by Barry, Mike
Wasn’t it always that way? Williams thought bitterly, holding the wheel with shaking hands, keeping the Ford at a savage, desperate, almost losing-control seventy-seven miles an hour. Maybe the pictures they drew were different but it was always the same: here he was, an American Negro, getting his black ass chased all over the continent, a bunch of white men in a big car behind him. That was the way it was: they reamed you from dawn to daylight, they stalked you all of your life. They trailed your black ass, stalking you from birth through the middle years, and then sooner or later, in a white, blank, staring space they got you. That was life, face it, breathe it in: he was running guns for the white man, moving in the white man’s service, and another group of white men were coming out to kill him. Did it matter why the one had sent him out with the guns, why the others wanted to stop him? It was just whitey, that was all; he was a rat in a trap, carrying out matters for whitey, fetching and carrying for whitey, and now they had decided to kill him. He shook his head, cursed, spat neatly through the spokes of the steering wheel. He saw what the Panthers meant now. He saw very well what Malcolm, that stoned priest, had been shouting from the pulpits. You carried out their shit all your life, mucked up their floors, did their dirty work for them … and then they killed you. The only solution, the only way to come to terms with it, Malcolm and the Panthers had said, was in recognizing the enemy, seeing him whole, realizing that when the enemy outnumbered you seven to one every black man would have to be your brother. Instead he had opted for the system. He had gone into the coils and wires of the network thinking that he could bury himself in it so deeply that he would not only be doing the white man’s work, he would be a white man. Well, that would show you. Oh, yes, indeed: live and learn, twenty-five years old, all the living and learning done, and now he was ready to die.
He had hung all this time in the passing lane; streaking near the flat valley between the two panels of highway, not in any hope that he could outrun them but only because it might be a shade more difficult to pass him on the right than on the left, particularly with the waggling, U-haul, duck’s ass behind him. But now the Mark came up beside him, lunging out of the rear view, reappearing to his right with the same insolent control and rapidity with which it had dropped back, the car coming belly to belly against the Ford. He could see the men in there for the first time, two of them hunched in the front seat, the driver holding the wheel rigid, hands stroking the wheel of the thing, shaking with the effort to control the car at this speed. The other one, obviously the one who he had to fear, looking at him sidelong in a strange, demented way somehow seeming to smile at him. Slowly, the Mark began to drift over to him then, crowding Williams in the lane, forcing him over to the shoulder. In a box, he tried to drive his way out of it but once again as the speedometer got past eighty the trailer began to slew dangerously behind him; he could feel the damned thing slewing, setting up a force that would, if the angle of the rock continued to expand, force him into a ditch. There was nothing to do then but to come off the accelerator, the car hanging back to seventy, then drifting to sixty-five. With that same insolent burst of power, the driver leaning forward in the seat, the Mark pulled away from him, drifted over and drifting lazily, gracefully, everything suddenly quite low at these speeds, the big car cut him off.
There was nothing to do but grab at the brakes and pray. Williams did so screaming, yanking the wheel right, drifting toward the other side of the road, the car looking for space on the shoulder. But the Mark, devastatingly maneuverable for all of its size, was there still. It was in front of him, crowding him into a panic-stop and nothing to do then but to come down on the brakes hard, harder, hardest, the Ford in a full-dive, almost out of control. Fighting, Williams could see that he was going to hit the big car, then the realization and the impact itself became spliced. He slewed into it, hit the rear quarter panel hard, the Lincoln slewing across the road. The Ford chased it, the U-haul waggling and hit it again, and then somehow the two cars were linked together. Just as he and Wulff had been tearing at one another in an embrace so now were the two cars, twisted, screaming metal, and they spun, turned, and came off the road, the U-haul clattering into them, beginning to roll as they came off the side and finally they came to a stop. Williams hit steering wheel, windshield, dashboard, bouncing off their surfaces like a ball, slamming around the car, the wheel braced in his hands only slightly lessening the jolting impact, not cutting it off and finally, he did not quite know how, he sprawled to a stop, lying on the seat, staring up at the ceiling of the car, at the gutted, ruined surfaces of cloth which had covered the struts. The car seemed to be resting on three wheels, bearings had snapped, the left front wheel was completely off the ground and he was watching it spin. Little puffs of smoke came from it. Someone was yanking at the passenger door.
