The Watchman (23 page)

It's the murder gun, isn't it? he said.

Jason, damn you, your three minutes is up! Cristi said.

No, he still has thirty seconds more, Sister, said the Sheriff. Yes, boy, this is the gun that killed Cole Blake.

And I wish to God, Jason mumbled among his fingers, that it had been loaded fresh—so that I could have killed you with it just now, Jesus, how I wish to God that gun had been loaded.

Then here, said Luther Alt, fumbling at his hip beneath the leather coat and moving across the rug to Jason. Here, boy. This one should do. Take it. This gun's loaded. If you want to kill me so much—take it. Here.

Jason, through the lace of his fingers, saw the dangling blue-steel barrel, and fought back the impulse to shamefiU tears.

Well, take it, said Luther Alt gently. Wouldn't that solve everything for you? I'm giving you the chance, boy, the chance you might not get again.

Get it away from me, whispered Jason.

As you wish, boy. I'll not argue, said the Sheriff, bolstering the gun again. Because your time's run out.

JasOn got up slowly, keeping his hands over his face still, not wanting either of them to see the shame and the tears his fingers hid, moving toward the door, past Luther Alt, his shoulders shaking with sobs.

You think you've beaten me, don't you! he cried, with his back toward them. You think you've scared me away from her, both of you. Cris, my God, I thought you were my friend. Well you're not. You're worse than him even—rotten and selfish inside! Both of you—you think you've stopped me and Jill! Well, you haven't! Do you know that? You made it even stronger! That's what you did!

Luther sighed, looked at the back of Jason's neck.

You've been warned, he said. I can do no more than that.

Father, listen to me! cried Cristi. I know what we'll do— Father, look at me! Listen, we'll leave again—tonight! You and me and Jill and—even Tzchak if you want him. There's a bus at midnight. Father! We'll find another town like we've always done. We'll be together again—on the move—safe again—a new town, Father. I won't mind. I always told you I hated all the towns but I didn't mean it. Father 1

That will do. Sister, said the Sheriff.

No, listen to me! she raved on, seizing his arm. Think, Father. We've always gone on to the new towns before—all the

towns, Father. The land's full of towns, Father. It will be all right again.

All the towns, he smiled. All the towns from here clean back to Christ's Body, Texas? No, Sister. No.

Then you want more of it? she shouted. Isn't that it? Oh, my God, Father, hasn't there been enough? Three! Christ above, isn't three enough. Father? Three boys murdered in six years between here and the Gulf. Can you live with that any longer? Aren't you satisfied by now? Don't you ever see the boys in your dreams, Father? Boys with their faces shot away? Does this child Jason here have to be fourth? Is that what you want?

I'll not run any longer, said the Sheriff. There are no more towns for us, Sister—not in all the land. No. You're right— I won't live with it any longer for I can't. And there'll be no more running to the towns. I'm tired.

She bent at the waist, slumping to the rug, against his boot heels, her weeping face hidden in the fallen tumble of her tawny hair. Then he worked his boots gently free of the clutch of her fingers, walked slowly toward the door, turned and looked at her.

Tired, little Sister, he said again. So tired I've only the strength left in me for one thing. Yes that—always enough for that so long as I live. Nor too tired to keep this boy in this town away from Jill—nor any boy in any town, never from here to Christ's Body—away from my Jill.

He seemed indifferent to Jason's presence now; heedless almost of the girl herself: speaking as if only to his mind as men talk to themselves in solitudes. But Jason who, by now, should have been apprehended and overwhelmed by the horrors of that night but who was instead helpless whetted to ever darker ones, had gone. Neither Luther nor his daughter spoke nor moved as he had walked from the bedroom silently and without a word clicked the hall door closed behind him. Cristi, in the glass, had glimpsed his face before he moved away: a face that did not seem to know she was there, nor Luther, nor yet that danger which lay in the air between them all like the acrid, residual chemistry of their violent interaction; it was as if that face were obsessed and fevered, not driven to caution and retreat but, on the contrary, moving now compulsively, almost dreamily, out into the night as if to confirm one catastrophe with an even greater one.

Father, will he go tell Mister Janders? she whimpered.

