The End of the Night

Nine

This morning I have been conjecturing about how long it will take me to be totally gone. By that I mean more than death. I mean the amount of time before no one will give me one single specific thought, no matter how fleeting. In a sense this is a discussion of limited immortality, a very contradictory phrase. Immortality is an absolute, not subject to limitation.

The old man and Ernie will remember me, of course. I think she’ll last longer than he will. She’s pretty tough. She’s forty-seven now, and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she’ll live to be ninety. That will take me a little past the year two thousand. That salesman named Horace said his youngest was eighteen months. I can assume his wife will teach his kids to use our names as curse words, and I will assume that the youngest will remember my name, and live to be ninety, so that extends awareness of Kirby Palmer Stassen up to 2050, approximately. I can’t stretch it and extend it to the salesman’s grandchildren. I suspect it won’t mean a damn thing to them. They will know vaguely that their grandfather was murdered, but that’s all. Taking it to 2050 takes it well beyond the span of anyone I know, of course.

Now consider physical things. Matter cannot be destroyed. It is a curious thing to realize that there is still in existence, somewhere, every cinder I have ever had in my eye, every paring of fingernail and toenail, every stone that has bruised me. My physical being will continue to exist. It will be tucked out of sight in Memorial Grove at Huntstown. It will be a very, very private funeral, I am sure, with no brave stirring words spoken. There will be a marker, of course. Ernie will insist upon that. Something very small, but it will bear the name Kirby Palmer Stassen. I could cheat on this game and say the marble will last a thousand years, but if the name means nothing to anyone who reads it, then I am truly and totally gone. The scandal will stay alive in Huntstown. I think I can assume that there will always be old ladies who recount the black deeds of past generations, so I will stretch a little and say that in 2100 they will still retain some dry morsel of information about this.

As far as possessions are concerned, I imagine Ernie and the old man will get rid of mine as quickly and quietly as possible, diverting them to the anonymity of the village dump and the Salvation Army. Ernie will save a few things, I imagine. Baby shoes. Pictures. But she won’t dare look at them when the old man is around.

The third aspect of this conditional immortality is a chancy thing. The crimes and the way they were done and the trial have, I suppose, some meaning to sociologists. They stimulate themselves with case histories. I shall appear, I am sure, in some laborious texts. I will doubtless be called K. S. or Kirby S. or perhaps simply S. But in this game I can count that, because they will be discussing me. This journal I am writing, should it get into the right hands, might possibly cue a very exhaustive study. Yet, in most cases, these books die when the professor who insists his students buy them dies. On that basis I can assume a half-life only until — say — the year 2000. But there is an imponderable here which cannot be measured. It is possible that my case might be written up by someone capable of turning out a classic. If it is very, very good, if it is a work of art, it could well last three hundred years. I would say that would be the outside limit, due to the continuing change in the language. So genius is my only hope of outliving gossip. This could take me up to 2260, a very science-fictiony sort of date. And on one day in that year the last man will read of me, of a crime three hundred years old, and discard the last book, and then I will be gone as completely as though I had never lived at all. The final ultimate rest.

Isn’t three hundred years a vast span of time? It is one ten millionth of the estimated life span of the planet to date. Or it is the same ratio as is three seconds to one full year. And on the same scale, my life span has been one quarter of one second.

Riker Deems Owen came in at the end of the morning and did his usual splendid job of boring me wretched. At least, this time, he spared me the presence of the nubile, self-conscious Miss Slayter. They took me down to the carefully engineered little conference room to meet with him. We talk into microphones and are separated by two thicknesses of bulletproof glass. He seems quite unaware of having made a thorough ass of himself in court. He is a pompous, pretentious, slack-witted little man. He spoke today of the complexity of appealing this case, of his hopes of obtaining a stay of execution. I suspect constant pressure by my male parent. It is useless, of course. Riker Owen knows it and I know it, but he beams at me in a glassy way in an effort, I suppose, to build up my morale. One can only exist in places like this when all hope is gone. Hope is an ennervating weakness that makes adjustment impossible.

He said again that they would like to see me, Ernie and the old man, and that it could be arranged, but once again I told him that it was not my pleasure to see them. It could not possibly do any of us any good. He asked if I would write, at least. I told him to tell them that I am well and in reasonably good spirits, that I am given anything within reason that I ask for. I told him that I am writing a record of my experiences and that I have been assured that it will be passed along to them after I have been put to death.

