The End of the Night

Twelve

I have torn up too much of this. I became too mystic and esoteric. So I had to tear it up and I have lost too much time.

It is going to happen TOMORROW. That’s the biggest word in the world. It’s hung on the back wall of my mind, flashing off and on. I didn’t sleep at all last night. If I can manage it, I’ll stay awake all night tonight too. I sense exhaustion may have certain morale benefits.

The human brain, facing extinction, is an illogical organism. It goes around and around the cage, checking every crack and corner. It refuses on some very primitive level to accept that fact that TOMORROW it is going to be turned off like a light in the attic. It is really and truly going to happen. Nothing can stop it. I must endure a brief ceremonial procession, seat myself in the ugly throne, suffer a few mechanical ministrations, then brace and wait for that special usage of what Mr. Franklin gathered on his kite string. Manmade lightning this time, focused for maximum efficiency. At times I can think of it as though I were going to be an observer, calm and curious about it all. The next moment I remember it will be Me, invaluable, irreplaceable Me, and the sour edge of nausea pushes upward into my throat. I flex my right hand and study it with great care. It is a wonderful, intricate tool, strong, flexible, healthy, self-mending. It has another fifty years of use in it. It seems an inconceivable madness, a grotesque waste, to turn it into cold, dead meat. My eyes move with oiled ease, focusing with an instantaneous precision. What is their guilt, that they should be glazed into eternal stillness?

Flaccid within the trousers of prison twill lies the reproductive sack, obscurely comic, no further anxious labors to perform. The sperm lie sleeping in hidden warmth, remote from any egg, unaware of the imminence of their death and mine. Where is their guilt? Who can tell that one of them might not have created greatness?

In some more sensible world all this innocence will be saved. There will be a table, I expect, and cleverly directed streams of electrons, and careful technicians at work. Guilt, identity, memory — all these will be destroyed. But the blameless body will be saved, and a new identity, a new memory, built into the brain. It will be a kind of death of course, but without all this clumsiness, which is like burning down a house where sickness has occurred.

I am very aware of another thing — and I suppose this is a very ordinary thing for all those condemned — and that is a kind of yearning for the things I will never do, a yearning with overtones of nostalgia. It is as though I can remember what it is like to be old and watch moonlight, and to hold children on my lap, and kiss the wife I have never met. It is a sadness in me. I want to apologize to her — I want to explain it to the children. I’m sorry. I’m never coming down the track of time to you. I was stopped along the way.

Yesterday I tore up page upon page of asinine generalizations about the condition of man. I know nothing about the condition of man. I know they are going to kill me TOMORROW.

I can say a few very obvious things, but I now know them to be true. You cannot know yourself. No man can know himself. No man can detect or define the purpose of his own existence, but it is the dull man who ceases all conjecture.

And there is this, too. We all — every one of us — walk very close to the shadows, to strange dark places, every day of our lives. No man stands in a perfectly safe place. So it is dangerously smug to say, I am immune. No one can tell when some slight chance, some random thing, may turn him slightly, just enough so that he will find that he is no longer in a safe place, and he has begun to walk into the shadows, toward unknown things that are always there, waiting to eat him.

Sandy drove circumspectly through Monroe that long-ago night, and it wasn’t until after he had turned off onto Route 813 that he began to make time again. Speed felt good. I wanted to get far away from many things. I wanted to put a lot of space and a lot of time between me and Kathy. And the salesman. And Nashville.

The world kept changing for us, moving faster toward some unknown climax. I kept trying not to think backward or forward, but to focus only on the moment after moment of actual existence. I could not think of what the end of it would be. It was too late to think of any return to normalcy. I begged more pills from Sandy. It put you way out where nothing bad could ever happen. All your senses were sharpened. You were with the best three people in the world, acquiring stories you could tell when you were an old, old man. It was like being fifteen again, after three cans of beer, eight of you in one car, rocketing home from the beach through the vacation night.

After Sandy banged the brakes on and we came swerving to a stop, the wonderful tableau in front of the headlights, centered in the white glare, was like outdoor theater.

At first the man thought we were going to help, and it is even possible we would have helped had he reacted differently. It was all balanced on the edge of impulse. We had no plan. Everything was improvised. The man — he was tough and husky and scared sick about the girl — pushed it just far enough in the wrong direction, and in a little while, as soon as he and Shack started belting each other, I knew we would kill him. That’s the way things were moving for us. It had become, perhaps in the instant the salesman died, a twisted kind of togetherness. Nan had the greatest need of it. It was a kick that shook her, so that her need had become geometric in its increase, a savage and necessary release for her. Sandy had begun to go the same way, but he was not so far along as Nan. But there was that need in both of them, and suddenly you could sense it. I cannot make any guess about Hernandez. He had only his normal brutish violence, without the emotional-sexual implications. I am not certain about myself. I knew I was one of them. I knew we would kill him. I wanted to be a part of it, but I think that it was partially a desire to put something in on the stack of memory, on top of Nashville.

