Ingram’s hands were still; he was watching the pain and confusion in Earl’s face, wondering about the man. He said at last, “How did you get the Silver Star?”
Earl looked at him curiously. “How did you know about that?”
Ingram dug around in his overcoat pocket and pulled out Lorraine’s car keys. The Silver Star gleamed brightly on his brown palm. “I figured it was yours,” he said.
“You figured right,” Earl said, nodding a little. He was silent for a few seconds, a humorless smile twisting his lips. Then he shrugged and fumbled for the pack of cigarettes.
“We got caught in the basement of a German farmhouse that night,” he said. “Six of us. We thought it was a good place to hole up, but the Germans came back with tanks and cut us off. They moved their company headquarters right into the house. We could hear ’em talking up above us, getting food ready, posting details. I didn’t know what to do. We talked it over and decided to wait until dawn, then slip out a basement window and crawl through the Krauts to our own lines.” Earl lighted his cigarette, remembering the smell of root vegetables in the basement, the slick muddy floor and the growling sound of German voices above their heads. He laughed. “We made it too, out the window, through the yard and into an orchard. Everybody was on his own, taking off at half-minute intervals. It was just like a field problem. But only five of us made it—one guy was missing, a big clodhopper replacement who’d just been with the outfit a week. I didn’t even know his goddam name. Monroe or Morgan or something like that. He was always picking his nose and stamping his feet.” Earl shook his head. “You know the kind of guy? Useless. But I had to go back and get him. I found him about ten feet from the house, huddled on the ground, too scared to move. Frozen there like a big pile of crap. I practically had to drag him back. But this time our luck was no good. A guard heard us and started shouting. They all began yelling then and flashing torches around—you know Krauts blow sky-high if you take ’em by surprise. Greatest soldiers in the world when everything’s going according to the book. But when things snafu they act like a bunch of crazy women. Anyway, I got this Morgan into the orchard and started shooting back. The trees were pretty good cover. Morgan or Monroe or whatever in hell his name was made a run for it and got hit. I kept moving from tree to tree and firing and the Krauts never charged. They must have figured we were a recon section. I picked up Morgan—that was his name, I guess—and dragged him back to our lines. And that was it.” Earl drew deeply on his cigarette, then threw it at the fireplace. “So they gave me the medal.” He stood up feeling bitter and ill at ease. “That and a dime buys a cup of coffee, I guess you know.”
Ingram smiled and studied the Silver Star. “I got a Good Conduct medal. That’s something, ain’t it?”
“The medals were mostly a lot of crap,” Earl said.
“I don’t think so.”
“To hell with it, anyway. You did what you were told, right? You said that yourself. You didn’t ask them to send you to England—I didn’t ask for Africa, France and Germany. They sent us, that’s all. You did your job, that’s all anybody can do. What’s there to worry about?” He squeezed Ingram’s shoulder as he limped past him. “Forget it, Sambo. You got as much right to be proud of yourself as a man with the Medal of Honor hanging around his neck.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.” He grinned with a kind of foolish pleasure; the touch of Earl’s hand on his shoulder had started him tingling all over. “Maybe you’re right at that.”
“Sure, I’m right.” Standing behind Ingram, Earl looked curiously at his hand, a frown darkening his eyes. Then he stared at Ingram, exasperated with himself. “How’re you coming with the radio?” he said. “You’re a communications man. How’re you doing?”
“It’s useless,” Ingram said, but he was still smiling. “It’s shot to pieces.”
“I could have told you that.”
Ingram sighed and turned around to look at Earl. “You know, I don’t understand you.”
“Well, so what? What difference does that make?”
“You might be the last man I see on this earth,” Ingram said. “That makes a difference. You’re like a magazine serial story I may not have a chance to finish.”
“So what don’t you understand?” Earl was limping back and forth in front of the fireplace, staring at Ingram with tense, irritable eyes. “Am I some kind of a freak? Do I have two heads or something?”
“Why didn’t you make something of yourself, that’s what I can’t figure out. You’ve a lot of good stuff in you. How come you never used it?”
