by John Farris
"Very likely he should be in the hospital, Beggs. Do you really think you're doing Major Bradwin a good turn?"
"Yes," she said stubbornly, and took a big bite from her sandwich.
"There's more you haven't told me."
"Narumph frissent. Promise."
"What is it you want me to do?" Jackson asked suspiciously.
"Go up to my place and find out if he's in shape to climb aboard the Scenic tomorrow morning. I'll handle the rest."
"That's all?"
"Cross my heart."
Jackson tossed his second whiskey down. "What if I can't certify him as travel-worthy?"
"Then—I'll just have to go by the book, I guess."
"I hope so. I can't afford even a minor run-in with the U.S. government. I'm not a citizen."
Beggs dabbed her lips with a napkin and reached for her purse. "Take my car," she said. "It's parked on the plaza." She handed him the keys to her car and her apartment.
Jackson began, rather deliberately, to pull a dollar from his undernourished money clip.
"Get out of here," Beggs said good-humoredly, giving him a little push. "The drinks are on me."
Jackson looked at his watch. "I should be back in an hour."
"Why don't you stick around the apartment? Sort of keep an eye on the major. I'll get a lift home about one."
Jackson retrieved his Cubatan straw and his medical bag from the hatcheck girl and left the station. Servicemen with girls strolled toward the Liberty Memorial on the heights across the road, where cheap seclusion was available among the trees and dark shrubbings. Lightning glinted in the sky around the city, but without potency.
Beggs had parked her car on the west side of the plaza, facing Broadway. The lot was poorly illuminated and Jackson had to scout around for the black '39 Ford coupé; every other person in Kansas City seemed to own one. More cars were circling slowly on the plaza, a familiar rhythm which did not intrude on the rather cheesy, downfall mood he was in. He kept wishing he had laid that dollar on the table, despite his near-poverty. Just a grace note he might have used in orchestrating some sort of return to basic self-esteem.
Ah, there it was, dent the size of a hen's egg in the right front wing beneath the bullet headlight.
Of course he'd never intended to pay, and she knew it as well; wasn't the big mistakes one made in life that rankled so, it was the tiny chippings of deceit and evasion that eventually had the underpinnings of the soul in a state beyond repair.
Jackson heard an engine gunned harshly as he bent to unlock the door of Beggs's. coupé. Now this matter of Beggs's wounded war vet, which he felt sour and uncertain about, obviously Beggs had reacted with her glands to Major Bradwin's predicament. No telling what the man had been through in the combat zone and it was just possible he wasn't safe to have around the house, did she ever give that a thought? No. And while he was at it, damn the mucky weather, his head felt like a throbbing sump.
A 1936 LaSalle 8 made a loud screechy turn off the drive in front of the station and Jackson's head popped up as the car bore down on him, strong headlights coming, around full in his face.
He stood there almost too long, dumbfounded and squinting in the glare. Then he ducked into the coupé, knocking his hat off. The blue LaSalle jolted to a stop right in front of him, neatly trapping him inside the parking space. Jackson slammed his door and locked it.
The interior of the expensive LaSalle lit up as all four doors seemed to spring open simultaneously. A lot of big, homely men were piling out of the LaSalle, which looked as if it had been driven hard, many times, through a cow wallow. They left behind a young woman in the middle of the back seat who clutched her silken head in a lush lonely pantomime of hysterics, like a prima donna on a tiny stage, and Jackson through his shock felt a jab of contempt for the Easterlin men: Had to bring her along, did you?
The evening seemed to be going to hell with a vengeance. He rolled the window up tight and started the engine, though they were massed in front of the coupé and he couldn't drive two feet without doing someone serious injury. They were more than just a pack of primitive boors, they were sadistic. He wondered if, after all, Evelyn could be pregnant—but that was out of the question. Clearly they'd forced her to come.
