Suspects

by David Thomson

  “I hadn’t seen him for … five years. Haven’t seen him since.”

  “Why not?”

  “Family, you know.”

  “Same old thing.”

  “He was supposed to meet me, or we were going to meet. After the game. That was the plan. But I expect the Kennedy stuff … changed his mind.”

  “You call him?”

  “Don’t think so. He just didn’t turn up.”

  “You waited?”

  “Right.”

  “He lived in Baltimore?”

  “No. This was at a hotel. He’s from the Midwest.”

  “He never showed?”

  “Suppose not.”

  “Did you ask at the hotel?”

  “Can’t recall.”

  “You should.”

  “You know … I was scared.”

  “Maybe he was there.”

  “Maybe.”

  They heard the cicadas, giving the night a serrated edge.

  “You crying?”

  “No sir!”

  “You are.”

  They made love, touching each other as lightly as possible, for it seemed prudent not to make noise. She had only once before, at college, had to let her orgasm out in silent cries. She felt that she was dumb, or deaf. But she could hear the water lapping against the dock. Perhaps it was Tom paddling out into the stream. The crickets had stopped to listen.

  Later, she woke suddenly, disturbed by his alarm. She heard the last of a cry from another room; in the dream, it had been the vagrant sound of her pleasure, looking for a home. She followed Harry into Delly’s room and watched him talk to her. He was tender with her. That gruff military air fell away; he seemed relaxed, as if he should have had a daughter. Then Paula heard him tell Delly that he had been a football player, and she knew she was going to be sick.

  “You’re a football player,” she accused in horror.

  “Oh, once upon a time,” he grinned.

  “What happened to your father?”

  “He’s alive still.”

  “You know?”

  “He’s fit. Has a deafness in one ear.”

  Paula turned away to look at the rims of light on the tide. Tears would not come; she did not deserve them. It was like the moment when fear finds its need, knowing there is a prowler outside, longing for him to show himself and end the suspense.

  “Poor old man,” she said, and went back to her room, her mouth full of vomit. I hope she said that.

  I was her uncle; he was my son. But none of us saw each other anymore. She was the daughter of Laura and Mark McPherson, born in 1946 in New York. But her father left her and her mother when she was an infant over a drama she might have seen, but without understanding. Still, as she grew into childhood, she would talk to an imaginary friend.

  “Who’s that?” her mother asked.

  “My little sister,” said Paula.

  “Nonsense,” said Laura, laughing.

  “No, Mother,” said Paula with a firmness beyond her years.

  She went to school, in New York, and then in Los Angeles. She was used to hearing nothing from her father, and she endured her mother’s futile second marriage to Shelby. She disliked being an only child. She nagged her mother to tell her about her relations in Nebraska, but she did not dream of seeing them. They were not much more real for her than that imagined little sister.

  Paula went to Smith in 1964, and she rode across country on the train. It went through Omaha in the middle of the night and she kept herself awake to look at the lights of the city. But the train did not stop. She studied English at Smith, and she wrote a good deal. Her final project was a research paper on Sylvia Plath, a Smith girl herself once, and a recent suicide. Paula herself was depressed at Smith. She found a psychiatrist and she was given drugs. The man said there were so many dark corners in her personal history. She should find her father, he thought. Nothing found could be as bad as not knowing.

  She didn’t tell her mother. In 1969 she took the job at ICM that her mother had arranged for her, and she did well there. Her script reports became famous for their prescience. She was given clients of her own. She packaged two successful movies—Memory Street and Woken by Bleeding—and she was not yet thirty. She might have gone far. She went out twice with Warren Beatty.

  But she preferred Tom Iverson. He was a figure of imprecise power and wealth, on the fringes of the industry. He had been a stuntman and that loose coterie of individualists admired him. He had contacts high up in the Teamsters. He had been married before and he had been in jail once, for six months, for fraud. He was nearly twenty years older than Paula, but she planned to marry him and go to Florida, where he had a business.

