn't take a drink?"
Again.
"By God! What a reform!"
"I'm trying to get that serial done--"
"--strictly on Presbyterianism."
I thought that over. "Maybe. They'll need the dough. And it's a
favorite old anodyne of mine--rolling up the sleeves."
Dave poured out a second glass of iced tea and gulped it. He nodded his
head toward my bedroom. "When he wakes up, tell him to come down to
my office. Tell him we're working for him. We'll do what we can think
of. I'll keep him stooging around--and sober, if possible--and see you
later."
"Going?"
He came across the room and put an arm around my shoulder. "You said
you wanted to work. I'll be back."
"Okay."
2
I remember, one day on the way to California, when the Chief stopped at
Needles. It was summertime and the thermometer on the station wall in
the shade said 125 degrees. I was standing around, dizzy, when I saw a
guy pacing up and down the platform as if he enjoyed it. I ventured out
in the sunshine to see if he'd lost his mind and he turned around--a
dark-skinned character. Royalty, it proved later, from Hyderabad. He
liked it.
My apartment, that morning, was something like the Needles station on
the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. No baking sand, red-hot rocks, or
mountains pitching on the miraged distance, of course. Needles was dry,
too, and Manhattan was close to saturate.