All Fall Down

by James Leo Herlihy

  He wore khaki trousers and a long-sleeved sweat shirt. His feet were bare. His hair needed cutting; it was of a dark chestnut color with streaks of red in it, a mass of large unruly waves that contributed to an over-all look of wildness about him. He was a six-footer, slender, with broad shoulders and slim hips. If he did not give an appearance of height, it was because of his posture: his weight usually rested on one leg, and he held his head down and to the side. He had a fine face with prominent cheekbones, a strong jaw, a deeply cleft chin, and eyes that were rather small, but of a vivid blue color.

  There was in his appearance an over-all strangeness that would be remembered longer than anything else about him. More vivid and more disturbing than any of these features that can be clearly named and described was an unlikely combination of invisible elements, qualities usually thought of as opposed: weakness and strength, kindness and cruelty, ease and tension, humor and sadness. And the balance would shift from one pole to another with all the quickness of a blinking eye, a gesture of the body, a tilt of the head—or the sudden death of a smile.

  Now as he stood in the archway, it was apparent to everyone that Berry-berry had had a good deal of liquor to drink; but no one made any mention of it. More cautious and deliberate in his movements than a sober man would be, he made every attempt to appear comfortable and easy. He walked over to Ralph, the member of the family closest at hand, and embraced him briefly. “Hi, Ralph.” His tone seemed to suggest that he had been gone only a week; but there was about him a sense of emotion deeply felt that clearly belied all of this elaborate casualness. As Berry-berry moved around the table toward Clinton, the younger boy rose quickly to his feet, and thrust his hand forward. Berry-berry pressed him close to his chest for a moment, and it was good to have that contact; but of Clinton’s five senses his eyes were the most eager for a feast. He watched Berry-berry move behind his own chair and approach Annabel.

  Now the simple act that was about to take place would remain for all of his life in the eye of Clinton’s mind: an act that seemed utterly simple and at the same time infinitely mysterious.

  Berry-berry and Annabel looked at each other for a long moment, a glistening look of suspension in the eyes of each of them; and then the son moved briskly forward and placed his arms about his mother. His face was buried for a moment in her hair, and then, suddenly, with an abruptness that was awkward, almost harsh, like the result of some crazy impulse, he kissed her full on the mouth. And for a moment so brief that it hardly existed at all, Clinton forgot who the man was. And he forgot who the woman was.

  Then Berry-berry moved swiftly into the kitchen.

  Annabel’s hands had been clenched for so long that they were now a pair of red fists, white at the knuckles. Her face, contorted with emotion, told that she was under an agony of strain. But this condition was inexplicably becoming to her. Clinton thought she often looked silly, almost ugly, when she had spent too long at her toilet, preparing too carefully her face and her attitude; but it was at moments such as these, in which she was totally unaware of herself, that Clinton was reminded of Annabel’s beauty.

  Now he heard Berry-berry’s footsteps on the basement stairs. Clinton started into the kitchen to follow him, but Annabel stopped him with her hand.

  Ralph said, “Just give him a minute down there, Clint.”

  The three Williamses sat down again but there had been a general loss of appetite. Annabel started to pick up a water glass, but withdrew her hand. Then suddenly she burst into tears and ran upstairs.

  In a moment, Clinton and Ralph heard her bedroom door slam shut.

  Ralph looked at Clinton and made the steam-kettle sound that was his laughter; but it did not have much force behind it. “Nerves, you know,” he said, of Annabel. “A terrible thing for a woman; can’t help themselves.”

  Clinton was thinking about Berry-berry. “You think he’s still down there?”

  Ralph said: “You never know about that Galbralian, where he is.”

  In a moment they heard Berry-berry climbing the stairs, and then he came into the dining room. His eyes took in the emptiness of Annabel’s chair. He leaned on the back of it with his arms folded, and he was grinning again. “Listen, Ralph, I think I’ll drive around the block a couple of times. You know, for about five minutes. I want to get used to this place—gradually. Know what I mean?”

  “Go on ahead,” Ralph said.

  “You’re lookin’ good, Ralph.”

  “Are you kiddin’?” Ralph tilted his head forward and pointed at the middle of his baldness. “Look at this, not a blade.”

