“Clifford?”
“Yes?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that it would be a source of great personal satisfaction to me if I could devise or arrange some means by which she would never again have to have any contacts with you.”
“Why do you talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“So…so unfriendly, all of a sudden. Haven’t I just been telling you what a nice boy I think you are, and what a high opinion I’ve always had of you?”
Against my will my face flushed and my eyes moistened in anger. “You never knew me,” I protested. “You never knew me any better than you knew your own daughter, and that wasn’t much, God knows.”
“Now, now, Clifford, don’t be unpleasant,” she admonished.
“Unpleasant!” I was as close to tears as I ever get. “Good grief, lady, you’re telling me not to be unpleasant, and you are just about the most mean and heartless person I’ve ever met.”
“If you intend to make remarks like that, I’ll have to ask you to get out of my house.”
“I’m going. I just want you to know that no girl ever deserved the kind of treatment you’ve been giving Margaret all these years, and you can henceforth consider me your sworn enemy, and I’m going to keep Margaret away from you if I have to take her to the farthest corner of the earth!”
“You leave my daughter alone! You’re a married man, you…you adulterer! You just touch my daughter and I’ll have you arrested!”
I moved out of the parlor and headed toward the front door. She followed. I turned briefly to say to her, “You would have to lock her up again to keep me from taking her away from you, and even that wouldn’t stop me.” I opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.
She stopped me with her hand on my arm and said, “I’m warning you, stay away from my daughter.”
I said, “And I’m warning you, prepare yourself never to see her again.”
She slapped me.
Considering that she is much bigger than I am, by about fifty pounds, I was tempted to return her blow, but I didn’t. I just glared at her. She burst into tears. Such sopping sobbing I have never seen before, such a deluge. It was disgusting, otherwise I might have felt some compassion for her. She buried her face in her hands and thoroughly drenched her fingers. Her hefty shoulders bounced at a rapid clip. I wondered if any across-the-street neighbors were watching. Eventually she peeked out between two of her fingers to see what sort of reaction I was having. My cold hard contemptuous glare set her to sprinkling and spluttering all the harder.
God have mercy on your soul, lady. I can’t.
I turned my back on her and walked down the front steps of that house for the last time. That, I think, was the real End of Innocence for me. This thing, this so-called End of Innocence, is supposed to happen in dramatic situations like getting one’s virginity lost, or robbing a bank, or performing a Carnegie Hall solo at the age of thirteen. But for me, I think it came when I was able to turn my back on a self-styled poor heartbroken mother who was crying her head loose from its already precarious moorings.
Dall would be proud of me.
Chapter thirty-four
If he lived. He had got himself battered badly, the foolhardy paladin, and was hospitalized. When I got home from my unpleasant visit with Margaret’s mother, Naps was waiting at the curb and without a word he rushed me out to St. Vincent’s, where we were admitted to a small room containing a large swaddled mummy, bedfast, taped and braced and splinted almost beyond recognition. The mouth and eyes alone were untaped and visible, and there was something curiously familiar about them, but I couldn’t be altogether positive, until Naps stepped forward and presented the items he was bearing. In each of his hands: a bouquet of Arkansas wildflowers and a pound tin of Brush Creek pipe tobacco. “Brought you some flars and terbacker, Sawjunt, suh,” he said obsequiously. But even then I would not accept the possibility that this corpse was my old buddy, until at last the old buddy himself spoke: “Goddammit, nigger, when you gonna stop callin me Sawjunt suh?”
“Dall!” I cried out and sprang to his side and placed a solicitous hand on his encased arm. “What in God’s name happened to you?”
“I got run over by a horse,” he said, vainly trying to manage a feeble grin. “Naps, did you get that horse’s number?”
“He didn’t have no Arkansas license plate on im, suh,” Naps answered, compensating with his own enormous grin for Dall’s inability to make one. “But he was headin west so fast, I couldn’t tell for sure.”
“What horse? Whose horse?” I demanded.
“Sit down, boys,” Dall invited us, and we pulled up chairs beside his bed. A nurse came in bearing a vase for the wildflowers, and arranged them neatly and set them on a table. Naps waited until she left, then opened the tin of tobacco, filled one of Dall’s pipes, and stuck the stem in the exposed orifice on Dall’s face, then lit it for him. Dall could not lift a hand to manipulate the pipe, so Naps periodically performed this office for him. “You know what I think?” Dall said to him, puffing out a contented cloud, “I think you aint really a nigger. You’re just one of them mistrel-show boys made up to look like one.”
