“I’m going straight in the cave.”
“We should’ve brought a flashlight.”
“Next time,” he said. “Next time we’ll bring one along.”
“Be careful,” Bobby said. “Don’t get the hose fouled down there.”
“Come on,” Chris said. “Put the helmet on me.”
We put it over his head, and I picked up the pump and started pumping. It was hard work and kind of tiresome. I pumped as fast as I could for him and Bobby kneeled and watched him go. He gave a jerk on the hose and Bobby paid it out.
“He’s got a whole armload of rocks,” Bobby said. “That’s what we needed, more weight.”
After that Bobby didn’t say any more. There wasn’t anything to see. Chris had crawled inside the cave. Every once in a while there would be a jerk and Bobby would throw in some more of the hose. Finally that’s all there was to it.
“He’ll have to come on back now,” Bobby said.
I was sweating all over and my arms ached from pumping. I just nodded and kept on. Chris jerked on the hose again.
“We forgot to make two-way signals,” Bobby said.
He peered over the side. The hose was taut. Then there were three jerks. He was coming up. We were relieved, but nothing happened. The hose slackened all right, but Chris didn’t come up. Then there was a good deal of slack floating loose in the water. Bobby gave the hose a tug.
“You keep on pumping and I’ll dive down and see if anything’s wrong.”
I was too tired even to nod by then, but I was worried about Chris and pumped as hard as I could. Bobby dived over the side, tilting and rocking the boat.
When Bobby came back up his face was white and drawn. He held up one end of the hose to show it to me. I felt like I was going to faint.
“Damn you!” he said. “Stop pumping. It isn’t doing any good.”
Chris was down there somewhere with no more air. We hoped he would come up, shooting up in a stream of bubbles from inside of the cave with a great big smile and a wonderful story about all the things he had seen. We didn’t even think that it was sure to mean losing the helmet. After a minute or so (so quiet we could hear the squirrels scrabbling in an oak tree up near the ruined bathhouse) we knew we would have to go down and get him. We dived and dived, but even holding our breaths as long as we could stand it, we couldn’t get far into the mouth of the cave. Spent, we clutched the boat and looked into each other’s eyes.
“I’m going to get help,” Bobby said. “Keep diving.”
He swam to shore and I saw him grab up his pants and start scrambling up the bank. Just as I went down again I heard the car engine start. When I came up for air he was gone.
I kept on diving down until my lungs turned into something like tripe and my eyes felt like running sores. But I never could get inside the cave. When they came I was so weak they had to pull me out before they could get started trying to locate Chris. I remember when I got my feet on the ground I fought them to try and get back in the water again. They had to drag me to the ambulance and I was cursing them and yelling at them every step of the way.
The funeral was something else again. A terrible occasion when you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was at the Episcopal Church because there isn’t any Greek Orthodox Church in our town. All of Chris’s buddies were told to dress up in our Boy Scout uniforms and act as a kind of honor guard. We still wore the old-fashioned uniforms then, shorts and knee socks and the wide-brimmed, soft-crowned caps; and for high school boys it felt pretty silly. Chris never gave a damn about the Scouts anyway, but his parents did or at least they thought he did. They even buried Chris in a Scout uniform. At least he was First-Class. Bobby was an Eagle Scout, and I was the oldest Second-Class in the county, if not the country. We all had to file by the body in the undertaker’s parlor and salute before they took it over to the church. There was old Chris with makeup on and, I swear, rice powder or something to make his dark face look lighter.
The church service wasn’t so bad. At least it had enough ceremony to suit Chris, lots of flowers and music and prayer read out of a book instead of made up by some windbag. It was at the grave that everything bad happened. Chris’s mother started carrying on in a foreign way, wailing a kind of tune, crying and wringing her hands. Chris’s father had on his old Greek Army uniform with a lot of medals on it. It looked strange and didn’t fit too well anymore. He put his arm around his wife, but he didn’t seem to want her to stop wailing. Then when they lowered the coffin we all lined up and saluted and Lonnie Jones played taps on the bugle. Lonnie is the world’s worst bugler (he used to drive Chris crazy at Scout camp), and I tell you I’d rather have heard anything, even a Bronx cheer, than Lonnie Jones playing taps over Chris’s grave.
