“Sit down and type up your report,” the Sheriff says, “before you forget what happened.”
Larry Berlin shakes his handsome head to say Jack Riddle, you’re a case! He goes around the desk and settles in the Sheriff’s swivel chair. It’s comfortable. He tests it, leaning back and twisting around while the Sheriff brings the typewriter from the corner and plunks it down in front of him. Larry Berlin looks at it and tests the keys, like a brand-new toy. The Sheriff fumbles around in the filing cabinet until he finds a stack of official forms he is looking for.
“What am I supposed to do with all these?” Larry asks, taking them.
“Six copies, boy. Everything serious comes in six copies. You know that.”
Larry shrugs and ineptly tries to get the forms and the carbon paper lined up correctly in the typewriter.
“You want some help?”
“I got to learn sometime.”
Finally gets everything in place, smiles, then rubs his hands and flexes his fingers like a concert pianist. Bending close to the machine, he begins by diffident hunt and peck to type out his report.
Ike Toombs has been watching all this with profoundly amused concentration. Kind of like watching a monkey play the piano or something. Worth seeing once. Now he is aware that the Sheriff has already asked him the question once and is repeating himself.
“You ever been busted? You ever done time?”
“I’m not denying it. You’ll find out soon enough anyway.”
“Maybe we could speed things up a little.”
“What’s the big hurry? Like I said, Sheriff, time is all I got plenty of.”
The hesitant, stumbling noise of the typewriter, like a wounded insect rattling, stops. “Gimme five minutes with him, Jack.”
“I’m still trying to make up my mind,” the Sheriff says to Ike Toombs. Freed from the fortress of his desk, he paces restlessly up and down the small room, small for the length of his legs, pacing, idly picking up an object here and there, examining it without interest, without even really seeing what it may be that he has in his hands, but not looking at his prisoner directly. And speaking always in a soft, controlled voice. Like he was holding something back.
“I can’t remember,” Ike Toombs is saying. “I mean I been in jails and jails. All kinds of jails.”
“How about the big ones?”
“Sheriff, I already told you I was all through talking.”
Larry stops typing again. “Jack,” he says, “you just walk outside and smoke a cigarette or something. Time you get back I’ll have this smart mouth telling his whole life story.”
“You finish up that report!”
“Lock me up! Lock me up!” Ike Toombs says. “I mean, I sure do enjoy you all’s company, but I’m going be too late for a free breakfast.”
At this moment the phone on the desk starts to ring. The sound fills the room, as shocking as a scream in the night. And for an instant all three men stop and stare at the small black instrument perched there smugly on the cluttered desk. They are tense, frozen. The sound of the phone seems to each of them and all together like a lewd interruption, a coarse fluttering tongue, a Bronx cheer offered in honor of them all.
It is Larry Berlin who picks it up. Listens: “Yeah, he’s here—” Cupping his hand over the speaker, offering it to Sheriff Riddle, who comes to life himself now, grabbing for it. “It’s for you, Jack. State Police—”
“Riddle, speaking.”
And there is a long pause while he listens intently. His hard face has become impassive again, showing nothing, revealing no emotion or feeling, though he nods as though the speaker could see him and appreciate the gravity with which he is receiving the news. Ike Toombs and Larry Berlin sit still, watching him close for a sign of anything. The voice on the other end of the tense, strung line between here and somewhere else crackles in a steady, hurried rhythm.
“All right, I’ll call you back,” the Sheriff says. And hangs up. Gently, as if the phone were a delicate vase.
And then a curious thing happens. He stands bowed, staring at the cold, silent phone as if he expected it to come to life again, to rise up in the room like a wild bird and shriek at him. His face changes slowly as he stares, very slowly. He begins to smile. It is an expression Ike Toombs has not guessed the Sheriff is capable of. A slow, relieved softening of his puzzled, outraged features. All slowly softening like wax held too close to flame. As if now it all makes sense. Something has changed radically and something else has been restored to him. Something he thought he lost forever this morning has been returned to him by a single phone call from a stranger.
