Alice

by Howard Fast

  The brass knuckles smashed his mouth; they chopped at an ear, turning it into a shapeless mass; they landed again on the exposed bone; but Angie was losing the whiplash speed of his reflex. He was moving too much, too fast, straining his body to the utmost of speed and motion—and finally he miscalculated.

  He was not quick enough, not quick enough by the fraction of a second that would have avoided Shlakmann’s right fist entirely. The blow glanced, but such was the force of it that it lifted Angie from his feet and sent him head over heels across the lounge. Shlakmann flung the chaise aside and lunged after Angie, who got to his feet and avoided Shlakmann’s charge. Angie had enough. He tried to get to the rail, but Shlakmann caught his shoulder and flung him back onto the deck. As Angie staggered up again, Shlakmann curled his two enormous hands around Angie’s neck and lifted him from the deck.

  “Now, you son-of-a-bitch!” Shlakmann grunted, his mouth so full of blood he could hardly get the words out. He swung Angie like a pendulum. Angie struck at his face with the knuckles, clawed at him with the opener, and Shlakmann’s elbows came up, his hands tensing. There was a snap as he broke Angie’s neck, and dangling there, the knuckles and the opener fell from Angie’s hands to the deck. Shlakmann let go of him, dropping him like a sack.

  I don’t know how long that fight took. Afterwards, Alice was of the opinion that it had happened quite quickly; to me, it appeared to stretch on for an agonizing and endless period. It held me in a spell of terror and anticipation, for from the very beginning, I knew what my own role in the outcome would be. I didn’t have to think about it or debate it with myself. I knew. I suppose you know when death comes, and I suppose there are few other things that are known so truly—beyond question or doubt.

  I turned back to the cabin room twice during the fight. The first time, Lenny was watching it. She stood a little behind me, staring through the door, her eyes fixed on the struggle, her face set and expressionless. Beyond her, Polly curled on the couch, hands over her face, whimpering the way a kitten whimpers. The second time I turned back, Lenny sat on the couch, Polly’s head buried in her lap, no longer looking at the door, but staring straight ahead of her at the opposite wall of the cabin.

  Alice watched. Trapped at the head of the ladder, unable to tear herself away and retreat back into the boat, unable to come on deck where the two men were whirling and clawing at each other and slipping on Shlakmann’s blood, she remained there and watched. There are some things that should not be seen, and this fight and what followed was one of those things, yet Alice remained.

  It caused me to think about the woman I had married. Perhaps a few minutes of time—time locked in the death struggle of two frightening and psychopathic hoodlums—is not an appropriate moment to review one’s life in terms of a woman; but then it seemed to me to be all the time I would ever have, and that made it appropriate enough. The fact was that I knew nothing of women, understood nothing about them, and was, in a sense, going away empty-handed. I think that took my mind off the full implications of the immediate future. I thought about Alice, and in all truth, I also thought about the other woman, who sat with my child’s head buried in her lap. I thought quickly, but not very clearly.

  I could not remember why I had married Alice. It appeared, via a series of recollections strung together like beads on a string, that we had both been very lonely and that we had a desperate need for each other. I had to ask myself whether it was love? It wasn’t the romantic kind of love that is specified as the only path to happiness. In fact, it wasn’t quite happiness, and only now and then actually approaching happiness. There were gaps in the string of beads I made out of my recollections; there were spaces where Alice simply did not exist, and this was not before I had married her but after our wedding; and there were a great many spaces where she was a symbol, a cutout of paper, a silhouette that had woman spelled out on its tag.

  That’s all. I had never learned her. The least of my subjects in college, the ones I had done most poorly in, were better learned than this woman I had been married to for eight years. I had not even properly asked who she was.

  As bits of her past continued to emerge after we were married, I was more impatient than interested. I had never taken the time or had the inclination to ask her properly what she dreamed about; it had been enough to involve her in my own dreams and berate her for their real life frustration. Whatever went wrong, she paid for it, by tolerating my whining, by holding up my head, by being a mother instead of a wife, by building up my ego, by gently and very skillfully doctoring my mind, so that I could work another day, another week, another month—and so, year by year, she had held the fabric of myself together.

