Color Him Dead

by Charles Runyon

  “Please, Drew, forgive me….”

  It was the first time she used his real name. He stopped, feeling the hair prickle at the back of his neck.

  “You’ve got it back now.”

  “All of it, Drew. But it’s too horrible. I can’t bear—”

  “Who killed your husband?”

  “I did. But please let me—”

  Something exploded in the back of his head. He fell to his knees. Edith screamed—a high, shrill sound which ended abruptly. The path was filled with men who darted out from the bordering grass. Drew swung the cutlass and heard the solid thunk! of steel on bone. A crushing weight landed on his back, forcing him down. He tasted dirt and felt a sharp toe hammering against his head. He tried to cling to consciousness, felt it slipping away, and told himself that this time Doxie would not stop until he was dead.

  TWELVE

  Sensation reached into the depths and stirred his sleeping mind. He felt a nipping pain in his right earlobe. Go away, he thought. Nibble-nibble, answered the tiny, curved yellow teeth. He tried to move his arms but couldn’t find them. Thirst was like steel wool scratching his throat. He tried to scream, but managed only a dull croak. He heard a scurrying in the grass, then the chitter-cheep-cheep of surprised indignation. Damn rats, can’t let a dead man lie in peace….

  But no, he wasn’t dead. Puzzled, he tried to open his eyes. Ohh, God. It felt like they’d been sewed shut with coarse thread. Setting his teeth, he managed to raise his arms and pry apart the tender, swollen lids. He saw a dim, pain-streaked world, lighted by a gray metallic dawn. Tall grass rattled over his head. He decided they must have dragged him off the path and left him for dead.

  He lay still, trying to divide the universal ache of his body

  into its component parts. Pain stabbed his side each time he breathed. Could be a rib cracked or broken. His groin ached, and for an instant he feared that Doxie had exercised a warped revenge for his own condition. No, he was all right. Stomach ached. He rolled onto his side and spat dryly on the ground. There was no blood in his spittle, so probably his insides were okay.

  His head was splitting. He touched it gently, felt a crusted mat of blood and hair. Concussion? He was thinking straight, wasn’t he? Sure, he remembered everything. Edith had gotten her memory back. He could still hear her remorseful voice: “Drew, forgive me….”

  Goddamn her remorse, and damn him for listening. Could it have been coincidence that she’d stopped exactly where the men waited? She’d screamed, yes, but women scream at movies.

  He felt a sour, futile rage, so strong that his stomach twisted with nausea. He put his aching head between his knees and vomited. A succession of dry, wracking seizures left him weak and boneless, and he lay back to wait for the pain to recede from his head.

  Next time, he told himself. No talk. Just … kill her.

  He struggled to his feet, surprised to find that his bad leg supported his weight. Either the strength had come back to it, or else it was hurting like hell and he just had too many other pains to notice. He walked in an awkward, spraddled fashion, following the trail of crushed grass back to the path. He searched the gouged earth where the fight had taken place, but found no sign of his gun. He made his way to the beach and peered through the branches of the banyan. There were no boats at the jetty; no signs of life around the big house. The evacuation had come off as planned; he was alone on the island….

  He was washing himself in the surf when he remembered Leta. He had left her in the burning shack, forgetting that she’d nearly died when the harem burned. She was probably scared to death of fire.

  He waded out of the sea and became aware that the smell of smoke hung heavy in the air. Halfway up the hill, he looked toward the fort and saw a boiling thunderhead of black smoke. He started running. He came to the edge of the fire, caught a deep breath and plunged into a smouldering wasteland of burning stalks. He decided the fire had started downhill, then shifted back as the morning breeze blew from the East. He understood why Doxie had failed to make sure he was dead. He’d expected the fire to do the job.

  Burning stalks whipped his arms, and his shoe soles grew so hot he felt like kicking them off and running barefoot. Each breath was like a hot iron pushed down his throat. His hair caught fire and he beat it out with his hands, stopping only when he reached the concrete platform which had held the shack.

  Nothing remained but a smoking ruin—a pile of corrugated roofing, a nest of twisted wiring, a half-buried cook-pot, and Leta’s blackened cot with its mattress still smouldering. Where had she gone?

