At the same moment that Gates was stealing the bike, his brother was passing one of the park campgrounds beside a baseball field. Parked right next to the road was a black van; the motor was running, the radio was blasting, the door was open. Hayes looked ahead. The train seemed to be making a stop. Yes. According to the map, there was a trading post up there. He thought he could catch it if…No, he didn’t think: there was nothing in his head but the image of a trembling Mingo Sheffield with his arms raised. Grabbing the fencing foil, Hayes jumped off the cart and jumped in the van and threw it into drive and drove! Just as he did so, a big young man covered with black hair and wearing nothing on his chest but a black leather vest with a red devil painted on it trotted out of the woods zipping his fly. “WHOOOA! BIG JOKE. OKAY, ASSHOLES, VERY FUNNY!” The van was a hundred yards away before this individual decided enough was enough, and started running after it. Inside the van, the girl named Wendy, the sumo wrestler, the girl with a crew cut, and the tattooed longhair rolled all over the black fur floor and walls. They thought the werewolf was playing a joke on them by leaving the road and bumping the van right up onto the railroad tracks. They laughed like crazy.
“Ride ’em, Bradley!” yelled the wrestler.
But when the crew-cut girl stuck her head between the curtains that separated the front from the back of the van they called “Sympathy With The Devil,” she didn’t see a man who looked like a werewolf. Instead, she saw a man who looked vaguely familiar. “Space-out,” she said. “Who are you?”
Raleigh, flying up and down in his seat, and desperately struggling to steer the bucking van over the train rails, had time for only the quickest glance; it was enough to recognize the girl who had, that hideous night in the rain, helped pull down his pants. “You’re under arrest,” he told her. “Go sit down.”
Her head disappeared. He could hear her in the back. “Oh man, oh man, too much. Those fairies we rolled in North Carolina? One of them’s busting us. No shit.”
Other heads popped out behind Hayes’s. He paid no attention. He was closing on the caboose, fifty more feet, twenty more. Was he going to hit it? He slammed on the brakes. Damn, the train was moving again! In one motion, he cut the ignition, rolled out of the seat, and sprinted down the tracks.
Back in the van, the devil sympathizers somersaulted into a heap. “What’s happening? Easy, easy,” said a voice from the corner, a young man with a spoonful of cocaine.
“Wow, wow, wow,” said Wendy, looking through the curtain. “He’s jumping a train now! He’s got a fucking sword in his teeth.”
“No way. You’re stoned. Oh, shit. She’s right!”
Yes, Wendy was quite right. Raleigh W. Hayes, middle-aged and middle class, had just chased down a train, had just leaped on it, and finding the caboose door locked, had just crawled up the ladder to the roof, with a fencing foil clamped between his teeth. He didn’t even know it was there; it was simply the habit of a lifetime not to throw things away.
Meanwhile, Gates Hayes, pedaling hard and pressing his palm into his bleeding shoulder, couldn’t see the steam engine until he rounded the bend at the trading post. What he saw then was a black van sitting right in the middle of the tracks. Ahead of that, he saw four yelping cowboys rush out of the woods and start firing guns at the train’s passengers, who stuck their faces out the windows and waved happily at the show. Suddenly the cowboys all stopped. They pointed up, and began to applaud. “Oh, Jesus!” Gates panted. Leaping from the roof of the caboose to the roof of the last passenger car was a man in a blue-and-white sweater. Something silvery glistened in his hand.
“GO BIG BRO!” Gates shouted and pedaled faster, dodging a big hair-covered fellow who looked like a Hell’s Angel and who was trotting painfully down the road in bare hairy feet.
Now, John Neill’s two hired guns were confused. They weren’t confused because their hostage kept babbling that his name was Mingo Sheffield and that he didn’t even know what cocaine looked like and that he’d never double-crossed a single soul once in his entire life. Naturally, that’s what anybody would say in his situation. They thought he was doing a very fine imitation of a mental defect, but they didn’t believe him for an instant: after all, he had enough sense to sit still with his mouth shut, once they told him they’d blow a hole through his head if he didn’t.
No, they were confused because they were being so hotly pursued in such bizarre ways. This Gates Hayes appeared to have a fairly good-sized organization, but an odd one. His men called attention to themselves, and that was bad for business. The hired guns didn’t like attention; when they wanted information out of somebody, they wanted to get it in private; when they wanted somebody dead, they wanted him privately dead. They didn’t want some maniac leaning off the roof of a train, staring at them upside down through the window. These men couldn’t afford to be noticed; they were wanted in too many states for too many unpleasant reasons.
