The end of the night (19 page)

We finally got another lift in a truck, this time a pickup, with two weathered men in the cab, and the four of us in the back. This time we made forty miles. To Uvalde. After food and cabins, sUghtly better than before, we didn't have much money left. We sat in Nan and Sandy's cabin and pooled all we had. Not quite nine dollars.

"Going along like this," Sandy said, "we'll have long beards the time we get to Burgundy Street, man. Or we'll stars^e."

"We can stop and work some," Shack said.

"Never use that word in front of me again, sir," Sandy told him.

"It's on account of we're too many," Nan said. "I've been telling you. We can spUt up and you and me, honey, we could make it aU the way throu^ in a day, honest to God. I know."

"We're all too happy together to break it up," Sandy said.

*This is happy?" she asked sullenly.

"Shut up," he said. "This is hilarious like. Anyhow, I've got an idea. For tomorrow. We've got to start being shrewd like. Use all assets and talents. We need a car of our own, children."

"Grand theft auto," Shack said darkly.

"Maybe we can just borrow one."

"How?" I asked.

"Watch and learn," he said. "Watch and leam, college boy."

The next day was Tuesday, the twenty-first of July. That's the day they say we started our "career." He slugged us so hard Monday night, we weren't stirring until noon, and then he hopped the three of us high and far, and got what was left of the tequila into Shack. He made us walk east on 90 until we were dragging. It was a blinding, dizzying day. The coaching didn't start until he found a place that suited him.

It went off exactly the way he planned it. Nan stood on the shoulder of the road with her hatbox. We lay flat behind rocks and brush. A man alone, in a blue-and-white Ford station wagon, a new one, came to a screaming stop fifty yards beyond her and backed up so hastily you could guess that he thought

he'd better get her before the next guy stopped. She got into the front seat with her hatbox. She smiled at him and suggested he set the hatbox in back. He took it in" both hands and strained around in the seat. While he was in that position she stuck the point of her little knife into the pit of his belly, puncturing the skin just enough, and told him that if he moved one little muscle, she'd open him up like a Christmas goose. She convinced him. He didn't even let go of the hatbox. She held him there until two cars went by. When the road was clear in both directions, she gave a yell and we scrambled up and hurried to the wagon and got in. Sandy and I got into the back. Shack went around and opened the door on the driver's side, took aim and chunked the man solidly under the ear with his big fist. The man sagged. Shack bunted him over with his hip and got behind the wheel and in a moment we were rolling along at a legal speed. Nan checked the glove compartment. She found a .32-caliber automatic and handed it back to Sandy. He shoved it into his rucksack.

"I do like station wagons!" Sandy said reverently, and suddenly we were all laughing. No reason.

I felt no slightest twinge of guilt or fear. It didn't seem to me then that we had done anything serious. It was all like a complicated joke.

The man stirred and groaned and lifted his head. *'What are you people doing . . ."

Nan put the knife against his short ribs. "No questions now, Tex," Sandy said. "Later."

After we'd gone maybe five miles, Sandy told Shack to slow it down. The road was clear. We turned off onto a sandy road that was hardly more than a trace. We crawled and bumped over rocks until we had circled around behind a barren hill, completely out of sight of the road. Sandy had Shack turn it around so we were headed out. Shack took the key out of the switch. We got out. In the sudden silence we were a thousand years from civilization. A lizard stared at us and ran. A buzzard circled against the blue, high as a jet. You could hear the hard high whine of the cars, fading down the scale as they went by on the invisible highway.

There was a pile of rocks twenty feet from the car. Nan and Sandy sat on the rocks. I sat on my heels not far from them. Shack took a half cigar from his pocket and lit it, and stood leaning against the front fender. The man stood beside the open door of the car. He rubbed his neck and winced. He was

maybe thirty-five, with blond hair cut short and a bald spot He had a round, earnest, open face, pale-blue eyes, a fair complexion. His nose, forehead and bald spot were red and peeling. He wore a light-blue sports shirt, sweaty at the armpits, and gray slacks, and black-and-white shoes. He had a long torso, short, bandy legs, and a stomach that hung over a belt worn low. He wore a wide gold wedding band and, on the little finger of his right hand, a heavy lodge ring.

He tried to smUe at all of us, and said, "I thought the little lady was traveling alone. My mistake."

"What's your name, Tex?" Sandy asked.

"Becher. Horace Becher."

**What do you do, Horace?"

"I'm sales manager of the Blue Bonnet Tile Company out of Houston, I've been making a swing around the territory. Checking up."

"Checking up on girl hitchhikers, Horace?"

"WeU, you know how it is."