Had there been more of it later on, I could have gotten onto the same kick-track as Nan and Sandy, possibly. But my need was related all the way back to Kathy in some way that made killing symbolic. I needed to help this man become dead because Kathy was dead. It makes no sense. But it is as close as I can come.

After I had moved in on him, he hit me so solidly just under the ear that the sky spun, my eyes ran and my knees were jellied. It was good to be hit so hard. It called for extra effort. It provided a certain amount of excuse. And I was in it, a part of it, my identity, submerged into the group until, like awakening from a dream, I saw Nan working that knife into him, and saw her face, and it was like looking down into the lowest pit of hell. Blood looked black on her fist and wrist. I raised my foot, put it against his hip, and shoved the body off the back slant of the car into the ditch to get it away from her. She stood, shaking all over, the breath gasping out of her, then stooped to wipe the blade and her hand on the grass of the ditch bank.

The girl was sitting up. She was beautiful.

“The little lady has drawn the lucky number and won the moonlight tour. Bring her along,” Sandy said.

I stepped in ahead of Shack. Nan and I got her onto her feet. She was dazed and docile. In the headlights I saw a lump over her right ear, the blond hair bloody and matted. We got her into the back, in the middle, on my left, between Nan and me. Shack was in front, crouched over, counting the dead man’s money by the light of the dash panel.

“We’re rich!” Sandy crowed when Shack gave him the total.

My knees still felt trembly. The blow I had taken had given me a headache. The knuckles of my right fist were puffy and tender. I was very conscious of the girl beside me, sitting perfectly still.

“One less flannelhead in the world” Sandy said.

“I thought you loved them all, every one,” I said.

“I do, I do, dear boy. God loves them too. He made so many of them. Nan, darling, turn around and keep your creepy little face in that back window. Our new lovely darling will be missed by somebody. I want to pile up those fine, fat miles tonight. Bleat if you see lights moving up on us, Nano.”

“Why the hell did we have to bring her?” Nan demanded.

“Chivalry, dear. Old-fashioned, warmhearted chivalry. She had no transportation and no escort. What else could I do?”

“We need more women,” Shack said.

The girl spoke then. “I want to go home, please,” she said politely. It was a very small, clear, childish voice. I knew I had heard a voice just like that before, and it took me a few moments to remember that it had been at a party where one of those ubiquitous amateur hypnotists found that my date was a very good subject. So he had “regressed” her back to, I believe, the third grade in school. And she had spoken in this same childish voice.

A car passed us, going in the opposite direction, and for a moment I could see her face in the headlights. She was looking at me gravely and politely, but I had the impression she was close to little-girl tears.

“What’s your name, dear?” I asked her.

“Helen Wister.”

“How old are you, Helen?”

“What?”

“How old are you?”

“I’m — almost nine.”

Sandy gave a whoop of laughter and Shack said, “That’s the biggest goddam nine-year-old broad I ever...”

“Shut up!” I told them. “She’s hurt. You can get one hell of a case of amnesia from a blow on the head.”

“My head hurts and I want to go home, please,” she said.

“This is spooky,” Nan announced. “I don’t like it.”

“She could have a pretty bad brain injury, Sandy,” I said.

“Now wouldn’t that be a dirty shame!”

“Hell, what good is she to you? We could dump her in one of these small towns.”

“Very interesting,” Sandy said. “The stratification of society at work. She comes from his own class. He recognizes that at once. So all of a sudden she’s a sister. What’s she done, Kirboo? Touched your heart?”

“Well, what are you going to do with her?”

“I’ll clue you, Samaritan. We keep her aboard. If she gets worse, we’ll dump her, but not in any town, man. If she stays the same or gets better, she’s for fun and games. Right Shack?”

“Fun and games, Sandy. You’re the boss,” Shack said.

“Please take me home!” Helen begged.

“We are taking you home, dear,” I told her. “It’s a long way.”

“How long?”

“Oh, hours and hours. Why don’t you take a nap, Helen? Here.” I put my arm around her, pulled her head onto my shoulder.

“Jesus K. Christ!” Nan said.

“Jealous?” Sandy asked.

“Of a washed-out blonde with the crazies? Hell, no!”

The child-woman snuggled closer. She sighed heavily a few times. As quickly as any child, she slid away into sleep.

We moved swiftly through the night in a whirring silence and then Sandy began, “Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh.”

