I went toward her slowly, smiling to reassure her.
“He’s gone, dear. He won’t bother you any more.”
“I’m scared of him. Why won’t you take me home?”
“It’s a long, long trip home, Helen. It’s time to rest up now.”
“Really?”
“Really and truly.”
She tried a small smile, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “All right, then.”
“You better go to bed.”
“I haven’t got any nightie or anything.”
“You better just stretch out, dear.”
“Will you stay here?”
“I’ll stay here. Yes.”
“Okay, then.” She crawled onto the bed closest to the window and stretched out and gave a great yawn and rubbed her eyes. “He knocked me down,” she said in a little voice.
“It won’t happen again. Go to sleep, honey.”
I sat on the other bed, a few feet from her. She had turned toward me, her clasped palms under her cheek. I noticed something about her eyes. I knew that in the case of head injuries, one of the things they look at is the eyes. The pupil of her left eye was visibly larger than the pupil of the right one. I wondered what it meant, how dangerous a symptom it was.
Her eyes closed. Through the soles of my feet I could feel a faint vibration that shook the frame cottage. I could hear the muffled sounds of the mating of Shack Hernandez, a flapping, thudding sound as though some leathery animal had been caught in a trap and now, in a senseless panic, was killing itself with its struggles.
When her breathing was deeper and I knew she slept, I gently removed the woman-shoes from the tired, injured child. I sat near her and watched her sleep all that day, while the sun swung up and over us and down. I smoked cigarettes and dropped them on the cheap, shiny varnish and ground them out with the sole of my shoe. I had no desire for sleep. The stimulant drugs were making me use myself up.
Once, when she had turned, and one hand was free, I reached and took it on impulse, and her fingers tightened on mine. I wondered if sleep was good for a head injury. Several times I watched her closely to be certain she was breathing. Even with lipstick gone and her hair tousled, she was a beautiful woman, full of perfections that revealed themselves, one after another.
The long hours passed. Bright spots of sun came through the chinks of the blinds and moved across the floor, the bed, the girl. Outside the cottage I heard the sounds of summer vacation, the rasp of outboards on the lake, the squalling and shrieking of children, music too far away to be identified, men yelling commands, women yelping with jackal laughter. Several times people walked by, close to the window, and I heard mysterious pieces of conversation.
“… so how d’ya like it, he comes back and he tells me it isn’t twelve dollars any more, it’s up to …”
“… drawing forty a week from the union alia time he was on strike plus the unemployment …”
“… I hope to hell she ain’t gone already. Honest to Christ, Sammy, you never seen such a pair …”
And thrice more during the day the familiar animal was trapped and flapped its foolish life away.
I thought of my curious ambivalence, my schizoid attitude toward the sleeping girl, despising what she represented, yet feeling a protective tenderness which I would have thought impossible for me.
I did not want to think of what would happen to her.
I was standing purposelessly at the window, looking out through a crack in the blinds at a small slice of blue lake when I heard her make a slight sound, and heard the bed creak. I turned around. She was sitting up and looking at me. She had a puzzled look. Her eyes were clear and aware.
“Who are you?” she asked in a woman’s voice.
I sat on the foot of her bed. She pulled her feet away and looked warily at me. “Back to arrogance,” I said. “Back to imperious demands. Ring for the waiter, Helen.”
“Are you trying to make sense?” she asked.
“You’d be very smart to keep your voice down, Helen. Very smart.”
“But who are you? Where am I?” With gingerly fingertips she touched the place where her hair was black-matted with her blood. The swelling was not as great. “Was I in an accident?”
“Sort of an accident. You’re somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Seven Mile Lake, if that means anything.”
“It doesn’t. Was I on a trip?”
“Keep the voice down, please.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that. Just accept the fact it’s important.”
She looked beyond me, frowning. “Wait a minute! They didn’t want me to see Arnold, and I shouldn’t have. He was completely mad. I couldn’t communicate. When he started up, I jumped. I could feel myself falling …” She touched her head and winced again. “I did this then?”
“Yes.”
She looked at a tiny gold watch. “Four in the afternoon?”
“Yes. You hit your head last night.”
She stared at me with obvious anger. “My God, do I have to pry all this out of you bit by bit? What the hell am I doing in Pennsylvania?”
“You’re kidnaped,” I told her. It sounded ridiculously melo-dramatic.
“Do you mean that?” she asked me.
“Yes.”
“You’re asking my father for money?”
“No. It isn’t that well organized, Helen. There aren’t any special plans. You’re just … kidnaped. We came along and you were knocked out, lying on the road. So we brought you along with us.”
“You were drunk?”
“No.”
“How many of you?”
“Four of us. One is a girl.”
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“That wouldn’t be pertinent.”
She sat, biting her lip, staring at me. I could tell that her mind was working, and I could sense that it was excellent equipment, agile and logical.
“Kidnaping is a very stupid idea. Don’t you think you made a mistake?”
“It’s possible.”
“If it was just … a sort of joke, you could let me go, couldn’t you? If you’re not after money. I’d make sure you didn’t get into any trouble. I’d say . . I’d hitched a ride with you.”
