The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  And the talk. My God, how I could talk! The right words came, the special words, so I could talk like poetry. I didn’t need the tequila. I got onto a talking jag. I put my trembling fists on the table and, leaning forward, I told them the Kathy story, all of it, and I knew as I was telling them that it was a pitiful shame there was no tape recorder there so it could all be saved. I told it all, and I finally ran down.

  “He’s really humming,” Sandy said fondly.

  “Too much D?” Nan suggested.

  “He’s big. He can use a heavy charge. So you’re headed no place at all, Kirboo?”

  “No place, on my own time, free as a fat bird,” I said. My ears were ringing. I could hear my heart, like somebody hammering on a tree.

  “We’ll go to New Orleans,” Sandy said firmly. “I’ve got wild friends and playmates there. It’ll be a long ball. We’ll scrounge a pad and live fruitfully, man.”

  “This party gets bigger, we can rent a Greyhound,” Nan said sourly.

  “Look at all he can learn,” Sandy said. “We can take his mind off his problems, Nano. Where’s your milk of human kindness?”

  “We don’t need him,” Nan said.

  Sandy, quick as light, thumped her so hard on top of the head with his fist that for a moment her eyes didn’t track.

  “You’re a drag,” he said, grinning at her.

  “So we need him,” she said. “You don’t have to clop me on the skull, man.”

  “I can let Shack do it, you like that better, doll.”

  I didn’t know at that time where she kept the knife, but it appeared with a magical swiftness, clicking, the blade lean, steady, pale as mercury, ten inches from Shack’s thick throat.

  “Hit me one time, Hernandez,” she said, barely moving her heavy mouth as she spoke. “Just one time.”

  “Aw, for Chrissake, Nan,” he said unhappily. “Put it away, huh. I haven’t done nothing.”

  There were two customers at the bar. The bartender came around the end of the bar and over to the table. “No knives, hey,” he said. “No knives. Don’t give me trouble.”

  As Nan folded the knife and lowered it below the edge of the table, Shack stood up. There was a hell of a lot of him to come up so quickly and lightly. “You need trouble?” he asked.

  “No. That’s what I was saying, fella. I don’t want trouble.” He turned away. Shack caught him in one stride, caught him by the forearm and spun him around.

  “I got mixed up,” Shack said. “I thought you were asking for trouble.”

  The man was big and soft. I saw his face turn suddenly gray and sweaty. I didn’t understand until I looked at Shack’s hand on the man’s arm. Shack seemed to be holding him casually. But his iron fingers were deep in the soft, round arm. The man’s knees sagged and he forced himself erect with an effort.

  “No … trouble,” he said in a weak, gasping way.

  “That’s nice,” Shack said. “Okay.” For a moment his face was contorted with effort. The man gave a faraway bleating sound and closed his eyes and sagged down onto one knee. Shack hauled him up, gave him a gentle shove toward the bar and released him. The man tottered back to the bar. Shack sat down.

  “The philosophy of aggression,” Sandy said. “She got sore at me and took it out on Shack who took it out on fatso. Tonight, when he gets home, he beats up on his old lady. She kicks the kid. The kid kicks the dog. The dog kills a cat. End of the line. Aggression always ends up with something dead, Kirboo. Remember that. It’s the only way to end the chain. She put the knife in Shack’s throat, that would have ended it. We’re all animals. Let’s get out of here.”

  We went out into a low slant of sunlight. I had the cheap, shiny, Mexican suitcase. Sandy Golden had his rucksack slung over one shoulder. Nan carried a large, sleazy hatbox, a drum-like thing covered with red plastic stamped in an alligator pattern. Shack had his few possessions in a brown paper bag. The world was bright, aimless and indifferent. We hitched for an hour. There were too many of us. It didn’t seem to matter. Nan sat on my upended suitcase. Sandy talked about the sexual implications of the design of the American automobile. In the last light of the day an old man in a stake truck stopped. He had the three of us get in back and he got Nan in front with him. He dumped us in Brackettville, thirty miles away. He had to turn north there. We ate questionable little hamburgers in a sour café.

