The Drowning Pool

Chapter 6

The fire in the sky had died, leaving long wisps of clouds like streaks of ashes livid against the night. All I could see of the mountains was their giant shadowed forms shouldering the faintly lighted sky. A few lights sprinkled their flanks, and a car’s headlights inched down into the other side of the valley and were lost in darkness. Then the night was so still that motion seemed impossible, all of us insects caught in the final amber. I moved and broke the spell, feeling my way down the dew-slick terraces beside the flagstone walk.

I closed a contact when I took hold of the left doorhandle of my convertible. The headlights and dashlights came on with a click. My right hand moved by reflex under my coat for a gun that wasn’t there. Then I saw the girl’s hand on the switch, the girl’s face like a ghost’s leaning towards me.

“It’s only me, Mr. Archer. Cathy.” There was night in her voice, in her eyes, night caught like mist in her hair. In a soft wool coat buttoned up to her soft chin, she was one of the girls I had watched from a distance in high school and never been able to touch; the girls with oil or gold or free-flowing real-estate money dissolved in their blood like blueing. She was also young enough to be my daughter.

“What do you think you are doing?”

“Nothing.” She settled back in the seat and I slid under the wheel. “I just turned on the lights for you. I’m sorry if I startled you, I didn’t mean to.”

“Why pick on my car? You’ve got one of your own.”

“Two. But father took the keys. Besides, I like your car. The seat is very comfortable. May I ride along with you?” She gave her voice a wheedling little-girl inflection.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere you’re going. Quinto? Please, Mr. Archer?”

“I don’t think so. You’re a little young to be running around nights by yourself.”

“It’s not late, and I’d be with you.”

“Even with me,” I said. “You’d better go back to the house, Cathy.”

“I won’t. I hate those people. I’ll stay out here all night.”

“Not with me you won’t. I’m leaving now.”

“You won’t take me along?” Her clenched hand vibrated on my forearm. There was a note in her voice that hurt my ears like the screech of chalk on a wet blackboard. The smell of her hair was as clean and strange as the redheaded girl’s who sat ahead of me in senior year.

“I’m not a nursemaid,” I said harshly. “And your parents wouldn’t like it. If something’s bothering you, take it up with your mother.”

“Her!” She pulled away from me and sat stonily, her eyes on the lighted house.

I got out and opened the door on her side. “Good night.”

She didn’t move, even to look at me.

“Do you get out under your own power, or do I lift you out by the nape of the neck?”

She turned on me like a cat, her eyes distended: “You wouldn’t dare touch me.”

She was right. I took a few steps toward the house, my heels grinding angrily in the gravel, and she was out of the car and after me. “Please don’t call them. I’m afraid of them. That Knudson man—” She was standing on the margin of the car’s light, her face bleached white by it and her eyes stained inky black.

“What about him?”

“Mother always wants me to make up to him. I don’t know if she wants me to marry him, or what. I can’t tell father, or father would kill him. I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m sorry, Cathy, you’re not my baby.” I moved to touch her shoulder, but she drew back as if I carried disease. “Why don’t you get the cook to make you some hot milk and put you to bed? Things usually look better in the morning.”

“Better in the morning,” she repeated, with toneless, empty irony.

She was still standing tense and straight, with her hands clenched at her sides, when I started to back the car. The white beam swerved as I turned, and left her in darkness.

I stopped at the gate, but it was open, and I went on through. A few hundred yards beyond it a tall man appeared in the road, lifting his thumb for a ride. I was passing him up when I caught a glimpse of his face: Pat Reavis. I barked to a quick stop and he came running.

“Thanks very much, sir.” He smelled strongly of whisky, but he didn’t look drunk. “Your dashboard clock working?”

I compared the lighted dial with my watch. Both indicated twenty-three minutes after eight. “Seems to be.”

“It’s late than I thought, then. God, I sure hate walking. I walked enough in the Marines to last me the rest of my life. My own car’s in the garage, front end smashed.”

“Where did you do all the walking?”

“One place and another. I landed on Guadal with Carlson’s Raiders, for one. But we won’t go into that. You know the Slocums?”

To get him talking, I said: “Anybody who is anybody knows the Slocums.”

“Yeah, sure,” he answered in the same tone. “All that class. What the Slocums is an equalizer.” But he said it in a good-humored way. “You trying to sell them something?”

