Item, his complete lack of concern later—blindest of all—over the appearance of Corkscrew; though that, of course, may have been simply because he could not see.
Yet, taking those items altogether, he was a man peculiarly obfuscated and mentally inept. Only in business did he seem completely intelligent. He must have been intelligent with money. There are men like that, of course.
There was a ten-cent store beyond the grocery; and after they had had their provisions stowed away in the car out front, they went into it. There they bought a griddle, a coffeepot, some paper cups and plates and napkins, a can opener, and some wooden spoons. And there, for a dollar and fifteen cents, they bought the red-handled kitchen bread knife, with its twelve-inch serrated blade....
Corkscrew could have been in the dark little stationery and ice-cream store while they had been laying out their route on the map and calculating their time schedule, of course. He could have been in the next booth to them, eating a dish of chocolate ice cream with slow lickings of his stubby lips, with little red unblinking eyes upon his spoon, pulling at his torn ear at times, ail the while. There is nothing in the picture of him to indicate that he was a man who would not like ice cream.
Nothing in the picture to indicate he wasn’t human. That he didn’t breathe, that he didn’t have to eat and sleep, like any animal. The idea that those grocery supplies which they bought in Danbury and carried with them in the gray Cadillac when they drove out of town had any part in the demon’s murder plans seems completely fantastic and unrelated.
Yet I am not sure.
I know the look of him as well as I know my own. Perhaps better. I know his height, his weight, his age, the color of his eyes and hair, the number of his teeth. I know the clothes he wore, to the last item. It seems to me that I know his background, almost, as if I had been brought up next door to him. I know the voice he spoke in. I know his little mannerisms. But I do not know where he came from, and I do not know his name.
I have never laid eyes on him. I feel sure that I shall lay eyes on him before this night is ended. I feel sure that he is somewhere very near me. That is definite. That is the one thing I know. But I do not know yet how I know it. And just that cold feeling in itself does not help me to see him. I have got to dig him out....
They saw him first on the road a little outside of Dan-bun’. He was standing by the roadside, thumbing to go their way. That was the first moment—the very first moment, so far as I can see—that he was visible. That he made an appearance. That a finger can be laid on him at all.
He was a man about forty-five years old. He was a man about five feet, three inches tall. He had a dirty seamy complexion, with a stubble of unshaved bristles growing up to his eyes.
His nose was nondescript—small and rather flat. He had long unkempt hair that was tipped with gray, like the bristle of a badger shaving brush, and raggedly cut about his ears and across the back of his neck, as if with a pair of dull shears ineptly handled. His left ear lobe had been torn or bitten off, giving his face a lopsided look seen from the front—a look a little baffling, of something inexplicably missing, until one realized what it was. His teeth were spaced rather wide apart, and pointed, when he grinned.
He wore a filthy old blue hat, with its brim cut away in saw-tooth scallops all around. He wore a dirty black and white checked sport jacket with a belted back, of shoddy material, with torn elbows, and bereft of buttons, as if it might have been passed on to him by some thrifty housewife who had first cut the buttons off.
He wore a faded green polo shirt, with almost all the coloring washed out of it, unbuttoned at the throat. He wore a garish green and red necktie of ten-cent-store pattern, loosely knotted, with the knot hanging down on his second shirt button—it was the only item of his clothing that seemed new or clean. His heavy corduroy pants were too big around the waist for him, and were gathered in folds about his middle with a broken black trunk strap. They were too long for him as well, and the legs wobbled down their length like the bellows of an accordion, giving an uneven silhouette to the lower half of him, like a man with corkscrew legs.
He might be called Red Eyes, or Clipped Ear, or Sawtooth just as well, then, from his appearance. But it was because of those ridiculous-looking legs of his that Lieutenant Rosenblatt has named him Corkscrew Legs, or just Corkscrew, tentatively. Until his true name is known.
