“Sure.” I reached over to the nightstand and got the bottle. I didn’t need the glass, so I tossed it over onto Bill’s bed. I drank from the bottle, and held it, looking at it, while I talked. “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Up here, since my uncle left. Trying to figure out what I’m going to do with myself. You want to hear what I’ve been thinking?”
“Well, sure. Certainly. I mean, that’s just exactly what I want, you see?”
“Yeah. All right, this is what I’ve been thinking. To begin with, every man has to have either a home or a purpose. Do you see that? Either a place to be or something to do. Without one or the other, a man goes nuts. Or he loses his manhood, like a hobo. Or he drinks or kills himself or something else. It doesn’t matter, it’s just that everybody has to have one or the other.”
“Okay,” he said. “I can see that. Like me wanting to live with my sister. So I’d have a home if I didn’t have any purpose. I can see that.”
“All right. Now me, I’ve been a kid, that’s all. So what I always had was a home. Even if I was in the Air Force in Germany, I still knew I had a home, and that was on Burbank Avenue in Binghamton, where my father lived. Then they killed him, and I didn’t have any home any more. But I had a purpose instead. Vengeance. To kill my father’s killer. That’s enough of a purpose, isn’t it?”
“Sure it is.”
“Sure it is. Only then you came along. And now my father is not my father. Is revenging a foster father just as good? No, it isn’t.”
“What about your brother?”
“My half-brother. Wait. Let me tell it to you the way I thought it out. Right now, I’m adrift. I have neither home nor purpose, only bits and pieces of purpose. To continue the vengeance of my father-who-is-not-my-father. To revenge my sister-in-law, whom I never knew. To protect my niece, about whom I care less than nothing. To assist you in your palace revolution, in which I have no stake. To even the score for the loss of my eye, which I can never get back. To save my own life, which isn’t worth saving unless I have a purpose. To avenge my halfbrother, where at least my own familial blood was spilt.”
“All right, what’s wrong with that?”
“Avenging Bill? But I need more than that. It isn’t purpose enough.” I raised the bottle and lowered it. While I got out a cigarette, I said, “In all of it, there still is one purpose worth having. But it dead-ends.”
He shifted in the chair. “What purpose is that?”
“Somewhere in New York City, there’s a man who pointed a finger and said, ‘Take away Ray Kelly’s home.’ Other men did it, but they were only extensions of the pointing finger. I can cut that finger off. Not because he killed a foster father or a half-brother or a half-brother’s wife. But because he killed my home. He left me no choice but purpose. To kill him.”
He laughed nervously, saying, “It comes around to the same thing, Ray, doesn’t it?”
“To kill the man who killed the me who might have been. Not exactly the same thing, Kapp.”
He emptied his glass, refilled it. “What the hell,” he said, “however you say it, you’re still after the same people as me. The ones running the organization in New York. Same people, different reasons. Why go off by yourself and fight them?”
“Because it’s my own purpose.”
“We could double up. I help you, you help me.”
“Fine. What’s the name of the man who owns the pointing finger?”
“What?”
“The guy who gave the order to kill Will Kelly. What’s his name?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“You want the crown, Kapp. You’ve got to know who’s wearing it now.”
“Hell, yes. But you don’t know this kind of organization. It might be any one of half a dozen guys. I don’t know which one.”
“A fair trade, Kapp. You give me the name, I’ll give you two weeks. You won’t need any more than that. The people you want to impress, they want to see me at first, that’s all. Once you’re organized, they’ll be too busy to wonder where the kid is.”
“You mean that? You’ll stick around till we’re set up?”
“Two weeks. Until—what’s the date today? Thursday was the fifteenth, so this is the Seventeenth. Thirty days hath September. Okay. Saturday, the first of October, I’m leaving.”
“But you’ll play it like you’re going to be sticking around, right?”
“Sure.”
“You’re my son and heir, right? As far as these guys are concerned, you’re set to sit in the throne when I pop off, right?”
