Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

Goodbye, Pops

I got off the Greyhound and stopped to draw icy Minnesota air into my lungs. A bus had brought me from Springfield, Illinois to Chicago the day before; a second bus had brought me here. I caught my passing reflection in the window of the old-fashioned depot — a tall hard man with a white and savage face, wearing an ill-fitting overcoat. I caught another reflection, too, one that froze my guts: a cop in uniform. Could they already know it was someone else in that burned-out car?

Then the cop turned away, chafing his arms with gloved hands through his blue stormcoat, and I started breathing again. I went quickly over to the cab line. Only two hackies were waiting there; the front one rolled down his window as I came up.

“You know the Miller place north of town?” I asked. He looked me over.

“I know it. Five bucks — now.”

I paid him from the money I’d rolled a drunk for in Chicago, and eased back against the rear seat. As he nursed the cab out ice-rimed Second Street, my fingers gradually relaxed from their rigid chopping position. I deserved to go back inside if I let a clown like this get to me.

“Old man Miller’s pretty sick, I hear.” He half turned to catch me with a corner of an eye. “You got business with him?”

“Yeah. My own.”

That ended that conversation. It bothered me that Pops was sick enough for this clown to know about it; but maybe my brother Rod being vice-president at the bank would explain that. There was a lot of new construction and a freeway west of town with a tricky overpass to the old county road. A mile beyond a new subdivision were the 200 wooded hilly acres I knew so well.

After my break from the Federal pen at Terre Haute, Indiana two days before, I’d gotten outside their cordon through woods like these. I’d gone out in a prison truck, in a pail of swill meant for the prison farm pigs, had headed straight west, across the Illinois line. I’m good in open country, even when I’m in prison condition, so by dawn I was in a hayloft near Paris, Illinois some 20 miles from the pen. You can do what you have to do.

The cabby stopped at the foot of the private road, looking dubious. “Listen, buddy, I know that’s been plowed, but it looks damned icy. If I try it and go into the ditch—”

“I’ll walk from here.”

I waited beside the road until he’d driven away, then let the north wind chase me up the hill and into the leafless hardwoods. The cedars that Pops and I had put in as a windbreak were taller and fuller; rabbit paths were pounded hard into the snow under the barbed-wire tangles of wild raspberry bushes. Under the oaks at the top of the hill was the old-fashioned, two-story house, but I detoured to the kennels first. The snow was deep and undisturbed inside them. No more foxhounds. No cracked com in the bird feeder outside the kitchen window, either. I rang the front doorbell.

My sister-in-law Edwina, Rod’s wife, answered it. She was three years younger than my 35, and she’d started wearing a girdle.

“Good Lord! Chris!” Her mouth tightened. “We didn’t—”

“Ma wrote that the old man was sick.” She’d written, all right. Your father is very ill. Not that you have ever cared if any of us lives or dies... And then Edwina decided that my tone of voice had given her something to get righteous about

“I’m amazed you’d have the nerve to come here, even if they did let you out on parole or something.” So nobody had been around asking yet. “If you plan to drag the family name through the mud again—”

I pushed by her into the hallway. “What’s wrong with the old man?” I called him Pops only inside myself, where no one could hear.

“He’s dying, that’s what’s wrong with him.”

She said it with a sort of baleful pleasure. It hit me, but I just grunted and went by into the living room. Then the old girl called down from the head of the stairs.

“Eddy? What — who is it’”

“Just a salesman, Ma. He can wait until Doctor’s gone.”

Doctor. As if some damned croaker was generic physician himself. When he came downstairs Edwina tried to hustle him out before I could see him, but I caught his arm as he poked it into his overcoat sleeve.

“Like to see you a minute, Doc. About old man Miller.”

He was nearly six feet, a couple of inches shorter than me, but outweighing me forty pounds. He pulled his arm free.

“Now see here, fellow—”

I grabbed his lapels and shook him, just enough to pop a button off his coat and put his glasses awry on his nose. His face got red.

“Old family friend, Doc.” I jerked a thumb at the stairs. “What’s the story?”

It was dumb, dumb as hell, of course, asking him; at any second the cops would figure out that the farmer in the burned-out car wasn’t me after all. I’d dumped enough gasoline before I struck the match so they couldn’t lift prints off anything except the shoe I’d planted: but they’d make him through dental charts as soon as they found out he was missing. When they did they’d come here asking questions, and then the croaker would realize who I was. But I wanted to know whether Pops was as bad off as Edwina said he was, and I’ve never been a patient man.