Right here is as good a time as any to insert my personal note to you, Ernie and Dad. I do not expect you to understand all this I am writing. I do not expect you to try to understand me. I have very little understanding of myself. You could read it and save it, and one day you might find a very wise man, someone you can trust, who will read it and tell you why all this happened, and tell you that in most basic ways I am no different from the sons of your friends. All of them are, potentially, exactly like me. They have been favored by the enduring of lesser crises.

Let me say also that I am not trying to wound you through frankness. Were I to write only what I suspect you might wish to read, there would be no point in writing this at all.

I had carried my account as far as Chubby’s Grill on Route 90 on the outskirts of Del Rio. I have devoted a lot of time and space to the Kathy Keats episode. It is not an episode, or an aside, or a digression. What happened there, to her and the relationship between us, is close to the very heart of all that came after.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Sandy Golden had jeered at me, but not in a way that made me angry. It was in the tone of his voice, a sort of lift of nervous excitement.

I smiled over toward the dingy corner where the voice had come from, then bought a bottle of cold ale at the bar and carried it over, ale in one hand, suitcase in the other.

“Every college boy likes to be recognized immediately as a college boy,” he sad. “It’s like scratching a dog behind the ear. Have you been dude ranching, man? You aren’t wearing your Marshal Dillon threads.”

“It’s a new kind of ranch kick, man,” I told him. “Nobody wears anything. They kept us on health food. You had to carry your own horse.”

“Sit, college boy,” he said. “Meet Nan and Shack. What’s your name?”

“Kirby Stassen.”

“Sit, Kirboo, and we’ll talk up a storm. I’ve fallen among dull comrades. I’m Sander Golden, poet, experimenter, cultural anthropologist. I dig the far pastures of the spirit. Sit and browse.”

I sat. My eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Shack was an ugly-looking monster. Sander Golden was a soiled, jumpy and amusing phony, a little older than the rest of us, close to thirty I decided. His heavy glasses were repaired with tape, and sat crooked on his thin nose. His teeth were not good and he was going bald. Nan was a sulky, sultry broad with too much hair and a practiced way of staring directly into your eyes. It was a corner table with four chairs.

In trying to write this down, I find that there is one special problem I cannot solve. I cannot put down the unique flavor of Sandy’s conversation. When I try to put down his words, they sound flat. His mind with always racing ahead of his words so that at times he was almost incoherent. And there was a flavor of holiday about him. That’s the best word I can find. He was living up every minute, enjoying hell out of it, and he pulled you along with him. You were certain he was a ludicrous type, and you kept wondering what he would say and do next. He was ludicrous, but he was alarming too. He was making up his own rules as he went along.

They had a bottle of tequila añejo on the floor. Sandy and the girl were drinking it very sparingly out of little porcelain sake cups which had come out of his beat-up, bulging rucksack, I found out later. Shack was belting it down. I bought a house setup and, on invitation, started belting along with him.

Shack and Nan took no part in the conversation. They stared at me from time to time without approval. I was the outsider. And, way in back of all Sandy’s effusiveness, was a disdain which also marked me as one who was not of the group. I was a sample of the outside world, and they were examining me.

The conversation with Sandy spun in a lot of dizzy directions. He was showing off, I knew, and I was waiting for a chance to trap him. I didn’t get it until he got onto classical music. Do not ask me how we got onto that. I remember dimly that the conversation went from Brubeck to Mulligan to Jamal and then jumped back a century or so.

“All those old cats borrowed from each other,” he said. “They dug each other and snatched what they liked. Debussy, Wagner, Liszt — hell, they admitted taking stuff off Chopin. Take that Bach character. He lifted from Scarlatti.”

“No,” I said flatly. The tequila was getting to me.

“What do you mean — no?”

“Just plain old no, Sandy. You missed the scoop. Vivaldi influenced Bach, if that’s who you’re thinking of. Antonio Vivaldi. Alessandro Scarlatti was the opera boy. He influenced Mozart, maybe. Not Bach.”

