The Last Tomorrow (7 page)

He could not possibly have done what they say he did.

‘Ma’am?’

‘I’m not leaving him alone with you.’

‘Ma’am, we just want to talk to him.’

‘He couldn’t have done what you think he did. He
couldn’t
have.’

‘I think it would be easier to do this here. I can take him down to the station and do it there, I can do that, but this is better. For him.’

‘He didn’t do it.’

‘Ma’am.’

‘He
didn’t
.’

‘If you don’t step outside for a few minutes while we talk to your son, we’ll have you escorted out.’

‘This is
my
house. You can’t kick me out of my own house.’

Vivian, who till now has been standing silently by the door with her arms crossed, walks to Candice, puts a hand on her shoulder, and says her name. Candice looks up and sees her friend’s
kind eyes glistening with empathy.

‘They’re just gonna talk to him, hon.’

‘They think he murdered Neil. I can’t leave him alone with them.’

‘We’ll be right outside.’

She helps Candice to her feet, and even though Can-dice doesn’t want to leave, even though she’s thinking no, I should stay, I should stay here with my son, her body rises, and she
finds herself being led outside, led into the dark April morning, and was her biggest problem two hours ago that Neil had taken the car and left her without a way home? Is that really possible?

6

Carl pushes the front door closed behind the women and turns around to face the room. He looks at the boy but the boy doesn’t return his gaze. Instead he stares down at the table, looking
sick. Carl knows the feeling. His stomach is cramped. The sweat beading on his face feels slick and oily. He can smell his own armpits, the awful stink of ill health. And an itch at the back of his
brain that only one thing can scratch.

But he shouldn’t think about that. He can’t think about that. He needs to think only about what’s happening with this case.

He takes the box with the gun in it from his partner and walks back to the table at which the boy is sitting and once more takes a seat himself. He sets the box down on the table between them.
He glances into it. As well as the gun there are several comic books, a Slinky, and three spent bullet casings.

There are only two bullet holes in the man on the street. Probably the boy missed with one, his hand shaking, the gun not having a rifled barrel.

‘I guess you know it’s over,’ he says.

The boy is silent. He swallows. Carl sees the thoughts behind his eyes passing like the shadows of clouds over a green earth as he tries, one last time, to think his way out of this, but he must
realize there’s no way out because, after a while, he only nods.

1

Here we are, New Hampshire Avenue, a narrow strip of asphalt lined with dark-windowed stucco apartment buildings, trees, and parked cars. For the moment silence covers the
street like a blanket. Even the neighborhood cats seem to be sleeping. Then the rattle of a doorknob, a man stepping into the early morning. A bespectacled man with black hair and green eyes. He
wears white pants, a heavily starched white shirt with short sleeves, and a black bowtie. Perched atop his head, a white captain’s hat.

The air is still and cool and the sky dark, though it’s already begun its morning fade to the milky blue-gray of daytime.

A block north Wilshire Boulevard stretches out empty across the land.

This man, just shy of six feet tall, taps an Old Gold cigarette from its crushed packet, lights it, and walks to his Divco milk truck, all white but for the fenders painted light blue, and, on
the side of the truck, also in blue, the words,

H.H. WHITE CREAMERY CO.

In Business Since 1912.

In business since the year this man, this milkman, Eugene Dahl, was born. In business for fourty years. In business since milk was delivered by horse and carriage.

He steps into the truck and gets it started. He pumps the gas pedal to keep it running while the four-cylinder engine warms up. It takes a few minutes.

While he waits for the engine to start running smoothly he smokes his cigarette and looks out the windshield at his quiet street.

He spits a bit of tobacco off the end of his tongue.

It’s hard to believe this is where life has brought him: to a finicky milk truck in front of his one-bedroom apartment just west of downtown Los Angeles. Once he thought he was going to be
something.

Once he almost was.

