The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition

by Darryl Ponicsan

  “Oh, sure, I know that. I knew that from the first minute I laid eyes on you.”

  “She’s a very sick woman,” said Maria.

  “She’s not that kind of girl, I said to myself. I know that other kind of girl, I said. But this girl is something special.”

  “I can’t understand what’s keeping Gordon,” Maria said, anxious again. That last was a sexual message, she believed.

  “Dividin’ his time like he does, it’s either his mother or you always wonderin’ what’s keepin’ him. He shoulda been twins.” Beef laughed at his joke. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It should be funny,” she said. “It’s a very funny situation, if it’s not you in the middle of it.”

  “I’m real sorry. It ain’t funny at all. Maybe once, but not with her...look, do you love him, honest?”

  Maria drew back in her chair. “What?”

  “Gordie. Do you really love him?” he asked, in lover’s despair.

  “Of course I love him,” she said. She tried to lead him to safer ground. “Now you said you had something to say about Mrs. Wynn.”

  “How can you love him?” he asked. “He makes you cry, he...”

  “You’d better come back when he’s here.”

  “He should be here now. She wants to kill you.”

  “She’s insane.”

  He could see he was frightening her and yet he could do nothing about it. Why couldn’t he say the right things, as others do with such ease?

  “That just makes it all the easier for her to do it. How am I gonna protect you?”

  “Protect me?”

  “We got to get you out of here somewhere. Utah, maybe. Pennsylvania.”

  He moved off the sofa and stood in front of her. He could see that his presence towering over her was sending her into terror. He squatted down, to bring his head below hers.

  “A safe place,” he said, “where you can have your baby and live in peace.”

  Her expression was one of mixed pity, revulsion, and fear. He realized like an awakening that what he felt for her could never, under any circumstances, ever be returned.

  “You want me to leave?” he asked, hoping she might not. If only she would offer him something again, he would stay and have a cup of coffee and let her do all the talking.

  “Please!” she said, and she started to cry. Every time he extended his hand she shrank back. He despised himself. Another man would have known what to do. He rushed out of the apartment, anguished to be the cause of further suffering.

  The jukebox blared, “...my son calls another man daddy...” and Beef covered his eyes with his hand. The old woman next to him wanted to cry too for such an ox so sentimental, or else she had her own thing to cry about, because she sure enough started crying. He drank his beer from the bottle, drinking as though each swig were the last of the final bottle. He rolled his shoulders and looked around him for begrudgers and belittlers.

  “Fuck you all,” he announced, spreading his sour mood evenly over the entire establishment.

  “Be the best one you ever had,” the old floozy boasted through her tears.

  Hardhats just off the job came in for some beer and pool before going home. They ribbed each other good-naturedly and drank with great relish, they played eight ball with boyish enthusiasm and ate chips noisily, like men thoroughly satisfied with themselves, knowing where their next lay and pay were coming from, caring little for the rest of it.

  Beef grabbed his beer and drank it viciously, sending a spurt of it up his nose.

  In spite of the proof that he messed up his own life, Beef’s father held a few fine values, one of which was a lesson he drummed often into his son: “You got your health? Then count your wealth in the friends you have.” Beef remembered these wise words every New Year’s Eve when he took stock of himself and found he hadn’t a friend in the world.

  “This shit has got to cease,” he said. “It’s got to come to a screeching halt.”

  Mae would be behind the bar in little more than an hour. He remembered the night she was too sick to get out of bed and he had to go down to the Ponderosa Pines and push beers in her place so that she wouldn’t lose her job. He hated it. It was the wrong side of the bar for him. Having to work the bar made him hate Mae, but then at two-thirty in the morning he returned to the apartment to find she had fixed him something exquisite, two grilled bacon and cheese sandwiches. She gave him a blow job as he ate them. He had her the following morning as she leaned against the stove, making a pepper and onion omelet. He could be a lucky man, if he could keep from going crazy.

