Man Drowning

by Henry Kuttner

  “Shut up,” the Countess said in an absent sort of voice.

  The smile never left his painted face.

  “Shall I pour you a drink, my dear?” he said. “A stirrup cup? I hear the state hospital isn’t so crowded since the criminally insane were moved to Florence. Perhaps you may not even need a reservation to get into Ward One. Nick can come and visit you occasionally, if you like.”

  The Countess put her hand on my arm and pulled me along with her. I didn’t want to go. But her fingers felt like bone. My stomach was cold. I didn’t want any part of this, and I kept trying to pull away.

  She wouldn’t let go of me.

  “Look—” I said.

  “You shut up too,” she said sharply. “Get over there and sit down until I—ah, there it is.”

  She let go my arm and crossed the room toward the telephone on its long cord, sitting on the piano bench. Her back was to me, but I heard the click of the instrument, and then the noise the dial makes, turning three times.

  “Long distance?” the Countess said. “Get me New York.” She gave a number that didn’t mean anything to me. I looked at the Count. Apparently it did to him. He was still smiling, looking like a kid from this distance, but a sort of strain had come into his face even under the mask the make-up and the glasses made. He didn’t quite get what was happening, but he didn’t like it.

  He gave me a look. I thought it was inquiring.

  “The Buick went off the road,” I told him, “but—”

  He shook his head impatiently. “Never mind that. I—”

  “Shut up. Both of you,” Mrs. De Anza said without looking around. We shut up. The funny thing was that the Count still had that smile on his face, like something he’d arranged there and forgotten to take off. He held an empty highball glass in his hand.

  “Hello,” the Countess said into the telephone. “Hello. Yes. This is Irene De Anza. Yes. Hold on a minute.”

  She turned around and faced us, holding her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and looking from her husband to me and back again with a nasty sort of smile on her face.

  “I have news for you,” she said. “Both of you.” The smile pulled back and showed her teeth.

  “You’re fired,” she said. “You’re both fired.”

  The Count didn’t say a thing. He just drew in his breath with a little hissing sound.

  I said, “Fired?” Whatever I’d expected, it hadn’t been quite that. “Fired? What do you mean, fired?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  We looked at each other.

  I guess I knew, all right. What had happened back there in the desert had been enough—whatever it was. It had given her what she needed. I suppose I’d known that all along, during the ride back, because she wasn’t at all the same woman that she had been. She didn’t need me any more. She’d taken a pretty bitchy way of telling me so, but it suited her. From the first time I’d ever seen her, with the snake squirming around her skinny neck, I’d felt that there was something wrong with her, and it wasn’t insanity, either. I don’t know what it was. But it was something that made her unsafe to be around and doubly unsafe if you were depending on her. A snake will strike only if it’s cornered, they say. I wondered how many years Mrs. De Anza had been backed into her corner.

  De Anza laughed. It was a little shaky, but a laugh.

  “Very amusing, my dear. Very. Not entirely in good taste, perhaps, but—”

  The telephone made metallic noises against the Countess’ hand. She glanced down at it.

  “—but of course you aren’t entirely normal,” De Anza went on. “Especially right now. You’ve been under a strain. Why don’t you—”

  “Didn’t you hear me, Leo?” the Countess said. “You’ve just been dismissed. I’m of sound mind, Leo. What do you think of that?”

  “But you are not sane, Irene.”

  “Remember that phone call I got this evening?” she said. “Well—I’m of sound mind. Just in case you doubt it, you’d better listen to news from New York about me.”

  She put the impatient, clicking phone to her mouth.

  “Irene De Anza speaking,” she said. “I want you to give my husband the good news. Here he is.”

  She held out the phone.

  He came forward to take it, his eyes on her face. She dropped the instrument into his hand a second before he was ready for it, and he had to move fast to keep it from falling. She didn’t even notice.

  She turned away and walked out of the room.