“What do you know about it? You don’t know me at all, Sambo.”
“I’ve got eyes and ears.” Ingram smiled. “You’re not the smartest guy in the world, of course, but that’s not too important.”
“I get along. I always did okay.”
“You don’t have to pretend with me. You probably couldn’t fool me if you wanted to.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“We’ve been through something, that’s all. I got a chance to know you pretty well.”
“You don’t know a damned thing about me. Get that into your skull.” Earl’s voice rose angrily. “Stop worrying about me.”
“You know me, don’t you? Why can’t it work the other way round?”
“What the hell do I know about you?”
“You know you can trust me. How many people do you know that well? Enough to trust, I mean?”
“I didn’t have any choice,” Earl said, looking away from Ingram. “I had to trust you.”
“Sure. And it turned out okay. You know, it might not be a bad idea if there was a law to make people trust one another. Everybody would probably be surprised how well things turned out.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Okay, I’m crazy. But how come you never settled down to a good job? With your Army record and everything, you could have made something of yourself.”
“Christ, I don’t know,” Earl said impatiently. “Nobody knows things like that.” He limped back and forth in front of the fireplace, suddenly filled with a weary despair. “Nothing ever worked, that’s all. I kept striking out. That just happens. Look at any Skid Row. You’ll see people wandering around with eyes like balls of glass. What happened to them? You think they know?” Earl stopped and pounded his fist on the table. “Like hell they do. They’ll tell you about a mother or father, or a girl maybe, but they can’t tell you about themselves. They don’t know what happened, they just don’t know. That’s why stories and movies are always about heroes. The life of a bum doesn’t make any sense. It’s just—” He shook his head with futile anger. “It’s just a mess.”
“But you’re no broken-down derelict,” Ingram said. “You’re a big healthy man. You could have been a construction worker or truck driver or a lumberjack or something. Or maybe got in with a veterans’ organization—with your record they could have used you for a showpiece.”
“Ah, cut it out,” Earl said wearily. “I was no good, that’s all. And I knew it. That was the toughest thing. I knew it.”
“Lots of people think that about themselves. Go into a bar where they’re playing the blues and you’ll find plenty of them. That’s why the blues got sung in the first place. They aren’t for heroes and good guys. They’re for people in a mess.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Earl was trying anxiously to organize his feelings into words. He knew it was important to be honest now; this was a chance to drive the thing into the open. He had never made the effort before; some guilty fear had always restrained him. “Now listen! I knew I was no good,” he said, speaking slowly and quietly. “I don’t mean I was a drunk or a deadbeat or anything like that. What I did had nothing to do with it. What I did might be good, but I was no good.” Earl swore under his breath, infuriated by the futility of his words. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. Finding what he wanted to say was like picking up a pin with gloves on—a frus
trating, hopeless task. “You understand?” he said desperately. “The stuff I’m made of is no good. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m put together with bargain-basement junk. That’s the feeling I can never shake. Don’t you see what I mean?”
“It doesn’t make sense. Why should you think that?”
“You don’t understand. You’re not listening to me.” Earl sat on the edge of the sofa and stared anxiously at Ingram. “Take a car that’s put together with cheap, worn-out parts. And filled up with watered gas and dirty oil. What’s going to happen to it? It’s going to break down, fall to pieces. You can tinker with it, and keep it washed and polished, but it’s never going to be any good. That’s what I’m like. I always knew that about myself.” Earl was breathing slowly and heavily. “I knew it. Sometimes I’d look at my hands and think about it. I’d see the skin and the veins and the hair, and I’d realize that none of it was any good.” He stared at Ingram in a silence that was broken only by the feeble snores of the old man in the corner. The coldness and stench of the big bare room seemed to force them closer together, compressing them into a single unit of humanity. Earl’s tension and fear lessened; he felt at ease with Ingram suddenly, understanding him, and depending on him for understanding. They were both in the same mess, he realized. Not just in trouble… it was more than that. They were alive and they were alone, he thought, but something helped him to realize that these terms meant pretty much the same thing; one stemmed inevitably from the other. There was no terror in this knowledge; the real terror was not knowing that everybody faced the same problem. That everybody was alone. Not just you…
“You see, Sambo—” He hesitated. “You mind me calling you Sambo?”