  “I’ll see you later, Ed,” he said to the bartender, rising and going to the door.

  “You make sure Mae’s ass is down here by six,” said Ed. “I ain’t hangrin’ around here all night waiting.”

  “Listen, you don’t say nothin’ about her ass, I’ll take care of her ass by my ownself.”

  He hurried to the apartment and found her sitting on the floor near the heat register, a blanket around her shoulders. Her eyes were watery, her nose was running.

  “What’s the matter, you got a cold?” he asked, taking off his shirt.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Look, you got any money?”

  “I got something better than money, baby. I got plans.” He took off his shoes. “We got to see what we can make of us.” He took off his pants.

  “I ain’t feelin’ so hot,” said Mae.

  “I got to take a pee,” said Beef on his way to the bathroom. “C’mon, hop in bed. Give you anything you want.”

  “Money,” she said weakly as Beef shut the bathroom door behind him. He urinated and was peeling off his shorts when he noticed the broken eyedropper on the floor beneath the sink. He knelt down carefully to pick up the pieces. A bit of tape dangled from the underside of the sink. Beef lowered his head and saw the rest of her fix kit taped to the sink.

  His plans or his plan to have plans drifted for a moment, then disappeared into thin air.

  He rose and put his hands on his naked body, as though feeling for the poison that might have passed to him.

  He opened the bathroom door and stood above her. “Bitch,” he said. “As if things wasn’t bad enough.”

  The pathetic creature he saw aroused a cruelty in him. He wanted to hurt her, to humiliate her sexually, to give her what she must have been used to.

  “I guess you think I’m pretty dumb,” he said.

  “I ain’t too smart either,” she said.

  “You said it, lady. I’ll give you this, you don’t lie.”

  The hell with it, his anger went nowhere but inward. He picked up his clothes and put them on. He went into the bedroom and threw his things into his canvas bag.

  “I’m leavin’,” he said on his way past her.

  She did not look up to see him go.

  He checked into the Folding Hotel with half a gallon of cheap Burgundy. It wasn’t his old room but it might as well have been. He took the Burgundy to bed and a pint through it began to miss the way Mae pinned her sheet to her blanket.

  Someone’s radio played country music from KPIK. When he woke up there was no more music. With his hangover as companion he missed her less. He resumed drinking, and soon he missed her more. The radio came on again. The wine was gone.

  SIX

  Rudy Montalvo was a baby-faced secret lover of music, who first ate the county’s chow at age twelve, for drinking wine and smoking marijuana with the big kids. Since then he had never been out of custody for more than a few months at a stretch, and he was currently on parole. Most of his arrests had been on drug-related charges, and though he had pulled some armed robbery jobs, he had never been caught on anything stiffer than breaking and entering.

  His pal, Danny “Goose” Yanez, was six inches taller than he, seven years older than he, and about eight beats slower than he. Although Yanez had participated in many illegal endeavors without fear or remorse, he had never been arrested and was never a problem to anyone, not his teachers, his
family, or the neighborhood. He was a major problem to his wife, who kicked him out, but in this he was not conspicuous among his wedded contemporaries. In truth everybody liked him. He was fun to be around.

  In all their lives, neither of them had ever been sought out to perform a service, unless you count Yanez’s draft notice as a solicitation, so they were rather pleased with themselves at landing so effortlessly a $5000 commission on which they now held a $125 retainer.

  The contract killers knew that to handle the affair properly they would need a car.

  “Let’s hot-wire one,” said Yanez. “Let’s get us a big fuckin’ Cadillac.”

  “Do you know how to hot-wire cars, Goose?”

  Sometimes Rudy made him feel inadequate. “My cousin Hector does,” he said in his own defense.

  “Oh, fine. Tell your cousin Hector to get us a Cadillac. Listen, tell him to bring his girlfriend too. Does he have a sister?”

  “Sure, he has three sisters. Carmen, Teresa, and Lucy.”

  “Well, tell him to bring Carmen, Teresa, and Lucy along too.”

