As Bleeker looked around him, he saw the third group of men which had divided earlier from the other two coming out of the bar across the street from Cunningham’s, waving their arms in recognizable motions of cheering. The boy who had been thrown from the motorcycle vomited quietly into the gutter. Bleeker walked very fast toward the hotel. When he reached the top step of the veranda, he was caught and jostled by some five or six cyclists running out of the lobby, one of whom fell and was kicked rudely down the steps. Bleeker staggered against one of the pillars and broke a fingernail catching it. He stood there for a moment, fighting his temper, and then went into the lobby.
A table had been overthrown and lay on its top, and wooden legs stiffly and foolishly exposed, its magazines scattered around it, some with their pages spread face down so that the bindings rose along the back. He stepped on glass and realized one of the panels in the lobby door had been smashed. One of the troop walked stupidly out of the bar, his body sagging against the impetus propelling him forward until without actually falling he lay stretched on the floor, beer gushing from his mouth and nose and making a green and yellow pool before it sank into the carpet.
As Bleeker walked toward the bar, thinking of Simpson and of what he could say to him, he saw two men going up the stairs toward the second floor. He ran over to intercept them. Recognizing the authority in his voice, they came obediently down the stairs and walked across the lobby to the veranda, one of them saying over his shoulder, “Okay, Pop, okay—keep your lid on.” The smiles they exchanged enraged him. After they were out of sight, he ran swiftly up the stairs, panting a little, and along the hall to his daughter’s room.
It was quiet and there was no strip of light beneath the door. He stood listening for a moment with his ear to the panels and then turned back toward the stairs.
A man or boy, any of twenty or forty or sixty identical figures, goggled and in khaki, came around the corner of the second-floor corridor and put his hand on the knob of the door nearest the stairs. He squeezed the knob gently and then moved on to the next door, apparently unaware of Bleeker. Bleeker, remembering not to run or shout or knock the man down, walked over to him, took his arm and led him down the stairs, the arm unresisting, even flaccid, in his grip.
Bleeker stood indecisively at the foot of the stairs, watching the man walk automatically away from him. He thought he should go back upstairs and search the hall. And he thought, too, he had to reach Simpson. Over the noise of the motorcycles moving rapidly up and down the street, he heard a crash in the bar, a series of drunken elongated curses, ending abruptly in a small sound like a man’s hand laid flatly and sharply on a table.
His head was beginning to ache badly and his stomach to sour under the impact of a slow and steady anger. He walked into the bar and stood staring at Francis LaSalle—LaSalle and Fleet, Hardware—who lay sprawled on the floor, his shoulders touching the brass rail under the bar and his head turned so that his cheek rubbed the black polished wood above the rail. The bartender had his hands below the top of the bar and he was watching Simpson and a half a dozen men arranged in a loose semicircle above and beyond LaSalle.
Bleeker lifted LaSalle, who was a little dazed but not really hurt, and set him on a chair. After he was sure LaSalle was all right, he walked up to Simpson.
“Get your men together,” he said. “And get them out of here.”
Simpson took a long yellow wallet folded like a book and laid some money on the bar.
“That should take care of the damages,” he said. His tongue was a little thick, and his mouth didn’t quite shut after the words were spoken, but Bleeker didn’t think he was drunk. Bleeker saw, too—or thought he saw—the little cold eyes behind the glasses as bright and as sterile as a painted floor. Bleeker raised his arm slightly and lifted his heels off the floor, but Simpson turned abruptly and walked away from him, the men in the troop swaying at his heels like a pack of lolling hounds. Bleeker stood looking foolishly after them. He had expected a fight, and his body was still poised for one. He grunted heavily.
“Who hit him?” Bleeker motioned toward LaSalle.
“Damned if I know,” the bartender said. “They all look alike to me.”
That was true, of course. He went back into the lobby, hearing LaSalle say, weakly and tearfully, “Goddamn them—the bastards.” He met Campbell, the deputy sheriff, a tall man with the arms and shoulders of a child beneath a foggy, bloated face.