“I’ll play it that way. All you have to do is give me the name.”
“I will. By the first of October, I’ll know which one it was.”
“Not that way, Kapp.”
He jumped to his feet, slamming the empty glass on the dresser. “Goddamn it, I don’t know which one! Ray, face it, I know it’s got to be one of maybe six or seven men. I could toss out one of their names and you’d swallow it, you know damn well you would. But I don’t know for sure which one it is, and I’m trying to play this square. I want you to go gunning! That’d work out fine for me, you know what I mean?”
“All right.”
“I’ll find out which one it was. I’ll have him fingered definite by the time you want to leave. I swear my oath on that.”
“All right.”
“Shake on it!”
I shook his hand. When he left, I finished the other bottle.
Nineteen
Monday afternoon we left Plattsburg. The Friday before, Kapp had had a lot of funds transferred to a local bank from a couple of New York and Jersey City banks, and then he’d taken it all out in cash. Monday we walked into the local Cadillac-Oldsmobile-Buick agency, and Kapp bought the showroom Cadillac for cash. I had to drive, because he didn’t have a license. I was getting more and more used to judging perspective with just the left eye, and after a while I found a way to get my right foot comfortable on the accelerator, so it wasn’t too bad.
We drove straight south to Lake George, and Kapp rented a place around on the eastern side of the lake. The south and west, he said, were all built up from what he’d known, he didn’t like it. Over on the northeast, it wasn’t much different from the old days.
The house was big and white, built amid evergreens on a steep slope down to the edge of the lake. There was a dirt road along the top of the slope past the summer houses, and a cleared space beside it for two cars to park. We got out of the Cadillac and walked across the tire ruts of the road to the hedge that bordered it for this section. There was a gate in the hedge, and a Quonset-hut mailbox on an arm. On the side of the mailbox was written reed. We’d rented from an agency in town who handled the property for the Reeds off-season. The spaced summer houses along the slope between the road and the lake were all empty, except for us.
We opened the gate in the hedge and went down twelve wooden steps to a screen door and a screened-in porch. On this side, the house looked small. One story high, and just a small screened-in porch with beer and soft drink cases stacked up against the house wall. But this was the top floor of three, the other two sprouting below us down the slope.
Inside, there were three large rooms, all with straw-mat rugs and bamboo or wicker furniture and a lot of dark red cushions. The flooring gleamed rich and well-cared-for in the wide archways between the rooms. There was also a kitchen, white and glittering like an operating room for midgets, with a window overlooking the empty beer cases on the porch. In the middle of it all was a railinged oblong hole in the floor and a staircase with black rubber runners. This led down to the middle floor, where there were four bedrooms, all done in walnut, with little green curtains over the small windows. There were windows at the front and sides, and a side door which led to a path running down the slope from the road to the lake. There was another set of stairs under the first, this one closed off with knotty pine and a varnished door. It led down to the bottom floor, with storage rooms and the boathouse
and another screened porch. Off this porch was a square wooden dock beside the boathouse. The whole house was ringed by trees on three sides, and the fourth side was built right down to the water’s edge.
We moved in and found the phone wasn’t working, but it was too late that day to do anything about it. The next morning, we drove back around the lake to town and got the phone company to activate the phone. Some sort of belated summer had come in during the night, so I bought a bathing suit. Then we went back to the house.
We didn’t talk to each other much, going or coming. Kapp was full of his plans. I was already losing my patience. It was the same as doing the tape for Beeworthy, only that hadn’t been any more than half an hour, and this was going to be for two weeks. I wasn’t sure I’d last two weeks. The only thing that kept me there was the sure knowledge that it would take me longer than two weeks to get the name I wanted if I was just bulling around New York on my own. I’d told Bill I didn’t want to do any Pacific campaign. I still felt the same way.
There was a full-length mirror on the closet door in the bedroom I’d picked for myself. That afternoon, when I put the bathing suit on, I looked at myself in it. It was two and a half months since the accident, and this was the first time I’d really looked at myself full length.
