Savage Night (16 page)

“Gosh,” I said. “You mean you’d still be willing to—?”

“Certainly, I would! Now, most of all. Of course, we’ll have to see what the doctor has to say about you, but—”

…The doctor didn’t like it much. He fussed quite a bit, particularly when he found out that I wanted to leave town that day. But Kendall fussed right back, calling him a pessimist and so on. Then he took him to one side, explaining, I guess, that I didn’t have much choice about leaving. So…

We drove to the house in Kendall’s car, me driving since he didn’t like to. He asked me if I’d mind driving Ruthie to her folks’ farm on my way, and I said I wouldn’t mind at all.

I stopped in front of the house, and we stood at the side of the car for a few minutes, talking but not getting much said.

“By the way, Mr. Bigelow,” he said, hesitantly, “I know I’ve seemed inexcusably dictatorial during our all too brief acquaintance. I’m sure there must have been a great many times when you must have felt like telling me to mind my own business.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not at all, Mr. Kendall.”

“Oh, yes.” He smiled at me. “And I’m afraid my reasons were extremely selfish ones. Do you believe in immortality, Mr. Bigelow? In the broadest sense of the word, that is? Well, let me simply say then that I seem to have done almost none of the many things which I had planned on doing in this tearful vale. They are still there in me, waiting to be done, yet the span of time for their doing has been exhausted. I…But listen to me, will you?” He chuckled embarrassedly, his eyes blinking behind their glasses. “I didn’t think myself capable of such absurd poeticism!”

“That’s all right,” I said, slowly, and a kind of chill crept over me. “What do you mean your span—”

I was looking straight into him, through him and out the other side, and all I could see was a prim, fussy old guy. That was all I could see, because that was all there was to see.
He wasn’t working for The Man. He never had been.

“…so little time, Mr. Bigelow. None to waste on preliminaries. Everything that could be done for you had to be done quickly.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “For Christ’s sake, why—”

“Tsk, tsk, Mr. Bigelow. Fret you with the irremediable? Place yet another boulder in your already rocky path? There is nothing to be done about it. I am dying and that is that.”

“But I…if you’d only told me!”

“I only tell you now because it is unavoidable. As I have indicated in the past, I am not exactly a pauper. I wanted you to be in a position to understand when you heard from my attorneys.”

I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even see the way my eyes were stinging and burning. Then he grabbed my hand and shook it, and his grip almost made me holler.

“Dignity, Mr. Bigelow! I insist on it. If you must be mawkish, at least wait until I…I—”

He let go of me, and when my eyes cleared he was gone.

I opened the gate to the yard, wondering how I could have been so wrong. But there really wasn’t much to wonder about. I’d picked him because I didn’t want to pick the logical person. The person who could do everything he could, and who had a lot better reason for doing it…Ruthie.

I wasn’t particularly quiet going into the house, so I guess she heard me, even if she didn’t let on. The drapes to the living room were pulled back and her bedroom door was open, and I stood watching her, braced against the end of the bedstead, as she pulled on her clothes.

I looked her over, a little at a time, as though she wasn’t one thing but many, as though she wasn’t one woman but a thousand, all women. And then my eyes settled on that little foot with its little ankle, and everything else seemed to disappear. And I thought:

“Well, how could I? How can you admit you’re screwing yourself?”

She put on her brassiere and her slip before she took notice of me. She let out a gasp and said, “Oh, C-Carl! I didn’t—”

“About ready?” I said. “I’ll drive you out to your folks.”

“C-Carl, I—I—”

She came toward me, slowly, rocking on her crutch. “I want to go with you, Carl! I don’t care what you’ve—I don’t care about anything! Just so I can be with you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. You were always afraid I’d go away, weren’t you? You were willing to do anything you could to keep me here. Help me with the school, sleep with me…be Johnny-on-the-spot if I needed you for anything. And you couldn’t leave either, could you, Ruthie? You couldn’t lose your job.”

“Take me, Carl! You’ve got to take me with you!”

I wasn’t sure yet. So I said, “Well, go on and get ready. We’ll see.”