No, said Luther. If it was his mind that moved that boy's legs and hands and mouth tonight he might do that. But he's all fever and glands and spunk just now. It's them that moves that boy tonight. And will tomorrow—if he's alive by then. Like a pack of three cocky mongrel dogs chasing a little lady dog across a street and them hit by cars and two of them dead and the third one, even with a broken back, dragging himself to the curbstones, still yearning, still sniffing and hoping, even planning—as good as dead already—moving by glands and not by mind or sense or pain. He'll not tell landers, Sister. Nor will he tell Chief Smitherman. Because the warning—my threats—he's heard none of them. So there is nothing in his mind that wants telling.

He paused and shot her a level look of queer-smiling, pensive portention.

He won't, Sister, said Luther. But will you?

She looked up at him, then away into the air absently, and shook her pain-drawn face negatively.

Are you sure, Sister? he said. Doesn't he mean that much

to you?

I won't tell, she said in a flat voice. No, I won't tell because it wouldn't do any good. It's too late for that like it's too late for everything else. If I thought it would stop you or him or her or any part of it I would run out screaming it to the streets tonight. But it wouldn't. This now is that second when it's too late to do anything, you can only close your eyes and wait for the sound—the second when a clock's machinery whirs and clicks and gathers before the bomb explosion—too late to stop the clock or turn it back or even break it. Like that. No. I won't tell your bloody, terrible secrets to them. Father.

That's as well, said Luther Alt, sighing and turning toward the dark parlor, his hand resting on the butt of the death-gun in his shirt, his big fingers recoiling from it, then touching it again, as if his tactile senses had not so easily achieved the decisions to which his wits were already committed. It wouldn't somehow be proper—coming from you, he said. So I will tell Mister landers myself. I deem that

proper. Yes.

She was still for that brief instant before she began to cry again; a moment in which she was unsure whether or not he had said that and then for another flickering instant unsure whether or not she had believed the hearing of it.

She threw herself against him; she buried her face in hia shirt, between the flaps of the open jacket.

Don't, he whispered, patting her shaking shoulders clumsily, for it had been so long since he had touched her. Don't, Sister. Don't cry. Didn't we always know that it would have to come to this someday? There, there, now.

Oh, Father, she wailed. Father, I always loved you!

Why, yes, now, he said. Yes, now. I've known that, Cristi.

Cristi? she grieved. Cristi? After all these years of Sister, Father, I'm Cristi again. Father, just listen to us. We're really talking.

Cristi, he said. I wanted to talk. But it wouldn't let me. Can you understand? It purely wouldn't let me. Daughter, I never hated you.

Oh, I knew, she said. I knew you didn't hate me. But I knew you didn't love me either—and I'd rather had hate than that.

He tilted back her streaked and haggard face, ugly with the loveliness of sorrow, and looked down at her.

Listen to what I say, Cristi, he said gently. You think I never forgave you when my Jane Nancy died horning you. And you think I've sat in judgment's seat on you since you've grown and run around the earth squandering your precious pennies on candy-love like a child on a Saturday night. No. I won't leave you thinking that. I'd come back wailing from the grave to make you hear if I thought I'd gone away and left you with a memory of me so broken-hearted in you and so spoiled. Do you hear me, Cristi? Do you understand me?

Yes, she sobbed.

Do you think I've gone along through all this bloody, awful exodus thinking that it was easy for you? That maybe it wasn't harder ever for you than even for me? Yes, harder. I know that, he said. And you—having to live with that knowing and still keep still tongued; having to keep that stillness and still have breath left to laugh. And maybe even keeping that pretty mouth of yours so busy kissing that it would never have time to tell. Why, sometimes I fancy you're the bravest of us all, little Cristi.

She clung to him as if her arms disputed some deadly contest between themselves and the down-pulling earth which lay one story and a cellar beneath the floor. In that strange, close, clumsy embrace: awkward with years of distance and disuse, it seems hard to guess which one holds the other up from falling. But now her face brightened again with that

feverish, last-ditch illusion: whimpering the words as if she sensibly doomed them, disbelieving, hoping savagely, before they even reached her lips.

Father, listen, there's still a chance? she whispered in a breath hollow with the sickened certainty that there were really none left. Isn't there, Father? Like the times before? You and me and Jill, Father, to another place?

Cristi, Cristi, he said gently. What other place? Think, Cristi. What places in the end for all of it, Cristi? The

( electric chair—?

I No, Father! she cried. We ran away before! We can run

( again. New places!

