Clinton sat on the edge of the bed and read the clipping:
GIRL SUFFERS STAB WOUNDS
A girl staggered into the Kit-Kat Bar and Grill, 122 San Lucia St., at 2:30 A.M. yesterday and, according to the police report, fell on the floor bleeding from knife wounds.
The owner of the Kit-Kat, Isobel French, told Lt. Arthur Ramírez, acting chief of police, that she was sitting at the bar with a friend when Elsie Muller, 34, an employee of the Festival Night Club on Gasparilla St., made her dramatic entrance.
Miss French called police, who rushed the wounded girl to the Bonita County Hospital. She had been knifed on the left cheek and in the breast, it was reported by Lt. Ramírez.
Ramírez said that Miss Muller told him she knew who did it, but that she would not tell, nor would she press charges.
Dr. Charles Ober administered first aid at the hospital. The patient was treated for shock, but no stitches were required. Miss Muller is expected to be released in a few days.
Shirley was now under the covers.
Clinton turned to her. “It doesn’t say anything about Berry-berry!”
“No, but it was him that done it.”
“Then why didn’t this woman give his name?”
“Lots o’ reasons. I’m gettin’ sleepy.”
Clinton went to the side of the bed. Her eyes were closed. He touched her face with his hand: “Please, don’t go to sleep now. You got to tell me.”
Shirley sat forward, her head propped up on her arm. “Listen, Clint, I don’t want to make you miser’ble. But your brother’s a mean kind of person. If Ize you, I’d quit lookin’ for him,”
“Shirley, he’s not mean. I’ll swear, if you only knew him . . .”
The little girl had become an old woman, her eyes cold and remote, filled with bitter, costly wisdom. “Well, maybe he’s not, who knows? Elsie’s not really sore at him neither, but she’s nuttier than anybody else put together. You know why she didn’t tell? She didn’t want to get your brother sore at her. Idden that a joke? —Besides, she had some pot in her room, and didn’t want the cops to find it.”
“What’s that?”
“Pot, you know, like Ize smokin’ last night. Marijuana.”
“You know something?” Clinton said. “You sure have changed a lot. I mean since before. You act different.”
“Look, you’re goin’ away, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. If you want me to.”
“If I want you to has got nothin’ to do with it. Has it? So why don’t you just do it? Go away and leave me sleep. I’ve already took my pill, you want me to waste it?”
“I’m goin’,” he said.
She lay back on the lavender pillow again and closed her eyes. Clinton found the panda on the floor and placed it in her arms. “I’m goin’ now, Shirley,” he repeated. “But aren’t we friends any more?”
The woman’s eyelids tightened slightly and there was a crease between her brows. “Little boy,” she said, without opening her eyes, “are you tryin’ to make me cry?”
There was a sudden loud banging on the door.
Shirley murmured, “Whoever it is, make ‘em go away.”
Clinton went to the door and opened it. The police lieutenant, Ramírez, entered the room. He reminded Clinton, by the quality of his glance, that he was dressed only in his trousers. Clinton picked up his shirt and put it on. Ramírez did not speak. He walked to Shirley’s bedside and looked down at her.
Clinton whispered, “She’s asleep.”
Then the lieutenant looked at Clinton for a long moment, his eyes curiously aflame; like tongues of vision, they lapped up the room, the boy, the woman. At length, he motioned to Clinton to follow him into the hall.
Ramírez leaned against the railing of the stairwell, and watched Clinton as he buttoned his shirt. “You got a bus to catch,” Ramírez said. “Leaves in three minutes.”
“I’ll never make it, will I?”
“You will. The driver’s waitin’ for you.”
“Then I guess I got to get on it, huh?”
“You don’t got to,” Ramírez said. “But I would. Go get your shoes.”
Clinton returned to the room and finished his dressing. Then he checked his belongings: money belt, duffel bag, notebook, a pocketful of assorted articles. When he glanced at the bed, he saw Shirley’s eyes, wide open and staring at him. And he heard her little girl’s voice once again: “I di’nt roll you!”