  “Hector lives in Arizona,” said Goose.

  They did what Rudy intended to do from the start: borrow Lupe Martinez’s car. She was the wife of a friend of his, who was currently serving time. They paid her $20 to use the car for a few days. It was a 1947 Buick, a source of many memories for its three previous owners, but a pain in the ass to Lupe. She called it her taco wagon—no spare tire, no jack, the original spark plugs.

  They walked into Sears, where Rudy bought two pairs of gloves and Goose boosted a roll of adhesive tape.

  They drove Lupe’s car to a snooker parlor, where they called into the alley a man they knew, for the purpose of borrowing the gun they knew he carried. They were going to Denver, they explained, and needed it to pull a few jobs. They gave him $10 for the use of it, and he gave them the gun. Neither Rudy, nor Goose knew the caliber of it. It was a gun.

  So there they were, standing on Nevada Avenue, the logistics of the operation covered, with $90.04 left to spare. Rudy shifted the gun to another part of his waistline.

  “What’ll we do now?” asked Goose.

  Rudy thought about it for some time and Goose waited patiently for his decision.

  “You want to catch a movie?” asked Rudy.

  When Gordon checked in from his watch the desk sergeant told him, “There was a call for you.” He shuffled about some papers. Mother, thought Gordon. He would forever be a station house joke. “Here it is,” said the sergeant. “The DA at Pueblo wants you to call.”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “What’s the beef, Wynn?”

  None of your fucking business, he thought, but said, “Just something I forgot to follow through on.”

  Gordon went back to the locker room and sat down. He was faced with somehow saving his mother, his marriage, and his job, all at once. He wondered which would be the first to fall, and would the rest come tumbling after. The judge had told him that as distasteful as it would be, he would have to go to the district attorney to iron out the fraudulent annulment his mother had committed. The judge was willing to let his mother and Bomba off with a reprimand, but the DA, he warned, might be harder to convince. “The impetuous action of a mentally ill woman now institutionalized,” was the phrase that came to Gordon. He wanted to feed it to the DA. Surely he would not press charges. The problem was that Gordon knew he could never institutionalize his mother. He picked up the phone to call the DA. He even deposited his dime, but the phone became lead in his hand and he put it down. He would call him Monday.

  Ralph Ferguson, who was distracted by other duties, did not remember until he was getting into bed that night that Gordon Wynn had failed to return his call. That was inexcusable. If Wynn did not call by ten o’clock Monday morning, he would simply place his mother under arrest, and quite possibly, depending upon the attitude of this young policeman, report him to his superiors for discipline.

  About the time Ralph Ferguson was settling down to sleep, Beef Buddusky rolled out of bed. He wore only one sock but hadn’t the courage to go looking for the other, not with his head pounding the way it was. He was afraid that if he lowered his head the top of it would pop right off. He took off his sock and tossed it away to find its own mate. He put on a fresh pair, full of the self-contempt of a man out of his own control.

  He went down to the Panama Club. The place was crowded and noisy and the talk was in Spanish. Juan Barrajas was behind the bar, unhappy to see Beef again. He ordered a Coors to put the old man at ease, and because he wanted one very much. He poured half a glassful and drank, spitting out tiny pieces of ice that had been in the glass.

  “Don’t like that,” he said aloud.

  The rest he drank from the bottle, then he ordered another. The cold beer brought his mouth back to life. By his third bottle he could again appreciate the advantages of being alive. The fourth made him long for Maria. The fifth made him miss Mae. The sixth made him resentful of the cesspool called life. Midway through the seventh he was loaded again and ready to fight.

  “Hey,” he said to Juan Barrajas, “where’s those two boys of yours?”

  “Not my boys,” he said, constantly worried.

  “Where are they? I want a talk with ‘em.”

  “They were here early. They went somewhere.”

  “Well, you tell ‘em for me I’ll kick their asses they don’t watch out.”

