One Fearful Yellow Eye (25 page)

No trouble diagnosing the problem. She was a little bit scared, and a little bit excited, and she wasn't accustomed to making a pass at a total stranger and she didn't know exactly how to go about it, but Bread Boy had not taken the edge off her and the only thing she could think of was how, without a total loss of all pride and dignity, she could hop back onto that counter top, sans moccasins, stretch jeans, and plain, practical briefs, and get rid of that aching weight, that burden teetering on the brink. She shivered again and gave a high tense artificial laugh and said,

"Somebody keeps walking across my grave, I guess."

I looked at my watch and said, getting up quickly, "Holy Maloney, Mrs. Shottlehauster, this has been so pleasant I lost track of the time. I certainly do appreciate your kindness."

"Don't you have time for just one more cup of coffee?"

"I wish I did."

As I drove away from the impressive farm, I tried to tell myself I was a very decent and restrained chap, quite above the shoddy device of rationalizing it as an act of mercy. But I knew I was lying to myself. I knew from a little sense of heaviness in my loins that had I not had that startled moment of peeping tomism, I might possibly have succumbed to the environment, realizing for the first time the grotesque eroticism of a kitchen deed, amid rich good smells of coffee and pies baking and country woman, as if desire had a curious link with the homely processes of hearty food. A brisk and staunch and amiable little woman, fruitful as the land, her needs earnest and simplified and swiftly and with abundant energy gratified, without residual obligation or accusation. Trot off and set herself to rights and come back with the grace to blush a little, then pay off with a pat, a sisterly kiss, more good coffee and another thickly buttered cinnamon pecan roll.

So it had not been restraint after all, not a moral hesitation. It had been just my supercilious sense of my own dignity. McGee could not take over the morning chore where Darling Bread Boy had left off. Fastidiousness. A stuffy sense of social stratum, and of course no chance to exercise that jackassy masculine conviction that the lady would not have yielded to anyone less charming and persuasive. Every day, no matter how you fight it, you learn a little more about yourself, and all most of it does is teach humility.

I knew something about her too. In any other part of the house it would be a horrified No. What do you think I am? The rest of the house gave her the sense of her value, wife of Harry, mother of six, doer of good deeds. The kitchen was her domain. There any little clinging web of guilt could be swiftly scrubbed away, like a thousand other things spilled and broken. Kitchens took care of simple hungers. Stir, mix, bake, and serve, then clean up the litter, polish, and scrub, and it is bright and new again-as if you hadn't cooked a thiog.

I turned the nose of the car into the third of a mile of muddy ruts that led to the Farley farm. I stopped and stared at the road. I patted the slash pocket of the topcoat, feeling the little lump of the Airweight Bodyguard. Six rounds of 158 grain.38 Special. I traveled with it wrapped in a washcloth and tucked into a slightly oversized soap dish. This will not delude professionals. It escapes casual snoopers.

I fed the gas evenly and fought the eagerness of the back end to swing itself into the ditch on either side. Mud slapped up into the fender wells, but I kept the momentum all the way up the gradual slope, speedometer saying thirty and thirty-five, car going about eight or ten. Once over the slight rise the speed began to catch up with the reading, and I eased off and ran on into the dooryard and found a slightly less soggy place to swing around and aim it back out before stopping. I got out and with the motor dead the wet landscape had a silence like being inside a huge gray drum. The air tasted thick. I could hear the hum of my blood in my ears. There was no smoke at the chimney, no face at the window. An old pickup truck stood beside the house. Road salts had rusted fist-sized holes in it.

I squelched my way to the front stoop, stepped up, knocked on the door and said, loudly, "Mr.

Faaaaarley! Oh Mr. Faaaaaaaarley!"

Cheery and jolly. Mr. Faaaarley, your kindly insurance agent has come to call, heigh ho. Nothing.

And so I went around the side of the house prepared to see the empty shed where the salvaged Cadillac had been hidden. I got into mud that grabbed and held. Ruined the shoes. Added ten pounds to each foot and made me walk like a cautious comedy drunk doing the chalk-line bit, and made me sound like a hippo in a swamp. A shed was open. Boards had been ripped away, the door pulled back, hanging at an odd angle from one hinge. It revealed the pale luxury sedan, a front view, the hood up and the doors open.

