The end of the night (5 page)

hear them as clearly but I hear casual talk—about a party, about repairs the car needs and about me—about my disobeying by leaving the house. Later I hear them calling me outside, calling my name into the dusk, and so I go downstairs, pretending great sleepiness, telling them I fell asleep under my bed while pretending I was in a cave. I cannot look directly at either of them. My face bums with their shame. My father gives me back the confiscated gun and rubs my head with his knuckles.

The next afternoon I go into the woods behind the house with my rifle. I stretch out, face down, in an open place, and I try to stop thinking about It, but it is there, golden pictures in my head, a dirty, naked plunging. The grass is a jungle. Ants are the size of lions. I look at the box of shells. Dangerous up to one mile. The Club is less than a mile away. The pool will be full. I know the exact direction of the invisible Club. I aim the gun at a high angle. I empty the clip, reload, fire, reload, fire—panting, my hands trembling, until the last bullet is gone. I see them falling, screaming, drowning, turning the blue water to bright-red. I hurl the new gun into the brush. I am crying. I bruise my fists on a tree, then fall to my knees and vomit.

I am sick when I go home. She puts me to bed. I wait for them to come after me. Nothing happens. The next day I talk to a boy who was at the pool. Nothing happened there. Two weeks later I look for the rifle and find it, ruined by rust. I bury it. When he asks what happened to it, I tell him I loaned it to somebody. By the time school starts, he has stopped asking. For a long time I dream about him. He is standing naked on the high board, his back to the pool. Little black holes appear in his back. He shudders as each one appears. I wait for him to fall. But he turns slowly and laughs at me, and makes a gesture, and I see that where his penis should be, there is a big bullet, the brass casing shining in the sun, ready to kill anybody.

The memor\' was far down, covered by the careless debris of eleven years, but I excavated it intact, using all the care of an archeologist, the lens, the soft brush, the ancient writings. I do not know that strange small boy. He moves through his own world, playing his secret games. The Freudian dream is ludicrously obvious. I understand all of it. But I do not understand the attempt to kill. I wonder where the small bullets went . . . a whole half box of .22 long rifle arcing across an August afternoon.

The light in this cell is never extinguished. It is countersunk

in the ceiling, shielded by heavy wire mesh. I have been told by one of the guards—a curiously clerical-looking fellow who spoke with professional pride—that in the event of power failure a standby generator cuts in automatically, and should that fail to kick over, a second generator will assume the load.

A death cell should be a dungeon, with black sweating walls and phrases of despair carved by those who have waited for execution. But this is a bright, clean, sterile place, functional, efficient. One could assume it has never been used before, but the clerkly guard assures me that it has, many times.

Under past administrations, prisoners under sentence of death lived under much the same conditions as the prisoners in the other cell blocks, except for living one to a cell and having no work assignments. But since the completion of the new execution area we, the condemned, inhabit—at the ex-I>ense of the taxpayers—^these special cells. We have soft bunks, books, v.Titing materials, television, radio, good food from a special kitchen, regular medical and dental examinations. I have gained eleven pounds since I have been in this place. We live under continual light, without contact with each other, with a guard always on watch. There are eleven of us here, filling one more than half of the t\^'ent>^ special cells.

It amuses me to imagine a Martian sociologist studying this place, reaching erroneous but plausible conclusions. He might well imagine that we are individuals of great value and importance. He might assume we are being conserved for some superstitious and barbaric sacrifice. For one full year the Aztecs fattened and pampered their sacrificial virgins before taking them one by one to the top of a pyramid and cutting out their pulsing hearts with the obsidian knife at sunrise. I beheve these maidens were selected by chance. I cannot avoid feeling that I have been selected in some random irrational manner for this questionable honor.

I have learned what they will do with Nan Koslov. She is being held in isolation in a women's prison a hundred miles away. All the rituals of preparation will be performed there. When it is time to destroy the four of us, she will be brought to this place and, if the scheduling is efficient, will arrive minutes before her important appointment. My clerkly guard smirks and says, "Ladies first."

