At first Bud watched it with only a vague, disquieting sense of familiarity. Then abruptly he recalled too vividly the time and circumstance of his first sight of the picture. It was in San Jose, at the Liberty. He and Marie had been married two days, and were living in that glamorous world of the honeymoon, so poignantly sweet, so marvelous--and so fleeting. He had whispered that the girl looked like her, and she had leaned heavily against his shoulder. In the dusk of lowered lights their hands had groped and found each other, and clung.
The girl did look like Marie. When she turned her head with that little tilt of the chin, when she smiled, she was like Marie. Bud leaned forward, staring, his brows drawn together, breathing the short, quick breaths of emotion focussed upon one object, excluding all else. Once, when Frank moved his body a little in the next seat, Bud's hand went out that way involuntarily. The touch of Frank's rough coat sleeve recalled him brutally, so that he drew away with a wincing movement as though he bad been hurt.
All those months in the desert; all those months of the slow journeying northward; all the fought battles with memory, when he thought that he had won--all gone for nothing, their slow anodyne serving but to sharpen now the bite of merciless remembering. His hand shook upon his knee. Small beads of moisture oozed out upon his forehead. He sat stunned before the amazing revelation of how little time and distance had done to heal his hurt.
He wanted Marie. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted her in the old days, with a tenderness, an impulse to shield her from her own weaknesses, her own mistakes. Then--in those old days --there had been the glamor of mystery that is called romance.
That was gone, worn away by the close intimacies of matrimony. He knew her faults, he knew how she looked when she was angry and petulant. He knew how little the real Marie resembled the speciously amiable, altogether attractive Marie who faced a smiling world when she went pleasuring. He knew, but--he wanted her just the same. He wanted to tell her so many things about the burros, and about the desert--things that would make her laugh, and things that would make her blink back the tears.
He was homesick for her as he had never been homesick in his life before. The picture flickered on through scene after scene that Bud did not see at all, though he was staring unwinkingly at the screen all the while. The love scenes at the last were poignantly real, but they passed before his eyes unnoticed. Bud's mind was dwelling upon certain love scenes of his own. He was feeling Marie's presence beside him there in the dusk.
"Poor kid--she wasn't so much to blame," he muttered just above his breath, when the screen was swept clean and blank at the end of the last reel.
"Huh? Oh, he was the big mutt, right from the start," Frank replied with the assured air of a connoisseur. "He didn't have the brains of a bluejay, or he'd have known all the time she was strong for him.""I guess that's right," Bud mumbled, but he did not mean what Frank thought he meant. "Let's go. I want a drink."Frank was willing enough; too willing, if the truth were known.
They went out into the cool starlight, and hurried across the side street that was no more than a dusty roadway, to the saloon where they had spent the afternoon. Bud called for whisky, and helped himself twice from the bottle which the bartender placed between them. He did not speak until the second glass was emptied, and then he turned to Frank with a purple glare in his eyes.
"Let's have a game of pool or something," he suggested.
"There's a good poker game going, back there," vouchsafed the bartender, turning his thumb toward the rear, where half a dozen men were gathered in a close group around a table. "There's some real money in sight, to-night.""All right, let's go see." Bud turned that way, Frank following like a pet dog at his heels.
At dawn the next morning, Bud got up stiffly from the chair where he had spent the night. His eyeballs showed a network of tiny red veins, swollen with the surge of alcohol in his blood and with the strain of staring all night at the cards. Beneath his eyes were puffy ridges. His cheekbones flamed with the whisky flush. He cashed in a double-handful of chips, stuffed the money he had won into his coat pocket, walked, with that stiff precision of gait by which a drunken man strives to hide his drunkenness, to the bar and had another drink. Frank was at his elbow. Frank was staggering, garrulous, laughing a great deal over very small jokes.
"I'm going to bed," said Bud, his tongue forming the words with a slow carefulness.
"Come over to my shack, Bud--rotten hotel. My bed's clean, anyway." Frank laughed and plucked him by the sleeve.
"All right," Bud consented gravely. "We'll take a bottle along."