"How is it, Horace?"

"I don't know. I just saw her there . . ." He visibly pulled himself together. His smile became more ingratiating. You could almost hear him teUing himself that he was a salesman, so get in there and sell, boy. "I guess you folks want money and I guess you want the car. Everything is insured, so you go ahead and take it. I won't give you a bit of trouble, folks. Not a bit. I'll wait just as long as you say before I report it, and I won't be able to remember the Ucense number when I do. Is that a good deal?"

"Throw me your waUet, Horace," Sandy ordered.

"Sure. Sure thing." He took it out and threw it. It landed near me. I picked it up and flipped it to Sandy.

Sandy counted the money. "Two hundred and eighty-two bucks, Horace. That's very nice. That's decent of you, man."

"I like to carry a pretty good piece of cash on me," Horace said.

"Mm-m. Credit cards. Membership cards. You're all carded up, Horace. American Legion too?

"I got in just as the war ended. Had some occupation duty in Japan.

"That's nice. Belong to a lot of clubs, Horace?"

"Well, the Elks and the Masons and the Civitan."

"What's your golf handicap?"

"Bowling's my game. Class A. One eighty-three average last year."

"Drink beer when you bowl?'*

"Well, that's part of it, I guess."

"You're in lousy condition, Horace, with that big disgusting gut on you. You should cut down on the beer."

Horace slapped his stomach and laughed. It was a flat and lonely sound under the hot sun, and it didn't last long.

*'Who's the fat broad in this picture, man?"

*That's my wife," Horace said rather stiffly.

"Better take her off the beer too. These your kids?'*

*Two of them. That was taken three years ago. I got a boy eighteen months old now. Like I said, you people can take the car and the money, and no hard feelings."

"If we do, would you call it stealing, Horace?"

The man looked blankly at Sandy. "Wouldn't it be?**

"That's a raunchy attitude, man. You're a big successful clubman. And you get this chance to loan us a car and some money."

"A loan?"

*'We're your new friends. Treat your friends right, Tex."

"Sure thing," he said brightly. "It can be a loan, if that's the way you want it."

He had been edging back toward the open door of the car. I had noticed it and I guessed Sandy had. Suddenly he whirled and plunged headlong into the car, yanking the glove compartment open. He scrabbled with both hands, releasing a gay rain of trading stamps, dislodging Kleenex, sun lotion, road maps. His hands moved more slowly and stopped. He lay half across the seat as though in exhaustion, and we heard the rasp of his breathing. He pushed himself slowly back out of the car and stood and smiled in a small sick way.

"Now that wasn't polite, man," Sandy said.

A faraway jet made a faint ripping sound. Becher stood in his own small black pool of shadow. He was sweating heavily. The situation was changing. He had triggered it. I could feel a coiling and turning in my stomach.

Shack walked slowly back to the tailgate, opened it, slid a heavy cardboard carton out onto the tailgate.

Horace turned and saw him and said, with automatic authority, "Careful with that! That's a special order. Imported Italian tile for a bar top."

Shack picked the box up in his arms. With a great effort so

smoothly controlled that it looked effortless, he swung it up over his head and launched it in a high arc. It turned slowly in the hot, white sunlight and landed with a jangling smash on the rocks. The box ruptured. Bright shards of tile clattered on the stones.

That changed it, also. It was a symbol. Becher probably sensed the way things were changing and accelerating, and so he said, "I can write it out for you. The loan of the car and the money. You'll have something to show."

Nan yawned like a cat. Sandy picked up a few stones and threw them carefully, one at a time, until the fourth one struck and broke an undamaged tile which had slid out of the broken box.

It was all growing and changing. We were all getting closer to the edge of something. I can remember a time very much like that time with Becher. I was fourteen. There were five of us, all of an age. On a Saturday evening in August we went on our bikes out to the Crozier place and up the long drive to the dark empty house. They had gone to their place in Maine for the summer. Paul Beattie, my best friend at that time, had a hopeless crush on Marianne Crozier. Our idea, riciculous, mischievous and shghtly romantic, was to break in and find which room was Marianne's, and leave there a mysterious message from an anonymous admirer.

We got in through a cellar window. It was scary work. We had come prepared, each of us with a flasMight. The electricity was turned off. We moved slowly in a taut group, whispering. From time to time we would stop and listen to the emptiness. It was a huge old place, full of ghosts and creakings. By the time we had located Marianne's room, we had become much bolder, and had begun to show off, each in his own way, for the others in the group. Fats Carey bounced up and down on Marianne's bed, with obscene commentary. Gussy Ellison found out that the water was turned on, and hurried from one bathroom to the next, turning on every faucet, stoppering every sink and tub. The constant roar of water gave us courage instead of alarming us. Kip McAllen began to pile the bed of Paul's beloved with the contents of bottles he found in medicine cabinets and on dressing tables. For a time Paul bellowed his indignation at this violation of the shrine, and tried to put a halt to all disorder, but soon be caught the spirit of anarchy.