  But I could not recollect the reverse. I could say nothing about her dreams. Had I ever asked her what she desired? I didn’t have to, I was decent and kind to her, and full of contempt toward men who misused their wives and cheated on them and treated them like servants. I never treated Alice like a servant, only like a crutch, a cane, a sling, and a weeping post.

  What had she been married to? She must have known. She must have looked at me, and if she had, what was there was inescapable. So what did she see when she looked at me? What did Lenny see? Whatever Lenny was, she was not totally stupid. You don’t approach a strong man with the proposition that he abandon his wife and child and go on a honeymoon with a good-looking prostitute—not unless you are out of your mind, and Lenny was not out of her mind. You don’t approach a good, a decent, an upright man with such a proposition. Whatever else Lenny’s life had failed to give her, it had at least granted her an instinct for corruption, a recognition of the smell of rot and disintegration. She had watched me during the luncheon in the Consulate, and she had taken my measure. Who was I to claim that she had taken it poorly or falsely?

  So they knew me, these two women—Alice perhaps better than the other, for Alice had stayed for a longer time and had watched more resignedly.

  Shlakmann faced the cabin door. He was something to see, all right, this Hans Shlakmann, whose father had kept a concentration camp. He was the superman. He translated life into the strength of his two hamlike paws. His lipless, lizardlike mouth, stuffed with blood and broken teeth, thundered the diluted doctrine of a master race. He had lived to prove himself. His shirt and jacket hung in rags and strips from his belt. His trousers were soaked with blood, and blood welled from the cuts and slashes that covered his trunk. His face was only the semblance of a face, the mouth and nose smashed, the left cheek open to the bone and bleeding profusely, the right cheek covered with welts and bruises.

  He swayed as he stood there, but he was not done. He was more dangerous than anything I had ever faced, more frightening. About fighting, I have no illusions, and it is something I did poorly if at all. I had a few fights in my childhood, one in my teen years, and none as an adult. In that, I am no different from my kind all over America, a part of the perplexing puzzle of a people whose chief form of entertainment is to watch, on one silver screen or another, men battering themselves into insensibility—yet whose distaste for physical combat is perhaps unmatched anywhere in the world. Perhaps we fear our own best qualities most, and it hurts to know how gentle we are. Some of us make a cover, but I never had, and I admit frankly that for a man to drive the clenched and delicate bones of his hand against the delicate, easily injured organs of another human being is unworthy at best and bestial at worst.

  So I was afraid, sick, terror-stricken, and self-doomed, yet I faced Shlakmann.

  “Camber!” he roared. “Camber, you filthy, friggin’ son-of-a-bitch—where are you?”

  I stepped through the door of the cabin. Beyond Shlakmann, Alice clung to the rail in the darkness, but not total darkness, and there was moonlight enough to sketch her round face and light hair, but not what the face said. She might have said, “You’re alone now, Johnny, God help you. But you’ve had it coming.”

  I had it coming. The fear began to leave me.

  “Look at me, Camber,” h
e grinned. “Look at me, you friggin’ bastard! I earned that key. Give it here.”

  I prayed to God for only one thing, that my voice would be clear and unshaken as I said, “There’s no key, Shlakmann.”

  “You lousy bastard! Give me that key!”

  “Shlakmann,” I shouted, “there is no key! Not here! Not anywhere! There—is—no—key!”

  “You said it was on the kid!”

  “I lied! I lied, Shlakmann!”

  “Lousy bastard! Get out of my way, Camber! I go in there and rip that kid apart! I take her apart bone by bone and find that key!”

  “No!”

  “Get out of my way, Camber!”

