Johnny Goes West

by Desmond Cory

  Johnny lifted his head a little, maybe three inches from the floor; forced his blurred eyes into some kind of a focus. The closed door came rushing towards him, steathed itself and stopped some two feet away; anybody opening it would open it right into Johnny’s face; he couldn’t be bothered to move. Not yet. No one was going to open it, anyway; or it wouldn’t have been bolted. Fedora lowered his head to the floor again, mildly surprised that through the slow waves of pain radiating outwards from his guts, his thoughts were ticking on as lucidly as usual. The thing to do now was to lie still, motionless, to recuperate, to recover his normal ease and speed of movement. They certainly hadn’t finished with him yet; not by any means.

  He lay there, eyes closed, muscles totally relaxed except for those of his belly, listening to the soft, insidious noises filtering through to him. Gracia West was talking now, or so he thought, in short, gasping phrases that he couldn’t quite catch. Galdos made no reply, but faint, hidden movements in the room showed that he hadn’t gone away with the others. . .. Suddenly, he did say something, in a voice that seemed surprisingly near but pitched so low that the words were lost in the thumping of blood within Fedora’s ears. There was a short pause; then Gracia’s voice again, higher than before and much faster, terminating in a choking sound and in a peculiar noise like that of an umbrella torn open in a strong wind. There was a series of little soft thuds, five or six of them; two or three seconds of silence; then a slow and anguished wail swerving sharply higher and higher until Fedora’s ears seemed to be ringing with it. It was an unbearable sound, inhuman as a buzz-saw and yet strangely feminine; Fedora twisted his head back as though to escape from it, and a darkness deeper than that which his own closed eyes had lent him came down over him. He fought against it for a moment, his fingers groping blindly at the tiles on the floor, then passed out. The wailing noise stopped briefly; then began again.

  Somebody opened the door, sharply, into his face; and the sudden, stabbing pain of it brought him to. He rolled over; found that he could get to his hands and knees, that from there he could rise to his feet. His head still seemed to be echoing with the rhythm of the swift, savage blows of Galdos’ cane; he didn’t know how long he had been unconscious, but guessed not more than ten or fifteen minutes. He took his hand away from his forehead; the room swayed to and fro for a moment like a ship in a typhoon, then settled down. Mendes stood in the doorway, smiling ingratiatingly, his slim and delicate hands tucked into his belt.

  “Oh hello, you,” he said.

  Fedora spat a residue of blood from his mouth, felt inside it with a finger that seemed the size of a banana. His teeth were still all there; only the lip was split. . . . Not that it mattered. It looked as if things were now just about to begin.

  “So glad to see you’re feeling better now. And actually on your feet, the heaven of it.” Mendes pushed the door a fraction farther open and took one of his floating paces to one side. “Come right in, why don’t you? and join Little One’s party.”

  Johnny walked through into the outer room. The table had been set upright again and Galdos was sitting on it. Pedro stood by the door, fingering his moustache. Gracia wasn’t there; but her bathing-wrap still lay on the floor and Galdos had one foot on it, the way a bull puts one foot on a cape when the matador has lost it. He wasn’t cross any more, though; indeed, he seemed to be mildly pleased with himself. “Ah, Fedora,” he said, in a lordly sort of way. “Come and stand here, Fedora. Here in front of me.”

  Johnny did what he was told. Galdos had his cane in his hand again now, and was tapping it tentatively against his massive thigh. Johnny didn’t look at it, but at him.

  “You thought you could put one over on me, didn’t you?” said Galdos. “You and your bloody carnotite. . . . Well, you were wrong. There’s only one man who rules the roost in these parts, and that’s me. So you can kiss your carnotite goodbye, even if you didn’t have the chance to do the same for Gracia.” His wrist flicked up and forward; the tip of the cane traced a hard red line across Fedora’s cheek. “You better do like I said, Fedora, and get out of here. Go back to your bleeding kindergarten. So far as I’m concerned, you’re not even competition.”

  He hiccuped to himself for a while, his fat cheeks wobbling as he did so.