It grew and blossomed with us. We ranged through the house, clumping up and down stairs, trying to outdo each

other in acts of outrage, each yelling to the others to come witness this particular violation of decent behavior. When, at least three hours later, we pedaled away, tremblmg with reaction, laughing and hooting in a coarse way, each one trying to exaggerate his own guilt, we left ruin behind us—precious things ripped, smashed, smeared and degraded, books, mirrors, draperies, lamps, statuary, clothing. It was reported later in the paper that the water overflow had caused structural damage to the extent of fifteen thousand dollars, and the other damage was estimated at twenty-five thousand. There were editorials about vandalism. We lived in terror for a month. We got together and devised an alibi so intricate that it could not have survived ten minutes of intensive questioning. But we were never questioned. We all came from substantial famiUes. A few weeks later three of us went off to private schools. Had we all stayed in Huntstown High, we might have given ourselves awav.

I am trying to make this point: we did not go to the Crozier place to do forty thousand dollars' worth of damage. We went on a romantic errand. We rode our sprocket-wheel steeds up there through the warm evening, noble as knights. When we left it was as though we had been through a brief and shocking illness. The violence was a cumulative thing, building upon itself.

I can remember the dreamlike way I climbed onto a chair and took down the saber hanging on Mr. Crozier's study wall. I shd it out of the scabbard. It made a hissing sound when I swung it. There was a marble bust on a low table, the head and shoulders of a bearded man. "Off with your head," I whispered and swung with all my strength. The blade snapped off at the hilt. My hands stung. The bust rocked and fell, and the head split on the hardwood floor. It was all a hot excitement, a roaring release.

Now, not quite a decade later, I sat on my heels in hot country and felt it all building again, toward the crazed release.

Becher could not quite believe what was happening to him. On one level I believe he felt that it would all come to an end, and it would be a story for him to tell in the home office and out on the road. But on a more primitive level there was a knowing dread inside him. His color was bad. His mouth kept working. A man could stand like that in a pit of snakes, won-

dering how to communicate, how to appease yearning for invisibility.

Shack pulled the salesman's suitcase out of the station wagon, dropped it on the ground, unzipped it. He pulled the clothing out, then stood up with a fifth of bourbon, half full. He uncapped it, took two long swallows, coughed and offered it to Sandy.

"Give it to Horace," Sandy said. "He's a nervous cat"

Shack gave Horace the bottle.

"Chug-a-lug," Sandy said.

"It's warm," Horace said faintly.

"Every drop, man. No stopping. Or you get some hard things to do. Drink it down, man."

He looked around at us, licked his mouth, then made his try. He tilted it up, squeezing his eyes shut against the sun. The soft throat worked. The level went down. He almost made it. But his stomach rebelled. He staggered and went down to his knees. The bottle dropped and broke. He spewed up the contents of his stomach onto the hot stones and sand. He got up slowly when it was over and leaned against the car. His face was yellow-gray.

"You're out of shape," Sandy said. "You need exercise. Anybody got any ideas?"

"Somersaults," Nan said. "They're nice.'*

"Somersaults—around the car," Sandy said.

"I don't think I . . ."

"You got some hard things to do, Horace. Come on!"

Shack drifted closer to him. Horace started. He found a soft place for his head. He went over sideways the first time. He did it right the second time. When he rolled into a sitting position, the stones bruised his back. He went slowly and laboriously around the car. He stopped, florid, shaking, gasping for breath, Sandy told him to go once around again. It took longer. As he was balancing, near Shack, to go over again, Shack booted him solidly in the rear and he went over very quickly, so quickly he rolled up onto his feet, staggering to find his balance. The back of his shirt was bloody.

"Do it every day and you'll live longer," Sandy told him. "Will you do it every day?"

"Yes, sir," Horace said. There was no resistance in him. He had accepted humiliation, and there wasn't much of him left, beyond a blind desire to please. His life had given him no tests of strength, no resource with which he could resist this night-

mare in the high noon sun. He hoped to endure. That was all.

Nan was kneeling, pawing through the suitcase. She took out a toilet kit and opened it, took out a shaving bomb and pressed the button on top. A long worm of suds gouted onto the stones. She grinned at Sandy and at me.