I now return to the February day when I left the university. I drove into New York at about six o'clock in a heavier rain that was just beginning to turn to sleet. I put the car in a

garage on 44th Street and started phoning hotels. There were conventions and the city was loaded. I gave up after a dollar's worth of dimes, and phoned Gabe Shevlan.

Gabc sounded cordial but preoccupied. I told him the hotel problem. He said I had caught him on the way out, but come on over. I could bunk on the couch. He'd phone the apartment later on, and I should wait there for the call.

It was on 77th, near Second Avenue. I pushed random buttons until somebody buzzed the front door open. I went up to 3B and Gabe had left it unlocked as he said he would. It was a smaller, dingier place than I expected.

Gabe had been a fraternity brother. He had graduated a year ago last June, and had worked with CBS for a while and then gone with an advertising agency. He looks like an underfed Lincoln without the beard. He is highly nervous and ambitious, and always has a dozen projects going at once.

After I'd gotten organized and built a drink, I called home long distance and got hold of Ernie. I could tell from the background noise they were having a big cocktail party. She sounded slightly loaded.

"What are you doing in New York? Darling, I can't understand a word you're saying. Hang on while I go take this in the bedroom." I heard her ordering somebody to take the phone and hang up after she got on the other extension.

"Kirby? Now what's this all about, dear?"

I told her I'd quit. She didn't like it. It didn't fit her maternal ideas of how my life should be'regimented. She kept pounding at me to get at some reason that would make sense to her. Was it because of a girl? I kept telling her I was tired of it, and so I'd quit. What was I going to do? Look around and find something to do. She said the old man could line up people for me to see in New York. I said the hell with that. I didn't want any part of that routine, thanks. She asked me about money. I said a check would help, and I gave her Gabe's address. She had me hang on while she went and got the old man. From the time it took, I guessed she was briefing him.

I was right. He came on big and ugly. "\Miat kind of goddam childish nonsense is this, son?"

"I felt like quitting so I quit."

**You felt Uke it. That's great!"

All I could do was let him rave. I was spoiHng the big plans he had for me. I was letting him down. I was letting the Executive Training' Program down. I was going to be a

bum. Well, by God, no more gravy for me. No more featherbed. I wasn't going to get one dime from him. A fool who quits four months before his degree doesn't deserve any kind of a break. Now what did I have to say for myself?

"Goodbye," I said, and hung up.

Incidentally, the check came from Ernie two days later, on Thursday. Airmail. Five hundred, accompanied by a rambling letter in her angular backhand, telling me how hard this was on the old man. They didn't know what to tell people, and so on, and so on. One reading was all I could give it.

Gabe phoned at eighty-thirty and asked me to come right along and join them at an Italian restaurant in the sixties. When I got there he was pacing back and forth in front of the hat check booth.

After we shook hands I started to thank him and brief him on why I was in New York, but he broke in and said, *Time for that later, Stass. I can use you. There's three at the table. The guy is John Pinelli. The blonde is Kathy Keats, an actress —Pinelli's wife. The Httle brunette is Betsy Kipp. She's a special friend of mine. I had to stab Pinelli in the heart tonight He'll want to cling to me like a Bandaid. I want to peel off alone with Betsy, so when any chance comes, you help out."

I agreed. He gave me an extra key to the apartment and said we could talk later, maybe tomorrow. We went to the table. It was a comer table, not far from the bar. A place had been made ready for me. Gabe introduced me around. Pinelli was a big, soft, pink-and-white man who looked more like a Swede than an Italian or a Spaniard or whatever he was. The two women were gorgeous. Betsy was younger and had a special glow. I knew I'd seen Kathy Keats before and heard her name before. I knew I'd seen her in the movies and on television. Her hair was dyed a beautiful silverblond, and done up in a regal and intricate way. She was on my left Her shoulders were smooth and bare.

She has a Dietrich face, long, slightly Slavic, a long throat, erect carriage, so that at a distance she looks tall. But close up you realize she is a small woman, about five four, a hundred and ten. I never found out how old she is. On that first night I would have guessed twenty-five. Since then I have guessed as high as thirty-seven. She gives an impression of terrible control. Every movement is slow and graceful. When her smile comes, it is slow in coming, and it flowers to great

brilliance, but you feel she is back there behind that smile, watching you, watching everybody.

