This is the third story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.
“Double Time for Pat Hobby” was filed in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University for many decades, with no title. It was identified, by Anne Margaret Daniel, as a complete Pat Hobby story, written in the summer of 1940, and appears here for the first time. It is published with the authorization of the Trustees of the Estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
If Mr. DeTinc continued to collapse, everything would be all right. When he ordered the prop department to mount an anti-aircraft gun on his bungalow, it looked as though the time had come, but the matter was hushed up, and Mr. DeTinc struggled onward through the labyrinth of production.
Sometimes Pat Hobby dreamed of sneaking in, seizing the Benzedrine pills on Mr. DeTinc’s desk, and cramming them down his throat all at once. He visualized the producer stuffed with Benzedrine, racing madly around and around his office, producing and producing until he collapsed. Then a long rest for DeTinc—utter forgetfulness, a slow, step-by-step recovery with frequent daily relapses, slip-backs, convulsions and comas . . . and Pat still on the payroll of a picture that had been abandoned a month ago.
“What are you writing on?” Pat was asked in the studio commissary. Or, “What producer you working for?”
He had two cautious answers. Either he was just starting work and didn’t know yet, or else he had just finished a job. Meanwhile, he lay low. Three times a week, he appeared in DeTinc’s outer office, showed himself to the secretaries, sat down for a minute—more often than not next to DeTinc’s doctor, who waited, bag on knee. When the doctor was admitted to the presence, Pat took advantage of the slight commotion to disappear. Then: a half pint of gin from the drugstore across the street, and Santa Anita for the day.
But the jockeys were terribly corrupt that summer, and the two-fifty a week he received for lying low flowed swiftly into the pocket of Louie, the studio bookie. On the day that Pat met Jim Dasterson in the barrier, he had less than a dollar in one pocket and an ounce of gin in the other. Bleak and crimson-eyed he stood under the revealing California sky looking every year of his forty-nine.
“You look like hell,” Dasterson said sympathetically. “Got a job?”
Offended, Pat started to say that he was employed—but thought better of it. Dasterson, a fellow-writer from better days, was a producer now.
“You ought to get a new hat,” Dasterson said.
He was not a kindly man but he spoke in the glow of a brilliant three-horse parlay.
“I’ll give you a job on a picture,” he said. “Did you ever work in Poland or a law office or a shipyard?”
“I worked in a shipyard,” Pat said, “in Newport News during the war.”
“O.K. You’re the technical expert on shipyards. Two weeks at seventy-five, Pat—how’s that?”
Pat pretended to hesitate.
“I can ask my agent.”
“There he is,” Dasterson said, pointing suddenly.
As Pat turned to look, Dasterson raised his knee abruptly into Pat’s rump.
“Your agent!” he said contemptuously. “Don’t pull that stuff on me! No agent would handle you. Come around to the lot tomorrow.”
Pat was not proud. He could take it. He could take everything. He had never had two jobs at once before, but what could you do, with the jockeys selling out and pulling their horses. The next day he reported to Dasterson’s studio and was referred to the writer on the picture.
Pat had indeed worked in a shipyard once, but he was handicapped by his impression that sabotage had to do with neglect of the Sabbath day.
“Oh, the welders always went to church,” he declared, “Except that on most Sundays they went to Sloppy Sam’s or Bad Annie’s.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Mr. Dasterson’s writer said hastily. “I don’t need that dope yet—I’m working out the love story. Leave me your phone number and I’ll get in touch with you later.”
Long sunny afternoons at Santa Anita. Fat half-pints sagging comfortably in his back pocket. Did he have a job? Let them ask now and he could afford to shake his head and smile, for he had two. After years of neglect, an Indian summer of prosperity had come at last. On alternate mornings he visited the two studios, reporting one day to Mr. DeTinc’s office and the next to Mr. Dasterson’s. He knew that, so long as he kept calling, he would always find the two men busy—in fact, the more he called the less likely he would be to see them. And this would have been fine if he had not called on Mr. Dasterson the day the wall of his office was being repaired.
A face kept regarding Pat through the broken plaster between the anteroom and the inner sanctum. It was a face he had seen before yet could not place.
The face passed and repassed the chink in the wall and each time looked curiously out at Pat. There was something a little uncanny about it, and he was about to withdraw to pleasanter pastures when the buzzer clicked on the secretary’s desk.
“Mr. Hobby.”
“Yes.”
“Wait one minute, Mr. Hobby. Mr. Dasterson wants to see you.”
Pat waited, squirming a little. Again he saw the face approaching the broken plaster. This time whoever was behind it raised a finger and tore the wallpaper a little so that they could better see.
“All right, Mr. Hobby.”
With a faint dew of sweat on his forehead, Pat went inside.
Dasterson received him jovially.
“Well, old-timer—how’s the research expert? Telling Rohnson all about the shipyards?”
Pat looked behind quickly. Apparently no one else was in the office.
“Just sit down there,” Dasterson said, indicating the sofa. “Tell me how you’re going. Turn your face to the right, will you.”
Again Pat clanked around.
“What is this?” he demanded. “I don’t get it.”
“Little more against the light—there.” He raised his voice. “All right, Breine.”
From the little washroom emerged the face that Pat had seen through the chink, a face he would still not have identified if the man hadn’t walked to a table and put a bag thereon. It was Mr. DeTinc’s physician.
“It is him?” Dasterson asked with a grin.
“I think so,” the doctor said. “I know I’ve seen him before and now I think I know where.”
Jail loomed, prison doors yawned. ♦