After the cemetery service was finally over we all filed by the grave and threw in dirt and started to leave. I was going to ride home with my family, but before I could get to them my father saw Bobby’s father in the crowd. And that was a scene!
“You’ve got a nerve!” my father yelled at him. Daddy was drunk, I could tell. “You’ve got your nerve to show your face here. Diving helmets! It’s your money that killed that poor boy and like to have killed mine. No, no, no, it wasn’t your money, it was our money, my money, you crook!”
All the time my mother and my brother Joe, the traveling salesman, were trying to get my father back to the car. He didn’t give them any trouble. He let himself be led along easily enough. But still he kept twisting around his red face to shout insults at Bobby’s father. Bobby’s father just stood there in the sun and looked at him proudly, as if he were beneath noticing. He looked at my father as if he didn’t really see or hear any of it, as if he were lost in some graceful thought. He was a slim, distinguished man with white hair and one of the gentlest faces I’ve ever seen. He never raised his voice at anyone or got drunk in public or did anything that might possibly embarrass his family. Of course a few years later it turned out he was and had been a crook all along just like my father always said. And he shot himself. That’s another story. I won’t go into it except to say that even that gesture was frustrating to my father. He felt cheated, I guess.
“You see,” he said when he heard the news that the banker had killed himself. “You see! People like that never get their just desserts. They have their cake and eat it too. Goddamn them all to hell!”
With all that going on at the cemetery I decided to walk home. Nobody was going to miss me in the excitement. And I cut across the graveyard, picking my way among the tombstones, old and new. I came over a little slope of ground and I found Bobby sitting under an oak tree smoking a cigarette. He gave me one too.
“Did you see all that?”
“Oh, I don’t blame your daddy at all,” he said. “I guess I’d be pretty mad myself if I was him.”
“You don’t feel like it was your fault, do you?”
He just shrugged. It was exactly like Chris’s shrug. A real weary kind of a gesture, and for some reason it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and I felt a chill even though I was wringing wet with sweat in my Scout uniform.
“You don’t feel responsible, do you?” I asked.
“Somebody’s got to be responsible,” he said.
“What do you mean by that? It was Chris’s idea as much as it was ours. He wanted to go there and go down in the cave in the first place. It’s a sad, terrible thing, but it isn’t anybody’s fault.”
“That’s the trouble with people like you, yes, like you and Chris both. And your daddy and my daddy too. You have all these crazy wonderful schemes and ideas. You don’t care what the risk is. And that’s all right for you. But somebody has got to watch after you all the time. And when you’re all finished with whatever you’re doing somebody else has got to come along and start to clean up the mess you leave behind. You people are babies in this world.”
That was about the longest speech I ever heard Bobby make. He sat there puffing on his cigarette with all those Eag
le Scout merit badges staring me in the face and grinning at me. There was some truth in it, but it made me mad.
“How does it make you feel to think like that?”
“It makes me feel old as hell,” he said.
He stood up and brushed off the seat of his Scout pants and put out his cigarette. He tore it up and scattered the shreds of tobacco and wadded the paper up in a tight little ball and threw it away. (I was to learn what “field stripping” a cigarette was some years later.) He wasn’t going to shame me that way. I deliberately threw mine still smoking into the grass to let it burn out of its own accord. Then, for some reason, he smiled at me and stuck out his hand to shake hands.
“Look,” he said. “There’s no use having an argument. Chris is dead and we can’t change that. We can’t ever change anything.”
So I shook hands with him, and we put on our hats and started Walking home.