"Oh, Mr. Faaaaarley! Yooo hoooo!"

My voice seemed to wedge itself into the heavy air, then fall into the mud. I got to the shed and stepped inside, stamped my feet, and had considerable cause for thought. Tools lay about.

Somebody had undone, with very little finesse, most of Saul Gorba's work. Interior door panels levered off with pry bars. All the seats ripped loose, dumped out, slashed open. Overhead fabric slashed open and pulled down. The trunk was open. The front end of the car rested on the hubs and the back end was jacked up. All the wheels and the spare lay around, tires deflated, pulled halfway off the rims: The big air filter lay in parts nearby. There was a ripe stink of gasoline. The gas tank had been hacksawed open.

The car was a dead animal. Somebody had opened it up to see what it had been feeding on.

There was a sadness about the scene. I could see that Gorba had been working on the car prior to its demolition. He had a set of body and fender tools. He had quart cans of enamel (Desert Dawn Beige), and baking lamps. He had two cans of that plastic guck they use these days to fill the dents. It is cheaper and quicker than beating them out with a rubber mallet and leading the rips and grinding the job to smoothness with a power wheel before sanding and painting. He had packs of sandpaper to smooth the goop down after it hardened.

He had been making it very pretty. There was some masking tape on the back window yet.

Everything in the shed had been given the same complete attention as the car. I squelched my way to the house and peered through the windows. Everything I could see had been pried open, broken open, ripped open, and spilled widely. The kitchen was left the way the Three Stooges leave kitchens.

Total silence.

I tried the only other outbuilding with an entire roof on it. The door was open an inch. I pulled it open the rest of the way, using my fingertips on the wooden edge of it, avoiding the metal handle. That kind of silence and that kind of total and ruthless search can teach you a spot of caution.

The door, squeaked as it opened. There was a gray and dusty daylight in his little work chamber.

And an elusive stink.

He sat on a chair placed against the wall, erect as an obedient child. Hands high, the backs of the hands against the wall. Head up. Can that be you, Mr. Faaarley? How straight you sit! But of course, sir! That leather belt around your chest has been nailed to the studding on either side.

And your ankles are wired to the chair legs. And that other band of leather around your forehead has been nailed to the old wood too, with the same kind of galvanized roofing nails,
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one over each ear, the same ones they drove through your wrists and palms before all the unpleasantness. My goodness, they dropped the cold chisel among your poor teeth, sir. And ripped away your pants for further intimate attentions which have left that faint stink of burning on the silent air. And there is just an ugly crusted paste in one eye socket, poor Mr. Faaaarley, but the other one is whole, a-bulge, and I saw an eye like that when I was very small, and crept on my belly to the edge of the lily pond intending to entice the granddaddy bullfrog to bite on the scrap of red flannel concealing the trout hook.

From the nightly ga-runk, I thought he would be gigantic, and he was, but I was not prepared to part the last curtain of the pond-side grass and find him not eight inches from my face: And, Mr. Farley, then as now, I stared with awe into one froggy yellow eye. It was not the yellowpredator eye of the great blue heron or the osprey, or the intractable black panther. Its fierceness was not as aimed, not as immediate. Like yours it was a golden eye, and like yours it was a bland and dif fuse venom, a final saurian indifference from across the fifty thousand centuries of the days of the great lizards.

One fearful yellow eye. A terrible hatred, so remote and so knowing and so all encompassing that it translates to mildness, to indifference.

Oh, they used you badly Farley Saul Gorba.

I found myself leaning against the outside of the shed, breathing deeply, my face sweaty in the fiftydegree day, and with an acid taste of coffee in the back of my throat.

I made myself go back in. I made myself touch him. Death had stiffened his body. I could find no wound that could have caused death. But enough pain can burst the heart or blow the wall out of a blood vessel in the brain. And he had been in the hands of someone who enjoyed that line of work. "Did you tell?" I asked him.

What do you think? said the stare of the froggy eye.

It was a good thing he was stiff, perhaps twelve or more hours dead. But I still had the problem of foot tracks, tire tracks, the motel registration, plenty of soil on shoes and car for analysis, testimony by the brawny bus-girl and the itchy farm wife.