"Oh, don't!" she cried, hanging half out of the LaSalle over a high back fender, wild light in her eyes, that face he'd doted on, rosy with youth and blissfully enigmatic, now so blubbed up out of proportion she was scarcely recognizable. "Don't hurt him, I love him!" Worse than salt in his wounds, more like crystallized acid, and to further his shame she began vomiting a yellow stream to the pavement like a drunken, degraded slattern. This had been a thoughtful girl whose nerves were not strong, who needed space and time and dreaming shade to neaten all her days. Easterlins were rocking the coupé, pounding on it with their fists, baying incomprehensibly, where were the fucking police tonight?
Jackson was already over his fear of being hurt; at this point, suffering so keenly for the lover he'd abandoned, he didn't mind the prospect of the unavoidable brawl. In fact there was a joyous reckless heat bringing steam to the blood, though he knew it would be a costly way to vent his anger, couldn't hope to get in more than a solid lick or two before they stomped him to a greasy lump.
His head bounced painfully against the roof as his car was bucked up and down. Come out of there you queer. Charming. I can't marry your sister so that makes me . . . in a moment someone's fist would plunge through the windshield. Kick your balls off. God, Evelyn, if I could only have a moment to say how sorry . . . Dicklicker. We'll get you out. He saw a black lug wrench, wielded by Adam of the crooked back. They would smash the glass, then pick up the car and shake him out of it like a nickel out of a piggy bank. A plugged nickel, which was about what he was worth nowadays. Poor Evelyn, squashed for days between these hobgoblins, sheen of bloodlust in their righteous eyes, we're doing it for you, honey, sweatbox of a car rolling through the bleak furnacelands of the high plains, no wonder she was retching now.
The car directly behind the Ford roared to life and was backed hard out into the aisle, the chassis laying over on two thin tires as the driver frantically cramped the wheel. In the rearview mirror Jackson had a glimpse of a frightened couple who until a few moments ago had been snuggled down together and now were running for their lives, inspired by images of another Kansas City Massacre.
Jackson reached out with his right hand and ball-cocked the coupé into reverse, stepped on the gas. Two of the huge Easterlins had to leap back from the side of the Ford to avoid having their feet mashed as the coupé shot backward through the space just vacated. Jackson braked to avoid slamming into the other car, whose driver was having difficulty changing gears. Metal ground against metal and then the other car jerked away, burning rubber in sprint parallels.
The thrown lug wrench shattered the window opposite Jackson, who ducked a prickly hail of glass and downshifted. He drove straight at those Easterlins who had come running after him. They had the good sense to realize he wasn't going to stop, and there was a spirited split-second scramble for precious inches in the roadway, Easterlin against Easterlin. Even so, Jackson nicked one of them in passing, a hearty hip shot that sent the brute reeling off balance into the spare-tire mount of a roadster.
As he drove away he had a last flashing glimpse of Evelyn that puzzled him. She was standing by the left front door of the LaSalle, body twisted at the waist, one hand desperately outflung as if she were waving goodbye. But she wasn't facing him, and it took Jackson a few moments to realize she must have plucked the keys from the LaSalle's ignition and hurled them away. The Easterlins might be a few minutes hunting the keys, or all night; but a minute or so was all he needed to get away, and Evelyn had given him that time.
Jackson trembled and gripped the wheel tighter as he sped down Pershing beneath Signboard Hill; then his eyes filled and he began to sob. It was wrenching sobs and soupy tears until he was barely able to see, to control the momentum of the little car.
He had never thought it possible to die of grief, though he'd seep men die of terror. But he became convinced that if his convulsion of grief didn't quickly subside he would strangle, or blow an artery, or simply wind down to cold, breathless meat and bone.
He came out of it south of 46th on Wyandotte, rutting down the middle of the trolley tracks with an irate bell binging behind him for right-of-way. He pulled over to the curb in a no-parking zone opposite the Fox Plaza Theatre and stayed there, slack in his seat, pulse galloping from the base of his throat to the top of his head, numbness in the extremities. He might have thought a heart attack was in the works, but he also knew very well the symptoms of acute self-loathing. No, he wasn't going to die, that was wishful thinking. People walking by stared at the crusty remains of the right-side window; and at Jackson, who was then made aware that he'd been swearing out loud. He decided he'd better move on
Beggs lived nearby, around the corner on 51st, in a brick apartment house that was typical of the architectural style of the neighborhood, massive Greek columns in front, railed balconies up and down. It wasn't a very quiet street, too many small children with working mothers. Everyone slathered on Jitterbug to keep the mosquitoes off and slept out on their balconies in the summertime. When they weren't sleeping they were promiscuously minding each other's business.