“The others wouldn’t want to let you go, Helen.”
“But they’re not here. You could unhook the screen and let me out that window and tell them later that it was the smart thing to do. You do look and sound too bright for this sort of thing, really.”
“You wheedle real well, Helen.”
“Well, if you’re not after money, what good has it done you to lug an unconscious girl around?”
“You weren’t unconscious. You acted like a polite nine-year-old child.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“It isn’t the kind of thing you make up, is it?”
She stirred uneasily and her face got slightly red. “Did any of you do anything to me when I was like that?”
“Something came close to happening, but it didn’t.”
“Why can’t you let me go?”
I looked directly into her eyes. “They wouldn’t like it and it wouldn’t be a good idea for me either. We killed Arnold Crown.”
She closed her eyes. For long moments she had a pasty color. As the glow of health began to come back she opened her eyes again. “The way you said it, I believe you. But what a foul thing! Why did you do it?”
“That’s a very good question.”
She tensed suddenly and sucked her lips white, and her eyes went round. “Three men and a girl. Are you the ones …”
“We’ve had a lot of publicity lately, Helen.”
That’s when I expected her to fall apart, when the full realization of her situation became apparent to her.
To my surprise she forced a smile. “Then I’m in a hell of a spot. You people don’t have anything to lose, do you?”
“That’s the general idea.”
“So
it didn’t make any difference whether you picked me up or left me on the road—whether you killed Arnold or didn’t kill him.”
“No difference at all.”
“Is that what you’re after? That kind of freedom?”
“Lectures I do not need, Miss Wister.”
She frowned. “They know I’m missing?”
“I’d say eighty to a hundred million people know it.”
“And they know … who has me?”
“Yes.”
“What pure hell for my people. And Dal.” She stared at me with obvious conjecture. “All right. I want to get out of this. Is there any chance at all?”
“Hardly any.”
She closed her eyes again, but not for long. “So I’ll be killed. For kicks. Isn’t that the reason you people have?”
“We’re expressing aggression and hostility, miss.”
“What if it were up to you? You alone? It wouldn’t happen then, would it?”
“You’re judging a book by the cover.”
“I’m asking you. Do you have any desire to help me? If you don’t, I’ll have to take any chance I can. It would be the same with me as it is with you—nothing to lose.”
No tears, no begging, no hysterics. Yet a complete awareness of mortal danger. This was a woman. A woman in the same sense that the Spanish call a man muy hombre. A bright unquenchable spirit, the kind that won’t break. Gallantry is a fitting word. You can’t find many of those. I wondered if that architect knew what a wondrous thing he almost acquired.
I found another balk line across my soul, and knew I would help. I was becoming a veritable tower of virtue.
“Maybe I can help. Maybe. But you have to be a hell of an actress.”
“I guess you can say I’ve got a hell of a motivation.”
“We’ll be leaving at dusk. You’ve got to be barely able to move. You’ve got to be semi-conscious. The head injury is getting worse. You’re damn near in a coma, and going deeper all the time. You cannot let yourself respond to anything. Can you do that?”
“Yes, I can do that.”
“When the time is right, I’ll give you a signal of some kind, and then you have to start to die. We’ll be rolling along in the car. I don’t know how the hell to tell you to do it, but make it convincing. Then it’ll be my problem to get you out of the car without injury. It’s the only chance you have.”
She thought it over. “Suppose, because of the way I act, they get careless and give me a good chance to make a run for it. Without high heels, I can run like the wind.”
“It could be okay for you, but bad for them and bad for me. I’ll watch so you don’t get a chance to do it that way. It has to be my way.”
“What if I started screaming this minute?”
“I’d knock you unconscious with my fist. And if you think you’ve picked a good time to start screaming when we’re in the car, the girl with us will have a knife into your heart at the first bleat.”
“What are they like?” she asked me.
“You’ll see.”
“How did … someone like you get into such trouble?”
I smiled at her. “When I was a young girl I got raped by my uncle and ran away from home and I’ve been in this place ever since. You wanna buy me another drink before we go upstairs, Mr. Barlow?”
“You aren’t what you look like, are you?”
“Not lately.”
“But you were, once upon a time.”
“I was?”
“Now it’s the eyes, I think. That’s the wrong part. They don’t fit the rest. It’s your eyes that give me … a strange feeling.”
“And your teeth are so big, Grandma.”
“Please, please help me,” she said.
“I told you I’m going to.”
“It would be such a crummy stupid way to die.”
I heard somebody stirring around at dusk. Then I heard Nan’s voice. Somebody rapped on the door. I unlocked the door and opened it, after signaling Helen to lie back. Sandy looked in and said, “Kiss her awake, sweet prince.”
“She doesn’t seem to want to wake up.”
“Get her up, man!” I looked at him in astonishment. He had snapped the order, but with an obvious uncertainty. He was a little man, posturing, posing, trying to regain lost authority. Last night he had been relieved of command. No matter how hard he strained, he couldn’t get it back. And I suspected that the same thing had happened in all the other groups he had joined during his lifetime. With all his brisk energies Sandy would run things for a little while. Until finally he was pushed and he backed down. And then he would become the group clown. Good old Sandy. He’s a gasser.