Both shins were criss-crossed with white scars down to the ankles. The right ankle looked wrong. A couple of bones were missing from it, and the doctors had had to rebuild it a little. It was too thin and too smooth. It looked more like a pipe joint than part of a human body. There were more of the white scars above my right knee and across my belly and over my right shoulder.
I opened the closet door all the way, so the mirror was against the wall. I kept it that way from then on. Then I went out and went swimming.
It stayed warm all the rest of the first week. I swam a lot, always by myself. Kapp spent most of his time on the phone. He made a lot of long distance calls to New York and to Miami and to East St. Louis and other places. After the first couple of days, he started getting other calls coming back. He did a lot of grinning and winking, whenever he saw me. But we didn’t talk much. I didn’t know what he was doing, and I didn’t care. And he was too busy with his plans for small talk.
We’d stocked up with House of Lords, and he usually had a glass in his hand. He was smoking cigars all the time, and his voice was getting raspy. He seemed pleased with life.
The air was warm, but the water was cold. I liked it. I couldn’t swim as well as before, because I couldn’t kick with any coordination, but I did pretty well.
I developed a swimming routine. Every time I went into the water, I swam straight out into the lake as far as I could go. Then I rolled over on my back and rested there until I had the strength to swim back. Sometimes I thought about diving down and walking on the bottom. But not seriously.
They say the Army is hurry up and wait. Air Force, too. When I was in, we used to bitch about that. On an alert, double-time to the truck and climb aboard and then sit and wait for two hours before the truck got moving. I felt now like I used to in the truck, except now the Air Force wasn’t doing it to me, I was doing it to myself.
I wanted to act. But I didn’t want it to be finished. Once I acted and it was over with and I’d done what I’d set out to do, then there wouldn’t be anything for me at all any more. A walk on the bottom, it didn’t matter at all.
I had trouble sleeping nights. I kept some House of Lords by the bed to help. And the light was always on. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling. I hadn’t wanted any of this. The things I was doing to myself were as bad as the things they’d done to me. But I couldn’t go back. July twelfth was back there, the last good day Ray Kelly had ever had, and I couldn’t get back to it. I had to keep moving the other way, hoping there was a way out at the other end.
Toward the end of the week, Kapp came to me and said, “We’re going to have to go into town and do some shopping. Some people are coming up. Maybe Monday, Tuesday of next week. I got the list.”
We bought groceries, and a lot of beer, and more House of Lords. We also got four Army cots and some cheap blankets and pillows. When we got back the phone was ringing. It rang all weekend. Kapp chewed his cigars to shreds. He was smiling all the time now, like a winner. Even when he was just sitting still, he was doing something. I envied him.
The warm spell broke on Saturday. A sudden wind came down out of the north, turning the lake choppy gray. We closed the windows, and turned on the electric heating units in all the rooms. The sun rectangles were gone from the straw rugs. In the sky, the clouds hurried south.
Sunday, I put on a sweater and went for a walk on the dirt road. It was quiet. Under the evergreens the ground was brown. I thought it would be nice to walk among the trees forever. I’d like to be an Indian, before the white man came.
The phone had been ringing when I left, and it was ringing again when I came back. I carried a folding chair down and sat on the dock and looked out over the lake. That night, the phone stopped ringing.
Monday the first one came. It was in the middle of the afternoon, and I was pouring us fresh drinks in the kitchen. A car horn sounded for just a second. I looked up the slope past the trees and the hedge and saw the side windows of the car and a face under a chauffeur’s cap. I said, “Somebody here.”
Kapp came around the table and stood beside me. He said, “Go see who it is.”
I hopped up the steps and through the gate and over to the car. It was a pearl gray Cadillac, like McArdle’s hearse. Three men were bulky in back. The chauffeur was a black cap and a round large nose. He kept both hands on the wheel, high up, and didn’t look at me.
I went past him and bent and looked in the side window. The man in the middle said, “Let’s see Eddie Kapp.”
