Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  7

  SOMEONE WAS STANDING on my eyelids.

  He had spurs on and the rowels made my eyes ache. I decided to try to open them anyway. The effort squirted fresh pain into a hundred and one tender spots in my anatomy and gained me nothing beyond a dull headache. I lay there gathering strength for the next attempt while my stomach rocked itself still and sweat trickled down noisily from my forehead into my ears. Meanwhile I watched the pyrotechnics going on inside those stubborn lids. They were corpuscle red and spleen green and arterial blue, with here and there a dash of bile yellow to give the whole thing balance. There were tubas too, but I didn’t much like them because every toot reminded me of the pounding in my head.

  Time for another try. No, it wasn’t. Yes, it was. I conjured up a crowbar and pried. I knew if I got one loose the other would break free on its own, as with stuck windshield wipers. Something gave. I cast the crowbar back to the limbo whence it came and grated open the lids.

  I’d been cheating myself on fireworks. They were outside, not in, and with the veil gone they leaped into naked brilliance, whirling and plummeting and exploding into colors I couldn’t identify. My stomach lurched. I rolled hurriedly onto my throbbing right shoulder and said goodbye to the roast beef I’d eaten in the little place on Woodward.

  I dry-heaved for a full minute after there was nothing left, then turned laboriously over onto my hands and knees and remained like that for a minute or an hour; my head hanging, body burning, and the cold clamminess in which I had lain seeping deeper into my bones. It was pitch dark, but I knew from the gritty wet feel of the surface under my hands that I was in some alley, a location in which my work had occasionally dropped me, not always standing up. It smelled of vomit and motor oil and damp and drunks’ urine and the dry musk of rats. So did the alley, but my work was worse. Traffic hummed in the distance. Except for Vietnam I had never been in a place where I couldn’t hear traffic humming.

  I went through the routine. What’s your name? A fairly simple question, but there might be a trick to it. What the hell, take a chance. Walker? First name? Amos, but don’t spread it around. Height? Around six feet, or it was before tonight. Weight? One eighty-five. Eyes? Two. Brown, if you’re particular. Hair? Also brown. Some gray. Next of kin? None, unless you count my once-wife, living in California with an out-of-work artist on my alimony. Interests? Old movies, jazz and early rock, good Scotch, staying alive. Not necessarily in that order. Reason for present predicament? My mother’s fault. She dropped me on my head when I was eighteen months old and broke my common sense.

  You’re hurt, Walker. Maybe more hurt than you’ve ever been, even in Nam. Breathing is agony. Get help. You know so much about it, where do I go? No answer. There’s nothing more useless than an unreliable Id.

  Odds are you’ve never been in total darkness. Few have. When you are, all bets are off. I knew where the ground was because I was kneeling on it, and the thread of logic to which I was clinging with my teeth and all four limbs told me that the sky was opposite. That gave me only four directions to choose from. I selected one and started crawling that way. My injured knees hurled white-hot barbs at my brain every time I put weight on them, but if I tried to stand without support they’d buckle.

  At length I put out a hand and touched a cold brick. My fingers curled around it, and then the fingers of the other hand curled around one six inches higher, and so on until I ran out of reach. Good old wall. I leaned against it, listening to my lungs creak as they filled and released, filled and released. With every breath I felt the pinch of a damaged rib, or maybe two. Thank God it wasn’t the one the doctors had pinned together. My face ached and my eyes were swollen almost shut. I was in no shape for the big game, or even to reach the end of the alley alone, wherever that was.

  Then a light pierced my world of darkness.

  It sprang toward me, then away, playing games. Damn childish, that light. I started pulling my way toward it. Hand over hand, wobbling on round heels. Whoever had been holding down my eyelids before was now standing on my feet, and he’d brought a friend. I dragged them along. The light didn’t look any closer. It was like that nightmare in which something you want, something you have to have, is always just out of reach, and the harder you work the slower you move. I started to cry.

  “Hold on there, hoss. You drunk or what?”

