by Jack Finney
“Yes.”
“Well, we can manage.” He looked around at the others. “So? That’s it? We leave in the morning?”
Harry nodded. “By way of the city, lost in the commute mob; our last battle with that, anyway.”
Again, for some moments they were silent; Jo got up to begin drying the dishes. But it was an uneasy, dissatisfied silence, and presently Lew said, “Son-of-a-bitch,” and they all looked at him, sitting on the living-room floor. “Less than three hours ago we were solid citizens. And now we’re on the run. That little creep was right, wasn’t he, Harry? We didn’t say, Yes, sir, and snap to attention; now he’s running us out of town.” No one replied. Harry stood at the balcony doors, frowning. Lew stood up to take his plate to the kitchen, saying, “Well, all right, okay. We have to run; Harry’s right. Pile our stuff in the cars, and drive.” He turned back into the living room. “But not in the morning, not tomorrow; not me, anyway. Before I leave, god damn it, I want to say good-by.”
“How do you mean?” Harry said, swinging around to look at Lew, voice sharp with interest, and Lew grinned.
“I want to fix that red-neck son-of-a-bitch first.”
“Why, yes,” Harry said softly, and grinned, too. “How!?” he demanded. At the sink the women stood motionless, listening.
Lew shook his head. “I don’t know exactly.” He shoved his hands into his back pockets, and walked to the balcony doors to stand beside Harry, staring out at the street; dark now, the street lamps on. “But, you know?—I’ve been sitting here feeling like some kind of invisible man. We’ll all be gone, vanished. Wiped out without trace. Someone else in our apartments in a day or so; there’s a waiting list. Our furniture scattered all over the Bay Area.” He swung around, speaking to them all. “Yet we lived here, damn it! We belonged here, didn’t we? As much as anyone else. I had a job, maybe even a career.” He smiled. “Lew Joliffe, city councilman; state senator; governor; head of the firm, finally; known, loved, and respected by all.” He shrugged, baffled. “Instead I’m being wiped away like chalk off a blackboard. Well, I don’t give a shit about the city council, you all know that. I just don’t like being erased. And before I am, I not only want to fix the guy who did it; I want the whole damn county and Bay Area to know Lew Joliffe was here.”
“Right. Right!” Harry began walking the room, gesturing, hands flinging out angrily. “A creepy little shit of a nobody starts mouthing off at us. And we don’t just stand there and take it. That’s all that happened! That was our crime! And for that—he’s a nobody, you wouldn’t spit on him!—but he’s got a job on the cops so he’s free to punish me by humiliating my wife. Publicly! Handcuff her! Before a crowd! Manhandle her around a parking lot!” He was addressing Shirley directly now. “So what am I supposed to do? Stand there saying, ‘So long, Shirl’? I take you away from him; I have to. And now I’m supposed to run like a fucking rabbit. Well, god damn it, Lew’s right: first, we fix that guy, then we say good-by.” He swung around to face Lew. “But how, Lew? You must have something in mind!”
“Well, yeah. Sort of. We’d have to work it out.” He stood looking at Harry appraisingly, then smiled suddenly. “You feel like some climbing? Some really weird climbing?”
“No!” Jo actually stamped her foot on the kitchen floor. “No, Lew: I know what you’re talking about, and I won’t have it! I won’t! Oh, why can’t we just go,” she cried out. “Just leave in the morning, and forget the whole—”
“Because we wouldn’t forget.”
“What, what?” Harry demanded. “What’s she talking about?”
“Well,” Lew said, and he pushed aside a mound of clothing on the chesterfield, sat down, leaned back, and began to talk.
When he had finished, Harry, sitting on the floor at the balcony windows, began to laugh, silently, his big shoulders shaking. He said, “That’s the worst thing I ever heard of. It’s terrible, you know that: we’d be crazy.” He shook his head, still laughing. “But it’s too good to pass up.
They argued then, the women with the men: Lew sitting back on the chesterfield, hands clasped behind his neck, the others sitting on the floor. Then presently Shirley said, “Jo, look at them: look at their faces. They’re going to do it. With or without us,” and Jo nodded shortly, her lips compressed. Looking curiously from one to the other of the men, Shirley said, “Do you really have the nerve? Do you really?”
Lew smiled. “No. I haven’t got the nerve at all. Except for one thing—the result. Oh, man, the result if we can bring this off! That’s what will get me through it, I think. Like the carrot in front of the donkey.”
