* * *
—
She turned toward the bedrooms. “I’ll go change,” she said, and I walked to the big living-room window, pulled the drapes closed, then turned on the living-room lamps and got out a card table I’d seen in the closet. I moved it next to the lamp on the davenport end table, brought in a straight-backed kitchen chair, then opened up the wood-carving set I had bought, and spread it out on the table. I found a ruler and a soft-lead pencil in the kitchen, and brought them in, then put the revolver I had bought on the table, and sat down.
Ruth came in, in a white blouse and summer flowered skirt, and sat down on the davenport at my elbow. I picked up one of the large pine blocks, and began slowly sketching on its smooth white surface the outline of the revolver lying on the table before me.
I’m pretty skillful with my hands, and I worked quickly but carefully, constantly checking the measurements of my sketch against the real gun. The outline was finished in half an hour, and I cut it out of the soft, straight-grained pine easily, with the largest of the razor-sharp knives. Then I began work on the details with the chisels and smaller knives. Ruth dusted the living room, washed some of our clothes, and about six o’clock went out to the kitchen to prepare supper.
* * *
—
All evening, I carved and sliced away the wood, Ruth on the couch beside me. Occasionally she read, but mostly we talked as I worked, talked for some reason about things we liked: books, music, plays, sports, all sorts of things, keeping at it, I guess, because our tastes agreed on so many things. Every hour Ruth would turn on the radio to a local news broadcast, and at nine o’clock we heard the first announcement of Arnie’s hideout. The Warden, the announcer said, had reported that a San Quentin inmate was missing at the four-thirty count that afternoon. The Warden was certain the inmate had not escaped from the prison; there was no indication that he had. He was believed to be hiding within the prison. A search was going on, and would continue till the man was found. Up to this hour, the announcer concluded, the missing man had not been found.
“And he won’t be,” I said; I felt a sudden rush of optimism about Arnie, and grinned at Ruth. Then I took the revolver from the table, and stood up, jamming the gun into my belt. Feet wide apart, arms hanging down at my sides, the fingers curled inward, my face sternly expressionless, I said, “I’ve just stepped out of the Silver Dollar Hotel onto the dusty street, under the hot yellow sun. Two men lounging against a pillar of the Deux Magots Saloon see me, and dart inside, the shuttered doors swinging behind them. A long-skirted woman grabs a child, and runs out of sight. Shopkeepers hurriedly close their iron shutters, and within seconds the street is empty except for one man.
“There he stands in the yellow dust, half a block away, facing me, gun slung from his hip. He stares at me from under the wide brim of his sweat-stained hat, eyes narrowed, lips contemptuous.” I glanced at Ruth. “Now, slowly, hands hanging carefully at our sides, we begin walking toward each other.” Eyes straight ahead, I began walking across the room in slow measured steps. “The breathless seconds tick by, a full orchestra ominous and low, in the background. Nearer and nearer, our deadly eyes never wavering, we approach.” I reached the center of the room. “Suddenly our hands move in two simultaneous blurs of speed!”—my hand shot up, sweeping the gun from my belt. “Bang! Bang! Two shots roar out as one!” I turned to Ruth. “What happened?”
“The honest sheriff was killed,” she said. “For once.”
* * *
—
“His own bullet went wild, striking an old lady asleep in a rocking chair, in the kneecap. And Wilkes, the hired killer from Dallas, is triumphant, the poor sheepherders are driven from the range, and I, for one, am glad to see it: danged varmints.” I whirled toward Ruth, snatching the revolver from my belt again. “Reach lady!”
“Ben, for heaven’s sakes, put that away! Honestly.” She shook her head, mildly exasperated. “Let a man get his hands on a gun, and he’s like a child.”
“You’re lucky I don’t make you dance in the road, pumping bullets at your heels.” I shoved the gun into my belt again, and walked over to her, legs slightly bowed. “You the new school mar’m?”
“Yes, for heaven’s sakes. Sit down; you make me nervous.”