  “But you’re not the kind of a guy needs a lot of hair. You look good.”

  Ralph was eager to be taken in, “Yeah? Well, maybe so. What the hell, I look all right.”

  “Yes, you do, you look really good,” Berry-berry said. Then, indicating Clinton, he added, “By the way, who’s your friend here?”

  Clinton was glad to have this attention. It caused him to smile in a way that he could not control, and he felt like a foolish gargoyle. But he was glad to feel that way.

  “Oh, that little sonofabitch,” Ralph said. “You got to keep your eye on him, he’s gettin’ to be the worst one in the whole tribe. Stand up, Clint.”

  Clinton said, “What for?” And then he stood up.

  Ralph said, “Look at the arms on him, and that chest. It’s enough to scare a sensible person.”

  Clinton stole a glance at Berry-berry. Berry-berry was looking him over, and he seemed to approve of Clinton.

  “You want to come with me, Clint?” he said.

  “Sure; where?”

  “Oh, just around the block. Is that okay, Ralph? For about five minutes?”

  Ralph answered in a slightly belligerent tone: “What the hell you telling me how long for? Do I ask you how long? Go on, get your asses out o’ here, for Chrisake.”

  Berry-berry started out of the room. “Come on, Clint.”

  Clinton followed. At the front door, he shouted to the house at large: “I’ll be gone for about fi’minutes! I’m takin’ a ride with Berry-berry!”

  These words repeated themselves silently inside him. “I’m takin’ a ride with Berry-berry, a ride with Berry-berry, with Berry-berry.” And they kept echoing back and forth in all the chambers inside him until they were all but meaningless. Clinton knew that the visitor was Berry-berry, but he could not fit the two together. “Realize it,” he begged himself, as he climbed into the truck. “You got to realize it.”

  Ralph went to the window in the living room and watched the young men climb into the truck. He read the sign on the side panel, and said, aloud to himself, “He’s no plumber, for godsake.”

  He went to the hallway and looked up the stairs, but he could not hear any sounds up there. He heard noises outside: distant motors, the faraway chattering of children, a woman giggling on the porch across the street. But his own house was silent now. He went back to the window and looked out into the street. The truck was gone. The Williams boys had driven off somewhere. The two of them together.

  This is how Berry-berry Williams handled an automobile, or in this case, a truck: he took all the quick speed he could get out of the first gear; then he shoved in the clutch and threw it into second, gunning the motor hard for all the power that was in it. In the city itself, he seldom had any use for the third position. The corners came too fast. He would slam on the brakes and start out again.

  He drove this way for a few minutes and soon they were on a four-lane highway, headed south, downstate. He shifted into high gear and steered the little truck with just one hand on the wheel. Then he leaned to the right and opened the glove compartment and removed a small bottle of brandy. He whistled loud between his teeth and said, very clearly, separating the words:

  “It is good to get out of that hell hole. Take that cap off for me, will you?”

  Clinton took the bottle, removed the cap, and handed it back. Berry-berry took two short drinks from the bottle. With each swal
low, he tightened the muscles of his throat as if the brandy had caused him pain. Then he handed it back to Clinton with a smile: “I needed that. Help yourself. You drink, don’t you?”

  Clinton said, “Now and then. You know, I can . . .”

  “Take it or leave it alone? Me too. That’s the way I am. I like the stuff, but I don’t have to have it. —She looks pretty good, a little older maybe. I was surprised.”

  “Who?” Clinton said.

  “Annabel. How old is she anyway? About fifty?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, I have had it. That dose will last me for about another two years. Just curiosity, you know. That’s all I went back for. You’re the only one I wanted to see, and that’s the God’s truth. People say to me all the time, Don’t you miss your family? And I say, Not a bit, only my kid brother.”

  “I missed you, too.”

  “You know what I expected? I expected you to be gone. I thought you’d take off by now. I did.”

  “I did for a while,” Clinton said, “but I had to come back ‘cause I got sick.”

  “Yeah? —Where’d you go?”

  “I’ll give you about a thousand guesses.”

  “Go on, where?”

  “Key Bonita,” Clinton said.

  “Key what? No shit!”