  I stopped crying and started laughing. The line, and its guttural delivery, were strictly Randolph Scott. Instead of the end of the alley, I had reached that point in the nightmare where since nothing made sense anyway, I had no trouble accepting the presence under a city street lamp of a bearded giant in a ten-gallon hat and checked shirt, grinning at me over a .44 magnum that would have knocked all three Earps and Doc Holliday out of their high-topped boots at the OK Corral before they had a chance to draw.

  And like all nightmares, this one ended before my face hit the pavement.

  “Drink this here.”

  I had been suspended for some time in that phantom world between light and dark, aware of my surroundings, of activity going on around me, of the unfamiliar sensation of something soft and wet dragging itself over my face like a big dog’s tongue, and yet unaware of what it all meant or what it had to do with me. My first realization was that I was lying naked to the waist under a sheet, and I wondered if all the corpses were this alert on the slab. When my eyes focused on a big seamed face with a shaggy red beard, it struck me that the Wayne County Morgue was looking pretty far afield for its personnel. The owner of the face and beard was dressed in a red-and-black-checked shirt, and his big cowboy hat was hanging on the back of his chair beside the bed. I was still having that same wacky dream.

  “This here” was a pungent brew in an insulated mug held under my nose, steaming hot and reeking of childhood remedy and a familiar, acrid something that stood for everything that was right about America.

  “What is it?” My vocal cords squeaked against each other, and the lips I was using had been donated by someone else. I hadn’t got the hang of them. They were a couple of sizes too large, for one thing.

  “Chicken soup and Kentucky sippin’ whiskey,” said Redbeard, in a southwestern drawl gone gravelly around the edges. “The soup part’s got something to do with one or two sheenies skulking around amongst the Irish and Cherokees in my family tree. The whiskey part comes from just plain livin’. Beats all hell out of that there brandy they’re always bringing folks around with in movies.”

  He was supporting the back of my head in a horned palm. It was either drink or drown in the steam. I drank. It tasted like boiled rags, but as the warmth spread outward from my stomach and settled into my bruised muscles and joints, the pain and stiffness subsided. It wasn’t a permanent cure, but then neither is anything else short of time or death. I took two more sips and waved the concoction away. It was curling the hairs in my nose. He lowered my head to a pillow.

  “Who the hell are you,” I asked, “besides the world’s biggest Saint Bernard?”

  It took him a second to get it. Then his ragged moustache turned upward and the cracks deepened in his sunbeaten face, making it look like a mask carved out of old barnwood. His eyes were blue marbles pushed back almost out of sight under a heavy shelf, and his beard had begun to bleed gray. Pink scalp showed through the dozen or so hairs in his widow’s peak.

  He chortled. I’d never heard anyone chortle in my life, but I recognized it right off. “That’s good,” he said. “I guess I sort of do look like one at that. And I did scrape you out of a tough spot and give you spirits, and folks have been known to liken me to a dog’s relative. My wife in Oklahoma calls me Munnis, but mostly I’m just plain Bum.”

  I shook the coffee grounds and egg shells off the newspaper item encountered in a healthier time and stuffed away in my memory. He fit the description. I looked around. I occupied a studio couch unfolded into a bed, at one side of a long narrow room with sliding windows and a tiled kitchen area at the far end equipped with a small steel sink, a refri
gerator scarcely large enough to contain a six-pack and cold cuts, and a two-burner stove. A lot of blond veneer suggested a room in a cheap motel or a small house trailer. The dimensions were wrong for a motel room. Daylight was leaking in through the windows.

  Two things made it different from most trailers. The first was a unique feature located halfway between the bed and the sink, made up of steel bars running from floor to ceiling and enclosing an area four feet square with a locked door. It looked as if it had been built to cage a gorilla. Beyond that, a child’s-size table with a Formica top supported a number of handguns and a stack of cartridge boxes. A pump shotgun and a rifle with scope leaned against the wall on the other side. I inclined my head in that direction.

  “You travel around with those loaded? There’s a law against that in this state.”

