“It’s time for me to get out of this town too.”
She started to say something, stopped, and looked intently at me. I had the odd feeling that it was the first time she had looked directly at me and seen me. “Of course you can drive a car, Stassen.”
“Yes.”
“John is a horrible driver. I despise driving. We were going to fly. But this way … I could take everything. Would you drive us down? It would be a business deal, Stassen. We’ll pay all your expenses plus … oh, a hundred dollars at the end of the trip.”
“I’ll do it for nothing.”
“Thank you, no. We don’t need a pal, Stassen. We need a driver. Then everybody will know where everybody stands.”
I agreed to do it. Their car was in dead storage. It was a lot of car, a two-year-old Chrysler Imperial, black, loaded with every power gadget there is, plus air conditioning. It had six thousand miles on it. The California tags had run out. I found out that a friend had driven it east for them.
I had it checked over for the trip, and I arranged for new tags. I took my Chev over to Jersey and peddled it for thirteen hundred. It was a horrible whipping, but the best I could do. So I was able to start off with about sixteen hundred bucks, all but two hundred in traveler’s checks.
They had a lot of stuff. Most of it was hers. I took it over to the apartment and loaded it the day before we left, a snowy day in mid-March. I packed the big rear trunk right to the eaves, and packed the rear seat to the roof, leaving space for one person back there. She had a lot of ideas about what should go where, and she kept changing her mind.
Finally I said, “Kathy, maybe I should get a chauffeur hat and uniform. To go with all the orders.”
She straightened and gave me as cold and flat a look as I have ever received from anybody. “Just do your job, Stassen, without bickering about it, and we’ll all get along a lot better.”
We stood beside the car with the snow coming down, big wet flakes that caught in her hair. I was close to walking away. I didn’t have to take abuse from a little broken-down actress. It was a showdown. She was establishing the relationship right there. A flake caught in her eyelashes. It didn’t melt. I wanted to take her by her childish shoulders and kiss that eye and feel the ice of the snowflake against my lips, and the warm round violet eye.
“Yes, sir, Mrs. Pinelli, sir,” I said.
There was a slight lift of the corners of her mouth. “Take that big blue one off the bottom and put this leather one there, please. I’ll have to get into the blue one when we get into warmer weather.”
So I unloaded and reloaded again. “What time should I bring it around in the morning, Kathy?”
“Let’s get an early start. Ten o’clock.”
So I drove the brute away. It was crouched on its haunches because of the weight. I garaged it and locked it myself, and spent my last night in Gabe’s apartment, laying out the route. I figured it for a seven-day trip. I didn’t know how naïve my guess was. I thought of sending them a card at home to let them know what I was doing, but I decided it would be more interesting to send the card from Acapulco. It would do more wondrous things for the old man’s blood pressure.
By quarter of eleven the next morning, we were through the tunnel and heading down the Jersey Pike. It was a clear, metallic morning, with a dry road and light traffic. I kept the needle locked on seventy. Kathy was beside me, John Pinelli in back. They both acted morose about the whole thing. There wasn’t any excitement or anticipation in them. But I felt like singing.
I felt I should report on the route. “I decided the best thing to do is go right down 301, then cut west on 80 until we …”
“That will be fine,” Pinelli said.
“I don’t know how many miles you want to make a day.”
“Every day at four o’clock, Stassen,” she said, “start looking for a nice place. We’ll stop between four and five. I won’t ride beyond five o’clock. Lunch between one and two, please. Try to find nice places for lunch.”
And that’s the way it went. When you’re lucky to get on the road before eleven, and you have to get off the highway a little after four, even in a brute like that Chrysler, it’s a good trick to do two hundred and fifty miles a day. At each motel stop she would hand me the money, and I would go in and register, a single for me, and a twin-bed double for them. Then I would drive to their unit and carry their baggage in. I was privileged to eat with them at lunch, but not at dinner. They had a fitted liquor case, and each night he would get smashed, and they would eat as late as the nearest restaurant would serve them. They never changed seats. She stayed up front beside me. About once an hour she would turn the radio on and hunt the whole length of the dial and turn it off. I could never figure out what sort of program she was looking for. Every day she spent at least an hour working on her nails. When she had a chance, she would buy a half dozen magazines. She would leaf through them very quickly, like an illiterate looking at the pictures, and drop them out the window one at a time as she finished them. Sometimes she would sleep, but for not more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. John Pinelli slept oftener, longer and heavier—slumped against the luggage, snoring resonantly.
As far as they were concerned, I was a part of the machine. It irritated me, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I kept trying to figure out their relationship. Sometimes they would have savage arguments. She would turn around and kneel on the seat. They acted as if I were stone-deaf. Those two would say anything to each other. Some of the arguments were about money. I’d wondered how they were fixed. They weren’t hurting as much as I had thought. He’d owned a piece of a couple of profitable movies, and he owned a piece of the producer’s end of a television show that had been running for three years and looked as if it would run forever. And he had stashed some into an annuity back in his fat days. I estimated they had thirty thousand a year coming in. But that was a tenth of the income he used to make, and so they felt impoverished. And they wouldn’t cut any corners. They schemed to live in borrowed houses, but in a motel he’d give the boy who brought the ice a five-dollar bill. Some of those kids looked like they’d been hit on the head. There was a flossy gift shop connected with one motel where we stayed. She bought two skirts of handwoven fabric, sixty bucks each.
