The man drew deeply on the cigarette. His eyes narrowed in recollection, and Mowbray saw a short vertical line appear, running from the middle of his forehead almost to the bridge of his nose. Then he blew out smoke and his face relaxed and the line was gone.
“Well, we were all alone on that beach,” the man continued. “No one within sight in either direction, no boats in close offshore, no one around to lend a helping hand. Just this young fellow with a gun in his hand and me with my hands empty. I began to regret sticking the rod in the sand. I’d done it to have both hands free, but I thought it might be useful to swing at him and try whipping the gun out of his hand.
“He said, ‘All right, old man. Take your wallet out of your pocket nice and easy.’ He was a Northerner, going by his accent, but the younger people don’t have too much of an accent wherever they’re from. Television, I suppose, is the cause of it. Makes the whole world smaller.
“Now I looked at those eyes, and at the way he was holding that gun, and I knew he wasn’t going to take the wallet and wave bye-bye at me. He was going to kill me. In fact, if I hadn’t turned around when I did he might well have shot me in the back. Unless he was the sort who liked to watch a person’s face when he did it. There are people like that, I understand.”
Mowbray felt a chill. The man’s voice was so matter-of-fact, while his words were the stuff nightmares are made of.
“Well, I went into my pocket with my left hand. There was no wallet there. It was in the glove compartment of my car, parked off the road in back of the sand dunes. But I reached in my pocket to keep his eyes on my left hand, and then I brought the hand out empty and went for the gun with it, and at the same time I was bringing my knife out of the sheath with my right hand. I dropped my shoulder and came in low, and either I must have moved quick or all the drugs he’d taken over the years had slowed him some, but I swung that gun hand of his up and sent the gun sailing, and at the same time I got my knife into him and laid him wide open.”
He drew the knife from its sheath. It was a filleting knife, with a natural wood handle and a thin, slightly curved blade about seven inches long. “This was the knife,” he said. “It’s a Rapala, made in Finland, and you can’t beat it for being stainless steel and yet taking and holding an edge. I use it for filleting and everything else connected with fishing. But you’ve probably got one just like it yourself.”
Mowbray shook his head. “I use a folding knife,” he said.
“You ought to get one of these. Can’t beat ’em. And they’re handy when company comes calling, believe me. I’ll tell you, I opened this youngster up the way you open a fish to clean him. Came in low in the abdomen and swept up clear to the bottom of the rib cage, and you’d have thought you were cutting butter as easy as it was.” He slid the knife easily back into its sheath.
Mowbray felt a chill. The other man had finished his cigarette, and Mowbray put out his own and immediately selected a fresh one from his pack. He started to return the pack to his pocket, then thought to offer it to the other man.
“Not just now. Try me in nine or ten months, though.”
“I’ll do that.”
The man grinned his wide grin. Then his face went quickly serious. “Well, that young fellow fell down,” he said. “Fell right on his back and lay there all opened up. He was moaning and bleeding and I don’t know what else. I don’t recall his words, his speech was disjointed, but what he wanted was for me to get him to a doctor.
“Now the nearest doctor was in Manteo. I happened to know this, and I was near Rodanthe which is a good twenty miles from Manteo if not more. I saw how he was cut and I couldn’t imagine his living through a half-hour ride in a car. In fact if there’d been a doctor six feet away from us I seriously doubt he could have done the boy any good. I’m no doctor myself, but I have to say it was pretty clear to me that boy was dying.
“And if I tried to get him to a doctor, I’d be ruining the interior of my car for all practical purposes, and making a lot of trouble for myself in the bargain. I didn’t expect anybody would seriously try to pin a murder charge on me. It stood to reason that fellow had a criminal record that would reach clear to the mainland and back, and I’ve never had worse than a traffic ticket and few enough of those. And the gun had his prints on it and none of my own. But I’d have to answer a few million questions and hang around for at least a week and doubtless longer for a coroner’s inquest, and it all amounted to a lot of aggravation for no purpose, since he was dying anyway.
“And I’ll tell you something else. It wouldn’t have been worth the trouble even to save him, because what in the world was he but a robbing, murdering snake? Why, if they stitched him up he’d be on the street again as soon as he was healthy and he’d kill someone else in no appreciable time at all. No, I didn’t mind the idea of him dying.” His eyes engaged Mowbray’s. “What would you have done?”
Mowbray thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly can’t say. Same as you, probably.”
“He was in horrible pain. I saw him lying there, and I looked around again to assure myself we were alone, and we were. I thought that I could grab my pole and frying pan and my few other bits of gear and be in my car in two or three minutes, not leaving a thing behind that could be traced to me. I’d camped out the night before in a tent and sleeping bag and wasn’t registered in any motel or campground. In other words I could be away from the Outer Banks entirely in half an hour, with nothing to connect me to the area, much less to the man on the sand. I hadn’t even bought gas with a credit card. I was free and clear if I just got up and left. All I had to do was leave this young fellow to a horribly slow and painful death.” His eyes locked with Mowbray’s again, with an intensity that was difficult to bear. “Or,” he said, his voice lower and softer, “or I could make things easier for him.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. And that’s just what I did. I took and slipped the knife right into his heart. He went instantly. The life slipped right out of his eyes and the tension out of his face and he was gone. And that made it murder.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Of course,” the man echoed. “It might have been an act of mercy, but legally it transformed an act of self-defense into an unquestionable act of criminal homicide.” He breathed deeply. “Think I was wrong to do it?”