She wore a woman’s perfume. Her hair tickled my neck. My left arm went to sleep, but I did not want to disturb her. Shack got out the gin bottle. He and Nan were the only ones who wanted any.

We were trapped, all of us, in that small, drumming place. We were united, like survivors of catastrophe, floating down a river on a roof. No matter what happened, it was going to happen to all of us.

Nan suddenly said, “Remember Louie? Remember Louie, Sandy? In Dago?” There was a forced gaiety in her voice. It was a device she often used, this abrupt recollection of things shared, establishing hers as the closest relationship to Sandy.

“I remember that cat,” he said.

“It was fun, Sandy.”

“It was the greatest,” he said in a tone of boredom.

The girl circled in my arm was clean and fresh, and her sleeping breath was humid against the base of my throat. Something stirred in me in response to her helplessness, and yet at the same time I resented her. I had seen too damn many of these brisk and shining girls, so lovely, so gracious, and so inflexibly ambitious. They had counted their stock in trade and burnished it and spread it right out there on the counter. It was all yours for the asking. All you had to do was give her all the rest of your life, and come through with the backyard pool, cookouts, Eames chairs, mortgage, picture windows, two cars, and all the rest of the setting they required for themselves. These gorgeous girls, with steel behind their eyes, were the highest paid whores in the history of the world. All they offered was their poised, half-educated selves, one hundred and twenty pounds of healthy, unblemished, arrogant meat, in return for the eventual occupational ulcer, the suburban coronary. Nor did they bother to sweeten the bargain with their virginity. Before you could, in your hypnoid state, slip the ring on her imperious finger, that old-fashioned prize was long gone, and even its departure celebrated many times, on house parties and ski weekends, in becalmed sailboats and on cruise ships. This acknowledged and excused promiscuity was, in fact, to her advantage. Having learned her way through the jungly province of sex, she was less likely to be bedazzled by body hunger to the extent that she might make a bad match with an unpromising young man. Her decks were efficiently cleared, guns rolled out, fuses alight, cannonballs stacked, all sails set. She stood on the bridge, braced and ready, scanning the horizon with eyes as cold as winter pebbles.

One of these invincible ones slept against me, all weapons discarded for a time. I found her left hand, found her ring finger, felt the small, cool angles of the engagement stone. I wondered about her prey. I sensed that it was not the husky type we’d left dead in the ditch. No, this was one of the very special ones, so she would have had a large choice of game, like a hunter in a game preserve. So she had probably knocked down a trophy head, one who combined most of the advantages the girls of this station sought. He would be amiable, polite, well-educated, tall and “interesting-looking.” He would be witty, but not in any acid way that might inhibit their social life. He would be gregarious without being a jolly-boy full of life-of-the-party routines, because that is in bad taste. He would have that quiet drive, that unobvious ambition, which would take him high and far. His occupation would give them good social status, so he would be in one of the professions most probably, or he might be a junior executive type with a very reliable corporation. And, with all her tools and weapons, she would now have him noosed so firmly his eyes would be bulging. He would be so far gone he would be willing to trade his immortal soul for permanent legal uninterrupted access to her expensive panties.

Not for me, I thought. I shall never be suckered by that cold-hearted routine. And I suddenly realized that I had gone well beyond the point of choice. Even if I changed my mind and decided to fall in step with everybody else, it was now too late. Only in the animated cartoons could a small creature fall off a mountain, look down, register surprise, and climb back up through the empty air to safety.

She woke twice during the long night ride and each time she complained in a sleepy child voice about wanting to be home in her own bed.

Sandy found the place we would stay, shabby dusty cottages at a resort area called Seven Mile Lake. He had a special genius for picking safe places. It was good to hole up. He’d had the radio on a few times, and it sounded as if the whole world was looking for us. The radio told us we had grabbed the daughter of a wealthy surgeon, and she had been planning to marry an architect. We learned for the first time how two witnesses had watched us kill the man. We found out his name was Arnold Crown, and that he had owned a service station. The world told us that we were despicable, heartless monsters, crazed by drugs, on a cross-country slay-fest.

We could not identify ourselves with the people they were describing. Sandy put it in words when he said. “They shouldn’t oughta let people like that run around loose.”

It broke us up.

I had no trouble with the slob woman who rented me the cottage. All she had eyes for was the twenty-five dollars. We got our stuff out of the car trunk and went in and turned some lights on. The bedrooms were off either side of the small sitting room. Nan escorted Helen to the bathroom, with Sandy warning her not to try anything cute with the blond. Sandy and I sat on a sagging couch, leaning back, our heels on a coffee table. Shack stood with the gin bottle and tilted it high, heavy throat pulsing. He lowered it and looked at Sandy. The tension was there, and it was building, and it made the pit of my stomach crawl. Shack’s eyes were small, bright, hooded, vulgar — with long lashes, reminding me of the eyes of an elephant.