“Can you do anything?” Bleeker asked. The motorcycles were racing up and down the street, alternately whining and backfiring, and one had jumped the curb and was cruising on the sidewalk.
“What do you want me to do?” Campbell demanded. “Put ’em all in jail?”
The motorcycle on the sidewalk speeded up and skidded obliquely into a plate-glass window, the front wheel bucking and climbing the brick base beneath the window. A single large section of glass slipped edge-down to the sidewalk and fell slowly toward the cyclist who, with his feet spread and kicking at the cement, backed clumsily away from it. Bleeker could feel the crash in his teeth.
Now there were other motorcycles on the sidewalk. One of them hit a parked car at the edge of the walk. The rider standing astride his machine beat the window out of the car with his gloved fists. Campbell started down the steps toward him but was driven back by a motorcycle coming from his left. Bleeker could hear the squeal of the tires against the wooden riser at the base of the steps. Campbell’s hand was on his gun when Bleeker reached him.
“That’s no good,” he yelled. “Get the state police. Ask for a half dozen squad cars.”
Campbell, angry but somewhat relieved, went up the steps and into the lobby. Bleeker couldn’t know how long he stood on the veranda watching the mounting devastation on the street—the cyclist racing past store windows and hurling, presumably, beer bottles at the glass fronts; the two, working as a team, knocking down weighing machines and the signs in front of the motion-picture theater; the innumerable mounted men running the angry townspeople, alerted and aroused by the awful sounds of damage to their property, back into their suddenly lighted homes again or up the steps of his hotel or into niches along the main street, into doorways, and occasionally into the ledges and bays of glassless windows.
He saw Simpson—or rather a figure on the white motorcycle, helmeted and goggled—stationed calmly in the middle of the street under a hanging lamp. Presumably, he had been there for some time but Bleeker hadn’t seen him, the many rapid movements on the street making any static object unimportant and even, in a sense, invisible. Bleeker saw him now and he felt again that spasm of anger which was like another life inside his body. He could have strangled Simpson then, slowly and with infinite pride. He knew without any effort of reason that Simpson was making no attempt to control his men but waiting rather for that moment when their minds, subdued but never actually helpless, would again take possession of their bodies.
Bleeker turned suddenly and went back into the lobby as if by that gesture of moving away he could pin his thoughts to Simpson, who, hereafter, would be responsible for them. He walked over the desk where Timmons and Campbell, the deputy, were talking.
“You’ve got the authority,” Timmons was saying angrily. “Fire over their heads. And if that doesn’t stop them—”
Campbell looked uneasily at Bleeker. “Maybe if we could get their leader—”
“Did you get the police?” Bleeker asked.
“They’re on their way,” Campbell said. He avoided looking at Timmons and continued to stare hopefully and miserably at Bleeker.
“You’ve had your say,” Timmons said abruptly. “Now I’ll have mine.”
He started for the lobby doors, but Campbell, suddenly incensed, grabbed his arm.
“You leave this to me,” he said. “You start firing a gun——”
Campbell’s mouth dropped, and Bleeker, turning his head, saw the two
motorcycles coming through the lobby doors. They circled leisurely around for a moment and then one of them shot suddenly toward them, the goggled rider looming enormously above the wide handlebars. They scattered, Bleeker diving behind a pillar, and Campbell and Timmons jumping behind the desk. The noise of the two machines assaulted them with as much effect as the sight of the speeding metal itself.
Bleeker didn’t know why, in course of watching the two riders, he looked into the hall toward the foot of the stairway. Nor did it seem at all unreasonable that when he looked he should see Cathy standing there. Deeply, underneath the outward preoccupation of his mind, he must have been thinking of her. Now there she was. She wore the familiar green robe, belted and pulled in at the waist, and beneath its hem he could see the white slippers and the pink edge of her nightgown. Her hair was down, and he had the impression her eyes were not quite open, although, obviously, they were. She looked, he thought, as if she had waked, frowned at the clock, and come downstairs to scold him for staying up too late. He had no idea what time it was.
