by Dell Shannon
He got to the dark top of the stairs, and he thought frantically, I got to tell her. I got to try. Because—
He was sick and shaking with fear, with guilt, with the weight of a thing thirteen couldn’t bear alone. The door was locked like always and he knocked and she said sharp, “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Ma, let me in.” And there wasn’t any other way to say it than he did, then: “Ma, it’s happened again! Ma—please listen—I didn’t mean to—I never meant nothing to happen—but it must’ve, because—”
She just stood and stared at him.
“—Because it was blood on my coat, ’s morning.” He gulped and went on through the lump in his throat, “And—and the place they found—it—it was right where I—”
The fear pulled her face all tight and cross-looking for a minute, but then it changed to being mad at him, and she said quick, “I don’t listen to a boy tells lies!”
He looked at her dumbly. He knew what else she’d say, like she had before; but this time he knew something else—that what she said wasn’t just at him, it was at that place she had way inside her where she knew it was so—it was to shut the door to that place and forget it was there at all. And now she was asking him to help her, seemed like, not mad any more but asking.
“You get washed an’ eat your supper while it’s hot, an’ then you set right down to that schoolwork you shoulda done last night—I’m allus tellin’ you, don’t want to end up like your dad, not enough schoolin’ for a decent job—you’re a real smart boy, Marty, you take after my folks, an’ last thing I do I see you get educated good, maybe even college. But you got to remember you don’t know ever’thing yet, see, an’—an’ kids get mixed up in their minds, like, that’s all—”
He whispered, “I’m not awful hungry, Ma.”
And all the while the secret was there in the room with them, neither of them daring to look at it open: that she wouldn’t see for what it really was, that he was getting more and more afraid of—that they had to live with somehow.
* * *
Danny stood there by the drugstore awhile after Marty left.
On top of his mind he thought, That big lummox of a Lindstrom kid, sure a dumb one. But most of him was occupied with the job he was on, and he felt kind of tensed-up because it was the first time his dad had taken much notice of him, acted like he was a person with any sense, and he wanted to do this right.
It had been a big surprise to him to feel the way he did. Asked him last week, he’d have said it wasn’t nothing to him, whatever his dad did or said—been three and a half years since he’d laid eyes on him, anyways—and that went other way round too, they’d always just sort of stayed out of each other’s way. Same as with his mother, but she was just a nothing, like a handful of water, and there was at least something to his dad. And he’d felt a new, funny feeling when his dad said that: Kind of a sharp kid, you can maybe be some use to me.
Besides, this was different from hooking little stuff off store counters or stripping cars at night. This was a big job.
When the man came, he spotted him right off from what his dad had said he looked like; but he waited awhile, just went on looking in the drugstore window. The guy stopped and stood there too, waiting, under the store canopy. Nobody came past after him, and when Danny walked down the block there weren’t any cops watching from alleys, nobody at all. It was all going just like his dad had planned, but of course you had to play it smart. Danny walked back to the drugstore; he didn’t stop by the guy waiting there, just slowed down, and he said, “He’s changed his mind, mister, he says meet him at the Paradise Bar on Second, right now.”
The man said, “What?” sort of dumb and surprised, and then he made as if to grab for him, but Danny slid away in the dark, into the alley round the corner, and waited. After a minute the man started to walk up toward Second Street, not very fast; he looked back a couple of times, but once away from the corner lights it was dark and Danny stayed close up against the buildings.
On Second Street there were more lights, but people on the sidewalk, too, to hide him; he stayed farther behind, but he could still see the guy when he turned in under the pink neon sign that said PARADISE. So that was O.K. And no cops.
Danny turned and sauntered back to the corner; another man stood there, looking in the window of the liquor store. “O.K.,” said Danny. “He’s in, and no cops.”
“You sure?”
“You think I can’t smell a cop?”