I plodded to my car, only then noticing that the farm truck had been given its share of the attention too.

I put my hand on the door handle and wondered what it was in the back of my mind that was trying to claw its way out. Something did not make any sense: I had seen some contradiction and I did not know what it was. I moved along the car and, in irritation, thumped a body panel with my fist and felt the metal skin give and spring back...

The thought got through and it brought me up onto my muddy toes like a bird dog. The body and fender tools and the loving care expended on that Cadillac did not jibe with the use of that plastic goop. And somebody must have had some feeling the money was in the car somewhere. I went back to the car in a muddy noisy lope. I saw canvas work gloves on a nail and put them on.

I picked a big screwdriver off the floor and with the metal end played a tune along the curve of a front fender. Pang pang pang pank pock tunk. Grab a rubber mallet. Dig the screwdriver end in.

Whack. The hardened goop chipped away. It flew out in large chunks. It exposed, barely visible
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through heavy pliofilm, an oval etching of General Grant. The packet was almost an inch thick.

Pang pang pang pank pock tunk. I got better at it. I put the packets aside. I whistled between my teeth. Lordy me o my I said. Treasure hunt. Here's another. And another.

Admirable idea. Take the rubber mallet, put a careful ding in the tailored metal wide, long, and deep enough to fit the pliofilmed money-package into it. Pack in the plastic glop and let it harden to hold the money in place. Then sand off the roughness of that first shaping of it to the curve -of the metal, paint, and bake.

Gorba had the brains and I had the luck. I worked as hard and fast as I could, dug out eleven packets, couldn't find another place on the body that went tunk instead of pang. I'd had the luck to watch the process one day while roaming around a repair garage, and then to tell the manager what a cheap-ass system it was. He had the kindliness and patience to tell me some of the facts of life. Costs were going up so fast anything more than a gentle nudge would total a car. So be glad there was a new system that would keep the insurance cost from going out of sight a little while longer. If I wanted to complain about something, he said, I should complain about the shyster operators who'd buy one for dimes that had been in a head-on, then scour around for the same year and model that had been crunched hard enough in the rear end to be a total, saw both in half, weld the two good halves together, repaint and sell it a long way from home plate. The plastic just didn't fit the personality of a painstaking man very good with his hands.

I whacked the crumbs of hardened goo off the packets, stowed them in my pockets, ran to the car, carved the mud off my shoes with a sodden piece of wood, and made as good time as I dared driving over to Peru, a small city of about 9000. I put the car in a big gas station in town, told the man to fill it and see if he could hose the worst of the mud off. I bought myself a pair of shoes and, in the dime store, some wrapping paper, twine, tape, and mailing labels. I parked on a quiet street, put on the new shoes, dropped the muddy ones onto the floor in back, packed the money and the gun into the shoe box, wrapped it neatly and solidly, filled out the label, drove to the post office, and mailed it to myself at the Drake. Parcel post. Fifty dollars' insurance. Special handling.

I was hurrying through the things I knew I ought to do because I couldn't find any good handle on the main problem.

The main problem was all too vivid. Country areas have their own kind of radar, and it is as old as man, old as the first villages after he got tired of being a roaming hunter and sleeping in a different tree every night. Once Gorba's mistreated corpse was found, Mildred Shottlehauster would leap into the act, grabbing her little moment of importance, and she would call the sheriff, maybe calling him Ted or Al or Freddy or Hank darling, and tell him about this great tall suntanned pale-eyed fellow driving a such and such, calling himself McGee and talking about a credit investigation and finding out there was nobody at the farm, but maybe he went up there and somebody was there, huh? And when this got around, Brawn-Baby, the gauntleted girl bus driver with the shoulders, would connect and come up with something else, and the ripples in that little pond would finally lap at the doorstep of my Georgian motel where Hank darling would get the license number off the registration.

There was some merit in stopping it dead right at the source, right in Milly's kitchen before she started to make waves. I could hustle back there and make it before lunch, and play it cool, and tell her she'd been so helpful I thought I'd tell her I'd had to turn down the Farley family, and even though she had very probably been slowly turned off by the passage of time, with just a
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