I said, “He wants to know who you are.”
“Nick Rovito.”
I went down and told him and he said, “Okay.” Then he went out, slamming the screen door, and shouted, “Hey, Nick!”
Up in the car, one of them shouted, “Is that you, you son of a bitch?” Then car doors slammed, and I saw the chauffeur maneuver the car out of the road.
The three men came down. They all looked alike. In their fifties, barrel-bodied, bull-necked, heavy-headed. Wearing tight topcoats, keeping their hands in their pockets. Smiling with thick lips and thin eyes. Rovito stuck his hand out and Kapp shook it. The other two grinned and nodded at Kapp, and he grinned and nodded back. Then they came in.
Rovito looked at me and said, “What’s your name?”
“Ray Kelly.”
He looked at me and pursed his lips and put his hands back in his topcoat pockets. Then he turned to Kapp and said, “Mmm.” It seemed to mean, “I’ll let you know.”
Kapp said, “Come on in and have a drink. House of Lords.”
One of the others said, “Not for me. Doctor’s orders.” He looked embarrassed.
Rovito looked at him. “Do you still know how to pour?”
“Sure, Nick.”
“Then pour.”
They went into the living room and sat down. I stayed with them. But they talked about old times and the people they used to know. No one paid any attention to me at all. I went downstairs and out on the dock. They had a window open above me, I could hear the drone of their conversation but not the words.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, the one whose doctor wouldn’t let him drink came out on the dock and stood leaning against the side of the boathouse. He lit a cigarette and threw the match in the water and looked at nothing across the water for a couple minutes. Then he turned to me and said, “You’re gimpy, aren’t you?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Fall off your scooter?”
I looked at him. He was grinning. I said, “No.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see. You don’t talk much, do you? You’re the strong silent type.”
I hadn’t heard any voices from upstairs for the last couple minutes. But I didn’t look up. I got to
my feet and folded the chair and hit him in the stomach with it. He bent over and I hit him on the back of the head with it. When he fell I rolled him off into the water. Then I looked up at the watching faces and said, “Satisfied?”
Kapp was grinning. So was the other guy. Rovito nodded. He said, “So-so.”
I started to go inside. Rovito called, “Hey, what about Joe?”
I looked up. “What about him?”
“Aren’t you gonna help him out of the water?”
“No. I wasn’t playing. I don’t play.” Then I went in and up to my room and got the bottle from under the bed.
I heard them go by, on their way down to help Joe out of the water.
Twenty
Two more came Monday night, and the phone rang a few times, announcing more who were staying at motels around on the other side of the lake. By Tuesday afternoon, ten of them had moved into the house. I spent most of the time in my room. Whenever anyone opened the door by mistake, they said, “Oh, excuse me,” and backed out again. Nobody asked me who I was, and I wasn’t introduced to anybody. But they knew.
Appalachin had taught a lesson, though these weren’t the same people. But they came in on different highways from different directions. No two cars stopped at the same restaurant or the same motel. They traveled in no convoys.
Wednesday night, eleven o’clock, they had the meeting. Cadillacs clogged the road. Only two of them had New York plates. One had Florida, and one California. Some of the chauffeurs stayed with the cars, some came down to the house.
The two large rooms facing the lake on the top floor had been fixed up for the meeting. All the chairs and tables from all over the house were in those rooms, plus all the ashtrays and wastebaskets. The refrigerator was full of nothing but beer and ice. House of Lords lined the cupboards. The early arrivals played poker while they waited.
Kapp came down to my room at ten-thirty. He was wearing one of the black suits he’d bought in Plattsburg. His shirt was white and his tie was black. Tie and collar were both too wide and too pointed. So were his shoes, which were black. The ring on his left pinky was white gold. His cigar was black. A white handkerchief peeked out of his breast pocket. His gray hair was brushed back till it shone. He didn’t exactly look fatter, but he did look sort of heavier, as though he were more solid, more full.
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