  I had been with them long enough to sense the undercurrents between them. Shack was stalking Nan with a relentless patience, with implacable purpose. When he moved near her, his neck looked swollen. She was aware of it, and so was Golden. But Shack was stopped just short of savage directness by his pathetic desire to please Sandy in all ways. It wasn’t the knife stopping him. I’d seen him move. He could have cuffed it out of her hand before she could have used it. The focus of his desire was so strong it was like a musk in the air.

  We found a place in Brackettville. A dollar and a half a bed, Moldering little eight-by-ten cabins faced in imitation yellow brick, each one with an iron double bed that sagged like a hammock, one forty-watt bulb, one stained sink with a single faucet, one chair, two narrow windows, one door. Cracked linoleum on the floor. Outhouse out back. Sheets like gray Kleenex. Nails in the studding for coat hangers. The Paradise Cabins.

  There were six cabins and we were the only trade. We took three. Four and a half dollars for three beds. We sat around Sandy and Nan’s cabin—Shack on the chair, Sandy and me on the bed, Nan on the floor. We talked. Sandy finally doled out pills.

  “These all by themselves are death, man,” he said. “You go down six feet under, where the worms talk to you.”

  We broke it up. I was in the middle cabin. I wasted no time piling into the sack, trying not to think about bugs. I fell away so fast I didn’t even hear her come in. I woke up with a great start when she wound herself around me, saying in an irritable, conversational tone, “Hey! Hey, you! Hey!” She jostled me insistently.

  I had fallen so deeply into sleep so quickly that time and place were out of joint, and with an almost unbearable joy I put my arms around Kathy Keats and found her mouth with mine. But the lips were wrong, and her textures were wrong, and her hair had a musty smell. Kathy was gray and dead, and as I remembered that, everything else clicked into place.

  I took my mouth from hers and said, “Nan?”

  “Do you think it’s for Chrissake little Bo Peep,” she said in a sleepy, sulky voice, administering a caress as mechanical as any song lyric.

  “I didn’t know you cared, kid.”

  “Shut up, will you? Sandy said pay you a visit. So here I am and so get it the hell over with, will you, without all the conversation.”

  Had I not awakened thinking she was Kathy, it would have been impossible. But it was not, and so we got it the hell over with because it seemed easier than sending her back with a no-thanks message for Sandy. With meaningless dexterity, she made it very quick indeed, and rolled out and, in the faint light, stepped into her slacks. She’d left her blouse on.

  “Tell Sandy thanks,” I said, with rancid amusement.

  “Tell him yourself, sometime,” she said, and the screen door creaked and banged shut as she left. Before I could enjoy my own bitterness, I fell back into sleep.

  I learned Sandy’s special motive on Monday when it was almost noon and we were a mile east of Brackettville on 90, swinging high and clear on Dr. Golden’s encapsulated joy, thumbing the cars that whined by, trailing dust devils. Sandy reached over and patted Nan on the firm seat of her slacks in a proprietary way and said, “Did this chick do you right when I sent her to you last night, Kirboo, or did she drag?”

  “She … she was fine,” I lied, feeling uneasy.

  And I had to turn and look at Shack. His face had turned a swollen red and he was staring at Sandy, and looking as if he had lost his last friend. He looked as though he would break into tears.

  “Jeez-Chri, Sandy!” he said. “How come it’s okay for him, but you never …”

  “Don�
�t we have to teach this upstanding young man all about life and reality, Shack? Would you deprive him of an education?”

  “I figured you just didn’t want to share, and that was okay, but if you’re going to do like that, I’m going to …”

  “You’re going to what?” Sandy demanded, moving close to Shack.

  “I just meant …”

  “You want to go to New Orleans, or do you want to go back to Tucson, Hernandez?”

  “I want to come along, Sandy, but …”

  “Then shut up. Okay?”

  Shack gave a long and weary sigh. “Okay. Anything you say, Sandy.”

