by Barry, Mike
Vietnam was little more than a drug war; the shit would be flowing points east and west through Saigon for the next hundred years, and what the war was really about was which element of capitalist would control the important access doorway and direct the fruit of the Far East. But there was no way to tell anyone that. There was not even any fashion in which this truth could be accepted by the army itself because if it had been it would have blown up the war … So Wulff kept it to himself, and kept the memories of Vietnam as well tightly bound in, harnessed against himself. Anyway, after he had gone on the road he had had too much current with which to concern himself, and his nightmares when they came in the little sleep he was able to get as often had to do with the girl who had OD’d out on West Ninety-third Street as with Vietnam itself. Every experience, no matter how awful, could at least be contained and modified by time; that was why America itself had been able to go beyond the sixties and the more terrible convulsions of the seventies, still lying.
But every now and then on the rare occasions when he thought about an experience which he never talked about, Wulff wondered if it would have been better for everyone if he had not been so damned interested in paying his dues, if he had been a little less goddamned curious and a little more certain earlier rather than later as to what that damned war was really about.
He might have still been a beat cop in Bedord Stuyvesant, calling in on the hour, or long since moved up to sergeant and comfortable work in a patrol car. Probably the latter, for he was certainly a capable cop, always had been. He might well have been captain by now, sitting in a station house in Fort Greene issuing attack signals through a transistor while the city blew up, which every so often it did, and which it certainly would do again for good within the next few years.
But then again what the hell. You could not look back; the past could not be recovered. There were five hundred, six hundred people he had dealt with, minimum, who could give testimony to, at least, that point.
XII
Maury took the waitress that he had picked up at the diner off the Interstate, back to her dismal two-room furnished apartment, and fucked her there, while still in her uniform at four in the morning. Waitresses were the easiest fucks in the world, it was true. They dealt all day with people who did not see them at all, saw only the uniform and the food they brought, and the few who paid attention to them were foul-mouthed men trying to score their own points. All you had to do was to pay a little attention to them at a time when they could talk and you had them, Maury knew. It was an old and useful trick that he had picked up going off post in the Army many years ago, and it had yet to fail him. If you absolutely had to get laid and only had a few hours to spare, you could always find yourself a waitress. Of course, most of them were not particularly good-looking, and this one was no exception, but a fuck was a fuck. She was about thirty-eight and had good legs anyway, strong and tireless, even though the rest of her could have been stuffed in a bag somewhere and put over in a corner. Still, she was the best example he could offer of an old decision: all things being equal, it was always better to get laid than not to get laid at all. Life was too short for you to make calculations. Shit, you might die tomorrow and have passed up the last fuck of your life.
When he was finished he rolled off her and looked at the ceiling. In just a minute, of course, he would leave. No reason to push this. He had gotten what he had needed, and now he had to get back to the wagon which was parked right outside and find the Lone Wolf. He was closing in tight on him, he knew that now. “Where are you going?” she said to him when he began to shift on the bed.
He took his hand off her breast, which was quite insubstantial anyway. “Got to go,” he said.
“Go where?”
“North. I’m headed north.”
“Right now?”
“Afraid so.”
“Stay a little while.”
“No,” he said after a pause which he hoped would show that he had seriously considered what she said. “No, I couldn’t do that. I’m in kind of a hurry.”
“That much of a hurry?”
“Afraid so. No time to waste.”
“Just fuck and run, huh?”
He patted her wrist. “Now don’t feel that way,” he said. “There’s no reason at all for you to feel that way. You’re a fine person, but it’s just that—”
“Why you heading north?”
“I’ve got business there.”
“I’m entitled to ask,” she said, with a catch in her voice. “Why don’t people tell me anything. I have a right—”
“Of course you have a right,” Maury said soothingly. He sat up on the bed, his eyes quite adjusted to the frail light of her room by now, the clutter of furniture a pattern in the darkness through which he could see himself in just a moment, weaving toward the door. He reached heavily over his stomach to the end of the bed, took his underpants, began to meditatively dress. “I’m looking for a man.”
“What kind of a man?”
“A guy I know.”
“Oh,” she said. “A guy you know. Why do you have to go now?”
“It’s just one of those things. I don’t have too much time to waste; I have to get there.”
“It sounds like you want him very badly.”
