Just Another Sucker Read Free

to jail. Then she had been twenty-two and I had been twenty-seven.
    She had dark wavy hair and her skin was the colour of ivory. We both had agreed she wasn’t beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, but I had declared, and still thought so, that she was the most attractive woman I had ever seen.
    Watching her, as she slept, I could see how much she had suffered. The skin around her eyes was too tight. There was a droop to her lips that hadn’t been there when I had left her to serve my sentence and she looked sad: a thing she had never looked when asleep in the old days.
    She had had a rough time all right. I had left her three thousand dollars in our joint account, but this had gone quickly: my attorney’s fee and the last payment on the bungalow had taken most of it, and she had had to look for work.
    She had had several jobs, then finally, as Renick had told me, she had discovered a talent for art and had got a job with a man who sold pottery to the tourists. He made the pots and she decorated them. She had been earning sixty dollars a week for the past year: enough, as she explained to me, to keep us going until I could take over again.
    I now had only two hundred dollars left in my account. When that was gone, and unless I found a job, I would have to ask her for bus fares, money for cigarettes, and so on: the thought of having to do that demoralised me.
    The previous day, growing desperate, I had tried to find a temporary job – anything that would bring me in a little money.
    After tramping around most of the day, I came home still empty handed. I was too well known in Palm City to be offered a menial job. The guys who wanted a man were embarrassed when they saw me.
    ‘Aw, Mr. Barber, you’re kidding,’ they said to me. ‘This is no job for you.’
    I hadn’t the guts to tell them how flat broke I was, and they were relieved when I made a joke and left.
    ‘What are you thinking about, Harry?’ Nina asked, rolling over on her side to look at me.
    ‘Nothing… I was dozing.’
    ‘You’re worrying, but you mustn’t. We’ll make out. We can get along fine on sixty a week. We’re not going to starve. You must be patient. The right job will come along.’
    ‘And while I’m waiting for the right job to come along, I will have to live on you,’ I said. ‘Well that’s wonderful. I’ll enjoy it.’
    She lifted her head to stare at me. Her dark eyes anxious.
    ‘We’re partners, Harry. When you get a job, I’ll retire. As you haven’t a job for the moment, then I do the work. That’s the way a partnership should be.’
    ‘Thanks for telling me.’
    ‘Harry… you’re worrying me. You may not realise it, but you have changed so much. You’re so hard and bitter now. You must try to forget. We have our lives to lead together, and this attitude of yours…’
    ‘I know.’ I got out of bed. ‘I’m sorry about it. Maybe if you had spent three and a half years in jail, you might feel the same way as I do. I’ll fix the coffee. At least, that’s something I can do these days.’
    All this that I’m telling you about happened two years ago. Looking back on it, and taking it now in its right perspective, I realise I was a pretty weak kind of character. I can see I had let this frame-up and the prison sentence get on top of me. I wasn’t tough and bitter. I was eaten up with self-pity.
    If I had had what it takes, I would have got rid of the bungalow, and with Nina, I would have gone some place where I wasn’t known and made a new career for myself. Instead I went around looking for a job that didn’t exist for me in this town and making a martyr of myself.
    For the next ten days I went around pretending to look for the non-existent job. I made out to Nina that I was hunting all day, but it was a lie. After making a couple of calls and being turned down, I sought sanctuary in the nearest bar.
    When I had worked as a columnist, I had never been much of a drinker, but now, I began really to hit