The places, Cristi, he said. Think of the places. The hangman's noose, Cristi? The gas chamber? The long, slow death-in-life of a penitentiary cage? Or, at best, the staring wooden corpses standing dead-alive along the giggling walls of some asylum. Are those the places you'd have me ask for when I buy the next three bus tickets out? Don't you know, Cristi, that those are the only places left now? Would you have it end in one of them? No, Cristi. You're too brave and honest to kid yourself. Can't you fairly hear all the doors closing— all the doors but those doors—all the doors to the little towns closing one by one. They've been closing behind us for years, Cristi, a few at a time—and now, listen. Can't you hear a great host of all the rest of them clicking, slamming, latching shut against us in citizen terror. All the doors to all the places. All except those little rooms that the world in sickness and complicity has painted green like life to shut us up with dark like death?

She dragged away from him, wincing as if at fresh tendrils torn loose from him and never to touch again; she tottered to the bed and sat, looking wanly at him in the mirror.

I'll go now, he said, with the fumbling gesture of a lonely guest who has overstayed a call.

She leaped from the bed as if she had to face him full to savor this last look at him; as if she were wanting to fix some last image of him, like a snapshot, to keep against the times.

You're going to—you'll go wake up Mister landers now? she said. And tell him? Father, where are you going? Tell me!

To do the first thing first, he said, in the parlor's darkness now. Mister Christmas landers will have to be convinced that

I am a murderer if the thing is to be brought off proper. And I reckon that won't be easy.

My God, what do you mean? she cried. What are you talking about?

landers has looked murder in the face for decade upon decade of tiring country-trials, said Luther Alt. Ain't it queer how a man can look at something so often he doesn't recognize it any more? Janders is bright—razor-bright. No, I didn't mean stupid. But still and all he's honed that Sheffield blade of his so keen that once somewhere sometime he cut the nerve of his own bright brain's instinct and never even felt it. I know Janders—I've known him in a hundred country towns. He thinks me a man incapable of murder. So it would be a foolishness to just go tell him. Mister Janders, sir, I am your killer. A foolishness. No. Daughter, I've lived with this, thought this, dreamed this out so long. I can't be wrong. Mister Christmas Janders must be proved to that I'm a murderer!

Father, you're insane! she cried, racing to the bedroom door, staring through tears at his great hunched shape by the hall door with his hand on the knob and the thin bar of light from its half-opened slit slicing his eye, cheekbone and jowl with a thin bar of fire.

It's very reasonable, he said. Mister Christmas Janders must be proved to that I'm a murderer.

How? she whispered into her knuckles, with her face bowed in terror, seeing him blurred through her lashes.

Why, with my gun, he said, and in the moment when he opened the door and slipped swiftly into the dingy yellow of the hallway, she saw the oiled-blue shine of the pistol in his fist. And now, fainting and sick against her door jamb, listening to his anguished progress down the stairwell, Cristi heard from him for the first time ever in her life the last sound she would ever hear in his: the diflBcult and strangled choke of Luther Alt's dry tears.

There were clouds now; scudding wispish herds of them racing across the moon above the rose of Sharon: small and torn clouds scurrying in straight flight as though to some appointed urgency, racing their way clean round the earth perhaps to meet the night tomorrow and come to earth then in the fumed, immobile congregation of autumnal river fog. And now, as if because of that not only: earthbound no more, they skimmed along those starry altitudes and left the moon-

washed valley to its chilled, nocturnal brilliance. Dede slept like a stone in the deeps and patchwork shambles of her brass bed's eiderdown. Dede always slept good on clear nights. It was the tarnal, teasing fog that kept her muttering and fitful in her quilts: and even in brief, snatched sleeps it taunted her with dreams and on such shrouded nights she would groan, creaking and cursing, out of bed and go suck half a tin up of cold coffee or a few, gorge-scouring drags of bright hurley from her cherrywood pipe and then go peer out into the mists and perceive that it was—all of it out there— eighteen-ninety as it had been once, was now, and would be always when the fog so appointed it: a fog doing, as does the snow, whatever it wishes with the sorry, daytime shape of things: the fog all white, with shadows and shapes without time, and not a fact in sight; only the everlasting truth of fireplugs miraculously become long dead and well-mourned family pets and the fantasy of traffic meters standing like the thin, austere captains of the vanished steamboats' century. But Dede sleeps now: this clear, this almost noonday, this moonbathed brilliant night in that September. For otherwise she would long have been up, sloshing for her optical dentures in the dusty tumbler by her bed, stomping off in her bare feet to the pantry to throw curses at the night-comer who stood beneath the rose of Sharon now, pelting pebbles against a window of her second floor. The sash flung up, the lead weight rumbled in the window jambs, the glass panes chattered.