  “Yeah. I thought you might be around. And I was going to take off anyway, so I went down to Key Bonita. I didn’t care where I went.”

  “When? When did you go down there?”

  “Oh, it was about the time Ralph got that wire, I think. Yeah, it must’ve been along about then, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you say you were comin’ down? I’d’ve waited!”

  “I just figured, if you were there, okay, and otherwise, what the hell.” Clinton drew in a breath and held it for a moment. “Then I—uh—shacked up with this broad for a while and . . .”

  Berry-berry said, “You did!” And then he started to laugh. He put both hands on the wheel, looked straight ahead, and laughed for a long time. Clinton looked at him carefully, trying to judge the meaning of this behavior. Then his brother reached over to him, as if to encourage him, and squeezed his shoulder. “Go on, tell me what else, you little bastard. Oh, you kill me, goddam you, you little cocksman you, you really do! You know you’re the only one I missed in this entire miserable hell hole of a town? That’s the truth! You know what you are? You’re just like me. We’re neither one of us any different.” Then he laughed some more.

  Clinton was deeply pleased with this impression he was making. Through some divine inspiration he had struck just the right attitude with which to win Berry-berry’s interest and respect. He was not yet at his ease in this wild world of a speeding truck headed for no place special, but the brandy helped him some. He wanted to get the feeling that this ride was really taking place, but there was something disturbingly false in the core of it. It was as if he had forced it to happen by the strength of imagination and desire; it was an event of the will, without his flesh being involved in it, without truth.

  “You know what I get the feeling of sometimes?” he said aloud. “It’s like we’re not really here.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Clint. We are. And that’s all we are. We’re just here.” Then he laughed again.

  Clinton said: “I guess you’re right about that. We’re just here.” But he no longer knew what they were talking about. Clinton wanted to be agreeable. Anyway, maybe it was not important.

  Then Berry-berry said, “I suppose you know I hate her guts.”

  “Who’s guts?”

  “Annabel’s.”

  Clinton had not known this. He listened in amazement, as Berry-berry went on:

  “It’s true, and I can’t help it. She makes my flesh creep. That’s mainly why I don’t like to come around. I’m always afraid I’ll do something rotten. But I don’t want to, so I keep the hell away.”

  “What d’you mean, something rotten?”

  “I don’t know even. I’m half nuts, you know. I am, I’m a mess. What about you? Are you a mess?”

  “Yeah,” Clinton said, “but not like that. Course me and Annabel don’t have much in common. But I don’t feel like that about her.”

  “But you’re a mess; aren’t you?”

  “Oh, sure I am. God, I do really crazy things. For a while, she almost sent me to this psychiatrist even. But I didn’t go.”

  “We’re both nuttier’n hell,” Berry-berry said. “And I don’t even care. Do you?”

  “Naw, hell,” Clinton said. “I don’t care.”

  “We’re Ralph Williams’ two prize Galbralians, that’s what we are,” Berry-berry said. “I feel sorry for the old man. I do. I can’t hardly look at him even. You know what he’d be doing if it wasn’t for her? He’d be sittin’ around in a whorehouse drinking beer. He would, I swear.”

  “Yeah, I guess maybe you’re right about that.”

  “You know, Clint, she bamboozled the poor old bastard. She’s got him bamboozled. God, I’m glad I got out of that hell hole.”

  The talk between the two young men went round and round in this way. Clinton was soon hungry and dizzy. They stopped at a roadhouse. Clinton ate a sandwich and Berry-berry drank brandy. They sat in this place for a long time, sat in a back booth that had linoleum on the counter, and for perhaps three hours or more, Clinton listened while Berry-berry told these several stories of his escapades in the last two years:

  Most of his experiences had been based on two discoveries he had made during the first summer away from home. First of all, he found that work was disagreeable to him. His first job had been as a cherry-picker up north in Michigan. The bosses paid so much a basket, so that your earnings were in direct ratio to the effort you put out. Berry-berry found that when he whistled and daydreamed and took his time, he earned only enough for food and lodging. But when he worked fast, he was too tired at the end of the day to enjoy spending whatever extra money he’d made. No matter how he went at it, this job required no mental activity of any kind; and all day long his mind was busy with thinking up schemes by which he might get a living without any work at all. Ralph had always preached that if a man earned only enough at his work to pay for his daily bread, then that man was in fact selling his life to his employer in exchange for the mere privilege of remaining alive. Berry-berry began therefore by telling himself that he wanted to avoid becoming a victim to such an absurd injustice. Ralph had also said that in a capitalistic system, a man’s only chance of winning out over this evil was to become an employer himself. But Berry-berry quickly observed that most of the employers he had known seemed to put out a good deal more effort than the men who worked for them. If they made a lot of money, chances were they had big families to squander it on. But Berry-berry was alone, and money was a secondary matter; what he wanted was ease and pleasure and freedom. —The second discovery had to do with his power over certain women. He had known even in childhood that they found some quality in him irresistible, especially women who were somewhat older. They doted on him. They liked to muss up his hair and invented opportunities to touch him and squeeze him and kiss him. Now during this first summer away from home, he found that there were a number of these women who also wanted to get into his bed with him. At the cherry orchards, he fell in with a crowd of other single men who spent their weekends at nearby lake resorts. The managements of these places, for the most part, closed their eyes to the intrusion of these male non-guests who came in on weekends and made free use of the swimming pools and tennis courts and other facilities; in fact, since there were not enough men to go around anyway, these intruders were welcome and became a valuable, though unadvertised, feature of the establishment. Toward the end of the summer, Berry-berry took up with an unmarried woman of thirty-four, a schoolteacher from Cincinnati who was spending a week of her summer vacation in a scantily veiled search for a husband. At the end of her week, she offered to pay Berry-berry for his time if he would drive her car back to Cincinnati, as s
he claimed she was afraid to travel alone. He had planned anyway to make his way south for the fall, and so he set out with this woman to drive her to Cincinnati. After a night in a tourist court outside Dayton, the woman maintained that she was in love with him and could not live without him. Within a few days, Berry-berry was living in a rented room in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, and the schoolteacher was paying his bills and supplying him with pocket money. She contrived to spend as many as possible of her non-working hours with him, many nights and all weekends, without the matter coming to the attention of her superiors on the school board, or of the fellow teacher with whom she shared a small residence in Cincinnati. As for Berry-berry, he spent more and more of his days with other loungers in the less reputable quarters of these two cities, and after a while had given up any thought of finding work. By the time winter came, he was engaged in intimate affairs with two other women, one of whom was the wife of a naval officer stationed in a foreign port; and each of the women, three of them altogether, were contributing money for his support. Meanwhile, the secret life of the poor schoolteacher, through some incautious confidence with another teacher, became known to the school board, and she was summarily dismissed as a person unfit for daily contact with young and unformed minds. She began to demand more of Berry-berry’s attention, which he was unwilling to give. In fact he tried to break off with her altogether. Then she began to pursue him like a crazy person, seeking him out in public places and upbraiding him in the presence of others. All of this behavior led to the incident of his knocking her down in a tavern on that Christmas eve of the telephone call. He never saw her again. The judge told him to leave town altogether, and he was glad to go. The naval officer’s wife left her family and went with him. She and Berry-berry drove to Norfolk, Virginia, the base to which the officer himself was expected to return in a few months’ time. They took up residence together, living off the income of the cuckolded party. When the man came in from his sea duty, late that spring, the woman was pregnant with Berry-berry’s child. Berry-berry had been instantly repulsed by the news of her pregnancy. He had found that whenever the thought of motherhood entered his association with any woman, he became impotent with her and could no longer bear to touch her. Now the officer’s wife was angry and offended by his response to her condition. Therefore, when