Harry sat nodding, smiling, and Jo stood up abruptly. “All right, what the hell,” she said. “It’s late, the police haven’t come back, and we’re not going to Seattle or Santa Fe; not for a while, anyway. Let’s get to bed.”
• • •
CHAPTER NINE
• • •
At five-forty in the morning Shirley’s eyes opened. She lay listening, hearing only Harry’s slow breathing beside her. Yet something had awakened her, and she got up quietly, walked to the side windows, and in the gray dawn saw Floyd Pearley walking soundlessly up the driveway on the balls of his feet.
He wore uniform, including his cap. Behind him—hands busy under her chin knotting a green scarf over her gray hair—Mrs. Gunther, manager of the buildings, followed in slacks, red slippers over bare feet, a raincoat buttoned to the chin. Harry said, “What’s going on?” and his blanket flew aside before Shirley could answer.
They stood watching, Shirley shivering a little in the morning chill. Pearley had pressed their bell, Mrs. Gunther turning casually to look carefully around her. Now he pressed again. A token wait of a second or two, then he nodded abruptly, and Mrs. Gunther brought out a key from her raincoat pocket, unlocked the door, and followed Pearley in. “Can they do that?” Shirley whispered. “Without a warrant?” and Harry shrugged.
In less than two minutes they reappeared, Pearley walking swiftly down the driveway as Mrs. Gunther pulled the apartment door shut; and Harry turned away. “Back to bed. If Stupid knew this was Lew’s place he’d be pounding the door down.”
• • •
Promptly at nine every morning Tom Thurber arrived at the office, the only partner to do so; and at nine-five Lew phoned him, tilting the earpiece so the others, standing close, could hear. “Lew! What the hell is going on!”
“Why, what’s happened, Tom?”
“A cop was just here! Waiting at the doors when Freddie arrived to open up.” The cop had asked about Harry, and then, Thurber was afraid, in reply to further questions Freddie, the office manager, had given him Lew’s name and address as a friend of Harry’s.
Lew covered the mouthpiece. “Start emptying my apartment!” As the others ran to the balcony doors, he said, “What’d the cop look like, Tom?”
Thurber described Pearley, then: “Now, what’s this all about?”
Lew told him. For himself and Harry he apologized for their having to leave without notice, and Thurber said he understood. They were all packed, Lew went on, were leaving within minutes to drive out of the state today, and Thurber said quickly, “Don’t tell me where!” He added that he was sorry, and that he wished them luck: Could he help? Lew said no, and as he replaced the phone Jo and Shirley hurried in from the balcony carrying armloads of clothing, Harry following with Lew’s skis, his wet suit, his tennis equipment. From the clothes Jo dumped onto a bed, Lew took his tweed coat and, buttoning it as he ran, clattered down the outside stairs, and ran to the VW.
Standing at Mrs. Gunther’s desk, the VW at the curb, engine running, Lew laid his apartment keys before her, smiling pleasantly. He had to give up his apartment immediately, he said; he’d been “transferred to Atlanta,” to report on Monday. Since he had a long drive and wanted to get started right now, would she mind notifying furniture rental? She asked for a forwarding address, and Lew gave her one, slowly and carefully as she wrote it down on a print
ed form: 808 . . . South Crescent Drive . . . apartment 2B, the home of a friend in Atlanta with whom he’d be staying till he found a place of his own: no, he didn’t know the zip. The Levys? Yes, he knew them slightly; had sometimes played tennis with them. No, he didn’t know they’d moved, let alone where; was surprised to hear it. And the young lady next door? Miss Dunne? Was she staying? Lew shrugged, his face going coldly indifferent. “Far as I know.” Then he smiled charmingly, offering his hand. “Good-by, Mrs. Gunther; I’ve enjoyed knowing you.” She flushed slightly, and her eyes dropped.
Entering his car, Lew didn’t glance back: what she had believed or thought, he didn’t know. He drove on in the direction of the freeway. Making a three-mile loop, he returned to the apartment from the other direction, and parked behind the first of the buildings, four down from his own. With the pliers from his glove compartment he removed both his license plates, shoved them under a seat, and walked through the parking areas behind the buildings to Jo’s van. He took off the front plate, returned, and attached it in the VW’s rear plate-holder.