The man relaxed a little, grinned. “Maybe you ain’t so smart as you think, but I guess you’re not so dumb neither. Chip off the ole block like they say, huh? O.K., you go along. Now I just let the guy stew awhile an’ get real worried.” He went back to looking in the window.
* * *
Inside the bar a jukebox was pounding, and the blood-hammer in Morgan’s head began to keep time with it. He went all the way in to the last of the little booths opposite the bar, and sat down; the waiter who came up gave him a sour look for taking a booth instead of going to the bar, but he didn’t say anything and he’d come over promptly because Morgan was a lot better dressed than the usual customer in here and might be drinking something besides beer or wine.
Morgan asked for whiskey, but when it came he just left it there on the table; he’d never been much of a drinker and not at all the last eight years, since—Which was a useless gesture, maybe: morbid.
He sat there and waited. The place wasn’t crowded on a rainy night, only ten or a dozen men at the bar. It was stuffy, too hot after the street, and he realized he still had his coat on, slid out of the booth to take it off, fold it beside him. The clock on one side of the bar said half-past six, but Morgan knew he’d better keep his eye off the clock—the man wanted him to sweat, and might not show up for hours. In his mind he knew that, while all the rest of him was tense and agonizing to get to it, have it done, the ultimate doom arranged.
He lit a cigarette and set himself to wait, and wait, and wait some more; and his intellect told him further (methodical, plodding Morgan) that if he let himself go over and over this thing emotionally, he’d be in just the softened-up state the bastard wanted, at the end. So he made himself think about anything, everything else than Sue and Janny.
The first thing he seized on to think about was that boy. Using a youngster, for this. That was a conventional thought out of the small neat circle of life he’d always lived in up to now: correction, up to being on the job he held now, for that (even before his own private nightmare) should certainly have taught him about lives lived elsewhere and otherwise, where children weren’t automatically screened from the uglier realities because they were children. It didn’t occur to him that the boy was just relaying a message, didn’t know what he was mixed into: he’d seen his expression. And there were two things about that, that turned this into something like a real nightmare where ordinary sights and sounds made no sense or a new monstrous kind of sense. That boy hadn’t realized, maybe, that there on the rain-swept empty corner, as he swaggered past Morgan, the lights from the store fell unshadowed on him. Oh, yes, the boy had known just what he was doing.
Morgan looked down at his hands on the wet, scarred table, and as he looked they began to shake violently, so he put them in his lap.
Quite a handsome boy. Even in that deceiving light, he had seen the regular features, fair skin with the black hair and blue eyes all the more emphasized for it, the thick brows going up in little wings at the end. He knew that curve by heart, the very angle, Janny’s brows winging up at the corners off Janny’s blue eyes—
Not to think about Janny, or Sue. Janny, just about now, being tucked into bed with that ridiculous stuffed tiger Mrs. Gunn had got her, that she was so crazy about. Warm and powdery from her bath, buttoned into the woolly blue pajamas.
That boy had just had on jeans and a leather jacket. That boy who was, who must be—
For God’s sake! said his mind to him savagely.
He glanced sideways at the clock. It was twenty-five minutes to seven.
He remembered a while ago, couldn’t remember where, reading an article on juvenile delinquents that had interested him. It was funny, there was a clear picture in his mind of himself saying to Sue, “The man’s got something there, you know,” but he couldn’t recall now who the author was, some official or a senator or whatever. Anyway. Often the most intelligent children, it said, those with imagination and ability, the nonconforming minds any society needs—but for this and that reason turned in the wrong direction.
All right, yes; up to a point; some of them, the leaders. Most, well—
Hell, maybe the man was right.
The boy—led to Janny and he mustn’t think about Janny. Quick, something else.
Another boy. Barging into him in the street there, dodging past. Didn’t know it was a boy—big as a man, as tall as Morgan himself—until he heard the sobbing light breath, had a glimpse of him close in the reflected street light. That was the Lindstrom boy, that one; they lived around here, of course. Clumsy big ox of a kid, one of those got all his growth at once, early, and wouldn’t quite learn how to handle his size for a while; and still so baby-faced, any roundish, smooth, freckle-nosed thirteen-year-old face, that you expected to see half a foot below where this one was. Lindstrom was what, Danish, they grew big men mostly.