Jackson found a parking space for the Ford and walked toward the apartment house with his medical bag. Lightning was nearer than before, touching off the roofline and community of windows, announcing him in a saturnine glare. He went in through the screen door and up the steps to Beggs's door, which he opened, making almost no sound, with the key she'd given him.
Inside there was a foyer with a night-light burning, an electric candelabrum mounted on one wall. Jackson passed by his reflection in a moody mirror and went through an arched doorway into the living room. The room was furnished with dumpy stuffed chairs, a sleigh-shaped couch covered in green velvet the color of the skin on a drying-out pond, standing lamps with ball-fringed shades offered at right angles to the perpendicular, and a collection of vasa murrhina displayed on shelves, windowsills and the mantelpiece. A clock was ticking on the mantel between ebony-framed photographs: Beggs and the girls, each of whom had her faithless dusky eyes, that attitude of artless promise and the unaffected come-on; Begg's husband, with tankers' goggles on his forehead and a cigar stub between his teeth, looking devil-may-care and pleased to be at war. Flocked curtains were joined over the closed windows and glass doors to the balcony, and the shades had been pulled down as well. As a result the temperature in the apartment may have been close to a hundred degrees. Jackson turned on a lamp with a forty-watt bulb in it and wondered why Beggs had left the place closed up.
Facing him was another arched doorway, draped and overdraped with more of the green couch velvet Beggs was so stuck on. Beyond the doorway was the dining room, with a small kitchen on the left, another short hallway straight ahead to the back bedroom. Holding the drapes aside, he stepped into the dining room, his mind on the liquor cache in the sideboard, what Kansas City folk called the old Ignorant Oil. A long shadow came out of the kitchen, followed by a tall, thin, glistening, nearly naked man with a glass of Coke in one hand and an army-issue .45-caliber automatic in the other.
He aimed the pistol at Jackson, who came to a standstill, sweat popping out all over his face. Major Charles Bradwin of the unhorsed U.S. Cavalry? Too bloody right.
"Beau?" said the major, in a crude voice that was only slightly above a whisper. "I'll kill you, Beau, if I have to."
For a weightless moment they were close in the matter of this threat, as close as longtime lovers. The major's eyes were earnest and unwinking but not too well fixed on Jackson himself, an indication that emotionally he was out the back door of the mind somewhere, balancing, in the dark, on a high thin wire, with only a pencil spotlight to show him the way.
While he was trying to put together an answer that would neither startle the major nor give credence to his worst suspicions, Jackson took professional inventory of wounds recently healed. Two-inch scar on the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, penetration wound, most likely the result of a bayonet thrust. The tip of the bayonet undoubtedly had gone through the diaphragm and the pleura and may have holed the right lung, resulting in a pneumo-thorax. Serious but not often fatal unless untreated for a long period of time.
The other wound, the one across his throat which was responsible for his lack of voice, had come close to killing him. Since he was alive today it meant there'd been a field hospital on the perimeter of the battlefield, because a surgeon who was both lucky and good had had to do a fast job of tying the artery in the neck. Even so, if the major's brain had fasted without blood for more than a few minutes, then today he would be in a vegetable bin instead of running around loose. Also possibly credit an alert medic who'd pounced on the major shortly after he went down with his throat slashed and spurting blood.
Though he was now ambulatory and seemed to have normal reflexes, he could still be permanently crazed by reason of his ordeal, or by a crucial loss of oxygen to the part of the brain that did most of his thinking for him. He'd established right away that he was no one to trifle with.
"Major," Jackson said, "I'm a friend of your friend Beggs. A doctor. She asked me to look in on you tonight to make sure you were comfortable."
