Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

Leonard went to the refrigerator and brought one back.

  “How many more we got?”

  “That’s the last one.”

  “Shit. I seen me a show once where these two guys killed a guy. They was tryin’ to be smart, of course, but what give it away was that one of’em left somethin’ behind at the crime which later was traced to them—a pair of glasses. Now, we di’n’t do nothin’ like that, see. An’ no fingerprints ’cause we wiped everythin’ off. Now we got to get us an alibi—some place where we was.”

  “We can say we was fuckin’ some girls.”

  “That ain’t no good. They’d just ask who.”

  “We’d say they was whores we picked up, that they didn’t give us no names or nothin’, and we c’n tell how each other’s looked an’ all agree.”

  “Then they’d say ‘Where?’ ‘n’ ‘When?’ If we said we was in a hotel, we’d have to prove—”

  “We could a been in the car . . . out in the country somewhere.”

  “Oh no, never mention nothin’ like as to remind them of somethin’ connected to the crime. They’d go, ‘Ah, so you guys were out in the country, huh? What car?’ Then maybe they get the idea to ask that cop in the parkin’ lot if he remembers a red Mercury, kind of jazzy-lookin’, ‘n’ he probably would. No, we c’n say we was here.”

  “But we wasn’t. There’s too many people around. Donnie was here before.”

  “He’s a down guy, hell. He’d say we was here. I was here all last week. Jesus, can’t you keep ’im from doin’ that?”

  July opened his knife and stepped down from the cinder blocks. Looking at it in the faint light from the window, he knew he wouldn’t be able to use it. A shiver of deep regret passed through him. He’d stayed too long looking in the window.

  At first he thought that Mal’s betrayed spirit must be crying out in utter misery and shame as it lay unavenged, but he then recognized that feeling for what it truly was—his own sense of pride and loss begging him in the pretended voice of his wife. He sat down on the cinder blocks and thought.

  If I kill them, then how am I better off?

  You’d still feel bad, but you’d feel better about it. If you don’t want to kill them all, just get the big one.

  How’s that any different? One, none or all—I don’t see where it makes any difference.

  At least you’d know you weren’t a coward.

  That’s ridiculous. And, anyway, what’s bravery got to do with it? It’s a matter of making them pay for what they did to her.

  Pay who?

  Her.

  She’s dead. It would be nice, granted. But it can’t be. If she was still alive, do do you suppose she’d say: JULY, GO KILL THOSE MISERABLE KIDS, AND EXPLAIN TO THEM EXACTLY HOW MUCH THEY HURT US BEFORE YOU DO IT?

  I don’t suppose. Of course she wouldn’t say that—and that’s the reason. What right did they have to take someone’s life like that?

  They didn’t have any right. What’s that got to do with it?

  If they didn’t have any right, but did it anyway, they can expect nothing better.

  And probably don’t. But if they didn’t have any right, then neither do you.

  Damn it, I simply want to for myself.

  Good, now we’re getting down to basics at least. Do you think that’ll make you feel better?

  Yes. Better about everything except Mal being gone. Her absence’ll be the only pain.

  Only!!! What other pain is there?

  Hatred.

  That’s a joy compared to Mal being gone.

  I know it.

  July went to the police station and told them who he was and that there were some murderers over in Riverview Courts, number 27, gave them a description of the car and the plate number. They wrote down the information carefully and asked for the spelling of his name, which he told them, along with his address. Then they told him that they’d already known the boys were somewhere in the area, and it’d’ve been only a matter of time before they were picked up anyway. It was a simple procedure of pulling out files on likely types and looking around and talking to people, and thanked him for the information.

  “I was going to kill them,” he confessed solemnly.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Montgomery.”

  At this point July cast all thoughts of them out of his head, and with the bang of his car door closing behind him, his involvement with them ended. The long journey back to his lonely house began.