Ike Toombs grips the neck of his guitar. He feels a chill spreading over his flesh like a cold sweat. There is something about the Sheriff’s smile that is like the smile of a man who has tasted something evil and found that it is sweet and good to eat. The Sheriff is a different man. Ike Toombs knows now, though he cannot let himself believe it yet, that he will not walk out of this office a free man. He won’t walk away from this one with only a few little scratches and scars.
The Sheriff has turned away from both of them. He is pouring himself a cup of coffee. Carefully he takes two spoons of sugar and with that new smile fixed on his features, as if he now wore a stiff, painted, fierce mask, he is stirring and stirring. Finally he lifts it to his lips and takes a little sip, that’s all, just a taste. He smacks his lips theatrically. He sets the cup down and lights a cigarette, inhaling deeply the first puff. Then he picks up Larry’s magazine and unfolds the picture of the young blond lady with the towel. He stares at it, meditative, smoking.
Larry Berlin has long since shrugged and returned to his typing.
“Sheriff?” Ike Toombs says.
The Sheriff turns toward him and holds up the picture. “Ain’t that something else?”
Ike Toombs blinks and looks at the picture. It means nothing at all and it means everything, too, if you think about it. Ike Toombs stares as if hypnotized. All the women he has ever known, in fact and in the rich harem of the imagination, are dancing before his eyes—whores and virgins, sluts and nuns, dark ones and light ones, skinny and fat, short and tall, without names and a few with names, and once, by God, even a wife with the name of Hyacinth, which is a name that sticks. Hotel rooms and boxcars, and once standing up in the men’s room on a moving train, and barns, and the old green-grass hotel. And maybe he did and maybe he didn’t because it all happened when he was young and strong and full of the juice of life which dries up just when you finally know how to use it. The old shuddering moment of almost knowing another human being, as close as you can come to knowledge. And the deprivation, the doing without until you learn it’s one more thing you can do without, one less link on the chain you dangle from, that link by link he’s pared down to where at last it’s short enough now to tolerate. What is the Sheriff telling him? He’s saying a lot of things at once like a song. But most of all he’s telling him, Ike, we done got there. We got the thing stripped down pretty close to the naked truth. And he’s saying something about life. There it is. Now you see it now you don’t. Take a look because it may be your last one.
“I want to talk to you, Sheriff,” he says. His voice sounds strange to him. He feels like he’s a ventriloquist talking through a wooden dummy.
“I thought you were all through talking.”
“A man is always willing to listen to reason.”
The Sheriff throws the magazine away. It flies across the room in a flutter of pages and falls to the floor near the door. The girl’s expression does not change. Now she’s flat on her back looking at the ceiling.
“Well now, you just listen to this,” the Sheriff says. If he had fangs, they would be showing now, Ike Toombs has come into the parlor of the spider, the lair of the wolf. “Seems like whoever it was in that car knocked over a little gas station in Ocala last night. And it seems like whoever it was had to go and shoot the kid that was working in the station. A high school kid. Seems like he is about t
o die on us.”
Larry is banging the desk drawers, opening and closing them, rummaging irritably. “I can’t find a freaking eraser.”
“Seems like there may have been two men in that car,” the Sheriff goes on evenly. “There’s an eyewitness who says he is sure he saw two men in that car.”
“Sheriff, I swear at the feet of God Almighty—!”
“Jack, do you know where an eraser is?”
“Ask Monk,” the Sheriff snaps at him. “Maybe he’s got one.”
“You never can find anything around here when you need it.”
Larry Berlin gets up and goes out. His heels click as he goes. Ike Toombs is amazed. How come he didn’t even notice that before? Taps on his boots, naturally. He would wear taps. But he never even noticed it until now. Where has he been—asleep? Has the shock numbed him out like a drug? The sound of those taps takes the heart out of him.
He rises to his feet slowly. His legs feel weak and rubbery. “You mind if I take you up on that coffee now?”
“It’s cold.”
“I don’t care,” Ike Toombs says with a little giggle. “Just as long as it’s wet.”
