“Far’s I’m concerned,” Dall said to Naps from his hospital bed, “I’m just glad you didn’t stop to give anybody any tickets. That would of been goin too far.”
“Was Slater really trying to kill you?” I asked.
“I don’t reckon he was just exercisin his horse,” Dall replied.
“But why? Why did he want to do something like that, and what made him think he could get away with it?”
“Well, I guess I knew too much and he figgered if he didn’t put me out of the way he’d never have a chance to go ahead with what he wanted to do about his wife and about Margaret. A nut like him. Why, sure he could of got away with it. The more I think about it, the more I think I was pretty stupid doin what I done. He could of put my dead body in my car and rolled me into the lake. Or he could of told the sheriff I come out there snoopin around and got trampled accidentally by one of his horses. All kinds of ways he could of got away with it.”
Diabolical, I mused in awe, positively diabolical. “What are you going to do now?” I asked him.
“That’s a damn-fool question if ever I heard one,” Dall said, but only with a tinge of disgust in his voice. He managed to raise one hand just high enough to point his fingers at himself, and said, “Looks like I aint gonna do nuthin for a good little while. Doctor says a week or more before I can even get out of this bed. The Chief, I expect, is not gonna think too highly of me. Might be I’ll even get demoted.”
“Why?” I asked. “You got injured in the line of duty, even if it was a sort of self-appointed duty.”
“Aw, hell,” Dall said and he sounded like he was about to cry. “I wasn’t on no duty. Hell naw. I’m still supposed to be on the night shift, and I just wore my uniform and took the squad car to kind of impress Slater, see? The Chief wouldn’t like it none atall if he found out I did that, it bein outside city limits and all, so I’m hopin he won’t find out. Still they aint gonna think too highly of a sergeant that somehow gets banged up so bad he has to take a couple weeks off work.”
“Do you think Slater is going to hide out, or do you think he’ll try to find Margaret?” I asked.
“Well, I caint say for sure, but I guess he’s pretty damn sore at her and he might just have a notion to get even with her. Of course, I don’t think he could ever find her, long as she stays at Naps’s place.”
“She isn’t at Naps’s house any more,” I said. “She ran away.”
“What?” Dall demanded.
“What?” Naps echoed him.
So I explained to them what Tatrice had told me over the phone.
“Goddamn that woman all to hell!” Naps moaned.
“Hey, nigger boy, watch who you’re cussin about,” Dall cautioned him.
“I’m cussin about my wife,” Naps said. “Lettin Miss Margaret get away like that. I should of known better than leave it up to her to keep an eye on Miss Margaret.”
The nurse came in and said to Dall, “It’s time we took a little nap. Your friends will have to leave.”
“Nub, we got to find her,” Dall said to me. “Maybe she aims to go out to see Slater, and she don’t know what’s been happenin lately.” To Naps he said, “Could you get your pal Feemy to sort of keep a eye out for her if she should turn up out there, and get her away from the place or somethin?” Naps nodded. Then Dall said to me, “Find her, Nub. Get her back to Naps’s place and keep her there if you have to tie her down.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “But don’t you think you ought to let the sheriff in on this, and have him get a posse out after Slater?”
“I done did,” Dall said, and there was a note of regret, of resignation, to the way he said it. “I didn’t mean to, or want to, not yet anyway, but it looks like there’s not a blessed thing I can do about it any more.” He was breathing hard, and the nurse repeated her injunction that we must leave, putting her hands on our shoulders and urging us toward the door. Before I went out through the door, Dall spoke once again: “Nub, feed my dog, will you?”
Chapter thirty-five
Downstairs in the lobby Naps’s friend Feemy was sitting in a chair, waiting. Naps reintroduced me to him, and I said I remembered him well from the old days when he lived on Ringo, and we chatted reminiscently for a while, then the three of us got into the Lincoln and drove out to the Slater ranch. Under any other circumstances I might have delighted in the ride, meandering as it did through the pinewooded hills west of Little Rock, passing around the unique Pinnacle Mountain which I had climbed as a boy, passing through the little hamlets of Natural Steps and Monnie Springs, weary and brown yet still having a quaint rural antiquity in the late but still hot afternoon sun, passing close enough to the lake to see it, the Big Maumelle Lake which had not even been here at all the last time I was out this way. And under any other circumstances I might have been thrilled to see for the first time the Slater property itself, the profuse, almost luxuriant pine forests, the carefully tended fields, and the anachronism of a house, that grand casa, an abode of adobe and curved-tile roofs and all the appurtenances of a flamingo-colored Spanish-Gothic style which would have looked out of place even in St. Augustine, Florida, but in Pulaski County, Arkansas, was hopelessly far-fetched, remote, eccentric, and lonely. Even the presence in the front driveway of three automobiles from the sheriff’s department could not keep me from feeling an acute nervousness and anxiety, as though I expected Slater’s horse Houyhnhnm to materialize out of the sky, Pegasus-like, and trample me; but perhaps my antipathy toward the place came only from my being aware that this was where Margaret had spent many an hour lately of…of what, sin?
