The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  Sandy nudged me awake with his foot when the day was almost gone. There was an icy stream a hundred feet away. We used the cold water to freshen up and scrape the stubble off. Nan went a dozen feet downstream, stripped, soaped herself, squatted in a shallow pool and rinsed, not knowing or caring that Shack did not take his eyes off her for an instant. When she pulled her slacks on again he made a low moan, very deep in his throat, half growl and half moan.

  I had glanced at her a few times as she bathed there. The tilted sunlight came between the trunks, dappling the grass, her haunches and the black pool. With that heavy crop of hair and the faint and dusky shadow of the pelt that ran down the cleft of her back, she could have been Prehistoric Woman, a diorama in a museum of natural history. Our modern culture had put red paint on her lips, metal in her mouth, and a puckered surgical scar on her belly. But all the rest—the slightly brutish cast of features, the S curve of waist into hip, the saffron nipples, the pubic pyramid, the elemental savageness—these were unchanged across fifty thousand years.

  I could not want her. She had been tossed to me, the way you flip a pack of cigarettes to a friend, and it had been nothing. Once you have accustomed yourself to drinking acid, sour red wine is like stale water on the tongue. I sensed, however, how sublimely suited to each other were Nan and Hernandez. Sandy called them the animals. They were displaced in time. They both belonged in prehistory, back in callous violence, roaming the raw land, mating with random fury, tearing at each other, charring the bloody meat of the latest kill in the fire in the mouth of the cave.

  They were not for this time. But their inadequacy was not the same as Sandy’s and mine. There are the constitutional inadequates, whose bodies have too frail a grasp on life. And the mental inadequates, trapped back in their dim minds. Sandy is a moral and social inadequate, unable to cope with the folkways and structures of his culture. I am an emotional and spiritual inadequate—but this can be said in a much simpler way: I have no capacity to love. A man who cannot love is like one of those machines that jokester mechanics build as a gag. Wheels go around and lights flash and plungers go up and down, and it makes a ratchety noise, but it has no purpose. A machine without a purpose, once it is out of control, is dangerous. Once I came very close to being able to love. But that, of course, was Kathy. After Kathy the pointless machine began to work with greater speed and fury.…

  As we drove east into the Arkansas dusk, I felt dull, wooden, spiritless. I felt as if all the furniture of my mind had been reupholstered in dusty black velvet. I took a hundred small naps, and in the periods of going to sleep or awakening, their voices sounded metallic and unreal over the rolling thunder of the Olds.

  I was asleep when they picked up a better car, a red-and-white Chevrolet, a new one, in some small city in Arkansas. They picked it up in the parking lot of a private club. I vaguely remember transferring from the Olds to the newer car. And I can remember Sandy relating their adventures in his taut, tumbling voice.

  He was calling Shack a monster. In sneaking through the dark and crowded parking lot of the club, hearing the music coming from the club, they had come across a car where a couple was making love in the back seat.

  “Both of them bagged,” Sandy said. “So before I can move a pinky, the monster opens the rear door, takes that stud by the nape of the neck, pulls him out, pops him one time, drops him and kicks him under the car. The woman is saying in a little whiny voice. “Wheresha go? Arthur! Arthur! Whereya, baby?’ So the monster says, ‘Here I am!’ and he dives in there like a fullback going over center. In about five seconds that broad realizes something brand-new had come into her life, and she didn’t like any part of it, man. She starts yelping like she’s being killed, so the monster thumps her one too. While this is going on, I’m pulling Arthur out from under the car and checking him over. Fifty-eight bucks, but no keys. When the monster got out, I had him pick Arthur up and chunk him back in there with her. When the lights come on for those love bugs, they’re going to be confused like. The next car I checked was this one, and it had the keys in it.”

  So now, I thought, we add rape to the list. After Horace, it was about as serious as disorderly conduct. After Horace there was no worse place you could go.