Sheriff Jack Riddle watches the man the way you might observe the undulant motions of a snake in a glass case. A fat and shabby shiftless bum with his guitar and the color and pallor of jailhouses around him like an invisible cloak. And the softness, the sag and jiggle of his belly, the soft, white, fish-belly hands, the loose jowls and the rings and rolls of it cropped up around his neck, the softness is disgusting. Probably got titties like a woman. And a little pecker like a cigarette. All the envy and pity he first felt for him has gone. Half an hour ago, ten minutes ago even, and he might just as well have turned the fella loose. Not just to save young Larry and the Sheriff’s office from a bad name, though that was something to think about. But to set him on his way again. Because with all his smart mouth and the stain of toughness (which, soft or hard, is nothing more than the ability or the willingness to take a fair share of punishment) on him, he looked harmless. Just had the itch in his toes and on the soles of his feet to keep moving on across the dull, settled land. Never staying anywhere for long. Always a traveler. Always living in a world where everything was exactly what it seemed to be because that’s all you ever had to know about any of it. Thus in a way childlike. Like a child for whom elves are as real as rocks on the ground.
This lack of the burden of sad knowledge is enviable to the Sheriff, who has spent most of his life in Fairview. Slowly, veil by veil, the truth has been revealed to him whether he has wanted it that way or not. Even though he has chosen to live by noble illusions. For what is Justice, he thinks, with all its elaborate machinery and ritual if not the strict preservation of the illusion of the possible freedom and rationality of man? And he has become, by custom and ceremony and long usage and experience, the protector of illusion, guardian of the secret nakedness. High priest of a veiled goddess. Obedient servant of the little, flimsy illusions of respectability and decency the townspeople live by and for. Without that, he is thinking, what do they have left to worship in a bad world? The world came through in a fast car. The world came into town in the morning paper and on the TV. Lying with a smile and killing with a kiss. The world had an Italian name and lived in a cheap hotel in Brooklyn, New York. The world passed overhead, so faint you couldn’t see it, leaving a vapor trail behind. He stands between the world and them. Oh, he is all too familiar with their vices and stifled virtues. But he has remained the steadfast preserver of those secrets and their illusions. Because without them, he knows and believes, life would be unbearable.
He had envied, though, to the point of admiration, the lucky ignorance that allowed a man like this one, this Ike Toombs, if that is even his right name, the freedom of almost complete indifference. Innocence, ignorance, indifference, a few songs in his head like pennies in a purse. There was a kind of purity about it. That, too, was an illusion that seemed well worth preserving.
He has been wrong this time. In his own ignorance, the supreme ignorance of believing that after a certain time and a certain number of wounds and scars a man can faithfully trust his own judgment. He has failed even in his duty. He knows that he can say that much for Larry Berlin (about whom he has guessed wrong too), he may not have had a clue what he was doing when he did it; but when he drew his pistol and shot Anthony De Angelo, whoever he was or might have been, without a question, as reflexively as a trained watchdog attacks a prowler, he was right. He should have killed the both of them.
“You about made up your mind to answer some questions, huh?”
The prisoner, drinking his coffee, clears his throat and nods.
“All right, let’s back up. How many times you been busted?”
“There’s a lot of them. A lot of little ones.”
“I can imagine,” the Sheriff says. “Just give me the big ones. To the best of your recollection.”
“Well, they got me one time, a long time ago, on assault with a deadly weapon. I was nothing but a fresh-faced kid then. Middle of the Depression. This guy was in plainclothes. He come running at me in the freight yard. I didn’t know—”
Plainclothes, hell! He looked like a bum hisself. What would you do? He come running and hollering with a big stick in his hand. That was in Meridian, Mississippi. Which was a helluva tough town in those days.
“What else?”
“I didn’t have no way of knowing he was a railroad bull,” the prisoner says with sudden vehemence and complaint.
“What else?”
“Well now, the other one, the other big one.… It was what you’d call a kind of a rape, Sheriff. What I mean is, me and the lady in question, we had a little misunderstanding.”