  The scene had elements of the bull ring in it. Hernandez could have snapped Sandy’s spine in his hands. The girl was the cape, spread in front of the black bull, then whipped gracefully away as he charged. I knew Sandy was testing his own strength and control. But when the scene was over, Shack looked at me in a way that made me entirely uncomfortable. Up until then he had been indifferent toward me. But now I could sense that he wanted to get those big hands on me.

  We finally got another lift in a truck, this time a pickup, with two weathered men in the cab, and the four of us in the back. This time we made forty miles. To Uvalde. After food and cabins, slightly better than before, we didn’t have much money left. We sat in Nan and Sandy’s cabin and pooled all we had. Not quite nine dollars.

  “Going along like this,” Sandy said, “we’ll have long beards the time we get to Burgundy Street, man. Or we’ll starve.”

  “We can stop and work some,” Shack said.

  “Never use that word in front of me again, sir,” Sandy told him.

  “It’s on account of we’re too many,” Nan said. “I’ve been telling you. We can split up and you and me, honey, we could make it all the way through in a day, honest to God. I know.”

  “We’re all too happy together to break it up,” Sandy said.

  “This is happy?” she asked sullenly.

  “Shut up,” he said. “This is hilarious like. Anyhow, I’ve got an idea. For tomorrow. We’ve got to start being shrewd like. Use all assets and talents. We need a car of our own, children.”

  “Grand theft auto,” Shack said darkly.

  “Maybe we can just borrow one.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Watch and learn,” he said. “Watch and learn, college boy.”

  The next day was Tuesday, the twenty-first of July. That’s the day they say we started our “career.” He slugged us so hard Monday night, we weren’t stirring until noon, and then he hopped the three of us high and far, and got what was left of the tequila into Shack. He made us walk east on 90 until we were dragging. It was a blinding, dizzying day. The coaching didn’t start until he found a place that suited him.

  It went off exactly the way he planned it. Nan stood on the shoulder of the road with her hatbox. We lay flat behind rocks and brush. A man alone, in a blue-and-white Ford station wagon, a new one, came to a screaming stop fifty yards beyond her and backed up so hastily you could guess that he thought he’d better get her before the next guy stopped. She got into the front seat with her hatbox. She smiled at him and suggested he set the hatbox in back. He took it in both hands and strained around in the seat. While he was in that position she stuck the point of her little knife into the pit of his belly, puncturing the skin just enough, and told him that if he moved one little muscle, she’d open him up like a Christmas goose. She convinced him. He didn’t even let go of the hatbox. She held him there until two cars went by. When the road was clear in both directions, she gave a yell and we scrambled up and hurried to the wagon and got in. Sandy and I got into the back. Shack went around and opened the door on the driver’s side, took aim and chunked the man solidly under the ear with his big fist. The man sagged. Shack bunted him over with his hip and got behind the wheel and in a moment we were rolling along at a legal speed. Nan checked the glove compartment. She found a .32-caliber automatic and handed it back to Sandy. He shoved it into his rucksack.

  “I do like station wagons!” Sandy said reverently, and suddenly we were all laughing. No reason.

  I felt no slightest twinge of guilt or fear. It didn’t seem to me then that we had done anything serious. It was all like a complicated joke.

  The man stirred and groaned and lifted his head. “What are you people doing …”

  Nan put the knife against his short ribs. “No questions now, Tex,” Sandy said. “Later.”

  After we’d gone maybe five miles, Sandy told Shack to slow it down. The road was clear. We turned off onto a sandy road that was hardly more than a trace. We crawled and bumped over rocks until we had circled around behind a barren hill, completely out of sight of the road. Sandy had Shack turn it around so we were headed out. Shack took the key out of the switch. We got out. In the sudden silence we were a thousand years from civilization. A lizard stared at us and ran. A buzzard circled against the blue, high as a jet. You could hear the hard high whine of the cars, fading down the scale as they went by on the invisible highway.