  I watched De Anza while the phone made noises in his ear all the way from New York. Whatever it said, it must have been convincing. I could tell by the way the angle of his shoulders changed, though he didn’t say a word from first to last. He listened until the voice stopped making noise in the instrument.

  Then without a word he laid it back in its cradle. It started to talk again halfway down, asking questions, I thought, but he paid no attention. The sound cut off in the middle of a word, and New York was a couple of thousand miles away again, and out of hearing.

  He looked at me without much expression.

  “What happened?” he asked. “After you left here, what happened?”

  There was too much to explain. I made some kind of gesture with my hand. De Anza’s face twitched.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “There isn’t much time. What happened?”

  “McElroy started a fight,” I said. “I had to knock him out. He’s outside, in the car. Mrs.—”

  “Yes. That’s it. What happened to her?”

  “She came back,” I said. “She—that was all.” I couldn’t tell him. What was there to tell? It didn’t make sense, in words, the way she’d drained the fight out of me. It was crazy. The whole thing was crazy. And this was craziest of all, the Count and I standing here in a kind of nightmare while something we couldn’t stop was beginning to happen all around us. For just a second I felt the room start to tilt. Everything seemed to slide sidewise.

  It was imagination. The room was perfectly steady. But I still sensed that feeling of hurry, out of sight, somewhere else in the house, or in Phoenix, or in the world.

  We were standing there trying to think what to say next when the Countess came back into the room. She had two fur coats over her arm. One of them was mink. There was a checkbook in her other hand.

  “What do you—where do you think you’re going?” De Anza asked. He seemed to be having a little trouble with his words.

  “Did you talk to my lawyer? I see you did. Very well. I’m going to Reno. Rafael’s going to drive me into Phoenix, and I’ll get a plane from there. He’ll drop McElroy at a hospital. I think that clears us up.”

  “Oh, you’re insane,” De Anza said. “How far do you think you’ll get?”

  “That has nothing to do with you any more.”

  “It will. When I get a call from Bellevue or somewhere.”

  “You won’t get a call,” she said. “We’ll be divorced in six weeks.”

  “You’ll be in an asylum in two,” he told her. “You can’t live away from me any more.”

  “What you mean is that you can’t live away from me. And you’re entirely right. You can’t—not without money.”

  She laughed and waved the checkbook in front of him.

  “It’s my money now. I write the checks, starting tomorrow. You won’t need this any more.” And she tossed the checkbook into the empty fireplace. A little puff of ashes flew up and settled again around it.

  “We—we’re civilized people,” De Anza said. “You—”

  “What’s so wonderful about civilization?” she asked.

  “Look here, Irene. I can contest the divorce. This isn’t necessarily as easy as you—”

  “You won’t get a cent,” she told him. “I checked on that, too. You haven’t a leg to stand on. And I hold malice. Stay here and rot. There’s money in the safe. You can have that—just out of charity. Hel
l, keep the cars too. I hope it makes the attrition more painful. But I’m putting the house on the market tomorrow. You’ll have to get out when it’s sold. You’ll hate that, won’t you?”

  De Anza made a queer half-laughing, half-angry sound and walked away from her. He went back to the bar.

  “We’re civilized,” he said over his shoulder. “After all, we’re both civilized.” She was walking toward the front door all the while he was talking. He kept on, a little faster. “We can talk things over and come to a convenient solution, Irene. Sit down for a moment. I’ll fix you a drink.” She had opened the door and was standing there looking out into the night, with the two fur coats over her arm. “Irene, I said sit down. Even in this barbarous world, we can still act like civilized people. Matters can be worked out logically—”

  She looked back at him.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said, and went out and shut the door after her.

  De Anza stood perfectly motionless for a moment. Then he laid both of his hands, palms down, on the surface of the bar. His back was toward me.

  A moment later, he picked up a bottle and a tall glass and started pouring. He’d got about an inch in the glass when a motor started. He tilted his head and stopped pouring. He held the bottle motionless and listened.

