Tough Guys Don't Dance

by Norman Mailer

  Now my limbs began to tremble freely of one another. Parts of my body were shivering while the rest was still, an experience I had not had before. It was then I felt an idea coming forward to the center of my attention, pressing into my spirit against all resistance, as if the thought and I were on opposite sides of a door. Then I could hold it off no longer: I had to examine my pistol (Patty’s pistol). It was a .22.

  How implausible this sounds, but, do you know, for the last five days I had succeeded somehow in avoiding the thought. Now, however, the subpoena was served: I had to examine the .22.

  It was where it had always been, there in a cabinet on her side of the bedroom. It was sitting in its case. The lid once raised, the box reeked. Someone had fired it recently and put it back uncleaned. Was it myself? The casing had been ejected from the chamber and there was a round missing from the magazine.

  I did not feel guilty. I was angry. The nearer the evidence, the more furious I became. The pistol was particularly infuriating, as if I were a criminal lawyer presented with one more nasty witness inserted without fair notice; yes, I felt innocent and full of anger. How dare they? Whoever they were. What was being done to tear my mind from its hinges? How curious that the more likely it would seem to others—including my father—that I had killed at least one of these women, the more certain it seemed to me that I had not.

  The telephone was ringing.

  I took it for a sign that it was Madeleine.

  “Thank God, it’s you, darling,” she said and began to weep.

  That rich and husky voice had dimensions for expressing misery. Her emotion soon opened into those deeps of sorrow that speak of the loss of years of love, and hot vows of fucking in the wrong bed. “Oh, baby,” she managed to say, “Oh, darling,” and was off again. I could have been listening to the wails of a woman who had just learned she was a widow.

  “Darling,” she said at last, “I thought you were dead. I had a chill in my heart.” She started to wail again. “I was so afraid no one would answer your phone.”

  “What is it?”

  “Tim, don’t go out. Lock your door.”

  I could not remember a time when she had wept so terribly as this. “What’s the matter?” I begged.

  Slowly it came from her. Phrase by phrase. Every few words were followed by her woe, her fear, her outrage. Now there were moments when I did not know if she failed to speak from horror or fury.

  She had found some photographs. That was clear at last. She had been putting fresh laundry in his drawers and came across a locked box she had not seen before. It had enraged her that he kept a locked box in their bedroom. If he had secrets, why didn’t he hide them in the cellar? So she smashed the box.

  How her terror keened into me. Over the phone, I could hear her trembling.

  “Madeleine, no,” I said, “speak clearly. You must speak clearly. Who is in these photographs?”

  “Patty Lareine,” she said. “They’re of Patty Lareine. They’re nude. They’re obscene.” She began to choke on her words. “They’re worse than the ones you took of me. I don’t know if I can bear it. The moment I saw those pictures, I thought you were dead.”

  “Am I in them?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you have such a thought?”

  Her weeping changed. It was not unlike the whimpering of a young girl who has been thrown from a horse and now must, no matter the shock, sheer panic and bottomless fright, get back on again. So did Madeleine force herself to see the photos in her mind. Then she said, “Darling, he cut the head off every one of them.”

  “You better get out of that house,” I told her.

  “I believe he’s decided to kill you.”

  “Madeleine, get out of your place. It’s more unsafe for you than for me.”

  “I’d like to burn his house,” she said. Then she began to giggle. That was more upsetting than her grief. “I can’t, though. I might burn the neighbors down.”

  “You would.”

  “But think of his face when those guns melted.”

  “Listen to me carefully. Does he have a machete in his collection?”

  “Several,” she said. “And swords. Only he uses a pair of scissors.” She began to giggle once more.

  “Do you see any swords missing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t keep up with his collection.”

  “Could you recognize a .22 handgun?”

  “Is that a pistol?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s got all kinds of pistols.”

  I let it go.

  “Madeleine, I want you to join me here.”

  “I don’t know if I can move. I ripped up a few gowns he bought for me. It’s left me paralyzed.”

  “Hey,” I said, “you can do it. You can make the move.”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing works right now.”

  “Madeleine, if you won’t come, I’ll drive down to get you.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “With his timing, he’ll walk in on us.”

  “Then pack your bags and get in your car.”

  “I don’t want to drive,” she said. “I’ve been up all night. I haven’t slept since you were here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love you,” she said.

  “All right,” I said.

  “All right, what?”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Both of us loving you. That’s not hard to understand.” She actually stirred out of her woe long enough to give one suspicion of a merry laugh. “You’re a fiend,” she said. “Only a fiend could hit a happy note at a time like this.”

  “If you don’t want to drive,” I said, “call a cab. Take it to Provincetown.”

  “Take a cab fifty miles? No,” she said, “I won’t support the cab companies.” Yes, she still had her dependable thrifty streak.

  “I need you,” I told her. “I think Patty Lareine is dead.”

  “You think?”

  “I know it.”

  “You saw her?”

  “I know it.”