“How about it, Sandy? How about it?” he asked.

“Shut up a while,” Sandy told him.

“Sure, Sandy. Sure thing.”

Nan brought Helen back. Gray was coming in the windows, feebling the lights we’d turned on. There is a way a woman stands, and there is a way a child stands. Helen stood, toeing in slightly, chewing the first knuckle of her right hand, plucking at the side of her skirt with the other hand, regarding us solemnly. The look of her made the look of her breasts incongruous, so round against the green of her sleeveless blouse. Her diamond caught the light, refracting sharp glints of color. Her white skirt was of the material I believe is called dacron fleece. It had two high slash pockets, with a large green non-functional button on each pocket. Her green shoes were very pointed, with those tall, spidery heels, tipped with brass.

“Sit down, honey,” Sandy told her. “Join the group.” She sat in a wicker chair, plumping herself down as a child does.

“This isn’t home,” she said accusingly. “You promised.”

“Be a good girl or you’ll get a spanking,” Sandy said.

Nan sat in another chair and pulled her legs up into the chair and watched the scene with a dark and sulky amusement.

Shack moved restlessly, nervously, lifting his knees curiously as he walked, fists balled, face dark and sweating, neck bowed. “How about it, Sandy?” he begged.

I suddenly remembered what he reminded me of. Long ago in a summer camp in Vermont, three of us sneaked away to watch a farmer breed a mare. When we got there, breathless after a long run down the country road, the stallion was in a corral beside the barn. The mare was in the barn, in a box stall. The stallion was pacing back and forth as close to the barn as he could get, ears back, nostrils distended, whinnying and blowing. From time to time he would trot in a curious compact way, lifting his knees high, bowing his neck. I learned much later that this is one of the basic steps of that art of horsemanship known as dressage.

They wouldn’t let us into the barn. But we waited and we heard the stomping of hoofs and the men yelling excited instructions to each other, and the whistling, triumphant scream of the stallion.

“Jesus Christ, Sandy!” Shack said with growing indignation.

“Shut up, monster,” Sandy said. He turned toward me, his blue eyes dancing bright with malicious curiosity. “You had a lot to say in Del Rio, boy. You said you’d come to the end of all crud. You said emotion was something you could do without from here on in. You said nothing meant a damn to you, and nothing ever would. Remember?”

“Certainly I remember.”

“No sentiment, boy. But Nashville gave you the jumps.”

“Did it?”

“Maybe you’re a faker, college boy.” It was the last time he ever called me that.

“How so?”

“You’re just playing a game with yourself, maybe. And inside you’re still loaded with crud.”

“All this talk talk, for God’s sake!” Shack said.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, Sandy,” I said, but I knew which way he was going, and what he was doing, and I didn’t know if I could take it. I just didn’t know.

“Let’s kick over a baby carriage, and see if you’re kidding yourself. All you got to do is say the word, Kirboo, and we can stop it right there. Okay, Shack. Put baby to bed.”

Shack grinned like a shark and whirled toward the girl. “Come on, baby. Come on!” he said.

She looked at him with a childish dubiousness and distaste. He took her by the wrist and pulled her up out of the chair. She tried to pull away from him, her mouth beginning to make the shape of tears to come.

“Come on, doll,” he said, his voice so thickened it was barely comprehensible, and spun her and got a thick arm around her waist, the heavy, hairy hand clamped on slenderness. He walked her with an almost grotesque tenderness toward the open door of the bedroom.

She tried to hang back, saying thinly, “I want to go home. Please, I want to go home.”

I told myself that it didn’t matter a damn to me. I told myself it was just an interesting play on beauty and the beast. I told myself that one more rape in the history of the world was hardly significant. I told myself that she was too dazed to have much knowledge of what was happening to her, and it was unlikely that she would remember any of it. I told myself that people were dying in agony as I sat there. I told myself that I had given up pity and sentiment and mercy. I’d stared at Kathy, gray and shrunken, pasted to the tile floor by her own cooling blood, and that had been the end of all mercy.

They had reached the doorway. Helen had begun to whine in the hopeless way of defeat and fear. Nan chuckled, and the sound of it sickened me.

“You win,” I said to Sandy. “You win, brother.”

He gave one yelping, derisive laugh and said, “No dice today, Shack. Break it off, monster. It’s Kirboo’s baby.”

But, of course, it was too late. We should have known it was too late. Sandy had been testing that blind loyalty, putting an ever-increasing strain on it, always demanding, never giving. And so it snapped.

Shack thrust the girl into the room with such force that we saw her stumble, then heard her fall where we couldn’t see her. He turned, filling the doorway, staring at Sander Golden and seeing a stranger.