“Have it your way,” Naps said.
“I reckon you think you’re a hot-shot cause you saved my life, don’t you?”
“Nawsuh, that never occurred to me. All I was thinkin of was what my little girl Lucy said to me yesterday. She said, ‘He sho a nice man. You gon have him come back again?’ And I promised her I’d get you to come back again. So I figured if that horse killed you, I’d have some tough explainin to do to her.”
“Will somebody kindly tell me what happened?” I asked.
“Well,” Dall said and squirmed a little inside his wrappings, “for one thing, me and Slater didn’t get along none too well today. I reckon he got a notion that a wise cop is a dead cop.”
“Did you get him?” I asked. “Did you nab him?”
“Naw, Nub, I never nabbed him,” Dall said sadly.
Naps said to me, “He let him get away.”
“I didn’t neither!” Dall objected.
“You did too!” Naps said. “You had your gun pointed right at him, but you wouldn’t pull the trigger, so he got away.”
“Dammit, I didn’t have enough strength left to pull the trigger! Besides, what good would it of done if I’d of shot him?”
The nurse, a kindly-faced nun, came in and said, “Gentlemen, please don’t excite the patient. He mustn’t be excited. Try to keep him calm.” Then she removed the pipe from Dall’s mouth and went out again.
“You tell it,” Dall said quietly to Naps. “I’ll just fill in anything you leave out.”
So between the two of them, speaking in perfect accompaniment like Bones and the Interlocutor, or like Huntley and Brinkley, they narrated the story of Showdown at the JRS Ranch, or, How a Brave Cop Confronted a Crazy Playwright and Was Run Over by a Horse.
Naps, who has been sitting semi-secluded in the Slater kitchen talking to his friend Feemy Bastrop, sees the squad car arrive, watches it coming up the long pine-forested driveway. Feemy excuses himself to go answer the bell. Feemy had not been surprised when Naps told him what he had learned from Margaret of Slater’s intentions regarding his wife; with sadness and censure and a sense of helplessness Feemy (as he was known in sobriquetion of his Christian name Blasphemy Bastrop) had admitted to Naps that it was all too obvious that Slater’s burning obsession was to do away with his wife, which in a sense, as Feemy saw it, would be a blessing, because Ethel Slater was the most miserable and useless woman on earth. When Feemy returns to the kitchen and tells Naps that Slater and the sergeant are going to have lunch together and he has to get busy and fix them something to eat, Naps sits down at the table and scrawls a note on a piece of paper, and later, when Feemy goes to carry a tray of club sandwiches in to the men, Naps hands him the note and asks him if he can slip it to the sergeant without Slater seeing h
im, and Feemy nods.
“By the way,” Slater says to Dall conversationally, “did I ever tell you about the history of this house? No? Well, it was built quite a long time ago, 1856 in fact, by a Spaniard named Isidore de Carranza who paddled up the Arkansas in a canoe, although steamboats were plentiful at the time and Little Rock was already a flourishing port, because he wanted to retrace the route of Hernando de Soto in his famous but fruitless quest for gold. Somehow he got hopelessly lost and—But wouldn’t you like a glass of brandy first? It’s a long story.”
“Never drink when I’m on duty. Thanks just the same,” Dall says.
“I see. Well, this Spaniard, Isidore de Carranza, it seems he was quite a wealthy man, his primitive means of travel notwithstanding. So when night fell, and he realized his position was totally off his intended route, he banked his canoe and walked in from the river a few miles and discovered this property and was so taken with it that he called it Le Agradezco Mucho, which is untranslatable but means, roughly, that he was awfully glad he found it, and he decided to stake out a claim and build this grand casa. The fact that a large community of Negroes already held squatter’s rights to the place did not deter him. He—”
“Slater, if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon talk about Margaret.”
“Margaret? Heavens, man, what is there to be said about Margaret? Haven’t you just said yourself that she absolutely refuses to see me again? Agnes Galloway would be delighted to have her part in the play. So Margaret is a dead issue as far as I’m concerned…well, perhaps dead issue isn’t the right way to put it, but, I mean, she’s passé, you know. We’ve rung down the curtain—rang, is it?—for a playwright I sometimes have atrocious grammar. The fault of my education, I suppose. You see, I went to a little hick college down in the southern part of the state, and—”
“Slater, listen—”
“Ah, here’s our lunch. Just set it down here on the coffee table, if you will, Feemy, and ask the sergeant what he would like to drink with it. A bottle of Löwenbräu Dark? A glass of Liebfraumilch?”
