“I can’t see anything, Herbie, he’s got too much hair. His hair is in the way.”
“Here, let me look, will you?”
“Maybe we ought to call a doctor or—”
“No, no. What is a doctor going to do? You have to stop the bleeding first, anyway, before you can do anything.”
“I once had a first-aid course. There are seven known pressure points. In the back of the neck—”
“Quiet. It’s too late for first aid. We’ll have to—”
“Ask him where it hurts!”
“Stupid, he’s out cold. Does anyone have a knife? The thing to do is cut it off at the roots.”
“I’m awake,” Peter yelled, “don’t cut anything.” But when he opened his eyes, the lids coming apart like petals, he saw nothing, only shades of blackness like patches one on top of another drawn tight. He blinked his eyes to no purpose, meteors circling his head; a red one with a striped tail had gotten inside and was trying—chopping at his brain—to get out.
He bumped into Lois, who was next to him, curled up in a kind of fetal position—her behind on his side of the bed. She’s asleep, he thought, it’s the middle of the night.
But then she wasn’t sleeping. “Are you all right, Peter?” she said, in a voice tremulous with concern.
“I can’t see,” he said, but he saw Lois, who was in a white flannel nightgown, her hair done up in braids; he saw her perfectly. With absolute, incredibly absolute clarity.
“Oh, my poor Peter.” She touched his eyes with generous fingers.
“I can see now,” he said. “Where’s Herbie and Gloria?”
“They left a long time ago, baby. I think you have a temperature. Your head is terribly warm.” Her mouth’s cool touch burned.
“I’m all right,” he boasted.
“I think I ought to call a doctor, Peter. I think so. Your head’s burning up.”
“I’m fine,” he insisted. “You see … what it is, there’s this flame in my head that goes on and off. When you touched me just now it went on.”
She laughed. “You’re out of your mind,” she said as though it were a grace. She kissed his forehead again, tasted his fever, lingered.
“If you don’t watch out,” he said, “you’re going to burn the house down.”
“Do you know,” she said, turned away from him, “sometimes, like now, I love you so much it frightens me.”
He closed his eyes and let it pass over him like a cool breeze, like a dream. “Would you repeat that, please?”
She touched his forehead with her hand, an official gesture of care. “You’re much cooler now, Peter,” she said. “You really are. I think your fever is completely gone.”
It was. It was gone. And, of all things, he missed it.
Lois had turned over onto her side, was trying to sleep.
“Who invited Herbie and Gloria, anyway?” he said, and waited and waited for no answer.
He reached his foot under the covers so that it touched her. She shivered in her sleep, moved away from him. “What are we going to do?” she muttered.
In the morning, in a dull bright glow, Peter’s fever was back, flickering in his eyes like a snake’s tongue.
With a kind of terrible tenderness, as if he were on the edge of death or breaking, Lois served him breakfast in bed—an enormous breakfast of juice, bagels and cream cheese, bacon and eggs, toast and jam, and coffee, which he wolfed down ravenously, still hungry when he finished.
“What day is today?” he said; he had the feeling he had been in bed convalescing for weeks, months.
“Yesterday was Wednesday,” she said, “today is Thursday, and tomorrow …” She smiled queerly, shrugged, looked at the wall behind his head.
“What’s tomorrow?” he said, realizing with a shock what it was in the moment of asking.
Having assembled the dirty dishes on a tray, Lois carted them into the kitchen, dropping a cup, the handle snapping off like dry wood.
She returned from the kitchen, unaccountably cheerful, smiling, carrying a cup of black coffee, her breakfast, a half-smoked cigarette floating face down in the saucer.
She sat on the edge of the bed, facing away from him. “What do you think?” she said in an abstracted, childlike voice.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. He shrugged.
Lois started to get dressed; Peter dozing, daydreaming. “Maybe I won’t go to school today,” she announced. “Will you stay home if I stay home?”
“Okay,” he said, not sure that the conversation wasn’t a part of his dream, and his answer made merely to the ghosts of his mind’s will.
“It will be nice,” she mused. “Like it was before we were married.”
Something bothered him. “Why do you say like before we were married’?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t have to be in love then.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” He was suddenly, the fever leaving him, terribly depressed, his head throbbing somewhere.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, still in her slip, studied him as if he were under glass, as if he were glass. “Do you think you’d feel better if you went to work?”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.” He couldn’t explain.
“It was better before we were married,” she said, her face mournful, her mouth twisted as if she just remembered having eaten something distasteful.
He was too depressed to talk—something, some hand of pressure hugging his throat.
“Why was it better before?” she said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either.” She got up, concerned with the necessity of getting dressed. “Even if you stay home, I think I better go to school. I’ve been missing too many classes as it is, Peter. And then I may have to miss a few days …” She looked at him, waited for him to say something, but he stared at the wall, pretended not to know that she was looking at him. They both knew he was pretending.
“I think it was better before,” she said, “because it seemed impermanent then, doomed to end sooner or later.” She finished dressing in a nervous hurry, glancing around as if something was out of place or missing. He remained in bed, lonely, convalescing.
