by Barry, Mike
The trailer court had been blown up and so was the enemy, but it was a temporary respite; they were starting to roll in like cavalry now. It was obvious that they had to split up, that Williams would have to go back east and put the pieces of his life together, get back into the system again, and Williams had not fought that insight; he had said goodbye to Wulff without sentiment and taken the U-haul back on the roads toward New York … but in the early part of that long drive he had been abducted by two of Calabrese’s men and brought into Chicago. Now he was in Miami and his life, he supposed, was in peril. That peril did not matter to him so much as the outcome of his wife’s pregnancy: she would have given birth by now. He wondered if he had a son. That would have been something worth knowing; as far as the rest of it Williams felt himself simply to be beyond fear. It did not matter; once abducted he had taken to the capture with a virtual sense of relief. It solved his problems for the time being, the dilemma of whether he would go back and face his life or chuck it completely. This was easier. Being a captive took the pressure off, almost completely. For the first time in his life Williams was beginning to see the benefits of slavery. No wonder so many of the slaves, once freed, had stayed on the plantations, begged the masters to keep them. Almost anything was easier than a world in which will or free choice dominated.
Now, at the rooming house, Williams said to the man who was staying in the room with him, “It’s time to play some more poker.” The guards had taken him for granted. Apparently the word was out: Williams was no trouble. So they worked in shifts one off, one on, in twelve-hour cycles and the one who was on often acted less like a captor than another bored prisoner in the room.
Williams had no idea what was going on with the girl in the next room other than that Wulff knew her and they had apparently kidnapped her from San Francisco as an additional hold upon him. He had not said a word to her. He supposed that if he had wanted he could have gotten angry as hell about the fact of the kidnapping: wasn’t he sufficient hold upon Wulff? Did they have to involve the girl too, were there no limits to the ugliness of the games they played? but he was too weary for anger and he knew the answer; there were no limits to ugliness. In or out of the world, ugliness predominated.
“Two-handed poker is shit,” the guard said, “there’s no fun in two-handed poker.”
“What the hell,” Williams said, “head to head. Challenge match.”
“That’s just for the movies. In the movies two-handed poker is a good game. But it doesn’t work head to head.” The guard spat on the planks of the wooden floor, ran a hand through his hair, then got a pack of cigarettes off a bureau. “It’s all shit,” he said.
“I’ll go along with that.”
“How the fuck long are we going to stay here? It’s ridiculous; I’m going stir crazy.”
“There’s a way out of it,” Williams said.
“What’s that?”
“Why you can let me go. If I escaped on you then you wouldn’t have to guard me anymore. You’d be out of it. We could work out an escape attempt.”
The guard seemed to genuinely ponder this, cupping his chin in his hand. Both of them were contemplative types who seemed only marginally interested in their job. Maybe Calabrese had as much employment difficulty as any other small business. “No,” the guard said, his head finally retreating, “it wouldn’t work. It’s ridiculous. And besides,” he said, “Jack wouldn’t go along with it.” Jack was the other guard. “You couldn’t imagine how seriously he takes this kind of shit. If he learned that we were trying to work something out he’d report you right to Calabrese.”
“That’s too bad,” Williams said, “then we’ll have to settle for poker.”
“Jack will be back in a little while,” the guard said, “you could ask him. Personally I don’t give a damn; if you could think of a way to work it out I’d go along with you. I’m fed up to here with all of this crap, I really am. But I see no way at all.”
“Okay,” Williams said again, “I won’t force it. We’ll play poker, head to head.” He dug into a pocket, rattled a few pieces of change. “Nickel ante,” he said.
“Nah,” the guard said pondering this, “it wouldn’t work out, it just wouldn’t work out at all,” and shook his head, slumped into a chair, went into a deep, ponderous doze from which, at times, he would emerge, floundering, to blink an eye at Williams before retreating again. He was lolling, his hand resting on the point thirty-eight inside his jacket, nominally ready to blast Williams if Williams tried to move from the room but Williams knew that that was merely for show; he could, if he wanted, overpower, take the guard’s gun, charge from the room. A certain relationship of trust and inattention had been set up. It really would not have been difficult at all.
The point was simple though; why bother with it? Why embark on a risky and dangerous escape attempt when Calabrese, if he had any sense at all, undoubtedly had the house ringed with guards who would blow his sensibility from his purpose the moment that he came outside of this two-story dwelling? Calabrese was not a fool; the cemeteries and seas were littered with men who had made that mistake, taking him for a fool, and Williams would be in that category if he thought that these guards were the first and only line of defense: the old man would not do this. The old man who had been clever enough to have intercepted him in the middle of the country and abducted him to ransom out Wulff’s reappearance … he would not leave him to these two bored, indolent guards. If anything, Williams thought, there could only be direct purpose in Calabrese harnessing two guards like this to him: they might lull Williams into the feeling that he could indeed try to escape … giving Calabrese the perfect excuse that he needed to kill him.
No. No, he would not play the old man’s game. It was better to wait now because he knew that Wulff was coming.