I shrugged and went over and shook Helen. She simulated a return of semi-consciousness. I got her up into a sitting position and slipped her shoes onto her slack feet. She mumbled incoherencies. I pulled her up onto her feet and, half supporting her, walked her out into the sitting room.
“Bad shape?” Sandy asked.
“She doesn’t seem any better to me.”
Nan took her and guided her into the bathroom. As they passed Shack he reached out and gave Helen a massive, full-handed pinch on the buttock and winked at me with relaxed, expansive good cheer. “You make it good, doc?” he asked me. He had never been as friendly.
Nan, supporting Helen, looked back over her shoulder at him and pulled her lip up away from her teeth. “Good like you made it, you ox bastard?”
But there was no real rancor in her voice, and Sandy should have sensed that. He said, “I’ll keep the monster tied up so he can’t get to you again, darlin’ Nano.”
“Go chew a pill, you sick spook!” she snapped.
Shack gave a roar of laughter and clapped Sandy on the back. Sandy’s glasses jumped off his nose and swung by one earpiece.
“She found herself a man,” Shack said proudly. “She made a switch. You and Stassen split the blonde, Sandy.”
“Don’t bang my back, you goddam oaf!” Sandy yelled.
Shack banged him again and laughed. Sandy went over and sat down, brooding.
When Nan came out with Helen, the blond girl’s eyes were almost closed, and her head lolled loosely. She was doing well, but she was almost overdoing it. We put the meager luggage in the trunk and got into the car, Nan in front between Sandy and Shack, with Sandy at the wheel.
Within a half hour the big jolt of dexedrine and the other wild range of happy pills had built Sandy back up to his usual level of joyous optimism. He wanted a new car, and he wanted to prove a theory of his. So we cruised a big residential area of Pittsburgh which seemed like damn foolishness to me. When he found what he wanted, he parked a block beyond and went back alone. He said he didn’t need help. Within a shockingly short time he was back with a new Mercury. He said with roosterish pride that he had proved his theory that the last one to get to a private party doesn’t want to block the cars in the drive, so he leaves his keys in the ignition like a good fellow. Hurray for the good fellow.
We brought both cars along. Sandy had another sparkling idea. We found a big auto dump, ran the Buick far back into the clatter, stripped off the plates and threw them into the night.
“Let them figure that the hell out. It’s like confusion, man,” he said. “How’s baby doing, Kirboo?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not so good.”
We had another hot, fast car. We moved east, digging deeper into the night, never missing the little roads that Sandy had looked up and remembered. He had a complete map inside his head, and we were a little light moving along it.
I had to have a thoroughly empty road. If we were rushed by an oncoming car, it could go sour. And finally we were on a road that suited me. I took her hand and squeezed it hard. She squeezed back. And suddenly she began to breathe in a deep, rasping way, articulating each exhalation.
“What the hell?” Nan said, looking around.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she could be dying.”
The great raw bre
athing went on, very audible over the sound of the motor and the tires and the night wind. It stopped abruptly.
“Is she dead?” Sandy asked.
Before I could answer, the breathing began again, slowly at first and then picking up the previous tempo.
“The next time,” I said angrily, nervously, “it may stop for good, and the last thing I want back here with me is a dead blonde. Let’s leave her the hell off, Sandy. This looks like a good place.”
He slowed the car, then suddenly swung off into a wide and level dirt road. He deftly worked it around until we were heading out, and turned off the lights and the motor. The breathing seemed three times as loud.
“Jesus, that’s a terrible noise,” Shack said. I got out quickly and went around the car and opened the door on her side and got her out. She was completely limp. I got her under the armpits and dragged her. Her shoes came off. I could see them, and the tracks her heels made by the light of a high half moon.
Sandy was beside me. “Where you taking her?”
“Off in the bushes.”
We were talking in whispers. I heard Nan say, back in the car, “Hones’ ta God, Shack, with you it’s a disease.”
And that cut the problem way down. I had been most nervous about Nan and her little knife, and her high delight in using the little knife.
I heard the sound of a brook as I pulled her into the bushes. And suddenly the ground dropped away and the girl and I went crashing and rolling down a short, steep bank into an icy stream. I cursed and hugged my elbow and got up onto my knees, in about five inches of water.
I suddenly realized that the harsh fake breathing had stopped. I got hold of the girl and wrestled her clumsily over to the muddy bank. There was an entirely new quality to her inertness, and I realized that this time it was genuine. She had gone headlong onto the rocks.
“You okay?” Sandy called in a hushed voice. He came cautiously down through the brush.
“Got wet and hit my elbow. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold it,” he said. He bent over the girl and put his ear on her back. “Heart’s still thumping, man.”
“So what?”
He found a rock the size of a softball and forced it into my hand. “Finish it up, man. Take it all the way.”
The End of the Night Page 23
