Some women in the town put on a pet show. I entered Fatima, and in the finals of the judging I was in the ring with her. So was a fat boy who went to the same school that I did. He had a big boxer dog. Fatima didn't like dogs, and I asked the fat boy to keep the boxer away. He laughed and let the dog come closer. The boxer sniffed curiously and Fatima raked his nose. The dog snapped once and Fatima died in an instant of a broken neck.
I really climbed the fat boy. The women running the pet show pulled me off him finally. I went home and didn't say anything to anyone. The next day I caught the fat boy on his way home from school and I climbed him again.
The fat boy's father came to my house that night. My father was surprised to hear about Fatima. The fat boy's father said he'd get me another kitten. I told him I didn't want another kitten. My father took me upstairs and talked to me. I told him I didn't want the kitten.
The next day after school I had to chase the fat boy to within two blocks of his house before I caught him. It didn't help him when I did. My father gave me a licking when he got home. The minister came to our house that night. When he left, I don't think he felt his talking had accomplished much.
After two more go-rounds with the fat boy, I was kicked out of school. I waited for the fat boy on his way home and gave it to him again. By now he screamed like a girl at the sight of me. I got another licking at home that night. It didn't change anything.
The fat boy started leaving school by different doors at different times. When I had trouble catching him, I slipped out of the house mornings and caught him on his way to school. Each time his father called my father I got another licking. My mother argued with my father about his handling of me. I was sorry to hear it. I didn't feel like a martyr. I felt like someone doing what he had to do.
It went on for three weeks. Then one of my sisters ran into the house one day and said there was a big moving van in front of the fat boy's house.
The fat boy's family was moving away.
They let me back into school in two months. Around the house the subject was never mentioned. In a year I think everyone had honestly forgotten.
Except me.
Then during my senior year in high school I got cross-ways with a bullying local police sergeant. It started out as an honest misunderstanding. He was hardheaded, though, and so was I. We locked horns. I ended up at the police station. By that time he knew he was wrong, but he wouldn't back down. Neither would I. He roughed me up in a cell. I hit him in the face with the heel of my shoe. Afterward they took me to the hospital.
My father in his anger talked about suing the city. I wouldn't cooperate. I knew what I was going to do. It wasn't too difficult when I got out of the hospital. Three men had been in the cell with me. I watched them. I got the first two a couple of months apart, each in situations where his age and strength didn't help him.
Each time the chief of police came to our house afterward and all but accused me of it. I smiled at him and said nothing. I couldn't understand why my father grew more nervous-looking every day. The police hadn't a scrap of evidence.
The sergeant took longer. He was on his guard. No snotty kid was going to make a laughingstock of him. He came up his slippery front steps one night during a sleet storm, and I got him with a piece of pipe. Someone found him at the foot of his steps before he froze to death.
The chief of police was at my house before daylight the next morning. He was raging. Leave town, he told my father. You're harboring a wild animal. Cage him, or leave town. I couldn't believe it when a "For Sale" sign went up on our front lawn. The police couldn't prove a thing.
I didn't intend to inconvenience the family, though.
My father might not be able to cope, but I could.
I left home, and I never went back.
I drifted a few hundred miles north and got a job in a gas station. It was night-shift work, and I slept days in a cheap rooming house. Working the hours I did, I met few people, but one odd duck took to turning up at the filling station during my midnight-to-eight shift.
He was older, perhaps thirty. He was educated, and he brought me books to read. I could see that he was lonely. At first I thought he was a homo, but he never made a move. He was interesting in the things he could tell a kid who had never been anywhere.
Then one night the police came and scooped him. The charge was molesting a small girl. It turned out he'd done time for the same thing twice before. That should have been that, except that I learned the hour he was supposed to have committed the molestation. I knew he'd been picking up some of his books at my rooming house at that time.
I went to the police. They wouldn't listen to me. They'd decided that he'd done it. I insisted that whatever he had done before, he hadn't done this. I made no impression. I did my talking to a lieutenant who could have been die cast from the same mold as my hometown police sergeant.