2

After a childhood of squalor in rural Kentucky, living in a shack with a dirt floor about thirty miles outside of Elizabethtown, surviving only on the meat he and his father
could shoot – deer, wild turkey – Eugene made his way to New York to become a writer. He rented a room in Red Hook and got a job in construction. His skills were limited, but he could
swing a hammer. After work he’d go home, sit at the typewriter with a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him, and bang out stories with titles like ‘Planet 17’ and
‘The Black Ooze Had a Name’. Sometimes they’d sell to
Astounding Stories
or
Weird Tales
and he’d get a check for twenty or fourty bucks.

Usually they wouldn’t.

Every once in a while he pretended to work on a novel.

Then, in 1938, he got an idea for a comic book.

He’d spent many a Sunday in his youth learning to draw by copying the funnies, and later by writing and drawing comics to hand out to his friends, so, though he was out of practice, he
thought he might have enough ability left in him to create on paper what existed as yet only in his mind.

It turned out he was right.

He spent hours writing and drawing after work. He checked out anatomy books from the library to help him, and books on architecture, and books on animal life. He almost always found an image
that could work as a reference when his abilities or his imagination failed him, as they often did. If he couldn’t find a reference, or if something was simply beyond him, he drew around the
problem.

It took him months to finish, months hunched over his small table after long days of swinging a hammer in the sun. He worked with aching muscles. He worked with blood-blisters throbbing on his
fingers. He worked with gashes in the backs of his hands. Then one day he looked up and was finished. He had four seven-page stories written and drawn, and, as far as he was concerned, ready to be
printed up and put on newsstands.

It was a superhero comic.

His superhero was called Rabid, but Donald ‘Don’ Coyote was the name of the man behind the mask. He was a bookstore clerk who spent his days and nights lost in tales of adventure. He
lived with his mother, had a cat named Meow he fed every morning, had a crush on a girl at work he was afraid to ask out.

The first story began with Don Coyote being bitten by a rabid dog as he walked home from work. Over the next several days he changed. His cat noticed the difference before he did and began
hissing at him when he walked by. Then his hearing improved. High-pitched sounds began to bother him. His teeth grew long and sharp. He began to crave raw beef, and eat it with his bare hands. His
muscles doubled in size.

Then he went to work and learned that the girl he liked, Sue, had been mugged the night before. He asked where she’d been mugged and what the fellow looked like. That night he went
hunting. He found the man who stole Sue’s purse and recovered it. Then he beat the mugger to a pulp and left him on the front steps of the police station with a note pinned to his shirt.

After creating his superhero and spending two stories developing him, Eugene introduced the villain who was to become Don Coyote’s arch nemesis.

His name was Reginald Winthrop. He was a heartless businessman whose plane had crashed on a remote island. For months he was presumed dead. His brother took over his business, married his wife.
But Reginald wasn’t dead. After the crash, a witch doctor found him in the wreckage and nursed him back to health. He’d lost an arm in the crash, but the witch doctor replaced it with
an airplane propeller.

He returned to the city. But he was no longer Reginald Winthrop. He now called himself the Windmill. When he tried to reclaim his old life, his brother had him declared insane. He was put into
an asylum, but could not be contained. He broke out, smashed the wall to smithereens with his propeller arm – and anyone who got in his way. He went after his brother, demanding his wife and
business back. His brother broke down crying and admitted he’d lost all the money. His wife refused him. The Windmill burned down their house with them inside it. He started robbing banks,
convinced he could rebuild his empire. He just needed a little capital.

At the end of the last story, Don Coyote, while walking home from work, turned a corner and saw the Windmill leaving a bank with a sack of money hanging from his fist. The Windmill turned on
him, propeller spinning. Don stepped back. The Windmill raised his propeller arm and took to the sky like a helicopter, escaping. Don Coyote went into the bank to make sure everyone was all right.
His mother was there. She’d been killed, sliced to pieces. Don Coyote swore to himself then and there, and to his dead mother, and to God, that he would stop the Windmill at all costs.

Even if it was the last thing he ever did.