The late-afternoon sun was at his back. He had some small, gray thing in his arm, which they didn’t see till they were almost on him. He had nothing else, no bag, no bundle
He lifted up his thumb with a grin to them as they came on. He was the little man who was there. The curtain was lifted on his brief but terrible appearance.
I can see them coming on, Elinor and Inis St. Erme, along the late sunlit highway, between the rolling summer meadows and the pleasant wooded hills, in the smoke-gray car with its red leather upholstery, its chromium gleaming, its whitewall tires purring, with its top and windshield down.
I can see them, moneyed and carefree, bright as butterflies beneath the summer sun, on their way to their wedding and honeymoon, and happiness forever after. I can see her with her dark brown hair blowing, her chin up proudly, watching the road through the azure-framed 500 glasses which she needed to use for driving, with her white summer coat open, the wind riming the collar of her periwinkle-blue dress, with her big emerald ring which St. Erme had given her last night reflecting sunlight on her left hand on the wheel. I can see St. Erme beside her, with his white smile in his brown face, his head bent a little aslant against the breeze, holding his broad-brimmed, fine-textured Panama down on his head, with one arm lifted, and his other arm, in dove-gray gabardine of rippling sheen, lying along the top of the cushions back of her shoulders, a touch of white silk shirt cuff at his wrist, of gold love-knot cuff link, and his massive caned antique gold Florentine ring on his hand.
No, he always wore his Borgia poison ring on his right hand, of course. The ring was on his hand that was holding down his Panama. It was the one thing that wasn’t found. But he did have a right hand. It was the one he wore his ring on. He was holding down his hat with it.
That’s the picture as I see it, as they came on. It was the picture Corkscrew must have seen, standing beside the road, too.
They weren’t going fast, just idling along well below the wartime speed limit, enjoying the wind and sunlight and the sight of the blue hills stretching roll on roll ahead. There was time enough to kill before they reached Vermont. The concrete road was straight and wide. They could see his figure from a distance, and for some little time. Not for a great time, perhaps. But if they were a mile away when they first saw him, they had more than two minutes. If they were only half a mile, they still had more than a minute. Yet it didn’t occur to either of them to turn around and speed away.
They couldn’t see all the details of him from any distance, of course. And there were some details that Elinor didn’t see at once, even when they had stopped beside him and he was getting into their car—details that she absorbed later, more or less subconsciously, as she glanced at him in the rear-view mirror while he was riding in the back seat, and that came back to her in full force as she fled and hid from him in terror and breathless silence during that hour of horror by the black wooded waters of Dead Bridegroom’s Pond. As for St. Erme, with his blind eyes, perhaps there were details of Corkscrew which he never did see.
But they both had time enough to see, at least, that he was an extraordinarily repulsive-looking little man.
Repulsive—that was the feeling Elinor Darrie had about him at first sight. A distaste of his sheer dirtiness. A crawling in her skin. But not fear, at first. She hadn’t thought of it as fear, anyway.
“Do you see what I see, Inis?” she exclaimed. “That extraordinary little man ahead!”
Inis peered from beneath his flapping hat brim.
“What’s so extraordinary about him, sweet?” he said. “He looks like just a tramp to me.”
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��Everything about him!” she said with vehemence. “He’s positively a tramp to end all tramps. Why, he’s grinning at us and thumbing us, do you see him, Inis? How ridiculous! He looks as if he actually believes he’s going to have us stop and pick him up.”
“Maybe he’s advertising something,” Inis St. Erme said idly. “He does look damned odd, doesn’t he? He’s got something funny he’s holding in his arm. What the devil is it? Like some kind of a gray rag, with somethingred about it—”
“Why, it’s a kitten!” she said. “It’s a little gray kitten, with a red mouth!”
She had taken her foot off the accelerator. She did not intend, consciously, to stop. But the thing which Corkscrew was holding in his arm had snared all her attention, with pity and revulsion. With a freezing sense of horror, even, it may be.