He sat as still as a bird on a limb, staring at me, then suddenly snapped his fingers. “Scarlatti, Vivaldi. I switched wops. You’re right, Kirboo. What goes with education? I thought all you types learned was Group Adjustment and Bride Selection.” He turned to the others. “Hey, maybe I got somebody to talk to, you animals. Shack, hand me the sack.”

Shack bent and picked the rucksack off the floor. Sandy held it in his lap and opened it. He took out a plastic compartmented box. It was about eight inches long, two inches deep, four inches wide, with six compartments in it. The compartments were almost full of pills.

He looked at his watch, took two pills out, two different ones, and pushed them over in front of Nan. She took them without comment. He put two aside for himself. Then he selected three and pushed them over to me. One was a small gray triangle with rounded corners. One was a green-and-white capsule. The third was a small, white, round pill.

“Eat in good health,” he said.

I was aware of how intently the three of them were watching me. “What are they?”

“They’ll put you way out in front, college boy. They’ll get you off the curb and into the parade. They won’t hook you. Miracles of modern medical science.”

If I had anything left to lose, I couldn’t remember what it was. I washed them down with tequila. “You’ve got a supply there,” I said.

Nan joined the conversation for the very first time. “Chrissake, he had those prescription pads in L.A. and any time anybody goes any place, they got to hit a new drugstore for Doc Golden. He papered the town.”

“In old Latin,” Sandy said, patting the box. “It gives me this deep sense of security.”

“What’ll they do to a square?” Nan asked.

“That’s what we’re checking out, man,” Golden told her.

As we talked I waited for something to happen. I didn’t have any idea what to expect. It all happened so gradually that I wasn’t aware of the change. Suddenly I realized that my awareness of everything around me had been heightened. The golden color of the sun outside, the stale beery smell of the low-ceilinged room, Nan’s bitten nails, Shack’s thick hairy wrists, Sandy’s eyes quick behind the crooked lenses. The edges of everything were sharper. The edge of my mind was sharper. When Sandy talked I seemed to be able to anticipate each word a fraction of a second before he said it, like an echo in reverse. There was a steady tremor in my hands. When I wasn’t talking, I clenched my teeth so tightly they hurt. When I turned my head it seemed to be on a ratchet, rather than turning smoothly. I had a constant butterfly feeling of anticipation in my gut. And everything in the world fitted. Everything went together, and I knew the special philosophical significance of everything. Sometimes I seemed to see the three of them through the wrong end of a telescope, tiny, sharp, clear. Then their faces would swell to the size of bushel baskets. Shack was an amusing monster. Nan was loaded with dusky glamour. Sandy was a genius. They were the finest little group I had ever met.

And the talk. My God, how I could talk! The right words came, the special words, so I could talk like poetry. I didn’t need the tequila. I got onto a talking jag. I put my trembling fists on the table and, leaning forward, I told them the Kathy story, all of it, and I knew as I was telling them that it was a pitiful shame there was no tape recorder there so it could all be saved. I told it all, and I finally ran down.

“He’s really humming,” Sandy said fondly.

“Too much D?” Nan suggested.

“He’s big. He can use a heavy charge. So you’re headed no place at all, Kirboo?”

“No place, on my own time, free as a fat bird,” I said. My ears were ringing. I could hear my heart, like somebody hammering on a tree.

“We’ll go to New Orleans,” Sandy said firmly. “I’ve got wild friends and playmates there. It’ll be a long ball. We’ll scrounge a pad and live fruitfully, man.”

“This party gets bigger, we can rent a Greyhound,” Nan said sourly.

“Look at all he can learn,” Sandy said. “We can take his mind off his problems, Nano. Where’s your milk of human kindness?”

“We don’t need him,” Nan said.

Sandy, quick as light, thumped her so hard on top of the head with his fist that for a moment her eyes didn’t track.

“You’re a drag,” he said, grinning at her.

“So we need him,” she said. “You don’t have to clop me on the skull, man.”

“I can let Shack do it, you like that better, doll.”

I didn’t know at that time where she kept the knife, but it appeared with a magical swiftness, clicking, the blade lean, steady, pale as mercury, ten inches from Shack’s thick throat.

“Hit me one time, Hernandez,” she said, barely moving her heavy mouth as she spoke. “Just one time.”

“Aw, for Chrissake, Nan,” he said unhappily. “Put it away, huh. I haven’t done nothing.”