As Lew entered the apartment Jo, standing at the balcony doors, cried, “The cop’s back!” and with the others Lew hurried over in time to see the Mill Valley black-and-white, Pearley at the wheel, swing into the driveway beside the building and disappear, accelerating.
They heard the brake squeal, the door-slam, then—all standing silent, the women’s eyes widening—they listened to the faint peal of Lew’s bell on the other side of the living-room wall. A moment’s pause, then it rang four or five times in rapid, angry succession. Back at the balcony doors they watched the car bounce down into the street, shoot ahead to the manager’s office and, brakes screeching, tires patching, park on the wrong side. The door flew open, and Pearley ran up the short walk to the manager’s office.
On common impulse Lew and Harry stepped into movie pose, backs to the wall at each end of the double doors, hands on the butts of imaginary shoulder-holstered guns. “Shirl, look at them,” Jo said. “They love this, they really do.” Half a minute later Pearley reappeared, got into his car, and drove on.
In Jo’s van all but Harry drove into Mill Valley—a chance they had to take—and emptied their bank and checking accounts. When they returned, Harry was kneeling before Jo’s white table, set in the light beside the balcony doors. As they stood watching he sighted through his 35-mm camera mounted on its tripod; propped before the lens, against a stack of paperbacks, stood a small photograph. Harry unscrewed one of two closeup lenses he’d attached to the camera, refocused, made a short time exposure. He began arranging his next setup, a long yellow card, its blank spaces handwritten in ink, and the others began carrying Jo’s long paste-up table out to the van.
In the van Lew and Jo drove to the city, Lew in back out of sight. As she entered the bridge, the empty Pacific sliding past her side vision far below beyond the red-painted railing, Jo sat conscious of the knot of dread which had appeared under her breastbone as soon as she’d awakened. It would stay there for the next three days, she knew, but she’d become aware that along with it during the morning there had come a sense of anticipation: now, she decided, she felt simultaneously frightened and intensely alive. She drove on beside the long loops of the great support cables, passing under the two great bridge towers, thinking how placid and almost entirely without risk her life had been; and at the toll plaza, dropping her coins into the collector’s cupped hand, she smiled at him genuinely, thinking, “What would you say if you knew what I knew?”
It took five hours to draw a line through everything on their list. On Kearney Street, Jo dropped Lew off at Brooks Cameras, and drove on to Market where she sold her worktables and supply cabinet at the office-supply shop at which she’d bought them. She delivered her finished model at a California Street office building, enjoying the luxury of parking directly at the building entrance in the clearly marked NO PARKING ZONE. There she asked for and got her check immediately, and—no ticket on her windshield yet—walked a block to the bank it was drawn on, and cashed it. When she returned, a folded white ticket lay under her wiper; she slipped it out, tried to crumple and throw it into the gutter, and couldn’t. She put it into the glove compartment and drove on to pick up Lew.
He stood waiting on the curb, straddling a cardboard carton, as she pulled into the yellow zone. He opened the back doors, and when he heaved the package up onto the floor, it shook the van.
At a Mission Street electronics store, Lew bought a good-quality transformer; at a hardware store, a hundred-foot coil of light cable, two one-hundred-yard rolls of nylon fishline, and a bolt cutter. At Sears, out on Geary Street, he bought four of their cheapest twenty-four-volt automobile batteries.
Just outside Sausalito on the way home, Jo stopped at Big-G market to buy food. This was the waterfront industrial area, and Lew walked across the road to the nearest sail loft and bought the cheapest and widest nylon sailcloth they sold. This turned out to come in 44-inch bolts at $2.42 a yard, and he took all they had, five hundred feet. At another loft nearby he bought two hundred feet more; at the building-supply store eight fourteen-foot lengths of threaded two-inch plastic pipe, and a sackful of couplings and caps. From their garden shop he bought a sack of gravel. They drove to San Anselmo, and at The Alpine Shop bought four hundred feet of eleven-millimeter perlon rope.
Shirley stood at the stove in Jo’s purple terrycloth apron when they returned, potatoes boiling, frozen vegetables in their plastic sacks ready to heat; she took the wrapped package of steak from Jo. Harry sat on the chesterfield with a drink, his camera in its case on the mantel beside the folded tripod. “Get it all?”
