A Covenant with Death (15 page)

Dietrich commenced.

Singlehanded, Dietrich killed Bryan Talbot that afternoon. He began quietly, leading the jury gently away from Parmelee's dramatic admonitions. He reconstructed the crime, and then reconstructed Talbot. And here he displayed a perverse genius: the coldness Parmelee had vaunted became, in Dietrich's description, a very perfect cunning: Talbot was the archetype of the amoral man, whose impassivity masked a contemptuous and diabolical ego. To hear Dietrich every step, even the absence of an alibi, even the drunkenness, had been planned; and the jury heard him. The very senselessness of the crime was a subtle defense; and only the coldest of men would count on that.

Louise Talbot, being the hottest of women, required reconstruction too; and her heat—Dietrich was careful to use the word, informing it with resonances of both whorehouse sultriness and animal oestrus—was the direct and immediate cause of Bryan Talbot's decision, timing, and accomplishment. She drew men, and Dietrich's analysis of that attraction was accurate if moralistic. She drew them by symmetrical features and extraordinary physical proportions; equally important, she radiated availability, and Dietrich spoke a truth when he said that availability was the most insidious and powerful of female attractions. (A truth for that time, at any rate; now that I am a debilitated old crock availability has become, among younger people, the rule and not the exception. Eheu fugaces. Born thirty years too soon. I prefer a golden age to a brassy, though; was kept busy; will not complain.) Her power was a constant threat to Talbot, and his life was a continuing plot to diminish it. Which, out of his own fear, guilt, pride, baseness, he had succeeded in doing. Dietrich did not glorify the victim: she was not a woman he would have liked, he lied, but she was a human being, and the law exists for the protection of the innocent as well as for the punishment of the criminal. (He quoted an English decision, “The law is for the protection of the weak more than the strong.”)

Talbot seemed to me to grow pale and rigid as Dietrich progressed, but it may have been my nervous imagination. Parmelee was glum; Hochstadter took a note now and then, for his charge, I assumed. The audience remained silent, attentive, respectful, and frightened me; it was like a beast, a great panther apparently in repose but really screwed to rigid tension by the approach of its prey. Now and then it seemed to twitch its tail as a fan flapped lazily. Bruce Donnelley sat motionless; he had not missed a session since his testimony, and had brooded like Jehovah through the slow, hot hours.

At five minutes of four I left, slipping up the side aisle as quietly as possible. Dietrich was in his peroration, and was quoting Cicero. Barring the unforeseeable—the flash of irrational and sometimes noble independence that every lawyer feared from every juror—he had won. Hochstadter would deliver a solemn charge, and it would be a good one; Hochstadter was a careful man and fair. Then he would dispose of various points submitted by Parmelee, to be added to the charge if the Judge saw fit; then he would have two bailiffs swear to keep the jury incommunicado and comfortable. Parmelee would move again for a dismissal, and probably take exception to the charge, and to any refusal of his points for charge; all that was ammunition for his appeal.

And then the jury would find Bryan Talbot guilty, and Edgar Musgrave would print up a hundred pages in a great hurry, and the superior court would deny the appeal, and then we would have a hanging for the edification of the weak and the entertainment of the strong. A highly moral diversion, with a distinguished cast and a rousing climax and a lesson for all.

Crossing the square I was lucky: on a Gambel oak I saw a walkingstick move. Many people pass a lifetime among walkingsticks and never see one move. I observed him. He was some three inches long, six twiggy legs and a twiggy body, two hairlike antennae whipping back from his head. He sensed my presence, and was still, melting into the rough bark. I looked away—at the courthouse, brown, shining, homely in the afternoon sun; at the municipal building with the high wall embracing the exercise yard where Bryan Talbot would be hanged; at Juano's Stanley Steamer, exhausted and somehow limp at the dusty curb; down Main Street toward the distant corner of Pueblo Street, on which stood the shrine that had once been Connie's place. Then I looked back, and the walkingstick was gone. I found him about ten seconds later, in the same spot; he might have been a roughening of the bark, or a single, wasted, leftover tendril from some prehistoric ivy. I left him there. He would have a short season and be soon gone.