THE VICTIM
AT FIRST there was an odor in the dry and dusty woods. Then it was in the leaves, a flicker of something unexpected like a sourceless shaft of light or the swift passage of a bird nearby, unseen. By the time they heard it unmistakably, the sparkling rush and white roar of water on rocks, they were already running. They blundered among the trees, tripped over roots and stones and fallen branches, thrashed like swimmers as they ran, and plunged headlong down a sudden steep slope, falling, rolling, bruised and bleeding from the rocks and the gnash of underbrush, but always rising and running on until they came to the edge of the mountain stream, fell on their bellies, pushed head and shoulders into its thrilling current, and gulped at it. The cold water was as cruel as fire to their parched tongues, cracked lips, their dusty throats.
They had been without water all day long.
Side by side they lay in the coarse sand and gravel, heads and shoulders thrust into the stream, the young man in khaki and the fat man, middle-aged, wearing the gray work uniform of the State Prison Farm. Almost at the same instant, like puppets, they raised their dripping heads and looked at each other and started to laugh. The cold water ran down them as, half-raised, they looked deeply into each other’s eyes. The young man cupped a handful of water and splashed the other. The fat man, using his hands like little paddles, splashed back, and in a moment they were lost in a storm of splashing, wordless and wild.
They might have embraced then, they were so close, but the rifle lay between them like a sword.
Spent, they rolled over on their backs and looked into the bowl of the sky, blue as the heart of a flame with, here and there, the immaculate sculptured clouds of midsummer. A way off, behind them, back where they had come from, a buzzard circled in a slow lazy arc, then vanished behind the trees.
“I’m going to take off my shoes,” the fat man said. “The hell with it. I’m going to pleasure myself.”
He sat up, bending over the sag and bulk of his belly and, groaning a little, began to unlace his high-top work shoes. The young man grunted and looked at him, and it was then that the blued glint of the rifle barrel caught his eye. Very slowly, while the fat man struggled with the laces of his shoes, the young man’s hand, poised high on its fingertips like a large, lazy spider, moved toward the rifle. When the fat man seized a shoe with both hands to tug it off, the young man snatched at the rifle, rolled away, cocked it in the moment that he was rolling, sat up, and snapped the safety off. The little click that the safety made might as well have been thunder. The fat man froze with one limp shoe dangling like a small dead animal in his hand, still not looking at the young man. His body seemed to turn to wax. Face and muscle began to melt, and he let the shoe slip from his fingers. Only his head turned, sad-eyed and hurt, the lips trembling like elastic stretched too taut, the rolls of fat below his face, where the tanned neck joined the fish-belly whiteness of his body in a ragged little horizon, shook. The young man saw sweat pop out all over his face at once and shine like a coat of grease.
The young man felt his own lips forming a slight smile.
“I’ll take the knife too,” he said.
“You got the gun,” the fat man said. “I mean you got everything now. Why take the knife too? If you have the gun, what harm is there in a little jackknife?”
“Give it to me,” the young man said. “And give it to me right. I want it.”
The fat man mumbled to himself and dug in his pockets. His hand came up with the jackknife in it, and he edged his hand forward, palm up, fingers slack and useless, the knife resting lightly in his palm.
“Just drop it in the sand. That’s right.”
The knife fell and the fat man wiped his face with his sleeve. He rubbed his sleeve across his face, and gradually his face seemed to take a shape and color again. Even his eyes brightened.
“I should have known,” he said. “I just got so thirsty I couldn’t even think straight. I guess I got careless.”
“Oh, you’ve been careless,” the young man said. “Last night, the night before, you dozed off and I could’ve taken the gun then. I could have jumped you anytime in the woods.”
“Don’t forget I had the knife too. Don’t forget that.”
“You’re a damn fool,” he said. “I could’ve wrung your neck like an old stewing hen anytime I wanted to. And it wouldn’t even be a crime. Just good riddance.”
The fat man swallowed hard and quick lines of puzzlement troubled his forehead.