The memory of it tickles him. He can even laugh about that now.
“Is that all?”
“It’s about enough, ain’t it?”
Indignation is in that answer. You can take away a lot, but don’t take away jail pride. He’s done his time, walked in and walked out where many a man couldn’t. Don’t make light of his suffering and endurance. A man has little enough to comfort himself with.
“It’s enough,” the Sheriff says calmly. “Probably put you smack in the slammer for life on this felony murder.”
“Oh Jesus—”
“You don’t much like jail, do you?” the Sheriff says, that hard mask with the fixed smile on his face again. “A fella like you, a bum, a drifter, a singing man. You been in and out of plenty of jails. And you tough enough to take it too. But you never got to like it. You got to have your freedom.”
“What are you trying to do, Sheriff. What do you want?”
The door flies open behind them and they whirl around to see Larry Berlin saunter in, smiling again, holding up for everyone to see the source of his smile, a small typewriter eraser.
“Got it.”
“Jesus Christ,” the prisoner says.
Ike Toombs is stunned. All his life he has been acting on the hopeful assumption that if you can just keep your hands more or less clean, if you never care too deeply or obviously about anything and therefore have nothing to be deprived of, you can lose only bits and pieces at a time. No more than time and the natural process of change and decay will deprive you of anyway, one way or the other and without asking your permission. It’s the way of the world. He has philosophically learned to include injustice in the grand design and even learned to accept it. Like rain on your head. Like a stroke of bad luck. Freed in this way, freed from the fear of loss, he has been able to live and look after himself. A wily, wary life like a small scurrying rodent with sharp teeth. Alert, agile, dodging when he can and taking it when he has to. But total loss. Loss, the ultimate blind injustice of going all this way on his aimless pilgrimage only to find that something beyond belief was patiently waiting for him all the time, is hard to bear. He has propitiated. He has atoned to the greater and the lesser gods. He has lived poor and alone, offering up his unattractive body and all of the
things valued in the world, in return for which he has claimed only the right to live out his time. But now, he thinks, there never was a bargain. His whole life has been the working out of an equation designed to prove that life itself is ridiculous.
This morning he has seen sudden death. Not for the first time in his life, but what a way to begin this day! He has seen himself able to cause a good man (for he has been convinced ever since he was first pushed blindly into the small room that the Sheriff is a good man and that that will be his salvation) to reveal pure and naked cruelty. Reveal a hidden hatred, hidden even from himself. He has been able to bring that out of the Sheriff like a dentist yanking a rotten tooth. He has been forced to be witness to the undeniable truth that the young deputy is neither cruel nor vicious, but merely possessed of a mindless, visceral brutality which might even be defined as innocence. It is an innocence which makes the young deputy, who just happened to be riding along the road at the same time, the exact and perfect instrument for the working out of Ike Toombs’s fate.
He would curse and shake his fist in God’s face now if he could. But who has ever seen the face of God?
Still, he is not defeated yet. They haven’t tried, convicted, and locked him up forever. He still has chances and alternatives. He has the alternative of pleading for himself. A cry of mercy may be alms enough even to satisfy the good Sheriff. And it seems that the Sheriff may offer him this role.
“I’m still thinking to myself,” the Sheriff says. “I can turn you loose. There’s no reason in the world not to believe you. You ain’t got nothing real to connect you with a holdup in Ocala.”
“That’s right. You didn’t find nothing on me. No weapon, no money—”
“Or then again, I can do my duty and lock you up. Leave it to a jury to decide what to think about your story.”
“You know what a jury will think.”
“You never can tell.”
Ike Toombs swallows hard. There is still the alternative of Job. Accepting even this and in so doing to be freed of the last humiliation. Or he can give the Sheriff what he wants, go on and say what he wants to hear. Acting on the unlikely supposition that the Sheriff hasn’t already made up his mind, is not already confirmed in his will. Hoping that he can still be fooled and deluded. If he is right, he will save his life. And if he is wrong again, he will have paid out everything for nothing.
Evening Performance Page 51