“It’s as good a name as any.”
“Well—” Earl stared at his grimy hand, studying the dirt-rimmed nails, and the hair coiling strongly on the brown skin. “I always knew I was no good. Because I knew where I came from. I knew my old man.” There was pain in the admission, but no shame; it was just a hard, bitter fact.
“That’s a load to carry,” Ingram said. “But hell, you and your old man are two different people. He’s him. You’re you.”
“I know,” Earl said thoughtfully. “I just figured that out. And you told me I was dumb.”
“Not dumb,” Ingram said, shaking his head. “Just not smart. There’s a big difference. Let’s have a drink on it, okay?”
As he was looking for Earl’s glass Crazybone came in from the kitchen humming softly under her breath. “The fox hunters are coming,” she cried merrily. “I just saw one of their hounds in the meadow. Oh, there’s a fine sight.” She pirouetted slowly, patting the back of her head with both hands. “The gentlemen in their red coats, and the ladies so calm and fine leaping over the fences.” She laughed shrilly. “Sometimes the ladies fall on their fine round tails, too. Oh, dearie me, it’s a sight.”
The old man stirred under the blankets. “You’ve woke me,” he muttered petulantly.
“I better let Lorraine come down,” Ingram said. “We’ve been gabbing here more than an hour.”
Crazybone stared at the parts Ingram had removed from the radio. “Won’t do you no good to fix it,” she said, shaking her head firmly. “She’ll just break it again.”
“Who?” Ingram said.
“The woman. She’s bad-tempered and destructive, qualities you don’t find in true ladies. Ladies are sweet and gentle.”
“What’s she talking about?” Ingram said to Earl.
“She’s crazy. It was an accident. Lory stumbled against the table.”
“Ha, ha,” Crazybone laughed gaily. “That’s her story. But she picked it up and threw it down. And I know why.”
Ingram stared at the cracked plastic case of the radio. It was pretty banged-up for a fall from a table… The tiniest of doubts nagged at him. “Why did she break it?” he said slowly.
“She doesn’t like music,” Crazybone said promptly and cheerfully. “She isn’t gentle and sweet. What a curse for a good man!”
Ingram sighed and smiled sheepishly at Earl; the suspicion he had almost entertained made him warm with embarrassment. “Rumors every hour on the hour,” he said. “She’d go great in the Army.”
But Earl wasn’t looking at him; he was staring through the windows at the layers of white fog rolling over the wet fields. “You better go on upstairs,” he said slowly. “Keep an eye out for those fox hunters.”
“All right. Sure, Earl.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE DAY cleared slowly and by the middle of the afternoon a patch of thin sunlight brightened the faded carpet in the living room of Doctor Taylor’s home in Avondale.
Kelly stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, and the sheriff sat heavily on a straight-backed chair holding his wide-brimmed hat on his knee. They were alone but they had nothing to talk about, no speculations to exchange; the silence between them was a mark of their failure.
They had been working here on and off since dawn, questioning the doctor and his daughter, then returning to Crossroads to feed the information to the teams of agents and police working on the case. But so far they hadn’t got on a definite lead.
They had learned a number of significant things, however. They knew the condition of the white man, they knew the Negro was feverish and ill. And they knew they were holed up in an old house somewhere in the country. And that they had disposed of the station wagon and were using a sedan now.
From the other sources they knew that the sedan belonged to a woman named Lorraine Wilson, a friend of Earl Slater’s. Frank Novak had been picked up by police in Baltimore, and he had talked; he had given them Slater’s name and address, and that had led them to the drugstore where the girl worked in Philadelphia. The counterman remembered that a Negro had come to the store the night before and talked with her. She had left the store after him. Now her car was gone, and her apartment was empty. The inference was obvious; the Negro had brought her back to the hideout. Then he had driven to Avondale for the doctor. Quite a boy, Kelly thought with reluctant respect.