Then, I went upstairs to my room.

I packed my two suitcases. I turned back a corner of the carpet and picked up a carbon copy of the note I’d sent to the sheriff.

For, naturally, I had sent the note. I’d meant to tell Ruthie about the carbon afterwards so that she could take credit for the tip and claim the rewards.

I hadn’t had anything to lose, as I saw it. I couldn’t help myself, so I’d tried to help her. The person who might wind up as I had if she didn’t have help.

I hesitated a moment, turning the slip of paper around in my fingers. But it was no good now. They’d muffed their chance to catch me in the act of attempting to kill Jake Winroy, and I figured there was at least one damned good reason why they’d never get another one.

I figured that way, but I wanted to make sure. I burned the carbon in an ashtray, and crossed the hall to Jake’s room.

I stood at the side of his bed, looking down. At him and the note Ruthie had written.

It was stupid; no one would believe that Jake had tried to attack her and she’d done it in self-defense. But, well, I could understand. The whole setup had been falling apart. Ruthie had to do it fast if at all. And I guess if a person is willing to do a thing like that, then he’s stupid to begin with and it’s bound to crop out on him sooner or later.

It was all wrong. The Man wouldn’t like it. And getting me for him wouldn’t help her any. She had to latch onto me now, of course; and you get stupider and stupider the farther you go. But excuses didn’t cut any ice with The Man. He picked you because you were stupid; he
made
you stupid, you might say. But if you slipped up,
you
did it. And you got what The Man gave people who slipped.

It was done, though, and me, I was done, too. So nothing mattered now but to let her go on hoping. As long as she could hope…

I took one last look at Jake before I left the room. Ruthie had almost sawed his throat out with one of his own razors. Scared, you know, and scared not to. Angry because she was scared. It looked a lot like the job I’d done on Fruit Jar.

I
’d never seen the place, just the road that led up to it; and I’d only seen that the one time years before when that writer had driven me by on the way to the train. But I didn’t have any trouble finding it again. The road was grown high with weeds, and in some places long vines had spread across it from the bare-branched trees on either side.

The road sloped up from the Vermont highway, then down again, so that unless you were right there, right on top of them, you couldn’t see the house and the farm buildings. Ruth looked at me pretty puzzled a time or two, but she didn’t ask any questions. I ran the car into the garage and closed the doors, and we walked back toward the house.

There was a sign fastened to the gate. It said:

BEWARE OF WILD GOATS

“The Way of the Trespasser is Hard”

And there was a typewritten notice tacked to the back door:

Departed for parts unknown. Will supply
forwarding address, if, when, and as soon as possible.

The door was unlocked. We went in.

I looked all through the house, by myself mostly because the stairs were steep and narrow and Ruthie couldn’t have got around so good. I went through room after room, and he wasn’t there, of course, no one was there, and everything was covered with dust but everything was in order. All the rooms were in order but one, a little tiny one way off by itself on the second floor. And except for the way the typewriter was ripped apart, even that one had a kind of order about it.

The furniture was all pushed back against the wall, and there was nothing in the bookcases but the covers of books. The pages of them and God knows how many other pages—typewritten ones that hadn’t been made into books—had been torn up like confetti. And the confetti was stacked in little piles all over the floor. Arranged into letters and words:

I kicked the piles of paper apart, and went downstairs.

We moved in, and stayed.

There was case after case of canned goods in the cellar. There was a drum of coal oil for the lamps and the two stoves. There was a water well with an inside pump at the sink. There wasn’t any electricity or telephone or radio or anything like that; we were shut off from everything, as though we were in another world. But we had everything else, and ourselves. So we stayed.

The days drifted by, and I wondered what she was waiting for. And there was nothing to do…except what could be done with ourselves. And I seemed to be shrinking more and more, getting weaker and littler while she got stronger and bigger. And I began to think maybe she was going to do it that way.