  “All right,” she said after a time, “I’ll come. If you need me, I’ll come.”

  “I need you,” I said.

  “What if he shows up?”

  “Let’s face him here.”

  “I don’t want to see that man anywhere,” she said.

  “Maybe he’s afraid of you too.”

  “You better believe,” said Madeleine, “that he is afraid of me. Before he left the house this morning, I told him not to turn his back. I said, ‘If it takes ten years, you filthy horror, I’m going to shoot you from behind.’ He believed it. I could see his face. He would believe something like that.”

  “I’d believe it more,” I said, “if you knew what a .22 was.”

  “Oh,” she said, “please don’t understand me too quickly.”

  “Who said that?” I asked.

  “André Gide.”

  “André Gide? You never read him.”

  “Don’t tell anybody,” she said.

  “Take your car. You can do it.”

  “I’ll get there. Maybe I’ll call a cab. But I’ll get there.” She asked for the address and was fortified when I told her my father would be with us.

  “There’s a man I could live with,” she said and hung up.

  I calculated that it should take her no more than an hour to pack, and an hour to drive here. Madeleine’s habits, however, being likely to remain constant over ten years, I could count on waiting four to five hours before she showed. Again, I wondered whether I should drive out for her and decided I wouldn’t. We would be stronger here.

  Now I heard the rattle of the dinghy being hauled up the davits, then the heavy tread of my father on the deck. He went around, however, to the front door of the house and let himself in with the key Patty Lareine gave him years ago when he first visited us.

  Patty Lareine was dead.

  This thoug
ht, which kept arriving in my mind like a telegram delivered every fifteen minutes, still had nothing to offer but its integument. It was like the envelope to a telegram that has no message inside. Certainly no emotion. Yes, Madeleine, I said to myself, I could get crazy about you, but not now.

  My father came into the kitchen. I took one look at him and poured some bourbon into a glass, and put the water on to boil for coffee. He looked as tired as I had ever seen him. Yet the flush on his cheekbones was still spread across his face. He also looked virtuous.

  “You did a good job,” I said.

  “Pretty good.” He squinted at me like an old fisherman. “You know, I was three miles out in the bay before I realized they might be following me with field glasses or worse. Maybe they even had a surveyor’s transit. If they get two of those on you, they can take a finding on where you drop it off. Then they send a diver down. Nothing to it. So I realized I better drop my package while I’m moving at medium throttle, and make sure I do it casual on the side of the boat away from shore. That way my body covers what I’m doing. I’m sure it was all for nothing,” he said, “and nobody was watching. That’s the likelihood. But that’s not how I felt then.”

  The coffee was ready. I handed it to him. He poured it down his throat as if he were an old diesel taking in fuel. “Just at the moment I was about to drop it off,” he resumed, “I started to worry if the baling wire would hold. You know, getting those heads onto the chain was the toughest part of the job.” He went into detail. Like an obstetrician describing how he got two fingers in to turn the baby’s head out of breech, or, yes, like an old fisherman taking you along step by step on how to bait a hook so that the wriggler stays alive, he accompanied his account with motions of his hand. I followed enough of it to realize that the operation had carried him through the socket of one eye and out through a hole he had driven in the skull with a spike. It left me startled again at how little I knew my father. He gave his account with a ruminative relish like a man who works for the Department of Sanitation giving a recital of the worst barrel he has collected in an interesting work career, and it was only when he was done that I could recognize why he had enjoyed the account. There was some kind of cure in process. Do not ask me to certify my statement. But there was a smug complacency in my father’s air as if he were a convalescent who was getting better by disregarding doctor’s orders.

  Then he startled me. “Did you feel anything unusual,” he asked, “while I was gone?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you,” he said, “but when I dropped the anchor I heard a voice.”

  “What did it say?”

  He shook his head.

  “What did you hear?”

  “I heard you did it.”

  “You believe such voices?”

  “Considering the circumstances—no. But I’d like to hear you say so.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. “As far as I know, I didn’t do it. I’m beginning to think, however, that I’m responsible in some way for the minds of all the others.” When I saw that he did not really follow me, I said, “It’s as if I was polluting the pipeline.”

  “I don’t care if you’re only half Irish,” he said. “You’re certainly degenerate enough in your mentality to be all Irish.”

  “Shove the abuse,” I said.

  He took another sip from his coffee.

  “Tell me about Bolo Green,” he said.

  “I can’t keep up with you,” I told him.

  Our conversation was taking on the slippery frustrations of a dream. I felt close to some elusive truth and he wanted to talk about Bolo Green.

  He certainly did. “All the while,” he said, “that I was bringing the boat back, this Bolo Green kept coming into my head. I felt as if Patty was telling me to think about him.” He stopped. “Am I being a sentimental son of a bitch about Patty?”

  “Maybe you’re a little drunk.”

  “I’m getting a lot drunk,” he said, “and I miss her. I tell myself—you want to see how crude I am deep down?—I tell myself, if you put a weight on an old dog and sink him at sea, you’re going to miss the dog. Is that crude enough for you?”