  He raised his eyes and saw fiery red fingers groping up toward the fort. The wind blew in gusts; the flames whooshed and roared, licking at the ramparts.

  A movement drew his eyes far to his right, where the fort rose straight up from the sea below. Leta stood on the ledge, her old gray dress billowing from the heat of the flames.

  “Leta! Go to the room! The underground—!”

  His voice was lost in the hiss and crackle of the fire. He ran across the platform and stood almost directly beneath her. He waved his arms like a dervish, but she stood with her chin high and her eyes squeezed shut. He saw the smoke behind her and realized the grass on the fort had caught. Her dress burst into flames, and he saw that she was leaning out too far….

  “Leta, don’t! I’m coming—!”

  A piece of sky appeared beneath her feet. His shout ended in a sob; he stood frozen as she came down like a burning torch toppled from a wall. She didn’t appear to fall, only to expand in his field of vision. Time crawled like a slow-motion film; each detail pierced his mind and stuck fast like flies trapped in amber. She turned over once as she passed him, the flaming dress flying up beneath her armpits, her arms straight out from her body. He had a photographic image of her brown legs squeezed tightly together, that sudden, surprising delta of blackness where they met, and the slight mound of her stomach above it. A weird thought wriggled through his brain: The kid was beginning to show….

  Then she was dwindling, trailing a tenuous spiral of smoke. He wasn’t aware that she had struck bottom, only

  that her twisting and turning had ended with the suddenness of a movie stopped on a single frame. He was unable to move his eyes from the crumpled shape on the black rock below. She looked much fatter than he remembered; the arms, the legs, the torso, all seemed to have widened into shapelessness, and her dress had split completely apart at the seams.

  He was glad when the sea rushed in and buried her in white foam. It receded, leaving the rock bare. Released, he lifted his eyes and felt a drop of rain on his forehead. Within two seconds the sky turned to water, as though the bottom had been kicked out of a rain barrel. He stood in the downpour with his fists clenched, wishing there was something near enough to rip and destroy, something to release the frustration inside him.

  Edith. She started the fire.

  The shower ended in less than a minute. The little cloud moved out to sea trailing its gray veil of rain. Drew stripped off his dripping shirt and wrung it out in his mouth; it tasted of smoke, sweat and blood but it cooled his burning throat. He left the platform and slogged to the fort through wet, stinking ashes. Beside the wall he found the blue canvas flight bag which an Air France steward had given Leta for a night of love. He opened the charred bag and found her red party dress, her goodnight panties, the rolled-up sketch he had made of her, the white shoes, and the curling irons she used to straighten her hair.

  He swung his arm and threw the bag over the wall, watched it fall into the sea. The old woman had been right; death had come between them. But Leta no longer cared; she was out of it now.

  He made a dazed circuit of the fort, noting idly that the fire had consumed a surprisingly small part of the grass which grew between the flagstones. He peered into the underground room, saw the seething, stinking gray mass of rats, and understood why Leta had not taken refuge there. He found a smouldering clump of grass and tossed it into the room, then kept adding mo
re until flames billowed from the hole and the rats poured out in shrieking, terrified hundreds. He could think of no reason for clearing the room now, but he wanted to keep his hands busy. His mind seemed to reach only a few seconds into the future. He found his binoculars on the wall where he’d left them the night before and hung them around his neck. He was not aware of having retrieved his food cache until he found himself at the fort eating bully beef and crackers, washing it down with warm water from his bottle.

  Damn, gotta get organized: What now? Get to the main island. Swim, there’s no other way. Go to Diamond, find that river of Leta’s, then go in and get Edith.

  The food weighted his eyelids. He forced his aching body to the wall, leaned on the parapet and scanned the channel through the binoculars. He saw seven boats approaching and wondered drowsily why the fishing fleet should be coming from the capital. No, it wasn’t the fleet; they came too fast for oar-driven craft, and that was Ian’s power cruiser in the lead. He could just make out the rumpless figure of Captain Leo at the wheel. The cabin blocked his view of the passenger well, so he couldn’t see who else was aboard the cruiser. Each of the six outboards behind it held five men in pith helmets. With their rifle barrels gleaming a dull blue in the early sun, they looked like an amphibious army on the move. Well well, he thought, Ian Barrington’s jolly cutthroats, come for a day’s outing on the island….