He said, “The cop is puttin’ me on the bus.”
She nodded. He blew a kiss into the air. “Bye.”
She smiled at him. “You go straight home now, Willy,” she said.
In the police car, as they drove toward the bus station, Ramírez turned to Clinton: “Big night, huh? Did you light up?”
“Light up?” Clinton was puzzled for a moment, and then he understood.
“The pipe,” Ramírez said. “Didn’t she give you a drag on her pipe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, sir,” Clinton lied. “Can I ask you, how’d you know I was up there?”
“How does a plumber fix bathtubs? I got a job to do. —Went di-rect to the Festival last night, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
” ‘Cause I said not to?”
“No, sir.”
“How many times you screw her?”
Clinton looked straight ahead.
“Don’t frown at me, kid. I ast you something. How many times, six or seven? I could’ve busted in there any time I wanted. You know that, don’t you? So thank me. You got me to thank, hear that?”
Ramírez was filled with some puzzling emotion. Clinton could feel this strangeness, even though the officer tried to suppress its signs. But his face was pale and his breathing unnatural. “She was your first. Right?”
Clinton determined not to answer.
“Remember this,” Ramírez said. “Whatever you got from that tramp, two or three times, whatever it was, you wouldn’t have got it except for me. A gift from Ramírez. Hadn’t been I’m big-hearted, you’d of waited for the bus in jail. You know that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, now you got a lot to think about, huh? Am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ramírez removed one hand from the wheel and raised it toward Clinton. For a moment it hovered in the air, near the boy’s neck, caught between an act of strangling and a caress. But without touching Clinton at all, the hand returned to the wheel.
“Goddam you, you got a nerve,” Ramírez said, “sittin’ there bein’ polite to me, callin’ me ‘sir.’ So goddam smart.” He stopped the car. “Get out.”
They were parked across the street from a variety store that served also as a bus station. The bus was at the opposite curb. The driver, sitting on a bench in front of the store, watched Clinton climb out of the police car. A few passengers, already seated on the bus, watched from the windows as Clinton walked across the street, through the white tropical glare of noon, followed by the police lieutenant.
Ramírez talked with the driver of the bus. Clinton went into the store to buy his ticket. Inside, on the counter, he saw a display of cheese-flavored crackers wrapped in five-cent cellophane packages. He bought seven of them and stuffed them into his pockets and under his shirt. Then he went outside and handed his ticket to the driver and got on the bus.
Ramírez and the driver climbed aboard. The driver got into his seat and accelerated the motor several times, as if testing it. Ramírez conducted Clinton down the aisle, stopping him midway with a hand on the boy’s arm. “Not back there. That’s for colored,” he said.
Clinton sat down. The seat next to him was empty. Ramírez looked at him; and in a voice that was like a politician campaigning for office, he said: “Now, son, you go on back to Ohio with your daddy, and when you’re twenty-one, maybe you’ll come back and see us. Will you do that? Now, no hard feelings, is there?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I hope not,” the
officer said. Then he strutted back up the aisle. “Hello, Mary,” he said to a lady passenger, seated alone. “Goin’ up to see Danny, are you? And do a little shoppin’?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant.”
“Well. You hurry back.”
“I will.”
As he stepped off the bus, Ramírez said, over his shoulder, to the driver, “Thanks, Henry.”
Then the bus started to move.
part 3
WHEN HER 1929 Dodge touring car went off the road—the road that goes from Cleveland to Toledo—and crashed into the living-room fireplace of a country dentist, Echo O’Brien was instantly killed. This took place in a heavy rainstorm, at 4:45 A.M., on the second Sunday of October. The state police pointed out that the hazardous bend in the road was clearly marked by luminous arrows and large signs that said SLOW—DANGEROUS CURVE. They therefore attributed the accident to weather conditions and a possibly defective windshield wiper. But people who knew her well doubted that the vehicle itself had any defects whatsoever; because Echo O’Brien was a fine mechanic and especially fastidious in the care and upkeep of her 1929 Dodge touring car. Most of them believed that what happened to her was simply a terrible thing for which there was no accounting. The two persons who could not hold entirely to this opinion were Clinton and Berry-berry Williams.