  “Not if they’re in a house trailer, which constitutes a home,” he said. “Little trick I picked up when I was a bail bondsman. We got the same law where I come from.”

  “The cell optional or does it come with the trailer?”

  “You like it?” He reached over and shook one of the bars. The trailer swayed. “Had it built special. Before, I had to take a partner along to keep an eye on the meal ticket. Now I just stick ’em in here and forget about them, and there’s no splitting the bounty. No one’s busted out of it yet.”

  “Cozy,” I said. “If you’re the Bum Bassett I read about in the paper; you’re six-five. What keeps your feet from sticking out past the end of this bed?” My own came right to the edge.

  “Nothing. Wintertime I wear hunting socks. So you know me.” It was a statement of fact, not of pride. People who have been famous a long time have nothing to prove.

  “We don’t get a lot of bounty hunters up here these days.”

  “Nor buffalo neither, I expect. There ain’t a lot of us still around.”

  I struggled into a sitting position. The effort undid the anesthetic effect of the broth and whiskey and awakened the stitch in my side. I put a hand to it and felt tape. It girdled my abdomen like a cummerbund.

  “I’ve taped enough of my own to know a cracked rib,” Bassett explained. “I was you, I’d have that X-rayed. Move around all you care to meanwhile, but don’t blame me when you put a sharp end through a lung.”

  I leaned back against the wall, breathing carefully and waiting for the pain to diminish. When it did: “Where’s this thing parked?”

  “Damn!” He cuffed a treelike thigh with his hand.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I bet myself you’d ask how long you was out first.”

  “Okay, how long was I out?”

  “Too late. We’re in a K-Mart lot in Warren. I know, it’s one hell of a hike from where I found you. But them newspaper bloodsuckers will never think of looking for me here. It’s getting so I can’t take a crap without finding one of them in the tank. Also, it’s the only place I could find where I didn’t have to trade two mules to pay for a spot. And I thought inflation was bad in Tulsa.”

  “Where did you find me?”

  He blinked. “Don’t you know?”

  “Give me time. I only just found out where I am now.”

  “I reckon you was kind of out of it at that.” He scratched his head. He didn’t make near as much noise doing it as a Rotomill tearing up pavement. “I was coming away from that communist place on McDougall where the niggers and freaks hang out when I see you in the alley next to the building. I was that close to smoking you. Last time someone came at me out of the dark that way, I blew the son-of-a-bitch redskin in half.”

  He’d maligned about four different racial and social groups in that snatch of conversation, but I didn’t belong to any of them so I let it dangle. “How long ago was that?”

  “I knew you’d get around to that for real sooner or later. Eleven, twelve hours. It’s coming on noon now.” He paused. “You wouldn’t want to let me in on what you was doing there.”

  “Same as you, I suppose. That true what they said in the paper about you promising to bring Smith in dead or alive?”

  He winked, a gesture that involved a simultaneous sideways jerk of his head, like Buffalo Bob being conspiratorial with the peanut gallery. “You got to put on a show for them reporter fellows. In this business it’s important no one takes you seriously. Hell, you should know that. You’re a P.I.”

  “You’ve been through my wallet. Where is it, by the way? Not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t know you from the King of Ruritania. And my clothes? And my car, as long as I’m asking. Just for future reference. I don’t feel like dressing or driving or spending money again this year.”

  “I don’t know nothing about a car. Wasn’t no keys in your pockets, so I figured you didn’t have one. Your clothes are in that closet, your wallet too. You’re wearing your pants and socks. I didn’t want you getting the wrong idea about me.”

  He gestured at a knob on a section of wall next to the bed. No seam showed to indicate a door. I took his word for it that it opened and that there was a closet behind it containing my shoes, shirt, and jacket.

  “Got a smoke?”

  “Figured you’d ask.” He dug a sorry pack of Winstons from a flap shirt pocket and handed it to me. It looked familiar “They’re yours. I gave it up years back. You should, too.”

