The end of the night (26 page)

"Sit down, honey," Sandy told her. "Join the group.'* She sat in a wicker chair, plumping herself down as a child does.

"This isn't home," she said accusingly. "You promised."

"Be a good girl or you'll get a spanking," Sandy said.

Nan sat in another chair and pulled her legs up into the chair and watched the scene with a dark and sulky amusement.

Shack moved restlessly, nervously, lifting his knees curiously

as he walked, fists balled, face dark and sweating, neck bowed. "How about it, Sandy?" he begged.

I suddenly remembered what he reminded me of. Long ago in a summer camp in Vermont, three of us sneaked away to watch a farmer breed a mare. When we got there, breathless after a long run down the country road, the stallion was in a corral beside the bam. The mare was in the bam, in a box stall. The stallion was pacing back and forth as close to the barn as he could get, ears back, nostrils distended, w hinn ying and blowing. From time to time he would trot in a curious compact way, lifting his knees high, bowing his neck. I learned much later that this is one of the basic steps of that art of horsemanship known as dressage.

They wouldn't let us into the bam. But we waited and we heard the stomping of hoofs and the men yelling excited instructions to each other, and the whistling, triumphant scream of the stallion.

"Jesus Christ, Sandy!" Shack said with growing indignation.

"Shut up, monster," Sandy said. He turned toward me, his blue eyes dancing bright with malicious curiosity. "You had a lot to say in Del Rio, boy. You said you'd come to the end of all crud. You said emotion was something you could do without from here on in. You said nothing meant a damn to you, and nothing ever would. Remember?"

"Certainly I remember."

"No sentiment, boy. But Nashville gave you the jumps.*'

"Did it?"

"Maybe you're a faker, college boy." It was the last time he ever called me that.

"How so?"

"YouTe just playing a game with yourself, maybe. And inside you're still loaded with cmd."

"All this talk talk, for God's sake!" Shack said.

"I don't know what you're saying, Sandy," I said, but I knew which way he was going, and what he was doing, and I didn't know if I could take it. I just didn't know.

"Let's kick over a baby carriage, and see if you're kidding yourself. All you got to do is say the word, Kirboo, and we can stop it right there. Okay, Shack. Put baby to bed."

Shack grinned hke a shark and whirled toward the girl. "Come on, baby. Come on!" he said.

She looked at him with a childish dubiousness and distaste. He took her by the wrist and pulled her up out of the chair.

She tried to pull away from him, her mouth begmning to make the shape of tears to come.

"Come on, doll,*' he said, his voice so thickened it was barely comprehensible, and spun her and got a thick arm around her waist, the heavy, hairy hand clamped on slender-ness. He walked her with an almost grotesque tenderness toward the open door of the bedroom.

She tried to hang back, saying thinly, "I want to go home. Please, I want to go home."

I told myself that it didn't matter a damn to me. I told myself it was just an interesting play on beauty and the beast. I told myself that one more rape in the history of the worid was hardly significant. I told myself that she was too dazed to have much knowledge of what was happening to her, and it was imlikely that she would remember any of it. I told myself that people were dying in agony as I sat there. I told myself that I had given up pity and sentiment and mercy. I'd stared at Kathy, gray and shrunken, pasted to the tile floor by her own cooling blood, and that had been the end of all mercy.

They had reached the doorway. Helen had begun to whine in the hopeless way of defeat and fear. Nan chuckled, and the sound of it sickened me.

"You win," I said to Sandy. "You win, brother."

He gave one yelping, derisive laugh and said, "No dice today. Shack. Break it off, monster. It's Kirboo's baby."

But, of course, it was too late. We should have known it was too late. Sandy had been testing that blind loyalty, putting an ever-increasing strain on it, always demanding, never giving. And so it snapped.

Shack thrust the girl into the room with such force that we saw her stumble, then heard her fall where we couldn't see her. He turned, filling the doorway, staring at Sander Golden and seeing a stranger.

"Go to hell!" he said thickly. "It's mme."

Sandy bounced to his feet and stepped over the coffee table. "You don't want me to be mad at you, Shack."