Generalizing again, he thought; you couldn’t, of course. The archetype Scandinavian wasn’t a wife-deserter, but this one was. That report wasn’t made up yet either, and he had to have it ready Monday morning for Gunn. Something queer there about the Lindstroms, something that smelled wrong, hard to say what. It could be another case of collusion to get money out of the county, but Morgan didn’t think so; he didn’t think that, whatever was behind the indefinable tension he’d sensed in that place, it came from dishonesty. Anything so—uncomplicated—as dishonesty. The woman was a type he knew: transplanted countrywoman, sometimes ignorant, frequently stubborn at clinging to obsolete ways and beliefs, always with a curious rigid pride. That type might be dishonest about anything else, but not about money.
Invariably the first thing that kind said to him was, “I’ve never asked nor took charity before.” Marion Lindstrom had said that. She hadn’t told him much else.
But the report had to be made out, and the hunt started for Eric John Lindstrom.
It was a quarter to seven. Morgan kept himself from watching the door; his mind scrabbled about desperately for something else irrelevant to occupy it. He heard the door open, couldn’t stop himself looking up to see: outside he was still uncomfortably warm, but there was an ice-cold weight in his stomach, and it moved a little when he saw the man who’d come in—a stranger, not the one.
And right there something odd happened to him. Suddenly he knew what was behind the queerness he’d sensed in that Lindstrom woman, this morning. The few minutes he’d been there, talked to the woman and the boy. It was fear: secret fear. He knew it now because it was his own feeling: the sure recognition was emotional.
He thought without much interest, I wonder what they’re afraid of.
At seven o’clock, because of the looks he was getting from the barman, he drank the whiskey and ordered another. It was cheap bar whiskey, raw. At a quarter past seven he ordered a third; he decided the whiskey was just what he’d needed, because his mind had started to work again to some purpose, and suddenly too he was no longer afraid. That was a hell of a note, come to think, getting in a cold sweat the way he had without ever even considering whether there were ways and means to deal with this, come out safe. What had got into him, anyway? There must be a way, and what he’d told himself this morning still went: to hell with any moral standards. If—
When at half-past seven someone slid into the booth opposite him, he’d almost finished a fourth whiskey. He looked up almost casually to meet the eyes of the man across the table, and he wondered with self-contempt that didn’t show on his face why he’d ever been afraid of this man.
“You been doin’ some thinkin’, Morgan?” The man grinned at him insolently. “Ready to talk business?”
“Yes,” said Morgan, cold and even. “I’ve been doing some thinking, but not about the money. I told you before, I haven’t got that kind of money.”
The man who called himself Smith laughed, as the barman came up, and he said, “You’ll buy me a drink anyways. Whiskey.”
The barman looked at Morgan, who shook his head; he’d had just the right amount now to balance him where he was. “Don’t give me that,” said Smith when the man was gone. “You’re doin’ all right. You got money to throw away once, you got it to throw away twice.”
Money to throw away… But that was perfectly logical reasoning, thought Morgan, if you happened to look at things that way. He looked at Smith there, a couple of feet across the table, and he thought that in any dimension that mattered they were so far away from each other that communication was impossible. He found, surprisingly, that he was intellectually interested in Smith, in what made him tick. He wondered what Smith’s real name was: he did not think the name the woman had used two years ago, Robertson, was the real name any more than Smith. Smith’s eyes were gray: though his skin was scarred with the marks of old acne and darkened from lack of soap and water, it was more fair than dark. And his eyebrows curved up in little wings toward the temples. Morgan stared at them, fascinated: Smith had worn a hat pulled low when he’d seen him before, and the eyebrows had been hidden. The eyebrows were, of course, more confirmation of Smith’s identity. With detached interest Morgan thought, Might be Irish, that coloring.