So Williams sat in the room, looking at the dozing guard, and waited for something to happen. Sooner or later you ran your options out and had to do it; you had to wait for something outside of yourself to create a change of circumstances, to change the balance. It had happened to him now; it had happened to the guards and in a sense it had happened to Calabrese himself.
All of them were simply waiting for Wulff to appear.
For a man that the outfit had sworn for death, he sure had a hell of a lot of options left.
You had to admire that.
Even if the man you were admiring was a dead man.
VIII
Wulff came into Miami in a stolen car, a 1968 Chrysler New Yorker which he had abducted from the surprised driver right off US 1. There was no time for frills or maneuvers anymore, the business of the Floridian had convinced him that if it was going to be done at all it would have to be done quickly and directly. The confrontation with Calabrese could not be accomplished through delicate maneuvering. Coming off the Floridian at its first stop, Louisville, there had been a moment of sheer doubt, indecision, with two corpses or near-corpses on this train and what was waiting for him ahead it all seemed hopeless, and he had hung on the platform stupefied for a few moments wondering if he could go ahead. Then the shrieks and sirens of distant cars had piled upon him and he had started to run. Running was simple, instinctive, he knew how to do that. The sirens meant that they had found the bodies on the train; they also meant, if his knowledge of local police was any guide, that the Louisville cops would be just as happy as they could be to do the job that Calabrese’s men had fucked up. Everybody was a bounty hunter. Running with the sack dangling from his shoulder he had burst out at last into an open space, turned a corner, and then found himself at Main Street which was US 1 itself, the big apple before the turnpikes had wiped it out, the only direct route in the old days between Maine and Florida. He had gotten on a bus there, ignoring any glances which he might have been given, wrapped himself into a little sullen space of waiting while in little clumps all of the passengers had gotten off. He had ridden the bus to the end of the line and then gotten out past the suspicious, sweeping glance of the driver, walkin
g south through the outskirts of Louisville, ruined houses lining the road, black people sitting on the sidewalks, mumbling at one another. It was another Harlem scene; despair and the imprint of drugs were universal. They had carried their damages to Louisville, home of the Kentucky Derby and the gateway to the New South as thoroughly as they had in the ruined northeast … and this insight had given him impetus.
He had kept on walking, a mile, two miles maybe, until the houses had thinned out and then he had turned toward the roadway, looking for a likely car. A Cadillac had passed him, a ruined one all right but driven by a black with three screaming children in the rear of the convertible, the top pulled down, the children standing and hitting one another and he figured that the black had enough trouble already. Then a couple of small domestics had passed him and he figured that these were no good altogether, but then the Chrysler had come by, exactly what he was looking for, driven by a man in his twenties, arm hanging out the window, hand on the roof, banging it in rhythm to radio music. When the car had slid to a stop at the light, probably the last light south in Louisville, Wulff had come from behind a post quickly and had done the necessary almost without conscious thought, functioning on instinct. You learned a few damned things if you were at it this long, probably the drug traffickers had the same feeling: that there was nothing between them and the outcome they wanted but motive. Considerations such as morals just did not enter into it anymore. If they ever had.
Out into the roadway, level the gun (there was no one in line behind the Chrysler at the light but even if there had been he would have gone ahead with it; who was going to interfere with him?), watch the rising dread pouring into the driver’s face from all the pockets which sowed dread, gesture with the gun, no need to say a word, yank open the door, push him, spinning, from the car and then behind the wheel. The easy transfer accomplished, the car enveloped him like a gigantic mouth, strangely warm, smelling delicately of sweat and exhaust, the huge wheel already curving into his hands with a sense of total familiarity: there were women like that, they could go from one man to the other with such ease and accommodation that you wondered, really wondered, if they were making love to anyone but themselves. The same thing with this Chrysler New Yorker, brougham equipment, floor mats with Cadillac symbols beneath him (so the driver had perhaps had equivocal feelings about his car), the shouts of the driver diminishing behind him as he pulled the car into lane and at speed merged with traffic heading southward, always now, heading south.
It was easy. Once you broke free of restraints, once you functioned in Calabrese’s world where your desires were modified only by the equipment you had to satisfy them … everything was very easy. Wulff could see the pleasures of criminality. All of that stuff the agencies gave you about how ill-paying a life of crime was and how your average criminal spent five years in jail for every one out and earned a net income of four thousand and fifty dollars a year before taxes … all of that was crap. They did not want to acknowledge the fact that the criminal’s way of looking at things was simply superior to the more ordinary view and that the statistics were spoiled by a lot of amateurs and smalltimers getting lumped in with the overall statistics. Actually, the professional criminal took risks which were merely consonant with his job and he tended to make out rather well. Better than he would have any other way.
Wulff headed the car into Miami. From Louisville to Miami is not a long trip but it was somewhat longer than he thought; it must have been five or six hundred miles anyway and this meant two gas stops, the Chrysler guzzling it away at eight or nine miles to the gallon even on the road. The big cars just couldn’t take it anymore, the country was clamping down on them, but aside from thinking of the gas mileage and the oncoming death of the big car Wulff kept his mind as completely blank as possible, watching the sack bouncing on the seat next to him, sweeping his glance between US 1 and the sack mechanically, rhythmically every thirty seconds or so, drawing this attention into a concentrated, fixed tube. Driving was satisfying and mindless, that was why it had to be the true American pasttime.