John Pinelli was stupidly drunk, and drinking steadily. But there was more than that wrong with him. He was like an ox who had been clubbed on the head. He kept shaking his big head in a bewildered way. Two conversations went on at once. One was between Gabe, Betsy and Kathy, bright talk about people I didn't know, none of whom seemed to have last names. John Pinelli carried on a monologue, most of it so slurred you couldn't understand it, all of it ignored by the other three, as thoroughly as they ignored me. From the little I heard of Pinelli's rambUngs, he was telling himself about the great, important, sensitive, significant things he had directed.

The food that came was wonderful. Betsy Kipp and I were the only ones who ate it. Pinelli ignored his. Kathy Keats ate a few small bites with slow precision. Gabe has always been too jittery to eat much.

The whole evening was unreal. At about eleven Gabe said, "I'm sorry, but we have to be running along."

Pinelli fixed him with a heavy, bleared eye and said, "Got to talk to you, my boy. Got to explain why you need me . . ."

I felt a touch on my right knee. I reached down and took folded bills from Gabe.

Gabe stood up and took hold of Betsy's chair and said, "Settle with you later, Stass. Have fun, kids." And they were gone.

I paid the check. It was over sixty dollars. Gabe had passed me two fifties.

I said to the PLnellis, feeling awkwardly out of my depth, "I guess 111 say good night and ..."

"Stay with us," she said. It was an order.

"Flamenco guitars," Pinelli rumbled. "Flamenco guitars, darling."

She knew where he wanted to go. She gave the name to the cab driver. It was a dark place. The three of us sat at one side of a roimd table, and looked at the small stage where a man sat in a kitchen chair under a very bright spotlight and played intricate Spanish music on the gaudiest guitar I have ever seen. He had fingernails longer than any woman's. Under the music I could hear Pinelli muttering to his wife. We drank white wine there, a lot of it.

At two-thirty, when there was no more guitar, and Pinelli was slumped with his eyes closed, she worked his waUet out

of his pocket, took two twenties out of it, wedged the wallet into her small gold evening bag, handed me the forty dollars and said, "Fll have the cab wait for you."

I helped her get him up. Once he was on his feet he walked well enough. The cab was waiting. We went back up to the seventies, this time off Fifth. The little elevator was just big enough for the three of us. It climbed very slowly. Just as it stopped at their floor, Pinelli slid slowly down the elevator wall and sat on the floor like a fat child, his chin on his chest We couldn't waken him. She held his head up and slapped his face until the comer of his mouth started to bleed. He was too big to carry. I took him by the wrists and dragged him. She went ahead and opened the door, shut it when I had dragged him inside, and then went ahead, leading the way to the bedroom.

She turned the bed down. We undressed him on the floor, down to his shorts. He breathed little pink bubbles of blood out of the comer of his mouth. I sat him up against the side of the bed and then, kneeling, got my shoulder under his flexed knees and with one great heave, got him up onto the bed.

"I'll do the rest," she said. I went out to the living room. It was a spacious apartment, high enough so that the big windows looked toward the lights of downtown. The apartment had a hotel flavor about it, as though nobody ever lived in it very long.

I was looking at the lights when she said, "Oh, I'd thought you'd left."

I turned. She looked exactly the same as when I had first met her. Glamorous, chic, controlled. Nobody could have guessed she had just put a drunk to bed. "I've got your change, Kathy."

"Put it on the table."

"You've got a beautiful place here."

"Have we? It's borrowed, for Chrissake. Every goddam place we live is borrowed. What's your name, anyway?"

"Kirby Stassen."

She gave me a tilted look of a special insolence. "All this courtesy, motivated by guilt. Get used to it, Stassen. You did well tonight. You might even be human enough to feel sorry for John. But I didn't know that son of a bitch Shevlan ever hired anybody human."

"I don't work for Gabe."

"So did he borrow you from Stud Browning? Don't crap me

about a technicality, darling. It doesn't make you any cleaner."