The croaker straightened his suit coat, striving to regain lost dignity. “He — Judge Miller is very weak, too weak to move. He probably won’t last out the week.” His eyes searched my face for pain, but there’s nothing like a Federal pen to give you control. Disappointed, he said, “His lungs. I got to it much too late, of course. He’s resting easily.”

I jerked the thumb again. “You know your way out.”

Edwina was at the head of the stairs, her face righteous again. It seems to run in the family, even with those who married in. Only Pops and I were short of it.

“Your father is very ill. I forbid you—”

“Save it for Rod; it might work on him.”

In the room I could see the old man’s arm hanging limply over the edge of the bed, with smoke from the cigarette between his fingers running up to the ceiling in a thin unwavering blue line. The upper arm, which once had measured an honest 18 and had swung his small tight fist against the side of my head a score of times, could not even hold a cigarette up in the air. It gave me the same wrench as finding a good foxhound that’s gotten mixed up with a bobcat.

The old girl came out of her chair by the foot of the bed, her face blanched. I put my arms around her. “Hi, Ma,” I said. She was rigid inside my embrace, but I knew she wouldn’t pull away. Not there in Pop’s room.

He had turned his head at my voice. The light glinted from his silky white hair. His eyes, translucent with imminent death, were the pure, pale blue of birch shadows on fresh snow.

“Chris,” he said in a weak voice. “Son of a biscuit, boy... I’m glad to see you.”

“You ought to be, you lazy devil,” I said heartily. I pulled off my suit jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, and tugged off my tie. “Getting so lazy that you let the foxhounds go!”

“That’s enough, Chris.” She tried to put steel into it.

“I’ll just sit here a little, Ma,” I said easily. Pops wouldn’t have long, I knew, and any time I got with him would have to do me. She stood in the doorway, a dark indecisive shape; then she turned and went silently out, probably to phone Rod at the bank.

For the next couple of hours I did most of the talking; Pops just lay there with his eyes shut, like he was asleep. But then he started in, going way back, to the trapline he and I had run when I’d been a kid; to the big white-tail buck that followed him through the woods one rutting season until Pops whacked it on the nose with a tree branch. It was only after his law practice had ripened into a judgeship that we began to draw apart; I guess that in my twenties I was too wild, too much what he’d been himself 30 years before. Only I kept going in that direction.

About seven o’clock my brother Rod called from the doorway. I went out, shutting the door behind me. Rod was taller than me, broad and big-boned, with an athlete’s frame — but with mush where his guts should have been. He had close-set pale eyes and not quite enough chin, and hadn’t gone out for football in high school.

“My wife reported the vicious things you said to her.” It was his best give-the-teller-hell voice. “We’ve talked this over with Mother and we want you out of here tonight. We want—”

“You want? Until he kicks off it’s still the old man’s house, isn’t it’”

He swung at me then — being Rod, it was a right-hand lead — and I blocked it with an open palm. Then I back-handed him, hard, twice across the face each way, jerking his head from side to side with the slaps, and crowding him up against the wall. I could have fouled his groin to bend him over, then driven locked hands down on the back of his neck as I jerked a knee into his face; and I wanted to. The need to get away before they came after me was gnawing at my gut like a weasel in a trap gnawing off his own paw to get loose. But I merely stepped away from him.

“You... you murderous animal!” He had both hands up to his cheeks like a woman might have done. Then his eyes widened theatrically, as the realization struck him. I wondered why it had taken so long. “You’ve broken out!” he gasped. “Escaped! A fugitive from... from justice!”

“Yeah. And I’m staying that way. I know you, kid, all of you. The last thing any of you want is for the cops to take me here.” I tried to put his tones into my voice. “Oh! The scandal!”

“But they’ll be after you—”

“They think I’m dead,” I said flatly. “I went off an icy road in a stolen car in downstate Illinois, and it rolled and burned with me inside.”

His voice was hushed, almost horror-stricken. “You mean — that there is a body in the car?”

“Right.”

I knew what he was thinking, but I didn’t bother to tell him the truth — that the old farmer who was driving me to Springfield, because he thought my doubled-up fist in the overcoat pocket was a gun, hit a patch of ice and took the car right off the lonely country road. He was impaled on the steering post, so I took his shoes and put one of mine on his foot. The other I left, with my fingerprints on it, lying near enough so they’d find it but not so near that it’d bum along with the car. Rod wouldn’t have believed the truth anyway. If they caught me, who would?

I said, “Bring up a bottle of bourbon and a carton of cigarettes. And make sure Eddy and Ma keep their mouths shut if anyone asks about me.” I opened the door so Pops could hear. “Well, thanks, Rod. It is nice to be home again.”

