Savage Night

by Jim Thompson

  “Now, wait a minute! He could have had someone workin’ with him! They could’ve given him away!”

  “Oh, come now.” Kendall shook his head. “He’s a stranger here. I live with him and work with him, and I can assure you he has no intimates aside from me. But perhaps that’s what you had in mind, sheriff? You think I was involved in this matter.”

  “I didn’t say so, did I?” The sheriff glared at him helplessly. “I—anyway, that ain’t all I got on him. I got a wire from the kin of some folks he used to live with. They said he swindled and abused these old people, and—”

  “I believe you got two other wires about me, also,” I said. “From a chief of police and a county judge. What did they say about me?”

  “I—well—why’d you run away tonight?”

  “I didn’t do any running, sheriff.”

  “Why didn’t you stop when I hollered? You heard me.”

  “I heard someone, but they were a couple of blocks away. I didn’t know they were hollering at me.”

  “Well—uh—why—?”

  He paused, trying to think of something else to ask me. He wet his lips, hesitating. He slanted a glance at Kendall and Dodson and the county attorney, and in his mind’s eye, I guess, he was also looking at his wife, wondering how he was going to explain and excuse himself to her.

  The county attorney yawned and massaged his eyes. “Well,” he said, “I suppose we’ll have an army of city cops moving in on us now. Ordering us around and telling us how to run our business like they did last time.”

  “Now, I—I—” The sheriff gulped. “I don’t reckon we will. My boys ain’t letting out anything.”

  “He’d probably like that,” said Dr. Dodson. “Likes to get his picture in the papers. If I didn’t think you’d suffer enough without it, I’d file a complaint against you with the county commissioners.”

  “You will, hey?” The sheriff jumped to his feet. “Hop right to it! Go ahead and see if I give a dang.”

  “We’ll see,” Dodson nodded, grimly. “Meanwhile, I’m going to take this boy to my clinic and put him to bed.”

  “You are, huh? He ain’t going anywhere.”

  “Very well. He needs rest and medical attention. I’ve said so. These gentlemen are my witnesses. And I’ll tell you something, Summers—” He slammed on his hat. “Don’t be too surprised if you find them testifying against you on a charge of murder by criminal neglect.”

  “Pshaw.” The sheriff’s eyes wavered. “How come he gets around like he’s been doin’ if he’s so sick? You can’t tell me—”

  “I could but I doubt that you’d understand…Coming, Phil?”

  Well…

  I went to the clinic.

  The doctor checked me over from head to foot, shaking his head and grunting now and then in a kind of baffled way. Then he gave me a shot glass of some yellowish stuff, and three hypodermic injections, one in each hip and the other right over my heart; and I went to sleep.

  But Sheriff Summers still hadn’t given up. He posted a deputy on my door at the clinic that night. And the next morning, around eleven, he came in and threw some more questions at me.

  He didn’t look like he’d got much sleep. I’d have bet dough that Mrs. Summers had eaten him out to a fare-you-well.

  He was still at it, going through the motions of playing cop, when Kendall showed up. Kendall spoke to him pleasantly. He suggested that they take a little walk, and they left together.

  I grinned and lighted a cigarette. Kendall was starting to earn his money, if he hadn’t already earned it. It was the first real chance he’d had to get the sheriff alone.

  The next thing he’d do, now…

  The rest and the stuff the doctor had given me seemed to have perked me up quite a bit. And I guess a guy always fights best just before he’s through fighting. I didn’t think I could beat The Man—no one ever beat The Man—but I figured I could give him plenty of trouble. It might be a year or two before he could hunt me down, and if I could hold out that long…well. Maybe I could find the place or the thing or whatever it was I’d always been looking for.

  I had almost five hundred dollars—more in the bank in Arizona, but I might as well forget about that. With five hundred bucks and a good car—and there was a drop in Philly where I could turn that car fast for another one—well, it was worth a try. I couldn’t lose anything.