“Go to hell!” he said thickly. “It’s mine.”

Sandy bounced to his feet and stepped over the coffee table. “You don’t want me to be mad at you, Shack.”

“Get back. Get back or I’ll kill you, pal.”

I got up and moved slowly, angling toward him, walking on the balls of my feet. He stood with his chin on his chest, eyes flicking back and forth from me to Sandy.

“You do what I tell you to do,” Sandy said softly.

“That’s over,” Shack said. “No more of that.”

And it was all going to blow up, right then and there, in ten thousand pieces. I edged toward a table lamp. The base looked heavy enough.

Nan said, “You damn fools!” and she went by me almost at a run, right at Shack, and for a moment I thought she had the knife in her hand, held low. But she flung her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. “What do you want with somebody who don’t know the score, honey?” she cooed at him.

He tried to pull her arms free, but they were strongly locked.

“Be nice to Nan, cutie-pie,” she murmured.

His face changed. She tugged him out of the doorway. They went awkwardly across the room toward the other bedroom.

“What’s going on here?” Sandy demanded.

“Close your face,” Nan said sweetly, and they entered the other room and banged the door shut.

I went through the doorway. Helen was standing by the window staring at me, tears running down her face, shiny in the first pale light of day. As I closed the door from the inside, I looked out at Sandy. He spread his hands and shrugged as I closed the door and locked it. Nan had saved the group. I couldn’t ask myself whether it was worth saving. Perhaps Helen was. You can go and go until you find the last limit of yourself, and there’s no way to get beyond that.

I went toward her slowly, smiling to reassure her.

“He’s gone, dear. He won’t bother you any more.”

“I’m scared of him. Why won’t you take me home?”

“It’s a long, long trip home, Helen. It’s time to rest up now.”

“Really?”

“Really and truly.”

She tried a small smile, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “All right, then.”

“You better go to bed.”

“I haven’t got any nightie or anything.”

“You better just stretch out, dear.”

“Will you stay here?”

“I’ll stay here. Yes.”

“Okay, then.” She crawled onto the bed closest to the window and stretched out and gave a great yawn and rubbed her eyes. “He knocked me down,” she said in a little voice.

“It won’t happen again. Go to sleep, honey.”

I sat on the other bed, a few feet from her. She had turned toward me, her clasped palms under her cheek. I noticed something about her eyes. I knew that in the case of head injuries, one of the things they look at is the eyes. The pupil of her left eye was visibly larger than the pupil of the right one. I wondered what it meant, how dangerous a symptom it was.

Her eyes closed. Through the soles of my feet I could feel a faint vibration that shook the frame cottage. I could hear the muffled sounds of the mating of Shack Hernandez, a flapping, thudding sound as though some leathery animal had been caught in a trap and now, in a senseless panic, was killing itself with its struggles.

When her breathing was deeper and I knew she slept, I gently removed the woman-shoes from the tired, injured child. I sat near her and watched her sleep all that day, while the sun swung up and over us and down. I smoked cigarettes and dropped them on the cheap, shiny varnish and ground them out with the sole of my shoe. I had no desire for sleep. The stimulant drugs were making me use myself up.

Once, when she had turned, and one hand was free, I reached and took it on impulse, and her fingers tightened on mine. I wondered if sleep was good for a head injury. Several times I watched her closely to be certain she was breathing. Even with lipstick gone and her hair tousled, she was a beautiful woman, full of perfections that revealed themselves, one after another.

The long hours passed. Bright spots of sun came through the chinks of the blinds and moved across the floor, the bed, the girl. Outside the cottage I heard the sounds of summer vacation, the rasp of outboards on the lake, the squalling and shrieking of children, music too far away to be identified, men yelling commands, women yelping with jackal laughter. Several times people walked by, close to the window, and I heard mysterious pieces of conversation.

“... so how d’ya like it, he comes back and he tells me it isn’t twelve dollars any more, it’s up to...”

“... drawing forty a week from the union alia time he was on strike plus the unemployment...”

“... I hope to hell she ain’t gone already. Honest to Christ, Sammy, you never seen such a pair...”

And thrice more during the day the familiar animal was trapped and flapped its foolish life away.

I thought of my curious ambivalence, my schizoid attitude toward the sleeping girl, despising what she represented, yet feeling a protective tenderness which I would have thought impossible for me.

I did not want to think of what would happen to her.

I was standing purposelessly at the window, looking out through a crack in the blinds at a small slice of blue lake when I heard her make a slight sound, and heard the bed creak. I turned around. She was sitting up and looking at me. She had a puzzled look. Her eyes were clear and aware.