her husband returned, the bold creature not only confronted him with all the facts of her infidelity but, in retaliation for Berry-berry’s coldness toward her, told the officer just where the culprit could be found. This led to an automobile chase down the highways of Virginia, Berry-berry in the officer’s car, being pursued by the officer, who in turn had borrowed a Navy station wagon. When Berry-berry sought to elude the man by turning sharply and at great speed into a country road, his wheels skidded in the dirt and the car was overturned. But he himself was not hurt. When the officer arrived on the scene, he did not even get out of the station wagon. Now that he had caught up with this devil who had been sleeping with his wife, he did not have the least notion of what to do with him. So the poor man merely sat in the station wagon, and wept. After a while, Berry-berry got in and they rode back to town together. Notwithstanding his grudge, the officer behaved toward him in an exceedingly friendly way, and even ended up by forgiving Berry-berry for fornicating with his wife. Therefore, Berry-berry was taken completely by surprise when the police came for him the next day and locked him up in jail. He was charged with stealing and demolishing the officer’s car. Ralph wired the money for his bail, and the case awaited trial. But as the date of this trial drew nearer, Berry-berry’s lawyer became less certain of victory for his client, and secretly urged him to forfeit his bail money and run off to California. He said it was unlikely his opponent would want to bother with the expense and red tape of extradition. Besides, they’d have to locate him. Berry-berry flew to Los Angeles. During the first few days he expected to be tapped on the shoulder by every policeman he saw; but gradually this fear left him and he drifted over to San Pedro, a nearby port town, where he fell in with the same kind of seaport riffraff he had known in Norfolk. One of their number, with whom he became particularly friendly, was a big, ugly American Indian by the improbable name of Silas Rents His Ox. Silas was a panderer who dealt in marijuana and prostitutes. He maintained a kind of floating office that shifted from one to another of various waterfront cafés. Intimate comradeship often grows swiftly among lawbreakers, and so it was with Berry-berry Williams and Silas Rents His Ox. The older man even took a kind of fatherly pride in the quick aptitude Berry-berry demonstrated in learning the secrets of his trade. The Indian showed him how to keep track of his women, and taught him certain methods of tripping them up when they tried to withhold income from their manager. He also taught Berry-berry to smoke marijuana in cigarettes and in pipes; but because of the serious legal consequences of being apprehended as a peddler of the stuff, Silas, out of a real fondness for his apprentice, would not allow him actively to participate in this branch of his illicit enterprises. For his own pleasure, Berry-berry had his pick of any new girl that might turn up in the quarter looking for a manager under whom to ply her trade. He would keep her to himself until she ceased to interest him as a bed partner, and then put her to work. Certain of these women developed crazy attachments for him, and even liked to be beaten by him. The act of love, as a rule, had lost its meaning for such a creature. But if she could provoke her man to violence against her, she might imagine she held some real power over him. Berry-berry learned to take part in these twisted games, and even discovered in them a source of actual pleasure to himself. He liked the company of these barren women for whom any thought of marriage or childbearing was as remote as an imagined sun in some distant heaven; these were matters that never came up at all. Life had become a dizzying round of pleasure and violence, benzedrine tablets and women, alcohol and leisure. Berry-berry had found a life in which he could do as he pleased. But he made one serious blunder: he had begun to withhold considerable quantities of money from Silas Rents His Ox. One day in the winter of the year he was summoned by this person to talk the matter over in the back booth of a saloon called the White Horse. The Indian did not seem to be angry. He merely gave Berry-berry a drink of liquor and started to lecture to him in a fatherly fashion on the ethics of his behavior. But while the man talked, Berry-berry sank quickly into a heavy stupor and lost consciousness altogether. That was the last time he laid eyes on Silas Rents His Ox. He woke up on a Greyhound bus that had just pulled into its station in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The driver was telling him that passengers bound for Biloxi, Mississippi, had to change coaches at this stop. Berry-berry had never heard of Biloxi. But the bus ticket he found in his pocket was clearly marked for that destination. He was still in a fog from the drug Silas had administered to him, and it was to this condition that he attributed his inability to remember the purpose for his trip. It was not until he reached Biloxi that his situation became clear to him: he had been gotten rid of. On the December day of his arrival in this Mississippi town, a cold wave had blown in from the Gulf of Mexico, and Berry-berry wandered through the streets shivering with a chill, and in a general state of misery and bereavement. The