The Legacy by Alan Warren

It was a crazy offer, and only a madman would accept it!

I still get gooseflesh thinking of it.

It began in Le Bouc, a French restaurant a stone’s throw from Dallas — that is, if the stone were encased within a guided missile. My traveling companion and I had sat down for a drink, having heard the bar prices were reasonable. I doubt we had twenty dollars between us.

It was a blistering hot day, the kind that numbs the senses and fries the brain to the texture of a fine Swiss cheese, and the reason most Texans wear wide brimmed ten gallon hats had just occurred to me: the brims protected the wearer’s forehead from the sun’s fearsome rays. Of course!

“The armpit of the nation,” Landry suddenly announced, apropos of nothing. He spoke so loudly I glanced around to make certain no one had overheard. I was suddenly aware that both of us were conspicuous non-Texans by our lack of hats, Levi’s, and rangy drawls, and were, for that reason, interlopers.

“What makes you say that?” I said, and instantly regretted asking, realizing it would lead into one of Landry’s monologues filled with machismo, seasoned with chauvinism, and leavened with the occasional off-color remark or description.

“Because these sonsabitches have all the money in the world, and they flaunt it,” he said.

“Do I detect a note of jealousy there?”

“Damn straight. You know what I could do with the kind of money in this state? This drifting around is for cockroaches. If I had one tenth the money of one of those sonsabitches in Dallas, I’d plant my ass down in Big D and stay, y’know? Get me one of those estates with a winding driveway so long you run outta gas just driving in from the front gate. Y’know?”

“I know,” I said. I’d heard this diatribe before, and although it changed slightly in the re-telling, it was essentially the same tirade I’d heard during our travels through Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. And it always began after a drink, or two, or three. Up until then, Landry was a pleasant enough companion.

“I’d do anything to get that kinda dough,” Landry was saying. “Anything. I wouldn’t care who I’d have to screw.”

The waiter drew abreast of our table. “Another?” he asked.

I was about to say no. My chamois-thin wallet wouldn’t permit it, but Landry rumbled before I could speak. “Yeah, two more.”

The waiter nodded, took our empty glasses away, and left.

I could have questioned the wisdom of ordering drinks when our pocketbooks were rubbed raw and we had little hope of getting back to California, but decided against it. Landry was again speaking of his obsessions, and he was a dangerous man to cross, even verbally.

“These sonsabitches think money’ll buy anything, and maybe they’re right. Truthfully, I couldn’t stand living here. Too hot, for one thing. And the women — most of ’em are high priced whores.”

“Are you talking about Dallas,” I asked, “or Texas in general?”

Landry shrugged. “The whole damn South. I couldn’t stand being here more than a couple of days. You think we could—”

The waiter returned with two double bourbons on a tray. He set them down before us, and before I could pay for mine Landry dropped a five dollar bill, folded lengthwise, on the tray. “Keep the change,” he said. The waiter stared down a moment, looked as if he were about to comment and thought better of it, and carried the tray away.

“Thanks,” I said, sipping my drink. I was about to comment on it when I froze.

Academicians will tell you there is no such thing as a sixth sense, but they in turn will proffer no explanation for the unmistakable sensation any animal, including man, experiences when he is being watched. He may not see, smell, hear, taste, or touch the observer, but he is nonetheless aware of his presence. I was thus fully cognizant of the rangy Texan standing directly behind me before I turned and stared up at him.

He was Texas personified. His black Stetson, string tie, and enormous stature spoke of oil and wild Mustangs and flashy bankrolls. There was even something about his stance that suggested the wide open spaces: it was not arrogant or showy, merely self-confident. I would have been willing to wager, without even glancing down at his feet, that he was wearing a tall pair of boots with spurs. And I would have been right.

“Y’all have to excuse me,” he said, and the drawl was thick enough to cut with a pearl-handled knife, “but I was listenin t’some of what yuh was sayin. Don’t git the idea ah’m the kinda fella listens in on private conversations, but I caught yer general drift, an it kinda intrigued me. Yuh said there’s a general feelin roun these parts that money’ll buy anythin’.”

“That’s right,” said Landry. He did not look embarrassed or even surprised. I had to give him credit for a certain bravery: he was not one to step back from a challenge or an obstacle. He was hot headed, certainly, but he was not without the courage of his convictions. You had to give him that.

The stranger pushed his hat back, exposing a high, lined forehead and, above it, a mane of thinning gray hair. He might have been a retired Western star, or a champion rodeo rider, or a cardsmith. But I had a premonition he was none of these things.

“Well, that may be the feelin, but y’all excuse me if I tell yuh there’s at least one thinget money cain’t buy. No, sir. And that’s courage.”

“Courage?” Landry repeated.

The Texan nodded, then glanced from Landry to me and asked, “Y’all mind if I sit down here?”

Landry shook his head and indicated a chair.

The big man sank into it and exhaled, then looked up with a startled expression as if he had just been caught cheating at cards.