Eugene was immoderately proud of his creation. He flipped through the pages again and again, looking at it. He’d worked harder on this comic book than on anything else he’d ever
done. He believed it might be his escape from poverty.

He knew people liked to say that in America anyone could do anything. With enough hard work a man born in the gutter could become a millionaire, or president. But the truth for most people was
different. Poverty was a room with no doors. There were windows, you could see outside, but the windows didn’t open. If you hoped to escape you had either to break through the glass and into
a life of crime or else dream a doorway into existence. If you could do neither of those things you’d be stuck in that room no matter how hard you worked. He believed
Rabid!
might be
his doorway, and he planned to walk through it if he could.

The day after he finished the comic, he took the train into the city, determined to find a publisher. The first two weren’t interested. Then he walked into the offices of E.M. Comics on
42nd Street. After waiting for twenty minutes he was called into the publisher’s office. The publisher’s name was Michael Leonard. He was a thin man with prematurely gray hair, a nose
like a snowplow, and a loose-skinned neck.

Eugene’s stomach was a knot of anxiety.

He handed the pages over.

Leonard flipped through them quickly, like someone browsing a catalogue with nothing of interest in it. Seeing Leonard scan the pages, seeing his bored expression, Eugene prepared himself for
rejection. He prepared himself for another no, sorry, it just ain’t our thing. He started thinking about where he might go next. He’d made a list of comics publishers before leaving the
house. As soon as he was down on the street again, he’d look it over, see what was close by.

But when Leonard flipped the last page he looked up and said, ‘Not bad. I’ll give you two hundred bucks for the idea, twenty bucks a story, and fifteen dollars a page for the art.
I’ll tell you now you aren’t getting your own book right away. We’ll run these four stories in the next few issues of
Bash! Comics
, see if the kids respond to them. If they
do we’ll think about it. And work on your drawing. You’re at the back end of good. Improve a bit and I’ll pay twenty bucks a page, but you ain’t there yet.’

Eugene stood silent, unable to believe what he’d just heard. He made a dollar twenty-five an hour doing construction – ten greenbacks a day – and this man had just off-handedly
offered him hundreds.

‘Do we have a deal?’

Eugene simply nodded.

‘Good.’

He had his own comic book within six months. He wrote every story. He had notebooks full of ideas and was always adding more while refining the ones he’d already jotted down. Once each
month’s stories were decided upon, Leonard would assign them to various artists. Eugene would draw one himself and oversee the completion of the rest. It was a productive, creative time.

Then the kids started to get tired of superhero comics.

Circulation dropped fast.

The last issue of
Rabid!
ran in April 1943.

As the superhero comics were sinking, crime comics were rising. Eugene stayed on at E.M. Comics to write and draw for
Gutterguns
, an anthology comic about lowlife criminals. He handled a
story a month for a couple years, making enough to get by on, but not much more. Making less than he had in construction.

This was not the escape from poverty he’d imagined it would be.

In 1945, feeling depressed and creatively stifled by working on other people’s projects, he told Leonard he wanted to do a comic book of his own again. It would be a crime comic, but one
that allowed him to stretch himself a bit. Every story would be set in a fictional place called Down City, where dark things were always happening. Criminals ran the place. Albino alligators
survived in the sewers, living off the bodies of those unfortunate enough to have crossed the wrong mobster – or the corrupt police department. Each story would reference something that
happened in another story, would reveal a previously undisclosed connection, until there was a network of fiction so elaborate that Down City seemed real, seemed a three-dimensional place that a
person could step into.

The first issue ran in August 1945. The last issue ran in December 1949. It was never the most popular comic E.M. published, but it was a good run all the same, and Eugene managed to accomplish
some of what he’d wanted to accomplish when he began. He’d even seen adults reading his work. Those were proud moments, moments when he felt he’d actually done something worth
doing.

But by 1949 he’d been in the business eleven years. He was thirty-eight and he was tired of comics. He decided he wasn’t going to do them anymore. The quiet pride he sometimes felt
wasn’t enough.