"Are you sure?" I said.
"I thought I was."
"But you're not sure."
"I only caught a glimpse. He was backing away. It looked like him."
The counterman smoked a cigarette, leaning on the end of the counter and talking with a seedy man who was nursing a cup of coffee. The window was blank. The door was blank. It was quiet. So quiet I could hear the blood rushing and pounding in my head.
Two boys in jeans and leather jackets strolled by outside the window, walking tough, with cigarettes in their fingers.
"There," I said. "It was one of them you saw."
"Maybe."
"Or some other boy. God damn it, how could it be Bobby Stillman? How could they have followed me?"
Bill shook his head. His shoulders moved uneasily.
"Well, let's go," I said. "Here, there's a back way."
We went out the back door into an alley. All alleys lookalike. I had never realized that before. They are dark with a darkness that has nothing to do with night but is akin to that of old cellars and the places under rocks. They are dirty and drab, and people live over them, putting cheap red curtains in the windows and red geraniums in pots on the sills to pretend that there is a little light and cheer there. Alleys all smell alike, too, of sour stinking water and old garbage. We stood on the edge of this one and looked up and down, and we didn't see anything except some lighted windows overhead and a cat going spring-footed among the puddles.
"Come on," I said. "There's nothing."
We walked along the brick pavement, beaten and broken down by trucks, patched with asphalt. The night air was cool. The canned, professional sound of a woman singing came from one of the apartments. We passed the back entrance of a tavern, in a burst of warm beery air and convivial voices. I walked as fast as I could. Bill slunk beside me, his shoulders drawn down, his head moving from side to side, craning to see behind him.
We came out on the street. People were moving up and down, not many people at this hour, but enough to keep the street from being deserted. There were a few couples, but mostly single men, an occasional drunk, a belated workman, some of the town types who don't seem to have any homes and don't care when they get back to them. I did not see any boys. It was pleasant to get back to where there were lights and store windows. The Diamond was only a block away. We walked toward it, and Bill still peered over his shoulder and around.
"See anything of them?"
"No. No, I don't."
"You were mistaken."
"I guess so."
His voice carried hope but no conviction.
We walked along the Diamond to the post office, where my car was parked. I unlocked it, and we got in, and I started it. We drove off, around the Civil War monument with the iron soldier on the top. Nothing happened.
"Keep an eye out," I said. "If you see Chuck's car following us, let me know."
He hunched around, twisting so that he could see out the back window.
I headed west on 422 in thin traffic.
"There's headlights," Bill said.
"There are other cars on the road, you know."
"Yeah. It's hard to tell at night."
"That's another thing," I said. "How could Chuck and the others follow a car at night anyway? They can't have all the powers of the devil."
"Mr. Finelli followed us," said Bill.
"Sure. But that was his job. He'd had years of experience at it. And even so, he had to keep so close that you spotted him. There's nobody that close to us. There wasn't on the way over, either."
He did not dispute me. He went on looking out the back window, his chin on his hands, his hands folded on the top of the seat.
We got out beyond the drive-in theater, the markets and the eating places that fringed the town. We got out where it was dark and quiet, with nothing on either side of the road but open country, with now and again a secondary road leading off among the fields, past unlighted houses where the farmers slept against the morning milking. I stepped it up.
Headlights came swooping up the road behind me. "Watch out," said Bill, in a high whimpering voice. "Watch out." The headlights rushed at express-train speed. Abruptly they dimmed, brightened, dimmed, and brightened again. "They're going to pass," I said. A horn tooted and the car went by. It must have been doing eighty. "It isn't Chuck's car," said Bill. When it swung back in front of me my own brights picked up a fleeting glimpse of a red-and-black rear end. Then even the tail-lights were gone around a bend of the road.
My hands were shaking on the wheel. "God!" I said to Bill. "Will you relax? We'll be there pretty soon."
"Of course," said Bill slowly, as though he had not heard me at all, "he might not be using his own car. He might figure you'd recognize it. He might have got another one."
The road surface hummed under the tires. The wind whistled at the windows. A large sign whipped by, welcoming me to Ohio.
He might have got another one.
"Where?" I said. "The three of them are supposed to be in Cook's Forest. They couldn't borrow from their families or friends. Besides, how would Chuck know in advance that he was going to follow me?"
"He wouldn't have to know very long ahead," said Bill. "And he wouldn't have to borrow. Everett and Bobby both have hooked cars before and never got caught. And he's got Bobby with him."
"That's just great," I said. Now I was not afraid of only one specific car, a gray convertible. I was afraid of every car on the road.
I stepped it up some more. I wanted very much to be back in Mall's Ford where there were lights and people.
"So they steal cars too," I said. "What for?"
Bill shrugged. "Just to show they can."
"What do they do with them?"
"Joy-ride around, and then leave 'em somewhere. Then they brag about it afterward to the other kids."
Well, you read about that in the papers every day too. Kids picked up riding around in a stolen car. Grown men steal a car for something—to sell it, to make a getaway, to take them somewhere. Kids do it just to show they can.
"Is that why your friends beat up people—just to show they can?"
