Death Is a Lonely Business (26 page)

Wham, wham, and wham wham.

The rifle was empty but I kept yanking the trigger. I suddenly knew it was impotent. Someone took the rifle away from me. Annie Oakley, staring at me as if she had never seen me before.

"You know what you're doing?" she asked.

"No, and I don't give a damn!" I glanced around. "How come you're open so late?"

"Nothing else to do. I can't sleep. What's wrong with you, mister?"

"Everybody in the whole damn world is going to be dead by this time next week."

"You don't believe that?"

"No, but it feels like it. Give me another rifle."

"You don't want to shoot any more."

"Yes, I do. And I haven't money to pay, you'll have to trust me!" I cried.

She stared at me for a long time. Then she handed me a rifle. "Sock 'em, cowboy. Kill 'em, Bogie," she said.

I fired sixteen times. This time I hit two targets by mistake, even though I couldn't see them, my glasses were that fogged.

"Had enough?" asked Annie Oakley, quietly, behind me.

"No!" I shouted. Then I said, lower, "Yes. What are you doing outside the gallery on the boardwalk?"

"I was afraid I'd get shot in there. Some maniac just unloaded two rifles without aiming."

We looked at each other and I began to laugh.

She listened and said, "Are you laughing or crying?"

"What's it sound like? I got to do something. Tell me what."

She studied my face for a long time and then she went around shutting off the running ducks and the bobbing clowns and the lights. A door opened in the back of the gallery. She was silhouetted there. She said:

"If you've got to shoot at anything, here's the target." And she was gone.

It was a full half minute before I realized she expected me to follow.

"Do you behave this way often?" asked Annie Oakley. "Sorry," I said.

I was on one far side of her bed, she on the other, listening to me talk about Mexico City and Peg and Peg and Mexico City so far away it was a dreadful ache.

"The story of my life," said Annie Oakley, "is men in bed with me bored silly or talking about other women, or lighting cigarettes or rushing off in their cars when I go to the bathroom. You know what my real name is? Lucretia Isabel Clarisse Annabelle Maria Monica Brown. My mom gave me all those, so what do I choose? Annie Oakley. Problem is, I'm dumb. Men can't stand me after the first ten minutes. Dumb. Read a book, an hour later, it's gone! Nothing sticks. I talk a lot, don't I?"

"A bit," I said, gently.

"You'd think some guy would like someone as truly dumb as me, but I wear them out. Three hundred nights a year it's some damn different male goof lying where you're lying. And that damn foghorn blowing out in the bay, does it
get
to you? Some nights, even with a jerk of a cluck in bed with me, when that foghorn goes off, I feel so alone and there he is, checking his keys, looking at the door…"

Her telephone rang. She grabbed it, listened, said, "I'll be damned." She waved it at me. "For you."

"Impossible," I said. "No one knows I'm here."

I took the phone.

"What are you doing at
her
place?" said Constance Rattigan.

"Nothing. How did you find me?"

"Someone called. Just a voice. Told me to check on you and hung up."

"Oh, my God." I was turning cold.

"Get out of there," said Constance. "I need your help. Your strange friend has come to visit."

"My
friend?"

The ocean roared under the Rifle Gallery, shuddering the room and the bed.

"Down by the shore, two nights in a row. You've got to come scare him off… oh, God!"

"Constance!"

There was a long silence in which I could hear the surf outside Constance Rattigan's windows. Then she said, in a strange numb way, "He's there now."

"Don't let him see you."

"The bastard is down on the shoreline, just where he was last night. He just stares up at the house, like he's waiting for me. The bastard's naked. What does he think, the old lady is so crazy she'll run out and jump him? Christ."

"Shut the windows, Constance, turn off the lights!"

"No. He's backing off. Maybe my voice carries. Maybe he thinks I'm calling the police."

"Call them!"

"Gone." Constance took a deep breath. "Get over here, kid. Fast."

She didn't hang up. She just let the phone drop and walked off. I could hear her sandals slapping the tiled floor making typewriter sounds.

I didn't hang up, either. For some reason I just put the phone down as if it were an umbilical cord between me and Constance Rattigan. As long as I didn't disconnect, she couldn't die. I could still hear the night tide moving on her end of the line.

"Just like all the other men. There you go," said a voice.

I turned.

Annie Oakley sat up in bed, huddled in her sheets like an abandoned manatee.

"Don't hang up that telephone," I said.

Not until I reach the far end, I thought, and save a life.

"Dumb," said Annie Oakley, "that's why you're going. Dumb."

It took a lot of guts to run the night shore toward Constance Rattigan's. I imagined some terrible dead man rushing the other way.

"Jesus!" I gasped. "What happens if I
meet
him?" "Gah!" I shrieked.

And ran full-tilt into a solid shadow.

"Thank God, it's you!" someone yelled.

"No, Constance," I said. "Thank God, it's
you.
"

“What's so damn funny?"

"This." I slapped the big bright pillows on all sides of me. "This is the second bed I've been in tonight."

"Hilarious," said Constance. "Mind if I bust your nose?"

"Constance. Peg's my girl. I was just lonely. You haven't called in days. Annie asked me for pillow talk, and that's all it was. I can't lie. It shows in my face. Look."

Constance looked and laughed.

"Christ, fresh apple pie. Okay, okay." She sank back. "I scare the hell out of you just now?"

"You should've yelled ahead as you ran."

