by Gil Brewer
“Stop the car, Steve!” Angers said. He reached out and grabbed my shoulder. “Lillian’s back there. Stop the car!”
All right. I decided to stop the car. I slammed the brakes with everything I had and the Dodge was out of my hands.
We whipped to the left, slammed over a curb, and careened wildly across somebody’s big beautiful lawn. We narrowly missed two coconut palms and I wrenched the wheel.
“Steve!” I heard Angers say. Something hit the back of my head.
I let her go then. I turned in the seat and went at him. He slammed at me with the gun, yelling something. The car came down into the street again, not going very fast now, and headed for the sea wall. It barked up against the short edge of wall, climbed it, followed it, then screeched to a rusty stop, teetering. The right-hand door was open again, and the car was tipped that way.
Angers was up on the back of the front seat and we started falling toward the water. Not the car, just us. I tried to hang on, but we went right on through the door into the bayou.
We landed in about two feet of water. I knew that just a step or two farther away from the wall the water was deep, real deep.
“Steve, what’s the matter with you?”
I dove at him. He was standing against the wall. I didn’t reckon with the gun. I tried to dodge, but he brought it down against my forehead. Once, twice, he whipped that gun against my head. I reeled backward and fell. It hurt plenty. I could hear him talking to me but I couldn’t make out the words.
I kept trying to get up but the bottom was mud and silt and slippery. I fell back toward deeper water. I dragged myself toward the sea wall and he was standing there, loading the clip on that damned gun, talking to me. Through all the pain in my head, I heard him say, “Steve, you shouldn’t do that. Don’t act that way. I know you get excited, but there’s no reason for you to take it out on your pal, Steve.”
Somebody called up on the street.
“Hey, there! Anybody down there?”
Neither of us said anything. I went toward him and he was finishing loading the clip. I couldn’t move fast on the muck bottom, my feet kept sliding, and I heard myself sobbing with the effort and the failure. Sobbing with him standing there, now, putting the box of shells into his pocket and standing there and slapping the clip back into the gun.
“Come on, Steve,” he said. “There’s some stairs, right there.”
We were by a pier and I kept hearing myself sobbing. The car was nose down over the sea wall, with the right side hanging over the water, the right front wheel propped up on the wooden pier. If we’d missed the pier we would have gone all the way in. Damn the pier.
“Come on, pal. Up the stairs.”
Angers pushed me to the stairs and I started up. I was still plenty foggy from being hit with the gun. He waited till I was on the pier, then he said, “Go ahead, pal. Walk out onto the street, there.”
He was a wise bird now, all right. His eyes were kind of shining down there, where he stood in the water. He was plenty wise now. I stepped away from the head of the wooden steps, and he came up fast, watching me.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Steve,” he said.
A man walked toward us on the street. We stepped over the sea wall into the street. The man came on toward us. He was in his shirt sleeves, holding a pipe in his hand. He was probably around sixty years old, with a very anxious face. He looked over his steel-rimmed glasses and said, “You men all right? That was a bad one.”
“Listen,” I said. “Go back home, quick.” I was reeling.
“Been drinking, eh?” the man said.
“The blueprints,” Angers said.
The man said, “I heard the racket there and you tore up considerable of my lawn, I reckon. This is a bad one. A wonder you weren’t killed.”
“Please, go home,” I said.
“Have to report this,” he said. “You can use my phone.”
“Please,” I said. Angers was standing there, looking at the man.
“Didn’t hurt the car much, though, I don’t reckon,” the man said.
Angers started for the car. The man turned and touched Angers’ arm. “You all right?” the man said.
Angers turned, without pausing, and shot him in the chest. Just once he shot him, and kept on walking over to the car. The old man collapsed on the brick pavement. His pipe jumped from his hand and rattled along to the sea wall and I heard it go plunk into the bayou water.
• • •
“They’re all right,” Angers said.
I looked over at him. He was standing there beside the car with his beloved blueprints in his hand. The big roll of paper was all right.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ll never get this car out of here.”
“Maybe we can,” I said, stalling.
“Come on.” He came over by me, glanced once at the man lying in the street. A car came along, coming fast from the other direction. “Cross the street, pal.”
We went across the street in front of the car.
“Keep walking,” Angers said. “There’ll be a crowd of people around here in a little while.”
We slogged along across the road, up over the curb, and started across a lawn. Our clothes were soggy and they stank of fish and muck. Every step I took, my shoes squished. We kept on moving.
The car out there had stopped and a man said, “Somebody’s there in the road. An accident.”
I glanced back. A man and woman left their car and went over to where the old fellow was lying in the road. I wondered if he was dead. He probably was.
“Hey, you, there!” the man called. He’d seen us.
“Keep walking,” Angers said softly. “Don’t turn around again and don’t stop, pal.”
“Hey, you guys going to phone in about this? Better hurry up! Get an ambulance!”
“He’s not dead,” I said. I heard myself say it from someplace far away. “You hear that? He’s not dead.”
“Yes,” Angers called out. “We’ll phone for one, right away!”
