Crusader's Cross Read Free Page A

motel, Jimmie showered and changed into fresh clothes and started looking for Ida again.
    “I found her,” he said our second day back. “She’s at a music store. She was piddling around with a mandolin, plink, plink, plink, then she started singing, with just me and the owner there. She sounds like Kitty Wells. She promised she’d wait. Come on, Dave.”
    “Why’d you come back to the motel?”
    “To get my wallet. I’m gonna buy us all a meal.”
    Jimmie had said she was waiting in a music store. It was actually a pawnshop, a dirt-smudged orange building sandwiched between a pool hall and a bar on the edge of the black district. She was sitting on a bench, under the canvas awning, twisting a peg on a Gibson mandolin that rested in her lap. Most of the finish below the sound hole had been worn away by years of plectrum strokes across the wood.
    The street was hot, full of noise and dust and smoke from junker cars. “Oh, hi, fellers,” she said, looking up from under her straw hat. “I thought you weren’t coming back. I was just fixing to leave.”
    “Did you buy the mandolin?” Jimmie asked.
    “It’s already mine. I pay the interest on it so Mr. Pearl doesn’t have to sell it. He lets me come in and play it whenever I want.”
    She returned the mandolin to the pawnshop owner, then came outside again. “Well, I’d better get going,” she said.
    “I’m taking us to lunch,” Jimmie said.
    “That’s nice, Jimmie, but I got to get ready for work,” she said.
    “Where you work?” he asked.
    She smiled, her eyes green and empty in the sunlight, her attention drifting to a car backfiring in the street.
    “This time we’ll drive you,” I said.
    “My bus stops right on the corner. See, there it comes now, right on time,” she said, and started walking toward the intersection. A throwaway shopper’s magazine was tucked under her arm. She looked back over her shoulder. “I’ve got your phone number now. I’ll call you. I promise.”
    Jimmie stared after her. “You should have heard her sing,” he said.
    When the bus pulled away from the curb, Ida was sitting up front, in the whites-only section, totally absorbed with her magazine.
    Just as we got into our convertible, the owner of the pawnshop came out on the sidewalk. He was a tall, white-haired man with a sloping girth and big hands and cigars stuffed in his shirt pocket. “Hey, you two,” he said.
    “Sir?” I said.
    “That girl has enough trouble in her life. Don’t you be adding to it,” the owner said.
    Jimmie’s hands were on top of the steering wheel, his head bent forward. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
    “Sass me again and I’ll explain it to you,” the owner said.
    “Screw that. What do you mean she’s got trouble?” Jimmie said.
    But the pawnshop owner only turned and went back inside his building.
     
    The next night Jimmie came in drunk and fell down in the tin shower stall. He pushed me away when I tried to help him up; his muscular body beaded with water, a rivulet of blood running from his hairline.
    “What happened?” I said.
    “Nothing,” he replied.
    “Is this about Ida Durbin?”
    “That’s not what they call her,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Shut up about Ida,” he said.
    The next morning he was gone before I woke up, but our car was still in the carport. I crossed Seawall Boulevard to the beach and saw him sitting on the sand, shirtless and barefoot, surrounded by the collapsed air sacs of jellyfish.
    “They call her Connie where she works. They don’t have last names there,” he said.
    The previous afternoon Ida had called him at the motel and told him that he was a nice fellow, that she knew he would do well in college, and maybe years from now they’d see one another again when he was a rich and successful man. But in the meantime this was good-bye and he mustn’t get her confused in his mind with the girl who was right for him.
    After she rang off, Jimmie went straight to