Geronimo stood in his doorway and favored me with a flippancy. “How,” he said. “Paleface hanged yet?”

“Almost,” I said. “Don't let John hear you talk like that.”

“A good boy, John. What are you doing here?”

“My duty,” I said. “I have a marriage ceremony to perform. I am a servant of the people.”

“What were they doing in court?”

“Dietrich was finishing. It should go to the jury in an hour.”

“And come back again in five minutes.”

“You think it's that clear?”

Geronimo shrugged. “It's pretty clear. I've been thinking about it.” He was in khaki, with a bandanna around his neck to catch the sweat. He was old and lined, blinking in the sunlight. “It's like the World's War,” which is what he always called it, “when the atrocity stories came out. Nobody believed them. Not really. Did you ever find anybody who believed them really? No. But we pretended to believe tham because we needed an excuse to hate Germans. People like to kill. You take early man. Prehistoric. He killed from necessity, and he felt good when it was done. So that's a tradition, a deep tradition, no getting away from it. Right? Everybody likes to kill and now nobody will admit it. So they'll punish Talbot to show how they hate murder, and they'll get him hanged because they love it. Right?”

“You sound as though you don't think he did it.”

“Oh, he did it, all right. No question. A cold man. But they'd hang him anyway. Because they know why he did it. He had his fun and now they'll have theirs. See?” He waggled a hand at me in impermeable triumph and swept on. “Always. Always it happens that way. When a jury has to acquit, they're disappointed. I'm glad you're not mixed up in this. Talbot did it, all right. No question.”

“A deep thinker,” I said. “Is that why you're such a good card player?”

He laughed joyfully. “No, no. The cards is from my Jewish half. Pinochle when I was a boy.”

“I see. And the thinking is from the Apache half.”

“No. From my Apache half is knowing how men love to kill.” He smiled dreamily, like a sage, and nodded. It was the repeated, impervious, charitable nod of the man who is sure, whose nod is merely the final confirmation of a truth he has vouchsafed the world. “Now go make your wedding,” he said.

Which I did. Clambering up the musty stairs I whiffed again at that faint odor of wrong, but I shook it off at the door and entered my office resplendent and bubbling. A wedding. A wedding! How unique and glorious! Smiles and nods; Miss Wendt giggled, Mr. Golub crushed my hand in his manly grip. Mother Wendt was crying. Father Wendt was slightly embarrassed, slightly uncomfortable: my daughter, he seemed to be saying, will spend the night in this lout's arms. John was a self-effacing usher; but I noticed, with admiration, that he had arranged assorted blossoms in our one vase; the office was all but festive.

I did not hurry the ceremony. These upright young things would, with luck, be married only once; I owed them a pleasant memory, and was therefore properly benign, sprinkling this symbolic pollination with a fine spray of official approval, as though under instructions from the good Harding himself. I performed few marriages, and was curious: why had these fine young Americans not hied themselves to a church? Atheists? Of different and irreconcilable religions? None of my business; I beamed upon them. When I said, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” Mother Wendt exploded like a paper bag full of water, showering my threadbare carpet, a cloudburst in the desert. I added, “You may kiss the bride,” which was not part of the ceremony but sounded like an order from the State House and sometimes inspired a shy groom who might otherwise have felt that the dignity of judicial precincts estopped any such barbaric sexual assault. He kissed her; they clung, eyes closed, sweet and twenty. Father Wendt kissed her. Mother Wendt kissed everybody, blindly, including me and John; her tears wetted my cheeks. I too kissed the bride, and as my face approached hers a mischief almost burst within me, and I had to check a gorgeous impulse: what would happen, I wondered as the cold, rubbery, moist lips met mine briefly, if I were to seize this unspeakable child and embrace her in Chaucerian enthusiasm, hands on her buttocks, eyes aflame, feverishly roaring “Good luck! Good luck! Be happy!”? I withdrew chastely, nodded like a sachem, refused the two dollars preferred by a tremulous groom, and escorted them, in a muggy cloud of asphyxiating platitudes, to the door. When John closed it behind them it was as though a convention had left town.

John would not leave me alone. “You can't do this,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I'm doing it. It's not so terrible. I'll be staying at the Bench Club.”