  Laura scolded her irresponsibility. All the planning would be wasted. Tom Iverson was no good; trust her opinion, she had seen that type before.

  “My father?” said Paula.

  “If you like.”

  “Where is he? I want to meet him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know.”

  “I give you my word.”

  “I’ll look for him.”

  “You mustn’t.”

  “Why? Why?”

  There must have been a lifetime’s longing in that question, an awful vulnerability to the doubt. Laura made up her mind. It was the truth, she didn’t know where Paula’s father was, or whether he had changed his name. But her father had gone off with another child when he left.

  “My sister?”

  “Your half-sister,” said Laura. “So I think.”

  It went on all night, the daughter preying on the mother’s secrecy, the mother losing all the armor of her life. They both knew it was their last talk. A few months later, Laura killed herself. Paula had to take care of the funeral.

  She married Iverson, and she went to Florida. It was hateful, he was loathsome. But she preferred it to Los Angeles. She liked the water and the colors at either end of the day. The racket was miserable. Every month she meant to leave, but then Delly arrived and Paula looked at her as a waif she might help. Harry Moseby came next. She never knew why he attracted her, for she didn’t like him. It was something deeper and more helpless. She betrayed him and seduced him; she thought that might help remove the mystery. And then she found the reason for her feelings.

  Maybe a small madness overtook her. She was not pregnant. She imagined it, if you will, and took savage comfort in the cracked open womb in a Mexican stone goddess. She would have watched the airplane all the way into her head. How did we think we were safe from chance, when it was all that had brought us together once before?

  TRAVIS BICKLE

  Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, 1976,

  directed by Martin Scorsese

  I received it in June 1974, a postcard from New York City, a picture of Forty-second Street at night. The gaudy, not exactly registered colors show neon bubbles of pink and amber, the glaring marquees like flesh beginning to rot, and a sleek brimstone cab passing by. On the back, there was a stamp of the American flag, my name and address, and this poem, written in jagged black ink:

  here comes a little fellow riding his bi-sickle

  and all his inside thoughts are in an outsize pickle

  now, father of the family, please don’t be fickle

  or else I’ll come and tickle

  you—at least give a nickle

  to stout-hearted Travis Bickle

  The Bickle was written in red.

  It was the first we had heard from him since 1971 and the letter from the Marines announcing that, after forty-seven days’ captivity under the forces of North Vietnam, Pvt. Travis Bailey had escaped and rejoined his unit. I wondered why the Marines wrote—out of strict duty? to help the letter-writers who had so many notices of death to convey? or because the corps knew that so many of their men no longer wrote to their parents? Semper Fidelis.

  And I wondered how to read the verse. I realized I did not know my son’s mind well enough to judge whether this was af
fected childishness, hostility, irony, scorn, disturbance or his true voice. Did he need money? Was that the point of the “nickle”? And why would he think I might be fickle? Had his name really changed? What was his outsize pickle? The grim chant to the verse jangled in my head, and I always saw his wolfish white grin. It was only later that I understood the picture was part of the poem: the city and the cab, like Sodom and Gomorrah and their approaching thunderbolt.

  This was our second child, born on August 6, 1945, the day we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Yet he was a source of peace. I still remember the day in 1946 when he lay in his cot, twitching in a patch of sunlight, when I knew I could not leave him, and would stay with Mary Frances and Nebraska because of that. My decision was made above him, but he slept on, his small fists clenching and unclenching at his dreams. I wondered if my deliberation was just the drama of his sleep. I stayed. But in time the child left.

  Travis was nine when Harry went off to military school. It was a severe loss for him, for he revered his older brother—not Harry simply, but the force of example in a brother bigger and stronger. Harry guarded Travis in boys’ battles. He told him stories about armies and fighting. He showed him the difference between the ways Joe Louis and Marciano fought. It made Travis grow up on the alert for older models and advisors. Perhaps it persuaded him about God and all his duties.

