She pushed back her hair. “Pour me a drink,” she said to Shawn. “My mouth’s dry.” She scarcely tasted it, put it down again. “Oh, everything!” she exclaimed, pushing over the entire handkerchief cabbage and what was left in it. “I can’t stand any more of this, it’s like dying by in—” She checked herself quickly.
“Make your bets!” she said, in too loud, too hoarse a voice.
Suddenly, by afterthought, she wrenched the ring off her finger, pitched that in with the rest.
The ball trundled, socketed.
She drew in her breath, in a long cooling whisper.
“He hasn’t lost once,” Reid said hectically. “He hasn’t gone off that color once since we began. It has to end, it has to break sometime! The record, I think, for consecutive number of—”
“The wheel’s a fix,” Shawn said surlily. “Somebody’s ribbing me.”
“The wheel’s straight!” she flashed at him. “And if I’d intended manipulating it in anyone’s favor—” He knew what she’d been about to say. She tasted her drink again, twisting her body offside. She spilled a little of it, her hands were fluttering like leaves.
“I’m through. Luck doesn’t love ladies.” She backed her hand to her forehead, held it there a moment. “I’ll go ahead spinning for you—if I can calm down a little.”
“Should we quit?” Shawn asked, reaching out to steady her, then pulling back again.
“Don’t leave me stranded now!” Reid whinnied, almost beside himself. He had one packet left. “Wait a minute. Where’s my checkbook? I have more on deposit in my account. And my securities.”
“Don’t,” Shawn objected throatily.
Her foot quickly trod his undertable. “Look at his face,” she breathed. “We’re winning. Keep on.”
A light-blue paper oblong fell on the table. “Here—blank,” Reid said. “The entire amount, whatever it is. Fill it in yourself afterwards. If you get it.”
“The entire amount,” Shawn said quietly. And moved all the packets forward once more.
“There are just two of us left. We’ll leave out the odd and even after this, just bet on color. Color against color.”
“Your bet,” Shawn nodded.
“I’ll take red, the color of life. The other is the color of—”
“Bet’s down!” she snapped.
The click of finality seemed never to come. On and on and on, slower and slower and slower. Reid was gripping the loose fold of skin at the front of his emaciated neck, pulling it out until it almost seemed made of rubber. She had her hand crosswise to her mouth, was biting the back of it. Shawn kept slapping lightly and incessantly at his own thigh, as if curbing extreme pain.
The ball dropped home.
Looking at them, and not at the stilled wheel, it would have been impossible to tell who was the loser and who the winner. They all three alike seemed the losers, the players as well as the nonplayer.
“I’m done,” Reid said strangledly. “I haven’t anything left.”
Shawn made a move to push the terraced accumulation of currency back toward him.
“No, that can’t undo it!” Reid said fiercely. “Don’t you understand? This little wheel runs true to the other, bigger one. You think this is just a wooden gambling wheel. It isn’t; it’s my wheel of life. I’ve got to win just once, before it’s too late. I want a sign from it; then that’ll mean— I’ve got to keep on playing, keep on playing, until I get one!”
He glanced at the clock.
“Wait. The house here. The deed is downtown somewhere. My daughter is a witness. I can’t put it on the table. Give me a piece of paper. Oh, anything, anything.”
He drew a square of four lines. He put a chimney over it. He put a window in it. He signed his name under it.
“Witness this,” he said, and handed the paper to her.
She wrote her own name underneath his.
He took it back, and put it on the table.
“This goes against everything you’ve got. On the red.”
Shawn nodded.
She spun.
“Stand back, a foot back,” he ordered her. “Fold your hands on top of your head, and keep them there. I want my sign, but I don’t want it from you. I want it from—” His eyes flicked to the ceiling, then down again to the blurred whirlpool of the wheel, that never finished dissolving. You could hear their breathing over the faint rustle it made. Short and swift, and sanded with tension.
The ball plunged. Their breathing stopped. There was silence.
Reid smiled. It was an awful smile. “The house is yours now, too,” he said. “The house and all the money.”
Shawn didn’t answer.
“I have nothing left.” Again Reid eyed the clock, as he had before, “No, wait.” He turned slowly, and his eyes rested on Jean.
Shawn’s face whitened. “No, don’t,” he faltered. “Don’t do anything like that.” He recoiled a step. “I’ve humored you until now—”
“Humored me?” Reid said viciously. “I’m not betting against you! I’m betting against life.” He was still looking at Jean. “Is it agreeable with you, Jean?”
There was a look of sickish repugnance on Shawn’s face. “You’re going mad,” he said. “It’s time to stop. You don’t know what you’re doing—”
“I don’t?” He answered Shawn, but it was Jean he kept looking at. “The eyes of death are clearer than yours will ever be, son. You don’t know you love her, but I do. She doesn’t know she loves you, but I do.”
He kept looking at her.
“Is it agreeable to you, Jean?” he asked again.
Her eyes didn’t waver. She didn’t even glance at Shawn, as though he weren’t there in the room with them at all.
She spoke low, but her answer was as distinct as a tap against thin crystal. “It’s agreeable to me, father.”