  Now that he was not protected from his grief by outrage and fantasies of revenge, the very fact of his aloneness made itself clearly felt for the first time. He was overwhelmed with dread. It seemed there was no place to which he could turn for comfort. Behind him was regret, and the alluring desire to go over that day and find ways of altering the events so what had happened wouldn’t have. He might have come home for lunch. Mal might have gone to work that afternoon instead of waiting for the evening. He might have been sick and stayed home. He might have thought to leave the gun where she could get it, and taught her how to use it. These and countless other circumstances were alternative ways that day could just’ve easily gone, and there was no reason that it hadn’t.

  To his left was the commonness—the almost mundane statistic of it: people get killed. In any large city hundreds of people were killed every year. Everyone knew that each day you managed to get through with yourself and your family alive and unharmed was quite a treasure—and you should thank your lucky stars for it. People get killed sometimes. It’s the way of the world—something that an introspective person should have conceded from the very beginning of his conscious thought: an undeniable rottenness to living itself.

  To his right was nature, which was the closest thing he had to a religion, and in it he noted the same grim statistics—death and killing, almost as frequently as life and growth. No, it wasn’t all like that, bees, seed-eating birds and the like had little participation in the horrors of it—but they were preyed upon by winter, predators, pesticides, food shortages and adaptation difficulties. There was no comfort for him here.

  And in front of him, toward which he was driving steadily, were the empty house and the drawing Mal had made of him hanging above the sofa, about which one of the policemen had commented, “A sort of an artist, wasn’t she.” He remembered wondering what he had when she had her painting, sitting down in the timber below the barn, and only now was he aware of the answer, which came screaming at him from all around: he had her. Oh, why didn’t I realize how happy I was then? The picture above the sofa was a good one, capturing him just as he had been, a little smug, self-righteous and proud of the mere situation that he was who he was and considering that quite a virtue—completely unaware of how he owed everything he had to her. To have her back he would gladly give anything.

  Yes, all along it had been this death business. Everyone he had ever loved had been taken from him, past that impenetrable barrier: his grandmother by nature, his parents by accident, Carroll (whom at least he’d liked a lot) by his own choice and, most terribly, Mal by human ignorance and malevolence. No, that wasn’t right. The distinctions weren’t that clear. All of them in a way had been within nature, and couldn’t escape being. All had been accidents, even his grandmother’s—there was no reason not to keep living. As his father had long ago said, it isn’t age that kills anyone. It’s always some malfunction. Just as much an accident with Mal as with Carroll—even to decide to take one’s own life is an accident. And what could be more rightly attributed to ignorance and malevolence than a traffic accident? Wasn’t there malevolence in his grandmother’s death too? He thought there was.

  It was light when he returned home, and he sat in the living room staring at his own image above the sofa, drawn with a broken piece of charcoal and sprayed with a thin fixative to keep the tiny grains of black dust from falling off. He looked at it and thought he would rather be dead.

  In the trailer, Wally Cobb thought he heard something and went over to the side window. A solitary figure was walk
ing by in front, moving with caution, and he watched him get into an old car and drive out of the court.

  “Come on,” he said. “Hurry.” And all three of them got into the Mercury, backed out of the garage and went after the moving tail-lights.

  “What you suppose he wanted, Wally? Maybe he didn’t have nothin’ to do with us. Do you s’pose he was a cop?”

  “I don’t know, but we better find out for sure.”

  They followed him to the police station and watched him walk inside.

  “He must be a cop. Let’s get out of here.”

  “No, I don’t think so. If he was, we’d be caught now. No, he ain’t a cop.”

  “You think he maybe didn’t have nothin’ to do with us—maybe it’s somethin’ else? Did you really see him up close to the trailer?”

  “No. We got to just wait.”

  A short time later he came out of the station, got into his car and drove off. They followed him from a careful distance behind. Hours later, back in the Iowa City area, they began to get nervous. Then, when they continued to follow and he led them back to the brown-stone house, they began to panic.

  “He must be her husband, Wally. How did he know—”

  “I don’ know. I don’ know.”