"I was glad to see you, son. Sorry I haven't phoned. Once I forgot funerals in a few hours. Now, it takes days."

She touched a switch. The lights dimmed and the sixteen-millimeter projector flashed on. Two cowboys knocked each other down on the white wall.

"How can you watch films at a time like this?" I said.

"To rev me up so I can go out and knock Mr. Naked's block off if he shows again tomorrow night."

"Don't even joke about it." I looked out the French windows at the empty shore where only white waves sounded on the edge of night. "Do you think he telephoned you to tell you where I was, with Annie, and then walked up the beach to stand out there?"

"No. His voice wasn't right. It's got to be two different guys. Christ, I can't figure it, but the one guy, the one with no clothes, he's got to be some sort of exhibitionist, a flasher, right?

Or why doesn't he just run up in here and ruin the old lady or kill her or both? It's the other one, the guy on the phone, that gives me the willies."

I know, I thought, I've heard his breathing.

"He sounds like a real monster," said Constance.

Yes, I thought. A long way off I heard the big red trolley shriek around an iron curve in the rain, with the voice behind me, chanting the words of a title for Crumley's book.

"Constance," I said, and stopped. I was going to tell her I had seen the stranger on the shore many nights ago.

"I've got some real estate south of here," said Constance. "I'm going to go check it tomorrow. Call me, late, yes? And meantime, you want to look into something for me?"

"Anything. Well, almost anything."

Constance watched William Farnum knock his brother Dustin down, pick him up, knock him down again.

"I think I know who Mr. Naked on the Shore is."

"Who?"

She searched down along the surf as if his ghost was still there.

"A son-of-a-bitch from my past with a head like a mean German general," she said, "and a body like all the boys of summer who ever lived."

The small motorbike pulled up outside the carousel building with a young man in swimshorts astride, his body bronzed and oiled and beautiful. He was wearing a heavy helmet with a dark visor down over his face to his chin, so I couldn't see his face. But the body was the most amazing I think I have ever seen. It made me think of a day years before when I had seen a beautiful Apollo walking along the shore with a surf of young boys walking after him, drawn for they knew not what reasons, but they walked in beauty with him, loving but not knowing it was love, never daring to name and trying not to think of this moment later in life. There are beauties like that in this world, and all men and all women and all children are pulled in their wake, and it is all pure and wondrous and clean and there is no residue of guilt, because nothing happened. You just saw and followed and when the time on the shore was over, he went away and you went off, smiling the kind of smile that is such a surprise you put your hand up an hour later and find it still attached.

On a whole beach in an entire summer you only see bodies like that, on some young man, or some young woman, once. Twice, if the gods are snoozing and not jealous.

Here was Apollo, astride the motorbike, gazing through his dark, featureless visor at me.

"You come to see the old man?" The laugh behind the glass was rich and throaty. "Good! Come on."

He propped the bike and was in and up the stairs ahead of me. Like a gazelle, he took the steps three at a time and vanished into an upstairs room.

I followed, one step at a time, feeling old.

When I got to his room I heard the shower running. A moment later he came out, stripped and glistening with water, the helmet still over his head. He stood in the bathroom door, looking into me as he might into a mirror, and liking what he saw.

"Well," he said, inside his helmet, "how do you like the most beautiful boy, the young man that I love?"

I blushed furiously.

He laughed and shucked off his helmet.

"My God," I said, "it really
is
you!"

"The old man," said John Wilkes Hopwood. He glanced down at his body and smiled. "Or the young. Which of us do you prefer?"

I swallowed hard. I had to force myself to speak quickly, for I wanted to run back down the stairs before he closed and locked me in the room.

"That all depends," I said, "on which one of you has been standing on the beach, late nights, outside Constance Rattigan's home."

With wondrous timing, the calliope downstairs in the rotunda started up, running the carousel. It sounded like a dragon that had swallowed a corps of bagpipers and was now trying to throw them back up, in no particular order to no particular tune.

Like a cat that wants time to consider its next move, old-young Hopwood turned his tanned backside toward me, a signal that was supposed to fascinate.

I shut my eyes to the golden sight.

That gave Hopwood a moment to decide what he wanted to say.

"What makes you think I would bother with an old horse like Constance Rattigan?" he said, as he reached into the bathroom and dragged out a towel which he now used to swab his shoulders and chest.

"You were the great love of her life, she was yours. That was the summer all America loved the lovers, yes?"

He turned to check on how much irony might show in my face to match my voice.

"Have you come here because she sent you, to warn me off?"

"Perhaps."

"How many pushups can you do, can you do sixty laps of a pool, or bike forty miles in a day without sweating, what weights can you lift, and how many people,” I noticed he did not say women, "can you bed in one afternoon?" he asked.

"No, no, no, no, and maybe two," I said, "to answer all those questions."

"Then," said Helmut the Hun, turning to show me Antinous' magnificent facade, something to match the golden hind, "you are in no position to threaten me, ja?"

His mouth was a razor slit from which bursts of bright shark teeth hissed and chewed.

"I will come and go on the beach," he said.

With the Gestapo ahead and the summer boys soon after, I thought.

"I admit nothing. Perhaps I was there some nights." He nodded up the coast. "Perhaps not."

You could have cut your wrists with his smile.

He hurled the towel at me. I caught it.

"Get my back for me, will you?"

I hurled the towel away. It fell and hung over his head, masking his face. The Horrible Hun was, for a moment, gone. Only Sun King Apollo, his rump as bright as the apples of the gods, remained.