  …It was almost two o’clock when Kendall came back. And I was sure of what he was going to say, but he led into it so gradually that I almost got unsure.

  Mrs. Winroy had gone to New York, he said. Her sister had taken sick and she’d had to leave suddenly.

  “Poor woman. I’ve never seen her quite so agitated.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said, wanting to laugh so bad it hurt me. She’d probably worry herself to death before they could get to her. “When is she coming back?”

  “She wasn’t able to say. I gathered, however, that it might be quite some time.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s certainly too bad.”

  “Yes. Particularly with nothing better than Winroy to depend on. I wanted to talk to him—straighten out our accounts since Mrs. Winroy isn’t available, but Ruthie hasn’t seen anything of him since lunchtime and he’s not at his shop. I suppose, now that the last restraining influence is gone, he intends to get drunk and stay drunk.”

  I nodded. And waited. He went on.

  “An awkward situation. Poor Ruthie; it’s really a tragedy in her case. There’s no other place she can get a job, and, with Mrs. Winroy gone indefinitely, she can’t stay there. I’d like to help her, but—uh—a man my age, giving financial assistance to a girl who obviously could not repay it…I’m afraid it would do her more harm than good.”

  “She’s dropping out of school?”

  “I’m afraid there’s no alternative. She seems to be bearing up very well, I’m happy to say.”

  “Well,” I said. “It looks like we—like you’ll have to be finding another place to live.”

  “Uh, yes. Yes, I suppose I will. Uh—er—incidentally, Mr. Bigelow, the sheriff is satisfied to—uh—abandon this Winroy matter. I’ve brought your clothes from the bakery, your pay to date also since it seemed doubtful in view of your health, and—uh—the situation in general—that you would care to continue there.”

  “I see,” I said. “I understand.”

  “About Sheriff Summers, Mr. Bigelow. His attitude is by no means as compromising as I would like to have it. I suspect that he would need only the slightest pretext, if any, to—uh—cause you serious embarrassment.”

  I thought it over; rather I appeared to be thinking it over. I laughed, kind of hurt, and said, “It looks like I’m out of luck all the way around, Mr. Kendall. No place to live. No job. The sheriff all set to make trouble. The—I don’t suppose the college will be exactly happy to have me around either.”

  “Well—uh—as a matter of fact—”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t blame them a bit.”

  He shook his head sympathetically, clucking his tongue a few times. Then he looked up sharply, eyes sparkling, and came out with it. As though it had just then popped into his mind.

  “Mr. Bigelow! This may turn out to be a stroke of good fortune in disguise! You can go up to my place in Canada for a few months, use the time for studying and rebuilding your health. Then, when all this business is forgotten—”

  “Gosh,” I said. “You mean you’d still be willing to—?”

  “Certainly, I would! Now, most of all. Of course, we’ll have to see what the doctor has to say about you, but—”

  …The doctor didn’t like it much. He fussed quite a bit, particularly when he found out that I wanted to leave town that day. But Kendall fussed right back, calling him a pessimist and so on. Then he took him to one side, explaining, I guess, that I didn’t have much choice about leaving. So…

  We drove to the house in Kendall’s car, me driving since he didn’t like to. He
asked me if I’d mind driving Ruthie to her folks’ farm on my way, and I said I wouldn’t mind at all.

  I stopped in front of the house, and we stood at the side of the car for a few minutes, talking but not getting much said.

  “By the way, Mr. Bigelow,” he said, hesitantly, “I know I’ve seemed inexcusably dictatorial during our all too brief acquaintance. I’m sure there must have been a great many times when you must have felt like telling me to mind my own business.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Not at all, Mr. Kendall.”

  “Oh, yes.” He smiled at me. “And I’m afraid my reasons were extremely selfish ones. Do you believe in immortality, Mr. Bigelow? In the broadest sense of the word, that is? Well, let me simply say then that I seem to have done almost none of the many things which I had planned on doing in this tearful vale. They are still there in me, waiting to be done, yet the span of time for their doing has been exhausted. I…But listen to me, will you?” He chuckled embarrassedly, his eyes blinking behind their glasses. “I didn’t think myself capable of such absurd poeticism!”

