Man Drowning

by Henry Kuttner

  “Plenty of time.”

  “No, there isn’t. Nick.”

  “Yes?”

  “Will I wake up tomorrow?”

  “Yes. You’ll wake up all right.”

  She didn’t answer. The rhythm of her breathing changed. I sat there in the hot dark, sweating, the brandy making me feel dizzy and sick, and after a while I knew she was alseep.

  She was wearing pajamas. I carried her across the patio, into the house again, and to her bedroom, hoping to God I wouldn’t run into the Count. I dropped her on her bed and covered her up. I switched off her light and listened to her breathing.

  Finally I went over and found her pulse. It was slow but seemed steady enough.

  I went out of the bedroom, realizing now why Vincent Callahan had run out.

  I didn’t get very far. I’d taken only a couple of steps down the hall when I heard something that brought me up sharp, swinging me around toward De Anza’s bedroom.

  The Count was talking.

  I heard it faintly, through the closed door, but he was talking to somebody, all right. I froze. It was a few seconds before I got myself enough under control to move again, and then I wasn’t too completely under control. For when I stepped forward and tried to put my ear against the panel, I put it there a little too hard. It didn’t make much noise, and it didn’t hurt me, but the door started to swing open. The latch wasn’t caught, I suppose.

  I pulled back fast, out of sight in the hall. The Count’s voice was a little louder now, but not much, and it sounded funny. Irregular. Sometimes he’d just mumble, and sometimes he just breathed hard. And he was talking in Spanish.

  I realized then that I was in the darkness, there in the hall, and that moonlight was coming through the Count’s windows. So I moved a little to where I could see most of the bedroom. De Anza was alone. He was in bed and asleep, and he was talking to somebody, all right, but that somebody was dead.

  Because I heard him say, after a gabble of choking Spanish, “Presente, Silvestre!”

  Then he let out a long, groaning sigh and wrenched himself over, away from me. There was no sound after that.

  I made no sound, either, as I went back to my own little hell.

  Chapter 15

  Sometime in the early morning I heard a car start and I raised myself up to look at the alarm clock on the bureau. It was five-fifteen. The way the motor kept racing, coughing and dying, three times, told me who was in the Buick. It was a hell of a way to treat a cold engine on a cold morning. After a while she got it started and roared off. I went back to sleep.

  She got back at seven thirty-five, while I was dressing, and I heard her quick footsteps tap across the patio and then I heard a door slam. I took my time getting ready, paying a lot of attention to every detail. I shaved carefully, first with the grain, then against it. My hair looked stiff and dry and wouldn’t stay down, so I played with hair oil and water till it looked civilized. I polished my shoes, and finally I couldn’t delay any longer. Somebody was cooking bacon. The clear, bell noise of wood being chopped began. I took a deep breath and stepped out into the patio.

  It was a wonderful morning. The heat hadn’t started yet, and the air was tingling and sharp, but not too cold. To the west I could see the desert, stretching for miles until a purple-gray haze began and hid the mountains. There wasn’t a cloud.

  The sound of wood-chopping was just right, somehow.

  When I went into the kitchen, Benita and Rafael were getting breakfast. That is, Benita was; Rafael was sitting at the table restitching a fancy leather belt, hand-tooled, with a silver buckle. Benita looked over her shoulder at me. Rafael stretched his wide mouth as far as it would go and said hi.

  “Nita. Rafe. Nice morning.”

  “Pretty good,” Rafael said. “Thanks for the cigarettes, Nick.”

  “That’s okay. Nita, I hope the eggs didn’t get broken.”

  She held up two fingers at me.

  “So Mrs. De Anza had omelette for breakfast,” Rafael said. “We owe you some dough. Nita has house money. You tell her how much, she pay.”

  I got out my notebook and told her the amount. She reached under her dress, took out a little purse, and counted the money onto the table.

  Outside, the Countess yelled something. The chopping didn’t stop. Benita picked up a couple of eggs, broke them in the pan, and began scrambling them. Rafael groaned and pushed his needle slowly through the leather. Then, as the call came again, he got up, staring at the back of Benita’s head.