  I slept again. I remember waking up when Shack and Nan were sleeping. Sandy was pushing the Chev hard. I saw the glow of the dashlights against the small round knob of muscle at the corner of his jaw. The dark land wheeled by. He was singing. He sang that part that comes after you finish singing “I’ve been working on the railroad.” But he sang only one part of the ending, over and over. “Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh. Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh.” Over and over, endlessly. Listening, I realized I had heard him doing it before. Now it has become a part of all the memories of that time. The night and the running roar of the car, and Sandy’s voice, like the sound track of an art movie.

  Sandy shook me awake in the predawn light. We were parked outside the office of a motel near Tupelo, Mississippi. “We got to have the services of the clean American yout’,” he said, “he who by virtue of his shining countenance is above suspicion. Rise and give me that scout master beam, Kirboo.”

  After I got out and yawned and rubbed my face and stretched, I was able to be the responsible errand boy. The red neon vacancy sign was lit, and a light over the night bell. After three long rings I heard somebody stirring. A very pregnant dough-faced blonde in a red satin housecoat opened the door, stared stupidly at me and said, “Yah?”

  I signed us up. Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Sanderson, Mr. Kenneth Tynan and Mr. Theodore Sturgeon. It shows poverty of invention, but I plead sleepiness. Much later this gave the prosecuting attorney a wonderful opportunity to display his considerable talent for sarcasm.

  I paid her eighteen dollars for two twin-bed doubles. It was a fraud motel, glossy and landscaped on the outside, full of borax furniture and junk plumbing on the inside. I almost fell asleep standing up in the cranky shower. By the time I got into bed, Hernandez was snoring like a snare drum. It didn’t bother me a bit.

  We were back on the road just as the sun went down. Sandy had doled out pills which lifted us up and out and away, glowing with induced joy, floating on numbered clouds, making bad jokes. Even that tension between Shack and Nan was gone, and they were unexpectedly animated. She sang some dirty little French songs a sculptor had taught her, her voice husky and untrue. Sandy did a long imitation of Mort Sahl.

  But we were on our way through Nashville. I am not going to write the Nashville episode into this record. The newspaper did enough chop-licking over it. It was a sick, dirty business, pointless, cruel and bloody. This is, I suspect, as close as I can come to apology. I cannot say that the business of Horace Becher had any particular grace or style. But it had a flavor of some kind that the Nashville affair did not. The Nashville affair was symptomatic of sickness and desperation. I took part in it directly. From then on Sandy dropped the “college man” routine. He brought it up one more time after that, during the Helen Wister thing, but that was all. In Nashville I won my dirty spurs.

  Also, in Nashville, I learned something about us, the four of us. I learned that we were going to be caught. I had been thinking that we might get away. We might get to New York and split up. But Nashville demonstrated that we weren’t going to let ourselves get away. When things started looking too easy, we would compulsively compound our problem and intensify the search. Even if Sandy had not dropped and lost Horace Becher’s pistol at the scene of the killing, I suspect the two would have been tied together. But he practically handed it to them, even though they took a long time to check it out. His losing it there was part of that same compulsiveness too, I believe.

  Nashville was a pointless gesture of hostility, a dirty word yelled at the world. It was without style or meaning. Pigs are slaughtered with more dignity. After Nashville we were committed all the way. Even Sandy was slightly chastened. We discussed splitting up, and said it was a good idea, a
nd we would split up later. But I think we all knew we’d never get the chance, and, in some obscure, perverse way, didn’t want the chance.

  Auto theft, rape, kidnap, murder. They were big words. I couldn’t make them real in my head. They were things other people did. The things I did were different, because I was Kirby Palmer Stassen, unique. For me the words were different. I was not engaged in a career of crime; I had embarked on a program of social experimentation. After it was all over, I would lecture to thoughtful groups, electrifying them with my pertinent observations on the meaning of life and the meaning of death.