“Shucks, I forgot t’introduce m’self. That’s downright rude. M’names DuBose. John Jacob DuBose. J.J. to m’friends.”

He reached out a hand the size of a small ham, and pumped Landry’s first, then mine.

“This is Paul Gardner,” Landry said, indicating me. “My name’s Steve Landry.”

“Pleased t’meet both o’you,” the Texan said. “Yer not from this part o’the country, ah’d wager.”

“No,” Landry said. “I’m from San Diego originally, and Paul’s from San Francisco.”

J.J. DuBose winked at me. “Nice city,” he said, putting an end to that phase of the conversation and turning his attention back to Landry. As he spoke he fished a golden cigarette case out of his pocket, shook a cigarette loose, and then spun the wheel of a gold-plated cigarette lighter that bore on its side the single gleaming monogram-med letter D. That done, he touched the flame to the cigarette and said, “But we was speakin o’courage. I wish t’God money could buy that, cause ah’d...”

He broke off, and glanced from Landry to me.

“Ah’ll level with you boys. Yer lookin’ at a dyin’ man.”

The incongruity of his statement must have struck us both at once: J.J. Du Bose looked perhaps sixty years of age, and everything about his appearance, from his burly forearms with their timberline of dark curling hair to his powerful voice, suggested he might live to be a hundred.

Noting our appraisal of his physical condition, he shook his head. “Don’t let appearances fool ya. Ah’m eaten up with cancer. That’s what comes o’smokin five packsa Chesterfields a day over forty years. There ain’t no doubt of it: ah’ve been t’every g.p. an every cancer specialist from here t’Tuscaloosa, an it cost me sixteen Gs t’hear the same thing from ever one of em: ah’m crawlin with the things. They’re all over me, in muh lungs, muh colon, muh liver. They probably reached muh brain b’now.” The Texan took a deep drag off his cigarette and smiled wistfully. “But it’s OK. Ah’m resigned t’that. It don’t scare m’none. Hail, everbody gotta die sometime. Ah’ve had a good life: ah’ve been with a lotta women — if y’catch muh meanin — ah’ve made a lotta money, ah’ve gotta nice spread. Ah coulda died, wheezin and coughin, twenty years ago an ah didn’t. The lord been lookin after me fer a long time. But that ain’t m’point.”

He drew his chair closer to the table. The wistful expression was gone now, replaced by one of remarkable earnestness.

“The point is ah ain’t got too much time left on God’s earth, an the land an the money has gotta go somewhar after ah kick. Ah ain’t got nobody t’leave it to. Nobody deservin, that is.” He scowled. “Ah’m single now, but ah was married oncet. To a Mexican woman, name o’Juanita. She’s dead now a good five years. She was fifteen years younger’n me, and I outlasted her.”

He smiled bitterly at the memory, then went on:

“Anyways, we had a son. But he ain’t a DuBose. Not by a country mile. An d’you know why? Cause he lacks the greatest dang thing God ever give us: courage. Truth t’tell, he’s the most miserable bastard was ever whelped. He’s off livin somewhar in Mexico now. I ain’t even heard of him since afore his mother died. Dint even come t’the funeral. Some people are like at. I guess it’s somethin yer born with, like a suck-egg dog, they’s nothin y’can do for em; y’either get rid of em or shoot em. I can’t very well shoot m’own boy, so I disowned em. Point bein: who in hail’m I gonna leave m’money to?” He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray.

I glanced over at Landry. To my surprise he was listening to the Texan’s every word. I thought it an appropriate time to speak. “Who are you going to leave it to?”

J.J. DuBose turned to look at me, and smiled a crooked smile that even now makes me distinctly ill at ease just to recall it.

“Don’t know that,” he said. “But I kin tell you this: it’ll be someone with courage. Someone who kin show me he has guts, who’ll take anythin I kin hand im an come back fer more. You show me somebody who measures up t’that an I will write him a check that’s good at any bank in this dang state fer ten thousand dollars. An that is fer real.”

I don’t recall if he brought his fist crashing down on the table to round off his spiel with the proper punctuation mark, but it seems to me he did.

At this point the waiter returned to our table. Catching sight of our companion, the waiter smiled amiably and said, “I didn’t realize they were friends of yours, Mr. DuBose.” Then, turning to us: “Drinks are always on the house for a friend of Mr. DuBose’s.”

The Texan smiled again and said, “Y’see? Ah cain’t even give m’money away. Everwhere I go they tell me m’money’s no good. Shore is nice t’be liked.” To the waiter he said, “Gimme a stinger, Albert.”

The waiter smiled and nodded, and said, “How about it, boys? Another?”

“A double bourbon,” Landry said. I noticed he had consumed all of his while listening to our acquaintance. The waiter turned to me, but I shook my head and said, “No, I’m fine.”

As soon as the waiter had departed J.J. DuBose leaned across the table and, speaking directly to Landry now, said, “Ten thousand U.S. dollars shore buys a lotta bourbon.”

