Had there been more of it later on, I could have gotten onto the same kick-track as Nan and Sandy, possibly. But my need was related all the way back to Kathy in some way that made killing symbolic. I needed to help this man become dead because Kathy was dead. It makes no sense. But it is as close as I can come.
After I had moved in on him, he hit me so solidly just under the ear that the sky spun, my eyes ran and my knees were jellied. It was good to be hit so hard. It called for extra effort. It provided a certain amount of excuse. And I was in it, a part of it, my identity, submerged into the group until, like awakening from a dream, I saw Nan working that knife into him, and saw her face, and it was like looking down into the lowest pit of hell. Blood looked black on her fist and wrist. I raised my foot, put it against his hip, and shoved the body off the back slant of the car into the ditch to get it away from her. She stood, shaking all over, the breath gasping out of her, then stooped to wipe the blade and her hand on the grass of the ditch bank.
The girl was sitting up. She was beautiful.
“The little lady has drawn the lucky number and won the moonlight tour. Bring her along,” Sandy said.
I stepped in ahead of Shack. Nan and I got her onto her feet. She was dazed and docile. In the headlights I saw a lump over her right ear, the blond hair bloody and matted. We got her into the back, in the middle, on my left, between Nan and me. Shack was in front, crouched over, counting the dead man’s money by the light of the dash panel.
“We’re rich!” Sandy crowed when Shack gave him the total.
My knees still felt trembly. The blow I had taken had given me a headache. The knuckles of my right fist were puffy and tender. I was very conscious of the girl beside me, sitting perfectly still.
“One less flannelhead in the world” Sandy said.
“I thought you loved them all, every one,” I said.
“I do, I do, dear boy. God loves them too. He made so many of them. Nan, darling, turn around and keep your creepy little face in that back window. Our new lovely darling will be missed by somebody. I want to pile up those fine, fat miles tonight. Bleat if you see lights moving up on us, Nano.”
“Why the hell did we have to bring her?” Nan demanded.
“Chivalry, dear. Old-fashioned, warmhearted chivalry. She had no transportation and no escort. What else could I do?”
“We need more women,” Shack said.
The girl spoke then. “I want to go home, please,” she said politely. It was a very small, clear, childish voice. I knew I had heard a voice just like that before, and it took me a few moments to remember that it had been at a party where one of those ubiquitous amateur hypnotists found that my date was a very good subject. So he had “regressed” her back to, I believe, the third grade in school. And she had spoken in this same childish voice.
A car passed us, going in the opposite direction, and for a moment I could see her face in the headlights. She was looking at me gravely and politely, but I had the impression she was close to little-girl tears.
“What’s your name, dear?” I asked her.
“Helen Wister.”
“How old are you, Helen?”
“What?”
“How old are you?”
“I’m—almost nine.”
Sandy gave a whoop of laughter and Shack said, “That’s the biggest goddam nine-year-old broad I ever …”
“Shut up!” I told them. “She’s hurt. You can get one hell of a case of amnesia from a blow on the head.”
“My head hurts and I want to go home, please,” she said.
“This is spooky,” Nan announced. “I don’t like it.”
“She could have a pretty bad brain injury, Sandy,” I said.
“Now wouldn’t that be a dirty shame!”
“Hell, what good is she to you? We could dump her in one of these small towns.”
“Very interesting,” Sandy said. “The stratification of society at work. She comes from his own class. He recognizes that at once. So all of a sudden she’s a sister. What’s she done, Kirboo? Touched your heart?”
“Well, what are you going to do with her?”
“I’ll clue you, Samaritan. We keep her aboard. If she gets worse, we’ll dump her, but not in any town, man. If she stays the same or gets better, she’s for fun and games. Right Shack?”
“Fun and games, Sandy. You’re the boss,” Shack said.
“Please take me home!” Helen begged.
“We are taking you home, dear,” I told her. “It’s a long way.”
“How long?”
“Oh, hours and hours. Why don’t you take a nap, Helen? Here.” I put my arm around her, pulled her head onto my shoulder.
“Jesus K. Christ!” Nan said.
“Jealous?” Sandy asked.
“Of a washed-out blonde with the crazies? Hell, no!”
The child-woman snuggled closer. She sighed heavily a few times. As quickly as any child, she slid away into sleep.
We moved swiftly through the night in a whirring silence and then Sandy began, “Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh.”
She wore a woman’s perfume. Her hair tickled my neck. My left arm went to sleep, but I did not want to disturb her. Shack got out the gin bottle. He and Nan were the only ones who wanted any.
We were trapped, all of us, in that small, drumming place. We were united, like survivors of catastrophe, floating down a river on a roof. No matter what happened, it was going to happen to all of us.
Nan suddenly said, “Remember Louie? Remember Louie, Sandy? In Dago?” There was a forced gaiety in her voice. It was a device she often used, this abrupt recollection of things shared, establishing hers as the closest relationship to Sandy.
“I remember that cat,” he said.
“It was fun, Sandy.”
“It was the greatest,” he said in a tone of boredom.