“No,” Mowbray said.
“Do the same thing yourself?”
“I honestly don’t know. I hope I would, if the alternative was leaving him to suffer.”
“Well, it’s what I did. So I’ve not only killed a man, I’ve literally murdered a man. I left him under about a foot of sand at the edge of the dunes. I don’t know when the body was discovered. I’m sure it didn’t take too long. Those sands shift back and forth all the time. There was no identification on him, but the police could have labeled him from his prints, because an upstanding young man like him would have had his prints on file. Nothing on his person at all except for about fifty dollars in cash, which destroys the theory that he was robbing me in order to provide himself with that night’s dinner.” His face relaxed in a half-smile. “I took the money,” he said. “Didn’t see as he had any need for it, and I doubted he had much of a real claim to it, as far as that goes.”
“So you not only killed a man but made a profit on it.”
“I did at that. Well, I left the Banks that evening. Drove on inland a good distance, put up for the night in a motel just outside of Fayetteville. I never did look back, never did find out if and when they found him. It’d be on the books as an unsolved homicide if they did. Oh, and I took his gun and flung it halfway to Bermuda. And he didn’t have a car for me to worry about. I suppose he thumbed a ride or came on foot, or else he parked too far away to matter.” Another smile. “Now you know my secret,” he said.
“Maybe you ought to leave out place names,” Mowbray said.
“Why do that?”
“You don’t want to give that much information to a stra
nger.”
“You may be right, but I can only tell a story in my own way. I know what’s going through your mind right now.”
“You do?”
“Want me to tell you? You’re wondering if what I told you is true or not. You figure if it happened I probably wouldn’t tell you, and yet it sounds pretty believable in itself. And you halfway hope it’s the truth and halfway hope it isn’t. Am I close?”
“Very close,” Mowbray admitted.
“Well, I’ll tell you something that’ll tip the balance. You’ll really want to believe it’s all a pack of lies.” He lowered his eyes. “The fact of the matter is you’ll lose any respect you may have had for me when you hear the next.”
“Then why tell me?”
“Because I feel the need.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear this,” Mowbray said.
“I want you to. No fish and it’s getting dark and you’re probably anxious to get back to wherever you’re staying and have a drink and a meal. Well, this won’t take long.” He had been reeling in his line. Now the operation was concluded, and he set the rod deliberately on the grass at his feet. Straightening up, he said, “I told you before about my attitude toward fish. Not killing what I’m not going to eat. And there this young man was, all laid open, internal organs exposed—”
“Stop.”
“I don’t know what you’d call it, curiosity or compulsion or some primitive streak. I couldn’t say. But what I did, I cut off a small piece of his liver before I buried him. Then after he was under the sand I lit my cookfire and—well, no need to go into detail.”
Thank God for that, Mowbray thought. For small favors. He looked at his hands. The left one was trembling. The right, the one gripping his spinning rod, was white at the knuckles, and the tips of his fingers ached from gripping the butt of the rod so tightly.
“Murder, cannibalism, and robbing the dead. That’s quite a string for a man who never got worse than a traffic ticket. And all three in considerably less than an hour.”
“Please,” Mowbray said. His voice was thin and high-pitched. “Please don’t tell me any more.”
“Nothing more to tell.”
Mowbray took a deep breath, held it. This man was either lying or telling the truth, Mowbray thought, and in either case he was quite obviously an extremely unusual person. At the very least.
“You shouldn’t tell that story to strangers,” he said after a moment. “True or false, you shouldn’t tell it.”
“I now and then feel the need.”
“Of course, it’s all to the good that I am a stranger. After all, I don’t know anything about you, not even your name.”
“It’s Tolliver.”
“Or where you live, or—”
“Wallace P. Tolliver. I was in the retail hardware business in Oak Falls, Missouri. That’s not far from Joplin.”
“Don’t tell me anything more,” Mowbray said desperately. “I wish you hadn’t told me what you did.”
“I had to,” the big man said. The smile flashed again. “I’ve told that story three times before today. You’re the fourth man ever to hear it.”
Mowbray said nothing.
“Three times. Always to strangers who happen to turn up while I’m fishing. Always on long lazy afternoons, those afternoons when the fish just don’t bite no matter what you do.”
Mowbray began to do several things. He began to step backward, and he began to release his tight hold on his fishing rod, and he began to extend his left arm protectively in front of him.
But the filleting knife had already cleared its sheath.
Strangers on a Handball Court
We met for the first time on a handball court in Sheridan Park. It was a Saturday morning in early summer with the sky free of clouds and the sun warm but not yet unbearable. He was alone on the court when I got there and I stood for a few moments watching him warm up, slamming the little ball viciously against the imperturbable backstop.