  “How could he know we was—”

  “I don’ know.”

  “God, what’re we goin’ a do? They’re goin’ a get us, Wally. They already—”

  “Shut up. We ain’t caught yet. First we got to get rid of this car.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we c’n go see my cousin Ollie. He’ll know what to do. He’s been in plenty of trouble before. He’ll know what to do.” Staying on the back roads, they headed for Kalona, where they hoped to be able to steal a car and drive to Illinois.

  The Shamrock Hotel and Bar had rooms for $2.50 a night, and sold bottled beer at thirty cents. There was one common bathroom on the second floor. At about four o’clock in the afternoon the low, hoarse sounds of arguing and cursing began to flood out onto the street. The prostitutes came in at seven, and when one least expected it a woman’s cry from an upstairs room would disturb the night lull of the traffic. By midnight, dark, stooping figures from inside began to spill out onto the sidewalk, where they lay intermittently sleeping and cursing at imagined audiences. Pushers met addicts and suppliers here and made dealings across the tables along the wall. Black-marketeers sat at the bar selling as freely as vacuum -cleaner salesmen. Only a few of the girls lived there. The rest went home at 3:30 a.m., walking past the warehouses and abandoned office buildings. It was a retirement home for the morally destitute.

  Today was Friday. The official weekend had been ushered in just moments earlier, when M. Beshamp came back from work, went into his room, ordered his wife to undress and lie across the bed, took off his belt and beat her with it before they made love, as they did at the same time each week.

  Two young men were talking in the hallway on the third floor. One was Ollie Parrott, twenty-nine, who stood six feet three, with the build of a 314-pound refrigerator, long blond hair, nearly white skin and red, red lips, hips like a woman—a monster who had already left five men lifeless on the street after pulling their billfolds from them and digging out the change from their front pockets with his huge fingers. His brutal eyes were light blue, as though filled with faintly colored water. The other was Earl Schmidt, dishonorably discharged from the Army for striking a superior officer, living now with Ollie by what they could steal. Though only twenty-three, he appeared to be fifty and stood bent and leaning against the hallway wall as though he could not support his own weight. They talked of money in soft, secretive voices, and went down the corridor to their room to eat plain bread and coffee.

  Through the front door downstairs came three boys, one larger than the other two, and the desk clerk, from behind his newspaper, watched them approach. “Ollie Parrott,” one of them said very nervously.

  “Ollie Parrott what?” said the clerk insidiously.

  “His room. Which is his room?”

  “Thirty-six. Third floor.” He went back to his newspaper.

  Ollie opened the door, and immediately Wally Cobb greeted him by name, in the same breath explaining who he was in case Ollie had forgotten. Obviously he had. Ollie leveled his cold stare at them, still holding the door as though to slam it shut at any unexpected second. Earl Schmidt sat at the little table and looked at them with abstract contempt. In his pocket the safety was off his automatic.

  “What do you want?” snapped Ollie. “We’re busy.”

  Wally stammered.

  Leonard Brown blurted out, “We’re in trouble. God, we’re in trouble. Help us.”

  “We’re in trouble,” added Wally.

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “We thought maybe you could help us. You’ve been in trouble before.”

  “Tell ’em to say what they want or get out,” said Earl.

  “I’ve never been in trouble,” put in Ollie. “OK, punks, come on in and tell us what you want.” They came in and Ollie shut the door. In bits and pieces, unrelated to sequence or importance, from both Leonard and Wally, they explained their situation. Their story fell upon unsympathetic ears. Ollie opened the window and spat out of it, turned back and said: “So what am I supposed to do? You can’t stay here, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Throw ’em out,” said Earl.

  “Just tell us what to do,” pleaded Wally. “That guy—the husband—somehow he knows us. He can identify us.”

  “It’s quite a problem, all right. I hope you get out of it.” Ollie opened the door for them to leave.