“Who are you?” she asked in a woman’s voice.

I sat on the foot of her bed. She pulled her feet away and looked warily at me. “Back to arrogance,” I said. “Back to imperious demands. Ring for the waiter, Helen.”

“Are you trying to make sense?” she asked.

“You’d be very smart to keep your voice down, Helen. Very smart.”

“But who are you? Where am I?” With gingerly fingertips she touched the place where her hair was black-matted with her blood. The swelling was not as great. “Was I in an accident?”

“Sort of an accident. You’re somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Seven Mile Lake, if that means anything.”

“It doesn’t. Was I on a trip?”

“Keep the voice down, please.”

“Why?”

“We’ll get to that. Just accept the fact it’s important.”

She looked beyond me, frowning. “Wait a minute! They didn’t want me to see Arnold, and I shouldn’t have. He was completely mad. I couldn’t communicate. When he started up, I jumped. I could feel myself falling...” She touched her head and winced again. “I did this then?”

“Yes.”

She looked at a tiny gold watch. “Four in the afternoon?”

“Yes. You hit your head last night.”

She stared at me with obvious anger. “My God, do I have to pry all this out of you bit by bit? What the hell am I doing in Pennsylvania?”

“You’re kidnaped,” I told her. It sounded ridiculously melo-dramatic.

“Do you mean that?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“You’re asking my father for money?”

“No. It isn’t that well organized, Helen. There aren’t any special plans. You’re just... kidnaped. We came along and you were knocked out, lying on the road. So we brought you along with us.”

“You were drunk?”

“No.”

“How many of you?”

“Four of us. One is a girl.”

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“That wouldn’t be pertinent.”

She sat, biting her lip, staring at me. I could tell that her mind was working, and I could sense that it was excellent equipment, agile and logical.

“Kidnaping is a very stupid idea. Don’t you think you made a mistake?”

“It’s possible.”

“If it was just... a sort of joke, you could let me go, couldn’t you? If you’re not after money. I’d make sure you didn’t get into any trouble. I’d say... I’d hitched a ride with you.”

“The others wouldn’t want to let you go, Helen.”

“But they’re not here. You could unhook the screen and let me out that window and tell them later that it was the smart thing to do. You do look and sound too bright for this sort of thing, really.”

“You wheedle real well, Helen.”

“Well, if you’re not after money, what good has it done you to lug an unconscious girl around?”

“You weren’t unconscious. You acted like a polite nine-year-old child.”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“It isn’t the kind of thing you make up, is it?”

She stirred uneasily and her face got slightly red. “Did any of you do anything to me when I was like that?”

“Something came close to happening, but it didn’t.”

“Why can’t you let me go?”

I looked directly into her eyes. “They wouldn’t like it and it wouldn’t be a good idea for me either. We killed Arnold Crown.”

She closed her eyes. For long moments she had a pasty color. As the glow of health began to come back she opened her eyes again. “The way you said it, I believe you. But what a foul thing! Why did you do it?”

“That’s a very good question.”

She tensed suddenly and sucked her lips white, and her eyes went round. “Three men and a girl. Are you the ones...”

“We’ve had a lot of publicity lately, Helen.”

That’s when I expected her to fall apart, when the full realization of her situation became apparent to her.

To my surprise she forced a smile. “Then I’m in a hell of a spot. You people don’t have anything to lose, do you?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“So it didn’t make any difference whether you picked me up or left me on the road — whether you killed Arnold or didn’t kill him.”

“No difference at all.”

“Is that what you’re after? That kind of freedom?”

“Lectures I do not need, Miss Wister.”

She frowned. “They know I’m missing?”

“I’d say eighty to a hundred million people know it.”

“And they know... who has me?”

“Yes.”

“What pure hell for my people. And Dal.” She stared at me with obvious conjecture. “All right. I want to get out of this. Is there any chance at all?”

“Hardly any.”

She closed her eyes again, but not for long. “So I’ll be killed. For kicks. Isn’t that the reason you people have?”

“We’re expressing aggression and hostility, miss.”

“What if it were up to you? You alone? It wouldn’t happen then, would it?”

“You’re judging a book by the cover.”

“I’m asking you. Do you have any desire to help me? If you don’t, I’ll have to take any chance I can. It would be the same with me as it is with you — nothing to lose.”

No tears, no begging, no hysterics. Yet a complete awareness of mortal danger. This was a woman. A woman in the same sense that the Spanish call a man muy hombre. A bright unquenchable spirit, the kind that won’t break. Gallantry is a fitting word. You can’t find many of those. I wondered if that architect knew what a wondrous thing he almost acquired.

I found another balk line across my soul, and knew I would help. I was becoming a veritable tower of virtue.