"I see," Major Bradwin replied, with no indication in his face or voice that he'd even been listening. That was bad. Somehow he gave the impression, without speaking again or batting an eye, that he was willing to shoot Jackson just for practice. The hammer was cocked and it wouldn't take much, only a minor miscalculation on the major's part. Jackson felt his lips about to twitch, in mirth or high hysteria. Jackson Holley, unemployed sawbones, died last night in Kansas City of a minor miscalculation. His last words, which will be distributed along with his personal effects to the Salvation Army, were: I don't even know what I'm doing here.
With economy and a touch that said he knew his weapon intimately, Major Bradwin pointed the .45 at the ceiling and lowered the hammer with his thumb. He placed the gun on the dining-room table, but within easy reach.
"You're British, aren't you?"
"Yes," Jackson said.
"What's your name?"
"Holley. Jackson Holley, Mayor—"
"Forget that. Just call me Champ if you want to. I've been Champ all my life."
"Okay."
"Would you care for a Coke?" There was, in his phrasing of this inquiry, the suggestion of a man of quality, a West Pointer, perhaps, though he wore no rings, only dog tags like every other soldier. "There's no ice," Champ added. He drank from the glass in his hand. "I learned to like it without ice while we were at Oro Bay. That's in New Guinea."
"Oh—yes."
"Too hot in here for you?"
"I think so."
"I closed up after she left today. That was the only way I could sleep. Knowing the place was closed up."
"Who's Beau?" Jackson asked imprudently.
Champ's quick eyes had ice picks in them. Then he smiled, but his smile was out of sync with his guarded manner.
"Someone I'm having trouble with. What about it drink? Whiskey? She probably has some around here."
"In the sideboard."
"Fine. Why don't you help yourself? You must be more at home around here than I am. Sorry about the way I sound. It's better than it was, though. They did more surgery at Letterman, the vocal cords, and my voice is corning around."
He cleared his throat, almost bringing up a cough, which he was able to suppress by tensing muscles all over his body. Then he looked down at his glass as if something rare and interesting had fallen into it. Jackson walked gingerly to the sideboard, put his medical bag down, opened the doors and took out a bottle of Teacher's and a shot glass.
"We'll sit in the living room" Champ said when Jackson had measured out his drink. Jackson looked at him. "Go ahead," Champ said, his eyes dead level, his mouth grim again. He pic
ked up his shooting iron.
"You can trust me, major," Jackson said hopefully.
"I know that. You're a friend of a friend, aren't you? Go ahead friend."
They went into the living room and, after some minor skirmishing, body English and shifting eyes, chose opposing chairs. Champ in his olive-drab skivvies sat with his back to the corner nearest the fireplace, art glass like a church window, all around his head. The .45 he placed in his lap. Every inch of his body gleamed, it drizzled sweat. His hands, forearms and face were much darker than the rest of him, the tropical tan like a permanent walnut stain with a yellowing glaze that showed in the jaw hollows. He was clean-shaven. The eyes were brazen in their private darkness, the forehead high and broad at the temples, giving him a brainy, high-caste look. An archdruid, but the angular slatted body was that of a country man and so were the wide, penurious lips, the bony chin and the hint of a cowlick, though he kept his coarse brown hair short.
He fingered the well-raised scar at his throat, it was like a pink exclamation mark lying almost on its side: first the nick on the left collarbone, then the broad and upward slash, his assailant having attempted to hack his head clean off. It was obvious he had a fever that was worsening, and he had to drag for breath, which hurt him.
"Where do you come in?" Champ said hoarsely.
"Angel of mercy, and all that."
"I can get along without a doctor. What I need—" He went into a fit of coughing, his face going darker with effort and a heartfelt anguish. Jackson tasted his whiskey and looked calmly at the struggling man. Tears were running down Champ's face by the time he got himself under control.
"I'm trying—to get home. She said—she'd fix it. Confidentially. So where do you—come in?"
Jackson got up, took off his wrinkled jacket and headed for the dining room.
"Where do you think you're going?"