“Reckon I will.” I sat down at the card table again. “Hear you’re one of Ravenhill’s new gals; gonna work over to th’ new saloon.”
“That’s right; in long black stockings, and a short red skirt.”
I nodded, picking up my carving knife. “You’d look pretty good, too, Ma’m,” I added.
“Think so?” Ruth smiled up at me.
I shrugged, eyes on the wooden gun in my hand. “I think so,” I said. Then I looked up, my eyes met hers, and for a moment we stared at each other.
“Funny, isn’t it,” Ruth said then, “you and I here like this.” I nodded, and she dropped her head to the back of the davenport. “You know,” she said quietly, “a lot of it I like. I’m a domestic type, I guess, and I like keeping house, too. I enjoy cooking meals, when there’s someone to cook for. And while you were gone, I worked in the garden, watered the lawn, shopped for groceries, trying to get my mind off what was happening, and there were moments when I actually enjoyed it. Sometimes, dusting or vacuuming or even washing dishes, I’ve felt almost happy; it’s almost seemed real.” She smiled. “In a way, I could feel sorry that it’ll be ending soon. Though of course it’s good that it is; it’s been hard on you. I know. Hard on me, too.”
I smiled. “Propinquity getting in its licks,” I said. “I hope Arnie realizes what he’s putting me through.”
“I imagine he’s thought of it,” Ruth said soberly.
At eleven-twenty that night, the revolver I had bought in Reno was duplicated in pine, right down to the grooves and screw heads on the grip. Then I sealed the wood with wood filler, applied dark blue liquid shoe polish to all the simulated metal parts, burnishing them with a soft rag; and now, gleaming softly when I turned the gun in my hands, they looked like blued gun metal. When the handle had been stained brown by the wood filler, Ruth couldn’t tell which gun was which from even a few feet away.
* * *
—
We got in the car and drove toward San Francisco, and on Golden Gate Bridge, in the middle of the span, no cars visible behind us, Ruth picked up the gun I’d bought in Reno. She held her arm outside the car for a moment. Then her arm moved outward in a sudden arc, and for an instant we saw the revolver turning in the air, glinting in the yellow lighting of the bridge, and then, curving over the rail, it was gone, to fall into the deepest, most turbulent part of the Bay, over two hundred feet below. On the way home, we heard a late news broadcast; the missing San Quentin inmate had not yet been found.
* * *
—
All through the night, the ground under the canvas I lay on was hard and cold. I slept badly, waking often, and sometimes I heard the voices of the guards searching the prison for me; once I heard steps pass directly by my head. In the morning—I could see a little circle of blue sky through my pipe—I took a waxed-paper package and a carton of water from the things that had been in the canvas bundle. Then I brought out an empty tight-lidded coffee can. “No plumbing in here,” I thought to myself, “but this is the next best thing.”
Presently, the sun warming the ground I lay in, I slept soundly. I’d learned that I need not lie breathing with my mouth at the pipe. Small though the pipe opening was, so was the space I lay in, and since my body movements and oxygen consumption were at a minimum, I got enough air. At times I felt stifled, as if the quality of the air were bad; but a few minutes of breathing the outside air directly, my mouth at the pipe, would overcome that. Drifting asleep now, I had a feeling of certainty that it would not occur to the prowling guards to look for me in the ground under their feet.
I was nearly ready to give up by early
afternoon, to heave open the lid above me, and come crawling and stumbling out no matter what the consequences—I had never been in or imagined such heat in my life before. Lying there with the rigid, inescapable heat of the sun pounding down on the earth just above me, I was gasping for each breath of air, and I lay most of the time with my mouth at the pipe, all my clothes off long since, feeling the sweat trickle steadily from my body, soaking the canvas underneath me.