  I took one out and let him light it with one of my matches. “You saved my life and I’m grateful,” I said, blowing smoke. “That doesn’t make it yours. How come my friends at the commune didn’t greet you the way they did me?” I knew it was a stupid question even as I was asking it. He looked about as easy to knock down and kick apart as Rushmore.

  He nodded. “So that’s what happened. I thought so. No one greeted me any way. I knocked, but nobody answered. I didn’t go in.”

  “Sticky wicket,” I said.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah.” His teeth flashed insincerely in his beard.

  “If it’s not too personal, why’d you pull me out of that alley?”

  His forehead broke into a mass of inverted V’s, one on top of another “Where I grew up a man didn’t ask questions like that. He knew the answer.”

  “Code of the West, huh?”

  “I reckon it sounds sort of funny, put like that. But there’s sense behind it. Women don’t get raped and murdered out on the plains because somebody’s scared to dial a phone. One scream and the whole neighborhood’s out with Winchesters and lynch ropes.”

  “As long as the right person gets lynched.”

  “Maybe not always. But for every innocent that swings there are ten less women raped and murdered.” He paused. “Question now is, what do I do with you?”

  “What’s the matter, you run out of closets?”

  “I got to go places, but someone’s got to stay here and look after you.” He stood, and suddenly the trailer was crowded. There must have been three hundred pounds stuffed into his flannel shirt and brown-faded jeans, but though his waist was leagues from narrow there wasn’t enough fat on him to fry an onion. He had to stoop to avoid putting his head through the roof.

  “I won’t swipe anything I can’t pocket.” I put some ashes in a coffee can reeking of tobacco juice on the floor between the bed and the wall. No wonder he didn’t smoke; he could stink up a room without striking a match.

  “It ain’t that. I know where you live in case anything comes up missing, and Bum’s righteous wrath is a terrible thing to behold. I just don’t cotton coming back here to find you on the floor choking in your own blood. That’s not what I scraped you out of that alley for. I’ll send back a doctor, but I need a tough nurse to hold you down meanwhile.”

  “I know one,” I said, and gave him a name and number.

  He wrote it down with a pencil stub in a pad with bent corners, both taken from a hip pocket. “I’ll call her from a booth. Ain’t got no telephone hookup to this trailer. Sometimes I got to move out fast.” He demonstrated what he meant by reaching the door in half a stride, cowboy hat in hand. He scooped the b
ig .44 off the table into a snap holster inside his waistband.

  “Got a lead?”

  He looked back disapprovingly. “Did I ask you that?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Occupational hazard. Good hunting.”

  His departure left a very large empty.

  8

  I SLEPT; I DON’T know for how long. The crystal on my watch was shattered, the hands frozen at 9:37, recording for posterity the exact moment when I gave up membership in the human race and became a soccer ball.

  Suddenly I was ravenous. Last night’s dinner was coagulating in the alley off McDougall, and but for the soup Bassett had supplied, now ice-cold on the lamp table next to the bed, I hadn’t eaten anything else in twenty-four hours. I tore aside the sheet, rested, lowered one foot to the floor, rested, lowered the other, clenching my teeth against the pain in my side. My knees didn’t like the idea of having to bend. I had a stiff neck, and the pattern of bruises on my leaden arms made them look tattooed. I still didn’t have any feeling in the fingers of my left hand.

  A dizzy spell struck when I got up. I braced myself on the lamp table, waiting for my center of gravity to catch up. Then I started walking. I only bounded off two walls on my way to a wash basin and chemical toilet behind a folding screen at the rear of the trailer. A bloody cloth was crumpled in the basin, which explained the soft wet thing on my face earlier.

  There was a shaving mirror screwed to the wall above the basin. My face didn’t look too bad for chopped beef. About the only thing that wasn’t swollen was my nose—a relief, because I’d broken it once boxing in college and the septum hadn’t been the same since. The water jug was three-quarters full. After filling the basin, I splashed tepid water over the wreckage, fumbled a towel off a plastic rack, and patted it dry. Naked air stung the lacerated flesh.