  He felt a shrill terror deep inside, but the surface of his brain remained blank. The scene appeared unreal, unrelated to himself. He watched the cruiser approach, and one by one the passengers came into view. Ian was attired in his usual rumpled seersucker suit. The sun glinted on a one-day stubble of beard, and in his lap he held a ludicrous tubular object which Drew, recalling his college ROTC days, identified as a U.S. Army M-3 sub-machine gun, commonly known as a grease gun. Ian held his finger on the trigger guard, and a 30-round clip was locked in place.

  Beside him on the plush leather seat sat Edith in her blouse and wrinkled skirt. Her coiffure looked slightly worse than the night before, and she slumped in such a way that Drew could not see her face. On her left sat Doxie, wearing his usual pristine white riding pants and black boots. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and his hand rested on the butt of a holstered .45 automatic. His expression was one of pleased expectancy as he looked at the man seated opposite him—

  Drew gasped. That black-suited figure, with skin glistening like oiled and polished ebony, was the once-dapper Guillard D’Arco. No longer dapper, he sat with his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands. He seemed to be staring at the huge black hulk which lay on the deck like a beached killer whale. It could only be Chaka, with manacles gleaming on his hands and feet. Black Samson was chained; the revolution had been stillborn.

  They would have become my enemies, thought Drew, but I’m sorry to see it end this way.

  He saw Edith raise her head. For a second Drew looked straight into her dark-shadowed eyes, then he dropped behind the wall.

  Cursing his carelessness, he lay waiting for her shout of alarm. There was only the low growl of the cruiser and the muffled purr of the outboards. Instinct told him to run, but he knew the steps were visible from the boats. The only other way down from the fort was the route Leta had taken, and Drew would never be ready for that.

  He pondered. If Edith had seen him, she still might not give the alarm. Ian might then do his business here and depart without taking one last benign look at Drew’s presumably charred corpse. But if they found out his body was missing, they would eventually learn that he was in the fort. Even so, he could fight them off indefinitely—if he had a gun.

  And if I had a blast furnace I might make a gun.

  Moving in a crouch, he fashioned a camouflage of grass and tied it to his head by a strip torn from his shirt. He peered over the wall and saw the boats tied up at the jetty. The men were on the beach, all wearing the pukka-sahib garb of pith helmet, khaki shirt and shorts, and knee-length socks. Without their rifles they could have been a scout troop on a camp-out. Five riflemen formed a line thirty feet from the groin with their backs to Drew. Ian and Doxie took seats on the groin facing the same direction. Edith started toward the house, but Ian caught her arm and pulled her roughly down beside him. Watch, dear, our boys are going to put on an entertainment.

  Drew saw her look furtively over her shoulder and scan the fort, frown and turn quickly back. She hadn’t penetrated his camouflage, but now he was certain she’d seen him the first time.

  Drew watched Chaka being led ashore, mincing over the sand in his leg-irons. A pink bullet crease scored his neck and a pattern of fresh cuts glistened on his naked chest. It wasn’t until a man stooped to unlock the shackles that Drew understood the scene. Today was Execution Day.

  The leg irons fell on the sand and the guards ran like boys who’d just lit a mammoth firecracker. Drew heard the men yelling, taunting the giant, trying to get him to run. But Chaka stood still, a lonely black mountain on the white sand. His head sank into his shoulders; his biceps ridged like a horse’s flank. A rifle cracked, and sand spurted at his feet. Chaka broke into a run, not away from the riflemen, but toward them. He covered five yards before the first crash of a rifle. Three more shots came almost at once. Chaka faltered like a man who turns a corner and meets an unexpected gust of wind, then came on. He bent forward at the waist; his trunk-like arms swung wide, with the broken chains dangling from his wrist. He tore through the line of riflemen and left one man writhing on the sand, another lying still with his headless trunk pumping out a crimson fountain.