Their plan was quietly to leave the train with the rest of the tourists, quietly walk the hostage to their car, drive off someplace very secluded and quietly dispose of Gates Hayes, after he’d told them the names of every person even remotely connected with the boat “Easy Living.” Naturally, they hadn’t told the fat man their plans, but even a colossal optimist like Mingo was beginning to suspect the worst.
Mingo Sheffield knew a great deal about guns. He recognized a Magnum .45 and a silencer when he saw them. He and Vera had both taken Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced Target Practice evening classes at the Thermopylae VFW Post—just in case they ever needed to defend themselves. But these courses had never explained what you were supposed to do if you didn’t have a gun, and if some other people had two that could very easily blow your head off, and if these somebodies’ eyes looked as if it didn’t upset them at all to think about doing just that. Wedged in the railway car seat, facing away from the other passengers, Mingo was not making a move or a sound; he was so panic-stricken, he couldn’t have done so, even if he’d known what to do or say. He tried to think: what would Raleigh do? But Raleigh was too smart ever to get caught in such a dilemma. And Gates would just whirl in a blur of karate kicks, knocking the guns right out of their pockets. It was too bad, sighed Sheffield, that when Weeper Berg had taught him how to palm an ace (which had certainly come in handy when he’d cut the cards for Gates’s duel), the master criminal hadn’t added lessons on how to escape from killers.
Or maybe if he could think of a movie escape…But Mingo’s mind was blank. His whole body had wilted with fear, and his vocal cords were unstrung; he couldn’t even cough. Besides, he was all talked out. These men just wouldn’t believe he wasn’t Gates Hayes, and he couldn’t tell them where Gates was, because then they might go straight back to that island and kill Raleigh and his brother both.
So Mingo kept his hands, which were shaking, tucked inside his thighs, and he prayed. And he wondered if people still had eyes when they went to Heaven, so they could see what it looked like and could find their dead parents and special friends already up there. Or if maybe people in Heaven had even better eyes, sort of like God’s, so they could look all the way down on Earth and watch over their living loved ones, the way Clarence the angel watched over Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. Mingo prayed that if he did die, Vera wouldn’t go all to pieces. But the thought of not seeing Vera again was so unbearable, he immediately changed the prayer to a request that God either change these horrible men’s minds, or drop a tree on their heads. Or something!
The something arrived as Sheffield was shoved by his abductors out of the train door at the railroad station. Suddenly there was a man with a spear on top of the roof of the rail car yelling in a loud strange voice, “MINGO! RUN!” It was Raleigh! A fencing foil stabbed down and stuck in the back of the neck of one of the hired guns. He let go of Mingo’s arm, fell to his knees, and grabbed frantically at the pain. At the same instant Raleigh flew off the train roof, landing on top of the second man, knocking them both into the gravel track bed. The
crowd began to shriek and jostle. Mingo ran.
Kicking, desperately hanging onto his opponent’s hair and windbreaker, Raleigh rolled back and forth in the gravel, but was flung off and punched hideously hard in the kidney. This man then knocked a path through families of tourists to chase after Mingo, whom Raleigh could see racing away across the wide green slope where picnickers lounged and stared up at the Confederate Memorial. Now the thug into whom he’d thrust the fencing foil was stumbling to his feet. Hayes picked up a wood sign (“Steam Engine Ticket Holders Only”) and smashed its round steel base down on the man’s head; he fell back to his knees, then to his face. Staggering away, Raleigh chased after the one following Mingo.
Remarkably quick for his size anyhow, the fat man, spurred by terror, kept ahead of his kidnapper as he galloped past the Memorial Plaza. He ran blindly toward the next building he saw, skidded inside, and rushed into a tightly knotted crowd. It was the last place in the world Mingo Sheffield would have gone on purpose, for he was caught in an inexorable tide of shoving flesh pushing its way into the Skylift to ride up Stone Mountain. The crowd was already anxious and belligerent because those who didn’t make it inside had to wait twenty-five minutes in the crush for their next chance. As a result, everything from seething stares to nudges to efforts at physical constraint resulted when first a huge flailing man hopping up and down to look behind him, then a stocky cursing man in a windbreaker, elbowed their way past everybody else and snatched the last spaces in the big Swiss cable car just as the door was closing. Even more outrageous, here came a third man, a tall, thin one in a sweater, whose eyes behind his glasses were completely insane, who simply crawled on top of them and dived over them. Then (to the appalled, thrilled astonishment of both those jammed in the waiting line and those jammed in the now-moving glassed-in funicular), the man in the sweater chased the car as it swung upward, tilting beneath its enormous blue steel arm that hooked it to its cables. This man not only chased it, he jumped onto its guard bumper just as it jerked free of earth, he grabbed hold of the door rails, and he clung there to the outside of the Skylift while it swooped away toward the top of Stone Mountain. Some mouths just fell open, some screamed.