small quantity of money in his pocket forced him to choose between food and liquor. His choice was a poor one: the liquor caused in him an almost overwhelming dizziness. Perhaps it set off some residual powers of the drug that was still in his system. At any rate he found himself, long past midnight, on the main shopping street of Biloxi, staring contemptuously at a Bethlehem manger scene in the window of a department store. As he tried to move away from this display that was so galling to his sensibilities, he fell to the sidewalk. In order to get to his feet, he had to cling to a movable traffic sign that happened to be close at hand. As he leaned on this sign for support, his eyes were once again assailed by the Christmas display. The attitudes of the little sculptures depicting the Holy Family so filled him with resentment against their heavy sentimentality that he was suddenly enraged. The lon
ger he looked at it, the more he blamed his own desperate fix on this wicked myth of the Madonna, with all her smug purity, kneeling there, fondling the Infant. At length he began to imagine that this bit of papier-mâché window dressing held some actual hypnotic power over him. And in a moment, without realizing quite that it was he himself who had caused it, a burglar alarm was ringing, the shattered store window lay in smithereens at his feet, and the Bethlehem scene lay in ruins under the burden of the traffic sign. The display no longer depicted the joy of a birth celebration; it had become an image of devastation, an innocent peasant dwelling crushed under the wrath of some mighty and wicked monster. Once again, Berry-berry Williams was locked in jail. This time he telegraphed not only to Ralph for assistance, but also—on a kind of hunch based more on cunning than on guesswork—to Mr. Silas Rents His Ox in San Pedro. When the Indian came through with money, Berry-berry was none too surprised. He then made his way slowly along the Gulf Coast and into Florida, following always the line of the sea, stopping briefly in several towns along the way, and ending up, more by chance than by design, in Key Bonita, where his next unholy adventure awaited him. This strange island-town, though generally wide open to vice of all kinds, was also the scene of an erratic tug of war between the police department and the sheriff’s office. Each of these public servants vied constantly with the other for the position most favorable to the collection of graft from the many whorehouses and saloon operators. The flak from this battle had the panderers and barkeepers of Key Bonita on tenterhooks; they could never be quite easy in their relations with the law. Berry-berry thrived on these tensions. He was forced to use his wits and he enjoyed it. On a few occasions he ran afoul of these authorities, but they were fond of him and the matters were seldom of a serious nature. From Silas Rents His Ox he had learned to keep his pockets empty: money was often used as evidence. And he had learned that an office should be a floating proposition, shifting from bar to bar, with all records filed, so to speak, in the head. He checked in at the Tin Pot Arms Hotel, and in no time at all Berry-berry had a brace of exotic women—a Panamanian mulatto and a German refugee—earning good money for him. In a weak moment he might even have married the mulatto, “just for the hell of it.” This black-haired harlot intrigued him with the almost ludicrous dignity she brought to her profession; she walked the streets like a queen, commanding more respect than any official had enjoyed in this town in years. Far from toiling under the yoke of guilt that twisted the sensibilities of most of his women, it seemed to Berry-berry that she instinctively accepted her way of life as unimpeachable, perhaps even sanctified. For on the wall above her bed was a cardboard painting of an enormous eye, the eye of Santa Lucia. This eye disturbed the puritanical consciences of more than one of her patron-lovers, who were driven to perform their sins under its gaze. But the mulatto herself felt protected by it; she was certain that Santa Lucia drove away all evil influences. Berry-berry was half in love with her utter lack of any sense of wrong whatever; he found himself bringing gifts to her like a real suitor, and even suffered slight pangs of jealousy when he imagined her activities with other men. This peculiar affair might have continued to bring him all of its idyllic rewards for a long time to come, had it not been for the German woman, a perfect antithesis to the mulatto who was her rival. This blonde hellion thrived on suffering. Berry-berry grew bored with the repeated beatings she provoked from him. She would hold out money from him and then, by the purposely faulty concealment of her misdemeanor, challenge him to punish her. Perhaps the richest possible fulfillment of this strange lady’s life would one day be brought about by some man who loathed her sufficiently to cause her death. Berry-berry’s disdain for her was of no such exalted order. However, one night in her room, driven nearly to murder itself, he did accommodate her to the extent of delivering, with her own knife, which she handed him for this purpose, a minor surface wound of the face; and he slashed her right breast for her. The depth of this second wound was substantial and brought forth a good flow of blood. She begged him to complete the task, but Berry-berry, sobered