Naps left us for a while, “just to look around,” he said. Feemy made me a couple of roast beef sandwiches and I had a bottle of Lowenbrau Dark to wash them down with, taking some sort of strange pleasure in freeloading on Slater’s food. Later Naps came back again, and sat down and ate some sandwiches too. We sat around for a while, then we got up and wandered about through the house. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about any of the furniture; very little in the house was as curious as the house itself. Upstairs Naps pointed at one door and told me not to open that one, because she was in there. Thus I never had the honor of seeing Ethel Slater face to face; and, unless her husband were soon captured, I might never have the honor of seeing him either. We returned to the kitchen and had another bottle of Löwenbräu apiece. A sheriff’s deputy questioned us perfunctorily for a few minutes and then went on off. Naps observed that it was not likely that Margaret would show up here, because all the sheriff’s cars in the driveway would frighten her away. No use us hangin around any longer, he said. So we left.
It was dark when we got back to town, and I had Naps drive to the Austin house, and I got out and crept around to the side of it so that I could look up and see if there was any light on in her room. There wasn’t. Through the living-room window I could see Margaret’s mother and stepfather watching television.
Then we drove to Dall’s house, stopping first at a grocery store, where I bought four cans of Ken-L Ration, a package of Burger Bits, a ten-pound bag of Gravy Train, and thirty-five cents’ worth of beef bones. At Dall’s small house I carried these items around to the rear yard, and Bowzer (whom I had somehow expected to find chained) came bounding at me with a terrific yapping and snarling. I dropped his dinners and fled to the safety of the Lincoln, where Naps and I rolled up the windows and talked to Bowzer for five or ten minutes before he was pacified. “Damn mutt is scratchin up the finish of my car,” Naps complained. I tried to get it across to Bowzer that the packages I had dropped in the back yard contained tasty tidbits to assuage his hunger, but for all his wisdom he couldn’t grasp this essential point. Finally something in the beast’s murky memory reminded him that it was I who, less than a week ago, had nuzzled and coddled him in a moment of distress, licking the hand which I cautiously proffered through the car’s window, he identified my scent and concluded that I was no foe. I got out of the car and escorted him back to the r
ear of the house, keeping up a steady flow of nice doggies and good doggies and head pats. I retrieved my packages and opened the one containing the bones and spread it before him, and he fell to with a vigor and a grateful thrashing of his long tail, slobbering on my shoe from time to time as a token of his thanks. While he was busy chomping the bones I ventured to step up onto the back porch of the house; to my surprise the rear door wasn’t locked. I went into the kitchen, turned on a light, and found a bowl in which to mix the Gravy Train with hot water according to directions. I filled another bowl with fresh cold water and, after leaving the remainder of the food in the kitchen, took the two bowls out and put them down where Bowzer could get at them. I gave him a parting pat and told him to keep an eye out for pudgy playwrights.
We got back to St. Vincent’s just in time to catch the last fifteen minutes of evening visiting hours, during which we chatted and joked with Dall as best we could, attempting to shore up his obviously flagging spirits. Naps told him that for all we knew Margaret might have already returned to Naps’s house and was safe and sound again, to which Dall replied that Naps ought to go out into the hallway where there was a telephone and call his house and find out. Naps did, and returned smiling, saying, “Yeah, what did I tell you?” “You’re lying,” Dall said to him. “Yeah,” I joined in. “Don’t lie, Naps.” “Aw, man, you got to cheer up,” Naps urged, but his heart wasn’t in it. We sat in silence for a while, and then it was time to go. Dall said to Naps, “Fore you go, stick my pipe in my mouth and light her up, okay?” Naps said he didn’t see how Dall could manage it without the use of his hands. “Aw, I’ll just let her burn down on her own, and get a little suption out of her before one of them nurses comes in and yanks her away from me.” So Naps did. I wanted to cry, it was so pitiful. Then Dall thanked me for feeding his dog, and we left.
I asked Naps to take me on home. I told him he had done enough for one day, and anyway my father and grandmother would be wondering why I was abandoning them again. So he took me home and we promised to get in touch with each other immediately if either of us found out anything. He had already alerted his Little Rock underground again, the Negro grapevine of porters and red caps and cabbies and bellhops and all, and if this had worked in Hot Springs maybe it would work here. There was nothing more we could do for a while. Naps went on home himself. True to my expectations, my father loudly upbraided me again for missing supper; he said Grammaw Stone had fixed me something special and when I didn’t show up to eat it he was so mad he could spit. Grammaw Stone herself began adding to his remonstrations, but I silenced them both by telling them that Dall had had a terrible accident and was listed in critical condition at St. Vincent’s. Grammaw Stone got up and put on her hat; my father asked her where she thought she was going; she said she was going to go out and visit with Dall; I told her visiting hours were over. She took off her hat and said she would go out there first thing in the morning. Then she went back to the kitchen to bake him a cake. In answer to my father’s searching questions, I told him a little bit of what had been going on, but without mentioning Slater. When I finished he was silent for a while, and then, before going to bed, he asked, “Are you pretty sweet on that girl?” I told him I was very sweet on her. “If you take up with her,” he asked hesitantly, “does that mean you’ll stay in Little Rock?” I told him I was afraid that it didn’t. He shrugged his shoulders, gave me a sorrowful look, and went off to bed. I sat in the kitchen with my grandmother, talking with her while she finished Dall’s cake. She put it in the oven and told me that if I was going to stay up for a while I might as well take it out of the oven for her in forty-five minutes, so she could go on to bed. I told her I would; I said I would even put the icing on it for her. Then, as she was leaving the room, she asked, “He’s gonna live, aint he?” and I assured her that he would, and she said finally, “Cause if he don’t, there’s just not ary replacement, just nowhere to be found.”