The girl circled in my arm was clean and fresh, and her sleeping breath was humid against the base of my throat. Something stirred in me in response to her helplessness, and yet at the same time I resented her. I had seen too damn many of these brisk and shining girls, so lovely, so gracious, and so inflexibly ambitious. They had counted their stock in trade and burnished it and spread it right out there on the counter. It was all yours for the asking. All you had to do was give her all the rest of your life, and come through with the backyard pool, cookouts, Eames chairs, mortgage, picture windows, two cars, and all the rest of the setting they required for themselves. These gorgeous girls, with steel behind their eyes, were the highest paid whores in the history of the world. All they offered was their poised, half-educated selves, one hundred and twenty pounds of healthy, unblemished, arrogant meat, in return for the eventual occupational ulcer, the suburban coronary. Nor did they bother to sweeten the bargain with their virginity. Before you could, in your hypnoid state, slip the ring on her imperious finger, that old-fashioned prize was long gone, and even its departure celebrated many times, on house parties and ski weekends, in becalmed sailboats and on cruise ships. This acknowledged and excused promiscuity was, in fact, to her advantage. Having learned her way through the jungly province of sex, she was less likely to be bedazzled by body hunger to the extent that she might make a bad match with an unpromising young man. Her decks were efficiently cleared, guns rolled out, fuses alight, cannonballs stacked, all sails set. She stood on the bridge, braced and ready, scanning the horizon with eyes as cold as winter pebbles.
One of these invincible ones slept against me, all weapons discarded for a time. I found her left hand, found her ring finger, felt the small, cool angles of the engagement stone. I wondered about her prey. I sensed that it was not the husky type we’d left dead in the ditch. No, this was one of the very special ones, so she would have had a large choice of game, like a hunter in a game preserve. So she had probably knocked down a trophy head, one who combined most of the advantages the girls of this station sought. He would be amiable, polite, well-educated, tall and “in
teresting-looking.” He would be witty, but not in any acid way that might inhibit their social life. He would be gregarious without being a jolly-boy full of life-of-the-party routines, because that is in bad taste. He would have that quiet drive, that unobvious ambition, which would take him high and far. His occupation would give them good social status, so he would be in one of the professions most probably, or he might be a junior executive type with a very reliable corporation. And, with all her tools and weapons, she would now have him noosed so firmly his eyes would be bulging. He would be so far gone he would be willing to trade his immortal soul for permanent legal uninterrupted access to her expensive panties.
Not for me, I thought. I shall never be suckered by that cold-hearted routine. And I suddenly realized that I had gone well beyond the point of choice. Even if I changed my mind and decided to fall in step with everybody else, it was now too late. Only in the animated cartoons could a small creature fall off a mountain, look down, register surprise, and climb back up through the empty air to safety.
She woke twice during the long night ride and each time she complained in a sleepy child voice about wanting to be home in her own bed.
Sandy found the place we would stay, shabby dusty cottages at a resort area called Seven Mile Lake. He had a special genius for picking safe places. It was good to hole up. He’d had the radio on a few times, and it sounded as if the whole world was looking for us. The radio told us we had grabbed the daughter of a wealthy surgeon, and she had been planning to marry an architect. We learned for the first time how two witnesses had watched us kill the man. We found out his name was Arnold Crown, and that he had owned a service station. The world told us that we were despicable, heartless monsters, crazed by drugs, on a cross-country slay-fest.
We could not identify ourselves with the people they were describing. Sandy put it in words when he said. “They shouldn’t oughta let people like that run around loose.”
It broke us up.
I had no trouble with the slob woman who rented me the cottage. All she had eyes for was the twenty-five dollars. We got our stuff out of the car trunk and went in and turned some lights on. The bedrooms were off either side of the small sitting room. Nan escorted Helen to the bathroom, with Sandy warning her not to try anything cute with the blond. Sandy and I sat on a sagging couch, leaning back, our heels on a coffee table. Shack stood with the gin bottle and tilted it high, heavy throat pulsing. He lowered it and looked at Sandy. The tension was there, and it was building, and it made the pit of my stomach crawl. Shack’s eyes were small, bright, hooded, vulgar—with long lashes, reminding me of the eyes of an elephant.
“How about it, Sandy? How about it?” he asked.
“Shut up a while,” Sandy told him.
“Sure, Sandy. Sure thing.”
Nan brought Helen back. Gray was coming in the windows, feebling the lights we’d turned on. There is a way a woman stands, and there is a way a child stands. Helen stood, toeing in slightly, chewing the first knuckle of her right hand, plucking at the side of her skirt with the other hand, regarding us solemnly. The look of her made the look of her breasts incongruous, so round against the green of her sleeveless blouse. Her diamond caught the light, refracting sharp glints of color. Her white skirt was of the material I believe is called dacron fleece. It had two high slash pockets, with a large green non-functional button on each pocket. Her green shoes were very pointed, with those tall, spidery heels, tipped with brass.
“Sit down, honey,” Sandy told her. “Join the group.” She sat in a wicker chair, plumping herself down as a child does.
“This isn’t home,” she said accusingly. “You promised.”
“Be a good girl or you’ll get a spanking,” Sandy said.
Nan sat in another chair and pulled her legs up into the chair and watched the scene with a dark and sulky amusement.
