by Barry, Mike
“What’s he traveling in?”
Once again there was a long singing space on the wire. “Well, he’s got a black Fairlane, pretty beat up, with Jersey license plates. Not too good a car….”
“He got your car, didn’t he?”
“Well, all right, yes. But I got out of it with my ass, anyway. Listen,” the voice said, “You think it’s so goddamned easy, you’re so tough lying in bed there giving orders and telling me that I’m an asshole and Strauss who is dead is an idiot, you really think that that’s so goddamned easy, you take this guy on. He’s a fucking killer, can’t you understand that? He’s a murderer.”
“You’re a fool,” Nolk said to the voice. “Both of you are fools. One of you is dead because of it, and the other one deserves to be.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’d better not let me see you,” Nolk said. “You have any sense at all, you will make yourself difficult for me to find because if I do, I’m going to take care of the job that Wulff should have done. You bastard.”
The voice made astonished, revolted gibbering sounds. But Nolk was already without interest; first his attention and then the receiver itself had been withdrawn, placed on its pedestal. Closing off the voice was like tying off one abscess, only to open a tunnel into a deeper wound; he found, lying on the bed, that he was shuddering. Little movements of revulsion worked their way up and down the panels of his body, and Nolk found that he was cold, fifty-eight years old and heaving in the spaces of his bed like a child, an infant who had tossed off the covers in the middle of the night and had now somehow lost control of himself. He pushed the covers back suddenly, and in a convulsive motion stood, his feet on the floor establishing a connection that felt curiously insubstantial, disconnected. Wavering, he felt for his slippers, put them on, and then went for the door of the bedroom. I am getting old, he thought. It was the first time that he had thought this in a very long time. I am getting very old, I become cold in the middle of the night, I look for comfort, something in the network of night to hold against me. He went out the door and through the corridor. He opened the first door on his right, peered in, saw the sleeping form of his wife against the pillow. Looking at her in sleep was shocking; he had not seen her this way for a very long time—it must have been eight or nine years since the new house and the separate bedrooms—but seeing her that way reminded him of how it had been in much different times. Oh, he guessed that he had to go back almost thirty years to get that image properly fixed, but there it was: the way she had looked huddled in the bed of their hotel room on the first morning when he had come back from the bathroom to see her there in the spattering of sun, stricken by the light and yet framed by it as slowly, slowly she had turned then, held her arms to him, and he had moved toward and then upon her.
She moved now too, sensitive to him as she had always been in some part which he could not touch, which he must not have known about, and the two images must have meshed then: recollection, in which in a profound abyss of connection he moved upon her again and again, and the present, in which slowly he came toward her, driven by emotions that he had not had in many years. As the fires in recollection battered and tore at one another, rising and falling in the light, so in the present, in the harsh, guttering bulb of the nightlight, did he come upon her, and now, as then, she turned and held him; he felt her gathering him in, a sudden hardness in her touch as she brought him against her, and he felt her move toward him, damp. He can’t reach me, he thought as he worked within her grasp, he can’t touch me, he can’t get near, I will have a hundred men around this house and all of them trained and all of them ready to kill. To kill for me. I cannot be touched. But she could touch him, he felt himself beginning to grow within her, struggling to pull himself free from his clothing, not able to do so, settling into her with sighs and groans, and oh my God she was slack, she was loose down there; he had never realized until now, driven by need, how far gone she was; he had maintained in his mind some image of sufficiency which must have again and again circumvented realization so that time and again in these years of the separate bedrooms, when he had plunged into her he had been fucking not the woman she had become but the woman she had been; but now he saw, he was in the bed with her, not some recovered image, not some dream, but Jennifer herself, and heaving and bucking against her, her cries filling the air, he knew that they were cries not of the young girl he had married, the girl in the hotel room in the sun, but rather he was fucking the groaning and submissive fifty-three-year-old woman grunting beneath him, whose breasts slid like water to her sides, as insubstantial as the blood that ran within him, and his orgasm was diminished, feeble, coming out of him in little weak sprays.
That was, in a way, the worst of it—the fact that he was able to climax. If he had been impotent with her, seeing this new aspect, if he had turned in revulsion, unable to function, it would have at least made some statement on himself and how far he had come from the imposed fantasies which had enabled him to fuck her all these recent years; but he could not; reflex was stronger than recognition, habit leaped higher than disgust, and at the end, moving within her, Nolk felt not only emission but a kind of lust, actual lust, which made him reach farther into her, his prick a claw, the flow of his semen little nails to catch her more deeply, and it was his revulsion which must have peaked the orgasm, made it even more intense so that in reacting against it he found himself moved more strongly by her, so that he came in a long, thrashing, bleating series of movements that banged her against the bed and made her groan with pain, all of her soft against him, a feeling of waste. Fucking offal, he thought, I am fucking offal; and that part was all right, but not the perverse and rising excitement that, even in the aftermath of orgasm, tricked him over into his second and more violent coming, and he lay on top of her as those spasms passed from him, looking at himself in a kind of interior astonishment: he would not have imagined that he had this kind of thing within him. He would not have really thought that he was this kind of person.