“What's he going to say?”

“He won't like it,” I admitted. “But what good would I do around here? I'm sick of the whole business. Just leave me alone. You're not even a citizen. Why don't you go back where you came from?”

“All right, all right,” he said. “I'll wire you. Back Monday?”

“Sunday night.” Prudently I added, “If not sooner.”

It was much sooner.

7

I scuttled out of town. Not lurking in doorways; but I avoided the courthouse and made a roundabout way to the depot. Doubtless prompted by obscure sentiments I cut through Pueblo Street, touching my hand to my heart as I passed Connie's. A shingle outside announced
STATE POLICE
; a placard in the window advertised
NATIONAL GUARD
. That window had once been framed in Burgundy swag curtains with a gaudy ball fringe, and afternoons Connie—Consuelo Gracián—sat there crocheting and drinking beer and nodding like a chatelaine, which indeed she was, to friends in the street. Of which I had the honor to call myself one beginning in 1911, September, when upon a sudden high resolve I picked up my suitcase and a stuffed wallet, left the house to go to college, and got on a train three days later, incurring penalties for late registration but bringing to academe a far more rounded scholar than the ignoramus who had begun the journey. Within a week I had a note from my father, one of the three or four he ever wrote me; to wit, Dear Ben, Were you in that hussy shed last week? Your father, Graeme. He was angry because he had heard through my mother, who had heard from Connie through a network of cousins, and it did not seem just to him that he should depend on women for manly news.

He was right. I owed him something. I had made a good impression socially by remembering half a dozen of his paternal asides, enunciated at odd removes and apropos of random events. My father effused a rough gallantry all his life because he believed that a woman was a lady until she lied and he was too much of a gentleman to doubt a woman's word. So when I arrived at Connie's, gangling, the suitcase banging at my knees, and entered the parlor with all the blood in my body momentarily concentrated above the neck, I was prepared to comport myself with at least a gauche good grace. Though I believe that if the piano had fallen silent, if my three or four colleagues had broken off their conversation to stare, I would have fled like a jackrabbit. The piano tinkled on; the clients, gentlemen to the marrow, veiled their curiosity; Connie herself welcomed me. I thanked her, offered beer to the house, and sat opposite her at a wooden table. The young ladies chatted quietly with their visitors and the music was subdued; barring certain irregularities of dress we might have been in the parlor of the First Methodist Church. I won the honors of the house when Connie asked me if I had made a choice and I observed ruefully that I imagined she herself no longer took an active part. She grinned then, at the art and not the sentiment, and I blushed, and she complimented me on my upbringing, which was her way of telling me that she knew who I was and considered herself a friend of the family. I said that maybe she could choose for me better than I could for myself, which won me another smile, another flash of silver molar, and also won me Isabel Rosarias, with whom I spent forty-eight hours of ruinous bliss and whom I loved deeply, genuinely, blindly, and exclusively for the next three months with a purity, a tenderness, and a self-effacement I was never to know again. Isabel went off somewhere during the war, and Connie, who was in her fifties when I met her, died shortly after the Armistice. I missed her funeral but would have attended if I had been home in time. My father told me that several men of position and respectability were at the cemetery and no one was embarrassed or made a joke. Sometimes it was possible to admire Soledad City.

The train was on time. I swung into the coach and settled down, removing jacket and tie and twisting a kerchief under my collar. Trains were an abomination. I had the classic choice between two asphyxiations: plain Southwest, or flaming air, and fancy Pompei, or hot cinders. I chose the local variety because I was wearing white, and lolled moribund, tongue on chest, for three and a half hours. Clack, clackety, clack, clackety, and the desolate right-of-way, and the sweat dripping off my fingers onto
The Education of Henry Adams
. Every half hour I went to the men's lavatory and unbuttoned and sat over the bottomless pit in Bacchanalian glee while warm winds whistled upward, refreshing. A vulgar and obsolete piece of expertise to be passing along, you will say, but it had survival value, like escaping a fire with a wet cloth over the mouth, and was, to the connoisseur, a small, gritting but soul-satisfying victory over the industrial revolution.