He didn’t look my way, although he must have known I was watching him. When he paused for a moment I said, “A game?”
He looked my way. “Why not?”
I suppose we played for two hours, perhaps a little longer. I’ve no idea how many games we played. I was several years younger, weighed considerably less, and topped him by four or five inches.
He won every game.
When we broke, the sun was high in the sky and considerably hotter than it had been when we started. We had both been sweating freely and we stood together, rubbing our faces and chests with our towels. “Good workout,” he said. “There’s nothing like it.”
“I hope you at least got some decent exercise out of it,” I said apologetically. “I certainly didn’t make it much of a contest.”
“Oh, don’t bother yourself about that,” he said, and flashed a shark’s smile. “Tell you the truth, I like to win. On and off the court. And I certainly got a workout out of you.”
I laughed. “As a matter of fact, I managed to work up a thirst. How about a couple of beers? On me, in exchange for the handball lesson.”
He grinned. “Why not?”
We didn’t talk much until we were settled in a booth at the Hofbrau House. Generations of collegians had carved combinations of Greek letters into the top of our sturdy oak table. I was in the middle of another apology for my athletic inadequacy when he set his stein down atop Zeta Beta Tau and shook a cigarette out of his pack. “Listen,” he said, “forget it. What the hell, maybe you’re lucky in love.”
I let out a bark of mirthless laughter. “If this is luck,” I said, “I’d hate to see misfortune.”
“Problems?”
“You might say so.”
“Well, if it’s something you’d rather not talk about—”
I shook my head. “It’s not that—it might even do me good to talk about it—but it would bore the daylights out of you. It’s hardly an original problem. The world is overflowing these days with men in the very same leaky boat.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve got a girl,” I said. “I love her and she loves me. But I’m afraid I’m going to lose her.”
He frowned, thinking about it. “You’re married,” he said.
“No.”
“She’s married.”
I shook my head. “No, we’re both single. She wants to get married.”
“But you don’t want to marry her.”
“There’s nothing I want more than to marry her and spend the rest of my life with her.”
His frown deepened. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me think. You’re both single, you both want to get married, but there’s a problem. All I can think of is she’s your sister, but I can’t believe that’s it, especially since you said it’s a common problem. I’ll tell you, I think my brain’s tired from too much time in the sun. What’s the problem?”
“I’m divorced.”
“So who isn’t? I’m divorced and I’m remarried. Unless it’s a religious thing. I bet that’s what it is.”
“No.”
“Well, don’t keep me guessing, fella. I already gave up once, remember?”
“The problem is my ex-wife,” I said. “The judge gave her everything I had but the clothes I was wearing at the time of the trial. With the alimony I have to pay her, I’m living in a furnished room and cooking on a hotplate. I can’t afford to get married, and my girl wants to get married—and sooner or later she’s going to get tired of spending her time with a guy who can never afford to take her anyplace decent.” I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “you get the picture.”
“Boy, do I get the picture.”
“As I said, it’s not a very original problem.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He signaled the waiter for two more beers, and when they arrived he lit another cigarette and took a long swallow of his beer. “It’s really something,” he said. “Meeting like this. I already told you I got an ex-wife of my own.”
“These days
almost everybody does.”
“That’s the truth. I must have had a better lawyer than you did, but I still got burned pretty bad. She got the house, she got the Cadillac and just about everything else she wanted. And now she gets fifty cents out of every dollar I make. She’s got no kids, she’s got no responsibilities, but she gets fifty cents out of every dollar I earn and the government gets another thirty or forty cents. What does that leave me?”
“Not a whole lot.”
“You better believe it. As it happens I make a good living. Even with what she and the government take I manage to live pretty decently. But do you know what it does to me, paying her all that money every month? I hate that woman’s guts and she lives like a queen at my expense.”
I took a long drink of beer. “I guess our problems aren’t all that different.”
“And a lot of men can say the same thing. Millions of them. A word of advice, friend. What you should do if you marry your girlfriend—”
“I can’t marry her.”
“But if you go ahead and marry her anyway. Just make sure you do what I did before I married my second wife. It goes against the grain to do it because when you’re about to marry someone you’re completely in love and you’re sure it’s going to last forever. But make a prenuptial agreement. Have it all signed and witnessed before the marriage ceremony, and have it specify that if there’s a divorce she does not get one dime, she gets zip. You follow me? Get yourself a decent lawyer so he’ll draw up something that will stand up, and get her to sign it, which she most likely will because she’ll be so starry-eyed about getting married. Then you’ll have nothing to worry about. If the marriage is peaches and cream forever, which I hope it is, then you’ve wasted a couple of hundred dollars on a lawyer and that’s no big deal. But if anything goes wrong with the marriage, you’re in the catbird seat.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “It makes sense,” I said.
“That’s what I did. Now my second wife and I, we get along pretty good. She’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s good company, I figure I got a pretty good deal. We have our bad times, but they’re nothing two people can’t live with. And the thing is, she’s not tempted by the idea of divorcing me, because she knows what she’ll come out with if she does. Zeeee-ro.”
Enough Rope Page 44
