The Far Side of the Dollar la-12

by Ross Macdonald

  `I never did. Harley came and went by himself and he didn't talk. You could see he didn't belong in a high-stakes game, but he had the money, and he wanted to lose it.'

  `He wanted to lose it?'

  Arnie said.

  `That's right, the same way I wanted to win. He's a born loser, I'm a born winner.'

  Fletcher got up and strutted back and forth across the room. He lit a Brazilian cigar, not offering any around. As fast as he blew it out, the smoke disappeared in the draft from the air conditioner. `What time did the game break up this morning?'

  I said.

  `Around three, when I took my last big pot.'

  His mouth savored the recollection. `I was willing to stay, but the other people weren't. Harley wanted to stay, naturally, but he didn't have the money to back it up. He isn't much of a poker player, frankly.'

  `Did he give you any trouble?'

  `No sir. The gentleman who runs the game discourages that sort of thing. No trouble. Harley did put the bite on me at the end. I gave him a hundred dollars ding money to get home.'

  `Home where?'

  `He said he came from Idaho.'

  I took a taxi back to the airport and made a reservation on a plane that stopped in Pocatello. Before sundown I was driving a rented car out of Pocatello along Rural Route Seven, where the elder Harleys lived.

  16

  THEIR FARM, GREEN and golden in the slanting light, lay in a curve of the river. I drove down a dusty lane to the farmhouse. It was built of white brick, without ornament of any kind. The barn, unpainted, was weathered gray and in poor repair.

  The late afternoon was windless. The trees surrounding the fenced yard were as still as watercolors. The heat was oppressive, in spite of the river nearby, even worse than it had been in Vegas.

  It was a far cry from Vegas to here, and difficult to believe that Harley had come home, or ever would. But the possibility had to be checked out.

  A black and white farm collie with just one eye barked at me through the yard fence when I stepped out of the car. I tried to calm him down by talking to him, but he was afraid of me and he wouldn't be calmed. Eventually an old woman wearing an apron came out of the house and silenced the dog with a word. She called to me: `Mr. Harley's in the barn.'

  I let myself in through the wire gate. `May I talk to you?'

  `That depends what the talk's about.'

  `Family matters.'

  `If that's another way to sell insurance, Mr. Harley doesn't believe in insurance.'

  `I'm not selling anything. Are you Mrs. Harley?'

  `I am.'

  She was a gaunt woman of seventy, square-shouldered in a long-sleeved, striped shirtwaist. Her gray hair was drawn back severely from her face. I liked her face, in spite of the broken-ness in and around the eyes. There was humor in it, and suffering half transformed into understanding.

  `Who are you?' she said.

  `A friend of your son Harold's. My name is Archer.'

  `Isn't that nice? We're going to sit down to supper as soon as Mr. Harley finishes up the milking. Why don't you stay and have some supper with us?'

  `You're very kind.'

  But I didn't want to eat with them.

  `How is Harold?' she said. `We don't hear from him so often since he married his wife. Lila.'

  Evidently she hadn't heard the trouble her sons were in. I hesitated to tell her, and she noticed my hesitation.

  `Is something the matter with Harold?' she said sharply.

  `The matter is with Mike. Have you seen him?'

  Her large rough hands began to wipe themselves over and over on the front of her apron. `We haven't seen Mike in twenty years. We don't expect to see him again in this life.'

  `You may, though. He told a man he was coming home.'

  `This is not his home. It hasn't been since he was a boy. He turned his back on us then. He went off to Pocatello to live with a man named Brown, and that was his downfall.'

  `How so?'

  `That daughter of Brown was a Jezebel. She ruined my son. She taught him all the filthy ways of the world.'

  Her voice had changed. It sounded as if the voice of somebody slightly crazy was ranting ventriloquially through her. I said with deliberate intent to stop it:

  `Carol's been paid back for whatever she did to him. She was murdered in California on Monday.'

  Her hands stopped wiping themselves and flew up in front of her. She looked at their raw ugliness with her broken eyes.

  `Did Mike do it to her?'

  `We think so. We're not sure.'

  `And you're a policeman,' she stated.

  `More or less.'

  `Why do you come to us? We did our best, but we couldn't control him. He passed out of our control long ago.'

  Her hands dropped to her sides.

  `If he gets desperate enough, he may head this way.'

  `No, he never will. Mr. Harley said he would kill him if he ever set foot on our property again. That was twenty years ago, when he ran away from the Navy. Mr. Harley meant it, too. Mr. Harley never could abide a lawbreaker. It isn't true that Mr. Harley treated him cruelly. Mr. Harley was only trying to save him from the Devil.'

  The ranting, ventriloquial note had entered her voice again. Apparently she knew nothing about her son, and if she did she couldn't talk about him in realistic terms. It was beginning to look like a dry run.