There were two customers at the bar. The bartender came around the end of the bar and over to the table. “No knives, hey,” he said. “No knives. Don’t give me trouble.”

As Nan folded the knife and lowered it below the edge of the table, Shack stood up. There was a hell of a lot of him to come up so quickly and lightly. “You need trouble?” he asked.

“No. That’s what I was saying, fella. I don’t want trouble.” He turned away. Shack caught him in one stride, caught him by the forearm and spun him around.

“I got mixed up,” Shack said. “I thought you were asking for trouble.”

The man was big and soft. I saw his face turn suddenly gray and sweaty. I didn’t understand until I looked at Shack’s hand on the man’s arm. Shack seemed to be holding him casually. But his iron fingers were deep in the soft, round arm. The man’s knees sagged and he forced himself erect with an effort.

“No... trouble,” he said in a weak, gasping way.

“That’s nice,” Shack said. “Okay.” For a moment his face was contorted with effort. The man gave a faraway bleating sound and closed his eyes and sagged down onto one knee. Shack hauled him up, gave him a gentle shove toward the bar and released him. The man tottered back to the bar. Shack sat down.

“The philosophy of aggression,” Sandy said. “She got sore at me and took it out on Shack who took it out on fatso. Tonight, when he gets home, he beats up on his old lady. She kicks the kid. The kid kicks the dog. The dog kills a cat. End of the line. Aggression always ends up with something dead, Kirboo. Remember that. It’s the only way to end the chain. She put the knife in Shack’s throat, that would have ended it. We’re all animals. Let’s get out of here.”

We went out into a low slant of sunlight. I had the cheap, shiny, Mexican suitcase. Sandy Golden had his rucksack slung over one shoulder. Nan carried a large, sleazy hatbox, a drum-like thing covered with red plastic stamped in an alligator pattern. Shack had his few possessions in a brown paper bag. The world was bright, aimless and indifferent. We hitched for an hour. There were too many of us. It didn’t seem to matter. Nan sat on my upended suitcase. Sandy talked about the sexual implications of the design of the American automobile. In the last light of the day an old man in a stake truck stopped. He had the three of us get in back and he got Nan in front with him. He dumped us in Brackettville, thirty miles away. He had to turn north there. We ate questionable little hamburgers in a sour café.

I had been with them long enough to sense the undercurrents between them. Shack was stalking Nan with a relentless patience, with implacable purpose. When he moved near her, his neck looked swollen. She was aware of it, and so was Golden. But Shack was stopped just short of savage directness by his pathetic desire to please Sandy in all ways. It wasn’t the knife stopping him. I’d seen him move. He could have cuffed it out of her hand before she could have used it. The focus of his desire was so strong it was like a musk in the air.

We found a place in Brackettville. A dollar and a half a bed, Moldering little eight-by-ten cabins faced in imitation yellow brick, each one with an iron double bed that sagged like a hammock, one forty-watt bulb, one stained sink with a single faucet, one chair, two narrow windows, one door. Cracked linoleum on the floor. Outhouse out back. Sheets like gray Kleenex. Nails in the studding for coat hangers. The Paradise Cabins.

There were six cabins and we were the only trade. We took three. Four and a half dollars for three beds. We sat around Sandy and Nan’s cabin — Shack on the chair, Sandy and me on the bed, Nan on the floor. We talked. Sandy finally doled out pills.

“These all by themselves are death, man,” he said. “You go down six feet under, where the worms talk to you.”

We broke it up. I was in the middle cabin. I wasted no time piling into the sack, trying not to think about bugs. I fell away so fast I didn’t even hear her come in. I woke up with a great start when she wound herself around me, saying in an irritable, conversational tone, “Hey! Hey, you! Hey!” She jostled me insistently.

I had fallen so deeply into sleep so quickly that time and place were out of joint, and with an almost unbearable joy I put my arms around Kathy Keats and found her mouth with mine. But the lips were wrong, and her textures were wrong, and her hair had a musty smell. Kathy was gray and dead, and as I remembered that, everything else clicked into place.

I took my mouth from hers and said, “Nan?”

“Do you think it’s for Chrissake little Bo Peep,” she said in a sleepy, sulky voice, administering a caress as mechanical as any song lyric.

“I didn’t know you cared, kid.”