“If that’s the truth, then why didn’t you? If you could, why didn’t you? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“I don’t really know,” the young man said. “I must have wanted to wait you out.”
“Hah!”
“No, I’m serious. I knew if I waited long enough you’d forget yourself. You’d start to want something so bad you’d forget all about everything, what we were doing, where we were going, the whole works. People are like that. As soon as they start to want something bad enough they got one-track minds.”
“You don’t care much for other people. You got a fine contempt for them.”
“Don’t feel bad about it,” the young man said. “I waited so long, I got so thirsty, I pretty near forgot myself. Now just don’t you move.”
He stood up and felt for the knife one-handed, the other hand holding the rifle, his index finger hooked over the trigger, the rifle hip-high, pointed straight at the body of the fat man, his eyes never leaving the other’s. When his hand found the knife, he eased it into his pocket, then he moved back and away up the slope, crabwise, until he came to a tree he could lean against.
“That was all right,” he said. “Now go ahead. Go ahead and soak your feet all you want to.”
He leaned against the rough bark of the pine tree, wriggling his shoulders to scratch his itchy back, smelling the piney green sweetness, cradling the cool rifle in his arms; and the other turned his back to him and sat on a flat rock, dangling his bare feet in the water. The fat man wiggled his toes in the water like a child.
“You’re a pleasure-loving old bastard,” the young man said. “How did you ever stand it in jail?”
The fat man didn’t answer. He turned his head and grinned briefly. He finished washing his feet and letting them dry in the sun and air. He put on his socks carefully, smoothing the wrinkles out, and he squatted on his bulging haunches and laced up his shoes, tied them in a neat firm knot. Then he stood up.
“All right,” he said. “What now?”
“I dropped my pack up on the hill when we started running. I don’t know just where, but it can’t be far,” the young man said. “Let’s us stroll up there and pick up my pack and my canteen. Then we’ll come back here and fix us something to eat. Unless maybe you aren’t hungry?”
“I’m hungry all right.”
“Lead off, fat man. I’m right behind you.”
In a while they had a twig and brush fire going down by the stream. The fat man crouched beside it, stirring the twigs, blowing on the flames. The young man sat back against the tree and watched. They had two cans of beans, a little can of
potted meat, some bacon, and a few pieces of bread. The fat man strung the bacon on a forked green stick and held it over the flame. Grease spat into the fire and the flame danced. There was a good crackling sound and the smell of bacon cooking.
“If you hadn’t of been in such a big hurry,” the young man said, “we’d be all right. We could’ve brought along my pup tent and the rest of my stuff.”
“We never would’ve made it this far with all that,” the fat man said. “We come a pretty good ways. I expect we’re in Tennessee already.”
“No we’re not. We’re still in North Carolina. Tennessee is a ways yet.”
“I haven’t heard the dogs all day. I haven’t heard a single sound of dogs.”
“I expect you will before long.”
The fat man took the bacon off the forked stick and folded half the strips into a piece of bread. He came toward the young man, bent over, deferential, cautious, and handed him the sandwich. Then he backed down the slope again to the fire and fixed his own. He held it tight in his hands so that the grease could soak evenly into his piece of bread. Then he began to nibble at it in quick little bites like a squirrel with a nut.
“Stick the beans in the fire.”
“How we going to get the cans open?”
“I’ll let you use the knife.”
“Both cans? Don’t you think we better save one?”
“What for? Like you said, we’re almost to Tennessee.” The young man grinned and tossed the knife to him.
When the beans were warm, they ate them with their fingers, licking the sweet brown sauce so as not to lose a drop. They split the other piece of bread to wipe the cans clean. The can of potted meat remained unopened.
“Go ahead and have it,” the young man said. “You’re a big man. You need it worse than I do.”
The fat man opened the can. Looking up, he saw the young man was busy mopping his can of beans with the piece of bread. He kept his eyes on the young man and very slowly slipped the knife back into his pocket. The young man made no movement.
Evening Performance Page 19