"Bring me that yellow shirt there," Sandy said. She took it to him. He stood up and took his own shirt off. He was narrow and pallid, a spindly, rib-sharp whiteness in the sun, without a hair on his chest. He put the yellow shirt on and buttoned it. The shoulder seams came part way down his upper arms. It hung on his torso.

"It's a gone color," he said.

"It's too big," I told him.

"I can write it out, about the car," Horace said. It was a talisman phrase, repeated like a prayer without hope. His mind was dulled by illness, fear, pain and exhaustion. "I can write it out."

Sandy trotted to his rucksack and took out the automatic. His blue eyes were all a-dance behind the lenses of his glasses. The look of the gun in the sun changed it all again. I came slowly to my feet on cramped legs. Nan stood, her head tilted to the side. Shack was motionless, emotionless.

Sandy snatched up the shave bomb and flipped it underhand to Horace. It bounced off his chest onto the ground.

"Pick it up, Horace. That's just fine. I love you, Horace. You're the backbone of the new South. Move away from the pretty car. Further. That's my boy! You're a swingin' thing, man. This is the William Tell bit. Make like you can hear the the drum roU, citizens. Balance the can on the head, Horace."

Horace's eyes seemed to actually bulge. "You can't . . ."

"Trust me, man. I'm a dead shot. Get it up there! I love you, Horace Becher, sales manager, bowler, family man."

Becher stood with his eyes shut and his hands at his sides. He swayed slightly. Sandy bit his lip. I saw the muzzle of the gun make small circles in the air. He held it at arm's length, sighting carefully.

The gun made a snapping sound, a sound hardly more impressive than that of a child's cap pistol. Horace flinched violently and the can fell to the ground. Sandy made him pick it up and put it back. He aimed again. The pistol made its little crack. A little black hole appeared high in Becher's forehead, slightly off center toward the left. His eyes came open as the can fell off. He took one step to spread his feet wide,

as though to brace himself. And then he went down easily, breaking the fall. He was braced on one elbow for a moment, before he rolled onto his back. His chest lifted high, and then the air went out of him with a shallow, coughing, rattling sound.

Everything was changed forever. We all knew it. We had been walking back and forth through a big doorway, and suddenly it had been slammed, locked, bolted, while we were on the wrong side of it

Nan made a soft, tremulous sound. I looked at her. She was standing bent forward from the waist, her fists pressed hard against her belly. Her underlip sagged and her expression was totally empty and slack, as though in sensual release. She made that sound again.

Sandy went darting over and looked down at Horace Becher. He laughed in a high, wild way. He whirled toward us and fired one shot straight up into the air and stuffed the gun in his pants pocket

"A hundred thousand guys so like him you couldn't tell them apart with an electron microscope," he said breathlessly. "I love every square one of them. I dig all their dull Uttle lives. It doesn't count, just one of them. You'd have to kill them all, digging them at the same time, and they're like the marching Chinese, so you can't."

I don't know if he aimed that shot to kill. It doesn't really matter. We were going to kill him. We'd begun to smell death. His helplessness kept pushing us further and further. My legs were trembling as I got into the car. It had happened. The sky would never look exactly the same again. Once it had happened, it was as though it was what we had been looking for. It mattered, and yet it didn't matter. I had helped soap a dirty word on the biggest window in the world. Yet nothing could ever be totally serious after that instant of looking at Kathy, bloodless gray on the blue tile floor.

We drove east. We made time. Sandy was behind the wheel, Nan beside him, Shack and me in back. Within five miles I knew Sandy was an expert. He held the wheel high and hard and sat with his chin thrust forward, and he was a part of the car.

"How are we swingin', college man?" he asked me with a hard gaiety in his voice.

"We're way out, Sandy."

"Break out the portable pharmacy, Nano," he told the girL

I swallowed my pills dry. The edges of the world had begun to blur. In fifteen minutes the D kick was reinforced, and reality was brilliant, steely and ludicrous. I thrummed like an open power line. We sped away from the sun that slid down the western sky, lengthening the shadows. We got right up there onto the curling edge of our big wave, and Sandy and I alternated making up verses to a requiem for Horace Becher, Sales Manager. We made Nan and Shack join in on the choruses. We bought gas boldly, and kidded around with the pump jockey, in the town of Seguin, beyond San Antone. Ole Horace was daid on the lone prairee, and they wouldn't find him for a month, and we'd merely saved him from the coronary which would have gotten him anyway.

We had funds and a car which would float along at ninety, so that every minute brought us a mile and a half closer to New Orleans.