Somewhere around Jacksonville a radio car picked him up; he must have been doing seventy-five or eighty within the township limits and as the car came down on top of him, all the blinkers and headlights going, Wulff had a moment of indecision. Then without thinking about it further he put the accelerator into the floorboards and got the car quickly up to ninety, deciding to outrun the police car if he could. It would only be embarrassing and messy if he were picked up and he would probably have to shoot the cop down rather than get into any of it; he did not want to get into cop-killing if he could help it. It was just too complicated, it would mean more people to evade; ethics hardly entered into it at all.
They dragged down US 1 at ninety and ninety-five miles an hour, going through intersections and traffic lights as if locked together by a long chain, then, finally, Wulff began to open up a little distance on the roads, dropping the car back fifty yards or so. He could be running right into a roadblock of course, but somehow he did not think that he was; there were just not enough State Police around to justify a roadblock or even an interceptor car unless they were messing with something more profound than a speeding violation which at this time Wulff was. Besides that, if he knew cop’s mentality at all and he guessed that he should, the radio car was not going to summon reinforcements. Getting help would be an admission of failure and no cop, given a choice, wanted to admit that he couldn’t handle something himself. When you came right down to it, cops and criminals functioned on the same mentality; the only thing that was holding back most police from being lawbreakers themselves was the existence of a police force that managed to coat over their impulses, give them a rationalization.
Heavy thinking for a speeding chase but it beat worrying about what was going on behind. The Chrysler was surprisingly effective on the open roads. There was a miss in the engine toward the low rpm range and it stuttered and fumbled in the mid-passing zone of forty to sixty but above seventy-five miles an hour the big, aging car really came together, it handled more solidly and responsively at eighty-five than at twenty. It was really a shame that there were almost no roads in the country where the capabilities of these cars could be tested … crazy country this, whose production lines could turn out cars that could go at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, whose speedometers registered the fact that they could go at one hundred and twenty, whose every advertisement was inducement to try the cars at that speed … and then set up a network of cops, speeding violations, point systems, motor vehicle bureaus, traffic courts and insurance rating systems that made it as difficult as possible to use the cars up to that natural capacity. Crazy country: ambivalent country, maybe it was the same psychology in evidence that encouraged women to dress as provocatively as possible, which taught them from the age of twelve to be as conscious of the power of their bodies to incite, to inflame, as possible … and then made the natural response of men to these bodies as painful for them as possible. Maybe America took as much pleasure from denial as attainment but the sweetness of the pain could only be gauged by its difficulty … and his mind scuttled away from this, no point in thinking about it, no point in pushing his mind further and further into channels which would take him only toward revulsion.
The country was an exercise in ambivalence any way you took it; the drug culture came out of an advertising society which made escape-on-the-cheap as glamorous as possible and only made the penalties for that escape visible when it was too late to change. Blame not the pushers, the distributors, the network itself, when they were only responding to a need which had been created by television.
Yes, if you looked at things that way nothing made much sense at all. In his rearview mirror the pursuing car lurched, wiggled from one side of the road to another and then, all in one gathering simply disappeared, swerving right and out of the plane of sight. A high-speed blowout no doubt, the tires of the patrol car pushed past their capabilities by an engine which they could not control.
Wulff allowed himself a small, tight smile of satisfaction, thinking of the sensations of the cop as the car went off the road, as terror and futility battled with one another in the cave of the dislocated car.
Let him think about it in the ditch, Wulff thought, let him think about the consequences of pursuit … and then he was free again on the roads, he was moving at sixty and sixty-five, cutting back to an inconspicuous pace. The car as if blooded for the first time by the ninety-mile-an-hour chase tugging away at the accelerator like an animal, pleading, teasing for a little speed but Wulff was firmer with the car in holding it down than he had ever been in coaxing speed out of it. He shoved the lever into D1, holding the Chrysler into second speed where the engine labored anywhere above forty miles an hour and, spinning rpm’s, he moved along on US 1.
He wished that he had a police radio, a short-wave receptor that is, that would pick up reports of the police bands. He would like to hear what the cowboy in the ditched car had to say for himself now. He doubted that it would be very much.
He was on virtually empty road now with the car shaken. Once, a long time ago, US I had been the only route from Maine to Miami, due south through New York, Philadelphia and Washington, one row of custard stands, drive-in movie theatres, gas stations all the way down but now that was finished, the turnpikes had taken away everything but local traffic and where he passed business now it was faded, burnt-out abandoned hulks which once had been roadside stands. What had happened to all these people? the people who sucked their lives off the highway, that was. Had they retreated into the fields back there in the darkness, little beaten houses just dimly visible from the highway, or had they pursued the population onto the vast surfaces of the turnpikes where they had all become Joes at the filling stations, Emilies hustling tuna salad in the Hot Shoppes? What happened to the people who worked for the country when the country ineradicably changed?