“Oh, how dreadful! It’s badly hurt!”
St. Erme put forth his hand and turned off the ignition. She had stalled the engine, and they had stopped. There beside red-eyed little Corkscrew, waiting on the road.
He was no one that St. Erme recognized, then or later, it is evident. No one whom, so far as St. Erme had the slightest idea in his mind, he had ever seen before. He was just a hobo on the road, thumbing for a ride.
Not all the details of him were apparent, instantly. But even if St. Erme had seen every detail, it is improbable that he would have been afraid. St. Erme was not a man who had ever had occasion to feel any particular fear of anything, according to the picture of him. He had money, and so did not know the ordinary human fear of bosses and bill collectors. He was not a soldier, and so had never faced the battle fear. Whatever his religion, it seems improbable that it had given him a fear of hell.
That, essentially, must be considered the key to him. He simply couldn’t imagine anything for him to be afraid of. His air of measured diffidence, in itself, can be construed as a kind of hallmark of a profound inner self-assurance, as it often is—an embarrassment of condescension, as when a man feels that he is so intelligent, rich, educated, or otherwise superior that he owes apology to those who must struggle along with so much less.
His background, too, as he sketched it, can be assumed to have given him an additional lack of a salutary sense of fear—the inheritance of a fortune-tossing father, a belief in his lucky star.
A simple lack of fear. Of the fear of hell. It’s not the same as—in fact, it precludes—courage. The desperate, sobbing, crazed lion-rabbit courage which makes a man who has it fight with tooth and claw for his life, and fight even when he is half cut in two, and fight till death, and past it.
It’s all against the picture that St. Erme had that kind of desperate fighting courage, in the least. Deprived of the self-assurance of his superiority, he might melt like butter. But he was just simply and completely not afraid of the dirty, incredible little man.
“Looking for a lift?” he said amiably. “I guess we have room for you. What the devil happened to your cat?”
Corkscrew had the gray kitten in the crook of his left arm, against his dirty jacket. He was poking at its fur softly and tentatively with his seamy right index finger. It was a fluffy kitten, not many weeks old. Its eyes were still a watery blue. It must have been a pretty little animal once, as most kittens are—as most young living things. But it was filthy now, as filthy as he himself; and there was blood and froth on its muzzle. One of its front paws had been torn off at the shoulder socket, like the leg of a fly, and its head was mangled.
“What happened to it?” Elinor echoed. “Oh, what’s happened to it?”
“Found it on the road,” said Corkscrew, in a soft quiet voice. “Truck must have run over it, poor little thing.”
“Is it dead?”
“It’s dead,” he said. “End of its troubles.”
He lifted it by the scruff, looking at it with his small, inflamed eyes. It had lived out the destiny for which it had been made. He dropped it into the weed-lined ditch beside the road. With a brushing of his palms together, he opened the tonneau door and stepped in.
“Thanks for stopping,” he said in his quiet voice. “I kind of figured when I saw you coming that you would. You’re my same kind of people. Never used to drive anything but a Cadillac myself. I wouldn’t have any other kind of car if you tried to give it to me today. I let two Chevvies and a Dodge pass me by since I’ve been waiting. But it pays to be particular. I’ll just push some of this stuff aside.”
“Where are you headed for?” said Inis St. Erme.
“Anywhere,” said Corkscrew. “Wherever you’re headed for yourselves is all right with me.”
He had ensconced himself among the bags and groceries. Elinor looked at Inis a little wryly, but his gaze was blank and unconcerned—almost entranced. She started the car and drove on. Perhaps he had mesmerized them both with his red eyes and his quiet voice, she thought. With his mangled dead gray kitten.
All right, he had that soft, quiet voice. It was one of the chief things that she noticed about him. Its incongruity with his appearance may have emphasized it in her mind. She thought of it as the voice of an educated man, particularly.