“Yeah.” Lew dropped two bundles of sailcloth, ninety pounds of it, onto the floor before the newly exposed fireplace. “But it’s good you’re sitting down; wait’ll you hear what it cost.”
“Who cares? It’s a bargain.”
• • •
Saturday morning Jo walked to the camper and brought it back, and Lew and Harry drove to San Rafael, Harry in the back. In the nearly empty living room, crawling on hands and knees, Jo and Shirley cut the sailcloth into fourteen fifty-foot lengths. Each took two of these strips and, sitting cross-legged on the floor, tailor fashion, began sewing them together in big, looping stitches along the sides. Beginning at ten-thirty they watched on the Levys’ portable television set the morning cartoons, as they worked, and then whatever else came on, discussing it. They finished just before five, all the strips sewn together to form a fifty-foot square, a great white billow of cloth heaped along the side of the room.
In San Rafael Lew stopped first at a lumberyard, and bought several lengths of two-by-fours, some carriage bolts and washers. In the electrical-supply department he bought a short length of heavy insulated copper wire and some cutters. He drove to a tool-rental shop in the industrial area along the canal and rented a handsaw and drill. In an empty parking lot beside a closed-up cabinetmaker’s—most of the small factories, supply, and service shops closed today—he and Harry cut and fitted inside the camper a solidly braced and bolted two-by-four frame, level with a side window. Harry connected the batteries and transformer, and lashed them together on the floor under the new framework.
On Sunday, breakfast over, they had very little to do. While Jo and Shirley washed dishes and made beds, Lew and Harry folded the giant square of sailcloth with great care and difficulty. One end of the wadded-up mass they dragged onto the balcony. From there they laid it, a huge puffed-up worm of white cloth, the length of the living room and on into the short hall. Even so, they had to curve the last dozen feet or so back on itself. Shifting it frequently as they worked, they folded this in accordion folds a yard wide. Then Lew knelt on the yard-wide fifty-foot length and, working his way backward, flattened and compressed the many-layered bulk with forearms and palms. Harry followed on his knees, rolling the long length into a coil, as tight as he could squeeze it. They wrapped it with a length of nylon cord, cinching it into a squat, fat roll which Harry
lifted easily, though his arms wouldn’t meet around it, and carried down to the van.
In the bedroom, Shirley and Jo packed Jo’s Town, loosely wrapping each little building in tissue and fitting them into a small cardboard carton. Then, for most of the rest of the day they played a lazy, cheating game of Monopoly; each eating when he felt like it, searching the little kitchen area for whatever was to be found. In the afternoon they sipped white wine, not too much; Harry turned on the Raiders-Dallas game, and they watched it, continuing the Monopoly desultorily.
By four the Monopoly had dwindled into inaction; and when the Raider game ended at four-thirty, the men turned restless, glancing at their watches, walking to the balcony to glance out at the sky. At five Harry said, “I don’t think a drink or two at this point could do anything but help,” and Lew made them for everyone.
• • •
In the van after dark Jo drove north on the freeway in the slow lane at the steady fifty that was about all it could do; the men in back. Past San Rafael, she began, as always along this stretch, to watch for the break in the hills on the right that would suddenly reveal the great county Civic Center “in all its glory,” she said to herself, meaning it.
It came: the van rolled on past a high bluff and then, no more than a quarter mile from the freeway, there it stood—exterior spotlighted, interior lighting on—the strange, beautiful building unlike any other she had ever seen; the last, she believed, ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Slowing, glancing off at it as often as she could, Jo studied it again, thinking as always each time she saw it that some day she would make a model of it for herself. Long and narrow to give most of its rooms outside exposure, the building projected straight out from the side of a hill so steep that the end of the roof there nearly touched the ground. Jo had once stood beside it with Lew and, reaching up, had been astonished that her hand easily reached the eaves. Yet the other distant end of the long roof, extending out from the hillside far beyond its foot, stood several stories high. Now the roof lay in darkness, but Jo remembered it with pleasure, shooting ruler-straight out from the hillside, looking like a high-crowned road paved with tile of a rich, startling blue. The gold-ornamented eaves shone in the spotlighting from below, the beige walls exotically broken by enormous, scallop-topped windows. The black night-time hills began cutting the strange, lovely structure from view. Then it was gone, Jo smiling in the darkness of the cab, feeling that what she had seen was nothing so drab as a building of offices, courtrooms, a jail; it was more like Glinda’s palace.