Slowly Nolk separated himself from his wife, slowly he pivoted to an elbow, rolled, brought up his legs to guard against strain of the lower back, and looked then at the ceiling, dimpled and full above him. His wife lay there, his juices and hers running from her, an overturned urn, now leaking parts of the evening’s wreckage. He knew that he should talk to her, but he simply could not think of anything to say. What he really wanted to do, of course, was to get back to his own bedroom and lock the door and lie on his bed planning the retaliatory campaign. He would have to have a hundred men around the house. That was correct. He would not take on Wulff with less than a hundred, and a hundred and fifty would be better if you could raise that number in this area on short notice, but he doubted it. Settle for a hundred, then. He would have to begin calling around at once; he would have to be on the phone for hours, starting immediately, because there was not that much time in which to make arrangements, and there was no saying how near Wulff had already come to Mobile. He would have to do that. But somehow he could not force himself off the bed, not before he tried to talk to her, although he had no idea what to say. He simply did not have the slightest idea of what to say.
Neither did she, apparently. She lay there running her palm over the sheets in slow, skilled, expert motions of arousal, as if the sheet were he and she was trying to move him once again. He stopped the hand, put his palm over it. She looked at him. “It’s no good, is it?” she said.
“It was all right.”
“You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to lie. I know when it’s no good, for God’s sake.”
“All right, Jennifer,” he said. “All right.”
“Go on, tell me it was no good. I can take it.”
“I don’t want to tell you anything.”
“Yes you do. You’re dying to tell me. I can see how badly you want to. Well, go ahead and do it. Do it now and get it over with.”
It was hopeless. It was all of that; he was married to a
fifty-three-year-old woman who (how could he have forgotten this?) was not only aging but querulous, not only unsatisfactory but raised to a pitch of awareness about her weakness which was to make it doubly unbearable. “All right,” he said, and sat up in the bed. “All right.”
“You come into my room in the middle of the night, you have sex without saying a word, and now you just want to walk out? No,” she said, “no, it won’t work out at all. You could at least say something. You could tell me how it stunk.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Don’t just sit there. Say something. Let it all out of you. I can take it. I can take almost anything now.”
“Oh God, Jennifer,” Nolk said, and stood, swaying uncomfortably on the uneven surfaces of the floor. “Will you leave me alone?”
“That’s ridiculous. That’s the most damned ridiculous thing I ever heard. You start all of this off and tell me to leave you alone.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten into it,” he said.
“Don’t start with your foul mouth. You can tell me anything you want, but you don’t have to get into dirt. I don’t have to listen to that.”
“I don’t mean what you think I mean,” Nolk said. “It wasn’t that at all.” And he was almost ready to get into it then: I never meant to get into distribution, is what he would have said. That wasn’t what I wanted, but it was too easy an opportunity to pass up, I couldn’t let something like that go, no one would have. I would have been a fool to pass it up, and when things started to shake down here, when it looked like I had a shot at the top, I was really commited, but now I see I shouldn’t have done it, and it’s too late. Oh my, is it too late. To her he only said, “Good night, Jennifer,”’ and went toward the door of the bedroom.
“Come on,” she said behind him, “say it.”
He stopped at the door, turned. “I said it,” he said, “I said it all,” and he knew that this was absolutely the truth, that in all of the motions of his body, in all of the moans and gutturals in his throat, he had said it to her in a way that was absolutely and purifyingly clear, which had resonance in a way that he could never give with words. It was too late. Everything was too late. All that he could do now was to stand and fight. The stakes were, at least, absolute; he could see now that if he succeeded, it would be in a way that would entirely change his life.
I should have gotten a mistress, I should have fucked around more, Nolk thought as he went back to his room, closed the door. I would have been far better off spreading it around instead of getting hammered into this, but it’s far too late for that now, it’s far too late for any of that. It comes down to smack. He bolted the door and shut off the light, and there in the darkness at five in the morning began the phone calls to build the force that he would use to withstand the challenge of the enemy and thus catapult himself to the absolute head of all manipulations and distribution for the important Southern district.
XII
Wulff called him at about four in the morning on a Thursday. Williams had figured that the call was only a matter of time, that sooner or later it was going to come in, and he only hoped that he would be able to handle it the right way. It was no surprise at all. It did not wake his wife, because he had taken to sleeping in the living room in recent weeks, the phone right by the head of the couch. Things had not been the same between them since he had come home, and he guessed they would not be again. In line with that, it had seemed only good common sense to sleep separately until things cooled down. But then again, you never knew. Maybe they would get back together again. “I figured you’d call,” he said to Wulff when the man had said hello. “I just was wondering when it would be. Where are you?”
“I’m in the South,” Wulff said.
“How far south?”
“Not as far as I once was. I came out of Mexico. Now I’m heading toward Mobile.”
“That’s a tough-ass area,” Williams said, “that Mobile is a real motherfucker. I do not think that my father would miss Mobile at all if he were still alive, which he is not, because Mobile, among other places, left scars on him.”
“Want to come down here and get back at Mobile?”