“What are we talking about?” Landry asked suddenly. “What does a person have to do to satisfy you? What kind of courage are you looking for? Someone to rob a bank — is that it?”

The Texan went into a laughing fit I thought would never stop. His broad shoulders shook with a rhythm so emphatic and well-coordinated it looked choreographed. During this fit I glanced over at Landry. His face never changed expression: he was staring intently at J.J. DuBose, and there was not an ounce of humor, or human warmth, on his features. The big man continued to laugh until his chuckles turned into a wracking cough that continued to convulse him until at length it subsided.

When J.J. DuBose was again able to speak he said, “Hail, I don’t want you robbin no bank. I got more money in m’safe at home than most banks in this state got in their vaults. Besides, that wouldn’t prove nothin other than what a fool y’were t’do such a damfool thing. Naw; t’earn the ten thousand I want y’t’do somethin not one man in ten thousand would have the nerve t’do.”

The waiter returned with the drinks. Nearly everyone beside our party had cleared out, I noticed, for the restaurant closed at midday; the hubbub of conversation heard earlier had been reduced to an ominous silence. I knew we would not be asked to leave: the waiter’s every movement, and the very intonation of his voice, showed he paid deference to J.J. DuBose.

“How bout it, boy?” DuBose finally asked. “Have y’got the stuff?”

Landry took a gulp of bourbon, then set the glass down on the table with a steady hand. “Try me,” he said.

The texan never took his eyes off him, as though afraid he might turn tail and run the second he was unwatched. “Albert,” he called. The waiter reappeared. Sensing him behind him, but not turning in his chair to look, DuBose said, “You know what to bring me. A cupful. And make sure it’s hot.”

The waiter nodded and said, “Yes sir, Mr. DuBose. Right away.” He turned and walked off toward the back of the restaurant and disappeared into the kitchen.

“This is just a little, I guess you’d call it a test, o’mine,” J.J. DuBose said. “I’ve tried it on people before, an, d’you know, not a one — not one — of em’s passed it.”

“I’ll pass it,” Landry said.

DuBose stared at him, and his eyes seemed to bore into Landry’s, as if plumbing his depths. “We’ll see,” he finally said.

Fully ten minutes passed in excruciating silence, during which I do not believe J.J. DuBose once took his eyes off Landry. I rose from my chair at one point simply to stretch, but did not say anything. The atmosphere was filled with the kind of tenseness that forbids speech. I had begun to feel queasy, as though it were I and not Landry who was being tested, and by the time the waiter appeared from the back it was such a relief to have someone break the stillness that I exhaled loudly.

“Just set it on the table there, Albert,” DuBose instructed. The waiter did as he was told. All the gaiety he had displayed earlier had left his features; he looked like a man with an unpleasant duty to perform. He placed the object he was carrying very carefully on the center of the table, exercising the greatest of care in standing it upright and taking very great care indeed not to spill it.

It was a beaker, filled nearly to the brim with a liquid of some kind, a vaguely metallic bluish-gray in color. I could not for the life of me identify it.

“There’s a chemical shop built onto the back of this restaurant,” DuBose said. “An whenever I want t’test somebody I just ask Albert here t’go an git me m’testin tool.”

Pointing to the beaker, he said with deliberate, almost preternatural, calmness, “This here’s filled with molten lead.”

I did not say a word. I found it actually physically difficult to take my eyes away from the beaker and glance over at Landry. He was sitting staring at the beaker as though incapable of speech. What in the name of God, I wondered, is going through his head at this moment? The only thing I could think was. Let’s pack up and get the hell out of this place right now.

But Landry showed no signs of wanting to leave. He looked up from the beaker and said to DuBose, “What do you want me to do?”

The Texan smiled his crooked smile and said, “I want y’to prove t’me yer a man with the stuff. I want y’to earn those ten Gs.” Then, softly: “I want you t’put yer right index finger into that lead all the way up to the knuckle.”

I gasped. It was the natural reaction of one who has had as much of an emotional strain as he can stand.

J.J. DuBose glanced over at me and drawled, “You kin leave if you’ve a mind to, Mr. Gardner, though I’d think a man like Mr. Landry here’d want his friend t’stay with im when he does this.”

Landry had apparently not been fazed by the request. He abruptly asked, “If I do, what’s going to happen to me afterwards? I’ll need a doctor.”

J.J. DuBose smiled again. “Albert here’s had three years in the medical department at the University of Texas. I know, cause I paid for em. He’ll know what t’do; he’ll bandage you up as good as a hospital’d do, mebbe better. He’s been on hand ever time I get a volunteer. But we ain’t had need o’his services yet.” Again the wide crooked smile.

Landry glanced over at me. Our eyes met for just a second, and I gave him an impassioned look that I hoped said exactly what I was thinking: Let’s go, let’s get away.

Instead, he turned back to face J.J. DuBose and said, “Write out the check.”

It was clearly the moment the Texan had been waiting for. With a chuckle he slid a checkbook out of his coat pocket, laid it on the table in front of him, then produced a gold-plated fountain pen. With it he inscribed Landry’s name on the topmost check and, below it, the amount: TEN THOUSAND AND NO CENTS.