The lieutenant ran me off. I tried to go over his head. All of a sudden I had no job, and the next day I had no room. I walked the street lugging my bag all one wintry night until the bus station opened in the morning.
I left town because it wasn't possible to get another job. The police saw to that. I ended up a hundred miles away working as a stock boy in a supermarket. The job was so low-paying I couldn't accumulate any money. I lived from day to day. Nights in my room I had plenty of time to think over my two encounters with police. Then one noon at lunch I picked up a discarded newspaper and saw a paragraph that said that my acquaintance from the filling station had.been convicted and sentenced to fifteen years.
I knew he hadn't done it, but there it was-fifteen years. If that was the way the system worked, I'd had enough of the system. I never went back to the supermarket. I couldn't accumulate there the money I needed for what I had to do.
I began robbing filling stations at night, on foot at first, until I'd heisted enough for a car. I faked a gun at first until I was able to buy one. The week I had it and the car, too, I drove the hundred miles back to the town where the police lieutenant lived. When he opened his front door, I killed him. I couldn't do anything about the fifteen-year bum rap, but I was damned if I was going to let the bastard responsible for it get away with it.
For the next couple of years I knocked around from place to place. I graduated from filling stations to theater box offices to liquor stores. Then I met a guy who introduced me to a group setting up a bank job. There were five of us, and we worked on it for four months. Nothing went right. Two were burned down during the getaway. The rest of us holed up in a barn where we were found the next day. Another one was killed there and two of us were captured.
As a kid with no record, I drew three-to-five. If I could have shown a means of support, it might have been probation. It taught me something. My cellmate taught me a lot more. He was an embittered old dynamiter whose lungs were eroding. Forget the elaborate, complicated jobs, the old lag urged me. Smash-and-grab. Hit-and-run. In, out, and away in four minutes. I listened, and was convinced.
I didn't apply for parole. I did the bit and came out with no strings on me. When I hit the street, I had to shake the FBI tails waiting for me to go back for the unrecovered bank loot. I went up into the Pacific Northwest to get away from them. I took a job in a lumber camp. I became handy with an axe, and I practiced with a handgun until I was the equal of any circus trick-shot artist.
I came out of the woods when I figured I had the prison smell off me. Inside, I'd made plenty of contacts. I could pick and choose. I'd made up my mind I was going to do things my way. I contacted a man and laid down a few rules. They included scouting the job in advance to make sure it was worthwhile, thus holding the action down to a job or two a year. He was agreeable, and we went to work.
The time spent in the lumber camp had given me a legitimate occupation. Everywhere we went I passed as a tree surgeon. I could do the work, and I kept a name clean to work under. I always worked a couple of months a year. They were never going to get me again with that no-visible-means-of-su
pport gag.
My partner and I had a two-year run that was peaches and cream. We took five banks for the equivalent of a comfortable living. Then a suspicious husband came home early one night and my partner wound up on a slab in the morgue.
I found another partner. All told, I ran through five of them in thirteen years. None of them cashed in on a job with me. They all insisted in branching out for themselves. They'd have been better off if I'd kept them busier, but how much money can a man spend? I've never been a high liver.
Bunny was my last partner, and the best. We'd needed a driver for the Phoenix job, and we imported a kid from Juarez who panicked during the show. I took a slug in the arm trying to hold things together during the getaway. Bunny went on to Florida while I was hiding out, healing. He sent me a thousand a week in hundreds, registered mail. I didn't want my share of the swag around until I was a hundred percent mobile again.
The cash was mailed to me from Hudson, Florida, where Bunny holed up. The regularity of the registered letters to me attracted the curiosity of the Hudson postmistress, Lucille Grimes. She mentioned it to her boyfriend, a local deputy, Blaze Franklin. He steamed open an envelope, found the cash, decided on a shakedown, and went after Bunny.