“Maybe I can help. Maybe. But you have to be a hell of an actress.”

“I guess you can say I’ve got a hell of a motivation.”

“We’ll be leaving at dusk. You’ve got to be barely able to move. You’ve got to be semi-conscious. The head injury is getting worse. You’re damn near in a coma, and going deeper all the time. You cannot let yourself respond to anything. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I can do that.”

“When the time is right, I’ll give you a signal of some kind, and then you have to start to die. We’ll be rolling along in the car. I don’t know how the hell to tell you to do it, but make it convincing. Then it’ll be my problem to get you out of the car without injury. It’s the only chance you have.”

She thought it over. “Suppose, because of the way I act, they get careless and give me a good chance to make a run for it. Without high heels, I can run like the wind.”

“It could be okay for you, but bad for them and bad for me. I’ll watch so you don’t get a chance to do it that way. It has to be my way.”

“What if I started screaming this minute?”

“I’d knock you unconscious with my fist. And if you think you’ve picked a good time to start screaming when we’re in the car, the girl with us will have a knife into your heart at the first bleat.”

“What are they like?” she asked me.

“You’ll see.”

“How did... someone like you get into such trouble?”

I smiled at her. “When I was a young girl I got raped by my uncle and ran away from home and I’ve been in this place ever since. You wanna buy me another drink before we go upstairs, Mr. Barlow?”

“You aren’t what you look like, are you?”

“Not lately.”

“But you were, once upon a time.”

“I was?”

“Now it’s the eyes, I think. That’s the wrong part. They don’t fit the rest. It’s your eyes that give me... a strange feeling.”

“And your teeth are so big, Grandma.”

“Please, please help me,” she said.

“I told you I’m going to.”

“It would be such a crummy stupid way to die.”

I heard somebody stirring around at dusk. Then I heard Nan’s voice. Somebody rapped on the door. I unlocked the door and opened it, after signaling Helen to lie back. Sandy looked in and said, “Kiss her awake, sweet prince.”

“She doesn’t seem to want to wake up.”

“Get her up, man!” I looked at him in astonishment. He had snapped the order, but with an obvious uncertainty. He was a little man, posturing, posing, trying to regain lost authority. Last night he had been relieved of command. No matter how hard he strained, he couldn’t get it back. And I suspected that the same thing had happened in all the other groups he had joined during his lifetime. With all his brisk energies Sandy would run things for a little while. Until finally he was pushed and he backed down. And then he would become the group clown. Good old Sandy. He’s a gasser.

I shrugged and went over and shook Helen. She simulated a return of semi-consciousness. I got her up into a sitting position and slipped her shoes onto her slack feet. She mumbled incoherencies. I pulled her up onto her feet and, half supporting her, walked her out into the sitting room.

“Bad shape?” Sandy asked.

“She doesn’t seem any better to me.”

Nan took her and guided her into the bathroom. As they passed Shack he reached out and gave Helen a massive, full-handed pinch on the buttock and winked at me with relaxed, expansive good cheer. “You make it good, doc?” he asked me. He had never been as friendly.

Nan, supporting Helen, looked back over her shoulder at him and pulled her lip up away from her teeth. “Good like you made it, you ox bastard?”

But there was no real rancor in her voice, and Sandy should have sensed that. He said, “I’ll keep the monster tied up so he can’t get to you again, darlin’ Nano.”

“Go chew a pill, you sick spook!” she snapped.

Shack gave a roar of laughter and clapped Sandy on the back. Sandy’s glasses jumped off his nose and swung by one earpiece.

“She found herself a man,” Shack said proudly. “She made a switch. You and Stassen split the blonde, Sandy.”

“Don’t bang my back, you goddam oaf!” Sandy yelled.

Shack banged him again and laughed. Sandy went over and sat down, brooding.

When Nan came out with Helen, the blond girl’s eyes were almost closed, and her head lolled loosely. She was doing well, but she was almost overdoing it. We put the meager luggage in the trunk and got into the car, Nan in front between Sandy and Shack, with Sandy at the wheel.

Within a half hour the big jolt of dexedrine and the other wild range of happy pills had built Sandy back up to his usual level of joyous optimism. He wanted a new car, and he wanted to prove a theory of his. So we cruised a big residential area of Pittsburgh which seemed like damn foolishness to me. When he found what he wanted, he parked a block beyond and went back alone. He said he didn’t need help. Within a shockingly short time he was back with a new Mercury. He said with roosterish pride that he had proved his theory that the last one to get to a private party doesn’t want to block the cars in the drive, so he leaves his keys in the ignition like a good fellow. Hurray for the good fellow.

We brought both cars along. Sandy had another sparkling idea. We found a big auto dump, ran the Buick far back into the clatter, stripped off the plates and threw them into the night.

