Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 25

Someone had invented a magic time machine which gave men back their youth, and now in the machine Michigan’s all-time football team was playing Notre Dame in a stadium on the moon. Tom Harmon was on the field, and Willie Heston and Germany Schultz were twenty again, and Harry Fannin was all in one piece. Quarterback Bennie Friedman called the signals for my wide sweep to the right, the ball was snapped back, and up ahead a hulking lineman named Oliver Constantine pulled out to lead my interference. The screams of a hundred thousand fans thundered in my ears. “Go, Fannin, go—”

I lifted my face out of the blood.

We went back into the huddle. Ducky Medwick was calling the plays now. Ducky Medwick hadn’t gone to Michigan. On top of which he’d played baseball, not football. Did it matter? It was only a private fantasy anyhow. “Take it again, Harry, we’ll go all the way this time—”

I dropped my face back into the blood.

They shipped me down to the junior varsity, and I couldn’t make first string there either. I sat on the bench and glared at the players who beat me out, like Truman Capote, Liberace, Clifton Webb. I turned in my uniform.

This was ridiculous. Klobb’s studio was less than ten yards away. What would have become of western civilization if a little travel had ever fazed Leif Ericson, say, or Linda Christian? Come on now, Orville, you can get that thing off the ground.

I crawled to the studio. It didn’t take any longer than the voyage of the Pequod. I was carrying Moby Dick on my back and Moby was carrying Captain Ahab on his. Why the hell should I carry Ahab? All he had to complain about was a wooden leg, and I had a wooden head. Splintered. I dragged myself through the door, across a large room which reeked of turpentine, into a bathroom. Ahab, you hab, he hab. All God’s chillun hab, except Harry.

I lay there, not wanting to get up and wondering why I’d thought of Ducky Medwick when I had football in mind. Oh, sure, because I’d seen him get smashed in the skull by a pitched ball when I was a kid. They’d carried him off the diamond and I’d cried because I thought he was dead. But he’d come back to play again.

There seems to be a moral there, Fannin, if you’ve got sufficient wit to find it.

I was staring at a bathtub. I got the faucets turned for the shower, and then I squirmed over the side, flopping. That was ridiculous too. Let’s go, Ishmael, on your feet. The white whale was still on my shoulders so 1 hoisted him also, clinging to a towel rack.

I remembered the revolver Klobb had returned. And my wallet, with all those engraved pictures that ought to have been of Marilyn. I fished them out of my clothes and dropped them onto a mat. My ribs felt as if they were removable also, but I didn’t experiment.

The roof of the john was glass, like the rest of the structure. Jolly. Nothing like a shower under the stars at five in the morning, especially in your best suit.

I sat down on the edge of the tub to let myself drain, like Katharine Hepburn after she fell into the pool in Philadelphia Story. Did Katharine Hepburn fall into a pool in Philadelphia Story? She should have, if she didn’t. It was the first enjoyable vision Td had since Dana dropped that towel.

I limped back into the other room, making squooshing sounds. A big place, a sloppy place, hardly anything to lean on at all. Paintings on stretchers, paints, rolls of canvas, cans of oil, drafting tools, brushes, filthy rags — and what I was looking for on a chest in a corner. A half-full bottle of gin. Sweet, medicinal, London dry gin. Id have my cup of kindness yet.

The bottle wasn’t any harder to lift than an anvil. Could Ducky Medwick have lifted it? Certainly Medwick could have lifted it. Here’s to Medwick.

There was something on a wall near me that might have been a mirror. If it wasn’t a mirror it was a portrait of someone who’d been buried at sea. Whichever it was, I hoped they didn’t let in children who weren’t accompanied by adults.

It was I, ah sadness, it was I — battered as a bull fiddle, bruised as a fig. There was still a trickle of blood from the deepest tear, where the recoil reducer on the Beretta had taken me. To think I’d given them back that magazine, or she wouldn’t have been carrying it — this the unkindest cut of all. My cheeks were raw and swelling. I took another drink, a sorrowful drink, this time for Pistol Pete Reiser of the old Dodgers, who used to run head-first into concrete outfield walls.

There was alcohol in the John, and I bathed the gashes. They would have heard me in the Bronx if I’d had any sensation above my neck. I found gauze and patched the worst of the mess.

I could work my jaws. Maybe Pete Peters was right about that religious awakening in the air — maybe it was a time for miracles, maybe nothing was broken.

Maybe it was time for another drink. Was it? Of course it was. There was nothing else up there for me anyhow, except misery. To Ted Williams, who cracks bones and spits in the face of adversity.

I retrieved my wallet and the Magnum. I put them away, then reached a cigarette out of my shirt. It fell apart in my hands. I could have used a cigarette. Ah, well. I had a nip for Nile Kin-nick of Iowa, a fine halfback who’d crashed in the war.

I wondered what Klobb would do about his showing next week. I cared. I had a drink for Leslie Howard, who’d also crashed, and for General Gordon whose head got hung on a spear. Poor Leslie Howard. I had one for Billie Holliday. They were small drinks but the feeling was what counted. I had a smaller one for Gunga Din, who was a better man than I was, which was decidedly not much of an achievement. I had half of one for Oliver Hazard Perry, just because I liked the name, and then I had the other half for Dred Scott. There were about six drinks left when I heard the noise.

