The Autumn Dead

Chapter 30

In my apartment I clean and oiled my.38, checked the snap on the shiv I'd once lifted off an extremely successful pimp, and then slid on Diaz's knucks just to see how they felt. They felt good. They really did, and I knew I wanted to use them, in just the same eager bone-smashing way Diaz wanted to use them.

It was five o'clock then and I watched "Andy Griffith" on cable and wished there were a real Mayberry and Aunt Bea and Opie and Floyd the barber and Ang and Barney because I'd go down there and see them all and maybe stay a year or two. And then it was six o'clock and the news came on, AIDS and teenage suicide and crooked local politicians, and I started staring out the window at the spring rain, chill and silver on the window, and the whipping night trees beyond. And then it was seven and cable ran a "Three Stooges" episode before the ball game started, and I just sat there staring at Shemp's face, a face that even as a kid had made me sad, the gravity of the eyes, the frantic deals he tried to make with a world that needed to make no deals at all with his kind. Then I picked up Karen Lane's copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's and looked through it for the fifth time, hoping to find something enlightening in it. But it was nothing more than it seemed to be-the favorite book of a girl from the Highlands who saw in Holly Golightly the perfect escape, the one person who seemed to do exactly what she wanted-lie, cheat, steal, care about no one but herself-and be loved for it. Holly might be fine for gentle little books and arch romantic movies, but I'd known a few Hollys in my days and they weren't forgiven or indulged forever. They were punched or even killed or they just moved on, and by age thirty-five the things in them that had been cute or fetching just looked silly and empty, and a meanness overtook them then. Go into half the bars in this town and you'll see women who used to be Holly Golightly. Now they're just drunks with evil mouths and sour memories. "She ought to be protected against herself," said a character on page 104, and I thought about that, about how Karen had needed that. And then I started wondering about the suitcase again and what was in it and thinking that maybe she was trying to protect herself with whatever it held. Then it was eight o'clock and I put a bowl of Hormel chili on the hot plate and crunched up about ten saltines in it. Then it was eight-thirty and I had two cold generic beers and went back to checking my.38 and my shiv and my knucks and knowing I was ready, knowing I needed this. Then it was nine and I went down and got in my Toyota and drove out to Pierce Point.