  When we had tumbled back into the car in such great haste, Nan and I had gotten into the back seat. I think we must have been twenty miles from Nashville when she did a curious thing. I think she knew from my silence that I was deeply troubled, and it is even possible that in the shadowy recesses of her spirit there was the dim urge to give comfort. She picked up my hand, my right hand, reaching across me to take me by the wrist, and she pulled my hand over and slipped it into the V of her blouse and pressed it tightly against her warm, scanty breast. The slight stir of the nipple against my palm was as distasteful as though I trapped some sluggish insect there and it moved slowly in panic. And then I remembered, too vividly, the fatal thing my hand had done. My window was halfway down. I pulled away from her, found the electric button that put it down the rest of the way, leaned far out and gouted vomit into the soft, warm night. The hard wind snapped at my cropped hair and whipped the tears out of my eyes. When I sat back I was weak and dizzy. No one made any comment. Shack dug the final bottle of tequila out of Sandy’s rucksack. Sandy didn’t want any. Shack and Nan and I passed it back and forth until we had killed it. Nashville then was much more vague, but I knew it would be back, unbearably vivid. I knew that that final scream would sound forever in a closet in the back hall of my brain.

  The reverend came again today. As time grows shorter they seem to be sicking him onto me with increasing frequency. The governor has signed the execution warrant. Today I told him I was far too busy to grant him the standard courtesy of ten minutes of my time. I said I wanted to be certain I would complete this journal. He looked at me severely and told me it would be more fitting if I devoted the time to the nurture of my immortal soul. I told him that I agreed heartily, and I was looking for my immortal soul in my own fashion, and half expected to find it somewhere on these pages, and it would probably be a gray, sly little fellow in a gnome hat, peering maliciously out from behind a bad word. He went away, shaking his ecclesiastical head.

  TEN

  It is curious to note that during the weekend recess which was followed almost immediately by the summations of the prosecution and the defense and the judge’s charge to the jury, Riker Deems Owen, the attorney for the defense, used precious time and energy in the preparation of his final informal memorandum on the Wolf Pack Case.

  Certainly the same time devoted to his summation would have resulted in a more effective job, but it is possible that Owen realized by that time, as did most of the perceptive spectators and communications people, that he had already lost his case. Even with a lost case, however, it would seem more in keeping with Owen’s evident egomania and distorted sense of history to have worked up a summation which he would hope would rank with the deathless ones of Darrow, one of his household gods.

  There is the alternate assumption that Owen did give the preparation of his summation every morsel of time and energy he felt it required. Those of us who were present that icy day can be forgiven for believing that his final effort in the trial could have been improved upon, regardless of the outcome. His case was beyond saving. His professional reputation was not.

  Though it is not pertinent, it is somehow touching to see how perfectly the Owen memoranda were typed by Miss Leah Slayter. They were without erasures, strikeovers. It is likely that whenever she made an error, she started the page over. Though this is prescribed procedure with legal documents, it could only be considered proper for informal memoranda when the typist has the feeling she is typing a work of great importance for a great man.

  It is rather pleasant somehow to realize that this devoted employee was blind to the hapless performance of her boss in his most famous trial, and thought his rambling memoranda so precious as to deserve infinite care.

  Certainly Riker Deems Owen’s total performance in that trial can be considered of the second-rate. If we assume it was a case no man could have won, we can at least say that there are men who could have come closer. The electrocution of a female is a startling example of the ineptitude of any defense attorney.

  It was the post-trial derision in the public press which reduced Riker Deems Owen to a shrunken and rather hesitant old man.

  At the time he wrote this final memo on the case, he was not absolutely certain he would lose the case. Certainly he had no suspicion that his conduct of the defense would cause him to be jeered at. He had no idea of placing his professional reputation on the line when he took the case. But sometimes we gamble without knowing what the stakes are.