“Milk,” Dall says.
The Negro servant, bringing him his glass of milk, places himself between Slater and Dall in such a way that Slater cannot see that the Negro is passing a folded note into Dall’s hands. “Wh—” Dall begins to say, but the expression on the Negro’s face silences him, and he takes the note and conceals it beside his hip so that he can open and read it without Slater’s knowledge.
“You haven’t put any arsenic in the sergeant’s milk, have you, Feemy?” Slater says to his servant and titters with laughter. “It isn’t time yet. Later. I’ll let you know. Ha ha.”
Surreptitiously Dall reads the note: MISS MARGARET HAS CONFESSED. UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF INTOXICANTS AND STIMULATING QUESTIONS AT MY DOMICILE LAST NIGHT SHE SAID MR. SLATER PLANNED TO QUOTE GET RID OF HIS WIFE UNQUOTE BY PUSHING HER DOWN THE STAIRS IN HER WHEELCHAIR. FURTHER DETAILS ON REQUEST. THE BEARER OF THIS NOTE IS ANOTHER FRIEND OF MINE. THE JIG IS, AS THEY SAY, UP. NO PUN INTENDED. YOURS COOPERATIVELY, N. LEON HOWARD. P.S. I AM BACK IN THE KITCHEN. SLATER’S KITCHEN, THAT IS. By God, Dall says to himself in unabashed awe. When I get to hell one of these days, that nigger’s gonna be down there spying on old harry hisself.
“Well now,” Dall says, “if you don’t want to talk about Margaret, suppose let’s talk about your wife—”
“My wife? Why?”
“Her and you aint gettin along too good, are you? How come?”
“Hawkins, aren’t you married?”
“I used to be.”
“Ah, that’s even better. Then you know what it’s like to be a martyr, to be martyred by a woman? You know how a woman can prey on a man with her subtle tortures, her provoking whims, her guileful wiles? You know how utterly gifted all wives are at making their mates miserable?”
Dall, forced to think for a moment of his own former tormentor Rowena, answers, “I sure do.” But then he quickly adds, “All the same, that aint no excuse for killin em.”
“Beg pardon?”
“You heard me.”
“My friend, what wild conjectures have been filling your head lately?”
“I just got a idee maybe you’d like to get rid of her so’s you could marry Margaret.”
“But I told you I’m no longer interested in Margaret.”
Dall reaches into his pocket and takes out the fragment of worsted trouser-bottom and passes it across to Slater, without comment.
Slater casually studies it for a moment and apparently decides not to pretend ignorance. “Thank you,” he says. “Although I’m afraid that particular garment is beyond repair, with or without this missing piece.” A moment later he adds, as in idle observation, “A competent and vigilant dog you have. My compliments.” Then he leans forward and asks, “Where are you keeping her?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” is all Dall can think of in the way of a rejoinder, so, puerile as it is, he doesn’t say it; instead he says, “At my place, like I told you. I reckon she must’ve stepped out for a six-pack of beer or something when you came by.”
Slater seems to accept this. “Aren’t we friends, you and I?” he asks solicitously. “Didn’t you write a beautiful three-letter-word poem to me in the Gazette this morning? I wanted to thank you for—”
“Slater, you wrote that yourself. You know it.”
“Oh well. No matter, then.” He stands up, stretches a little, adjusts his ascot, and says, “I generally take a short stroll after lunch. Care to walk along with me?”
Naps watches them leave the house, the two ugliest white men he has ever seen, walking side by side. They cut across the broad rear lawn of the house and enter the dirt road that winds up the hillside toward the stables. Naps begins to follow them, but the land is so open that he has to remain at a considerable distance from them to keep from being seen. He cuts over toward the pinewoods that encircle Slater’s fields, and here he can move from tree to tree, making his hidden progress. Still, the closest he can get to them is behind an outcropping of metamorphic rock some hundred feet away from where they have stopped at the end of the paddock beside the stables. He cannot hear what they are saying to each other.
Dall watches Slater take down a bridle from the nail on which it is hanging, and open a half-door of a stall in which there is one of the roan Morgans. “Would you care to ride a little, Hawkins?” Slater asks. “We could lope down to the lake and back.”
“Much obliged, but I aint been on a horse since I was eight years old.”
“I give lessons, you know. I could teach you. Usually I charge ten dollars an hour for private lessons, but considering that you’re a friend—” Slater has already led the Morgan out of its stall and is placing the bridle on him.