The doctor was co-operating with them, Kelly thought. Trying his best, anyway. He had used his pulse beat to time the trip, and in his judgment it had taken the Negro almost an hour to drive them to the old house. But he couldn’t recall the turns and backtrackings on the way. And his estimate of how long they had driven over concrete and dirt roads was no more than a thoughtful guess.
But with these facts and impressions a dozen police cars were probing the countryside southwest of Crossroads, in close co-operation with FBI agents in jeeps and commandeered delivery trucks. They had pinpointed the plane the doctor had heard; a commercial flight flying a southeasterly course toward New York. If the doctor’s memory was accurate he had been west of the federal highway when it passed over his head.
But they still couldn’t reach out and put their hands on the men. It was an exasperating and dangerous failure, Kelly knew. Slater and Ingram could probably make their move when it got darker, and that would mean trouble for anyone who got in their way.
Kelly glanced at his watch: two o’clock. If his assumption was right they didn’t have much time left. The doctor had gone upstairs a moment or so ago to wake his daughter. He had put her to bed with a sedative, after they had questioned her. Kelly wanted to talk to her again because he had suspected something that hadn’t occurred to the sheriff; the doctor and his daughter were unconsciously protecting the Negro. Without knowing it, they were in collusion to save him.
He strolled restlessly across the room to the fireplace. “It’s clearing up,” he said, looking at the sunlight on the carpet. “Be a nice day to go gunning.”
“There’s more rain coming,” the sheriff said. Then: “You like hunting?”
“I don’t have much opportunity anymore.” They had talked about the case so long it was a relief to talk about something else. “But I went after turkeys last year in Georgia. That’s pretty special. They run as fast as a horse, and c
an hear a twig break a thousand feet away. They settle into an oak or a pine twenty feet above your head looking as big as cargo planes. Then they disappear. Vanish. Their markings are green and gold and black, and they just fade out of sight before you can raise your gun.”
“Sounds interesting,” the sheriff said, taking out his pipe. There was both hope and skepticism in his tone, the reaction of a true hunter. “Our pheasants aren’t anything special, but some pretty good shots go season after season without getting their limit.”
“Your daughter told me about them. She’s quite a booster for the area.”
Kelly had stopped at the sheriff’s house early that morning, and Nancy had made a quick breakfast for him…
“I used to take her gunning when she was little,” the sheriff said slowly. “I didn’t know she was still interested. She was a nice shot.” He rubbed the bowl of his pipe slowly between his big hands. “I thought she’d put all that away with her jeans and boots. Girls get into ribbons and skirts and they’re not so keen about tramping through the fields with a gun anyhow.”
“That’s true, I guess.” Kelly was tactfully noncommittal; he had sensed the stiffness between the sheriff and his daughter, and he wasn’t planning to blunder into that personal area. This morning she had been at ease with him, attractive and confident in a white sweater and dark slacks, with her blond hair tied back in a pony tail. This was Saturday and she wasn’t going to the office. They had talked about hunting and fishing, and places they knew in New York, and several other matters, the kitchen warm against the cold morning, their cigarette smoke mingling pleasantly with the aroma of bacon and coffee. He had listened to her with a stranger’s capacity for direct, relevant compassion. She had wanted to talk, he realized. So he had listened…
The sheriff was still rubbing the bowl of the pipe between his hands. “Nancy and I are pretty close in some ways,” he said defensively. “But sometimes—” He looked steadily at Kelly, trusting him in this, but refusing to ask help of any man with averted eyes. “Sometimes I can’t understand her. Maybe I’m too standoffish.” The sheriff hesitated; in his code you didn’t go whining to strangers with your personal problems. He liked and trusted Kelly, but he was nonetheless a stranger. “I don’t know,” he said, lowering this standard with a sense of defeat. “I’d like to talk to her, to help her any way I can. But I just don’t know how.”
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