When I finished the cake I pussyfooted into the bathroom and searched the bottom of the dirty-clothes hamper for one of my father’s bottles, but there weren’t any. I asked myself: If my mother came to visit me and I didn’t want her to find my bottles in their usual place in the clothes hamper, to where would I transfer them? After considerable preoccupied cogitation with this knotty problem, I thought to inspect the house-maintenance junk on the back porch, and there, in a bottle labeled Spirits of Turpentine, I found some spirits which were distinctly not of turpentine but of corn, and I poured out three fingers into a glass of ice, thinking it would make me sleepy. It didn’t. Three additional fingers didn’t either; if anything, it only aroused my libido, and I realized it would be futile for me even to take off my clothes, much more futile if I got into bed, ridiculously futile if I tried to sleep. So, sometime after midnight, I left the house and began walking north up Ringo, townward, with no particular destination in mind but simply a desire to walk myself into complete sleepable weariness. But I had not gone a mile through the dark and cool streets of that city before I realized that I was searching for something, or, rather, someone, and that that someone was, of course, Margaret. She might be lurking behind any ashcan or billboard or forsythia bush, and even if she weren’t, there was no harm in my looking anyway. Little Rock would be a great place if it were like this all the time, I reflected, relishing the quietness of it at that hour, the calm dark emptiness of it, the spring-night fragrances of people’s yards, the distant sounds—traffic downtown, switch engines in the train yards, a correspondence of dogs—which intoned a gentle cadence like the dying of an overture. The sky was starry, the night above the dingle starry, and I looked up and caught sight of Orion and the Dog Star and the Dippers, but instead of feeling small, as I usually do so many light-years beneath these celestial bodies, I felt that I and Margaret were the only two beings in the universe, and were lost from each other, and had to get together again. This illusion, however, was soon shattered when a car pulled up alongside me and began to stop. Remembering all the times that pansies had offered me a ride when I walked alone at night in Little Rock long ago, I was tempted to keep walking, but a second glance told me the car was a familiar one, so I stopped walking. “Give you a lift anywheres?” Naps asked, and I got in. I didn’t ask him what he was doing out that time of night, because I didn’t have to ask him; I knew he was doing the same thing I was doing. “Seems like we’re right back where we started from Friday night and Saturday morning,” I observed, thinking of how we had sought her in Hot Springs, and he nodded. I told him I couldn’t see how he was ever going to get any of his own work done, the way he was devoting so much of his time to helping me and Dall. He said in reply that he carried his office around with him in his hip pocket; just that day, he proudly reported, he had taken orders for two sets of The Catholic Encyclopedia from a couple of staff members at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and for a twelve-volume Home Handyman’s Guide from one of the sheriff’s deputies out at Slater’s place. That was a good day’s work for him, he said.
Then he snapped on the interior lights of the car and handed me a folded note. “Found that on the bed where she slept last night,” he said. “I’m surprised Tatrice didn’t find it earlier.”
The note was short, hastily scribbled in pencil, and it was addressed to me. “Clifford,” it said. “Everything is happening so fast. You came at the wrong time, I guess. Three or four years earlier would have been more like it. I still don’t know why you came at all, but I am sorry that I have been such a disappointment to you. Now I don’t know what to do. Every little thing seems to be terrifying me. If you leave, I will know why. If you don’t, you should know why. M.”
I offered it to Naps, but he said, “I done took a peek at it.”
“Make any sense out of it?” I asked.
“Naw, not much,” he said. “But it seems to me she tryin to tell you sump’m.”
“Yes,” I said, taking the note again and studying it. It seems she’s trying to tell me that she doesn’t want to see me again.”
“Naw, man, you readin things into it. She just tryin to say that if you do hang around, you better make up yo mind why you hangin around.”
All right: why? Why, indeed.
We drove around aimlessly for an hour, up and down the streets of the old part of town. There was nothing better to do. Naps asked me heuristic questions. Did I really want to take Margaret away, and, if so, what did I plan to do about my wife? Was I contemplating divorce and remarriage? Was I after Margaret only in search of a quick lay? Why, actually, was I in pursuit of her? Just as a favor for Dall? Did I really think I could keep her from killing herself, if that was what she wanted to do? Did I really think there was any chance she would? Did I really know anything about her?
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 174