  “That’s all right,” I said, slowly, and a kind of chill crept over me. “What do you mean your span—”

  I was looking straight into him, through him and out the other side, and all I could see was a prim, fussy old guy. That was all I could see, because that was all there was to see. He wasn’t working for The Man. He never had been.

  “…so little time, Mr. Bigelow. None to waste on preliminaries. Everything that could be done for you had to be done quickly.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “For Christ’s sake, why—”

  “Tsk, tsk, Mr. Bigelow. Fret you with the irremediable? Place yet another boulder in your already rocky path? There is nothing to be done about it. I am dying and that is that.”

  “But I…if you’d only told me!”

  “I only tell you now because it is unavoidable. As I have indicated in the past, I am not exactly a pauper. I wanted you to be in a position to understand when you heard from my attorneys.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even see the way my eyes were stinging and burning. Then he grabbed my hand and shook it, and his grip almost made me holler.

  “Dignity, Mr. Bigelow! I insist on it. If you must be mawkish, at least wait until I…I—”

  He let go of me, and when my eyes cleared he was gone.

  I opened the gate to the yard, wondering how I could have been so wrong. But there really wasn’t much to wonder about. I’d picked him because I didn’t want to pick the logical person. The person who could do everything he could, and who had a lot better reason for doing it…Ruthie.

  I wasn’t particularly quiet going into the house, so I guess she heard me, even if she didn’t let on. The drapes to the living room were pulled back and her bedroom door was open, and I stood watching her, braced against the end of the bedstead, as she pulled on her clothes.

  I looked her over, a little at a time, as though she wasn’t one thing but many, as though she wasn’t one woman but a thousand, all women. And then my eyes settled on that little foot with its little ankle, and everything else seemed to disappear. And I thought:

  “Well, how could I? How can you admit you’re screwing yourself?”

  She put on her brassiere and her slip before she took notice of me. She let out a gasp and said, “Oh, C-Carl! I didn’t—”

  “About ready?” I said. “I’ll drive you out to your folks.”

  “C-Carl, I—I—”

  She came toward me, slowly, rocking on her crutch. “I want to go with you, Carl! I don’t care what you’ve—I don’t care about anything! Just so I can be with you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. You were always afraid I’d go away, weren’t you? You were willing to do anything you could to keep me here. Help me with the school, sleep with me…be Johnny-on-the-spot if I needed you for anything. And you couldn’t leave either, could you, Ruthie? You couldn’t lose your job.”

  “Take me, Carl! You’ve got to take me with you!”

  I wasn’t sure yet. So I said, “Well, go on and get ready. We’ll see.”

  Then, I went upstairs to my room.

  I packed my two suitcases. I turned back a corner of the carpet and picked up a carbon copy of the note I’d sent to the sheriff.

  For, naturally, I had sent the note. I’d meant to tell Ruthie about the carbon afterwards so that she could take credit for the tip and claim the rewards.

  I hadn’t had anything to lose, as I saw it. I couldn’t help myself, so I’d tried to help her. The person who might wind up as I had if she didn’t have help.

  I hesitated a moment, turning the slip of paper around in my fingers. But it was no good now. They’d muffed their chance to catch me in the act of attempting to kill Jake Winroy, and I figured there was at least one damned good reason why they’d never get another one.

  I figured that way, but I wanted to make sure. I burned the carbon in an ashtray, and crossed the hall to Jake’s room.

  I stood at the side of his bed, looking down. At him and the note Ruthie had written.

  It was stupid; no one would believe that Jake had tried to attack her and she’d done it in self-defense. But, well, I could understand. The whole setup had been falling apart. Ruthie had to do it fast if at all. And I guess if a person is willing to do a thing like that, then he’s stupid to begin with and it’s bound to crop out on him sooner or later.