He arched himself on the seat, saw that it was the man who had been in the passenger seat of the Mark, and weakly dove within his clothing trying to get his gun … but something hit him on the shoulder, a hard blow which seemed to sever the nerves between shoulder and hand and his fingers fluttered out of the jacket, twitching. “You son of a bitch,” the man said, “you put us off the road.” His tone was almost petulant; in just a moment, Williams thought weakly, the man might begin to whine. “You wrapped up a fucking ten thousand dollar car,” the man said. He shook his head like a dog, shaking blood into his eyes and he paused, wiped them clear, then gripped Williams’s wrist and pulled him through the passenger side of the Ford.
Too weak to fight him, too shocked to feel, Williams fell out of the car into the mud, slowly got arms and feet underneath him, tugged himself to a standing position. The man thrust a hand into his pocket, took out Williams’s pistol. This is where it all ends, Williams thought, unceremoniously, without hope, on an interstate highway. The other man had come out of the Mark, was already working on the U-haul, struggling with the slats, trying to break down the doors but the impact had wedged them shut. The man stopped, cursing, turned, looked at Williams with hands on hips. “Have you got it?” he said.
“Got what?”
The man who had pulled him from the car slapped Williams hard on the side of the head. “Answer the question,” he said, “have you got the shit?”
“I have nothing,” Williams said, thinking that that was quite right, he had nothing at all. “Nothing.”
“What’s in there?”
Williams followed the angle of the arm to the U-haul. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
“You don’t, eh? You don’t know a thing.”
“Nothing,” Williams said, “nothing.” And the man hit him again, harder, a savage blow to the temple that knocked him into the mud. He lay there in a curiously detached, peaceful position, the murmurs of the men as they started to confer with one another strangely pleasant. He was sliding out, he was moving apart from all of this, he was totally detached. It didn’t matter. Dying could be pleasant after all; feeling had been disconnected. The men were talking frantically to one another, something about the Mark being totalled, something about having to try the Ford then and he felt himself lifted, carried, vaulting on air into the abcess of the sedan again. Then he was lying on the back seat, looking upwards, the others in the car already, the car beginning to move somehow, the U-haul clattering. The thought hit him: They aren’t going to kill me: they have a different plan. This gave him comfort, somehow, for he had not wanted to die, not really, he could admit that and he drew it up around him like a sheet, swaddling himself with the knowledge that he was not going to die … and everything passed away from him and for a very long time Williams, twenty-five years old, heard and thought nothing at all. Leave it up to the assailants. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
XVIII
He was in another rooming house again, this one far out on Wilshire Boulevard, which seemed to cater less to washed-up and would-be actors than it did to unambitious homosexuals. At least that was the impression that Wulff got, although he tried
to keep his public appearances in this boarding house and his circulation generally, at a very low level. He suspected that it was filled with homosexuals, however, because there were peculiar scufflings and singing in the bathrooms down the hallway and because the few people he did see looked at him in an appraising way, not the casual glance of strangers. Actually the place had more the aspect of a YMCA than it did of a rooming house: there was the same communal feeling, the same sensation of men leading public as opposed to private existences, fragmentary relationships rather than isolation, but he did not want to think about any of it too much. Los Angeles was a different state of mind than New York and it stood to reason that the YMCA mentality, if it were transplanted, would take on a somewhat different hue. Instead of cubicles there was sunshine, instead of snifflings and snufflings in the corridors there would be a lot of boisterousness and good fellowship. Better not to think about it Homosexuality was a normal and inevitable part of life; it fit somehow into the whole failure-syndrome which you were likely to find in fringe residences of this sort, but as far as Wulff was concerned he simply did not want to think about it. He had never been on the vice squad. Narco was bad enough. Vice squad to him was the bottom of the barrel and at the bottom of that had been the miserable operatives who had spent their duty-time in public toilets standing over urinals, waiting for a proposition so that they could make an arrest of some miserable creature. Those were the worst cops of all; even in his most humiliating days on narco Wulff had known that he was superior to them.