“Have you seen my wallet anywhere?” she asked him, her coat on, ready to leave.
He was innocent this time (that is, he hadn’t seen it), though also suspicious of himself, a known liar and voyeur. He didn’t answer.
“I know you’re not sleeping, Peter, so you can stop pretending. Have you seen my wallet? I want to know. Did you take it?”
No, he muttered, the word soundless, trapped in his throat, burning.
“I’m going to be late,” she said, frantic, tearing about the apartment from kitchen to bathroom as though her frenzy could shame the wallet into making an appearance; in desperation—a protest against the duplicity of things—she poured the contents of two handbags onto the floor. “I’m late,” she kept saying. “I’m late. And my blue bag is also missing.”
Her last words at the door: “I hope you feel better.” The irony like poison gas.
As soon as she was gone, he was out of bed and dressed, weak on his feet but willing—willing for what, he didn’t know. Before he left for work, Peter pulled out the bottom drawer of the dresser and was rewarded for his curiosity: Lois’s blue bag was there, her wallet inside the bag. How could she not have known? he wondered. It was something else to worry about.
His mistake was to report the robbery. He had had only two fares in an hour—one a ten-cent tip—when he was called to a police station in Flushing to make an identification.
The man they were holding, he was told by a knife-faced detective who bore a curious resemblance to Dick Tracy, had been picked up the night before in the vicinity of the robbery for—in the detective’s words—making improper advances to a sailor. (What were proper adva
nces? Peter wanted to ask, didn’t.) “We found on his person,” the detective went on grimly, “fifty-four dollars and sixty-eight cents, of which more than ten dollars was in change. Which made us, as you can understand, suspicious. But then, to the best of our knowledge, no robbery had been committed last night which could be pinned to our man.” The detective paused, stabbed Peter with a look.
“I was in no condition …”
The detective cut him off. “This man we picked up, Peter—this Franklin Hart Windsor—had a toy pistol in the pocket of his coat. A kid’s cap pistol. Harmless, except that it is heavy enough to break a man’s head in.”
Peter was thinking, distracted—chronically at his unease with the police—that it would be nice, almost worth the day’s loss, to recover the money that had been stolen from him, but in his heart he anticipated only more trouble than he already had.
“We didn’t really know what we had, Peter, until the lab report came in this morning. Our men found particles of blood on the barrel and handle of Windsor’s toy pistol. What do you think of that, Peter?”
Reflexively, Peter felt the back of his head, which was still raw, soft-scabbed.
The detective smiled for the first time, his closed mouth like an iron rod bent up at the ends, an economy of gesture. “Caught you looking the wrong way, didn’t he?”
“I guess he did.” Ha ha. He wondered what they would do to him if he punched the detective in the mouth, though as a matter of tact he decided against it.
Sitting behind his desk, the detective looked busy, browsed through a pile of official-looking reports; separating one from the others, he pored over it with solemn deliberation, nodding to himself as he read, making notations with a red pencil, Peter growing increasingly impatient.
“Is that all?”
“What?” The detective looked up as if surprised to see Peter standing in front of his desk.
“Damn paper work,” he grumbled. ‘You can’t blow your nose without filling it out in triplicate.” His glance seemed to hold Peter responsible. “Pete, this description you gave us of your assailant jibes more or less perfectly with our old queer, Franklin Hart Windsor, who was picked up about two or three blocks away from where you say you were robbed. It looks to me like we have your man, Peter. How does it look to you?”
“I’d have to see him first.”
“It sounds like the man, though, doesn’t it?”
Peter shrugged, admitted grudgingly—giving nothing away—that it did.
“So as not to take up any more of your valuable time,” the detective said, with just the trace of irony in his toneless voice, “we’ll have him in here for you to identify in a very few minutes. Okay?”
As if on cue, a side door opened—a door Peter hadn’t noticed before—and a distinguished-looking middle-aged man swaggered in as though he were on a guided tour, an armed policeman his escort.
“Persecution is as old as sin,” Franklin Windsor said to the detective. He smiled at Peter as if they were old friends.
“What do you think?” The detective nudged Peter. “Take a good look at him.”
Arms out, Franklin Windsor turned himself around as if he was modeling the crumpled gray suit he had slept in.
“Ain’t he a beauty?” the guard said.
“What’s the verdict?” the detective said to Peter, winking at him.
At first Peter was sure that Windsor had been the man in his cab, but the more he looked at the suspect, the more it seemed possible that it might not have been Windsor. This man, this Franklin Windsor, standing clown-eyed between guard and detective, seemed more bloated than the man Peter remembered, though probably the night in prison explained the discrepancy—or the light, or the failure of Peter’s memory.
“Can you have him say something?” Peter asked, embarrassed at discussing Windsor as if he weren’t there.
“You have to wind me up first before I talk,” Windsor said.
“Mr. Windsor,” the detective said gently, with the soft pleasure of malice, “disrespect for the law is not going to help your case. Co-operate with us, and we’ll do our best to make it easier on you. Peter,” he continued, talking into Windsor’s face, “this man fits the description you gave us of your assailant. Take a good look at him. I want you to be absolutely sure before you make an identification.”