“Shut up, will you? Sandy said pay you a visit. So here I am and so get it the hell over with, will you, without all the conversation.”

Had I not awakened thinking she was Kathy, it would have been impossible. But it was not, and so we got it the hell over with because it seemed easier than sending her back with a no-thanks message for Sandy. With meaningless dexterity, she made it very quick indeed, and rolled out and, in the faint light, stepped into her slacks. She’d left her blouse on.

“Tell Sandy thanks,” I said, with rancid amusement.

“Tell him yourself, sometime,” she said, and the screen door creaked and banged shut as she left. Before I could enjoy my own bitterness, I fell back into sleep.

I learned Sandy’s special motive on Monday when it was almost noon and we were a mile east of Brackettville on 90, swinging high and clear on Dr. Golden’s encapsulated joy, thumbing the cars that whined by, trailing dust devils. Sandy reached over and patted Nan on the firm seat of her slacks in a proprietary way and said, “Did this chick do you right when I sent her to you last night, Kirboo, or did she drag?”

“She... she was fine,” I lied, feeling uneasy.

And I had to turn and look at Shack. His face had turned a swollen red and he was staring at Sandy, and looking as if he had lost his last friend. He looked as though he would break into tears.

“Jeez-Chri, Sandy!” he said. “How come it’s okay for him, but you never...”

“Don’t we have to teach this upstanding young man all about life and reality, Shack? Would you deprive him of an education?”

“I figured you just didn’t want to share, and that was okay, but if you’re going to do like that, I’m going to...”

“You’re going to what?” Sandy demanded, moving close to Shack.

“I just meant...”

“You want to go to New Orleans, or do you want to go back to Tucson, Hernandez?”

“I want to come along, Sandy, but...”

“Then shut up. Okay?”

Shack gave a long and weary sigh. “Okay. Anything you say, Sandy.”

The scene had elements of the bull ring in it. Hernandez could have snapped Sandy’s spine in his hands. The girl was the cape, spread in front of the black bull, then whipped gracefully away as he charged. I knew Sandy was testing his own strength and control. But when the scene was over, Shack looked at me in a way that made me entirely uncomfortable. Up until then he had been indifferent toward me. But now I could sense that he wanted to get those big hands on me.

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, slightly 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 starve.”

“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 split up and you and me, honey, we could make it all the way through 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 learn, 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 smile 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?”

“Well, 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 telling 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 license number when I do. Is that a good deal?”

“Throw me your wallet, 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 slightly 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 flashlight. 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, trembling 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 families. A few weeks later three of us went off to private schools. Had we all stayed in Huntstown High, we might have given ourselves away.

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 slid 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, wondering 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 nightmare 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 roll, 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 little 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 slightly 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 we’ll find a spot to trade cars, and well 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 town 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 like.”

“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, sun-burned 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 corner. 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.”

About a hundred and fifty miles later we crossed on over into Arkansas. The Olds was running hot. There was a line of gray along the horizon in the east.

Sandy checked the maps again and we headed more directly east. Somewhere west of Eldorado, Arkansas, with the misty sun high, we turned off on a dusty track that faded away in dense woodland. Sandy slept in the front seat, Nan in the rear seat. Shack and I stretched out on opposite sides of the car. Birds and insects made sleepy midday noises. The forest floor smelled sweet and loamy. I felt a thousand taut springs unwinding, felt the world fading. Just as I tilted down into sleep I wished that it was a sleep that would never end.

Sandy nudged me awake with his foot when the day was almost gone. There was an icy stream a hundred feet away. We used the cold water to freshen up and scrape the stubble off. Nan went a dozen feet downstream, stripped, soaped herself, squatted in a shallow pool and rinsed, not knowing or caring that Shack did not take his eyes off her for an instant. When she pulled her slacks on again he made a low moan, very deep in his throat, half growl and half moan.

I had glanced at her a few times as she bathed there. The tilted sunlight came between the trunks, dappling the grass, her haunches and the black pool. With that heavy crop of hair and the faint and dusky shadow of the pelt that ran down the cleft of her back, she could have been Prehistoric Woman, a diorama in a museum of natural history. Our modern culture had put red paint on her lips, metal in her mouth, and a puckered surgical scar on her belly. But all the rest — the slightly brutish cast of features, the S curve of waist into hip, the saffron nipples, the pubic pyramid, the elemental savageness — these were unchanged across fifty thousand years.