  “You’re not competition,” he said again. “Only one of you three can do me any harm now—and I know which one it is. We’ll be doing something about him right away. Not that this notebook would have helped him.” He took it from his pocket; not looking at it, his eyes fixed on Fedora, he tore it into shreds with his fingers. “Did you think I’d never seen that notebook before? It’s no bloody good, you know, not to you nor to me. These notes are just a survey he did for me, a survey of one of my mines. You ought to be grateful to me for saving you from a most unsatisfactory agreement.” He whickered again, this time more briefly. “You’re not clever, Fedora. You’re a fool. You don’t interest me. Nor that big stupid pal of yours, either. I know which one of you three I’ve got to watch out for. At the same time,” he said, watching Fedora very closely now, “you’re a bit too good with a gun for my liking. I’ll admit it—you’re good with a gun. What you haven’t got is brains, I‘ve got brains; and I’m going to see that after this you’re no good with a gun, not any more. I know what they do to naughty children in those English schools of yours.” He switched the cane lightly against the table, just once. “. . . Hold out your hand.”

  Fedora didn’t move, Galdos’ tongue protruded a fraction from between his lips.

  “Don’t say you’re going to refuse,” he said. “It’d be too much fun making you do it . . . don’t you think? Of course it would. Hold out your right hand, then.”

  Fedora hesitated a moment longer, then silently extended towards Galdos the thing that he valued more than anything else in the world. The thin, nervous sinews that ran the length of his fingers tautened, relaxed. Galdos looked down, estimating the distance carefully; raised the cane with deliberate slowness. Then brought it down with all his weight behind it. . . . A leaping serpent of pain whipped up the length of Fedora’s arm and burnt agonisingly into his brain; his fingers involuntarily curled up against the shock of it. He set his teeth, refused with all his will-power to close his eyes or to look down towards his hand, to look anywhere but directly at Galdos’ face. The cane fell again, then again and again. . . . After the fifth blow, the pain was suddenly dulled, as though the impact were being absorbed by the thickness of a pair of gloves; that was a bad sign, thought Fedora, his face turning whiter even than before. He began to count the blows, numbering them through a dim haze of pain as a child counts sheep in a mist of sleep . . . nine, ten, eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. . . .

  They stopped at twenty-six. Fedora let his pulverised hand drop to his side, neither looking at it nor touching it. Galdos had been quite right; after this, he was not going to be good with a gun any more, not for a long time and perhaps never. Not with his right hand, anyway. There remained his left, though; Galdos knew many things, but he had no means of knowing that Fedora’s left hand was almost as deadly as his right. It was true that when dealing with someone like Paquito Mendes, that “almost” could make all the difference in the world . . . but Fedora was not thinking at that moment of guns and of death, but of the highly-polished Steinway grand in his London flat; and his pain was already almost lost in the flame of sheer, violent hate that was consuming him.

  “I think,” said Galdos, not looking at him now, “that your hash is settled for good. And Hendricks I’m going to see to. As for your other pal—he’s lucky, that’s all. Now listen, Fedora.” He sat down once more on the table, which creaked under his weight. “You’re getting out of here, like I said. At ten o’clock tomorrow morning I’m going to be outside my offices, in the main street. I’ll be there for half an hour. And in that half-hour I’m going to see you come driving right past me and out of town. You and your pal, understand? Not Hendricks. He’s going to be dead. And if I don’t s
ee you and your chummy come driving by like two little queens in a carriage—then I’ll send the boys to you, and you’ll end up dead as well. Take my tip, Fedora. Be sensible.”

  He got up, walked past Fedora to the door. The cane dangled loosely from his hand. At the threshold, he looked back. “Rough him up a bit, if you like,” he said. “But don’t kill him. He’s not the one we want, remember.”

  He walked away, over the verandah and down the steps, whistling as he went. Mendes and Pedro looked at each other, and smiled. They advanced towards Fedora, one on each side.

  Then they began to rough him up a bit.