He didn't get the bulk of the loot. Not then. I knew something had happened to Bunny when the mail stopped coming. I drove to Florida when I could travel. It took me a while, but I ran down Lucille Grimes and Franklin, and what was left of Bunny. I evened the score for my partner, but I ended up in the prison wing of the state hospital for a long healing period.
I was out now, and I intended to stay out.
6
A knock at the cabin door woke me in the morning.
When I opened it, no one was there, but a bag of groceries was propped up against the wall. I carried it inside. After I unloaded it, the kitchen table was covered with coffee, tea, salt, sugar, butter, bread, milk, cereal, hamburger, and two TV dinners. That was one thing about Blind Tom's: the price was high, but service came with it. Anyone staying at one of Tom's cabins never had to leave it unless he chose. A shopping list Scotch-taped to the outside of the door each night would provide the supplies delivered in the morning.
I put the perishables in the refrigerator. I wasn't looking forward to eating my own mediocre cooking during the interval it took me to heal properly. I'm a fair subsistence cook and that's about all. Taking my meals in the cabin guaranteed privacy, though, and for that I was prepared to put up with my own culinary shortcomings.
Thinking about the necessary healing period sent me into the bathroom. I wanted to see my new face. The day before, I had had fleeting glimpses of myself in the cruiser's rearview mirror, but never so that I could see the overall effect. Then last night when I reached the cabin and tried to see myself in the dim light of the low-wattage bulb illuminating the water-spotted mirror, most of my new face was in shadow. All that showed up was my clean, bare skull with its spider web of perforations from sutures. Now in the bright morning light I could see myself clearly.
The scarred, crimson, rough-looking features that confronted me in the mirror were no surprise. Neither was the upper body with its patchwork effect where missing healthy skin had been transferred to other areas. There was one surprise, though. Dr. Afzul had given me the features of a man ten years younger. Not a handsome man, but then it had never been a handsome face. It was certainly a different face. I made a mental note that I still owed the little plastic surgeon ten thousand dollars. He had certainly earned it.
I left the bathroom and rummaged in a closet until I found a pair of faded swimming trunks and sneakers. I pulled them on, left the cabin, and descended the steeply winding, rutted path to the river's edge. Each spring after the high water receded, Tom had truckloads of sand dumped in front of each of the riverbank cabins. The result was instant beaches. All the cabins were strategically placed along the winding channel so that none commanded a view of any of the others.
I waded out into the cool water and splashed around for a moment. Then I swam the seventy or eighty feet to the opposite bank, rested a bit, and swam back. Each morning I intended to add another lap to my morning swim to restore muscle tone lost during the months in the hospital.
I stayed only ten minutes in the early-morning sun. Dr. Afzul had warned me that my tender new skin would have to be treated to sunshine only in brief, gradually increased doses. When I left the water and started to climb up the path to the cabin, a grunting sound to the left caused me to detour. Twenty yards along the riverbank I came upon an arrangement of telephone poles and steel cable interlaced with barbed wire. This was Cordelia's dwelling place. She lay there sunning herself on a mudbank.
If I had changed since Cordelia last saw me, the same was true of her. She had been a svelte five-foot maiden 'gator. Now she was a barrel-bodied ten-footer, and if Blind Tom were to be believed, complacently steeped in 'gator sin. At the sound of my approach she opened her eyes, fixed me with a cold stare, and closed them again.
I returned to the cabin and breakfasted on cereal, milk, and a cup of coffee. I waited half an hour and did a few of the RAF exercise series, then took out the.32 Sauer I had acquired from Blind Tom and cleaned it carefully with tools and gun oil I found in a drawer. In a couple of days I'd take it out into the woods to sight it in and learn its shooting characteristics.