  “You said it.”

  “It’s gross. But I miss her. I buried her, god-damnit.”

  “Yes, Dad, you did.”

  “You didn’t have the balls to do it.” He stopped. “I’m getting unreasonable, aren’t I?”

  “What’s the good of being a Mick if you can’t welcome senility?”

  He roared. “I love you!” he cried out.

  “I love you.”

  “Tell me about Bolo.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s part queer,” said Dougy.

  “What’s your evidence?”

  He shrugged. “Patty. Patty told me on the water.”

  “Why don’t you take a nap,” I said. “We may need each other later.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “I want to do a little snooping around town.”

  “Stay alert,” he said.

  “Get your rest. If Regency comes around, talk to him nicely. When he’s not looking, hit him over the head with a shovel, then tie him up.”

  “Too bad you ain’t serious,” my father said.

  “Give him a wide berth. He may be able to hold his own against both of us.”

  I could read my father’s thought, but he pinched his lips together and said nothing.

  “Get some sleep,” I told him, and left.

  I had been casual but, truly, I was not in hailing distance of such a state. An outsize stimulation had begun as soon as I said, “I’m responsible for the minds of others.” A recognition stirred that I must get into my car and drive around town. The impulse was as powerful as the force that came through my drunkenness on the night I tried to climb the Monument. I knew the same fear, delicate, near to exquisite in my chest, like the shadow of one’s finest pride.

  I obeyed. I had not spent close to twenty years contemplating the lessons of my climb up the tower for too little—no, with as much marching grace as my bunged-up toe and half-paralyzed shoulder would permit I crossed the street, got into my Porsche and drove slowly with one arm on the wheel down Commercial Street, not knowing what I looked for, nor whether feats would be demanded of me, no, it was something like the excitement, I must suppose, of an African hunter when big animals are near.

  The town was quiet. The town bore no relation to my mood. In the center The Brig was half empty, and through the windows of The Bucket of Blood I could see only one pool player contemplating his next shot. He looked as lonely as the waiter Van Gogh once painted standing in the middle of the café at Arles.

  I took a turn to the right at Town Hall and parked across the street from the basement entrance to the police station. Regency’s car was outside, standing double-parked and empty. The motor was running.

  Then came a temptation clear as the mandate to mount the tower. It told me to step out of my car, walk over to his, turn off the motor, take his keys, open his trunk, look inside—speak of creative visualization, I saw the machete in the trunk!—remove it, lock the trunk, put the keys back in the ignition, start the motor, leave his car and stroll back to my Porsche and a good exit, yes, I saw all of this in advance and as vividly as any trip to the burrow I had thought out for myself before I went. Now my first reaction was yes, do it! My second was no.

  It was then I understood, as never before, that we live with not one soul but two, our father and our mother—at the least!—the night and the day, if you will; well, this is no exposition of dualities, but two souls I possessed that were equal to two matched horses—badly matched!—if one said yes, the other said no, and the poor driver was nothing but my own person who now cast the deciding vote: Yes, I would do it, I had to. I could not live through the debacle of the Monument one more time.

  So I got out of my car. To my misery, the side street was deserted, thereby giving me no excuse t
o delay, and with an exaggerated hobble (as if a maimed man could do less harm in the eyes of the police) I crossed to his car, my heart beating at such a pitch that fear passed right through vertigo into the delirium of intoxication itself. Have you ever taken an anesthetic through a mask and seen the concentric circles bore in upon your brain as you go under? I saw them now as I took the keys from his car.

  “Oh, hullo, Regency,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind. I need a tire iron from your trunk.”

  “Oh, yes, I mind,” said he and drew his gun and shot me.

  That passed. The vision passed. Toes tingling, hand shaking, I got the key into the lock of his trunk.

  The machete was there.

  In that instant when my heart spun like a cat on a high power line and I thought I would die, I knew some far-off chord of exultation and woe: He exists, or It exists, or They are out there. It was confirmation that the life we live with all our wit and zeal is only half our life. The other half belongs to something other.

  My first impulse was to run. Instead, I pried the machete from the floor of the trunk—it was stuck to it!—slammed down the rear deck of the police cruiser, forced myself (it was the most demanding measure in the sequence) to get inside his vehicle long enough to start his motor again and only then was I free to cross the street to my own car. Under way, the steering wheel of the Porsche kept oscillating in my good hand until I was obliged to hold it with both.

  Five blocks down Bradford Street I pulled under a lamp for a moment and looked at the machete. It was covered with dried blood on the side of the blade that had not been stuck to the rubber mat. All my notions of Regency collided. Never could I have conceived he would be so careless as this.

  Of course, if he had used this weapon upon Jessica (and, yes, he must have used it) was it possible that he had not been able to go near the blade since? If one is going to perch on the abyss, it is reassuring to discover that one’s fellow maniacs also know fear and trembling.