  The sky above the hills was growing dark. There were stars in it, but as yet no moon. Fedora looked at it for a while with a singular lack of interest, standing propped up against the doorpost. Eventually he detached himself; lurched forward over the verandah and down the steps. He took small, careful paces; none of them more than nine inches. He swayed a good deal, for all that. He came to the edge of the pool and looked at the shadowy waters for perhaps a minute. Then he half-dived, half-tumbled in.

  The water was far too warm to make him catch his breath, but he felt the impact of it tingling on his hands and face and against the bruises on his ribs. He lay for a while floating on his back until all those cruel quiverings had settled down into one dull, subdued ache; then he rolled over and tried two or three slow strokes of the crawl. The twisted muscles of his shoulders and biceps seemed reluctant to abandon their rigidity; they began to burn, to crease up into angry little knots of fire. Fedora rested for a moment, then ploughed determinedly on; he knew very well that the only answer to a working-over such as he had just received was to get the essential muscles moving again at once. If not, they would stay seized up for days. Steadily quickening the pace, he swam the length of the pool and back again; then rested for a few moments half-in and half-out of the water, lying on the smooth cement of the artificial bank and breathing very deeply. Then he got to his feet, shook water from his shirt and trousers, looked around him once more. Nothing moved. A sliver of moon was rising gradually above the far-off hills; otherwise, nothing had changed.

  He began to walk round the pool, lengthening his pace to a stride slightly looser than the normal. He felt considerably better now. Halfway round the pool, he stopped; tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt and bound it tightly around his right hand, which had swollen until the flesh seemed about to split through the skin. He tied, as best he could with his left hand and his teeth, a knot in this improvised bandage, and was about to move on once again when a faint gleam of white at the water’s edge attracted his attention. He walked over to the bank and looked down.

  It was Gracia, all right. Gracia, still in her one-piece bathing-suit. But perhaps Galdos was no longer jealous, now that she was dead.

  Fedora took a step forward, into the water; hesitated; withdrew. There was no point at all in pulling her out. She floated face upwards, the red criss-cross pattern of the cane clearly visible at that close range on the sides of her thighs; the tiny intangible currents of the pool were drawing her steadily away from the shore. In a few hours’ time she would be carried through the Salto del Gato, and those marks lost in the greater outrage offered to her flesh by the tearing rocks. Perhaps in four days’ time they would find her again, as they had found West . . . and perhaps not. . . .

  Fedora turned on his heel, and went away. He climbed the slope of the bank with his slightly exaggerated stride; at the top he paused, looked back briefly. And then went on again.

  He went quite fast, for—physically, at any rate—he was feeling better now. When he had first picked himself up from the floor of that darkening room and crawled towards the door, nothing but his will-power had carried him there. But now that he was walking home, something stronger and more ruthless than his own will had come to impel him onwards; and that was his hatred. Not for many years had Johnny hated anyone or anything the way he hated Galdos now; his hatred was like a devouring flood that poured through him, refreshing him as the water of the pool had done and giving all his movements an object. Nothing was difficult any more; if it had impelled Fedora towards those far-off mountain peaks, weary as he was, he would have attained them with ease. And Fedora nursed his hatred carefully as he walked; knowing that tomorrow he would have to lose it, to put it aside, to become cold and clinical and dispassionate, but that meanwhile it was the strongest thing he had, far stronger than himself, a force to be canalised and husbanded until it had done its work. He didn’t think of Gracia, nor of Hendricks, nor of Trout, nor of Paquito Mendes; he thought of nothing but of his burning, tortured hand and of the pliant yellow cane whipping through the air and of Galdos and of Galdos’ eyes, glowingly intent on his work. . . . It wasn’t necessary. He didn’t even have to think of it. Fedora had a temper on; a temper that would last him until he reached the house and for quite a long time afterwards.

  That was if he found the house still there.

  Ten minutes later, he followed the final twist in the path through the high cane-break and paused on the far side. He could make out the sloping, broken-backed outline of the house’s roof against the dark sky, silhouetted by a clearing in the trees; he knew at once that something had happened there, and for the first time he thought of Hendricks. Hendricks’ll be dead, Galdos had said. Maybe he hadn’t lost any time.