I skipped lunch in favor of the river again. The spring-fed coolness of the swift current was wonderfully refreshing, and I prudently made myself return to the cabin to avoid the sun's rays before I was actually ready. I took a nap in the afternoon, and in the early evening I broiled a part of Blind Tom's hamburger. Afterward I took a chair outside the cabin and cocked it up against the wall. I sat in the swift-gathering twilight and listened to the increased volume of woods noises. The river breeze swept the majority of mosquitoes inland, leaving me comparatively unmolested.
By the time darkness fell and the river disappeared from sight if not from sound, the day-long combination of sunshine and exercise resulted in stifled yawns. I fought off sleep while I did some mental arithmetic. In the very near future, money was going to be a problem. In order to move on I needed a car, which Tom would have to purchase for me. It needn't be much car, but any kind of transportation worthy of the name wouldn't return much change from a thousand dollars.
I also needed a hairpiece. I didn't want Tom to know my need for one, so it would have to be one of the first orders of personal business when I left the cabin. I didn't see how I could stretch my stay at the cabin much longer than three months without leaving my bankroll dangerously low before I had made a connection. I hoped that three months would be long enough to restore a normal color so that I wouldn't be the conspicuous beneficiary of plastic surgery, but regardless, I'd have to be moving on.
I knew my next stop. I planned to drive to Mobile and look over the Golden Peacock, a nightclub. When it had been run by Manny Sebastian, the place also had functioned as a meeting spot and armament center for a hardcore underworld elite, those who operated on a major scale behind a gun. Manny Sebastian was buried under a mangrove root in a Florida swamp, but no one knew it except me. Sebastian had been one of the preliminary hurdles in my abortive effort to recover the Phoenix bank loot.
Regardless of the identity of the new proprietor, it was unlikely that the high-profit end of the Golden Peacock operation had changed. I even felt I knew who the new man would be. Sebastian's second-in-command at the nightclub was a slim, dark man named Rudy Hernandez. More than likely he had taken over. Hernandez had known me slightly, but he wouldn't know me at all with my new face. Sebastian had known me well, but not well enough to stay clear of me when his quick, greedy mind connected me with the Phoenix job.
Assuming that nothing else had changed, I could find out more quickly at the Golden Peacock than anywhere else what I needed to know: who was in circulation, who was not, and why.
I climbed out of my chair, entered the cabin, and went to bed.
For sixty seco
nds I heard the crisp night breeze whispering through the window screens, and then I didn't hear anything.
* * *
I sunned myself every day that it was possible, and I swam every day in the river whether it was sunny or not. Each time I came out of the water I applied some of the healing liquefied spray in Dr. Afzul's aerosol cans to my face. The first week I examined myself in the bathroom mirror each morning. I stopped when I could see no apparent progress. Every fourth day I permitted myself a quick look. Change was more noticeable that way, although it still came slowly.
The raw look of the transplants faded in the same proportion that the fish-white hospital pallor of normal skin gave way to a subtle tan. Even when I felt able to increase the sun dosage, the surgical scars were another story. They would be with me for a long time. During the time I could stay at the cabin the healing wouldn't be far enough advanced to conceal the fact that plastic surgery had taken place, but it would be far less evident.
Nobody came near the cabin except Blind Tom, who brought late-night sacks of groceries in a child's little red wagon. Sometimes I waited up for him. By the time he reached my cabin there was only one other sack left in the wagon. I didn't even know how many cabins were occupied. I didn't want to know. I saw no one during my daily swims and my forays into the woods to practice with the Sauer. Privacy was what a man's money bought for him at Blind Tom Walker's, and privacy was exactly what I wanted.
Six weeks after my arrival I stopped the old man one night on his rounds. "Keep an ear out for a thousand dollars worth of automobile," I told him. "Nothing fancy. Just transportation."
He nodded sagely. "Big?" he inquired. "Small? Sedan? Station wagon?"
"A small sedan," I decided.
"Volkswagen okay?"
I hesitated. I was used to thinking in terms of horsepower that could outrun pursuit but horsepower cost money. And at the moment it wasn't essential. "Sounds all right, Tom."
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