  Wheels spun on gravel. The sound of the motor grew fainter.

  It kept on getting fainter.

  I saw De Anza’s hand move again, just a little. Brown liquid pulsed out of the bottle again, into the glass. I watched the glass fill. Just before it spilled over, De Anza put down the bottle, picked up the glass and walked to the nearest chair.

  He sat down.

  He looked at the glass.

  He started to drink.

  I stood there looking at him, completely mixed up, but knowing I had to keep on watching him.

  Because, if I didn’t, my eyes would swing down to where the floor safe was under the carpet.

  Seven thousand dollars. I hung on to that thought. Everything else was getting thoroughly fouled up. But there was still big money in that safe.

  De Anza took a drink, met my eyes through his dark glasses, and shrugged.

  “The trouble with life,” he said coolly, “is that there aren’t any curtains. The last-act curtain on A Doll’s House would be rather effective now. But in life there’s no audience, except one’s self.”

  But he wasn’t as cool as he sounded. I could tell that all right. He couldn’t quite cover it up. Inside, he’d changed as much as the Countess had done. And I thought that she’d done to him exactly the same thing she’d done to me, back there in the desert, even though she hadn’t touched him. She’d drained him.

  He sat there, pretending there was still something left inside of him.

  I had to think of myself.

  “What’s going to happen now?” I asked him.

  He kept on pretending.

  “The curtain’s down,” he said. “We’re at an intermission.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it.

  Finally I said, “It’s none of my business, but I was in the middle of what happened, after all. Aren’t you going to have to make some changes around here? Am I fired?”

  He reached up to adjust his dark glasses.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “…What?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Well all right. But I have to make plans. I can’t just sit around and wait. It seems to me I’d better know right now whether I’m fired or not.”

  “Why should I fire you?”

  “Because you can’t pay my salary,” I said.

  “What do you suggest, then? Shall we shake hands and kill ourselves? Nonsense. Forget the future. Humans are fools, Nick.” He hesitated. Then, a little unsteadily, still carrying his glass, he stood up, went to the door, and pulled it open. He stood there on the threshold staring out across the desert. I glanced down at where the floor safe was. Somehow, instead of seeing the rug on the floor there, I could see an hourglass with the sand running fast, very fast. McElroy. Sherry. Money. Sherry.

  If I could get De Anza to open the safe, somehow…

  My thoughts stopped there.

  At the door, the Count said, “This is much like Sidi Dris, the desert here. But the Mediterranean should be over there”—he waved—“and there was no house like this, of course. A few palms. The smell of blood, and gunpowder. And sweat. But honor has no smell.” He turned to face me. “Nick, if I believed as you do, I’d have died at Sidi Dris thirty-odd years ago, with Silvestre and the others.”

  “I’m not you,” I said. “So I think I’d better consider myself fired. If you want to pay me up to date—”

  “You haven’t any more money coming, Nick,” De Anza said. “How long have you worked here? And how much money have you had, in advances? I think we’re quits.”

  For a second I thought about asking for a week’s notice or a week’s salary, but I knew that wouldn’t be any good. Because I realized pretty clearly that I couldn’t get another cent out of De Anza.

  Not by asking him for it.

  “Mr. De Anza,” I said, “it’s this deal with McElroy that’s bothering me. He started that fight, but he pulls weight around here, and I don’t. If he charges me with assault, I’ll be in trouble. I…you know McElroy. What do you think I’d better do?”

  He’d gone back to his chair while I was speaking, and he sat there looking blankly at me through the dark glasses. He took a drink, still silent.

  “I mean, should I pull out? If Mrs. De Anza isn’t here to explain how it happened, I’d feel a lot better if I knew that you’d back me up if—”

  De Anza put his empty glass on the chair arm and stood up.

  “Good night, Nick,” he said.

  He walked out of the room.

  I went over to the bar and had a drink, hoping it would stop the jerky twitching of my stomach. But whisky wasn’t enough to do that.