  Twenty feet of space lay between Chaka and Barrington; blood streamed down the gargantuan chest, and one leg was dragging. Fifteen feet, ten…. Ian raised the grease gun negligently. There was a chug-chug-chug, and Chaka’s chest rippled like fabric whipped by a sudden breeze. He dropped to one knee, then fell forward. The huge hands clenched once, a yard from Ian’s boot, then opened.

  Scratch one revolutionary, killed while escaping….

  Drew’s horror of the scene had been weirdly heightened by the muffled silence conveyed by distance. Through the glasses, he saw Edith turn on Ian with her hands curved into claws; Ian tried to imprison her wrists but she was wild; she drew blood from his cheek and ripped out a fistful of thinning, sandy hair before Ian clubbed her down with his fist. Two men ran forward and carried Edith into the house. Ian followed, holding a handkerchief to his cheek. Two other men started scooping a trench in the sand beneath the manchineels. It took four men to drag Chaka there, two on each leg. After he was rolled in, two of them wanted to roll their headless comrade in beside him; the other two seemed to be insisting on a separate grave. Doxie strode up, barked an order, and the dead gunman was laid to rest beside Chaka. Then Doxie started up the hill from the banyan; Drew could almost read his mind: Why not bury all three corpses?

  Drew remained still as Doxie reached the spot where he’d lain; he heard the shout, saw Doxie run back to the beach. A dozen armed men spread out and disappeared into the grass. Captain Leo roared away from the jetty with three more aboard the cruiser. Two outboards puttered off in opposite directions, keeping close inshore. Each held five armed men with rifles ready.

  Feeling an itch for action, Drew gathered rocks and piled them beside the entrance to the fort. Then he had nothing to do but wait and sweat as the sun climbed higher. He considered destroying the steps which led up to the fort, then decided to leave them. Only one man could enter at a time, and it might give him a chance to get one of those guns….

  But nobody came nearer the fort than the ruins of the shack. After two hours of searching, Drew saw Doxie and Ian standing on the beach. Doxie pointed to the fort. Ian nodded once and went into the house. Doxie produced a police whistle and blew it, bringing the searchers in from the grass. The boats still patrolled the water.

  A half-hour passed, then Guillard D’Arco appeared and started up the path alone. In his left hand he carried a white envelope; in his right, a white handkerchief which he held to his
mouth. His cheeks looked hollow, his lips were swollen. Drew met him at the entrance.

  “Gil, what the hell—?”

  The man shook his head and pointed to his mouth. Drew saw the blackened stump of his tongue and felt ill. Barrington had a vicious and insane talent for revenge; he had silenced the golden-voiced orator in a most effective way. Drew read the dead despair in the lawyer’s eyes and knew there was nothing he could say. He took the envelope and pulled out two sheets of paper. The first was Edith’s, identifiable by its uncrossed t’s and undotted i’s. He read the salutation and his knees felt weak. He squatted down with his back against the wall and continued:

  My dearest Drew,

  I beg you to please, at least, read this. I will try to give only facts and leave out the emotion, though Lord knows it’s tearing me apart, grief and joy and despair—

  I didn’t want to hurt you last night. It was the sudden shock of remembering, having the whole mess come back at once, like a garbage can dumped on my head. I just wanted to run from it. In the path I thought I could explain about my first husband. I didn’t plan the killing. He was there, and it was his gun and it seemed such a simple solution. Then that lawyer said there was so much public feeling about the case that the prosecutor was going to ask the death penalty. I didn’t know they did this all the time; I only knew I didn’t want to die. There was nothing, absolutely nothing on my mind but that. I probably wasn’t sane at the time, but I’m not trying to use that for an excuse. I wanted to sign those papers your lawyer brought, but you remember at the trial you said you’d kill me, and you looked at me like I was some kind of slimy worm you wanted to step on. I kept running to one place after another, trying to forget that look, taking one drink after another, one man after another. But you never left my mind. I’d remember that I’d never even looked at another man when we were together, and when we weren’t, all my waking moments had been filled with schemes to have you with me forever. It got worse after I came here and time lay heavy on my hands. I scratched your name from the ashtray and tore it out of that book, but I couldn’t throw away the only part of you I’d kept. I even wrote out a confession and tried to send it off, but Ian found it and tore it up. Later I realized that even if you were free, you’d never forgive me for the time I’d taken from you.