I was near the studio door and I breast-stroked behind it. I could just see across to the roof doorway through the crack.

The door had been pushed toward me. A shadow hesitated along the wall. Maybe it was the Shadow. Who knew? The Shadow knows — heh, heh, heh. The weed of crime bears… or maybe it was someone from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I took one more quick one for Lamont Cranston, just in case.

Never mind the stupid bottle, you cluck, a voice said. Don’t you think maybe it’s about timeyou got the jump on somebody? You’ve been bopped by a Beatnik, cuflFed by a cop, pounded by a pander….

I took the hint. No need to tell Mrs. Fannin’s boy Harry anything a second time, no sir. I reached into my holster.

My son the detective. I’d put my wallet in the holster. I found the gun in the pocket where I keep my wallet on days when I wake up knowing my name.

The shadow advanced an inch or two. I tilted the revolver downward. Water dripped out of the barrel onto my shoe.

I supposed I could always throw it. Although I’d hand-loaded the cartridges myself, a little dampness was not going to make them defective. Never. Nothing defective about this detective. I suppressed a giggle.

But they were still well-sealed cartridges. Cartridges? Hmmm. I broke open the cylinder. Well — sincere old Ivan, he’d really meant for me to shoot myself.

There was still no activity over there. I was crouching now, like Pat Garrett in that room in Fort Sumner in 1881, waiting to lay out poor Billy the Kid. From 1881 to now was seventy-nine years. Billy the Kid had been twenty-one. If he were still alive he would be exactly one hundred years old. I hoped it was Billy the Kid. Most likely he would be sort of sickly, too.

The shadow finally spoke. Just a cautious whisper. “Ivan?”

I let him wait. I had a snort for Joe DiMaggio, the real one.

“You in there, Ivan?”

“Hrlggr,” I said clearly.

Ephraim. Old son of a gun Ephraim, Bard of Beatville. The seersucker Swinburne. He stepped across the sill timidly, paused, then came toward the studio. On little cat feet, like Sandburg’s fog, and as quiet as a Robert Frost snowfall. There was nothing lethal in his hands. No gun, no switchblade. Not even an Oscar Williams Treasury of Mongolian Verse.

“Ivan?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Geoffirey Chaucer.”

“It’s—?”

He drew up short, halfway over. For a minute he wavered on his toes, like a kid caught at the cookie jar. Like an architect of epic odes, espying the esmoked oysters. Oysters were animals, not fish. I hoped they weren’t neurotic about it.

“Het your gands up,” I said.

“Huh?”

I stepped out and waved the gat at him, snarling like the desperate character I was. Dauntless Fannin, ominous as a crocheted doily.

“My God, what happened to—?”

“Ha! Don t ask,” I said. I’ve been suffering, young Turk. Little does the crass world know. Anguish, agony — just wait until I get it written. It’s going to be the greatest spiritual exercise since Peyton Place. I’ve even had visions, all sorts of people I haven’t thought of in — say, listen, do you have any idea whatever happened to Wallace Beery? It just struck me that I haven’t seen him since—”

“What?”

He was shaking his head, frowning at the bottle. “Take a belt,” I told him. “We’ll drink to Sacco and Vanzetti.”

He didn’t want one. Very slowly he started to back away from me. I took a step after him. I stopped abruptly when my ribs took a step in the opposite direction.

“Don’t leave, like,” I told him. “Let’s have a sermon or something.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you, Fannin.”

“Sure you do. We’ll parse sentences together. Do a textual exigesis of The Cantos of Jayne Mansfield. We’ll talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the — hold it right there.”

“You’re flipped, you know that? You better get to a doctor.”

He kept on backing off, a small, homely man, confused and frightened. So why didn’t he stop when I waved the revolver?

“This is a Colt Three-Fifty-Seven, Ephraim. A Magnum. You know what a Magnum is? It could splatter your frail brains from here to Xanadu, cut you off before you finish your first sonnet sequence. Think of it, The Efforts of Ephraim, left undone—”

“I didn’t kill them, Fannin. You know that—”

“Maybe. What the hell — not maybe, let’s say probably. But we still have portentous matters to discuss—”

“Say, I’m serious about a doctor. You look terrible.”

“I do not love thee, Doctor Fell — the reason why, I cannot tell.” I laughed senselessly, cocking back the hammer on the gun. “Enough of idle literacy, Ezra. Leave us converse.”

“You won’t shoot me, Fannin.”

“Won’t I? Ha! I shoot poets just for practice. Bing — smack in the middle of the iambic pentameter—”

He stepped over the sill.

“Damn it,” I said.

“People don’t kill other people,” he said.

“Sure they don’t. How many of your ex-girlfriends are dead who were reading Dylan Thomas within the week? Listen, they shot Gandhi, didn’t they? They shot Draja Mikhailovitch and Private Prewitt. They even shot Eddie Waitkus — you remember, that first baseman—”

“People are good, Fannin. People have beautiful souls.”

“Come back here, Ephraim.”

“You won’t shoot.”

“Come back,” I said. The door closed. I started to laugh again, like a maniac. “Shane,” I said. “Come back, Shane—”

I had one last fast one for Brandon deWilde before I followed him.