Girl Out Back Read Free Page B

picking up cigarette butts. . . .”
    ”Belt her one,” I said, “and keep her at home. What kind of a man are you, anyway?”
    “I just haven’t got the heart, boss. She’s usually carrying around one of the kids that’s too weak to walk. . . .”
    He had one child, a boy of around fourteen who already looked like something out of the back-field of the Los Angeles Rams. They owned their own home and Otis cleared around a hundred a week with salary, commissions, and overtime, now that he’d got a raise when Barbara was purged and we both had to double part time as clerks.
    He went back to the shop. I wrote out checks for a bunch of bills that were due on the tenth, and then opened the big sliding doors at the sides of the building. It was growing hot now at eight thirty of a still and cloudless morning in August. I swept down the showroom around the boats and trailers. We had over a dozen models on the floor, running all the way from a car-top duck boat to a sixteen-foot inboard runabout that sold for close to two thousand.
    As soon as the bank opened I called out to Otis to watch the front, took the deposit from the safe, picked up the outgoing mail, and walked over to Main. Brassy sunlight beat on my bare head and I could feel beads of perspiration under the thin sports shirt. I crossed with the light and entered.
    It was a small place, a branch of the Mid-South Bank & Trust of Sanport, with only a couple of tellers’ windows and Warren Bennett’s desk behind a railing at the right. I got in line at Arthur Pressler’s window, feeling almost chill in the sudden transition from the outside heat to air-conditioning. At the far end, behind a counter, I saw Barbara Renfrew seated at an automatic book-keeping machine, her smooth dark head bent over her work. She looked up in a moment, saw me, and smiled in that shy, quiet way she did. It occurred to me that now she was no longer working for me making a pass at her would be permissible under the revised ground rules without a loss of face on both sides, and that I really should, since I’d been accused of it so many times. It was an attractive thought, but I shrugged it off, hardly knowing why. Maybe it was because I didn’t share Jessica’s staunch faith in her accessibility. Clod, I thought. Godwin, you lack scope and vision. . . .
    “Good morning, Barney.”
    The line ahead of me had disappeared and I was facing Arthur Pressler through the bars of his window. “Good morning,” I said, passing over the cloth bag. He pulled it open and began adding checks on the machine with the precise and economical movements of some super-robot out of the twenty-second century. He was a rather cold-faced man in his early thirties, with sandy hair, rimless glasses, and a no-nonsense set to his mouth. As far as I knew he had no existence outside this cubicle of his, as if he’d been bought from I.B.M. and bolted to the floor, but he could handle money faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He did it almost in a blur, and he was infallible.
    I lit a cigarette and watched him now. He finished the checks and tossed them aside, and then tore into the bundle of currency, dropping it into neat and separate bunches of singles, fives, tens, and twenties. Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. He was counting the twenties. The fifth or sixth was one of those new ones Mrs. Nunn had paid me. It dropped, and the next one started to come down on it, and then he broke his rhythm. He paused. With an almost imperceptible shake of his head he picked them all up and started over. He’d lost count. It was odd, I thought; maybe they hadn’t been oiling him properly. He passed me the duplicate of the deposit slip and I went out and down the street to the post-office.
    * * *
    Business was brisk for Monday. Besides incidental items of tackle we sold one complete rig: fourteen-foot plywood boat, 7-h.p. motor, trailer, and all the incidentals such as a spare gasoline can, kapok seat