We walked on across the big smooth lawn and around the side of an immense home. I was numb. He had cleaned me out. There wasn’t anything left. I felt empty inside and all gone, hollowed out, finished.
I stopped walking there beside the house. We were in a side yard that opened onto a street. I could see the sidewalk stretching out beyond us, pale in the street lights’ saffron glow. I heard another car stop out there by the bayou.
“I can’t go on,” I told him.
“Cut it out, pal. Sure you can. You’ve got to.”
“I’m knocked out,” I said.
“You’ll be all right. We’ll get some clean clothes someplace, and—”
“Clean clothes—where?”
“We’ll find some. Come on now, pal. Let’s walk.”
We walked. We left the yard and went out onto the sidewalk. We started up the street, walking west now. We were a block and a half over from the bayou, heading on a slanting, intersecting street. It would take us farther and farther away from the accident. I wondered vaguely where Lillian was now. How was she? Was she still running, and had she gone to the police? What good would it do?
Angers didn’t seem a bit tired. We both looked like hell, but he walked along now just as he had when I’d first met him. It seemed years ago. It had been only a few hours.
“You’ll feel fine in a little while,” he said.
“I’ll never feel fine again.”
“Sure you will. Listen, remember what I told you earlier today?”
“What was that?”
“About trying to run away, pal. Don’t do it, will you? Why did you act like that?”
I said nothing and we crossed a street and went along a new block. The trees swished and fluttered in what was left of the breeze that kept coming in across the bay. The night was cooling down and it was a fine night, all fight. A fine spring night.
“I know,” he said. “You got excited because of Lillian, that was it. Wasn’t that it, pal?”
I looked sharply. Maybe he didn’t know it, but his mind was going worse and worse all the time. If he hadn’t slept in days, he needed sleep and rest, whether he knew it or not. You could stand up under that sort of punishment only so long.
“Lillian was frightened, I guess,” he said. “I don’t blame her, all this shooting and everything.”
“You don’t blame her?”
“She’s a woman, pal, after all. You can’t expect a woman to take it like men can. She couldn’t realize how much this means,” he said. He said, “Nobody seems to grasp the fact. But they will in time. Well, you saved us from going over that wall, anyway, pal.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“If people were just all like you, Steve,” he said. “Even-tempered. If they just wouldn’t get angry with me, stand in my way. That’s what they do, Steve, and I have to kill them. It’s the only way to shut them up. There’s really nothing to it. If they just would understand … It’s so utterly simple.”
Oh, utterly, I thought. I sneaked a look at him and he was trying to think. His face was expressionless, but it was getting so now I knew when the gears were meshing in that mad mixed-up brain of his. He was trying to catch hold of something so he could explain it to me.
“That old man,” I said. “He wasn’t mad at you.”
“Sure he was. He was mad about his lawn. He was getting all ready to tell us how much we owed him for cutting up his lawn, pal.”
I couldn’t figure him. On some things he was right with it, all the way.
“He wanted to hold me up, too,” Angers said. “He was in the way. He wanted to tell me his troubles. I don’t want to hear people’s troubles, Steve. I’ve enough of my own.”
We walked along, crossed another street, and started on another block. The wind was beginning to get a little stiffer now. On the wind, from far away and very faint, but growing steadily louder, came the wail of a siren. The ambulance.
“Maybe he didn’t die,” I said. “The old man, there. Maybe they’ll save him.”
“If he didn’t,” Angers said, “it’ll be a lesson he’ll always remember.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Sure I’m right. They told me I was working too hard. They were wrong. They’re always wrong. They didn’t realize how much punishment the human body can take. They’ll never find out, either, because they don’t have the guts to try. Told me I needed rest. All right. But who would do the job? Nobody but me. The fund was getting no place. All they wanted to do was talk, or sit and fill their pockets, out there. That’s all. So I kept on going, and I’m still going. I’ll build that hospital, Steve, and then they’ll see.”
We walked for quite a while between the trees, with the light from the street lights flickering between the branches. Sometimes we passed somebody out walking, too. They paid no attention to us. People sat on the porches playing cards, or talking, or maybe just sitting. You could hear an occasional radio playing from inside some of the homes. Once in a while a car hissed by and I had heard the siren stop for a few moments, then start up again and fade away into the city. They would take the man to the same hospital where Ruby was. He might even be on the same floor, might even see her. It was that close.
We were in a very quiet residential section now, one of the most expensive parts of town. The homes were huge, with tremendous lawns and old live oaks covered with Spanish moss. Tall royal palms lined the walks like slim gray giants, guarding the vaulted silence.
Angers still had the gun in his hand, hanging down along his leg, swinging loosely with his stride. Under his other arm was the roll of paper. His walk was still the same, shoulders swinging, busy, as though he were really headed someplace. Maybe he was.
Then he stopped walking. I paused, looked at him.
“Listen,” he said. “Listen to that.”
I listened but I couldn’t hear anything. A pale glowing street light shone on his face.
“Hear it?”
“No. The wind, maybe.”