Solitary in the pen makes you able to stay awake easily or snatch sleep easily, whichever is necessary. I stayed awake for the last 37 hours that Pops had, leaving the chair by his bed only to go to the bathroom and to listen at the head of the stairs whenever I heard the phone or the doorbell ring. Each time I thought: this is it. But my luck held. If they’d just take long enough so I could stay until Pops went; the second that happened, I told myself, I’d be on my way.

Rod and Edwina and Ma were there at the end, with Doctor hovering in the background to make sure he got paid. Pops finally moved a pallid arm and Ma sat down quickly on the edge of the bed — a small, erect, rather indomitable woman with a face made for wearing a lorgnette. She wasn’t crying yet; instead, she looked purely luminous in a way.

“Hold my hand, Eileen.” Pops paused for the terrible strength to speak again. “Hold my hand. Then I won’t be frightened.”

She took his hand and he almost smiled, and shut his eyes. We waited, listening to his breathing get slower and slower and then just stop, like a grandfather clock running down. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. I looked around at them, so soft, so unused to death, and I felt like a marten in a brooding house. Then Ma began to sob.

It was a blustery day with snow flurries. I parked the jeep in front of the funeral chapel and went up the slippery walk with wind plucking at my coat, telling myself for the hundredth time just how nuts I was to stay for the service. By now they had to know that the dead farmer wasn’t me; by now some smart prison censor had to remember Ma’s letter about Pops being sick. He was two days dead, and I should have been in Mexico by this time. But it didn’t seem complete yet, somehow. Or maybe I was kidding myself, maybe it was just the old need to put down authority that always ruins guys like me.

From a distance it looked like Pops, but up close you could see the cosmetics and that his collar was three sizes too big. I felt his hand: it was a statue’s hand, unfamiliar except for the thick, slightly down-curved fingernails.

Rod came up behind me and said, in a voice meant only for me, “After today I want you to leave us alone. I want you out of my house.”

“Shame on you, brother,” I grinned. “Before the will is even read, too.”

We followed the hearse through snowy streets at the proper funeral pace, lights burning. Pallbearers wheeled the heavy casket out smoothly on oiled tracks, then set it on belts over the open grave. Snow whipped and swirled from a gray sky, melting on the metal and forming rivulets down the sides.

I left when the preacher started his scam, impelled by the need to get moving, get away, yet impelled by another urgency, too. I wanted something out of the house before all the mourners arrived to eat and guzzle. The guns and ammo already had been banished to the garage, since Rod never had fired a round in his life; but it was easy to dig out the beautiful little .22 target pistol with the long barrel. Pops and I had spent hundreds of hours with that gun, so the grip was worn smooth and the blueing was gone from the metal that had been out in every sort of weather.

Putting the jeep in four-wheel I ran down through the trees to a cut between the hills, then went along on foot through the darkening hardwoods. I moved slowly, evoking memories of Korea to neutralize the icy bite of the snow through my worn shoes. There was a flash of brown as a cotton-tail streaked from under a deadfall toward a rotting woodpile I’d stacked years before. My slug took him in the spine, paralyzing the back legs. He jerked and thrashed until I broke his neck with the edge of my hand.

I left him there and moved out again, down into the small marshy triangle between the hills. It was darkening fast as I kicked at the frozen tussocks. Finally a ringneck in full plumage burst out, long tail fluttering and stubby pheasant wings beating to raise his heavy body. He was quartering up and just a bit to my right, and I had all the time in the world. I squeezed off in mid-swing, knowing it was perfect even before he took that heart-stopping pinwheel tumble.

I carried them back to the jeep; there was a tiny ruby of blood on the pheasant’s beak, and the rabbit was still hot under the front legs. I was using headlights when I parked on the curving cemetery drive. They hadn’t put the casket down yet, so the snow had laid a soft blanket over it. I put the rabbit and pheasant on top and stood without moving for a minute or two. The wind must have been strong, because I found that tears were burning on my cheeks.

Goodbye, Pops. Goodbye to deer-shining out of season in the hardwood belt across the creek. Goodbye to jump-shooting mallards down in the river bottoms. Goodbye to woodsmoke and mellow bourbon by firelight and all the things that made a part of you mine. The part they could never get at.

I turned away, toward the jeep — and stopped dead. I hadn’t even heard them come up. Four of them, waiting patiently as if to pay their respects to the dead. In one sense they were: to them that dead farmer in the burned-out car was Murder One. I tensed, my mind going to the .22 pistol that they didn’t know about in my overcoat pocket. Yeah. Except that it had all the stopping power of a fox’s bark. If only Pops had run to handguns of a little heavier caliber. But he hadn’t.

Very slowly, as if my arms suddenly had grown very heavy, I raised my hands above my head.