“I bet again against the wheel of life,” Reid said. “My daughter.”
He drew a forked figure on paper, all single lines, of a two legged creature. Put a tiny circle over it for head. Put a little kilt around its middle.
He signed his name.
“Now you sign your consent under that.”
Shawn’s face had a slight greenish tinge to it. His tongue touched at his upper lip, and he swallowed, as though something gorged him. “But it’s not a—not a transferable debt. You can’t convey ownership in a—in a living being across a roulette board.”
“It’s not ownership. It’s her hand in marriage. You can refuse.”
Shawn spoke as low as she had. And as clear-voicedly. “I don’t refuse.” He kept his hands off the table. “But I have nothing worth that.”
Reid palmed the cartoon to the board. “The stake is down. Bet with what you have.”
Shawn still refused to touch the money.
“You’re on the black, then, by default. You’re the wheel. You’re life.”
Her arm suddenly swept scythelike across the table, elbow down, pushed all his accumulated winnings into betting range.
“I refuse to go by default,” she said quietly. “That would be worse.”
The wheel flowed, seeming by optical illusion to go in the opposite direction to that which it actually traveled. Then suddenly, as it neared stopping point, reversing and only then actually reflecting its own direction of course. Then the faltering, castanetlike progress of the pellet, then its final pebblelike drop.
She had turned her back. She had moved several feet away. Their silence must have told her, before she turned and looked. When she turned, she turned slowly, on the side toward Shawn rather than on the side toward her father, still clasping her own arms, as she had held them clasped while standing there. A little tightly, as if in stress; not laxly. As if she needed a tourniquet, to check the flow of some emotion coursing through her. But what it was her face didn’t say; welcome or unwelcome.
“That was your betrothal of marriage, just then,” Reid said to her.
He waited. She didn’t answer. “
Do you accept?”
“I did before. Your daughter doesn’t welsh.”
“Do you?”
Shawn worked a commonplace seal ring off his finger, went over to her.
She offered her hand unasked. He slipped it on the middle finger, and it hung slack, even at the base. She tore off a tiny morsel of her handkerchief and wedged it in under the band, to hold it in place.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed contritely.
She looked steadily into his eyes. “The winner can refuse his takings. The loser mustn’t refuse to pay up. That’s the rule of honor.” Then she added softly, “The loser doesn’t want to, anyway. My own wishes go with the pledge.”
“I have one thing left,” they heard Reid say. They both turned back to him.
He was fumbling in an inside pocket with palsied hands. He extracted at last an ancient Manila envelope, that he must have removed from the safe along with the currency, unnoticed by Shawn. From this in turn he withdrew a yellowed document, folded in quadruplicate, veined with cracks along its seams, so that it threatened to disintegrate at any further molestation. He effected its opening with cautiously manipulating fingers so that its context, or at least the upper panel of this, lay flat upon the table and could be deciphered. At top, in intricate steel-cut engraving, was the municipal coat of arms. Below, in heavy, shadow-raised nineteenth century capitals, the heading: “Certificate of Birth.” Under that, in vanishing brown ink, in spidery antique penmanship, a namespace was filled: “Reid, William Harlan”; a date space was filled: “August the Twenty-third, Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-nine.” The rest was lost to view beneath the continuing folds that had remained undisturbed.
“On the red to win,” he said in a cackling voice. “On the last try of all.”
Fetishism.
Shawn stood there, knuckles idly curved against the tabletop. “What do you expect me to do?” he said quietly.
“You refuse to bet? You know it’s worthless?” Reid shrilled.
“What’ll I meet it with? It’s a hypothetical bet. This wheel can’t affect it. If I win, how can I take it? If I lose, how can I give it up to you—when I haven’t got it in the first place?”
“I want my sign,” Reid insisted. “This wheel can give it to me. This wheel can save me. There’s still time. If I win, I’ve saved it. If I lose—”
“And what do I bet against it? This?” Shawn swept the accumulated winnings off the table edge onto the floor.
“Haven’t you anything that you value? There must be something. Every man has something. Something that you want to lose as little as I want to lose—what I am staking.”
She didn’t say anything; she didn’t help Shawn out. Her father wasn’t to be denied, perhaps she knew that. Perhaps she felt by now as he did, that the symbol could influence the reality. Or perhaps she wanted to learn what the highest thing in life to Shawn was; or if he had any such thing at all.
“Well?” Reid nagged. “Isn’t there anything? If there isn’t, I feel sorry for you. Almost as sorry for you as for myself.”
“There is something,” Shawn said slowly. “But I don’t go around putting it down on gambling tables.” He took out a small black case, opened it, holding the raised wing so that what was in it was hidden from them.
“But I’m dying,” Reid whispered fearfully. “That’s my life, there, on the red.”
Shawn put his badge down, on the black.
The symbol was complete.
“My dream, the other night,” she murmured half audibly. “I saw it, and it looked just like that, and it was the only thing that could have saved us—
“Don’t!” she said to the two of them aloud. “Don’t do it. We shouldn’t have begun this. Oh, for God’s sake, don’t make this bet!”
“The bet is down,” Reid said, waving her back.