  Long days of testimony, of exhibits, objections, cross examinations tend to focus the mind and the attention on trivia, so that the larger issues are forgotten. John Quain is a clever, dogged, tireless prosecutor. I cannot take the chance of giving him perfectly free rein to establish the State’s case. I must protect my clients through emphasizing the chance of reasonable doubt in certain areas, in spite of my master plan of defense which borrows from certain interesting aspects of the Loeb-Leopold Case.

  John Quain is perfectly aware of my obligation to weaken, insofar as is possible, his edifice of evidence, and thus I must be constantly alert to avoid the traps implicit in his presentation. This, despite the competent staff at my elbow, is an exhausting task.

  I believe that I dug a few important holes in the testimony of the youngsters, Howard Craft and Ruth Meckler. The most significant one was Howard’s admission that it is possible that Arnold Crown struck the first blow, and due to their angle of observation, they missed it.

  Murder in the first degree implies motive, opportunity and prior intent. The priority of intent need be only a matter of a split second. If a murderer had adequate reason to have a rock in his hand, premeditation would be difficult to establish. But should he seek a rock and bend and pick it up, premeditation exists during that interval. However, should he be struck or injured in any way before picking up the rock, the chance of proving premeditation is weakened thereby.

  Would that I were permitted to defend these people before a judge and jury and spectators who had never heard of their wicked exploits. Justice, in the circumstances I face, is a farce. A whole nation watches these four human beings. An outraged nation demands they be executed. You can feel the weight of all the pressure in that courtroom. It is a tangible heaviness. If Stassen, Golden, Hernandez and Koslov had come from the most remote planet of the galaxy, if they were creatures of slime and tentacles, they could not be watched with any more curiosity and revulsion.

  They are being tried for what was done to the salesman, to the Nashville people, to Arnold Crown and to Helen Wister, not just for Crown alone. So this case is only symbolic, and hence my defense is the only possible one.

  It is interesting to see the various ways the four of them accept their long hours on trial. Stassen, in his well-cut flannel suit, with his polite, attentive and somewhat detached manner, would look much more at home at the press table. He writes me short notes from time to time. Some of them have been mildly helpful. I have noticed that he often stares directly at his jurors. I sense that he seems to baffle them, that they cannot equate his demeanor with the evidence presented.

  The idleness, the enforced spectator role is most difficult for Sander Golden to endure. He jitters and twitches endlessly, keeping a dozen mannerisms going at the same time. He whispers and mutters to the other defendants until he has to be silenced a half dozen times a day. He stares with bright mockery at every member of the jury in turn unti
l they look away. He has written me foolish notes in an awkward hand, miserably spelled.

  The girl sits placidly. She plays with her hair. She nibbles her nails. She yawns, and often, out of boredom, sighs audibly, recrosses her legs, scratches her thigh, yawns again. She cannot understand why she cannot have magazines to look at. Sometimes she draws the same face over and over again, the empty comic-book face of a pretty girl.

  Robert Hernandez endures it with the silent, unmoving patience of an ox. His metabolism is low, his deep, slow breathing imperceptible. A bear in a cage, when it is not pacing, will endure in that same way. He stares at the floor fifteen feet in front of him. A hairy fist lies slack on the table. The jury regards him with more assurance. This is a criminal type. Can’t you see it?

  I have tried to analyze the tangible emanations of hate that come from the spectators. It is uncommon, even in murder trials. I believe I have the reason for it. They did not kill for profit. Their entire adventure netted them less than fifteen hundred dollars, and finding so much cash on Crown was an accident they could not have anticipated.

  So because it was violence without meaning, they made a small, cheap thing of life. It is the instinct of man to consider life of greatest importance. If it is to be taken away the reason should be substantial. So he who denigrates the value of life, tries to give it a lower value in the market place, must be punished for the commission of great evil.

  And they have made a small, cheap thing of love. That is the second unforgivable. Reckless lust, if it should shake a man and overwhelm him and make him commit idiocies, can be partially understood and thus forgiven. But a casual code which makes of the act of sex a function barely more important than shaking hands invites hate and punishment.