  As Travis developed, anyone could see the gulf between his need for conviction and his fear of uncertainty. He wanted to be a hero, but he needed someone to design the role for him. He had tantrums when he failed his own hopes, inaccessible bouts of recrimination in which he abused himself. There were early signs of violence. Once, in an argument over nothing, he hit a boy two years older and broke his jaw. He implored other kids to be his friends, but he alarmed them with his ugly need. Girls laughed at him, and he laughed back stupidly. There were occasions when I found him in the yard or on a street corner, alone and still laughing, but deserted by the objects of his mirth.

  In 1961, when he was sixteen, he found God. The first discovery came at the church where we went at Christmas, and where Mary Frances sometimes spent hours at a time, sitting alone, muttering. But Travis gave up on the Church. He said it was hypocritical and out-of-date. There was a small temple in Wahoo—a cult, it would be called now. Its members lived in a commune. I picked up fragments of their doctrine. They believed in missionary work: Travis was sent all over the West, hitching and preaching. They insisted on peace, celibacy and poverty as the ideal states and Travis became a disciple of them all—learned but a crank, ragged, lonely and belligerent. He was arrested in a demonstration at Offutt Air Force Base in 1964, protesting some of the early troop movements to Vietnam.

  The worst thing was the convert he made of his mother, her forlorn attempts to show him her faith, and his rejection of her. The last thing he wanted was company in his faith. It had to be alien to us. But his mother’s woeful instability heard his passion and thought it could aid her. He laughed at her visions, beating her off. She looked at him as if he had struck her. I only have plain words to tell you what happened. But we lived in a madhouse, all of us unhealing wounds for each other.

  Then in 1968 he joined the Marines. For all I know, it was at the instruction of his temple, the action was so contradictory to what he stood for. He must have lied about Offutt to get in. He was sent to Vietnam a year later. I don’t know much about his time there: he is like the unknown soldier. But he patrolled in the mud and the jungle, and I imagine he shot some of the slim native people when he did not know whose side they were on. Perhaps he preached to his fellows; perhaps the bizarre faith failed him. He was captured. He must have been tortured and degraded. But he escaped.

  He left the Marines late in 1971 and then there was nothing until that card in 1974 from New York. I don’t know where he went or what he did. He may have rested, traveled or settled somewhere; he may have done all of those things. The temple denied knowledge of him. He became the creature of my imagining. But when I received the card, I knew he had altered in the empty years.

  He became a cab driver. The rest is nearly famous. As he went from Harlem to the Village, from Sutton Place to the piers, from Wall Street to the Bronx, he began to loathe the city. He was looking for a pretext, I think. He was in training again, buying guns, eating bread soaked in brandy, testing himself in the flame, writing a journal to himself, and becoming two men—the hard physique and the interior monologue.

  Then one day a child got in his taxi, a girl of twelve, only to be half-pulled, half-seduced away by a man. He could not forget her age, her high voice, and the debauched costume she wore. As he drove, he searched for her. We may have hunted for a lost female child, he and I, at much the same time.

  Her name was Iris. He did find her again: it is the role of whores to be predictable, to use the same streets. She thought he wanted to buy her, like anyone else. He could not let her see that he needed to save her. But the more he talked to her the clearer he made it that she was in great danger. At about the same time, she decided that he was right, but mad. Simultaneously, she recognized her own predicament and the absurdity of his as a rescuer.

  He prepared himself for the assault. He killed her pimp, the man who rented the room to her, and two of her clients. Four deaths, and he was shot himself, sitting in blood when the police arrived. The pictures were everywhere, with diagrams of the house and one paragraph saying that Travis Bickle, once a Marine, came from the Midwest and had been a religious fanatic.

  I never understood why he was not confined for the rest of his life. But he went free. He had slaughtered known criminals, all of them armed; he had acted in self-defense, coming to the aid of a minor—no matter that he was himself heavy with guns and knives. He was a kind of hero, as frightening as those he had killed. They let him go. It was as if he had passed into a movie in which fact yielded to his fantasies, and the law became a pillow to his unhindered, unrestrained desire.