Shack moved restlessly, nervously, lifting his knees curiously as he walked, fists balled, face dark and sweating, neck bowed. “How about it, Sandy?” he begged.
I suddenly remembered what he reminded me of. Long ago in a summer camp in Vermont, three of us sneaked away to watch a farmer breed a mare. When we got there, breathless after a long run down the country road, the stallion was in a corral beside the barn. The mare was in the barn, in a box stall. The stallion was pacing back and forth as close to the barn as he could get, ears back, nostrils distended, whinnying and blowing. From time to time he would trot in a curious compact way, lifting his knees high, bowing his neck. I learned much later that this is one of the basic steps of that art of horsemanship known as dressage.
They wouldn’t let us into the barn. But we waited and we heard the stomping of hoofs and the men yelling excited instructions to each other, and the whistling, triumphant scream of the stallion.
“Jesus Christ, Sandy!” Shack said with growing indignation.
“Shut up, monster,” Sandy said. He turned toward me, his blue eyes dancing bright with malicious curiosity. “You had a lot to say in Del Rio, boy. You said you’d come to the end of all crud. You said emotion was something you could do without from here on in. You said nothing meant a damn to you, and nothing ever would. Remember?”
“Certainly I remember.”
“No sentiment, boy. But Nashville gave you the jumps.”
“Did it?”
“Maybe you’re a faker, college boy.” It was the last time he ever called me that.
“How so?”
“You’re just playing a game with yourself, maybe. And inside you’re still loaded with crud.”
“All this talk talk, for God’s sake!” Shack said.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, Sandy,” I said, but I knew which way he was going, and what he was doing, and I didn’t know if I could take it. I just didn’t know.
“Let’s kick over a baby carriage, and see if you’re kidding yourself. All you got to do is say the word, Kirboo, and we can stop it right there. Okay, Shack. Put baby to bed.”
Shack grinned like a shark and whirled toward the girl. “Come on, baby. Come on!” he said.
She looked at him with a childish dubiousness and distaste. He took her by the wrist and pulled her up out of the chair. She tried to pull away from him, her mouth beginning to make the shape of tears to come.
“Come on, doll,” he said, his voice so thickened it was barely comprehensible, and spun her and got a thick arm around her waist, the heavy, hairy hand clamped on slenderness. He walked her with an almost grotesque tenderness toward the open door of the bedroom.
She tried to hang back, saying thinly, “I want to go home. Please, I want to go home.”
I told myself that it didn’t matter a damn to me. I told myself it was just an interesting play on beauty and the beast. I told myself that one more rape in the history of the world was hardly significant. I told myself that she was too dazed to have much knowledge of what was happening to her, and it was unlikely that she would remember any of it. I told myself that people were dying in agony as I sat there. I told myself that I had given up pity and sentiment and mercy. I’d stared at Kathy, gray and shrunken, pasted to the tile floor by her own cooling blood, and that had been the end of all mercy.
They had reached the doorway. Helen had begun to whine in the hopeless way of defeat and fear. Nan chuckled, and the sound of it sickened me.
“You win,” I said to Sandy. “You win, brother.”
He gave one yelping, derisive laugh and said, “No dice today, Shack. Break it off, monster. It’s Kirboo’s baby.”
But, of course, it was too late. We should have known it was too late. Sandy had been testing that blind loyalty, putting an ever-increasing strain on it, always demanding, never giving. And so it snapped.
Shack thrust the girl into the room with such force that we saw her stumble, then heard her fall where we couldn’t see her. He turned, filling the doorway, staring at Sander Golden and seeing a stranger.
“Go to hell!” he said thickly. “It’s mine.
”
Sandy bounced to his feet and stepped over the coffee table. “You don’t want me to be mad at you, Shack.”
“Get back. Get back or I’ll kill you, pal.”
I got up and moved slowly, angling toward him, walking on the balls of my feet. He stood with his chin on his chest, eyes flicking back and forth from me to Sandy.
“You do what I tell you to do,” Sandy said softly.
“That’s over,” Shack said. “No more of that.”
And it was all going to blow up, right then and there, in ten thousand pieces. I edged toward a table lamp. The base looked heavy enough.
Nan said, “You damn fools!” and she went by me almost at a run, right at Shack, and for a moment I thought she had the knife in her hand, held low. But she flung her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. “What do you want with somebody who don’t know the score, honey?” she cooed at him.
He tried to pull her arms free, but they were strongly locked.
“Be nice to Nan, cutie-pie,” she murmured.
His face changed. She tugged him out of the doorway. They went awkwardly across the room toward the other bedroom.
“What’s going on here?” Sandy demanded.
“Close your face,” Nan said sweetly, and they entered the other room and banged the door shut.
I went through the doorway. Helen was standing by the window staring at me, tears running down her face, shiny in the first pale light of day. As I closed the door from the inside, I looked out at Sandy. He spread his hands and shrugged as I closed the door and locked it. Nan had saved the group. I couldn’t ask myself whether it was worth saving. Perhaps Helen was. You can go and go until you find the last limit of yourself, and there’s no way to get beyond that.
The End of the Night Page 22