The Doomsters Read Free

me.”
    “Is it a deal then? You go back to the hospital, let me do the legwork?”
    He gave me a reluctant yes. It was clear that he didn’t like the plan, but he was too tired and confused to argue about it.

chapter
3
          T HE morning turned hot and bright. The brown September hills on the horizon looked like broken adobe walls you could almost reach out and touch. My car went miles before the hills changed position.
    As we drove through the valley, Carl Hallman talked to me about his family. His father had come west before the first war, with enough inherited money to buy a small orange grove outside of Purissima. The old man was a frugal Pennsylvania German, and by the time of his death he’d expanded his holdings to several thousand acres. The main single addition to the original grove had come from his wife, Alicia, who was the descendant of an old land-grant family.
    I asked Carl if his mother was still alive.
    “No. Mother died, a long time ago.”
    He didn’t want to talk about his mother. Perhaps he had loved her too much, or not enough. He went on talking about his father instead, with a kind of rebellious passion, as though he was still living in his father’s shadow. Jeremiah Hallman had been a power in the county, to some extent in the state: founding head of the water association, secretary of the growers’ co-operative, head of hisparty’s county central committee, state senator for a decade, and local political boss to the end of his life.
    A successful man who had failed to transmit the genes of success to his two sons.
    Carl’s older brother Jerry was a non-practicing lawyer. For a few months after he graduated from law school, Jerry had had his shingle out in Purissima. He’d lost several cases, made several enemies and no friends, and retired to the family ranch. There he consoled himself with a greenhouseful of cymbidium orchids and dreams of eventual greatness in some unnamed field of activity. Prematurely old in his middle thirties, Jerry was dominated by his wife, Zinnie, a blonde divorcee of uncertain origin who had married him five years ago.
    Carl was bitter on the subject of his brother and sister-in-law, and almost equally bitter about himself. He believed that he’d failed his father all the way down the line. When Jerry petered out, the Senator planned to turn over the ranch to Carl, and sent Carl to Davis to study agriculture. Not being interested in agriculture, Carl flunked out. His real interest was philosophy, he said.
    Carl managed to talk his father into letting him go to Berkeley. There he met his present wife, a girl he’d known in high school, and shortly after his twenty-first birthday he married her, in spite of the family’s objections. It was a dirty trick to play on Mildred. Mildred was another of the people he had failed. She thought that she was getting a whole man, but right at the start of their marriage, within a couple of months, he had his first big breakdown.
    Carl spoke in bitter self-contempt. I took my eyes from the road and looked at him. He wouldn’t meet my look:
    “I didn’t mean to tell you about my other—that other breakdown. Anyway, it doesn’t prove I’m crazy. Mildred never thought I was, and she knows me better than anybody.It was the strain I was under—working all day and studying half the night. I wanted to be something great, someone even Father would respect—a medical missionary or something like that. I was trying to get together enough credits for admission to medical school, and studying theology at the same time, and—Well, it was too much for me. I cracked up, and had to be taken home. So there we were.”
    I glanced at him again. We’d passed through the last of the long string of suburbs, and were in the open country. To the right of the highway, the valley lay wide and peaceful under the bright sky, and the hills had stepped backwards into blueness. Carl was paying no attention to the external world. He had a