I stood up. “Maybe everyone around here is crazy but me,” I said, “but if you think I’m going to—”

“Sit down,” said Landry.

I glared at him. I wondered if he could feel the anger, and even the hatred, I felt for him at that moment for playing along with the old Texan, for playing the part in the old man’s fantasy that every other applicant had turned down before.

DuBose finished signing the check, tore it out of the checkbook, and held it up for Landry’s approval. “There. All signed and legal-like. Good in any bank in this state. If yuh like yuh kin phone the bank — any bank — an ask if J.J. DuBose’s credit is good. Yuh won’t find anyone that’ll turn y’down.”

“I don’t need to call the bank,” Landry said. He was still staring at DuBose. Now his eyes fell away from him and settled on the beaker. “That’s all I have to do — stick my finger in up to the knuckle, and the ten thousand’s mine?”

The Texan smiled. “That’s all, honey.”

Landry began nodding. It was the kind of unconscious head movement I have witnessed divers in Acapulco make just before launching themselves from the steepest cliffs into the waters far, far below.

Landry cleared his throat, and the sound echoed throughout the room, empty but for the four of us. He flexed his hand and clenched it in a fist, then unclenched it.

I held my breath and waited.

The hand arced slowly toward the beaker and then stopped, poised above it. With what seemed to me intolerable slowness it clenched once more into a fist, all the fingers but one. The right index finger.

J.J. DuBose leaned forward. He was making an unconscious noise somewhere deep in his throat, and his teeth were bared, as if he were a large animal about to pounce on one smaller.

Landry’s finger descended slowly, slowly, towards the bluish-gray liquid inside the beaker. The finger stopped abruptly, as if it had reached an impassable barrier.

Landry flinched.

And then the barrier was suddenly lifted, and he plunged his finger into the liquid.

I stood up, all my senses tingling, my nerves frayed to the breaking point. I was waiting for the inevitable scream of agony Landry was about the emit. No man, no matter how nerveless, could withstand having his finger burned to the bone without screaming himself hoarse and collapsing.

Yet Landry had done it. He did not even open his mouth, nor did his face register pain or shock or even discomfort. His only expression was one of mild surprise.

He raised his finger from the liquid. It was dripping wet, but was its normal pinkish hue. It was no more burned or singed than if he had dipped it in a glass of tap water.

J.J. DuBose let out a whoop of sheer joy, and at once he was out of his chair and shaking Landry’s hand, unmindful of his still dripping-wet index finger.

“Damnit!” the Texan was saying. “I knew I could count on you! I knew it when I spotted you first off. I kin judge character from a mile away, an I said to m’self. There’s a man with the guts of J.J. DuBose hisself. But I had t’be sure.”

“A trick,” was all Landry could say.

“Trick? Why, son, the world’s fulla tricks. I strung you along the same as everbody else. The difference was none o’the others was up to callin my bluff. You called it. An you earned yer ree-ward.” He picked up the check from the table and handed it to Landry. “Fer services rendered,” he said.

I had no idea how Landry felt, but at that moment I experienced a distinct sense of unreality. The characters and landscape had suddenly taken on the quality of a dream, and it was all I could do to turn to the waiter and say, “I’ll take that drink now. A double. Please.”

J.J. DuBose had begun to chuckle again, and, as before, his laugh turned into the same wracking cough. He sat back down in his chair and, when the coughing fit finally passed, managed to say, “What’-chall gonna do with that money?”

Landry shook his head. He had a blank expression, as though he still could not believe what had happened, as though the test of courage DuBose had spoken of still lay before him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “There are a lot of things I could do, but I don’t know...”

His voice trailed off. Just at that moment my drink was brought in, and I gulped it gratefully.

“Looky here,” the Texan was saying. “It’s early in the day yet. You boys look like y’could use a meal. Why don’t y’all come out t’my spread? It ain’t too far from here. I got a good Filipino cook’ll make you the best dang lunch y’ever had. Dinner, too, if y’like. How’s about it?”

I had not eaten in half a day, but there was something about the terrible eagerness the Texan had exhibited that prompted me to decline.

“I don’t think so. We should be pushing on. We’ve got to get back to California.”

“What’s yer hurry?” DuBose said, but he had turned his attentions once more to Landry. “What d’yuh say?”

To my surprise Landry looked up at me. His wide-open eyes were eloquent. “Why not?” he said.

I felt a sudden twinge of alarm, the first sign of a creeping panic caused by an inchoate fear that the danger was not yet past — that we had, in fact, only skirted its perimeters.

In the end we went. Landry was keen on visiting DuBose’s “spread,” and the Texan had promised to show us over the grounds. I can explain my grudging acquiescence to the idea of going only by saying that, since I realized DuBose was one of the filthy rich oil millionaires of storied legend, and thus wielded such power, it would be foolish to resist. Plainly, his influence was pervasive throughout the county, and probably throughout the state, so anything I feared from him could come about just as easily here in the restaurant as on his estate.