  She said something fast in Spanish.

  “Eh,” Rafael said, and dropped the belt. He shook his hand, clucked his tongue, and began sucking his thumb. “I stuck myself. Ow. Damn. Nick, you wanta take Mrs. De Anza some coffee?”

  “Is that what she wants?”

  “Yeah, she…you take a cup to her, eh? I gotta put iodine on my thumb.” He went out fast.

  Benita was keeping herself busy with the eggs. She used her free hand to set a cup on a saucer and pour coffee in it. Then she held it out to me.

  “Okay,” I said, after a minute. There wasn’t any use delaying. I took the coffee and went to find the Countess. That wasn’t hard. The bell noises led me around in back of the house, where I found her, swinging a long-handled axe as though she was being paid by the cord. There was a lot of wood piled up, and she was working on the fairly big pieces, splitting them when she could manage it, but when she couldn’t not bothering to use wedges, just going on to another one. She wasn’t particular, though. Sometimes she chopped smaller pieces in half. She was wearing a dress I hadn’t seen before, and it looked too good to use for this kind of work. On the other hand, I guessed she simply hadn’t bothered to change it. It would have taken at least a minute.

  Right then I knew it wasn’t over; she wasn’t better, she was worse. A lot worse. She looked terrible. Her face was shining with sweat, and her eyes were sunk into her face. There were lavender blotches under them. She’d slept, all right—she couldn’t have helped it, after three Nembutal caps—but the sedative hadn’t kept the nightmares away. I was afraid to get near her.

  She chopped the way she drove a car, the way she’d keep going at ninety miles an hour while she was lighting a cigarette. She didn’t stop for a second. She saw me, all right, but the axe flashed up and swung down and the wooden bell rang and the axe came up again. She had that blue turban on, and the costume jewelry was catching the sun in a sort of crazy dance along her arms and breast. I stood there, holding the coffee, wondering how I could get close enough to hand it to her and not get my arm cut off. I guess Benita and Rafael were used to this. Anyhow, they’d certainly got busy on other jobs the minute the Countess yelled for coffee.

  I picked up a chunk of wood, in case Mrs. De Anza wanted something to chop, and held it in my right hand as I started to walk forward. The axe stuck in a log. “Son of a bitch,” the Countess said, and wrenched at the haft.

  “Here’s your coffee,” I said.

  She was bent halfway over, pulling at the axe, and she twisted her head around to look at me. We both stood that way for a while, I don’t know how long, but it seemed long. I thought she was deciding how to play it. I just waited, holding out the cup and saucer.

  Then she decided. She straightened, reached out, and took the cup, leaving me with the saucer. I dropped the piece of firewood and gripped the axe haft. I pulled. I couldn’t budge it.

  The Countess looked at me.

  I put the saucer on the ground and used both hands on the axe. The blade had bit deep, and this wasn’t pine; it was hard oak. I forced it forward a bit and rocked the blade till it worked free. Then I leaned it against the log, just in time to take the cup the Countess handed me. She’d drunk the coffee without taking a breath, apparently.

  “Thanks, Nick,” she said.

  “Want any more?”

  “I’ll yell if I do.”

  She reached for the axe and I went away. Circling the
garage, I noticed the Buick sitting beside the Chewy, so I went in and checked the speedometer. Last night I’d automatically noticed the mileage when I put it away, and I did a bit of quick figuring. She’d chalked up 180, in about two and a quarter hours of driving. That didn’t mean she’d driven at 80 m.p.h. all the way, even on a clear road. The thing that pulls down your average is starting and stopping, and slowing for curves and intersections. She must have burned up the road at a good deal more than 80 for part of the time.

  Rafael wasn’t in the kitchen, but Benita was dishing up my breakfast on a tray. I said, “I’ll eat it here, if it’s all right with you.” She didn’t care. She put the dishes on the kitchen table and took the empty cup and saucer away from me.

