The Good Old Stuff

by John D. MacDonald

  “You’ll be part of it. I promised.”

  “Do they have a good chance of catching us, blaming us?”

  “Not a chance in the world.”

  “Oh, good! And later … we’ll go away.”

  “Far away.”

  “How much time is there?”

  “Three hours. Four.”

  “Long hours to wait, George.”

  “We’ll take a ride. That’ll kill time. Come along.”

  She had not sat beside me in a car before. She was unexpectedly feline, a part of her that I had not noticed. She sat with her legs curled up under her, partly facing me, and I knew that she watched, not the road, but my face, the glow of the dash lights against it, the pendulum swing of the streetlamps.

  “Scared?” I asked.

  “No. Something else. Like when you’re a child. You wake up in the morning. Another day. Then you see the snow on the windowsill and it all comes with a great rush. The day after tomorrow is Christmas, you say. One more day gone. Yesterday it was the day after the day after tomorrow. Now it’s getting so close it closes your throat. That’s how I feel. Getting one at last that isn’t a sick one.”

  She inched closer so that the hard ball of her knee dug against my thigh. The musky perfume was thick in the car.

  Without turning to see, I knew how her eyes would look. “We’ve never had to say much, have we?” she asked.

  “Not very much. We knew without saying. A look can say everything.”

  “Later we can talk. We can say all the words that ever were. Good words and bad words. I’ve said bad words when I’m alone. I’ve never said them out loud to anybody. And we can say the other words too, and it won’t be like after reading a story.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, murder. Death. Kill. Blood. Bodies. I kill, you kill, we kill. The way you had to learn the Latin words in school.”

  “Conjugations, you mean.”

  “That’s what I was trying to think of. Miranda Wysner, conjugate the verb to kill. I kill, I shall kill, I killed, I had killed, I should have killed.”

  She laughed. Her fingers shut on my arm above the elbow. “Think about it, George. Like swinging a big shining white sword. You swing it at evil and you tell yourself that’s why you do it, but all the time way down inside your heart you know that it isn’t the reason for it, it’s the act itself.”

  I was on the road north out of town. She looked out the windows.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ll just go north out of town up into the hills and then swing around and come back.”

  She was silent. I drove ever more rapidly. The road climbed and then began to gather unto itself a series of gentle curves that later would grow hard, the shoulders popping and crackling as the car threw itself at them.

  I knew the landmarks. At the crest I slowed down, my arms tired from the strain. I started down the other side. The rising whine of the wind grew louder. The needle climbed. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five.

  “We’re killing the two of them, you see,” I yelled above the wind. “We can’t make the curve coming up. You wanted a part of it. You’ve got it, baby. You’ve got it. I left a letter with Mallory to open if I should die. It’s all in there. They’ll never worm out of this one. Electricity will kill them, all right. Courtesy of the State of New York, baby.”

  I saw the white posts of the curve in the farthest reach of the headlights.

  Her scream filled the car, filled my ears, drilled into my soul. “Faster, Georgie! Oh, faster!” Wild ecstasy, beyond the peak of human endurance.

  I gave her one quick look. The dash lights hit the white-ridged bone structure of her face so that the shape of the skull was apparent. The mouth was wide-screaming, lip-spread. Her voice told me that she had known.

  I came down hard on the brake. The car went into a long skid toward those posts. I let up on the brake, accelerated it straight, came down on the brake again. This time the skid was the other way so that the car headed toward the brink, still skidding sideways. I could hear only the scream of tortured rubber, then the jolting metallic scraping as tires were rolled right off the rims. I couldn’t bring it out of the second skid. The front right wheel smacked the posts and the car spun so that I lost all sense of direction. For a moment it looked as though the car were spinning in one spot, like a top, completely ringed about with the white posts. Then it hit again and I was thrown toward Miranda. I tried to find her with my arms but I couldn’t.

  The crescendo of sound was fading. The car jolted, lurched, stood absolutely still in a world where there was no sound.

  I got out. Other cars stopped. I looked for Miranda. I couldn’t find her. The tow truck had a spotlight on it, and so did the trooper car. I made them shine the lights down and search down the slope. They looked and looked. After I told them a little more about her they stopped looking and they were most polite, and they took me to a doctor who gave me white powders.

  I was in bed for ten days. I told Connie everything. She was very grave about it all and kept her eyes on my face as I answered every one of her questions.

  By the time I was on my feet the car had been repaired. I didn’t care what happened any more. I didn’t protest when she took me to the gas station. Conner acted odd, and the questions seemed to embarrass him. He said, “Why, sure, a few times Mrs. Corliss cashed checks with me, and I guess I turned some of them over to Louie as part of his pay.” Louie came over and shuffled his feet. He looked younger than I’d remembered. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn’t hold it in his Bogart way.

  “Louie,” she said, “have you and I ever had a date?”

  He stared at her. “What the hell! What the hell, Miz Corliss!”

  “Have we?”

  He manufactured a pretty good leer. “Well, now you bring the subject up, if you want a date, I’d—”

  “Shut up!” Conner rasped.