“You know,” he said, “you might not be in such a strong position as you think. Your story wouldn’t sound so good to a judge—not along with mine.”
“Then what’re you doin’ here?” asked Smith softly.
And that of course was the point. Because it was a no man’s land in law, this particular thing. Anyone might look at Smith, listen to what that upright citizen Richard Morgan had to say, and find it incredible that any intelligent human agency could hesitate at making a choice between. But it wasn’t a matter of men—it was the way the law read. And in curious juxtaposition to the impersonal letter of the law, there was also the imbecilic sentimentality, the mindless lip service to convention—the convention that there was in the physical facts of parturition some magic to supersede individual human qualities. He could not take the chance, gamble Janny’s whole future, Sue’s sanity maybe, on the hope that some unknown judge might possess a little common sense. Because there was also the fact that, as the law took a dim view of buying and selling human beings, it didn’t confine the guilt to just one end of the transaction.
Smith knew that, without understanding it or needing to understand it; but the one really vital fact Smith knew was that there had never been a legal adoption. They had hesitated, procrastinated, fearing the inevitable questions…
“—A business proposition, that’s all,” Smith was saying. “Strickly legal.” His tone developed a little resentment, he was saying he had a legitimate grievance. “You made a Goddamn sharp deal with my wife, a hundred lousy bucks, an’ you got away with it, she didn’t have no choice, on account she was up against it with me away like I was, flat on my back in the hospital I was, an’ the bills runnin’ up alla time—you took advantage of her not knowin’ much about business, all right! I figure it same way like a bank would, Morgan—innerest, they call it, see?”
There was an appalling mixture of naïve satisfaction and greed in his eyes; Morgan looked away. (Interest, just how did you figure that kind of interest? Twenty-six months of a squirming warm armful that weighed fourteen pounds, eighteen, twenty-two, and a triumphant twenty-nine-and-a-half?—he forgot what the latest figure was, only remembered Sue’s warm chuckle, reporting it. Twenty-six months of sticky curious baby-fat fingers pok
ing into yours, into the paper you were trying to read, into what was almost a dimple at the corner of Sue’s mouth: of the funny solemn look in the blue eyes: of ten pink toes splashing in a sudsy tub. That would be quite a thing to figure in percentages.)
“You can raise the dough if you got to,” said Smith.
“Not ten thousand,” said Morgan flatly. “I might manage five.” And that was a deliberate lie; he couldn’t raise five hundred.
“I don’t go for no time-payments, Morgan.” The gray eyes were bleak. “You heard me the first time. I give you a couple days’ think about it, but don’t give me no more stall now. Put up or shut up.”
Poker, thought Morgan. Bluff?—that he’d bring it open, go to law? You couldn’t take the chance; and in this last five minutes it had come to him that he didn’t have to. There was only one way to deal with Smith, and Morgan knew how it could be done, now: he saw the way. He could take care of Smith once for all time, and then they would be safe: if necessary later, he could handle the woman easier, he remembered her as an indecisive nonentity. There was, when you came to think of it, something to be said for being an upright citizen with a clean record. And it would not trouble his conscience at all. In the days he’d worn Uncle’s uniform,35 he had probably killed better men, and for less reason.
There was hard suspicion now in the gray eyes; Morgan looked away, down to his empty glass, quickly. He’d been acting too calm, too controlled; he must make Smith believe in his capitulation. He made his tone angry and afraid when he said, low, “All right, all right—I heard you the first time! I—I guess if I cash in those bonds—I might—but I’ll get something for my money! You’ll sign a legal agreement before you touch—”
“O.K., I don’t mind that.”
“You’ve got to give me time, I can’t raise it over Sunday—”
“Monday night.”
“No, that’s not long enough—”
“Monday,” said Smith. “That’s the time you got—use it. Make it that same corner, seven o’clock, with the cash—an’ I don’t take nothing bigger than fives, see?” He slid out of the booth, stood up.