I could not want her. She had been tossed to me, the way you flip a pack of cigarettes to a friend, and it had been nothing. Once you have accustomed yourself to drinking acid, sour red wine is like stale water on the tongue. I sensed, however, how sublimely suited to each other were Nan and Hernandez. Sandy called them the animals. They were displaced in time. They both belonged in prehistory, back in callous violence, roaming the raw land, mating with random fury, tearing at each other, charring the bloody meat of the latest kill in the fire in the mouth of the cave.

They were not for this time. But their inadequacy was not the same as Sandy’s and mine. There are the constitutional inadequates, whose bodies have too frail a grasp on life. And the mental inadequates, trapped back in their dim minds. Sandy is a moral and social inadequate, unable to cope with the folkways and structures of his culture. I am an emotional and spiritual inadequate — but this can be said in a much simpler way: I have no capacity to love. A man who cannot love is like one of those machines that jokester mechanics build as a gag. Wheels go around and lights flash and plungers go up and down, and it makes a ratchety noise, but it has no purpose. A machine without a purpose, once it is out of control, is dangerous. Once I came very close to being able to love. But that, of course, was Kathy. After Kathy the pointless machine began to work with greater speed and fury...

As we drove east into the Arkansas dusk, I felt dull, wooden, spiritless. I felt as if all the furniture of my mind had been reupholstered in dusty black velvet. I took a hundred small naps, and in the periods of going to sleep or awakening, their voices sounded metallic and unreal over the rolling thunder of the Olds.

I was asleep when they picked up a better car, a red-and-white Chevrolet, a new one, in some small city in Arkansas. They picked it up in the parking lot of a private club. I vaguely remember transferring from the Olds to the newer car. And I can remember Sandy relating their adventures in his taut, tumbling voice.

He was calling Shack a monster. In sneaking through the dark and crowded parking lot of the club, hearing the music coming from the club, they had come across a car where a couple was making love in the back seat.

“Both of them bagged,” Sandy said. “So before I can move a pinky, the monster opens the rear door, takes that stud by the nape of the neck, pulls him out, pops him one time, drops him and kicks him under the car. The woman is saying in a little whiny voice. “Wheresha go? Arthur! Arthur! Whereya, baby?’ So the monster says, ‘Here I am!’ and he dives in there like a fullback going over center. In about five seconds that broad realizes something brand-new had come into her life, and she didn’t like any part of it, man. She starts yelping like she’s being killed, so the monster thumps her one too. While this is going on, I’m pulling Arthur out from under the car and checking him over. Fifty-eight bucks, but no keys. When the monster got out, I had him pick Arthur up and chunk him back in there with her. When the lights come on for those love bugs, they’re going to be confused like. The next car I checked was this one, and it had the keys in it.”

So now, I thought, we add rape to the list. After Horace, it was about as serious as disorderly conduct. After Horace there was no worse place you could go.

I slept again. I remember waking up when Shack and Nan were sleeping. Sandy was pushing the Chev hard. I saw the glow of the dashlights against the small round knob of muscle at the corner of his jaw. The dark land wheeled by. He was singing. He sang that part that comes after you finish singing “I’ve been working on the railroad.” But he sang only one part of the ending, over and over. “Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh. Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh.” Over and over, endlessly. Listening, I realized I had heard him doing it before. Now it has become a part of all the memories of that time. The night and the running roar of the car, and Sandy’s voice, like the sound track of an art movie.

Sandy shook me awake in the predawn light. We were parked outside the office of a motel near Tupelo, Mississippi. “We got to have the services of the clean American yout’,” he said, “he who by virtue of his shining countenance is above suspicion. Rise and give me that scout master beam, Kirboo.”

After I got out and yawned and rubbed my face and stretched, I was able to be the responsible errand boy. The red neon vacancy sign was lit, and a light over the night bell. After three long rings I heard somebody stirring. A very pregnant dough-faced blonde in a red satin housecoat opened the door, stared stupidly at me and said, “Yah?”

I signed us up. Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Sanderson, Mr. Kenneth Tynan and Mr. Theodore Sturgeon. It shows poverty of invention, but I plead sleepiness. Much later this gave the prosecuting attorney a wonderful opportunity to display his considerable talent for sarcasm.