“Whatever you think I’ve done,” Windsor said, regaining his composure, “I assure you it was done by someone else.”
Peter knew what he meant.
“I suppose it was done by your girl friend,” the detective said, a close-mouthed smile for his audience.
“It is altogether possible,” Windsor said to the detective, “that this crime, whatever it was, was committed by you.”
The detective laughed like a man with feathers in his mouth.
“That’s not going to help you, mister,” the guard said to Windsor.
The detective laughed, a man who saw humor on all sides. “Well?” he said to Peter. “Is he or isn’t he?”
“I don’t know. I’m not absolutely sure.”
“Come on, Peter, don’t give us a hard time. You described this man to us. It’s in the report on my desk, in your own words, signed by you.” The detective smiled like knives. (Windsor, looking pleased and sad, farted.)
Peter felt the threat, the intention of threat, like the point of a weapon at the back of his neck. He had been indoctrinated in the Army to “Know Your Enemy,” and if as a matter of will he had unlearned everything else they had taught him, his knowledge of the enemy seemed ineradicable. This nerve of instinct was so well developed in him that he knew even more enemies than he had.
“It is possible that this is the man,” Peter said, the detective so close to him that he could smell the stale mint on his breath, “but since I’m not absolutely sure, I don’t think I ought to make an identification. The man who was in my cab was different in certain ways.”
The detective shook his head remorsefully, as though he were reprimanding a child. “All right,” he said to the guard, “take him away.” Windsor clicked his heels, made a Nazi salute. The guard prodded him in the back with the butt of his rifle. Windsor mock-grimaced. “I don’t mind pain,” he said to Peter as he left.
“To tell you the truth,” the detective said, sitting on the edge of his desk, “I think you’re either afraid of that man, Peter, or in conspiracy with him.” He turned his sharp face away, then back again, his eyes an assault. “Don’t you believe in law and order, Peter?”
“I believe in it,” Peter said. His hands were sweating.
“Without law and order,” the detective said, baring the teeth of a smile, “you people would go around all day beating each other over the head, stealing whatever you could get your greedy hands on.”
Peter nodded, looking at his watch, anxious to be on his way.
“You have contempt for the law, Peter, don’t you?”
“No.” It came out a whisper. “Lieutenant, I have to get back to work.”
“There’s no rush,” the detective said, going behind his desk. “Have a seat.”
Peter glanced behind him at the door, which was ajar. “Are you going to stop me from leaving?”
‘You surprise me, Peter,” the detective said, drumming his fingers on the desk. “I’m not ordering you to stay here, I’m asking you to give me a few more minutes of your time. Please sit down,” he ordered.
Peter remained standing, leaning over the detective’s desk, towering over it.
“If I let this man Windsor go,” the detective said, “the likelihood is—there are statistics that prove this—the likelihood is that he will commit the same kind of crime all over again, and the next cabbie he hits may not be as lucky as you. Do you want something like that on your head, Peter?”
“That’s not—”
The detective cut him off. “Answer my question, Peter.”
“Of course I don’t,” he said—a forced concession.
“So what are y
ou afraid of? A big guy like you. I don’t get it. A guy slugs me, I’d want to see his ass in a sling. I want to see him punished. All I’m asking, Peter, is that you help us enforce a law which is for your protection. Is that too much to ask of a guy like you?”
Peter suffered the question. “I don’t know,” he said, meaning “go to hell.”
“Don’t you understand what I’m saying, Peter? In this country, the law is you. You are the law.”
Peter looked at the detective for a moment as though he were looking in the mirror. “If it is me,” he said, “then I think it’s possible that I’m afraid of myself.”
The detective laughed gratefully. It was as if, without knowing it, starting from opposite positions, they arrived at the same truth. And whose terror was the greater?
Peter picked up a glass ashtray from the corner of the desk and began to play with it, tossing it from one hand to the other.
The detective’s eyes peering through private keyholes followed the flight of the ashtray. Be careful, the eyes said, I hate death. In his own voice, the detective said, “Then you’ll make an identification? All you have to do is sign your name on a sheet of paper. That’s all.”
“I told you before, Lieutenant—the man you brought in was not the one who hit me.”
“What kind of fool do you take me for?” The detective stood up abruptly and Peter had a vision of himself being shot while trying to escape from the police station. He took a tentative step backward.
Two policemen came in with an unkempt, weasel-faced man who looked like Ira Whimple. “Attempted rape,” one of them said.
“Do you want to make a statement?” the detective asked the rapist. (They looked enough like each other to be brothers.)
“She gave me the evil eye,” the man said, directing his remarks to Peter. “I couldn’t do but what I did.” “I see.” Peter nodded.
“The girl was no more than ten years old,” the other policeman said. ‘This guy’s some kind of nut, Lieutenant.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the detective said solemnly, smiling a wink at the older of the two policemen. “Have him fingerprinted and mugged, Frank, and get a statement—he looks like a talker to me. Find out if he’s ever been booked before.”
A Man to Conjure With Page 12