“In a way,” Maury said. He turned toward her. She had her knees drawn up, one forearm against her eyes, her tiny breasts settled to her sides, floating on her rib cage, distinguishable as breasts only by the nipples. She was not an attractive woman. He began to regret his impulse. Always in the aftermath of getting laid, even from some damned attractive women, he had had this feeling: the vague suspicion that it was all useless, time-wasting, that he might have spent the time better doing something else that would have at least been productive. This way, what the hell did he have to show for it? It probably was the most convincing reason he could think of why he had never gotten married. He could keep his need to get laid down to three or four times a week and compress it into minutes, whereas being married he never would have been free of it. That is, he would have been free of it most of the time, but he would have been trapped into a life situation where he never would have been away from its consequences. Ah, what the hell. He looked past her, looked at the chipped walls of the room in which she lay alone, at the street lamp which cut through the shade in a glare that made his eyeballs hurt. Atlantic City, New Jersey, for Christ’s sake. Living here alone at her age, working in a diner. It was a raw deal, any way you looked at it. There were a certain amount of people in the world who made you feel fortunate just in being themselves and in not being you or vice-versa. As bad as things had been for him at times, even with all the humiliations and difficulties, he had more than this to look forward to. He had a hell of a lot to look forward to if he became the man to kill Wulff. Just to make her feel better, to put something into her life that would cheer her up and give her something other than her own miserable existence to consider, Maury said, “Actually, this man I’m looking for. I’m going to kill him.”
“What?”
“He’s a bad man,” Maury said. “A very bad man, a criminal, a murderer, an escaped convict. He’s killed hundreds. I happen to be a law enforcement officer and it’s my detail to find him. I’ve been on his trail for a long time and now I’m closing in.”
“That’s incredible.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. I just said that was incredible.”
“It’s not easy,” Maury said, putting his shirt on. “Not easy chasing a bastard like this, let me tell you. I’ll be glad when it’s all over. You don’t think that I’d rather leave here do you? I’d like to stay. But duty calls.”
“You’re so full of bullshit,” she said, and drew her other forearm up against her eyes. “So full of bullshit.”
That hurt Maury. He really did not have to take stuff like that. Not under the circumstances, anyway, when he had been nice enough to take her home from the diner in
his own car and fuck her without a thought while he was doing it of how ugly she was. “You think I’m full of bullshit?” he said.
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“I’m from Atlanta. I’m a sheriff.”
“That’s great. That’s really great.”
“No, It’s true. I’m a sheriff from Atlanta. You think I’m not telling you the truth now?”
“I don’t care,” she said. She moved slightly on the bed. “Why don’t you just take your badge and get out of here?”
Rage moved within him. He was surprised at its force; he really had not expected anything like this. He almost never reacted to the women he fucked except in a mechanical way. He had just told her what he had because he felt sorry for her, to give her something interesting to think about. “You’d better cut it out,” he said.
“Why? I’d be in big trouble, sheriff.”
“Never mind,” he said, putting on his sweater slowly, carefully. “Just never mind.”
“You’re going to kill a man. You shouldn’t care what I say. You chasing after a man so important to catch you think you should be fucking around?”
“I do what I want,” Maury said. “I always do what I want.”
“They always do what they want in Atlanta, is that right? That’s the spirit of the new south.”
“Don’t piss me off,” he said and paused. “Don’t piss me off.”
“I’m not doing anything. Just go.”
“I’ll go when I’m ready to go.”
Her body shook a little on the bed, not pleasantly. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You know that? You’re really crazy.”
“You’re getting to me now.”
“That’s the only explanation I can think of,” she said. “That’s the only thing that would explain all of this, the business about chasing a man who’s a murderer. This business about being a sheriff. From Atlanta. Oh Jesus,” she said. “Oh Jesus, I knew I was scraping bottom. I’ve been heading down for a long, long time, but this part, this is really too much. Winding up in bed with someone who thinks that he’s the sheriff of Atlanta county—”
Too much. It was too much to take; anyone could see that. Anyone could see that he had taken far more than there was any reason to take from this bitch who should have been merely grateful that he had taken the time and energy to throw her a fuck she would probably otherwise not get in months; a fuck which, whatever its limitations, showed care and attention. He stood, sucked in his belly and said, “You’d better just cut that out now. You’d better shut the shit up if you know what’s good for you.”
“Shut the shit,” she said and giggled. “Is that the way they all talk in the new south?”
Suddenly, furiously, the gun was in his hand. He always travelled with the point forty-five, of course. Kept the heavier stuff locked in the trunk of the car downstairs. But the small, handy pistol was within reach at all times, even when he was fucking. Now he was pointing it at her. And the damned thing was, how quickly her entire mood changed. Even in the darkness he could see her features collapse and dive toward one another, her poor, naked, wasted body caving in against the sheets. Her fingers dug into the sides of the bed, and she began to breathe in uneven, terrible, terrible gasps. “Oh my Lord,” she said. “Oh my Lord now, you’re not going to—”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “There was no reason to talk in that way,” and he felt the gun in his hand. The transfer from pocket to hand must have been accomplished in a way almost unconscious; he had no memory of taking it. Still, there it was. The trigger was against his finger. Killing was easy. That was one thing you learned if you hung around guns a bit; killing was awfully easy. The body was just dead meat when you took the life from it, and the taking was automatic. With a pistol here was no confrontation at all. Just machinery. “Why did you say that?” Maury said, and he shot her in the heart.