By midafternoon I was no longer entirely sane. Once, years ago, I’d worked at a desk for two hours in a room where the recorded temperature was a hundred and nineteen degrees. I knew vaguely that the motionless cocoon of air I lay in now was much hotter; and I lay in simple agony, mouth at the pipe, chest heaving, my heart laboring to stay alive. The deadly oppressiveness of the awful heat was an actual physical pressure I could feel on every fractional inch of my naked skin, clogging and blocking my pores, and I drifted often into unconsciousness, drifting out of it more and more sluggish each time, half delirious and not wanting to awaken. But a little core of resistance and will to live inside me somewhere understood that my weakened dehydrated body would die in the carbon dioxide of its own making, if I simply lay here as I wanted to in motionless suffering. And I made myself rouse, over and again, to suck in the life-giving air from outside.
I was buried alive, I could no longer endure it, and nothing else mattered; I had to burst out of here. Yet I waited, postponing it second after second, the fight not entirely gone from me. Men have been chained in steel boxes under the sun all day long, but no one, I believed, had ever endured this, and I felt a sleepy pride at the thought, and again postponed a little longer the simple act that would end this agony.
I got through the afternoon that way, by minutes and seconds at a time, enduring on the endless promises I made to myself—and endlessly broke—of relief after only a little bit longer. After an incalculable time, only barely conscious, my mouth muscles slack and without strength at the pipe, I became aware of a minute decrease in the terrible temperature. A little more time passed, and now there was a definite slackening off of the heat: then steadily and perceptibly, minute by minute, the heat drained out of the air around me, and the air I was pulling into my lungs from outside was suddenly actually cool, wonderfully refreshing, and I came into full consciousness again, limp, terribly weak, but exultant.
A long time later, using my handkerchief, and water from a carton, I forced myself to take a kind of bath, sponging the drying sweat from every surface of my body. Then I ate; forcing myself at first, then suddenly ravenous. I drank steadily, sipping the tepid water from the cartons, chewing down salt from a little cardboard shaker Ben had brought in. Presently, well after I had heard the men leaving the industrial area at four, it was cool enough to work myself quietly into my clothes again. I heard the guard in the wall tower above me call to another down the wall, cursing because they had to man the walls again tonight, and I grinned; I had made it.
* * *
—
Ruth and I rented a small furnished apartment in the city, on Sutter Street, Saturday morning, or rather Ruth did while I waited in the car; I hadn’t shaved since the previous morning. She told the landlady it was for her brother who was moving up from Los Angeles, paid a deposit, got the key, and came down, and gave it to me.
We had lunch in a drive-in, then went to a movie on Market Street. We saw half the picture, maybe, and then I couldn’t stand it, and neither could Ruth; our nerves were jumpy, we couldn’t watch it, and we got up and left. I headed back for Marin then, and we went to Muir Woods, and walked along by the little stream that runs through it under the giant redwoods, and that was a little better. It was cool and peaceful, and we stayed for a couple of hours, just wandering around. But still, a large part of the time, we walked holding each other’s hand, clinging to each other for comfort against what lay ahead.
* * *
—
Somehow we got through the evening. We talked; I don’t know about what. We watched some television, or at least stared at the set. But apprehension lay in the air around us and once when I made some inconsequential remark Ruth burst into tears. I walked over toward the davenport where she was sitting, and she stood up, and stepped toward me, and I took her in my arms to comfort her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I mean it. I really do. It’s almost over; it will be in a few hours,” and I felt her relax a little, and she stopped crying. “Take it easy, and don’t worry,” I said. “Arnie’s going to be all right”—and then she burst into tears all over again.
We got through the evening till a little after ten, I guess. Then I changed into my blue denims and work shirt, and took the wooden gun from the dresser drawer, glancing into the mirror at the black stubble on my face. In the garage, I smeared some black car oil from the floor on my pants and shirt, and rubbed dust into the stains. Then with Ruth at the wheel, me sitting on the floor beside her, we drove out, heading for 101, and on the highway turned north once again toward the prison.
But at the county road leading to San Quentin we turned west this time, away from the prison, and onto the Greenbrae road. A few hundred yards west of the highway, Ruth pulled off onto the wide shoulder, U-turned, and parked on the other side facing the highway again. When she turned to me, her face was angry. “You look terrible,” she said.