He was in another rooming house and he had not heard from Williams in three days and he was beginning to get the feeling that he would never hear from him again. It had been the last thing that he had worked out with the man; Williams going back East with the munitions, the all-clear signal coming from Williams when he had returned to New York and unloaded on Father Justice. Why this had been so important to Wulff was beyond proper figuring. He guessed that it had to do with the fact that he felt responsible for everything that had happened to Williams and needed desperately to know that he was all right, wedged back into his life, before Wulff could proceed. There might be another angle to it also; they couldn’t eat that ordnance or really make it disappear; he wouldn’t feel safe until it went back to the source. He had picked the name of the rooming house out of a telephone book knowing nothing about it; it seemed as good a place as any to stay and sweat out a contact, that was all. Also after what had happened Wulff wasn’t too hot on the idea of surfacing, making his way directly to Chicago. Better to stay under wraps for as long as possible; wait out an all-clear signal from Williams, along with whatever other information the man could give, and then go onto his next stop.
But the rooming house was a horror all right, three days here was like spending three months back on narco: the same corruption, the same stupidity, the same dense feeling of isolation in the midst of this madness. He was also fairly sure that Williams wasn’t going to get in touch after all. Something had happened on the trip back East. He didn’t like it, he didn’t want to face it, because it meant that he was at the beginning of the situation rather than at the end but he had to come to terms with it. Williams had been waylaid. Somehow, somewhere, they had picked him up and now he was in trouble. Or dead. It was very possible that he was dead. Williams had told him about the crew who almost got him in Nebraska.
He didn’t know how he felt about that either. Williams dead was bad news, of course; probably the only real connection he had made since his Odyssey had begun (because two helicopter pilots were dead and the girl had walked out on him) and there was the feeling that he was personally culpable. If it had not been for him, Williams would not have taken this route. He would have been still tucked away in the house in St. Albans: maybe he would have a fool but he would have been a healthy, happy one, making the system work for him at least a little. What did Williams have this way? What had he been given him?
Fuck it, Wulff wanted to think, it’s his life, not mine, I didn’t force any damned choices on him, but as much as he wanted to take that point of view he knew that he could not. He simply could not get away with it. He was as responsible for Williams as he had been for everyone else whose lives he had touched during these months and Williams had been the best of the lot, the only one who he had been able to count on, the only one who had stood up with him when the screws had been put on. It would be nice to abandon him, and Wulff thought grimly he probably would be better off, a more efficient workman if he could … but he could not. He was responsible for the man. In a sense he was responsible for everything. Face it. He had to.
It was only then that slowly, reluctantly, Wulff got up from the one ruined chair in his two-room furnished and went to the door of the apartment. He had lost all perception of time; he might have been sitting in this posture for several minutes or hours trying to work out all aspects of the situation; now, having reached some point of decision without even a conscious choice he was already locked into it. He went out into the hall, over the ragged, uneven surfaces of the carpet, moving toward the end where the pay phone was. A large man in his mid-twenties intercepted him, blocked the hallway, stood in front of Wulff in a sports shirt and bathing trunks. “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he said.
“I suppose so.”
“This fucking climate gets me sick. Where did they get a reputation for having a good climate? It’s all public relations. Listen, you want to go back to my room and watch a little television? I got a new set, a good one, a Philco twenty-one incher. Color.”
“I don’t like television. I don’t believe in it.”