  FREDERICK MANION

  Ben Gazzara in Anatomy of a Murder, 1959,

  directed by Otto Preminger

  In the beginning, I had supposed I would somehow find myself an Al, one of those reliable, businesslike, career killers, men who keep to themselves, looking like hundreds of others, men who render an uncommon service at competitive rates and then return to the crowd. Do you remember Al? He shot Pete Lunn in Brentwood, New Jersey, in 1946; and when he was shot himself he happened to be a man who had gone out that day without any identification. Was he the last of a dying breed? The last freelance killer? Was his profession co-opted by corporations and syndicates, taking all of the Als out of the way of private contracts? There must be many who, some time or other, want a sure killer all to themselves. An Al could be addictive, a permanent hiring. And Als might be a little less grim with health insurance and a company pension at sixty.

  So I made up my mind to set out without an Al. I would wait for something to turn up. It was a strange, cheerful mood in which I believe I must always have been prepared to do it myself. But I knew I was too emotionally involved. I would bungle it, shoot an innocent bystander—if any such remained.

  I set out from Los Angeles the day after the funeral, after a breakfast at the Chateau Marmont (another youthful ambition realized), where I read the trade-press paragraph on the funeral, with Paula’s macabre tribute. I saw no reason to rush; I am never that confident driving a rented car, so I went patiently, giving myself the time to look at country that had been only names on the map. I had never been to Las Vegas, and I thought, Why not? I stopped there the first night, but I got in before dark, coming across the desert, seeing the fever of neon in the lapsing rouge daylight. It looked like a town painted in blood. I was intimidated by the big hotels, and I didn’t have money to burn. How long might this business take? So I found myself a motel on Paradise Road called the Showdown, but I did visit the Sands that night just to look at the gambling.

  There’s no indication of night or day in those places, just the tables, w
ith the croupiers in black and white, and people sitting or waiting for seats and the air of digestion that you get in a crowded cafeteria. I made one bet at blackjack, and I won. I felt perplexed at the omen and got up and went away, stepping carefully between the cowboys and the old ladies, suspicious of pickpockets.

  The next day, I kept going northeast on 15, clipping the corner of Arizona. Around midmorning I got lost, and found myself in a haunted little town surrounded by dirt roads, but with made-up roads at its center: Colorado City, a place of many children in long dresses and shirts buttoned at the wrists, all with milky faces and a starched look in their eyes. It seemed to be the isolated home of a cult. I stopped at a store to ask the way and there were kids in silent clusters watching me. I drove on quickly, my back pounding from their eyes, afraid of breaking down. There are pockets in this country, laws to themselves, where anything could happen.

  So on and on: to Grand Junction, Colorado, that night and a Best Western. The names change but the motels are alike; they have the same shape to their rooms, the same bed, the same pictures on the walls and TV sets showing the same old movies—Night and the City I saw there, falling asleep in The Dark Corner.

  Going on 70 and 76 I was in Nebraska the next day. It was late October, and the sky grew darker. There was snow in the mountains and the familiar hiss of cold stretching through the state. I didn’t go home, though I could have made it. I went close, but somehow I felt safer not being known: Beaver Crossing, the Rendezvous motel, They Live by Night and Farewell, My Lovely on TV, stuff I can watch till the end of time.

  In the morning, I drove through Lincoln and Omaha on 80, on to Des Moines, and then on 35 around Minneapolis, getting into Duluth after dark, stopping at the Detour motel. It was too cold for my constitutional, and He Walked by Night—which you don’t see that much—was preempted for football, Green Bay versus Detroit. A dull game, the Lions have lost a lot.

  And so it was the day after, the first Tuesday in November, that I got to Thunder Bay itself. The water of Lake Superior was the color of an old iron frying pan, and the sky was that scraped white when the wind has blown all day. You can feel the Arctic there. I could only think of bars and hotels as places to ask. It was a day and a night before I went in to an older inn, catering to sportsmen, and the man behind the bar gave me a beer—I was woozy from all of them—looked at the picture, turned away to scoop the head off my glass, looked again and said, “Older than that? Gray hair?”