The biggest money fight was about whether he should sell his piece of the television show and reinvest it in the Mexican movie venture. Every time they argued about it, they switched sides. And they would say things to each other I wouldn’t say to a weasel. She, in particular, had the foulest mouth I’ve ever heard on a woman. She said things to him worth killing her for, and fifteen minutes later they’d both be napping.
Sometimes they fought about how talented they were. He told her once that if she had fifty times the acting ability, he wouldn’t use her in a mob scene. She told him if he had a chance to direct the rape of the Sabine women, he’d turn it into a box-office dog. He told her the mares in Westerns had more talent. She told him he was the joke of the industry. Twenty minutes later they’d be telling each other how great they were. She had more than Hayes and he had more than Huston.
But the worst scraps were about cheating. Then the language was so choice I wondered why I didn’t run the car off the road. He’d tell her she made any honest tramp look like Joan of Arc, that if she’d kept score, her diary would look like a phone book. She’d tell him that he’d spent forty years proving he had no discrimination. If it was warm and wore a skirt, that was all he needed. Then they would start throwing names, dates and places at each other, but what it always came down to was that neither of them had any real proof. He’d call her an ice-cold scrawny, ridiculous bitch. She’d call him a fat, impotent old man. Once, when they were going it so hot and heavy I thought he was coming over the seat after her, a spark from her cigarette stung her wrist. From the way she carried on, you would have sworn she had just lost the arm. He cooed at her and petted her, and she whimpered and yowled until I located a drugstore. He h
urried in and came out with four different kinds of burn remedies, and fixed her up with a bandage big enough for a fractured wrist.
It was a weird marriage.
A strange thing happened at a motel just west of Montgomery, Alabama. It was unseasonably warm. The pool was drained, but there were chairs around it. I sat out in the warm dusk, thinking about going and getting something to eat. She came up behind me, touched me on the shoulder in a friendly way, and sat in the chair next to mine. She said John was taking a nap. She called me Kirby for the first time. She turned on so much warmth and charm, it was like standing in a hot-chocolate shower. We sat there for at least two hours. She drew me out. She made me feel like the most interesting man in the world. I gave her the full report on Kirby Palmer Stassen, from high chair to office boy.
“What do you want, Kirby? Where are you heading?”
“I don’t know, Kathy. There’s all the pressure to conform. I’m not ready to play on the team.”
“Kicks? Is that what you want?”
“That’s a word for it, maybe. I want to … do everything there is to do. I don’t want to go down a tunnel.”
Like a damn fool I thought we’d gotten onto a new basis. But the next day I was Stassen, part of the Chrysler. It gave me the feeling she’d used me for some kind of practice session, like a hell of a wing shot getting his eye ready for the season by trap shooting.
We went down 79 and 81 and crossed at Laredo. We stayed at Laredo one night and a half a day. Something happened to them there. Something private and significant and deadly. I don’t know what it was, what they did to each other. But it was the end of something between them. You could sense that. I didn’t see how it could be anything they said to each other. Nothing could have been more unforgivable than all the things they’d already said.
The change was abrupt. All of a sudden they were painfully polite to each other. They made comments on the road and the weather. No more battles. Something started to end right there at Laredo. And I was in at the finish. Some unknown incident gutted the relationship, and suddenly they had begun to be strangers.
I am treating my relationship with John and Kathryn Pinelli in such great detail because I suspect that it bears a significant relationship to all that came later. I know that on the basis of timing it was significant, because if I hadn’t gone to Mexico with them, I’d never have met Sandy, Nan and Shack at that beer joint on the outskirts of Del Rio. On another level, if it hadn’t been for the Pinellis and what happened, I wouldn’t have been ready to meet Golden, Koslov and Hernandez. I wouldn’t have had that special attitude which helped the four of us fit together like the fingers on a glove.
Once you have destroyed somebody, and there’s no way to put the pieces together, and you know you’re going to live with a funny kind of remorse the rest of your life anyway, you can maybe dilute remorse through more destruction.
So maybe what happened to me is suicide.
I wish that Kathy could have a chance to read this. I wouldn’t expect her to understand it, or make any attempt to try. If I could write it as a play, and if she could be given the chance to read it, then she would come alive, frowning in pretty concentration, fitting her mouth silently around her lines. But I know what would happen to this kind of a journal. She would riffle it, see there was no art work, and drop it out the car window and go to work on her nails, or pick a fight with John, or curl into a tiny and fragrant cat nap.