“I don’t mean the wind, pal. Listen real hard.”
What else was there to do? It seemed to me I could hear a piano from someplace. That was all. Maybe it was a radio, I wasn’t sure. It was very faint. No, it was a piano.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said. I was sick. The hell with it.
“Wait. Hear that piano?”
“Sure, I hear it.”
“It’s beautiful, pal.”
“All right,” I said. “It’s beautiful. Maybe it’s a radio.”
He shook his head. “Piano.”
He stood there looking at me in the street light, with his head cocked a little to one side, listening. I’ll tell you right now, it was a picture. With what I knew about this guy, it was a fine picture, all right.
“I’ve got to find it.”
Goddamn.
“I wonder where it is.” He listened some more. “It’s from up that way, someplace. Come on.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you hear what they’re playing?”
Now he had me listening. We both stood and listened. I couldn’t tell what was being played. All I could hear was very faint piano music and that was all.
“It’s ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ ” he said.
I looked at him hard this time. But you couldn’t tell anything, ever. There was no way.
“Hurry up,” he said. “I’ve got to find where it is.”
We went off along the sidewalk. He shoved me onto the grass. “Walk quietly,” he said. “Try to find out where it is. It’s beautiful. It’s my favorite piece, and anyway, it’s beautiful. You hear it, pal?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I hear it.”
Chapter Eleven
WELL, we came along the street like that, walking on the grass so we wouldn’t make any noise. There was only the hissing of our feet in the grass. It was quiet as a residential street is quiet in the early evening and from someplace came this piano playing “Dancing in the Dark.” That was the tune, all right. I recognized it now that he’d told me. But it was still so faint and far away, it just barely tickled your ears, like. I would sneak a look at him every once in a while as we went along, but it didn’t tell me anything.
It was funny how he carried on about that hospital of his, yet anything that came up could send him off on a tangent. I’d been feeling a little lower than usual since he reminded me about not trying to make a run for it. He was wise, all right, and that episode down at the bayou sure hadn’t helped matters any. Lord, I wished the car had taken the dip into the bayou. It would have maybe rolled over the shallow part on its nose and gone down in the deep water. He might have stayed down there, or at least lost the damned gun. Then I would have had a chance. As it stood now, nobody had a chance if he so much as wrinkled his nose at him. It seemed he would take quite a lot off me, but I wasn’t going to bend that too far, either.
“It’s not getting any louder, Steve,” he said.
“You’re right. Let’s drop it.”
“No, pal. I got to find out where it’s coming from.”
He brushed my arm, and we went on walking slowly down the lawns fronting these big homes. I wished the piano would stop. If it stopped now, he wouldn’t know where to go and we could forget it.
“Listen,” he said.
We stood still and listened some more. It was louder now, all right.
“Come on.”
“All right.” I was tired. We still stank from the mucky bottom of that bayou. The muck was in my hair, drying a little now, and our clothes were covered with it. My pants were still soggy, but beginning to stiffen some.
The tireder I got, the worse it got about Ruby and everything. It seemed as if we’d been going on like this for centuries, and when I remembered it was only this morning I’d been with Ruby, and decided to try to wash out Aldercook with the gun, it was impossible.
“It’s from over that way,” Angers said. “Come on, pal, we’ll cut through here.”
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“What the hell,” I said. “It’s only a piano.”
He turned and looked at me with his eyes kind of glazed over and that little crazy candle was burning in them.
You’re getting rattled, I thought. Quit thinking. It’s not good for you. So when he motioned to me again, I went along with him.
We crossed another yard under some slash pines and the ground was damp and springy underfoot. We got out there in the back of this big house and I could see a man and a woman sitting in the kitchen, all brightly lit, drinking coffee and eating pie. The woman was talking with a mouthful of pie and waving her fork at the man with her elbow resting on the table.
The piano was much clearer now. It was good playing, but maybe a little mechanical. One thing, it wasn’t a radio. Angers was right about that.
“This way,” he said.
We went along through back yards then. They were some yards, let me tell you; they were regular parks. I’d never really seen them before. Money could sure do things, all right. Yeah, money. Well, that’s the way it was and I had about twenty-six dollars, didn’t I? Money wasn’t important any more. I could have lit cigarettes with those bills I had, if they were dry, and it wouldn’t have meant a thing.
Funny about back there at the bayou, I kept thinking. He accepted my tackling him the way I had, just as though it were normal. He was on guard a little more, sure, but he just thought I’d got excited. I wondered if that’s what he really thought.
“It’s across the street,” he said.
So we went through some more yards and across the street under the street lights, and the piano was coming from a house about half a block up. You could tell. It was clear now, all right.
“Lord, that’s beautiful,” he said. “Come on, pal.”
“Why don’t we just stand here and listen?”
“I’ve got to see who’s playing that piano.”
I began to get a funny feeling in my stomach. I should have been used to it by now.
We went on along the sidewalk and then we were in front of this house. If anything, the homes over on this street were larger and richer and had more lawn and trees than those back where we’d come from.