  She didn’t say anything in Spanish or English. I didn’t either. I ate breakfast and, after a while, decided to go right along as though nothing had happened. If Mrs. De Anza was going to forget about last night, fine. I didn’t think for a minute that she’d really forget, but at least she hadn’t blown her top at me, so far. Then I had another idea; suppose she really didn’t remember what had happened after she got sleepy? Suppose she thought…

  I felt relieved for a minute, but not for long. If she were hazy enough about details to believe I’d slept with her last night, then maybe I’d find her in my bed again tonight.

  Maybe I ought to lay in a supply of sleeping caps.

  After breakfast, I went into my office, trying to shut out the sound of wood-chopping. I found a little screw driver and put the new platen on the Royal. While I was at it, I oiled the machine a bit, not too much, and I went to work on the correspondence. One thing that needed answering was Callahan’s note, and I reread that a couple of times. It was postmarked Tucson, and after a while I realized there wasn’t any return address, so I couldn’t answer it anyway. I made a note on the back of the envelope to locate Callahan’s suitcase and stow it away safely somewhere.

  Suddenly I remembered the two brandy glasses in my room. They were still there. They wouldn’t prove anything, probably Benita wouldn’t even notice when she came in to clean up, but I was feeling guilty. I went to my room, washed the glasses in the bathroom, and dried them on a towel. I wrapped the towel around them and headed for the kitchen. Benita wasn’t there, though. I put them back where they belonged, behind the bar. The cigarette smell was gone, thanks to the air-conditioning system. I looked around the room.

  The telephone was still trailing its cord across the carpet. I picked it up and took it back where it belonged. The cord was on a spring reel, so it wound itself up.

  Standing there, I picked up the receiver and listened to a voice say, “Number, please.”

  But I had forgotten Sherry’s number. I cradled the receiver and tried to remember the names of the girls she was staying with, or the address of their apartment house. Lillian was all I could think of.

  I looked across the room at a pattern on the carpet, just over the sunken safe.

  I had fifty dollars now, plus the six-odd bucks Benita had given me. It wasn’t three thousand.

  I thought: Take it easy. Use your head. After all, Sherry’s been living with Gavotte. And he’s been dead only a few days. She’s not going to fall in McElroy’s arms today or tomorrow or any time soon. She just wouldn’t do it. Even if Gavotte stole her dough, she wouldn’t go right from one man to another. Not Sherry.

  I noticed that the sound of wood-chopping had stopped.

  All day the Countess never slowed down for a second. She decided to have a general house cleaning. Benita, Rafael and I were roped in, but it was Mrs. De Anza who did the hard, heavy work, before we could get there to lift a chair or push a sofa for her. The Mexicans seemed to go blank. They didn’t say anything except yes or no, and they said it in Spanish. The Countess told them what to do, and they did it, and they didn’t seem to get nervous. But I did, even though she treated me the same as she’d always done.

  During one brief break, I asked Rafael about the suitcase Callahan had left, but he didn’t know where it was. We found it, by accident, while we were turning out a closet for Mrs. De Anza. The noise should have wakened the Count, but he stayed in his room, and, though Benita took him a tray during the afternoon, he probably ate it in bed, with his face greased up and a cigarette in his fingers, stuck in that green-white jade holder.

  The king snake crawled out from under the piano, and Mrs. De Anza glared at him, or it, and told Benita to get the lazy reptile out of her sight. We stopped for sandwiches once; the Countess made them herself, with a lot of rattling and clashing in the kitchen. I noticed her hands, blistered from chopping wood, and got her some ointment and gloves, but when I looked again, she’d taken them off. She stopped only when her hands started bleeding a little, around the blisters, and then she just went over to the telephone and called New York or maybe China, I don’t know. It was quite a day.

  She went for a drive, alone, around five, and the rest of us put the furniture back where it belonged and cleaned ourselves up. We were all fagged out. I took a shower and changed my clothes. Afterward, I saw Rafael sitting out in the patio, drinking a beer and smoking, so I joined him. He called something, and Benita came out of the kitchen with another glass and two opened cans.