This wreck took place just four months after Clinton’s return from Key Bonita. He had come home during the peak of a heat spell so severe that Cleveland newspapers, that same day, carried reports of four different persons who had dropped dead on the sidewalks.
When Clinton walked into the house late that afternoon, himself weak and feverish, he called up the stairs to Annabel: “Hey! I’m home! Annabel!” Then he sat on the floor, his duffel bag in his lap, and leaned against the doorframe.
Annabel rushed down the stairs in her petticoat, pulling a negligee about her shoulders. The first words she spoke to him were, “Clinton! What are you doing on the floor?”
“It’s hot,” he said.
“Where’s Berry-berry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you see him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Then she took a good look at the boy and said, “Why, precious baby, you are peaked!” She knelt on the floor and gave him a fever test: by pressing her lips against his forehead, she reckoned his temperature to be high enough for concern. “Straight to bed!” she commanded.
As she helped him out of his clothes, Annabel asked what sort of food he’d been eating.
“I ran out of crackers,” he said.
“Why crackers? Didn’t you have money?”
“Cheese crackers.”
“What’s wrong with you, Clinton?”
“I said I ran out of crackers.”
“Look here, Mister traveler, I will not tolerate insolence. Fever or no fever. Now get into this bed and tell me all about your brother.”
“He fell out of the tree.”
“He what?”
“He was eight years old, that’s all. Ker-plunk!”
Suddenly his teeth were chattering and he complained of the cold. Annabel soon realized he was delirious. She covered him with blankets and telephoned the doctor.
Dr. Bolz came to the house that afternoon. He was a frail and diminutive man who, in repose, seemed to be a creature of exceptional elegance and grace; but the fact was that he was indescribably clumsy. He seemed always to be tripping over his own feet and dropping things. The Williamses always referred to him privately as Dr. Butter-fingers; but in spite of this alarming personal trait, Annabel had perfect faith in his competence as a physician.
He was not a stammerer but he spoke haltingly and in sentences that had no definite endings to them; so that when he gave a diagnosis, one had to guess at its meaning. On this day Dr. Bolz left her with a vague impression that Clinton had contracted some insignificant summer malady called cat fever, which could be cured with plenty of blankets and the administering of his pills every four hours. But on the second day, he assured her that she had misunderstood his diagnosis: the patient had pneumonia. He told her to stop giving the pills altogether; instead, he injected into Clinton’s buttock a powerful new drug. On the fifth day of this new treatment, Dr. Bolz pronounced the patient cured. Clinton could get out of bed whenever he felt able; and it was the doctor’s professional opinion that Annabel might now safely question the boy about his trip.
Annabel’s curiosity had had too much time to grow in her. By now it had become a thing of unrecognizable proportions, a demon over whom her reason had no control whatever. When Clinton told her that Berry-berry had left Key Bonita by the time he himself had arrived, and that he, Clinton, had merely taken the next bus home—Annabel was not only disappointed but dissatisfied as well. She would not leave the subject alone.
“Do you mean to tell me a boy travels thousands of miles to see his brother, and then he gets on the next bus and comes home?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Annabel could think of no immediate question with which to counter this absurd answer. She sat in the undersized rocking chair next to his bed, silent for a moment, and stared at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the opposite wall.
“Well,” she said at length, “how d’you feel? Dr. B. says you can get dressed and come downstairs whenever you want to.”
“Oh, I don’t feel that good yet.”
“Your temperature’s almost normal. Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel stronger. Clinton, what did Berry-berry’s friends have to say about him?”
“Who?”
“Surely you met some of his friends, people who knew him!”
Clinton remained silent.
“What about the man he was going into business with? Didn’t you talk to him? Or if they’d already gone out to catch some fish, there must have been other fishermen who knew both of them. I’m not sure you used your head, mister. I’m not at all. Now look: the telegram said they make five-day trips. Anybody in his right mind would wait for his brother to get back. Especially after spending all that money on bus fare.”