He saw—and of course Cathy saw—the motorcycle speeding toward her. He was aware that he screamed at her, too. She did take a slight backward step and raise her arms in a pathetic warding gesture toward the inhuman figure on the motorcycle, but neither could have changed—in that dwarfed period of time and in that short, unmaneuverable space—the course of their actions.
She lay finally across the lower steps, her body clinging to and equally arching away from the base of the newel post. And there was the sudden, shocking exposure of her flesh, the robe and gown torn away from the leg as if pushed aside by the blood welling from her thigh. When he reached her, there was blood in her hair, too, and someone—not Cathy—was screaming into his ears.
After a while the doctor came, and Cathy, her head bandaged and her legs in splints, could be carried into his office and laid on the couch. Bleeker sat on the edge of the couch, his hand over Cathy’s, watching the still white face whose eyes were closed and would not, he knew, open again. The doctor, after his first examination, had looked up quickly, and since Bleeker, too, had been bent over Cathy, their heads had been very close together for a moment. The doctor had assumed, almost immediately, his expression of professional austerity, but Bleeker had seen him in that moment when he had been thinking as a man, fortified of course by a doctor’s knowledge, and Bleeker had known then that Cathy would die but that there would be also this interval of time.
Bleeker turned from watching Cathy and saw Timmons standing across the room. The man was—or had been—crying, but his face wasn’t set for it, and the tears, points of colorless, sparkling water on his jaws, were unexpectedly delicate against the coarse texture of his skin. Timmons waved a bandaged hand awkwardly, and Bleeker remembered, abruptly and jarringly, seeing Timmons diving for the motorcycle which had reversed itself, along with the other, and raced out of the lobby.
There was no sound now either from the street or the lobby. It was incredible, thinking of the racket a moment ago, that there should be this utter quietude, not only the lack of noise but the lack of vibration of movement. The doctor came and went, coming to bend over Cathy and then going away again. Timmons stayed. Beyond shifting his feet occasionally, he didn’t move at all but stood patiently across the room, his face toward Cathy and Bleeker but not, Bleeker thought once when he looked up, actually seeing them.
“The police,” Bleeker said sometime later.
“They’re gone,” Timmons said in a hoarse whisper. And then after a while, “They’ll get ’em—don’t worry.”
Bleeker saw that the man blushed helplessly and looked away from him. The police were no good. They would catch Simpson. Simpson would pay damages. And that would be the end of it. Who could identify Cathy’s assailant? Not himself, certainly—not Timmons nor Campbell. They were all alike. They were standardized figurines, seeking in each other a willful loss of identity, dividing themselves equally among one another until there was only a single mythical figure, unspeakably sterile and furnishing the norm for hundreds of others. He could not accuse something which didn’t actually exist.
He wasn’t sure of the exact moment when Cathy died. It might have been when he heard the motorcycle, unbelievably solitary in the quiet night, approaching the town. He knew only that the doctor came for the last time and that there was now a coarse, heavy blanket laid mercifully over Cathy. He stood looking down at the blanket for a moment, whatever he was feeling repressed and delayed inside him, and then went back to the lobby and out onto the veranda. There were a dozen men standing there looking up the street toward the sound of the motorcycle, steadily but slowly coming nearer. He saw that when they glanced at each other their faces were hard and angry but when they looked at him they were respectful and a little abashed.
Bleeker could see from the veranda a number of people moving among the smashed store-fronts, moving, stopping, bending over and then straightening up to move somewhere else, all dressed somewhat extemporaneously and therefore seeming without purpose. What they picked up they put down. What they put down they stared at grimly and then picked up again. They were like a dispossessed minority brutally but lawfully discriminated against. When the motorcycle appeared at the north end of the street, they looked at it and then looked away again, dully and seemingly without resentment.