We left the restaurant and headed towards the parking lot. The only car there was a Cadillac, a garish red in color. A stony-faced uniformed chauffeur sat behind the wheel. J.J. DuBose opened the door for us, and Landry got in first, then DuBose, so he was sitting between us. As I was getting in I noticed an enormous ornament on the hood, a praying angel that looked to have been forged from solid gold. I meant to ask DuBose about it, but never got the chance: I was struck speechless the moment I entered the car. It had a portable bar, a stereo, intercom, and telephone, and, my God, it was the biggest car I’d ever seen in my life.

DuBose never stopped talking once during our drive, which lasted over an hour. He moved from one subject to another with incomparable ease, from his cancer to his wildly successful career as an oil baron to his trips to Europe to his love of airplanes (particularly those of pre-World War II vintage) to his love for his departed wife and his estrangement from his ne’er-do-well son.

By the time the Cadillac turned into a gleaming metal gate with the single metallic letter D set into the intricate grillwork design high above, a roadway that might have led all the way to California stretched out before us, and I was more nervous than ever.

The driveway was exactly like the ideal of Landry’s dreams: a seemingly endless expanse of crushed stone and granite that eventually gave onto macadamized roadway. By then we were within sight of the estate itself, although “estate” does not begin to suggest the size and palatial splendor of it; nor does “palace,” with its vaguely European connotations of elegance and design. This mansion was thoroughly American in flavor and architecture; with its gabled front and tall stone columns, it suggested nothing so much as a monument, rather like the Lincoln Memorial. The only difference was this memorial was dedicated to a living man. I was reminded of Coleridge’s lines:

The Cadillac braked to a halt, and immediately there was a uniformed man opening the door on Landry’s side to let us out. DuBose continued his running description of the house and grounds without faltering or stopping for breath one single time.

“This here cost me six million to build in 19 an 56. That was a time when six million went considerable further than it does today, m’friend. Ah’ve had offers t’sell over the years, mostly from Texas oilmen like m’self, an ah’ve never considered em for more’n a second. No, thank y’all very much, I say, cause there’s s’much of my life wrapped up here. Where would I go if I was t’leave? Move into an apartment in Dallas? No, thank y’suh, I always say...”

He led us into the house, the uniformed servant slamming shut the door of the Cadillac after us. A second later, the chauffeur shot off down the road, presumably in the direction of the garage, which, for all I knew, might have been located in a neighboring state.

Once we were inside the house the contrast was startling. DuBose stopped speaking at once. His voice, along with the plaintive warbling of a mockingbird somewhere in the dying afternoon sun, had provided a cacaphony of sounds peculiarly Texan. Now all was silence, and it seemed to dwarf everything else, even J.J. DuBose himself.

Our footsteps echoed throughout the cavernous interior of what I assumed was the foyer as we paced across the marble floor just behind the rangy Texan. DuBose approached one particular door from among a half dozen, and swung it wide for us to enter after him.

We were in what looked like a library. Every wall but one seemed to be packed solid with books. In the center of the one bare wall was a long, polished mantel. Hung with great care on the dark oak wainscoting above the mantel were framed portraits under glass showing a younger but still recognizable J.J. DuBose, here with his arm around a smiling Ernest Hemingway in safari garb, here shaking hands with Joe Louis, both the boxer and the oil millionaire offering toothy smiles to the cameraman, and here kneeling beside Robert Ruark, in the twilight of his life, in the middle of what looked like an African veldt.

It is always a shock to see someone of your acquaintance in the company of the powerful or famous; in a sense it legitimatizes them, and so it was with J.J. DuBose, though I still had my doubts. Perhaps it was to assuage them that DuBose had brought us here.

“This yer’s m’den,” he said, indicating the room with a sweep of his enormous arm. I took in certain of the details: a gigantic writing desk, made of mahogany, complete with Rolodex, blotter, telephone, in/out tray, and an overstuffed, oversized easy chair. Everything is bigger in Texas.

“You boys hungry yet?” DuBose asked. “I’m starvin, m’self. You go on ahaid. Ah gotta make a phone call.”

We made our way out of the den with little difficulty, only to find ourselves in a corridor.

It was the first time I’d been alone with Landry Since meeting the Texan. I took hold of his arm. He turned around to face me. “We’re in a very dangerous situation,” I said.

Landry stared at me in disbelief. “Dangerous? What the hell are you talking about? I have a check for ten thousand dollars in my pocket, and we’re having dinner with probably the wealthiest man in this whole state. Dangerous... I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He turned to go. I tightened my grip on his arm. “Steve,” I said. “We’re dealing with a crazy man. There’s no telling what he has in mind. Let’s get out of here.”

Landry stared hard at me. His eyes held a gleam I had never seen there before. “Let go of my arm,” he said coldly.

At that moment a small, dark-skinned man in a spotless white uniform appeared from a door at the end of the corridor and spoke to us in what was apparently English underneath an indecipherable accent. Then he waved his arm, indicating we should follow.