  I flung myself at him, and he brushed me aside with one bloody hand. As he stooped to enter the cabin door, I found my footing, pivoted, and leaped onto his back. I locked my arms around his broken face and managed to find leverage for one foot against the cabin bulkhead. I kicked out. Shlakmann fought to maintain his balance with me clinging to his back; then he slipped in his own blood, lost his footing and fell back onto the deck, myself still clinging to him. I felt an eye under one finger, and gouged with all my strength. I no longer existed by intellect, reason, fear, or caution. I knew only one emotion—rage. I was going to die, but I would take killing.

  Shlakmann screamed as my finger dug into his eye socket. He flung a hand back to sweep me off, and I sank my teeth into two fingers, bit the way an animal bites, and felt the fingers separate, the blood welling into my throat and choking me.

  He flung me off then as a man would fling away an alley cat, and I went skidding on my face through the blood on the deck, to fetch up against the overturned chaise. One outstretched hand touched something hard and cold. It was Angie’s brass knuckles, and without thought or decision, I slipped my fingers through them.

  I came up on my hands and knees, coughing out Shlakmann’s blood. Shlakmann was standing in front of the cabin door, his hands pressed over the eye I had destroyed. Again and again, he screamed in pain—and then, seeing me, he hurled himself upon me.

  I knew that to get up to his height was to die, that my only hope was to knock him off his feet again, and braced by the chaise, I flung myself, head and shoulders, against his feet. He fell over me, and sprawled into a wedge created by the rail and the overturned chaise. For a part of a second, he struggled helplessly to free himself—even his giant strength feeling the toll that had been exacted by pain and the loss of blood. It was that fraction of a second that saved me. I was able to fling myself on him again, hook my left arm under his chin, and begin pounding his skull with the brass knuckles on my right hand.

  He heaved himself up to his feet, apparently heedless of the blows I rained on his skull, reached back, and clawed me off. I fell heavily, striking my head on the deck, and lay there a moment, stunned—and then Shlakmann bent over me, grasped my neck between his hands, and lifted me up off the deck.

  For an instant I hung there in Shlakmann’s grip, my breath cut off, plunging toward a black and bottomless pit, the shapeless, bloody thing that had been his face, close to mine and staring at me—and then he let go of me and I fell to the deck.

  Alice told me afterward that, in that moment, she had been screaming, but I had not heard her. I had no memory of hearing anything, or seeing anything but Shlakmann’s face so close to mine. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the deck and staring up at Shlakmann, who was swaying back and forth—until he appeared to crumple, as if the bones in his knees had become jelly. On his hands and knees, a few feet from me, he managed to say:

  “Lousy bastard—give me the key.”

  Or at least I think that was what he attempted to say, and it was the last thing he ever did say. He stiffened, attempted to rise, and then sprawled full length on his face.

  I crawled to him and tried to turn him over, but that was beyond my strength. I took his wrist and felt for the pulse, but could find none. His blood had stopped flowing, and he was dead.

  I still have nightmares about Shlakmann, and I suppose that I will continue to have nightmares about him until the day I die. In some of these dreams, I must fight him again, and there is never an outcome to the fight.

  That’s because I know that I didn’t stop Shlakmann; I didn’t defeat him and I didn’t kill him. As with our other actions that day, I simply postponed the inevitable, but this time we were lucky. It was Angie who had killed Shlakmann. Shlakmann bled to death.

  12: The Meadows

  I pulled myself erect and stood over Shlakmann. Alice came out of the cabin then. I had not seen her go in there or come on deck at all, but now she came out of the cabin with Polly in her arms, the child’s face buried in Alice’s breast. Lenny came out after her, and stepped to one side, standing back against the bulkhead, looking from me to the two bodies on the deck—and then back to me again.

  “They’re dead—both of them,” I said tiredly.

  Alice was watching me.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  I was all right, as far as physical things went, badly bruised, with an arm that would hurt like the very devil the following day, but nothing worse than that. So in some ways I was all right and in other ways not quite all right.