"Get back. Get back or I'll kill you, pal."

I got up and moved slowly, angling toward him, walking on the balls of my feet. He stood with his chin on his chest, eyes flicking back and forth from me to Sandy.

"You do what I tell you to do," Sandy said softly.

"That's over," Shack said. "No more of that."

And it was all going to blow up, right then and there, in ten thousand pieces. I edged toward a table lamp. The base looked heavy enough.

Nan said, "You damn fools!" and she went by me almost at a run, right at Shack, and for a moment I thought she had the knife in her hand, held low. But she flung her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. "What do you want with somebody who don't know the score, honey?" she cooed at him.

He tried to pull her anns free, but they were strongly locked.

"Be nice to Nan, cutie-pie," she murmured.

His face changed. She tugged him out of the doorway. They went awkwardly across the room toward the other bedroom.

"What's going on here?" Sandy demanded.

"Close your face," Nan said sweetly, and they entered the other room and banged the door shut.

I went through the doorway. Helen was standing by the window staring at me, tears running down her face, shiny in the first pale hght of day. As I closed the door from the inside, I looked out at Sandy. He spread his hands and shrugged as I closed the door and locked it. Nan had saved the group. I couldn't ask myself whether it was worth saving. Perhaps Helen was. You can go and go until you find the last limit of yourself, and there's no way to get beyond that.

I went toward her slowly, smiling to reassure her.

"He's gone, dear. He won't bother you any more."

"I'm scared of him. Why won't you take me home?"

"It's a long, long trip home, Helen. It's time to rest up now."

"ReaUy?"

"ReaUy and truly."

She tried a small smile, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "AH right, then."

"You better go to bed."

"I haven't got any nightie or anything."

"You better just stretch out, dear."

"Will you stay here?"

"Ill stay here. Yes."

"Okay, then." She crawled onto the bed closest to the window and stretched out and gave a great yawn and rubbed her eyes. "He knocked me down," she said in a little voice.

"It won't happen again. Go to sleep, honey."

I sat on the other bed, a few feet from her. She had turned

toward me, her clasped palms under her cheek. I noticed something about her eyes. I knew that in the case of head injuries, one of the things they look at is the eyes. The pupil of her left eye was visibly larger than the pupil of the right one. I wondered what it meant, how dangerous a symptom it was.

Her eyes closed. Through the soles of my feet I could feel a faint vibration that shook the frame cottage. I could hear the muffled sounds of the mating of Shack Hernandez, a flapping, thudding sound as though some leathery animal had been caught in a trap and now, in a senseless panic, was killing itself with its struggles.

When her breathing was deeper and I knew she slept, I gently removed the woman-shoes from the tired, injured child. I sat near her and watched her sleep all that day, while the sun sv/ung up and over us and down. I smoked cigarettes and dropped them on the cheap, shiny varnish and ground them out with the sole of my shoe. I had no desire for sleep. The stimulant drugs were making me use myself up.

Once, when she had turned, and one hand was free, I reached and took it on impulse, and her fingers tightened on mine. I wondered if sleep was good for a head injury. Several times I watched her closely to be certain she was breathing. Even with lipstick gone and her hair tousled, she was a beautiful woman, full of perfections that revealed themselves, one after another.

The long hours passed. Bright spots of sun came through the chinks of the blinds and moved across the floor, the bed, the girl. Outside the cottage I heard the sounds of summer vacation, the rasp of outboards on the lake, the squalling and shrieking of children, music too far away to be identified, men yelling commands, women yelping with jackal laughter. Several times people walked by, close to the window, and I heard mysterious pieces of conversation.

"... so how d'ya like it, he comes back and he tells me it isn't twelve dollars any more, it's up to . . ."

". . . drawing forty a week from the union alia time he was on strike plus the unemployment ..."

"... I hope to hell she ain't gone already. Honest to Christ, Sammy, you never seen such a pair . . ."

And thrice more during the day the familiar animal was trapped and flapped its foolish life away.