  Because something had happened, certainly. The house was still standing, all right; they hadn’t burnt it down; but no lights were showing anywhere. It was dark and as though deserted. Fedora, his face smooth and withdrawn like a mask, went quickly through the grass paddock and mounted the verandah. He paused again there, listening. No sound came from the house. Just darkness. He pushed the door farther open, stepped inside.

  He then stayed very still for almost five minutes, and in all that time no one moved. There was no light in the kitchen, no light in the bedroom; from where he stood, he could see only a pale reflected dimness from the open windows. He sniffed delicately at the air; his nose was not, as a result of the cavalier treatment it had recently received, functioning at the height of its form, but he could scent nothing unusual or extraneous; not cordite, nor blood, not strange human bothes. . . . There was a faint smell in the room, a new smell, but so faint as to be unanalysable; and perhaps it had always been there—mingled with the comfortable, familiar house-smells of beer, whisky, tobacco, oil, Maria, bacon fat, leather, canvas, all those things— without his ever having noticed it before. In the end, atisfied, Fedora went over to the oil-lamp; raised the glass hood; struck a match. Then, and as with the same movement, jumped like a cat to his left. A little lick of flame spouted from the far corner of the room; the wall behind him quivered to the impact of the bullet, reverberated to the smashing roar of a heavy revolver. Fedora, down on one knee, his bad hand cushioned against his thigh, clicked his tongue softly. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  Silence. A shadow moved somewhere in that far corner. Then a voice, raised to a pitch of almost unbearable nervous expectancy:

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” said Fedora, rising to his feet. “Who the bloody hell did you think it was?”

  He struck a second match and, fuming inwardly, lit the lamp. He hadn’t walked all this way, he told himself, only to be shot in the back by lunatic females. He turned up the wick as far as it would go, looked over his shoulder towards Maria. “Where did you get that gun from?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer him at once. Instead, she moved forward; stopping at a point about five feet away from him, where her body remained in the shadows but her hand with the pistol in it was raised to the light. The gun pointed more or less at Johnny’s chest, and the hand that held it was extraordinarily shaky. Johnny watched warily; if there was one thing he particularly detested, it was a nervous trigger finger.

  “Get out,” said Maria in a high, hysterical voice. “Get out of here.”

  This was, so far as Fedora was concerned, the last straw. He turned towards the tabl
e, his shoulders seeming to sag under the sudden weight of his annoyance and fury; he had recognised the pistol. It was Hendricks’. And a quick glance towards Hendricks’ sleeping-bag, on the floor just within range of the oil-lamp’s circle of light, confirmed what he had already guessed; Hendricks’ holdall lay on top of it, rucked up and slit open; Maria had helped herself to the Colt from it with the aid of a large, sharp knife. A thing which she certainly ought not to have done.

  “Go on,” said Maria harshly. “Largase. I’m sick of you y hasta la coronilla. Get out of here and leave me alone. Understand?”

  Johnny took a step away, swaying his hips as though to avoid the table; then exaggerated the sway into a sudden, swerving dive. Until that moment he hadn’t been sure, and hadn’t given a damn anyway, as to whether Maria would really use the revolver or not; a split second before he crashed into her, a burst of flame blossoming outwards almost into his face convinced him that yes, she would. It didn’t matter. She’d missed him. The bullet had gone over his outstretched arm and past his ear; she’d burnt his cheek with the powder blast, that was all. They went down to the floor together in a wild waving tangle of arms and legs; Johnny, with the skill of experience, contriving to land with his knee jammed hard into her stomach. The breath went out of her in a sudden agonised woof and her shoulders jerked up from the floor; the gun went off again, probably from a reflex movement of her fingers, whacking another bullet into the ceiling above them, and Fedora slashed with the back of his hand at the sinews of her wrist and sent the Colt hopping out of her grip and across the floor. That was his last altogether deliberate action for quite some time.