I let go of Landry’s arm. He turned his back on me and headed toward the door. After he disappeared inside the little man remained, waiting. Reluctantly, I followed.

J.J. DuBose joined us at the dinner table. After 15 minutes of small talk, to which I made only a minimal contribution (but in which Landry engaged readily, asking DuBose question after question regarding his wealth, holdings, and property), the Filipino cook returned, bearing a dinner tray, and began to lay out the courses one by one.

It must have been about then that I happened to look down at the places set for us, and gasped.

I had not noticed them before, but the eating utensils — fork, knife, spoon, and soup spoon — were fashioned of solid gold.

“They say y’can’t eat money, but dint say nothin bout eatin with it,” DuBose said. I looked up, startled at having heard my thoughts spoken aloud, and found the Texan seated across the table from me, doing his best to enact the role of the kindly benefactor, who, for all his wealth, was still just a touch provincial.

“You boys are gonna get a meal you won’t be forgettin,” he said.

He was not exaggerating. We started off with Escargots de Bourgogne, proceeded to L’Oignon Gratinee, and were then served Veal Maison, with a bottle of Mouton-Routhschild to top if off. Whatever else he might have been, J.J. DuBose was not provincial in his tastes in food.

The dinner conversation was basically a monologue delivered by DuBose, broken up by occasional questions from Landry, who seemed intent on gleaning every possible bit of information from The Great Man himself. When we had at last consumed every bit of the food on our plates, and refused the Filipino’s offers of more, I excused myself and went in search of a restroom. It proved difficult to locate, and once I stumbled into a pantry and once into DuBose’s den, but when I found the correct room I stopped in my tracks and looked it over from one end to the other.

The spigots on the sink and in the sunken bathtub were fashioned from solid gold, as was the flush device on the toilet. All the rest was china, and the marbled floor and walls gleamed from having been recently scrubbed. I do not think there was a single speck of dirt anywhere in that room. The ancient cliche “the floor was clean enough to eat off of” found a curiously truthful approximation here.

By the time I returned to the dining hall our host had served brandy, and both he and Landry were drawing on two Partagas Visible Immensas fully nine inches in length. I declined his offer of one, but accepted a glass of brandy. The conversation had evolved once again while I had been out of the room, and the turn it had taken frightened me.

“So you claim no one would have the nerve to do it?” Landry was saying.

J.J. DuBose shook his head. “It’s not just a question of nerve, it’s a question of acceptin what would, from that day on, be an un-ac-cept-able handicap t’some folks, somethin a fella’d have t’live with the rest o’his days. This isn’t quite the same thing as that little test I give you back at Albert’s. Ah wouldn’t be fakin this time, cause there’s no way in hail ah could be. You’d know there wasn’t but one way the thing’d turn out. An, like a magician, ah nevah do the same trick twice.”

“And how much would you be willing to pay?” asked Landry.

DuBose drew on his cigar and considered the question a moment before answering.

“Why, a man’d be willin t’do that, why, that man’d be worth a half a million dollars, ah reckon.”

The gleam in Landry’s eyes turned my stomach. “You’d pay half a million dollars?”

The Texan nodded. “Ah would. The money means nothin t’me anymore — they’s no way ah’d ever get aroun t’spendin it. But ah’d be satisfied knowin it was bein spent by a man with the balls t’do somethin like that.”

“Like what?” I asked. I noticed my voice trembled.

Neither man took any notice of my question. Their eyes were locked, and remained that way even after J. J. DuBose rose to his feet.

“Doc Jenkins’ll be here in just a bit. You’ll be OK afterwards — he’ll see t’it.” He took a last puff off his cigar, then crushed it out in an ashtray. “We may as well git the show on the road,” he said, and turned and headed toward the door.

Landry was already out of his chair and following DuBose. I stopped him and said, “What the hell’s the idea?”

“Never mind,” Landry said. His eyes remained fixed on DuBose’s retreating figure. “Just c’mon along. I’ll need a witness.”

“A witness to what?”

He didn’t reply, but merely followed DuBose out the door that gave on a long corridor. I had no choice but to follow. We traversed the corridor. At its end was another door. DuBose opened it, and we followed him out.

We were in an enormous room I recognized at once as an airplane hangar. The air hung heavy with paint fumes and the smell of grease and machine parts, and there were paintcans and crude workbenches and shelves built into the walls on our end. In the center of the hangar, its wings spanning the width of the room itself, was an enormous biplane of vaguely pre-World War II design.

“This here’s a Martin T4M-1,” DuBose announced. His voice echoed across the walls as he strode off towards the plane. “It was built for the Navy in 19 and 27. It was a torpedo-bomber.”

When he reached the plane he pulled himself up and into the cockpit. Thus ensconsed, he called out to us, and his voice sounded more terrifying than ever, amplified as it was by the acoustics of the room.

“Here’s Doc Jenkins now.”