I thought of my curious ambivalence, my schizoid attitude

toward the sleeping girl, despising what she represented, yet feeling a protective tenderness which I would have thought impossible for me.

I did not want to think of what would happen to her.

I was standing purposelessly at the window, looking out through a crack in the blinds at a small slice of blue lake when I heard her make a slight sound, and heard the bed creak. I turned around. She was sitting up and looking at me. She had a puzzled look. Her eyes were clear and aware.

"Who are you?" she asked in a woman's voice.

I sat on the foot of her bed. She pulled her feet away and looked warily at me. "Back to arrogance," I said. "Back to imperious demands. Ring for the waiter, Helen."

"Are you trying to make sense?" she asked.

**You'd be very smart to keep your voice down, Helen. Very smart."

"But who are you? Where am I?" With gingerly fingertips she touched the place where her hair was black-matted with her blood. The swelling was not as great. "Was I in an accident?"

"Sort of an accident You're somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Seven MLle Lake, if that means anything."

"It doesn't Was I on a trip?"

"Keep the voice down, please."

•*Why?"

"Well get to that Just accept the fact it's important"

She looked beyond me, frowning. "Wait a minute! They didn't want me to see Arnold, and I shouldn't have. He was completely mad. I couldn't communicate. When he started up, I jumped. I could feel myself falling . . ." She touched her head and winced again. "I did this then?"

"Yes."

She looked at a tiny gold watch. "Four in the afternoon?"

"Yes. You hit your head last night"

She stared at me with obvious anger. "My God, do I have to pry all this out of you bit by bit? What the hell am I doing in Pennsylvania?"

"You're kidnaped," I told her. It sounded ridiculously melo-dramatic.

"Do you mean that?" she asked me.

"Yes."

"You're asking my father for money?"

"No. It isn't that well organized, Helen. There aren't any

special plans. You're just . . . kidnaped. We came along and you were knocked out, lying on the road. So we brought you along with us."

"You were drunk?'*

"No."

"How many of you?"

"Four of us. One is a girl."

"What's your name, anyway?"

"That wouldn't be pertinent."

She sat, biting her lip, staring at me. I could tell that her mind was working, and I could sense that it was excellent equipment, agile and logical.

"Kidnaping is a very stupid idea. Don't you think you made a mistake?"

"It's possible."

"K it was just ... a sort of joke, you could let me go, couldn't you? If you're not after money. I'd make sure you didn't get mto any trouble. I'd say . . I'd hitched a ride with you."

"The others wouldn't want to let you go, Helen."

"But they're not here. You could unhook the screen and let me out that window and tell them later that it was the smart thing to do. You do look and sound too bright for this sort of thing, really."

"You wheedle real well, Helen."

"Well, if you're not after money, what good has it done you to lug an unconscious girl around?"

"You weren't unconscious. You acted like a polite nine-year-old child."

"Are you telling me the truth?"

"It isn't the kind of thing you make up, is it?"

She stirred uneasily and her face got slightly red. "Did any of you do anything to me when I was like that?"

"Something came close to happening, but it didn't."

"Why can't you let me go?"

I looked directly into her eyes. "They wouldn't like it and it wouldn't be a good idea for me either. We killed Arnold Crown."

She closed her eyes. For long moments she had a pasty color. As the glow of health began to come back she opened her eyes again. "The way you said it, I beHeve you. But what a foul thing! Why did you do it?"

"That's a very good question."

She tensed suddenly and sucked her lips white, and her eyes went round. "Three men and a girl. Are you the ones ..."

"We've had a lot of publicity lately, Helen."

That's when I expected her to fall apart, when the full realization of her situation became apparent to her.

To my surprise she forced a smile. "Then I'm in a hell of a spot. You people don't have anything to lose, do you?'*

'That's the general idea."

"So it didn't make any difference whether you picked me up or left me on the road—whether you killed Arnold or didn't kill him .'*

"No difference at all."

"Is that what you're after? That kind of freedom?'*

"Lectures I do not need. Miss Wister."

She frowned. 'They know I'm missing?"

"I'd say eighty to a hundred million people know it.*'