Three voices cried, “Oh shit!” simultaneously. One belonged to the Skylift attendant, who turned to telephone the control booth at the summit. One belonged to Gates Hayes, who skidded in a circle on the Italian bicycle fifty yards from the ride’s entrance when he saw, high above the tips of a forest of pines, the blue-and-white sweater stretched across the side of the blue and glass cable car. Gates didn’t stop; he bounced down the hill toward the main parking lot, with the pedals spinning so fast his feet flew out to the sides.
The third “Oh shit” came from Raleigh Hayes. Now, if our hero had taken the advice he so often gave others (“Use your head”), he probably would not have found himself plastered, spread-eagled, against the side of an airborne trolley. Never before had physical fear so sickened him. Not at four, when he fell into a pile of burning leaves; not at fourteen, when he was caught by three local hoods in an alley behind the Rialto Movie Theatre; not at twenty-four in Germany, when he knew the car that had just spun over the median strip was going to hit his jeep head-on; not at thirty-four, when he and Aura were robbed at gunpoint in Mexico City. And not even at any point in the past two weeks had Raleigh Hayes ever felt so nauseated with terror. Perhaps his predicament could have been worse; at least he had a solid rail to stand on and steel bars to loop his arms through, and the wind wasn’t bad, and the Skylift didn’t move very quickly. At least he was so high up that if he fell, he’d die instantly rather than end up mangled in a wheelchair. As an expert on actuarial charts, Raleigh knew that he was now in such a high-risk category that the probabilities were not all in his favor. But at least he had a $250,000 double-indemnity life insurance policy, which surely ought to pay for Aura’s mayoral campaign.
Ironies like these had none of their old soothing effect. He hadn’t used his head, and his present critical situation was the result. Not that when warning his daughters against the perils of not thinking had he ever thought that by their failure to do so, they might end up looking down, from the outside of a Skylift, on the largest sculpture in the world. For Generals Lee and Jackson and President Davis were now behind and below our hero. All three held their stone hats over their stone hearts, as if they were already paying their respects at Raleigh’s funeral. Or honoring a bravado they hadn’t seen since Jeb Stuart died. Or perhaps simply yielding the spotlight. For a closer view of the Confederates was usually the main attraction on the Skylift ride. But this trip, no one was paying them the slightest bit of attention. Only inches away from the crowd lucky enough to be on the right side of the car, and sturdy enough to protect their positions, was a much more interesting statue attached to the glass door. A man in a sweater who looked as if he were being electrocuted: his hair stood on end, tears were running out of his eyes, and he was spasmodically shaking his head, no. Some people in the car shrieked, some people beat on the glass and laughed, and the fat man wearing a Hawaiian shirt keeled over in a faint and had to be jerked back to his feet by a man in a windbreaker.
While the tourists were watching Raleigh, and Raleigh was trying to signal Mingo (once he came to again) not to notice him, and while all the Skylift personnel were trying to decide whether a suicide was more likely to jump if they stopped the car or if they kept going, Gates Hayes had already sped to the parking lot. There, Simon Berg and Toutant Kingstree were lying on a grassy incline beside the back of the red circus truck. They were deep in competitive reminiscences; Berg’s father was peddling junk in a handcart through the snowy streets of the East Village and Kingstree’s mother was sucking copperhead venom out of her own leg, when the two older men saw Gates, bare-chested and bleeding, hop off the bicycle, jerk open the truck’s front door, and leap back out with his whitehandled pistol.
“I never did like that dueling shit,” said Kingstree as they hurried over.
“Kid, kid, you’re hurt!” Berg shouted. “Enough already!”