  I left her and went to the barn to find her husband. He was in the stable under the barn, sitting on a milking stool with his forehead against the black and white flank of a Holstein cow. His hands were busy at her teats, and her milk surged in the pail between his knees. Its sweet fresh smell penetrated the smell of dung that hung like corruption in the heated air.

  `Mr. Harley?'

  `I'm busy,' he said morosely. `This is the last one, if you want to wait.'

  I backed away and looked at the other cows. There were ten or twelve of them, moving uneasily in their stanchions as I moved. Somewhere out of sight a horse blew and stamped.

  `You're disturbing the livestock,' Mr. Harley said. `Stand still if you want to stay.'

  I stood still for five minutes. The one-eyed collie drifted into the stable and did a thorough job of smelling my shoes. But he still wouldn't let me touch him. When I reached down, he moved back.

  Mr. Harley got up and emptied his pail into a ten-gallon can; the foaming milk almost overflowed. He was a tall old man wearing overalls and a straw hat which almost brushed the low rafters. His eyes were as flat and angry and his mouth as sternly righteous as in Harold's portrait of him. The dog retreated whining as he came near.

  `You're not from around here. Are you on the road?'

  `No.'

  I told him who I was. `And I'll get to the point right away. Your son Mike's in very serious trouble.'

  `Mike is not my son,' he intoned solemnly, `and I have no wish to hear about him or his trouble.'

  `But he may be coming here. He said he was. If he does, you'll have to inform the police.'

  `You don't have to instruct me in what I ought to do. I get my instructions from a higher power. He gives me my instructions direct in my heart.'

  He thumped his chest with a gnarled fist.

  `That must be convenient.'

  `Don't blaspheme or make mock, or you'll regret it. I can call down the punishment.'

  He reached for a pitchfork leaning against the wall. The dog ran out of the stable with his tail down. I became aware suddenly that my shirt was sticking to my back and I was intensely uncomfortable. The three tines of the pitchfork were sharp and gleaming, and they were pointed at my stomach.

  `Get out of here,' the old man said. `I've been fighting the Devil all my life, and I know one of his cohorts when I see one.'

  So do I, I said, but not out loud. I backed as far as the door, stumbled on the high threshold, and went out. Mrs. Harley was standing near my car, just inside the wire gate. Her hands were quiet on her meager breast.

  `I'm sorry,' she said to
me. `I'm sorry for Carol Brown. She wasn't a bad little girl, but I hardened my heart against her.'

  `It doesn't matter now. She's dead.'

  `It matters in the sight of heaven.'

  She raised her eyes to the arching sky as if she imagined a literal heaven like a second story above it. Just now it was easier for me to imagine a literal hell, just over the horizon, where the sunset fires were burning.

  `I've done so many wrong things,' she said, `and closed my eyes to so many others. But don't you see, I had to make a choice.'

  `I don't understand you.'

  `A choice between Mr. Harley and my sons. I knew that he was a hard man. A cruel man, maybe not quite right in the head. But what could I do? I had to stick with my husband. And I wasn't strong enough to stand up to him. Nobody is. I had to stand by while he drove our sons out of our home. Harold was the soft one, he forgave us in the end. But Mike never did. He's like his father. I never even got to see my grandson.'

  Tears ran in the gullies of her face. Her husband came out of the barn carrying the ten-gallon can in his left hand and the pitchfork in his right.

  `Go in the house, Martha. This man is a cohort of the Devil. I won't allow you to talk to him.'

  `Don't hurt him. Please.'

  `Go in the house,' he repeated.

  She went, with her gray head down and her feet dragging.

  `As for you, cohort,' he said, `you get off my farm or I'll call down the punishment on you.'

  He shook his pitchfork at the reddening sky. I was already in the car and turning up the windows.

  I turned them down again as soon as I got a few hundred yards up the lane. My shirt was wet through now, and I could feel sweat running down my legs. Looking back, I caught a glimpse of the river, flowing sleek and solid in the failing light, and it refreshed me.

  17

  BEFORE DRIVING OUT to the Harley farm, I had made an evening appointment with Robert Brown and his wife. They already knew what had happened to their daughter. I didn't have to tell them.

  I found their house in the north end of the city, on a pleasant, tree-lined street parallel to Arthur Street. Night had fallen almost completely, and the street-lights were shining under the clotted masses of the trees. It was still very warm. The earth itself seemed to exude heat like a hot-blooded animal.

  Robert Brown had been watching for me. He hailed me from his front porch and came out to the curb. A big man with short hair, vigorous in his movements, he still seemed to be wading in some invisible substance, age or sorrow. We shook hands solemnly.

  He spoke with more apparent gentleness than force: `I was planning to fly out to California tomorrow. It might have saved you a trip if you had known.'

  `I wanted to talk to the Harleys, anyway.'

  `I see.'

  He cocked his head on one side in a birdlike movement which seemed odd in such a big man. `Did you get any sense out of them?'

  `Mrs. Harley made a good deal of sense. Harley didn't.'