She died instantly. She must have died instantly; she made no sound at all. Nothing, merely fell back onto the bed, and when he came upon her, the pistol tangled in his fingers like a tool, and bent over her, he could see that her face had not gone slack at the moment of death the way that faces were supposed to, but instead in that passage had convulsed and come to a fine and deadly point of attention. All of her features seemed informed by alertness; her eyes, open, seemed to be fixed upon something of particular interest. Her mouth was pursed to an “O” that might have been in appreciation of a point of information she had just been given, often overlooked, but highly valuable. He had seen a lot of dead people, Maury thought, but he had never seen one like this. One who seemed to have gathered in death a dignity and a perception which she had never had in life. She seemed, indeed, to have welcomed it. Fucking and dying within fifteen minutes of one another. Two profundities gathered together to take her from life as gainfully as she had participated within it.
Maury felt cold, cold with emotional reaction, cold with the force of what he thought he might understand. He had killed her and he knew the realization of this had still not moved to a level of true acceptance. He still had not, on an emotional level, come to grips with the fact of murder, and he would not—he simply would not—for a while. But until then he had to go through the motions as best he could. The motions now had to do with those of evasion; obviously he had to get out. He had to leave at once and make sure that to the best of his knowledge he had left nothing which would tie him to the murder. Murder. That was a strange word, all right. He said it once, deep in his throat. Murder. He had killed someone She was not much, but she had lived just as he had, looked at the same sunrise and sunset, moved through the slow motion of her days like a living thing, just as had he. Now she was gone by his hand and he was still here, breathing. Moving on. Moving outward. It was as much of a miracle, the act of murder, as sex, Maury thought. The same strange transaction between people in the face of a mortality that could not care less. And then he thought, oh my, that is a strange thought. Strange, yes, indeed, and checked the room as best as he could in the colorless illumination and saw that there was nothing at all that could tie him to this. He had been an anonymous fuck for an anonymous woman; he could have been any one of a hundred men. It did not matter. Nothing mattered at all.
Wulff had infected him. Wulff had to be blamed for this. He had never been a murderer, would never have considered an act of this sort if he had not, somehow, gotten his psyche intertwined with Wulff’s. It was all that maniac’s fault, for it was he and not Maury who had brought blood and pain to the world. He either killed everything that he touched, or turned that thing into a killer. Maury could not be blamed. He was merely Wulff’s agent. Wulff’s agent, the commissioning force of the destruction within the man. Of course. That was the true and final explanation. He was not responsible for this at all.
He retched deeply in his throat and then began to shake with dry heaves, but that passed very quickly and he was already moving out of the room. He opened the door carefully through his pocket to leave no stains, and containing the heaves within him, went downstairs and to his car. By the time he got there he was fine. By the time he got back into the car and got rolling the nausea had passed and he was himself again and had but one thought: to find Wulff and to bring him to an end before, by contagion, the man had made not only Maury his agent but also the entire world, and had brought all of them to murder. All his fault. All of it. Maury and the rest of them merely machines, enacting that terrible will which whispered irresistibly to them in messages understood only by the mysterious and hammering blood.
XIII
Martin knew that the woman was killed in the explosion. That was all that he knew, and then only subliminally. He came out of the house with the image of her down beside him, buried under sudden rubble, her eyes open and anguished, and he had known at once that she was dead, without being quite sure what had happened or what all of this had to do with him. Memory and situation had been blown from him, and like an animal with a bare hold on consciousness, som
e incoherent beast, he had fought his way out of the ruins of what had been his house, working his way through levels of smoke and fire in the density to where he imagined the door had been. It was falling in upon him, what had been his house, and not only he but the world seemed to be trapped in that destruction. And yet he was able to hold onto enough of his sensibility to know that he must get out of there. After a long, imprisoned time spent stumbling through the debris of what had been his sanctuary, he found himself in an open space, and then after another time he was out on the street itself, flames leaping around him, the sound of many wings in his ears. He lay down on a little space of grass like a dying animal feeling reality close in around him tight like a blanket, feeling history itself recede and everything coming down to the dry wrenching sound of his breath moving unevenly in and out of his lungs, with only his heaving body to lend him awareness. He had neither any idea of where he was nor was he quite sure what had happened. Something had blown up and reality had shifted, memory was gone, and he was an animal. He lay on the grass waiting for everything to go away from him.
It was comfortable this way. He should have known it a long time ago. Whatever he had been he had not been as happy as he was now. Everything was explained by the absence of thought. The only thought he had was that he was not thinking. That was interesting, and he would come to terms with it somehow. Sometime. Not now, however. Martin closed his eyes and felt consciousness roll away from him, and then it abruptly returned. Someone was yanking at him. He felt a hand clawing on him and something digging into his eyes. He opened his eyes to pain and knowledge. A man was looking down at him. He could not distinguish the features, but it was definitely a man. “All right,” the figure said, “where do you keep it?”