“Slater, look, this aint no time for no horseback ridin. I think we’d best just sit down and talk this thing over. Or else I’d have to let the sheriff in on our little secret.”
“You haven’t told the sheriff—or your captain—of your suspicions yet, have you? That wasn’t wise, Hawkins. Whenever you intend to go somewhere to question a suspect, you should always let your associates or superiors know where you’re going.”
“Up to now this is just between you and me.”
“And Margaret,” Slater says and, in one remarkably agile leap, throws himself up upon the bare back of his horse. There he sits stiffly erect, holding the reins loosely in one hand. “Now,” he says. “Now I don’t have to look up to you. You have to look up to me. How does that feel? I liked you, Hawkins, but you are too gallant and noble and cocksure. You put me at a disadvantage. I allowed you to become my friend, and that was my only mistake. But I should have known. It has always happened whenever I have taken anyone into my confidence, and perhaps that’s why I have no other friends. Hawkins, you’ve abused our friendship.” Then he pats his horse on the neck and says, “This is my favorite gelding, Houyhnhnm. I don’t suppose you know Swift, do you, Hawkins?” Then to the horse he says, “Houyhnhnm, say h
ello to Sergeant Hawkins.”
From his hiding place behind the rock Naps sees the man mount the horse and continue talking to—or, rather, now, down-to—the sergeant, and his first thought is that Slater intends to ride away, to escape, but Naps knows that wouldn’t be a smart thing to try, as Dall is armed and could bring him down in an instant. Before Naps has time to do much more speculation about what is happening, he sees that Slater suddenly does something to the horse: spurs it, tugs the reins a certain way, speaks to it. And the horse rears. Its forehoofs dance in a rotating air-fanning movement above Dall’s head and then they come down, one hoof striking Dall atop his head, the other atop his shoulder. Dall staggers. The horse comes down, then rears up again, again dancing, again coming down upon Dall, this time clouting him on the side of his face with one hoof, his chest with the other. Dall falls. Lying there, he has only enough strength left to attempt to cover his face with his arms. The horse tramples him, cantering around and around and around upon him. A rear hoof crashes down upon one of the arms, and a bone snaps. Naps hears the snap of the bone and suddenly realizes that the reason he can hear it is that he is standing right beside the horse with a big stick in his hands, a piece of fallen tree limb which he paused to snatch from the ground in his headlong dash toward the horse. Now Slater sees him and wheels the horse toward him. Naps swings back the long stick of wood, and as the horse begins to rear, lashes the stick hard across the horse’s face. The stick breaks in two. The horse is stunned, but only for a moment, long enough for Naps to begin a mad dash in search of another stick. He turns to see that Slater is running the horse toward him. Then for what seems a long time Naps runs in circles around the stable, eluding the horse more with fancy footwork than with speed. His footwork is too fancy: he falls. Now I’m dead too, he thinks, waiting for the first shock of the hoofs upon his back, but when none comes he looks up to see that Slater is riding the horse at full gallop off into the woods, and he turns to see that Dall has rolled over and has drawn his revolver and is pointing it at Slater’s diminishing back. Shoot, shoot! he yells at Dall. But Dall only holds the gun as if aiming a camera at a passing parade, and no shot is fired. Slater entirely disappears into the pinewoods. Naps gets to his feet and rushes over to Dall, who has passed out now, face down. Dall’s face is severely cut and bruised, blood is running freely from his nose and from one ear. His uniform is ripped in several places. But his heavy breathing tells Naps he is still alive. Naps slips his hand into Dall’s pants pocket and fishes out the keys to the squad car, then begins running toward the house; halfway there he calls loudly to Feemy. Feemy comes out of the house, and they get into the squad car and Naps drives it up the dirt road toward the stable, not pausing to open the paddock gate but knocking it down with the front of the car. He stops the car as close to Dall as he can get, then he and Feemy improvise a stretcher with horse blankets and fence stakes and manage to lift Dall upon the back seat. He tells Feemy to take the Lincoln and meet him at St. Vincent’s; Feemy asks him if it wouldn’t be a good idea to call the sheriff, but Naps says not until Dall has regained consciousness and can pass approval on it. Then Naps gets into the squad car and barrels it off toward Little Rock. When he reaches Route 10 he turns on the siren and leaves it on all the way to St. Vincent’s Hospital. Always wanted to drive one of these things, he says to himself, watching all the other cars get out of his way.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 173