  The front door was still open. I walked toward it, just because it was an open door, but there was nothing outside that told me any answers. The moon had risen. The desert looked as though it went right on and never stopped. There were a lot of stars, and there was a lot of desert, and it was all empty. It didn’t tell me a thing. Neither did the section of the Phoenix highway I could see beyond the slope. If I was looking for a road, I was out of luck. There were no maps to where I was going.

  It was big, and it was waiting. Waiting for me to make a move. That was the way it had always been. The wind felt cold. I shut the door quickly, stepping back. Now I was inside the house. It made a difference.

  I walked across the room and stopped, without quite knowing why. I was waiting. I was trying not to think, because once I started, I knew I’d realize I didn’t have any time at all left. The walls of the room seemed to be closing in toward me, as though I stood inside a stone-and-wood mouth that was going to spit me out into the night and the desert. I stood there, my feet solid on the carpet, not wanting to move. As long as I didn’t move, I was okay. My feet had grown roots, right through the soles of my shoes. They had dug through the carpet and the floor, down deep, and they were sucking up something that made my feet tingle, a warm, tight feeling that gradually spread up my legs to my thighs.

  When I looked down, I saw that I was standing directly over the floor safe.

  There wasn’t a sound. I couldn’t hear Nita anywhere, and the doors were all closed. I crouched down, pulled the rug away, and slid aside the little metal plate over the safe’s sunken dial and the handle. I tried the handle. I pulled at it. But the safe was locked. I turned the dial gently, listening, but nothing happened.

  A noise from somewhere made me look up fast, but it came from the kitchen. Just the same, I slid the metal plate back where it belonged, pulled the rug into place, and went over to the bar, where I poured myself a quick straight one and for the first time let my mind open wide. Suppose the safe had been open?


  All right. I’d have taken the seven thousand dollars. The Countess had thrown it at De Anza. It didn’t mean anything to her. But she hadn’t thrown anything my way. She’d just got me into trouble, she and De Anza both.

  Seven thousand. And the Chewy was in the garage; Rafe had used McElroy’s Cadillac to drive Mrs. De Anza and Mac into town. If the safe had been open, I could have headed into Phoenix fast, to reach Sherry before McElroy did. Chances were the Count wouldn’t have noticed the missing dough till morning, or later than that. By then Sherry and I would have been out of town, far enough, on a plane—Chicago or somewhere. After that…

  My mind shut down. It didn’t matter. I’d have Sherry back. We could work it out, somehow, together. But I couldn’t work it out without Sherry. Not by myself.

  I had a funny thought. Suppose I got in the Army again? Things would be easy then. Everything would be labeled again. You just follow orders. You know what’s right and what isn’t. The goddam Japs and Germans. Only this time it was different, wasn’t it? This time, it was the goddam Russians and Chinese. That didn’t matter. They told you what to think, and you thought it, and…you were sure of something.

  But that was no answer for me, not any more. Even if I got in and stayed in, in spite of my dishonorable discharge and the fact that fingerprints get checked, I knew now that wars end. That you can’t stay in the Army, and you don’t want to, unless everybody else is in too. You have to put on civvies again, and the answers aren’t the same. There’s nobody to believe. You don’t have to believe everything. But you do have to believe something, and what is there? People don’t wear labels, the way they do in the Army. You can’t trust them, you can’t believe anything. De Anza had said people were dogs. He was right. They were sons of bitches.

  And it was a dogfight—the whole stinking mess of living.

  But you had to have somebody. You couldn’t be alone. You couldn’t live. Not when you wake up at night wondering if you’re hollow inside, and there’s nobody and nothing there, just the dark, and all you can do is grind your teeth and bang your fist on the bed and say, “God damn it,” over and over.

  My hand closed over a bottle. I nearly smashed it on the bar. But I didn’t. Instead, feeling the round, cold slickness under my fingers, I remembered the safe’s dial, and turned the bottle a little, back and forth, in my hand. If I knew the combination to the safe…