  “Thanks,” I said. She went back in the house and Rafael and I sat there, drinking beer, listening to the silence. I wondered if he knew about Gavotte and the rest. I thought about that detective, Hobson, the lieutenant, and I wondered what he’d decided about me, if anything. Then I wondered how the Count really felt about me, considering all the questions he’d asked last night. If he was really just afraid of taking chances, I needn’t worry too much about that angle.

  “How long is this going to last?” I asked Rafael.

  “Eh?”

  “Mrs. De Anza. Does she get like this often?”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Rafe. You know what. I like to know what to expect. What’s the matter with her?”

  He took a long drink of beer, sighed, and wiped his mouth. “She wake up, Nick.”

  “She acts hopped-up.”

  “She…sleep. Most time, sleep—only not real sleep. Take it easy, like snake.”

  “Snake?”

  “Maybe bear.” He nodded. “Si, bear. Bear sleep all winter.”

  “Hibernate?”

  “Zombie,” he said, grinning with pleasure at finding the word. “Like Zombie in movie. Walk around, not give goddam. Zombie.”

  “You could say the same thing about Mr. De Anza.”

  “No. He—he snake, she not. The blood—is no like ours—”

  “Cold blood?”

  “Si. Burned out. She just the opposite.”

  “Hot blood for her, eh?”

  “Bear, she sleep all winter, wake up—spring.” He made helpless gestures. “She wake up winter if she want. No matter. She zombie. Wake up, pretty soon, bang. Raise hell.”

  “How?”

  He drew down his mouth and shrugged.

  “Time like this, she don’t give one goddam. She get idea, maybe crazy—okay, she go ahead. Do it, crazy, no matter. She act like she gonna die tomorrow and got to do everything today. She go sort of crazy.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Any damn thing. Veence get his arm broke once. I dunno. They go over Las Vegas way that time. Mrs. De Anza, kinda like buzz saw. When she go round real fast…”

  “Well, maybe Mr. De Anza understands it. I certainly don’t. What does he do when she acts like this?”

  “Oh, he watch her. Funny. He watch. Never do nothing. He tell me, you want to know somebody, find out if they sick inside. Dig right there. You find out.”

  “What’s his angle in that?”

  “Maybe he prove something to himself. I dunno. Maybe he sick himself, gotta think everybody else sick. Snake, Nick. You watch. You find out.”

  “He was asking me a lot of questions last night.”

  “�
�Bout something you don’t like much?”

  I nodded.

  “Same with Veence. Veence was kinda afraid of people. Mr. De Anza always talk to him about it. Ask things. He smart fella, sure as hell. He feel round till he find right place. Same with fella worked here before Veence. One before that, too. They all quit. I think Mr. De Anza won’t hire nobody who ain’t got some—some trouble.” He coughed over a mouthful. “Not you, Nick. Other fellas. You more like me, take things easy. He don’t try dig in me. No fun. No-good lazy fella like me, sick all over, maybe, huh?”

  He held up his glass and looked at the half-inch of beer that remained in it.

  “She wake up. She get tired. She turn into zombie again. The bear sleep. Like fella go ’long fine, work hard, take it easy. One day take a drink. Whole goddam bottle. Get drunk for a week. Then good, quiet fella again.” He watched me light another cigarette.

  “You smoking a lot, Nick,” he said.

  “What of it?”

  “Don’t let Mrs. De Anza throw you. Soon she get quiet again.”

  “How soon?”

  “I dunno. Something happen, most always. One big bang. Pchs!”

  “I wish she’d bang and get it over.”

  “Soon, maybe. She no can stop, I guess, till it happen. But you take it easy, Nick. Slow down, like these desert. Dry sea is good place to relax, bad place not to.”

  “Anyhow, I can’t drown in a dry sea, can I?”

  Chapter 16

  Things speeded up, as though the Countess were pressing down on some accelerator I couldn’t see. She didn’t make anything happen, actually. It was only that she kept so busy, racing her motor so fast, that even Rafael’s dry sea seemed to wake up a bit, like a tide beginning to move. The king snake got a little more lively. Rafael said the snake was hungry and maybe he ought to catch a kangaroo rat or something for it. Benita didn’t say anything, but she gave the reptile a dish of milk and some raw eggs.