by Barry, Mike
“That was stupid,” Wulff said. “Damn it, that was as stupid as hell.”
The trooper was erect, holding onto his ribs with one hand, groaning, tears coming out of his eyes, gasping as he faced Wulff. “You dirty bastard,” he said.
“I warned you. I warned you not to try anything.”
“You hurt me.”
“You fool,” Wulff said, “you goddamned fool, I could have killed you,” and the trooper put his crew-cut head down, showing Wulff a fine, developing bald spot, and charged.
He butted Wulff hard in the solar plexus, and the shock of the blow drove the air from his lungs and sent Wulff sprawling, this time with the gun in his hands. The trooper immediately was on top of him, beating him behind the neck and around the ears, using his weight skillfully to pin Wulff and keep him from getting in a blow. Wulff could feel the pistol dangerously close against him, and the danger of the attack was that the pistol was more dangerous to Wulff than to the man on top of him. He could not use it without risking blowing a hole in himself, he could not even attempt a shot. He did then what a less experienced man would probably never have managed to do; he forgot about the pistol. Wulff let it fall from his hands after putting on the safety, just let it roll under him and forgot about it, and then he tensed, heaved, rolled the trooper off him.
The man went off to one side, rolling, and Wulff closed on him. The trooper, gaining his feet at the same time that Wulff did, threw a looping right hand that, had it connected, would have been very dangerous, but Wulff was able to duck it, and the trooper’s follow-up was very poor, a little twitch of a left hook. He was courageous, and he knew a little about hand-to-hand combat, but he had also had a gun shot from his hand, had been pummeled to the ground, and was functioning out of a good deal of terror. He was a remarkable man, though.
Wulff came in on him and leveled a right hand to the chin that carried everything that he could deliver. The trooper took it silently, his eyeballs seeming to explode with color, and then he fell forward and lay there. After a little while it was evident that he was unconscious. Only that would have explained his not trying to get up, because as long as consciousness remained, he would have struggled.
Wulff stood there looking at the man and then up and down the highway. Not another car had passed during the fight, nor if one had, would it have stopped. Anything could happen on the road; people traveled on it the way that they sealed their hotel rooms at night and went to sleep or fucked. What did screams in the corridors have to do with them? Nothing. Still, it was pushing his luck to stand here, and there was also something about his posture over the trooper, like a man staring through a bedroom window, watching a woman perform some intimate but unglamorous action, like douching. He had no right. He had no right to partake of the man’s vulnerability.
Wulff walked away, picked up his pistol, shoved it in his pocket, went back to the trooper. The man was breathing peacefully, quietly in the murky air; his face now seemed placid, as cleansed of expression or torment as might be one of the dead. He had not been badly hurt, and he would awaken and come away from this, and when he looked back upon it in weeks or years, he might remember it as one of the high points of his life. He would remember himself as having had courage, and that was no small thing. It might be the most important of all the possessions that he would carry as baggage with him as he passed along the shrouded line called life.
Wulff sighed and shrugged and went to the Cadillac and cleared out his gear, lumbered with it in two trips to the cruiser, hurled it into the back, threw the Cadillac keys next to the unconscious trooper, and then went into the cruiser. The keys were in it, the engine still idling, the radio crackling along. Someone was asking the trooper to report. Someone was saying that he had not reported for a hell of a long time: what was going on there?
Wulff knew how to operate the machinery. He took the microphone and checked in, saying that he had flagged a speeder and written the ticket. The dispatcher said that that was all right but please keep responding to calls from now on. All voices sounded the same through the transistors, Wulff knew. Wulff apologized and said something about his inexperience, and the dispatcher laughed and said that there were no complaints that he knew of, and went along the band, checking. That would take care of things for fifteen minutes anyway.
Wulff shut off the blinker and disconnected the siren and drove away at a good clip. Thirty seconds down the road he could see nothing in the rear-view mirror at all, not the yellow bulge of the Cadillac, certainly not the small form of the trooper. It was astonishing how insignificant many things were when you had just a little distance. All your life you enacted scenes within an area of maybe a couple of cubic feet: love, pain, courage, death. Move away from those little circles of space, and they meant nothing. Only the darkness mattered. Darkness and the quest.
He moved toward Philadelphia and the rites of the bicentennial.
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Copyright © 1975 by Mike Barry
All rights reserved.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4246-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4246-6
Cover art © 123rf.com/Victor Ortiz Pelayo