“Oh, shit,” Williams said, “I had that bit in Los Angeles.”
“I thought Los Angeles worked out pretty well.”
“It almost killed me,” Williams said. “I knew after Los Angeles that I wasn’t cut out for this kind of life.”
“No one’s asking you to be cut out for it. You can lend a hand, though. You can free-lance a bit.”
“Wulff,” Williams said, and then paused, got the receiver the other way so that the cord was now wrapped around his neck, not in a smothering grasp, just little tentacles to take him deeper into the conversation, sheltering and nestling his voice, “Wulff, I think you ought to pitch it in. You ought to come back.”
“Not for a little while.”
“They’re serious, Wulff. They’re goddamned serious. They’re pressing me to the wall. The bureau is in on this.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“You’re an escapee, Wulff. That puts you in a different category. You go on killing people, it’s on their heads now. They had you in custody.”
“I’m doing the right kind of killing. You want to join me?”
“I can’t do it,” Williams said. “I thought that all over. I went through that back in L. A. You understand, Wulff, I get into that again, and there’s no end to it. I’ll never get out of it alive.”
“Afraid?”
“And other things.”
“It’s a hell of a lot of fun,” Wulff said. “You’d be surprised; I’m starting to enjoy it for its own sake now.”
“I don’t ever want to enjoy it, Wulff.”
“You don’t have to enjoy it to do it. You can get the enjoyment just from knowing that it’s an important job and that it’s being well done.”
Williams drew his knees up carefully to his chest, felt the even beat of his heart under his wrist. “I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t do it, Wulff.”
“Well, I’m not surprised. It figured.”
“It’s better if we cut this short, Wulff. You start to press me, and I’ll have to say something to them. I swear to you I don’t want to do it, but I’m abiding a fugitive on a federal rap, and that’s serious. I can’t get into that.”
“You really want out, don’t you?”
“Back in L.A. That was the time. That was the time when I got out, Wulff.”
There was a little pause on the other end. Wulff might have lit another cigarette, Williams thought, but then again, he had a more vivid mental picture, the man bent over the receiver, his features resolved to a fine point of concentration, the tired eyes suddenly luminescent as the next idea occurred to him. He was always thinking, that was the point. Wulff was always functioning; you thought that he was somewhere, and he turned out to be steps ahead. It was a remarkable thing, but then again, in his business it was inevitable. “All right,” Wulff said, “it was just an idea. I didn’t figure that it would come to anything, but I thought I had to ask. I need some ordnance, Williams.”
“Shit,” Williams said automatically, “oh, shit.”
“I know you don’t like to be asked. But there’s nowhere else to turn right now. I’m a little out of my normal territory and kind of out of options. I had some stuff in a car, but it blew up on the Interstate.”
“Still blowing up cars on the Interstate, Wulff?”
“Don’t be funny, Williams, I’m goddamned serious here. I need some ordnance. I’m heading into Mobile, but I have a feeling that I’m going to be walking into some pretty heavy fire, and I can’t manage it on the lightweight arms I’ve got. I’ve just got a couple of pistols. I’m going to need some grenades and full clips. We can work out a drop point; if you ship them air mail—”
“No, Wulff,” Williams said.
“What? What’s that?”
“I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to ship you any stuff. In the
first place, I don’t have any more damned sources; I’m on office patrol.”
“Bullshit. You have contacts. I met some of your contacts.”
“They’re all gone. While you were blowing up Harlem, Wulff, you took care of some pretty brisk sources. And in the second place, whether I could find some stuff or not, I’m out. I’m out of the game. I’m about seven or eight towns behind, Wulff. I’m pulling out of this.”
“That’s the way you want to play it?”
“I have no choice. That’s the way it has to be.”
“Gone back into the system, eh? You’ve made the full round trip in a little over eight months. That’s a pretty damned fast cycle, rookie.”
“I’m not a rookie anymore. That’s for fucking sure,” Williams said. “I’m no rookie.”
“You’re talking like one. Back to St. Albans, hey, rookie? Back to the split-level.”
“It’s not a split-level.”
“Bullshit, rookie.”
“Listen,” Williams said. He drew the receiver closer, closed his eyes against the mental picture of Wulff now stirring within the telephone booth (or was he calling from some diner, was that faint sound of music he heard the jukebox drifting and pounding through the thin panels of the open phone? Some truckers’ diner in Mississippi, that’s what he would imagine it to be, the feel of it was somehow drifting through the wire, or was he once again overreacting?), his fingers twitching on the cord, looking toward the parking lot outside where his latest dangerous, fast car would be. “Listen to me, Wulff. It’s bullshit, all right. That’s what I want to tell you. It’s all crap. You can’t fight them. You can’t go on this way.”
“Don’t tell me—”
“But you can’t,” Williams said. “Goddamnit, we know what the hell’s going on here, don’t we? Every fucking cop on the beat knows what you used to know and won’t admit anymore—that if you clean it out at one level, you’ve just got a vacuum, and they’ll move in at the next level. You’ll just get another bunch of names; the system goes on.”