by the sight of her blood, refused. He leaped from the second-story window of her hotel room, and hid himself at the bosom of his mulatto. The German woman was left to run screaming down the stairs of the Tin Pot Arms, smearing herself and the banisters and the floors of the place with all the blood she could squeeze from her wounds. Then she ran into the street to display her terrible aspect to all the passersby, and ended by fainting in the barroom next door. It was from this establishment that the police were called to her aid. The next edition of the Key Bonita News-Advertiser carried an account of the incident, and because of all this public attention the sheriff’s office had to make some show of effort at rounding up the person who had wielded the knife. Besides, the sheriff was interested in demonstrating to the public the incompetence of the city’s police. Berry-berry’s culpability was known to every underworld character on Gasparilla Street, but since he had no enemies among them, no one gave his name to the investigators. And of all the persons who knew of his guilt, the wounded party herself was the least inclined to divulge his name or bring any charges against him. But the sheriff would not leave the matter alone. Therefore, Lieutenant Ramírez (the same mustachioed personage who was to usher Clinton out of town a few days hence) appeared that night in Berry-berry’s room. In return for certain lewd favors Berry-berry had in the past arranged in his behalf—the man, incapable of any direct participation in the sexual act, derived some modicum of satisfaction from witnessing the pleasures of others—he apprised Berry-berry of the dangers of his position: he reminded him that a convict in the South usually ends up on a chain gang. And he caused Berry-berry to realize that the power to deliver him into this fate lay entirely in the hands of a sheriff with an ax to grind and a half-crazy German prostitute. Summer was coming on anyway. Berry-berry decided to head north. He went immediately to a hangout known as the Seven-Eleven Club in search of his mulatto. But when he tried to induce her to travel with him, she betrayed no interest in such an adventure. She had always claimed that a good deal of her spare time was spent in attendance to the needs of her great-aunt, an old, crippled woman who lived in the Negro quarter; and this was the reason she now put forward for her inability to leave town. Some instinct in Berry-berry told him that she lied, and he determined, for his own satisfaction, to learn the truth. Late that night, unaware that she was being followed, the mulatto led him to an old vine-covered Bahama shack, which she entered with the familiarity of one who made her home in it. Berry-berry hung around outside for a few minutes and then crept around to the back of the place and peered into a lighted bedroom. Here he found his shadow-laved queen of Gasparilla Street in the arms of an enormous black lover. After a few minutes, he slipped away. The town had, after all, pretty much fallen apart for him anyway. He gathered his few belongings, including several caches of money he had stashed in various places. By the time the sun had risen, he had driven in a hired car all the way to Naples on the mainland. And during this drive he had conceived of Apple Mountain, Ohio, as his destination. This town had always held many attractions for him, and now, not the least of these was its proximity to Cleveland: he wanted to look in on the family. In his boyhood, the mere mention of Apple Mountain had been a wicked stimulant to his imagination. The place had been known to him, as to most of the males of Cleveland and all the other surrounding towns, as a wide-open center of sin. But its appearance was deceptive. Scarcely even touched by the plastic and neon under which the Victorian charms of most of her sister cities now lay smothered or hidden, Apple Mountain seemed to have been preserved by some historical society in the interests of showing a real Ohio town as it used to be. The face it presented to the casual visitor was that of a modest resort town with a few of its great old houses transformed into sedate hotels that featured mineral baths for the aged and the infirm, and fine churches representing eleven different Christian denominations. And so, to the routine pleasures of Berry-berry’s profession was now added th
is mild but titillating sense of the profane. Within two weeks of his arrival, he had three girls, the cooperation of many of the town’s taxi drivers, a silent partner, and a base of operations. The latter was a small farmhouse on the edge of town. Its owner, a drunken widower by the name of Vinnie Agricola, had never actually farmed the place. Before his wife had died, it had been their home and an office for his plumbing business as well. But in his grief he had turned heavily to drink; and now, of the business itself, nothing remained but his tools and the little Ford pickup truck. The place had become, by a series of simple maneuvers on the part of Berry-berry, a whorehouse: in exchange for the use of his home, Berry-berry kept this lonesome plumber in liquor and gave him the use of his women. Operating in a definite location was a concession to Berry-berry’s usual business principles, but in the present circumstances the risk to himself seemed minimal: in the event of trouble, Agricola, as legal owner of the place, would be left holding the bag.