  I had not seen Alice come on deck. Could she have helped me? I had fought a man who could have killed me with a blow of his hand, and it was a thing of chance, time, and flowing blood that I was alive at all. I had dangled by my neck between the two hands of this man, and I had taken a deep, long look into the pit of finality. Was that when Alice had chosen to slip past me? The choice then was hers—her husband or her child, and it’s not a pleasant choice for anyone to have to make.

  Could she have helped me? Could she have struck Shlakmann? A blow over his head might have made the difference between my own life and my death. Or is a blow impossible when you are not trained to think in terms of blows or the violence of death? Lenny, too, could have struck a blow. She had watched from the cabin doorway, as I learned later, but she had, only watched. She had not moved. My life wasn’t hers to preserve either.

  So which bothered me more? That was something I would have to decide in the future—not now, but in the future, when my neck stopped aching and my body stopped trembling from the violence it had done and had done to it.

  My wife was there, with my child alive and in her arms, and all I had to do was ask her. All I had to do was say to her, “Alice, when you could have struck a blow for my life, why did you go past me to Polly?”

  Would she have said that Polly needed her more than anyone in the world needed her? I don’t know and I never will know, because that is one question I will never be able to bring myself to ask. I married a remarkable woman, but I think I discovered it too late.

  Lenny stood against the bulkhead, the moonlight upon her. She was composed and indifferent, not as if she stood in the abattoir the little deck had become, but as if she were waiting for a date on some wind-swept and lonesome street corner. She stood there, a big black purse on her arm, gray skirt, white blouse, jacket open, black alligator shoes, high heels, a thin diamond bracelet on her wrist, diamond pin on her lapel.

  “A girl’s best friend is diamonds and alligator shoes,” I found myself thinking—is or are? It made no sense grammatically or in any other way, no more sense than her face, which was the face of an angel, or her wide, dark eyes, so pure and innocent of guile or wrong.

  “Johnny, let’s get out of here,” Alice said.

  I looked at her, and then I looked at Lenny.

  “What did happen to the key?” Lenny asked quietly, sadly.

  “Now!” Alice cried.

  I was still breathless, and I had to breathe deeply when I spoke. “The key is gone,” I said.

  “Gone?”

  “Lost. Gone. I don’t have it.” I nodded at the two bodies. “They don’t have it.”

  “No key,” Lenny said strangely. “Both of them dead, and you never had a key at all—”

  “Johnny, haven’t we had enou
gh of it?”

  I took a step toward Alice. My clothes were sticky with blood. They came away from my legs as if they were stuck with glue when I took that step. I touched my hair. It was full of Shlakmann’s blood, and my hands were covered with his blood. I tried to wipe my hands on my trousers. He was a big man. He had a lot of blood.

  “Let me go with you,” Lenny said. She didn’t ask or beg. She merely stated the request as a fact.

  “No,” Alice said flatly.

  “You want me to stay here,” Lenny said tonelessly. She nodded at the bodies. “It’s not just staying with that. I’m not afraid to stay with that.”

  “I don’t imagine you are,” Alice said, her voice as flat as Lenny’s, as distant as Lenny’s. She held Polly tightly, and Polly kept her face in Alice’s blouse.

  “But Montez is coming back. He could be here any minute.”

  “He’s your husband,” Alice said.

  “You don’t know what he is, Mrs. Camber.”

  “Perhaps I do. Perhaps I don’t. But I know what you are.”

  “I wonder,” Lenny said thoughtfully. “You would have to be very clever, Mrs. Camber, because I don’t know what I am. So help me God, I don’t.”

  “Then isn’t it time you learned, Mrs. Montez?” Alice said evenly.

  “I don’t want to be here when Montez comes back, Mrs. Camber. I’m afraid of him. When he learns about the key and your taking the child back, he will be wild. He could kill me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He’s not like any man you know, Mrs. Camber. Where a woman is concerned, he’s not a man at all. He could kill me—if it made him feel better to do so. Now that the key is gone, there isn’t much more that could make him feel better.”