“Let them figure that the hell out. It’s like confusion, man,” he said. “How’s baby doing, Kirboo?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not so good.”

We had another hot, fast car. We moved east, digging deeper into the night, never missing the little roads that Sandy had looked up and remembered. He had a complete map inside his head, and we were a little light moving along it.

I had to have a thoroughly empty road. If we were rushed by an oncoming car, it could go sour. And finally we were on a road that suited me. I took her hand and squeezed it hard. She squeezed back. And suddenly she began to breathe in a deep, rasping way, articulating each exhalation.

“What the hell?” Nan said, looking around.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she could be dying.”

The great raw breathing went on, very audible over the sound of the motor and the tires and the night wind. It stopped abruptly.

“Is she dead?” Sandy asked.

Before I could answer, the breathing began again, slowly at first and then picking up the previous tempo.

“The next time,” I said angrily, nervously, “it may stop for good, and the last thing I want back here with me is a dead blonde. Let’s leave her the hell off, Sandy. This looks like a good place.”

He slowed the car, then suddenly swung off into a wide and level dirt road. He deftly worked it around until we were heading out, and turned off the lights and the motor. The breathing seemed three times as loud.

“Jesus, that’s a terrible noise,” Shack said. I got out quickly and went around the car and opened the door on her side and got her out. She was completely limp. I got her under the armpits and dragged her. Her shoes came off. I could see them, and the tracks her heels made by the light of a high half moon.

Sandy was beside me. “Where you taking her?”

“Off in the bushes.”

We were talking in whispers. I heard Nan say, back in the car, “Hones’ ta God, Shack, with you it’s a disease.”

And that cut the problem way down. I had been most nervous about Nan and her little knife, and her high delight in using the little knife.

I heard the sound of a brook as I pulled her into the bushes. And suddenly the ground dropped away and the girl and I went crashing and rolling down a short, steep bank into an icy stream. I cursed and hugged my elbow and got up onto my knees, in about five inches of water.

I suddenly realized that the harsh fake breathing had stopped. I got hold of the girl and wrestled her clumsily over to the muddy bank. There was an entirely new quality to her inertness, and I realized that this time it was genuine. She had gone headlong onto the rocks.

“You okay?” Sandy called in a hushed voice. He came cautiously down through the brush.

“Got wet and hit my elbow. Let’s get out of here.”

“Hold it,” he said. He bent over the girl and put his ear on her back. “Heart’s still thumping, man.”

“So what?”

He found a rock the size of a softball and forced it into my hand. “Finish it up, man. Take it all the way.”

I balanced the heavy stone in my hand. I touched the roundness of the back of her head with my other hand, under the softness of her hair.

Sandy made a noise like a chicken.

I turned in a way that partially blocked his vision, and I struck down hard with the rock. I hit the hard mud close to her head. It made a convincing noise that would turn stomachs.

I stood up so abruptly I knocked him back against the slope. “Let get the hell out of here.”

“Is she...”

“Get moving!” I yelled at him. We scrambled up the bank. Sandy kicked her shoes into the brush. Shack and Nan had moved onto the back seat. They didn’t know or care whether the car was moving or standing still. We got back on the highway, and soon we were keening down around the curves of a long and dangerous hill.

A long time later Nan asked, leaning over between us, “Is she dead?”

“Like stone cold,” Sandy said.

“And I’m living,” Nan said.

“She had better legs, man,” Sandy said.

“So where is she? Walking, running?” Nan asked.

She leaned back. We rushed through the small hills, drifted through the silent, ugly, sleeping towns. Our headlights unraveled the patched roads.

“Fee fie fiddly-I-oh. Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh.”

We were with it. We rode right out there on the forward edge of it, like a dog with his nose in the wind. The square world was noplace. We were a fly, and a blind man sought to catch us in his fist.

I have been asleep and I resent most bitterly the waste of the thin edge of time I have left. I would have told all of it, right up to the end, but I guess not much of it is pertinent, not after the time we drove away from the girl. I reached for a paper tray of hamburgers and they snapped steel around my wrists. They were large, tough pros, and when they did look at me, it was the way a doctor might look at an abscess. Cool professional curiosity, plus the innate distaste of one who prefers to look at healthy tissue. Their stare turned me from a man into a thing. Put it another way. Maybe I had turned from a man into a thing, but had not known the transition was complete. Their eyes were cruel mirrors, so I soon learned to stop looking directly at anyone.

There is the temptation to drag this out. But I have said it all. TOMORROW has become TODAY and this is the end of me. This third day of April.

I’ll try to get through what’s left without slamming myself. I don’t think I can. It must be a lot easier to die for something you believe in.