  “Wait. Here, look.” From inside his jacket Wally took a crumpled newspaper and unfolded it. “Here, look,” he repeated and handed it to Ollie. It was the write-up of the killing. It told how her husband had come home, what he had found, the absence of clues, statements by the police, and the assumption that, whatever the motive was, it hadn’t been money, because there remained $300 in an upstairs drawer and a diamond valued at over $2000. Ollie read it and closed the door slowly, handing the paper over to Earl, who spread it before him on the table and, chewing on a piece of bread, began to read. He read the name twice before his eyes came back to it. July Montgomery. He stopped breathing, and he turned the safety of the pistol on for fear his nerves would pull the trigger of their own accord and shoot a hole through his leg.

  “Now, what’s this place like?” Ollie was asking. “You say he lives there alone—in the middle of the country? And already once you punks been there but didn’t take anything?”

  Ollie talked to them for the next three hours while Earl sat staring down into the newspaper. The only time he spoke was when Ollie asked him, “Earl, hey, Earl! You want to do it?” and he looked up and answered in a breathless whisper, “Yes.”

  “It’ll be a week or more,” said Ollie to the boys. “Time for us to get down there and look around. It’s perfect. Now, the thing for you guys to do is find yourself a place to stay—hide out, I mean—but where some people can see you. Not around here. That way you’ll have an alibi. Me and Earl, see, we already got one if we’re picked up ‘cause we was here. They’d have to think the two murders was associated, and if you didn’t do one and we didn’t do another, then there’s no worry. Just don’t stay anywhere around here. Get into another state.”

  It was dark when the boys left the hotel, and before the next morning they had driven over five hundred miles of back roads and county blacktops, back into Iowa, heading for Omaha, where Leonard knew some people from reform school living in a house. They were hungry and the money they’d gotten from Wally’s friend in the trailer court was almost gone.

  FOURTEEN

  July was sleeping upstairs now; not on his side of the bed, but hers. It seemed warmer there. In fact, he avoided his own side away from the window as if it didn’t exist, so much so that when he arranged the twisted blankets (he used no sheets and slept fully clothed excep
t for his shoes) he even avoided placing any over there. He had taken all of Mal’s clothes and put them in the closet, where they lived like spirits in the dark, waiting for him to have to look at them again, some of them laughing, some of them crying and some of them staring and never asleep. His dreams became more and more terrifying and it was increasingly difficult to get out of them when he was awake.

  He no longer had those times when he would forget—fall back into his former habit of knowing that when she was out of sight she was just in the next room: now he no longer thought about anything else at all. Her death and memory had his undivided attention. Horror draped the walls. Every light in the house burned without rest.

  Saturday afternoon he went outside. Wind blew and it was a little cold. He walked into the yard with his dog and cat, and later went into the garden. Round orange and green pumpkins had puffed up on the snaking vines. The summer squash was knotted and hard. Tomatoes were ripe and rotting and the rats had gnawed holes into others. The beans were nearly dried on the brown stalks. The sunflowers curled over at the head like hanged men. There were several big green-and-white-striped watermelons.

  A person could save some of this, he thought. Freeze the beans and . . .

  He felt an urge to do a little work and went into the barn to get a hoe. Something in his step seemed to infect the animals and Holmes began running around all over the place and Butch scurried about in the hay after invisible mice. The wooden handle felt good in his hands and he advanced with it toward the garden, the hatred of weeds rising up at each step. He began to tear away at them, but within several minutes the cat and dog sat dolefully and stared at him from the fence. He stood there inert, leaning on the hoe, his eyes completely vacant. With an air of futility he took another couple of swipes with the hoe, and stopped again. Who cares? he thought. Weeds or no weeds, what’s the difference? Why hate weeds? Why not hate everything?

  Once more he tried to go ahead and do more hoeing. But he couldn’t. Then unexpectedly he whirled and began smashing the watermelons and pumpkins, splitting them open with the blade of his hoe, swinging it down from over his head, blow after blow after blow. He chopped at the bean plants, and hacked down the standing yellow stalks of corn, crying and cursing.