“No, I don’t,” I said, smiling at her, rubbing the bristles on my face. “I’m the Schweppes man; I look distinguished.”
But she wouldn’t smile. “And now I can start waiting and worrying about you again,” she said. I started to say something, smiling again, but she burst out at me. “I hate it!” she said. “I hate sitting alone wondering what’s happening to you. Damn Arnie!” Then she put a hand to her forehead, and shaking her head slowly as though to clear it, she said, “Oh, I don’t mean that, I didn’t mean it.”
I put a hand on her arm. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Of course not!” she said angrily. “Before you might have ended up in prison; tonight you may only get shot.”
“I’ve got to go, Ruth.”
“All right,” she said, and leaning across me, opened my door. “Go ahead!”
There were no cars coming from either direction, and I got out, closed the door, and watched the car move on toward the highway ahead, stop at the intersection, and wait for the traffic light to change. Then it swung onto the highway, heading south. The lights of a car were approaching from far behind me, and I lay down in the dry drainage ditch beside the road, until it passed. Then I got up, and walked down the dark road. Twenty yards from the busy highway, I lay down in the drainage ditch again, pulled an envelope from my back pocket, and tore it open. From it I shook out a dozen scraps of torn paper coated with clear plastic onto the ground.
* * *
—
Over a dozen cars passed before one driven by a man alone and with its right-hand front window down stopped at the highway for the light, no car behind it. Then I got up, and walked toward it, keeping the rear corner of the car between me and the driver; passing the back end of the car, I saw the driver’s face turned away from me, staring to the north watching the traffic signal. Pulling the wooden pistol from my pocket with one hand, I stepped to the right-hand door, pulled up the little plastic-capped door-locking device, and yanked open the door as the man’s head swung toward me. My revolver pointing at his face, I got in beside him, pulling the door closed behind me without turning away from him. “Don’t act crazy, and you won’t get shot.” I said quietly. I waited a moment, while he stared at me, eyes wide with astonishment. “Understand?” I said pleasantly. “Just don’t get panicky; I don’t want to have to shoot you.”
He nodded, swallowing; he was a man of perhaps fifty, stout but not fat. He had on a dark brown suit and hat. “Don’t worry,” he said then. “I got a family. I’m not trying anything.”
* * *
—
I told hi
m what to do, and when the light changed he did it. He headed south on the highway and drove for two miles to a point where the road passed between two high embankments slicing through a hill. There was a wide place here where bulldozers had removed a lot of earth fill, and I had him swing well off the road there, turn off his lights, and set the hand brake, leaving the motor on. I made him get out, then walk as far off the road as he could get, his back against the high dirt embankment, well away from the car. While he walked, I rubbed the gun hard, both sides of it, on my shirt, wiping off any fingerprints. Then, holding it between two knuckles. I leaned out the right-hand window. “Here,” I called to him, as he turned to face me, and I switched on the car lights. “Here’s a souvenir,” and I tossed the gun out toward the man’s feet. “Go ahead,” I said, “pick it up. I’ll trade you; the gun for the car,” and I burst into laughter, glanced into the rear-view mirror, then released the clutch, gunning the car, gravel spurting under the wheels. He was a 2.2 mile walk from the nearest telephone; I’d clocked it on the way back from Muir Woods.
I had my window open, and I had my change ready as I approached the toll gate on Golden Gate Bridge six minutes later; then I was moving past it on toward the cutoff just ahead that led to the old San Francisco Exposition building whose domed roof I could see ahead.
Driving into the little tree-sheltered street that curves around the empty old building, I saw just the one car there, and I stopped mine right behind it. With my handkerchief I wiped every surface I’d touched, then got out, walked ahead to my own car, and got in the driver’s seat beside Ruth. The motor was running, and I started right up, heading out of the deserted little street, and I glanced at Ruth, smiling. “Everything’s fine,” I said.
She nodded, drew a sudden deep involuntary breath, then exhaled in a long sigh. She smiled, and said, “I want to hear about it; right away. Stop somewhere, Ben.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 34