Bill was a long time answering that. Then he said, "It makes 'em feel big."
I suppose it would. I suppose you would feel ten feet high, standing over a man lying flat on the ground.
"How did you ever get mixed up with such a gang?" I asked him.
His voice was heavy and bitter when he spoke, not like a boy's voice at all. "I thought Chuck was God," he said. "He's big and he's smart and he's good-looking, and the girls are all crazy for him. He's good at sports. And there wasn't another guy around that dared to stand up to him."
"Did they like him?"
"Not the fellas, no. But I didn't think that mattered. I wanted to be part of his gang. I wanted the other guys to give me room when I walked in. I wanted the girls to hang around me. I——"
He paused, as though he had choked on the memory of his own folly. I got the picture clearly enough. Gawky Adolph trotting after Chuck with open mouth and eyes bugging in admiration. Chuck would love that. He'd take him on just for the laughs.
Bill said suddenly in a burst of adult and purely masculine rage, "Mom always treats me like such a goddamn baby. If my dad had lived he'd have wanted me to grow up, but Mom'd still have me in diapers if she could."
Another set of headlights came up rapidly from behind.
A semitrailer wearing festoons of yellow lights like a Christmas tree approached from the other direction, heading east. The car behind me hung back. It was a dark sedan. I could see it in the reflection from the truck's headlights. I could not, of course, see who was in it. It was the only car behind me as far as I could look back down the road.
The truck went by, and now there was nothing ahead of me, either way. The eastbound lane was clear of passing.
The car behind me still hung back.
"What's he waiting for?" I asked, getting nervous again.
A yellow highway marker popped up
, with a black arc painted on it indicating a curve ahead. A straight line joined the arc, like a spear thrust into the side of a snake. A secondary road. The white center line on my left had acquired an auxiliary yellow stripe, meaning no passing.
The car behind me suddenly decided to ignore that and go around.
We were both traveling fast. Instinctively I slammed on my brakes to let the damn fool get around before something came the other way, and through the squealing of the tires I heard Bill's frantic cry, "He's cutting in on you——"
I wasn't going to be able to slow down in time.
The road swung in front of me. White guard posts, cable, a row of trees. Just like Finelli, and they'll come down to see if we're dead, and if we're not they'll make sure, and the Highway Department will place us on the list of the year's fatalities. The dark speeding flank of the other car forced me over and over, my right-hand wheels were skidding and tearing on the berm. The sedan's tail-lights made a baleful glaring to show me where not more than an inch of air separated our fenders, and I could swerve in and hit them and send us all over the bank but I wanted to live. Beside me, Bill was frozen in an attitude of screaming, but not a sound came out.
The subsidiary road opened up a gray gap of gravel and I went into it.
I almost did not make it. The road was narrow and built up on a low causeway. There were guards on both sides, of the steel-fender type. I shot rocking and screeching over the gravel, doing everything I could not to turn over, and I didn't turn over but I couldn't keep the car from slewing. We hit the guard with a mighty crash and rebounded, and now a new sound was added. The left rear fender was crumpled in against the wheel.
Back on the highway the sedan was fishtailing around the curve, burning rubber.
I had my car under control again. I tramped on the gas, and we barreled away down the road, but it was not going to work. The rear wheel dragged against the fender. I tried to ignore it and make the damn thing go anyway, as far as it would.
"Do you see any place?" I asked Bill. "A house?"
The road lifted up a grade. Bill bent forward. I could feel him shaking.
"There's something up there at the top," he said. "I think. A barn."
"Well, if there's a barn, there'll be a house near it. We can get help." I pushed the accelerator as hard and as far as I could, and the car staggered about halfway up the hill, and the tire blew.
"They're turned around," said Bill, looking back.
"All right," I said. "God damn them, let them."
I left the car where it died, in the middle of the road, blocking it. I turned the lights off. I hoped they would ram into it at full speed. "We'd better get away from here," I said.
We went over the ditch and into the field. I couldn't see any sign of a house, but the barn stood plainly on top of the rise, a big dark bulk against the sky. Too big even for a barn, I thought, but it was the shape of one, and I couldn't think what else it would be.
In the distance there was the sound of a car making a turn at high speed onto gravel. There were trees between us now, but I could see the headlights through them, moving fast.
"What are we going to do?" asked Bill, and his voice was so tight and small that I could hardly hear it.
But it was a good question.
The field was wide and open and the barn looked miles away, and I was in no shape for cross-country running.
"Listen," I said, "the house must be on the other side. You run like hell and find it." I wanted him safe, out of the way. "I've got a gun."
"Chuck's got one too," said Bill. "A little old target rifle. If he's got it with him."
And he probably would have.
"Well," I said, "go on anyway. We need someone to call the cops."
"No," he said. "We'll go together."
He grabbed my elbow and we humped it, through the sweet-smelling late-summer grass. I could hear the wheels of the sedan churning up the hill. It did not hit my car. They stopped in time. After that the countryside was quiet, very serene, very peaceful, with nothing to disturb it but the monotonous love song of the crickets.
We made it to the barn.