  There was a pile of rocks twenty feet from the car. Nan and Sandy sat on the rocks. I sat on my heels not far from them. Shack took a half cigar from his pocket and lit it, and stood leaning against the front fender. The man stood beside the open door of the car. He rubbed his neck and winced. He was maybe thirty-five, with blond hair cut short and a bald spot. He had a round, earnest, open face, pale-blue eyes, a fair complexion. His nose, forehead and bald spot were red and peeling. He wore a light-blue sports shirt, sweaty at the armpits, and gray slacks, and black-and-white shoes. He had a long torso, short, bandy legs, and a stomach that hung over a belt worn low. He wore a wide gold wedding band and, on the little finger of his right hand, a heavy lodge ring.

  He tried to smile at all of us, and said, “I thought the little lady was traveling alone. My mistake.”

  “What’s your name, Tex?” Sandy asked.

  “Becher. Horace Becher.”

  “What do you do, Horace?”

  “I’m sales manager of the Blue Bonnet Tile Company out of Houston. I’ve been making a swing around the territory. Checking up.”

  “Checking up on girl hitchhikers, Horace?”

  “Well, you know how it is.”

  “How is it, Horace?”

  “I don’t know. I just saw her there …” He visibly pulled himself together. His smile became more ingratiating. You could almost hear him telling himself that he was a salesman, so get in there and sell, boy. “I guess you folks want money and I guess you want the car. Everything is insured, so you go ahead and take it. I won’t give you a bit of trouble, folks. Not a bit. I’ll wait just as long as you say before I report it, and I won’t be able to remember the license number when I do. Is that a good deal?”

  “Throw me your wallet, Horace,” Sandy ordered.

  “Sure. Sure thing.” He took it out and threw it. It landed near me. I picked it up and flipped it to Sandy.

  Sandy counted the money. “Two hundred and eighty-two bucks, Horace. That’s very nice. That’s decent of you, man.”

  “I like to carry a pretty good piece of cash on me,” Horace said.

  “Mm-m. Credit cards. Membership cards. You’re all carded up, Horace. American Legion too?

  “I got in just as the war ended. Had some occupation duty in Japan.

  “That’s nice. Belong to a lot of clubs, Horace?”

  “Well, the Elks and the Masons and the Civitan.”

  “What’s your golf handicap?”

  “Bowling’s my game. Class A. One eighty-three average last year.”

  “Drink beer when you bowl?”

  “Well, that’s part of it, I guess.”

  “You’re in lousy condition, Horace, with that big disgusting gut on you. You should cut down on the beer.”

  Horace slapped his stomach and laughed. It was a flat and lonely sound under the hot sun, and it didn’t last long.

  “Who’s the fat broad in this picture, man?”
>
  “That’s my wife,” Horace said rather stiffly.

  “Better take her off the beer too. These your kids?”

  “Two of them. That was taken three years ago. I got a boy eighteen months old now. Like I said, you people can take the car and the money, and no hard feelings.”

  “If we do, would you call it stealing, Horace?”

  The man looked blankly at Sandy. “Wouldn’t it be?”

  “That’s a raunchy attitude, man. You’re a big successful clubman. And you get this chance to loan us a car and some money.”

  “A loan?”

  “We’re your new friends. Treat your friends right, Tex.”

  “Sure thing,” he said brightly. “It can be a loan, if that’s the way you want it.”

  He had been edging back toward the open door of the car. I had noticed it and I guessed Sandy had. Suddenly he whirled and plunged headlong into the car, yanking the glove compartment open. He scrabbled with both hands, releasing a gay rain of trading stamps, dislodging Kleenex, sun lotion, road maps. His hands moved more slowly and stopped. He lay half across the seat as though in exhaustion, and we heard the rasp of his breathing. He pushed himself slowly back out of the car and stood and smiled in a small sick way.

  “Now that wasn’t polite, man,” Sandy said.

  A faraway jet made a faint ripping sound. Becher stood in his own small black pool of shadow. He was sweating heavily. The situation was changing. He had triggered it. I could feel a coiling and turning in my stomach.