  “Get behind the wheel, George,” Connie said, “and take me to the Unicorn.”

  I found the street. It wasn’t there. I tried two other streets and then went back to the first one. I parked and went in a cigar store and asked what had happened to it. The man told me he’d been there twelve years and there’d never been a place of that name in the neighborhood.

  We went home. I sat on the living-room couch. She pulled a small footstool over and sat directly in front of me.

  “George, listen to me. I’ve been checking everything. That address you gave me. It’s a parking lot. There aren’t any old Victorian houses on that street made over into apartments. There’s no local record of a nurse named Miranda Wysner. I brought you home from the hospital and took care of you myself. They told me I should put you in a psychiatric nursing home. They thought I was in danger from you. You said some pretty wild things about me in the hospital. I took the risk. For the first two weeks you were home you called me Miranda as often as you called me Connie. It was, I thought, the name of some girl you knew before we were married. Then you stopped doing that and you seemed better. That’s why I thought it was safe to let you drive again. You were almost rational. No, you were rational. If it had been just almost rational, if I had thought that you were in danger, I wouldn’t have permitted it. The steering did break when you had your accident. That’s because the garage you took the car to installed a defective part.”

  I said haltingly, “But … you. The way you acted towards me. I know that I’m repulsive to you now. This eye and all—”

  She left the room, came back quickly with a mirror. “Take off the patch, George.” I did so. My two eyes, whole again, looked back at me. I touched the one that had been under the patch.

  “I don’t understand!” I cried out.

  “You were convinced you had lost an eye. They gave up and decided to humor you when you demanded the patch. And as far as my turning away from you in disgust is concerned, that is precisely what you did, George. Not me.”

  I sat numbly. Her grave eyes watched me.<
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  “I followed you that night,” I said.

  “I went for a walk. I didn’t want you to see my cry again. I’d cried enough in front of you—until I thought that no more tears could come. But there are always more tears. Funny, isn’t it? No matter how many already shed.”

  “Why have I done this to you?” I demanded.

  “George, darling. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t you. It was the depressed fracture, the bone chips they pulled out of your brain, the plate they put in.”

  “Miranda,” I whispered. “Who is Miranda? Who was Miranda?”

  Connie tried to smile. Tears glistened in the gray eyes. “Miranda? Why, darling, she might have been an angel of death.”

  “When I nearly died, she was there.…”

  “I was there,” Connie said, with an upward lift of her chin. “I was there. And I held you and whispered to you how much you had to live for, how much I needed you.”

  “She said she whispered to all of them on that borderline.”

  “Maybe she does.”

  “Take me in your arms, George,” Connie said.

  I couldn’t. I could only look at her. She waited a long time and then she went alone up the stairs. I heard her footsteps on the guest-room floor overhead.

  We went to the cabin on the lake. I was sunk into the blackest depths of apathy. Once you have learned that no impression can be trusted, no obvious truth forever real, you know an isolation from the world too deep to be shattered.

  I remembered the thin pink skin of her wide lips, the lurch of her walk, the unexpected competence of her hands.

  I do not know how many days went by. I ate and slept and watched the lake.

  And one day I looked up and there was Connie. She stood with the sun behind her and she looked down at me.

  The smile came then. I felt it on my lips. I felt it dissolving all the old restraints. I reached for her and pulled her into my arms. The great shuddering sighs of thanksgiving came from her. She was my wife again, and she was in my arms, and everything between us was mended, as shining and new as in the earliest days of our marriage.

  She wept and talked and laughed, all at once.

  That night a wind was blowing off the lake.

  When she slept I left her side and went to the windows. They look out onto the porch.

  The old rocking chair creaked. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  It was no surprise to me to see her sitting there. In the rocker. There was a wide path of reflected moonlight across the black water, and her underlip was moist enough to pick up the smallest of highlights from the lake.

  We smiled at each other the way old friends smile who have at last learned to understand each other.

  You see, Miranda knows about the drop from the top steps to the lakeshore rocks.

  I turned back to gather up my small and dainty wife in my arms.

  They Let Me Live

  The silly woman from the alphabetical agency kept trying to move in on me as I lay on top of the blue canvas of the hatch cover. The weary little ship chewed its way doggedly across the Pacific, and I thought I’d never be able to soak up enough sun. The doc in Calcutta had grinned like a well-fed cat when he told me that I had better just pretend that I had been dead for a year. There was a lot to think about, and the dumpy girl yawped at me until my head ached. I grunted at her for four days and finally told her that it was too bad she was a lady because that made it impossible for me to tell her what was wrong with me. She stiffened and then nearly went over the side trying to get off the boat deck.

  It was queer. There was a war on and you were bustling around. They sent you on strange trips because you were a specialist. Then you crashed, and when they finally got you out of Tibet it was nineteen forty-six and the war was over and the big installations were deserted and the aircraft were gone and the East was drifting back into its usual dim variety of slow death.

  I had lots of time to think on that slow trip back. They put me on a slow boat because they thought I’d mend better.

  I soaked up the sun and remembered.