I paid her eighteen dollars for two twin-bed doubles. It was a fraud motel, glossy and landscaped on the outside, full of borax furniture and junk plumbing on the inside. I almost fell asleep standing up in the cranky shower. By the time I got into bed, Hernandez was snoring like a snare drum. It didn’t bother me a bit.

We were back on the road just as the sun went down. Sandy had doled out pills which lifted us up and out and away, glowing with induced joy, floating on numbered clouds, making bad jokes. Even that tension between Shack and Nan was gone, and they were unexpectedly animated. She sang some dirty little French songs a sculptor had taught her, her voice husky and untrue. Sandy did a long imitation of Mort Sahl.

But we were on our way through Nashville. I am not going to write the Nashville episode into this record. The newspaper did enough chop-licking over it. It was a sick, dirty business, pointless, cruel and bloody. This is, I suspect, as close as I can come to apology. I cannot say that the business of Horace Becher had any particular grace or style. But it had a flavor of some kind that the Nashville affair did not. The Nashville affair was symptomatic of sickness and desperation. I took part in it directly. From then on Sandy dropped the “college man” routine. He brought it up one more time after that, during the Helen Wister thing, but that was all. In Nashville I won my dirty spurs.

Also, in Nashville, I learned something about us, the four of us. I learned that we were going to be caught. I had been thinking that we might get away. We might get to New York and split up. But Nashville demonstrated that we weren’t going to let ourselves get away. When things started looking too easy, we would compulsively compound our problem and intensify the search. Even if Sandy had not dropped and lost Horace Becher’s pistol at the scene of the killing, I suspect the two would have been tied together. But he practically handed it to them, even though they took a long time to check it out. His losing it there was part of that same compulsiveness too, I believe.

Nashville was a pointless gesture of hostility, a dirty word yelled at the world. It was without style or meaning. Pigs are slaughtered with more dignity. After Nashville we were committed all the way. Even Sandy was slightly chastened. We discussed splitting up, and said it was a good idea, and we would split up later. But I think we all knew we’d never get the chance, and, in some obscure, perverse way, didn’t want the chance.

Auto theft, rape, kidnap, murder. They were big words. I couldn’t make them real in my head. They were things other people did. The things I did were different, because I was Kirby Palmer Stassen, unique. For me the words were different. I was not engaged in a career of crime; I had embarked on a program of social experimentation. After it was all over, I would lecture to thoughtful groups, electrifying them with my pertinent observations on the meaning of life and the meaning of death.

When we had tumbled back into the car in such great haste, Nan and I had gotten into the back seat. I think we must have been twenty miles from Nashville when she did a curious thing. I think she knew from my silence that I was deeply troubled, and it is even possible that in the shadowy recesses of her spirit there was the dim urge to give comfort. She picked up my hand, my right hand, reaching across me to take me by the wrist, and she pulled my hand over and slipped it into the V of her blouse and pressed it tightly against her warm, scanty breast. The slight stir of the nipple against my palm was as distasteful as though I trapped some sluggish insect there and it moved slowly in panic. And then I remembered, too vividly, the fatal thing my hand had done. My window was halfway down. I pulled away from her, found the electric button that put it down the rest of the way, leaned far out and gouted vomit into the soft, warm night. The hard wind snapped at my cropped hair and whipped the tears out of my eyes. When I sat back I was weak and dizzy. No one made any comment. Shack dug the final bottle of tequila out of Sandy’s rucksack. Sandy didn’t want any. Shack and Nan and I passed it back and forth until we had killed it. Nashville then was much more vague, but I knew it would be back, unbearably vivid. I knew that that final scream would sound forever in a closet in the back hall of my brain.

The reverend came again today. As time grows shorter they seem to be sicking him onto me with increasing frequency. The governor has signed the execution warrant. Today I told him I was far too busy to grant him the standard courtesy of ten minutes of my time. I said I wanted to be certain I would complete this journal. He looked at me severely and told me it would be more fitting if I devoted the time to the nurture of my immortal soul. I told him that I agreed heartily, and I was looking for my immortal soul in my own fashion, and half expected to find it somewhere on these pages, and it would probably be a gray, sly little fellow in a gnome hat, peering maliciously out from behind a bad word. He went away, shaking his ecclesiastical head.