Some nights, afterwards, when I wasn’t too weak and sick to do it, I’d stand at the window, staring out at the fields with their jungle of weeds and vines. The wind rippled through them, making them sway and wiggle and squirm. And there was a howling and a shrieking in my ears—but after a while it went away. Everywhere, everywhere I looked, the jungle swayed and wiggled and squirmed. It shook that thing at me. There was something sort of hypnotic about it, and I’d still be weak and sick, but I wouldn’t notice it. There wouldn’t be a thing in my mind but that thing, and I’d wake her up again. And then it was like I was running a race, I was trying to get to something, get something, before the howling came back. Because when I heard that I had to stop.

But all I ever got was that thing. Not the other, whatever the other was.

The goats always won.

T
he days drifted by, and she knew that I knew, of course, but we never talked about it. We never talked about anything much because we were cut off from everything, and after a while everything was said that we could say and it would have been like talking to yourself. So we talked less and less, and pretty soon we were hardly talking at all. And then we
weren’t
talking at all. Just grunting and gesturing and pointing at things.

It was like we’d never known how to talk.

It began to get pretty cold, so we shut off all the upstairs rooms and stayed downstairs. And it got colder and we shut off all the rooms but the living room and the kitchen. And it got colder and we shut off all the rooms but the kitchen. We lived there, never more than a few feet away from each other. It was always right close by, that thing was, and outside…it was out there too. It seemed to edge in closer and closer, from all sides, and there was no way to get away from it. And I didn’t want to get away. I kept getting weaker and littler, but I couldn’t stop. There was nothing else to think about, so I kept taking that thing. I’d go for it fast, trying to win the race against the goats. And I never did, but I kept on trying. I had to.

Afterwards, when the howling began to get so bad I couldn’t stand it, I’d go outside looking for the goats. I’d go running and screaming and clawing my way through the fields, wanting to get my hands on just one of them. And I never did, of course, because the fields weren’t really the place to find the goats.

I
couldn’t eat much of anything. The basement was loaded with food and whiskey, but I had a hard time getting any down. I’d eaten less and less ever since that first day when I’d raised up the trap door that was set flush with the kitchen floor and gone down the steep narrow steps.

I’d gone down them, taking a lantern with me, and I’d looked all along the shelves, packed tight with bottles and packages and canned goods. I’d circled around the room, looking, and I came to a sort of setback in the walls—a doorless closet, kind of. And the entrance to it was blocked off, stacked almost to the ceiling with empty bottles.

I wondered why in hell they’d been dumped there instead of outside, because it would be stupid of a guy to drink the stuff upstairs, where he naturally would drink it, and then bring the bottles back down here. As long as he was up there, why hadn’t he…?

I
said we never talked, but we did. We talked all the time to the goats. I talked to them while she slept and she talked to them while I slept. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, I did my share of talking.

I said we lived in the one room, but we didn’t. We lived in all the rooms, but they were all the same. And wherever we were the goats were always there. I couldn’t ever catch them but I knew they were there. They’d come up out of the fields and moved in with us, and sometimes I’d almost get my hands on them but they always got away. She’d get in my way before I could grab them.

I thought and I thought about it, and finally I knew how it must be. They’d been there all along. Right there, hiding inside of her. So it wasn’t any wonder I could never win the race.

I knew they were in her, where else could they be, but I had to make sure. And I couldn’t.

I couldn’t touch her. She didn’t sleep with me any more. She ate a lot, enough for two people, and sometimes in the morning she vomited…

It was right after the vomiting started that she began walking. I mean, really walking, not using the crutch.

She’d tuck her dress up around her waist, so that it wouldn’t be in the way, and walk back and forth on one knee and that little foot. She got to where she could walk pretty good. She’d hold her good foot up behind her with one hand, making a stump out of the knee. It came just about even, then, with that little baby foot and she could get around pretty fast.

She’d walk for an hour at a time with her dress tucked up and everything she had showing, but you’d never have known I was there from the way she acted. She…

Hell, she talked to me. She explained to me. We’d been talking all the time, and not to the goats either, because of course there weren’t any goats, and…

She walked on the little foot, exercising the goats. And at night they sat on my chest howling.