  `I'm not surprised. He's a pretty good farmer, they say, but he's been in and out of the mental hospital. I took - my wife and I took care of his son Mike during one of his bouts. We took him into our home.'

  He sounded ashamed of the act.

  `That was a generous thing to do.'

  `I'm afraid it was misguided generosity. But who can prophesy the future? Anyway, it's over now. All over.'

  He forgot about me completely for a moment, then came to himself with a start. 'Come in, Mr. Archer. My wife will want to talk to you.'

  He took me into the living room. It had group and family photos on the walls, and a claustrophobic wallpaper, which lent it some of the stuffiness of an old-fashioned country parlor. The room was sedately furnished with well-cared-for maple pieces. Across the mantel marched a phalanx of sports trophies gleaming gold and silver in the harsh overhead light.

  Mrs. Brown was sitting in an armchair under the light. She was a strikingly handsome woman a few years younger than her husband, maybe fifty-five. She had chosen to disguise herself in a stiff and rather dowdy black dress. Her too precisely marcelled brown hair had specks of gray in it. Her fine eyes were confused, and surrounded by dark patches. When she gave me her hand, the gesture seemed less like a greeting than a bid for help.

  She made me sit down on a footstool near her. `Tell us all about poor Carol, Mr. Archer.'

  All about Carol. I glanced around the safe, middle-class room, with the pictures of Carol's ancestors on the walls, and back at her parents' living faces. Where did Carol come in? I could see the source of her beauty in her mother's un-disguisable good looks. But I couldn't see how one life led to the other, or why Carol's life had ended as it had.

  Brown said: `We know she's dead, murdered, and that Mike probably did it, and that's about all.'

  His face was like a Roman general's, a late Roman general's, after a long series of defeats by barbarian hordes.

  `It's about all I know. Mike seems to have been using her as a decoy in an extortion attempt. You know about the Hillman boy?'

  He nodded. `I read about it before I knew that my daughter-' His voice receded.

  `They say he may be dead, too,' his wife said.

  `He may be, Mrs. Brown.'

  `And Mike did these things? I knew he was far gone, but I didn't know he was a monster.'

  `He's not a monster,' Brown said wearily. `He's a sick man. His father was a sick man. He still is, after all the mental hospital could do for him.'

  `If Mike was so sick, why did you bring him into this house and expose your daughter to him?'

  `She's your daughter, too.'

  `I know that. I'm not allowed to forget it. But I'm not the one that ruined her for life.'

  `You certainly had a hand in it. You were the one, for instance, who encouraged her to enter that beauty contest.'

  `She didn't win, did she?'

  `That was the trouble.'

  `Was it? The trouble was the way you felt about that Harley boy.'

  `I wanted to help him. He needed help, and he had talent.'

  `Talent?'

  `As an athlete. I thought I could develop him.'

  `You developed him all right.'

  They were talking across me, not really oblivious of me, using me as a fulcrum for leverage, or a kind of stand-in for reality. I guessed that the argument had been going on for twenty years.

  `I wanted a son,' Brown said.

  `Well, you got a son. A fine upstanding son.'

  He looked as if he was about to strike her. He didn't, though. He turned to me: `Forgive us. We shouldn't do this. It's embarrassing.'

  His wife stared at him in unforgiving silence. I tried to think of something that would break or at least soften the tension between them: `I didn't come here to start a quarrel.'

  `You didn't start it, let me assure you.'

  Brown snickered remorsefully. `It started the day Carol ran off with Mike. It was something I didn't foresee-' His wife's bitter voice cut in: `It started when she was born, Rob. You wanted a son. You didn't want a daughter. You rejected her and you rejected me.'

  `I did nothing of the sort.'

  `He doesn't remember,' she said to me. `He has one of these convenient memories that men have. You blot out anything that doesn't suit your upright idea of yourself. My husband is a very dishonest man.'

  She had a peculiar angry gnawing smile.

  `That's nonsense,' he protested. `I've been faithful to you all my life.'

  `Except in ways I couldn't cope with. Like when you brought the Harley boy into our home. The great altruist. The noble counselor.'

  `You have no right to jeer at me,' he said. `I wanted to help him. I had no way of knowing that he couldn't be reached.'

  `Go on. You wanted a son any way you could get one.'

  He said stubbornly: `You don't understand. A man gets natural pleasure from raising a boy, teaching him what he knows.'

  `All you succeeded in teaching Mike was your dishonesty.'

/>   He turned to me with a helpless gesture, his hands swinging out. `She blames me for everything.'

  Walking rather aimlessly, he went out to the back part of the house.

  I felt as if I'd been left alone with a far from toothless lioness. She stirred in her chair: `I blame myself as well for being a fool. I married a man who has the feelings of a little boy. He still gets excited about his high-school football teams. The boys adore him. Everybody adores him. They talk about him as if he was some kind of a plaster saint. And he couldn't even keep his own daughter out of trouble.'