Gates had flung back the rear doors and was climbing into the van. As he threw things out of the way, he yelled, “Listen, Weep! I fucked up bad. Big mess with John G. Neill’s operation, okay? Two of his goons got Mingo! Think he’s me! Taking him up the Skylift! Raleigh’s hanging off the fucking outside! I’m going up the trail on the south slope, okay? Get back! Get back!”
An immense roar bounced off the metal walls of the truck; gray smoke fumed up; then through the thick cloud flew in air straight out of the opened doors the big black motorcycle with Gates floating on top of it. He landed skidding down the grassy incline and sped away.
“Motherfuck!” Kingstree gasped.
Berg was already trotting toward the Ticket Center at the end of the lot. “John G. Neill, I don’t believe! Dumb, dumb, dumb! He’s never gonna make it!”
“I don’t know, Weeper, he looked good on that bike.”
“Will yah listen? There’s got to be some security guards down there in that building. Here’s what I want you to do…” Berg pulled a carefully folded newspaper clipping from his pocket.
The security guards at Stone Mountain Park were already so frazzled they were cursing at each other. The guides and attendants and vendors and administrators of the park were all in an uproar too. Phones were ringing, people were running all over the place as if the Russians had just surrounded the mountain. Every few minutes brought another peculiar report. A private boat had been stolen and sunk. Picnickers on Covered Bridge Island had set a dead pine tree on fire. A golf cart had been abandoned on a softball field. A missing pedal boat was floating on the lake with no passenger. An empty motorboat had been found smashed on some rocks. An expensive bicycle had been snatched, and its hysterical owner described the thief as “a naked man covered with blood and mud.” Doped-up Hell’s Angels had parked their van right on the railroad tracks by the trading post and, after a loud exchange of vulgarities, had challenged the troupe of
cowboy actors to a free-for-all. People were coming into the main office claiming to have heard shots, to have seen a swordsman on top of the train, to have seen another swordsman in a white ruffled shirt forcing a huge blond-haired man to crawl down the road on his hands and knees. People claimed to have seen a man get stabbed in the back of the neck, then get bashed with a sign, then get run over by two senior citizens on a tandem bike. Now here came all these calls that there was a suicidal maniac clinging to the outside of the Skylift. The security guards were really hard-pressed to be civil to the tall elderly black man who barged in on them to insist that they phone for the police and the highway patrol because he’d just spotted the notorious escaped criminal Simon “Weeper” Berg sitting in the snack bar on top of Stone Mountain.
“Look here, grandpa,” snapped the young guard, “don’t bug me with this Simon Weeper whatever foolishness now. I don’t know diddly-squat about any such person. I got a possible suicide and all hell’s broken loose around here, so move on, okay. So long.”
Blocking his path, Toutant Kingstree unfolded a yellow piece of newspaper. “Well, I want this reward.” He pointed at the clipping. “I’m the one saw him. I’m the one with the information leading to his arrest.”
“Reward?!” The guard grabbed away the paper, furiously reading. “You sure this is the guy? You saw him up there?”
The black man nodded. “I sure am sure. But you ought not to go up after him by yourself. I believe he’s got some of his gang up on top the mountain with him. See where it says, ‘armed and believed dangerous.’ You better get the police fast. Now, you going to fix it so I get my thousand-dollar reward?”
“Yeah yeah, I’ll fix it. Leave your name.” The young guard rushed to a phone.
The Skylift ride was not very long, but it was long enough for Raleigh Hayes, fluttering in the wind, to consider in sequence most of the Great Philosophies of the Western World, as they’d been synopsized in the college course he’d taken a quarter of a century ago. At that time, he’d leaned toward a nihilistic angst flavored with a dash of French absurdist existentialism. But now, on reflection, he found he’d changed. Now, his ultimate conclusion was that while the world might well be a transitory vale of tears, or the pale reflection of an Idea, or a causeless, purposeless hodge-podge of matter, or the world might not even exist at all—still, he didn’t want to leave it behind. Now, while life might well be environmentally determined, or fatalistically predestined, or nasty and short, or a fool’s dream, or a Freudian nightmare, or life might be just a joke—still, he didn’t want to lose his. Now, on reflection, Raleigh Hayes’s ultimate conclusion about life in the world was, “I’ll take it.” And he clung to the steel bar of that Swiss cable car so tightly that his arms hadn’t stopped aching three days later when he put them around his father in New Orleans.
Handling Sin Page 57