His announcement caused me to turn. Sure enough, a man dressed in sombre dark clothes, carrying a small medical bag, had entered the room through another door, and now stood awaiting DuBose’s orders.

“He’ll patch y’up when this is over,” the Texan said. “Wail, I guess that’s enough of the pre-liminaries. You know the arrangements as well as ah do, so what say we just go on ahaid?”

“Anytime you’re ready,” Landry called back.

J.J. DuBose smiled his crooked smile one final time, and then nodded.

One of DuBose’s men whom I had not noticed before but who had evidently followed us into the hangar came forward, and, taking hold of one of the great propeller blades with both his hands, turned it as DuBose switched on the plane’s engine. It didn’t catch the first time, so he was obliged to try again, this time putting the full strength of his broad shoulders into the effort. This time the propeller blades instantly converted to a blur of whirring speed, and the hangar was filled with the deafening roar of their rotation. It blanked out nearly everything else, and became all I could think of. I tried to blank it out of my mind, but when I turned back to face Landry I saw that he was concentrating hard on the plane, and on the propeller in particular.

“Steve!” I shouted. “You’re not going to—”

Still staring straight ahead, Landry said, “Stand aside.”

I moved in front of him, blocking his way. “No. I’m not going to let you do it.”

His eyes finally turned to take me in. “Shut up, and stand aside,” he said.

“Steve—”

He pushed me, a rough shove, and I fell back a foot or so. I took a step towards him and then noticed two of DuBose’s men, big, broad-shouldered Texans, take several purposeful strides in my general direction, and stop. I hesitated, deciding to make one final appear.

“Steve!” I shouted. “For God’s sake! Steve!”

He did not turn around. Instead, he took another few steps in the direction of the whirring propeller blades.

Try as I might, I could not take my eyes off them. They were moving so fast they were lost to sight. There was only a vaguely silverish blur that might have had nothing to do with speed or power. It fostered the illusion that there was nothing there at all, no blades, and that if you wanted to you could thrust your hand directly into their path, and nothing would happen because there was nothing there. Nothing that could shred the skin and chop away the bones of your hand, nothing that could turn living tissue and muscle and flesh and bone into a bleeding raw stump in a fraction of a second.

And even as I looked I saw that Landry had raised not one hand but both of them, and was moving towards the whirring blades. He was no more than three feet from them, I should judge. I started forward again, and the second I did DuBose’s two men started towards me, their intentions unmistakable. I could not have stopped Landry even if they hadn’t been there: he had the look of a zombie in his eyes, the blank stare that betokened mindlessness, or rather, blind devotion to one single idea: that he could stick both his hands into the path of the propeller blades and come away from it a rich man. And high above him, in the cockpit of the biplane, sat J.J. DuBose, his grin a wrinkled river running from ear to ear, watching Landry’s progress with frenzied anticipation. He had been right: there was no way he could stop the whirring blades in time. Nothing in the world could stop the fateful encounter at this point.

“Landry!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.

The roar of the propellers drowned out my voice. It hardly mattered; Landry could never have heard me at that point even if absolute silence had prevailed.

Suddenly sickened by the whole spectacle, I turned my back on both Landry and the grinning madman in the biplane’s cockpit and walked away from both of them. I hurried, nearly running, to one of the side doors, anxious to get outside the hangar before the inevitable occurred. It seemed to me I had already done enough in the name of friendship for this hotheaded young man who was, after all, an acquaintance and no more, and that it was actually he who had dishonored what friendship existed between us by his blind devotion to money at any cost to his physical well-being.

I was running by the time I reached the door of the hangar, and I did not stop for breath until I had pushed the door open and rushed out, leaving behind me the noise and the tumult and the bloodshed that was about to occur. Careful not to glance back even once, I ran across the grounds of J.J. DuBose’s estate until at length I reached the stone and granite roadway. Once there I stopped, gasping for breath, and waited until I had the stamina to proceed, then walked swiftly along the roadway until it gave onto the highway. There I stood by the side of the road, one thumb extended, and tried my best to put all thoughts of that day’s events out of my mind forever.

Thus ends one story and begins another, or so it would seem. Actually, the two dovetail with marvelous economy: the man who stopped to give me a ride took me all the way into Oklahoma, and it was through him that I met the girl who was to become my wife. I need not describe our courtship, her family, or the investment business I eventually entered into back in California, so I will skip over those facts and pause only briefly to describe picking up a San Francisco Chronicle some months later and being greatly surprised to see J.J. DuBose’s face, complete with crooked grin, staring out at me from an inside page above the headline Texas Oil Millionaire Dies Of Cancer. I read the three column story underneath, searching in vain for any mention of Steve Landry. Judging from the writeup, DuBose had not exaggerated in describing his wealth and power, nor his illness. According to the obituary, he had no living relatives; apparently his son, living somewhere in the wilds of Mexico, was not to his thinking a proper relative.

That was not quite the end.