Shack went soundly asleep. We hammered an endless hole into the gathering dusk. Nan fooled with the car radio, changing stations with annoying frequency, keeping the volume high.

And, off the random dial, the name of Horace Becher roared out at us. The car swerved sUghtly as Sandy reached over, slapped the girl's hands away, and turned the dial back to the station.

We picked up pieces of the story here and there, all over the dial. A woman from Crystal City, Texas, loved animals and despised buzzards. She had a habit on trips of watching for their slow circling over animals near death. When their area of interest seemed accessible, she would park and hike into the barren land. She had rescued colts and calves and sheep and hurt dogs. She took a carbine along to put the hopeless ones out of their misery. She had seen the black birds circling low, had walked in and found the dead man, the broken tile, tire tracks, the spilled suitcase, the wallet, and the bolder carrion birds already tearing at his face. She had shooed the birds off, gotten a heavy tarp out of her truck and covered him and weighted the edges down with stones. She had driven to the nearest phone and called the Rangers and guided them to the body. In a very short time, aided by the information in the wallet, they had put the car description and the plate number on the air. An hour later a truck driver had reported seeing a blue-and-white station wagon turn out onto the highway where the man had been found. I remembered a truck in

the distance when we had turned out. It had been far away, but it had passed us while we were picking up speed, and soon we had passed it. He reported that this had happened at about one o'clock or a little later, that the station wagon had turned east, and there had been two men and a woman in it. The woman had found the body at twenty of three. The truck driver had reported at quarter to six.

We had all of it, more than we could use. Shack was cursing in a heavy, monotonous way. Sandy pulled way over onto the shoulder, turned off the lights, punched the radio off.

"We've got a car we don't hardly need, man," he said.

"We walk?" Shack asked.

"We should split up," Nan said.

"We got the car and it's night and we can make time," Sandy said. "Getting far away is the deal. It's important to make these fine miles. But the vehicle is torrid."

"So?" I said.

"I don't like the going east," Sandy said. "Not enough roads through the swamp country. Too easy to check the cars. So let's get off these big fat main roads. Let's go to New York. It's a good town. When you're there, you're lost."

"In this car?" Nan asked.

"Who said in this car? Let's turn north on a nice little road, and well find a spot to trade cars, and we'll keep on rolling, on those nice little back roads."

We put the dome light on and checked the maps. We found a good place to turn, and we kept pushing. I spelled Sandy for a while and he slept. I wanted to be rid of the Ford. Every pair of headlights in the night was potential danger.

By two in the morning we'd made over five hundred miles and we had come to a small place named Lufkin. A roadhouse beyond tov,ni was doing capacity business. A lot of banners were strung up, so I guess it was some kind of club affair. We parked a hundred yards beyond the place, and Sandy went back with Shack, after telling me this hadn't been in my course of study.

Nan and I waited in the dark car, ducking low when another car came by and the headlights swept across us.

"I keep telling him and telling him it's better we split up," she said indignantly. "No, he's got to have a crowd, an audience Uke."

"You can take off any time. Go ahead right now," I told her.

She told me what unmentionable thing I could do to myself. We waited there in unfriendly silence. I kept thinking of the magical way that black hole had appeared in the peeling, sunburned forehead, with a small frothy edge of blood around the bottom of the rim.

A car without lights suddenly drifted up beside us and pulled in ahead of us. The brake lights glowed briefly, Sandy yanked the door open beside me and said, "Go get in the other car. Make it quick, man."

Nan and I got into the other car. Shack was behind the wheel. The Ford pulled around us, lights on. Shack turned the lights on and followed it. They'd picked up a weary old Olds that smelled like a farmyard and sagged low in the back left comer. We were on the road to Nacogdoches. Sandy, ahead of us, slowed way down as we crossed a small bridge over the Angelina River. No cars were coming in either direction. Beyond the bridge was a long slope covered with brush. Shack came to a stop as Sandy turned the Ford down the slope. He gunned it and went churning down through the brush, bounding recklessly, making a hell of a racket. He got a good long way from the highway. We could see only the reflected glow of his lights. They went off. In a few minutes Sandy appeared in the beam of our headlights, grinning toward us. Shack got out. They scuffed out the tracks of the Ford on the shoulder. They had also taken a spare plate from another car. With difficulty we got it onto the Olds and threw the Olds plate off into the brush.

Sandy took the wheel and we got back up to speed. The engine was noisy. Sandy laughed with delight. "Man, we lifted the plate first, and we moved around until a drunk came wobbling out. He stopped at this car and we came in behind him and soon as he had the keys in his hand— pow! —^like a tree fell on him. Our luck, she is running good. The tank is full."