It was only after some moments that they looked up again, this time purposefully, and began to move slowly toward the hotel where the motorcycle had now stopped, the rider standing on the sidewalk, his face raised to the veranda.
No one on the veranda moved until Bleeker, after a visible effort, walked down the steps and stood facing the rider. It was the boy Bleeker had talked to in the bar. The goggles and helmet were hanging at his belt.
“I couldn’t stand it any longer,” the boy said. “I had to come back.”
He looked at Bleeker as if he didn’t dare look anywhere else. His face was adolescently shiny and damp, the marks, Bleeker thought, of a proud and articulate fear. He should have been heroic in his willingness to come back to the town after what had been done to it, but to Bleeker he was only a dirty little boy returning to a back fence his friends had defaced with pornographic writing and calling attention to the fact that he was afraid to erase the writing but was determined nevertheless to do it. Bleeker was revolted. He hated the boy far more than he could have hated Simpson for bringing this to his attention when he did not want to think of anything or anyone but Cathy.
“I wasn’t one of them,” the boy said. “You remember, Mr. Bleeker. I wasn’t drinking.”
This declaration of innocence—this willingness to take blame for acts which he hadn’t committed—enraged Bleeker.
“You were one of them,” he said.
“Yes. But after tonight——”
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Bleeker demanded loudly. He felt the murmur of the townspeople at his back and someone breathed harshly on his neck. “You were one of them. You could have done something. Why in God’s name didn’t you do it?”
“What could I do?” the boy said. He spread his hands and stepped back as if to appeal to the men beyond Bleeker.
Bleeker couldn’t remember, either shortly after or much later, exactly what he did then. If the boy hadn’t stepped back like that—if he hadn’t raised his hand…Bleeker was in the middle of a group of bodies and he was striking with his fists and being struck. And then he was kneeling on the sidewalk, holding the boy’s head in his lap and trying to protect him from the heavy shoes of the men around him. He was crying out, protesting, exhorting, and after a time the men moved away from him and someone helped him carry the boy up the steps and lay him on the veranda. When he looked up finally, only Timmons and the doctor were there. Up and down the street there were now only shadows and the diminishing sounds of invisible bodies. The night was still again as abruptly as it had been confounded with noise.
Some
time later Timmons and the doctor carried the boy, alive but terribly hurt, into the hotel. Bleeker sat on the top step of the veranda, staring at the moon which had shifted in the sky and was now nearer the mountains in the west. It was not in any sense romantic or inflamed but coldly clear and sane. And the light it sent was cold and sane and lit in himself what he could have liked to hide.
He could have said that having lost Cathy he was not afraid any longer of losing himself. No one would blame him. Cathy’s death was his excuse for striking the boy, hammering him to the sidewalk, and stamping on him as he had never believed he could have stamped on any living thing. No one would say he should have lost Cathy lightly—without anger and without that appalling desire to avenge her. It was utterly natural—as natural as a man drinking a few beers and riding a motorcycle insanely through a town like this. Bleeker shuddered. It might have been all right for a man like Timmons who was and would always be incapable of thinking what he—Joel Bleeker—was thinking. It was not—and would never be—all right for him.
Bleeker got up and stood for a moment on the top step of the veranda. He wanted, abruptly and madly, to scream his agony into the night with no more restraint than that of an animal seeing his guts beneath him on the ground. He wanted to smash something—anything—glass, wood, stone—his own body. He could feel his fists going into the boy’s flesh. And there was that bloody but living thing on the sidewalk and himself stooping over to shield it.
After a while, aware that he was leaning against one of the wooden pillars supporting the porch and aware, too, that his flesh was numb from being pressed against it, he straightened up slowly and turned to go back into the hotel.
There would always be time to make his peace with the dead. There was little if any time to make his peace with the living.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 161