  Then it landed on Beef and all but sobered him. If they went somewhere, maybe they went to kill Maria.

  He ran out of the Panama and all the way to her apartment house. He sweat away the beer by the time he arrived. The cold air chilled his damp body. The windows of her apartment were dark. There was sign of the two Mexicans. He crossed the street and leaned against a small tree, where he had a good view of her apartment. Show up here, you’ll wish you hadn’t, Beef promised them.

  He stayed there for half an hour. Finally a car driven by a young woman pulled to the curb in front of Maria’s place. Maria herself got out of the car, carrying a shopping bag. She waved good-bye as the car pulled away.

  She should know she was in need of him.

  “I love you,” he whispered as she climbed the steps to her apartment.

  The lights in her apartment came on. He would stay as long as it took.

  In another apartment, at an angle behind him and three stories above him, an old woman pulled aside her curtain with two withered fingers and spied on Beef. She believed him to be the thing she feared most, an arsonist, a madman who sets your building on fire, then warms himself in the glow of the flames in which you crackle and sputter like a rasher. An emergency rope fire ladder was rolled up in her closet, sitting next to an Ansul dry chemical fire extinguisher. It would not happen to her. She watched Beef for twenty minutes. He did not move. The number was taped to her telephone. She dialed. “Police?”

  He lost track of how long he had stood there, watching_ Maria’s apartment, but finally a squad car pulled to a stop in front of him and the outboard officer said, “What’re you doing out here?”

  Beef lowered his head to see if the driver might be Gordie. It wasn’t. He had the impulse to tell them he was standing guard over a pregnant woman in danger of her life. He had the impulse to tell them everything. He wanted to tell them everything and then give them a chance to ask him many questions which he would answer truthfully. Instead he .said, “Just walkin’ home.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Both cops got out of the car.

  “Hands against the car.”

  Beef leaned forward, putting his hands on the roof of the car. He spread his legs. He knew what to do, he had done it before. The cop searched him.

  “Got any identification?”

  Beef gave him his driver’s license. He looked at the guns in their holsters. He wanted one.

  One cop took the license into the car, and the other said, “Stretch your arms to the side.”
r />   He did it.

  “Now shut your eyes.”

  “What for?”

  “Shut them, you big shit.”

  He shut his eyes.

  “Now touch your nose with both fingertips.”

  He brought both forefingers to the tip of his nose. He was apparently sober. “We had a call about a prowler out here,” the cop explained.

  “One?” asked Beef. Maybe someone had seen the two Mexican boys.

  The cop looked at him quizzically. “Unless you got a turd in your pocket.”

  The other cop came out of the car and said there were no outstanding warrants on Harold Buddusky.

  “Where you live?”

  “Folding Hotel.”

  “What the hell you doin’ way over here?”

  “Takin’ a walk. I got a lot on my mind.”

  The two cops thought that was a pretty good joke.

  “Get in the car.”

  Beef got into the back seat and sat with his two hands between his legs, as if he were in handcuffs already. They drove in silence. Maria must have seen him and called the police. Why did she refuse to understand? He might as well tell the cops about Ginny hiring two Mexican boys to murder Maria. He was in jail anyway.

  But they pulled up to the Folding and one cop reached around and opened Beef’s door. “Out,” he said.

  Wait a minute! There’s gonna be a murder. Go to Ginny Mom Wynn and tell her it’s not allowed except in dreams, call up Maria and tell her who I am, who I really am. Yeah, I’m involved. Okay, I’ll do my time, but go to Ginny, call Maria...

  Beef looked out at the sad entrance to the Folding, feeling peculiarly misused, and got out of the car without a word. He went up to his room with nothing left of the seven beers he had downed but a full bladder. He relieved himself in the bathroom at the end of the hall. He walked back toward his room. One of the doors opened and an old wino poked his head out, fear on his face of the indecisiveness of life, the fidelity of death.

  “Would you like to join me in a drink?” he asked, like a gentleman, holding up a nearly full bottle of T-bird.