“The bet is down,” Shawn agreed inflexibly. “Spin the wheel.”
She did it with both hands this time, not as she’d done it before. Pressing them flat, palm to palm, over it, then slicing them apart, one forward, one back, and drawing them away from it as quickly as if it were hot, and to touch it for too long was to be burned.
Reid’s face was a mask of elastic, pulled so tight at the back of his head that only a flattened suggestion of former features was recognizable any more.
Shawn’s knuckles made five double white ellipses, like eyelids, across the back of his tightly packed fist. A fist that seemed to grow smaller, tighter, with every turn the wheel made, until it was like a knob of solid bone, there at the end of his arm.
And she, she kept watching his face, more than the wheel, more than her father even, with a sort of pensive, carefully concealed admiration. As you do someone who, dimly perceived though he may have been until now, has suddenly become fully known to you for the first time.
It stopped more quickly this time, it scarcely rolled at all, as if activated by a malign intelligence of its own, in a hurry to strike without sparing, to cut short even the slightest merciful delay its indecision might have given them. Their eyes were still swimming around in the orbit it had set for them to watch, after the wheel itself had already stilled and was at rest. Like something that throws its pursuers off the track by stopping short while they go on past it.
Their rigidity melted; a flux of limpness ran through all three.
Shawn took the badge back slowly, covered it with both his hands. Held it thus in a sort of cherished contrition for a moment.
“Hold him,” he said suddenly. He grabbed at a chair and drew it up behind the tottering figure that she was trying to keep erect on its feet.
They sat him down in it between them, limp as an overcoat stripped off someone’s back. His head went back over the chair, and Shawn had to hold it with his hand below it, to give it the support that its own neck couldn’t give it.
“It’s just a game,” she was saying into his ear, in a frantic smothered voice. “It’s just a wooden wheel, made in a factory, a workshop, somewhere. You could make one yourself. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t feel. The ball stops here, the ball stops there—”
“Here,” Shawn said. “Here. Look. Take it.” And crushed the desiccated birth certificate into the nerveless hand.
“You’re giving me back a piece of paper.”
“That’s all you put down on the table, nothing else.”
“I put my life down there.” His hand twitched, and a part of the brittle paper, caught within it, was ground into particles that sifted downward to the floor like confetti. “See? There it is. There it goes.”
His head, righted by Shawn’s supporting hand at the base of its skull, overbalanced the opposite way, came forward now. It dropped inert on the table, cushioned by one arm. The other hung down straight to the floor, swinging a little at first, loose in its socket. Then at last it stopped, like the pendulum of a clock that has run down.
Jean’s hand trailed reluctantly across his bowed back, as she moved away from him, powerless to help. She moved around the table, and as she passed the wheel, she spun it, in despairing valedictory, in idle finality.
It whirred and coursed and stopped again, unwatched behind her, as it had so many times before; its board sterile now.
She saw something on Shawn’s face, and that made her turn and look around at it.
For the first time all evening, now that the game was over, now that the player was destroyed, it had stopped on red.
16
Police Procedure:
Molloy
THEY FOUND HIM LYING THERE bestially mangled, along a footpath that led through clumps of trees down into the village. It was a short cut, a sort of branch trail, that left the main highway out at about the Hughes farm and rejoined it again at mid-village. The main highway took a slight bend getting in, and this little trail ran straight. It was the string to the highway’s bow. It was tree-walled and bramble-blind and not very good, but it was the shortest line between two points.
The thing must have lurked aroun
d in the trees along there, after clearing the screaming carnival ground, and then he’d come along all unwitting, and—the condition of the ground told the rest of the story.
Even the locals could read that part of it fairly accurately. Anyone could have. He’d been coming along alone. That was obvious. And he’d been coming along toward the village, and not out from it. That was equally obvious. Because everyone in the village knew what was at large somewhere out there, and no one would have been dumb enough to strike out alone along such a trail. He obviously hadn’t known; so he hadn’t heard yet; so he hadn’t been in the village, he’d been heading for it.
Word spread like wildfire, and Molloy got out there, to where they’d found him, within ten minutes of the time they’d first found him. So did most of Thackery; the adult male part, anyway.
The torches made it bright as day, around there where he was lying. A little too bright, in fact, for what they had to show. It was pretty bad. Those that crowded in closest to take a first look backed out fastest to take a good deep breath.
You could see he’d been a man, and you could tell what color his hair had been. You couldn’t tell much else about him with any definitiveness. He was tarred and feathered with leaves. He’d bled a great deal, and that had acted as the tar. Leaves and twigs were papered all over him, from threshing and struggling on the ground, and they played the part of the feathers. In many places his actual outlines were fuzzy.
The fight must have gone around in a circle. It had flattened the shrubs and things, and churned up the ground, like a great flat wheel, with him as the axle of it.
People were spitting all over, into the bushes, in the background, and some of them trying to keep from doing even worse.
They found the piece of dress goods a considerable distance away, as though it had caught onto something moving, a claw perhaps, and been dragged, and then finally been shaken loose. It was stiffened with dried blood. Not his. Far older blood, far browner.
Somebody finally recognized him. There wasn’t much to go by, but somebody did.
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