“You’d be amazed what kind of color reception you can get with an indoor antenna. That’s one thing they got; great reception.” The man licked his lips, put a tentative hand on Wulff’s shoulder. “Why not?” he said, “we can watch a little television, put our feet up, talk a bit. I think they got some sports on now. You like sports? I don’t mind them; that is, I got nothing against them.”
“No,” Wulff said, “I don’t want to watch television. I have to make a phone call.” The booth was vacant but he did not know how much longer it would be; also the pressure of the man’s hand on his shoulder, still there, digging in, was unpleasant. “Please,” he said, “excuse me.”
“Look,” the man said, tightening his grip a little more, “look, I’m not asking you to fuck or anything like that.” His eyes glared. “You ask a guy in this place to be a little companionable, to be friendly, maybe share a little time together and right away they got you labelled as a pervert. That’s what I hate about this fucking LA, they got you nailed as a pervert if you just try to do a normal human act. I don’t like you looking at it that way. I’m a scriptwriter; I mean I got stuff all over with the major studios. They’re not buying it, at least not just yet, but they aren’t rejecting it either, you know what I mean? I got an agent.” A little saliva peeked from the man’s lips, his tongue was moving. Still he would not relinquish the shoulder grip. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll tell you about myself.”
“Forget it,” Wulff said and brought up his hand angled sidewise, broke the grip with a chop, the man’s arm springing away from the shoulder, involuntarily flying upward, temporarily paralyzed.
Then the man was mashing it with a tormented expression, saliva cascading from him. “You’re really crazy, you know that?” he said.
“Forget it,” Wulff said again but the man was blocking his way. The only way through him was simply to push on but it would topple the man, he would probably send out a little cascade of shrieks, and what the hell good would that do him? Why was he pursued by involvement every step of the way? Having made the difficult decision about the phone call, he now seemed unable to complete it. “Come on, man,” Wulff said, trying to cajole him, “just let me down the hall, let me make a phone call.”
“Whole fucking town is full of crazy people,” the man said, “all of them, everyone. I say watch a little television, try to have a little fun, relax, forget your troubles,
establish a true human relationship between two men, one that won’t be corrupted by sex and desire, filth and fucking, and what do you get? You get a send-up, a rip-off.” The man’s face convulsed. “I’ve taken too much from this fucking town,” he said, “too goddamned much, I can’t stand it anymore,” and aimed a clumsy punch at Wulff’s face.
Wulff knocked him out with a single blow, a fast cross to the jaw that sent the man reeling back into the wall then onto the frayed carpet, with a peaceful expression, the most peaceful and benign by far of all the faces he had made in front of Wulff. His eyes moved up and down, he peered out from them as if trying to evaluate the situation, and then closed them all the way, his head lolling to the side. Wulff did not even know what room he had come from. Looking up and down the hall he saw that there was no one looking out, no one, if they were around, was going to get involved at all, but nevertheless there was a problem lying on the floor and he just was not going to go away.
“Screw it,” Wulff said, “screw this,” and went back to his room, pulled open a valise, put the few possessions he had into them furiously, checked ordnance, stuffed two pistols into his jacket and grabbing the valise off the bed went down the hall and out of this place. He would make the call from somewhere else. The man was still lying in the hall; he had brought his hands up now, cupped them, made a little pillow for his head and was lying that way with an almost benign expression, something soothing and peaceful about his sleep, little pleased gurgles bubbling out of him. Probably in sleep he was getting what he had sought; sometimes sleep was the only way; for a large proportion of the world sleep was the only means by which they could get what they needed. But Wulff, thank you very much, did not want to think about that now. A tendril of purpose waved like a grass-stalk within him, became harder, became a twig. He had had it with LA. Win or lose he had had it with this fucking town; he could not take it anymore. Somewhere there were people who could adapt to it or who growing up in it never knew the difference, but he had had it. It was a gigantic lunatic asylum and even the Calabreses mostly steered clear of it; there was just no way to regulate any kind of an organization or life-style here other than the mad one of the city itself. You couldn’t beat it and if you were a sane man, you couldn’t quite join it either.