  It was all wrong. The Man wouldn’t like it. And getting me for him wouldn’t help her any. She had to latch onto me now, of course; and you get stupider and stupider the farther you go. But excuses didn’t cut any ice with The Man. He picked you because you were stupid; he made you stupid, you might say. But if you slipped up, you did it. And you got what The Man gave people who slipped.

  It was done, though, and me, I was done, too. So nothing mattered now but to let her go on hoping. As long as she could hope…

  I took one last look at Jake before I left the room. Ruthie had almost sawed his throat out with one of his own razors. Scared, you know, and scared not to. Angry because she was scared. It looked a lot like the job I’d done on Fruit Jar.

  21

  I’d never seen the place, just the road that led up to it; and I’d only seen that the one time years before when that writer had driven me by on the way to the train. But I didn’t have any trouble finding it again. The road was grown high with weeds, and in some places long vines had spread across it from the bare-branched trees on either side.

  The road sloped up from the Vermont highway, then down again, so that unless you were right there, right on top of them, you couldn’t see the house and the farm buildings. Ruth looked at me pretty puzzled a time or two, but she didn’t ask any questions. I ran the car into the garage and closed the doors, and we walked back toward the house.

  There was a sign fastened to the gate. It said:

  BEWARE OF WILD GOATS

  “The Way of the Trespasser is Hard”

  And there was a typewritten notice tacked to the back door:

  Departed for parts unknown. Will supply

  forwarding address, if, when, and as soon as possible.

  The door was unlocked. We went in.

  I looked all through the house, by myself mostly because the stairs were steep and narrow and Ruthie couldn’t have got around so good. I went through room after room, and he wasn’t there, of course, no one was there, and everything was covered with dust but everything was in order. All the rooms were in order but one, a little tiny one way off by itself on the second floor. And except for the way the typewriter was ripped apart, even that one had a kind of order about it.

  The furniture was all pushed back against the wall, and there was nothing in the bookcases but the covers of books. The pages of them and God knows how many other pages—typewritten ones that hadn’t been made into books—had been torn up like confetti. And the confetti was stacked in little piles all over the floor. Arranged into letters
and words:

  And the Lord World so loved the god that It gave him Its only begotten son, and thenceforth He was driven from the Garden and Judas wept, saying, Verily I abominate onions yet I can never refuse them.

  I kicked the piles of paper apart, and went downstairs.

  We moved in, and stayed.

  There was case after case of canned goods in the cellar. There was a drum of coal oil for the lamps and the two stoves. There was a water well with an inside pump at the sink. There wasn’t any electricity or telephone or radio or anything like that; we were shut off from everything, as though we were in another world. But we had everything else, and ourselves. So we stayed.

  The days drifted by, and I wondered what she was waiting for. And there was nothing to do…except what could be done with ourselves. And I seemed to be shrinking more and more, getting weaker and littler while she got stronger and bigger. And I began to think maybe she was going to do it that way.

  Some nights, afterwards, when I wasn’t too weak and sick to do it, I’d stand at the window, staring out at the fields with their jungle of weeds and vines. The wind rippled through them, making them sway and wiggle and squirm. And there was a howling and a shrieking in my ears—but after a while it went away. Everywhere, everywhere I looked, the jungle swayed and wiggled and squirmed. It shook that thing at me. There was something sort of hypnotic about it, and I’d still be weak and sick, but I wouldn’t notice it. There wouldn’t be a thing in my mind but that thing, and I’d wake her up again. And then it was like I was running a race, I was trying to get to something, get something, before the howling came back. Because when I heard that I had to stop.

  But all I ever got was that thing. Not the other, whatever the other was.

  The goats always won.

  22

  The days drifted by, and she knew that I knew, of course, but we never talked about it. We never talked about anything much because we were cut off from everything, and after a while everything was said that we could say and it would have been like talking to yourself. So we talked less and less, and pretty soon we were hardly talking at all. And then we weren’t talking at all. Just grunting and gesturing and pointing at things.