There was a wide graveled space in front of it like a parking area, and there were several signs around, but it did not have any of the normal appurtenances of a farmyard. I looked up at the high blank wall, painted white, glimmering faintly under the stars. There were letters on it, big and black. Even in this darkness I could make out the size and shape of words, enough to guess the sense of them.
This was a sale barn, a place where livestock was sold at auction once or twice a week. At other times it was empty. And there would not necessarily be a house anywhere near it.
There was no house.
I leaned up against the plank wall, but not for long. Bill caught my shoulder and pointed. The road was only forty or fifty feet away. Someone in a light shirt was running on it. I looked around and made out two more moving shapes, one in the field the way we had just come, and one on the other side of the road. I took the gun out of my pocket and clicked the safety back. There was now no chance of Bill getting away unseen. He was safer to stay with me.
"Find a door," I said. "Break it open. Or a window. Get inside and then let me in. This is a sale barn, they ought to have a phone." I could make out wires overhead, but it was impossible to distinguish between phone and power lines. "Get with it," I said.
Bill scuttled around the corner of the building. I followed after him, more slowly. I watched the three moving shapes in the starlit night. Here we are again, I thought, and something evil and savage woke up in me. This time I wasn't helpless. This time I was armed.
The young tigers padded closer in the night.
One of them, the light-shirted one in the road, called out to me, "Sherris!"
It was Chuck's voice. It had a dark thick note of pleasure in it. I was standing just at the corner of the barn now. Behind me I could hear Bill slamming around in hurried desperation. There was a smashing noise. I said to Chuck, "Look out, yellowbelly. I've got a gun."
"Well, now," said Chuck. "And so have I."
But it wasn't Chuck at all that had the gun. It was the boy coming up through the field, at my right side.
He missed me. I heard the bullet go by, singing, and almost in the same second I fired at the place where the crack and flash had come from. The night had turned black, there were no stars in it, no road, no countryside, no white wall behind. me. There were three shadows in it, in three different places, and these I could see, but nothing else. I fired at them.
And they were gone.
23
BILL was pulling at me. "Come on," he said. "Come on, I've got the door open."
I pushed him off. I had almost forgotten who he was.
"No," I said. "They're dead. I've killed them."
The night was black. There was wind in it. It shook me. It was loud. I shouted to make myself heard above it.
"I killed them!" I shouted, and I was glad. I wanted to see the bodies. I wanted to maul them. I remembered Tracey with the blood on her face, and I wanted to kick and tear and destroy them, to stamp them into the earth. I started to walk away from the barn.
Bill cried, "Please! Please." His voice was shrill. "Hell," he said, "are you crazy? They aren't dead."
He dragged me by main force around the corner,
I caught the wall. "They aren't?" I said.
"Hell, no. They just ducked. They were on the ground before you even fired. Come on."
He hustled me through a door. Now it was pitch dark, but normally so. The smell of blood and gunsmoke was replaced by a heavy ingrained odor of sweet hay and cow manure. I stood trembling, but not in any wind of passion. I was just tired and cold, with all that heat run out of me.
I thought, For a minute I was no better than they are. For a minute there——
And I was still no better. I still had the vision of their bodies lying on the ground, and I was sorry it wasn't so. I was sorry that I hadn't ki
lled them.
I felt sick. I almost dropped the gun.
Bill was thumping futilely with the door. "I can't lock it," he panted. "I broke it with a big stone and it won't stay shut."
I leaned my back against it. "See if you can find a light switch."
"What about windows?" he protested. "They can see in."
"I don't think there are any on the ground floor," I said, squinting to see paler squares against the black. "They're all higher up. Go on, we can't stumble around in the dark."
"All right," he said, unconvinced. I could hear him feeling up and down the wall. In a minute there was a click, and we were blinded with light.
We blinked at each other like owls, and we felt exposed, but it was good even so. I was fed up with dark and shadows and the unhealthy things that hide in them. There were wooden benches around the wall. We dragged some of them up to help block the door. Then we looked around.
I had been right about the windows. They were all too high to be dangerous. A narrow balcony with folding chairs in it hung on three sides of the barn, reached by a steep flight of wooden stairs. On the ground floor were the benches, and plenty of room for men to stand and look over the railing into the semicircular pit where the stock was brought in. There was a stand there for the auctioneer, and at the back of the pit were big double doors leading into the stable shed. The rough board walls were covered with fly-specked posters advertising feeds and milkers and remedies for mastitis.
There were two doors in the inner wall. One was at the back, with the word MEN painted on it. The other one was on the opposite side of the pit. It was marked OFFICE.
"That's where the phone would be," I said, "if there is one."
We started for it, but we didn't make it. We weren't even close. There must have been a ground-floor window in the office, because we heard it break. We heard a great hustling of bodies climbing in and then more noises in the office.
There had been a phone in the office. There was not now. The boys had taken care of it.
Bill had got small again. He had a peculiar way of shrinking in, drawing his lank frame together. His face had no color in it. I pointed to the stairs and he went up them in about three wild bounds. I didn't go so fast.
The Tiger Among Us Page 17