“I didn’t see any point in waitin’ around. Everybody said he’d left town, so . . .”
“Everybody!” Annabel exclaimed. “Who?”
“I told you, the clerk at the hotel.”
“One little clerk is not ‘everybody.’ “
“All right, I was just now exaggeratin’. It wasn’t everybody, it was the clerk. —Besides, talking so much makes me feel dizzy.”
Annabel looked steadily into his eyes.
“No kidding,” he said. “I feel really lousy.”
Similar interrogations were to take place regularly, sometimes two or three of them in the course of a day.
That evening, after dinner, Ralph climbed the stairs and appeared at the door of Clinton’s room. He entered without knocking. Clinton had time to close his notebook, but he did not have time to get it entirely hidden under his blanket.
“Look here, old-kid-old-kid-old-sock,” said Ralph, “since when am I the kind of a sonofabitch you got to hide things from?”
“I thought it was Annabel,” Clinton said.
“Well, I should’ve knocked. But d’you think I give a fiddler’s fee what you write down in them notebooks? They’s nothin’ wrong with the English language. As a matter of fact, English is a fine goddam language. When I was on the bum, I read everything anybody handed me. I had to. I was a public speaker and I had to know my onions. You got a dictionary?”
Clinton pointed to the desk. “There’s one.”
Ralph got the book and handed it to Clinton. “All right, now open it up. Anywhere. I don’t care where. And pick a word. Any word they got in there. And I’ll tell you what it means.”
Clinton said: “Rowan.”
“Which?”
“R-o-w-a-n, rowan.”
“Is that in there?” said Ralph, with disgust. “Here! Give me that book.” Clinton handed him the dictionary. R
alph read aloud: “Rowan. A Eurasian tree.” He closed the book and examined its cover. Then he made his steam-kettle sound of mirth. “I think it’s a crime,” he said, good-naturedly, “slippin’ all those foreign words into an American dictionary. Webster’s Collegiate, my ass. Listen, I had a talk with some snotnose college kid in a saloon one night. You know what he said: Glass—now get this—glass is more perfectly elastic than rubber.” Ralph threw back his head and emitted a long spurt of invisible steam. “Well, I turned to the poor bastard, and I said, ‘Listen, if we leave the world to birds like you, we’ll end up looking through rubber windows, and screwing with glass contraceptives.”
Ralph and Clinton had a good laugh over this remark, and then the old man said: “Listen, Clint, I think the best step you ever took was drop out o’ school. And it wasn’t my idea, was it?”
“No. It was mine.”
“Tell her that.” He indicated Annabel with a downward motion of his thumb. “She says it was me give you that idea. —But whatthehell, if I pressed charges every time that woman slandered me, she’d be locked up for ninety-nine years. —Now answer me, when did I ever butt in on you boys? Or tell you what to do? Ever?”
“Never,” Clinton said.
“Oh, well. She can’t help it; we shouldn’t be too hard on her.” He lighted a cigarette. “It was her sent me up here, you know. She wants me to find out what you two bozos did down there in Key Bonita.”
“I told her I was only there overnight.”
“Didn’t see him at all, huh?”
“No, sir.”
Ralph nodded. “Listen, whatever you got to say is strictly volunteer. I’m not the one with the prosecution complex in this outfit. You know I’m no prosecutor, don’t you? You got anything to say, it’s up to you—and it don’t have to go any farther.”
There was a long moment of silence in which Ralph grew uneasy. “I come up here tonight just because—to see how you’re gettin’ along. The fact is, I miss you down in that cellar.”
“I missed you, too, Ralph.”
“Well, shit, why not!” There was another pause. Then: “Furthermore, I hope you had a helluva good time down there in Florida. I been playin’ with the idea o’ goin’ down there myself before I—before I, uh, decide not to. But then I prob’ly won’t go anyway.” Ralph studied the top of his shoe for a while. He turned his foot in various ways, considering it from several angles. “I never cared much for the water,” he said.
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