The tone of a man’s voice has no relation to his education, actually. Valets and vestrymen, bank clerks and burglars, all have quiet voices, even if they have gone no further in school that the fourth elementary grade. While, on the other hand, there are plenty of M.D.’s and LL.D.’s, summa cum laude and causa honoris, who roar continually like stevedores and bellow like sea elephants. A man who walks heavily by nature talks loudly by nature. A man who walks quietly talks quietly. That is all the tone of a man’s voice tells about him.
Yet he may have attended some college somewhere at some time, and may even have been a former member of one of the learned professions, as she felt him to be. Quite possibly there are as many professional men, proportionally, as men of any other classes or categories, among hoboes and derelicts, as well as in jails and penitentiary death cells, for that matter, and among the damned. It isn’t just education in itself which keeps a man from going down. If he is rotten inside, it may even speed him on his way.
What made her think that he was an educated man, in addition to his voice, was a Latin phrase which she thought she understood him to quote at one time. But she may have been mistaken about having heard it.
He hadn’t thrust his conversation on them too much, anyway. He had settled back to enjoy the scenery, unobtrusively enough. He made no threat. He had accomplished his purpose in getting aboard that car with them. Now he effaced himself.
Still, he was there. She and Inis couldn’t converse so freely between themselves. They must always be conscious of him. They must address a word back to him once or twice, moreover, because they knew that he was there.... She had asked him if the breeze was too much in back, because if so he might like to put up the rear windshield. And he had replied to her, no, that he liked the breeze. Inis had asked him what part of the country he came from, and if he got many rides. And he had replied that he came from nowhere in particular, and that he didn’t get many rides, but that when he got one, he enjoyed it. She had asked him a little later if he was hungry. He had replied that he might do with a bite.
She told him that he might help himself to crackers and fruit, or whatever he could easily reach, and that when they stopped for supper he could have something more, if he was still with them—though perhaps by that time, she suggested, he would have wanted out. And he had replied that he enjoyed riding with them, and would keep on as long as they were going.
Inis had explained to him then that they were going to Vermont, driving all night. He had replied that he would like to go to Vermont, since he had never been there. He had offered to take the wheel to spell the young lady, if she got tired, later on....
Just a word to him now and again that way, that had no significance, and a reply from him in his quiet voice, that had no particular significance, it seemed at the time, either. And in between times he was watching the scenery, there back of them, and eating
a box of crackers that he had opened, and a banana that he had helped himself to.
They came over the crest of a hill, where the winding highway for the time was headed west; and in front of them, far beyond the blue Catskills, on the other side of the Hudson a hundred miles away, in that moment the red sun was going down.
Elinor slowed the car on the hill crest almost to a stop.
“There!” she said, with the tight feeling in her throat that sunsets had always given her all her life. “The sun is going down!”
She had forgotten in the moment the existence or that little mangy man back of her. She had forgotten even Inis, almost, at her side. A feeling of an intolerable desolation had hold of her, at sight of the red descending ball. It was something connected with the death of her young parents, killed in a theater fire when she had been little more than a baby, or with their interment at a sunset hour which she had witnessed.... The sun going down. The voice of the preacher and the weeping of the women, and all the west a fire.
“Soles occidere et redire possunt—”
She felt a strangling breath. Suns may rise and sink again—She thought she heard the murmur of the words from the little man behind her. She turned her head around.
“Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,” she said, with tear-filled eyes.
But for us, when our brief light goes out—
And thought she heard the whisper of him finishing it, where he sat red-eyed behind her:
“Nox est una perpetua dormienda.”
There is one long night for sleeping!
How few men know their Latin any more!—Catullus’s line to Lesbia.
One would not have expected her to understand it, with her young face, a word in a dead tongue. But not so long out of high school, and filled with books, she had. Those lines among her favorites.
But for that reason, of course, she may have merely imagined it. He may have been saying something else, actually. Or nothing at all....
The Red Right Hand Page 6