I must skip ahead several years to a time when business dictated a trip to Houston on a matter of no importance to this story. While I was staying in a downtown hotel I happened to pick up a telephone book and, more out of boredom and idle curiosity than anything else, looked up Landry’s name on the off-chance that he might have remained in Texas after coming into the money I had no doubt he collected. To my surprise, there was indeed a listing for Steve Landry, though no address was given.

I spent perhaps ten minutes struggling with myself over whether to call him. Eventually, the side of me that remembered the good days of traveling with him throughout Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico won out over the side that hastened to remind me of his newly-won wealth and concomitant power and the fact that, whether my act was justified or not, I had left him during a moment of crisis.

I dialed the number listed. A man’s voice said, “Mr. Landry’s residence. Who’s callin, please?”

Somewhat surprised, I repeated my name.

“Mr. Landry’s right busy now, suh. Would it be all raht if ah have him call yuh at a later time?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, and hung up.

I thought that would be the end of it. How wrong I was. Not 20 minutes later the telephone in my room rang. I lifted the receiver, and heard Landry’s voice for the first time in nearly five years. There was not a trace of anger or malice or resentment in it; it sounded exactly the way I remembered it when we were both wayfarers with only a few dollars in our collective pockets and the prospects for a successful career for either of us were bleak indeed. The only difference was that this Landry seemed interested only in talking of investments, and mainly in companies I was unfamiliar with, at that.

“Listen,” Landry said at length, “I’ve got to see you. I’ll send a car out to pick you up. We’ll have dinner together. What hotel are you at?”

I did not attempt to remonstrate. Landry would have his way, as always, and, besides that, I was actually anxious to see and talk with him again. It had been a very long time. We agreed on seven o’clock as the pickup time, since dinner would be served at eight-thirty. I hung the phone up and sat back to wait.

On the dot of seven o’clock my telephone rang. It was the front desk, informing me the car had arrived. I had showered, shaved, and put on a fresh suit in the meantime. Once downstairs in the hotel foyer, I nodded to the uniformed chauffeur who stood waiting. He offered me a distinctively Texan grin and beckoned to me to follow him to a Rolls-Royce parked in front of the hotel. For some reason, he looked vaguely familiar.

“Mr. Landry certainly lives very well,” I commented, getting in.

“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said. “He does it up just fine.”

It was not until we were driving along that I recognized the chauffeur: he was the same man that had driven us to J.J. DuBose’s estate five years before. Landry had hired him for himself.

We had been en route nearly 20 minutes before I began to recognize the landscape flashing by the windows, and for the first time since we had set out on our journey, I spoke to the chauffeur.

“Does Mr. Landry live on Mr. DuBose’s estate?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said. “He dint want to change nothin, s’he lives there by hisself.”

I sat back and reflected on the fortune my friend had — must have — compiled. While I had been fortunate to earn twenty thousand dollars a year, Landry had most probably taken the $500,000 he had gotten from DuBose (I hesitate to say earned) and invested wisely. He might be a multimillionaire by now, I thought, not at all different in standing and influence than DuBose had been — a filthy rich Texas millionaire in spite of himself. On coincidences of lesser fiber have stranger paradoxes been built.

A sense of unease came over me as we passed through the gate that still bore the single gold initial D. I cannot say why, except that it might have been the psychic residue of J.J. DuBose himself. Although long dead and buried, he still seemed to cast a shadow over all — a shadow without limits.

The car braked to a halt, and a uniformed doorman came down the front steps and opened the door for me. I followed him inside the house while the Rolls-Royce drove off.

Once we were inside DuBose’s presence seemed stronger than ever. My nerves were on edge, and I noticed my teeth were grating — imagine that, actually grating — against each other. I felt very much like getting the meeting and the dinner over with and getting out of the house, off the estate, and back to my hotel.

“This way,” the doorman said, and led me past the marble foyer that was just as large and gleamed just as luxuriously as it had in my mind’s eye, toward a closed door. Before this he stopped.

“Mr. Landry is just beyond there, sir,” he said.

To my surprise, he turned his back on me and began walking away along the marble floor, his footsteps clacking and echoing hollowly throughout the vast foyer.

My apprehension was at its height. I did not dare enter the room. Instead, I raised my fist and rapped softly. “Landry?” I said.

His voice came back to me, through the mahogany woodwork: “Come on in.”

All my fears fell away, and I turned the knob and walked into the room, then stopped dead.

There, lying atop a gold cushion, surrounded by black satin sheets that completely covered what might have been a desk, or else simply a table or stand designed for someone of his size and weight, was Landry: a single, movable trunk no more than two and a half feet long from the head to the abrupt cessation at the waist. The ears had been cropped away, so there were only openings on either side of the head, the eyes were slits that glowered sightlessly, and the trunk was dressed in a coat of gold lame.

“So,” Landry said, edging a cigarette out of an open pack lying before him with his teeth, and then likewise scratching a match and applying it to the cigarette until its end glowed redly, and then transferring the lighted cigarette to his mouth, “You follow the stocks, don’t you? Ought to keep your eye on C and B. That’s a growth industry.”