  The crew chief had stuck his head through the door and told us to strap on the belts. It was the hump trip, early ’45. I rubbed the glass clear, and it scared me to look at the ice growing on the wings of the old crate. It was one of the few night trips that the China National Airways Corporation ever made. Those kids liked to take it on the bright days with just enough cloud to duck into one if necessary. The old Allergic to Combat had to fly it in any weather at any minute on the clock.

  The motors had been churning away when we hit. I knew we hit, and that was all. A grinding continuing crash and I knew I was torn loose from the strap and was being hurled toward the opposite side of the plane. Then nothing.

  When I came to, the sky was gray with dawn and the brown rocks stuck up out of the snow. The wind of the Himalayas needled the flying ice into my face. I hurt in a hundred places. The great plane lay silent and crumpled against the rocks. Snow had drifted high against the side of it. Bits of wing and tail surfaces were scattered around. I was cold. Almost too cold to stand. I tried to stand. My right ankle gave out, and I chipped my chin on a rock when I fell. I crawled around and felt the port motor. Cold. I crawled out of the wind and sat against the side of the ship and hugged my knees, waiting for it to get light enough to see.

  They hadn’t had any luck. The pilot and co-pilot sat rigid and frozen in their seats, their heads at the same strange angle. The other two passengers had crushed skulls. I found the crew chief thirty feet from the plane, his blood frozen to one of the brown rocks.

  I tried to build a fire outside and couldn’t. Then I tried to build it inside the plane. My hands were shaking too much. I spilled the little gas I had collected and the fire roared up. I had tried to haul the bodies out, but the fire was too fast and I was too weak. Besides, there was little point in it. I crawled through the hole in the side and sat in the snow and watched the whole thing blaze up. When it was half burned, the yellow sun climbed up and paled the flames. The sun was as cold as the snow.

  I had warmed myself a little in the radiant heat of the burning plane. I had no food. I looked around at the weird wild hills. Blinding snow, though a hundred miles away white men were passing out from sunstroke. I imagined that it was some part of Tibet. That’s all I knew. I was so cold that I knew I’d have to move. We had hit on the side of a mountain. Only one way to go. Down the hill.

  I died before I hit the bottom. That’s the way the doc told me to think about it. Stumbling and falling and rolling in the thin sharp air with my bare hands blue and my face numb. Feeling the slow, warming comfort, the driving desire for sleep, and remembering that you freeze to death that way. Crawling and rolling some more. The acid edges of the brown rock tearing my freezing flesh. I marveled stupidly at how little I bled. Then there wasn’t any more. Not until ’46.

  A very solid little Britisher with a face like a wrinkled boot sat beside my hospital bed in Calcutta and told me how they got me out. That was before they found out who I was. News doesn’t travel very fast in the wild villages of the hills. He estimated that I had traveled about twelve miles. They must have found me at the edge of one of their trails across the high passes. They must have marveled and loaded me like a sack of grain across one of their shaggy ponies. Eventually they had heard in the outside world that there was a sick white man in one of the far villages.

  I lay in the sun and remembered the fatuous nurse who had stood by the bed and tried to distract me while the doc changed bandages.

  “My! You certainly’ll have a lot to tell about living in the wilds.”

  I hadn’t bothered to argue with her. I could remember hot food being crammed into my mouth so I had to swallow it or strangle. I remembered the bitter smoke that hung in a small room and burned my eyes. Bulky people with wide heavy faces that grunted at me in strange tongues. Furs that stank. Somehow, they kept me alive.

  Coming to life in the hospital was like being born again. M
y voice was dusty in my throat, and I couldn’t fit my mouth and tongue over the words. The white sheet on the bed had been the most wonderful thing in the world. I remembered running my left hand across it and noticing something odd about my hand.

  I stared at my own hand for a long time, and my mind wouldn’t tell me what I had noticed. It didn’t look like my hand. It was thin, with the cords and bones showing clearly. Then I knew that the fingers were wrong. Not enough of them. The two on the end were gone, and the top of the middle one. But it wasn’t important. It was only important to feel the crisp soft texture of the sheet under my fingers. I know that I didn’t look to see how the other hand was.

  It had been a time for sleeping. I know that I was mending then. Coming back from death. Growing into awareness and life. There was the day I realized that I was in a hospital.

  I remembered the afternoon that the young doctor with the sharp face and the wise eyes sat beside the bed.

  “Well, man from the hills, can you remember who you are yet?”

  “Remember? Why not? Howard Garry. Captain. Engineers.”

  “I’ve been asking you that question for three weeks.”

  “I don’t remember you asking.”

  “You seem pretty bright today, Garry. What was the date when you got lost in the hills?”

  “Early April.”

  “What year?”

  “This year. Nineteen forty-five.”

  “Sorry, Garry. This is nineteen forty-six. May. The war’s over. Most of your people have gone home.”

  When I looked again, he was gone. I had to think it out. Thirteen months out of my life. The war was over. From that day on, I mended more rapidly.

  I remember the nurse getting excited when I told her that there was nobody to notify. Just the War Department. No relatives, no wife, no children. I wanted to tell them to find Dan Christoff and tell him that I was okay. Then I realized that I could have more fun walking in on him.