FOUR
Riker Deems Owen devoted one whole memorandum to a rather rambling analysis of the Stassen boy:
On what now appears to be superficial reasoning, I felt in the beginning that Kirby Stassen would be the one I could communicate with most readily. Now I realize I was misled by the similarity of our backgrounds. We are from the same approximate social and financial level. He has poise and good manners, and treats me with a respect only infrequently marred by a strange attitude of derision.
In appearance he is what might be called a typical American. He is large, as are most young people nowadays. Almost six foot two and about a hundred and ninety-five pounds. He has the look of a man who—if permitted to live on into his middle years—would become quite heavy. His father is a burly man of the same physical type, though about two inches shorter. Though the very deep tan he acquired in Acapulco is bleaching out, there is enough of it left to make a handsome and pleasing contrast with his healthy white teeth, his rather pale gray-green eyes, and his hair and eyebrows which have been sun-faded to a lighter hue than their normal shade.
His eyes are set wide. His nose is slightly flattened at the bridge as the result of an automobile accident when he was seventeen. This gives him a little bit of the look of a rough-neck. His features are rather heavy. One could say he is relatively more attractive as a young man than he will be ten years from now, should his life be spared.
There has been much comment in the press about the incongruity of his wholesome appearance contrasted with the savage crimes in which he participated. Some have used the expression “baby-faced.” This seems to me quite inaccurate. I would call it a poster face. It could be used to advertise ski resorts or cruises or enlistment in the service. There is nothing sinister about the appearance of this young man. He looks wholesome and rugged.
As I have said, he has a considerable amount of poise. And he has a habit of looking at you very directly. It is a directness almost disconcerting. He is as immaculate about his person as a cat. He moves easily and well. He listens with flattering respect and attention, and scrupulously calls me “sir.”
In the beginning, when I began to pay my periodic visits to each of the four defendants, I felt much more at ease with Stassen than with the others. Over these weeks, this situation has become reversed. I can communicate with Kirby Stassen to an astonishingly limited degree. It is like driving a nail through soft pine into tool steel. The first few strokes are easy. Further penetration is impossible.
Some of this, of course, may be no more than the usual lack of contact between generations. It sometimes seems to me that the Great Depression marked the beginning of a special change in our culture. All young people born during or after those years seem to act toward the rest of us with a great deal more tolerant disrespect than can be accounted for merely by the difference in ages. New standards of behavior have infected the world. The divergence seems to be growing more acute rather than diminishing.
I have discussed this observation with my closest friends. They seem aware of it, but the reasons they give do not satisfy me. Proctor Jonnson, a practicing psychiatrist, said that in his opinion this new generation has been subjected to such a bewildering, contradictory series of social and cultural stresses and strains that they have ceased trying to establish any sequence of relative importance of ideas and objects. They’ve had the blissful reassurance that no matter what they do, society will nurture them, and so they have no compulsion to consider a career more important than an ability to water ski. He says we have deprived them of an appreciation of reality by depriving them of challenge.
On the other hand, George Tibault, a professor of sociology at Monroe College says that we cannot communicate with our young because they have no inner direction, no code of behavior based on an ingrained ethical structure. He says they will adjust their own codes over and over, depending on the accepted behavior patterns of each group within which they find themselves. This, he claims, is a splendid mechanism which enables the young to meet the survival requirements of our society better than we older ones, with our inner burden of rightness and wrongness. I told him I thought this rather cynical. He smiled and quoted a dictionary definition of cynical. I wrote it down. “Given to or marked by sneering at evidences of virtue and disinterested motives; inclined to moral skepticism.”
I had to confess that it seemed to fit the tenor of our times, as reflected in the public press.
But all that does not solve the mystery of Kirby Stassen. Here is a transcription from Miss Slayter’s notes:
“To take just one example, Kirby, I would like to ask you this. Do you feel that you would have killed or helped kill Horace Becher if you’d been alone, or with a different group?”
“The question doesn’t make much sense, sir.”
“In what way?”
“I’d never have seen the man unless it happened just the way it did. So how can I tell you what I would have done?”
“Surely you’ve got enough imagination to make up a situation where you would have come in contact with Horace Becher in some other way.”
“What kind of way, sir?”
“Say you were hitchhiking alone and he picked you up. Would you have killed him?”
“There wouldn’t be much sense in that, would there?”
“You imply that there was sense in the way he was killed?”
“No, sir. That was just the way it happened. It wouldn’t have happened that same way again in a thousand years. That’s why I can’t see the sense in these hypothetical questions, sir.”
“Just as a game, then, can you devise a situation where you would feel called upon to kill that man?”
“I guess so. You mean all alone, don’t you? I guess if I escaped from this place and hitched a ride with him and he turned the car radio on and figured out who I was. And if we were in the right sort of place. I guess I could do it. I’m not sure, but I think I could do it all right.”
“Would you feel you were doing wrong?”
“Oh, I know it would be wrong, sir. Anything against the law is wrong, isn’t it?”
“But would you feel guilt? Remorse? Shame?”
“That would depend on who he was, I’d say.”
The End of the Night Page 6