“Life insurance.” I was tired of the farce of pretending to be interested in Marvell’s play.

“No kidding? That’s a laugh.” He laughed to prove it.

“People die,” I said. “Is it so funny?”

“I bet you ten to one you didn’t sell any, and you never will. The old lady’s worth more dead than she is alive already, and the rest of them don’t have one nickel to clink against another.”

“I don’t get it. I heard they were good prospects, well-heeled.”

“Sure, the old lady’s sitting on a couple of million bucks in oil, but she won’t sell or lease. Slocum and his wife can’t wait for her to bump. The day she bumps, they’ll be down at the travel bureau buying tickets for a de luxe round-the-world cruise. The oil under the ground’s their life insurance, so you can stop wasting your time.”

“I appreciate the tip. My name is Archer.”

“Reavis,” he said. “Pat Reavis.”

“You seem to know the Slocums pretty well.”

“Too damn well. I been their chauffeur for the last six months. No more, though. The bastards fired me.”

“Why?”

“How the hell do I know. I guess they just got sick of looking at my pan. I got sick enough looking at theirs.”

“That’s a nice-looking kid they got, though. What was her name?”

“Cathy.”

But he gave me a quick look, and I dropped the subject. “The wife has her points, too,” I offered.

“She had it once, I guess. No more. She’s turning into another bitch like the old lady. A bunch of women go sour like milk when they got no man around to tell them where to get off.”

“There’s Slocum, isn’t there?”

“I said a man.” He snorted. “Hell, I’m talking too much.”

The car went over the little ridge that marked the edge of the mesa. The headlights swept empty blackness and dipped down into the valley. There were a few islands of brightness on either side of the road where night crews were working to bring in new wells. Further down the slope, aluminum-painted oil tanks lay under searchlights like a row of thick huge silver dollars in a kitty. At the foot of the hill the lights of the town began, white and scattered on the outskirts, crowded and crawling with color in the business section, where they cast a fiery glow above the buildings.

The traffic in the main street was heavy and unpredictable. Fenderless jalopies threatened my fenders. Hot rods built low to the ground and stacked with gin-mill cowboys roamed the neon trails with their mufflers off. A man in a custom-made Buick stopped in my path abruptly to kiss a woman in the seat beside him, and drove on with her mouth attached to the side of his neck. Eats, Drinks, Beer, Liquor, the signs announced: Antonio’s, Bill’s, Helen’s. The Boots and Saddle. Little knots of men formed on the sidewalk, jabbered and laughed and gesticulated, and broke apart under the pull of the bars.

Reavis was feeling that pull, his eyes were glistening with it. “Anywhere along here,” he said impatiently. “And thanks a million.”

I angled into the first empty parking space and turned off the lights and ignition. He looked at me with one long leg out the door. “You staying in town tonight?”

“I’ve got a room in Quinto. Right now I could use a drink.”

“You and me both, friend. Come on, I’ll show you the best place in town. Better lock your car.”

We walked back a block and turned into Antonio’s. It was a single large room, high-ceilinged and deep, with restaurant booths along one wall and a fifty-foot bar to the left. At the far end a fry cook worked in a cloud of steam. We found two empty stools near him. Everything in the place looked as if it had been there for a long time, but it was well-kept. The cigarette butts on the floor were new, the scarred mahogany surface of the bar was clean and polished. Reavis rested his arms on it as if it belonged to him. The sleeves of his gaudy shirt were rolled up, and his forearms looked as heavy and hard as the wood under them.

“Nice place,” I said. “What are you drinking?”

His answer surprised me: “Uh-uh. This is on me. You treat me like a gentleman, I treat you like a gentleman, see?”

He turned and smiled wide, full in my face, and I had my first chance to study him. The teeth were white, the black eyes frank and boyish, the lines of the features firm and clean. Reavis had quantities of raw charm. But underneath it there was something lacking. I could talk to him all night and never find his core, because he had never found it.

He offered the smile too long; something for sale. I put a cigarette in my mouth. “Hell, you just lost your job. I’ll buy the drinks.”

“There are plenty of jobs,” he said. “But buy ’em if you want. I drink Bushmill’s Irish whisky myself.”

I was reaching for a match when a lighter flicked under my nose and lit my cigarette. The bartender had approached us noiselessly, a middle-sized man with a smooth hairless head and a lean ascetic face. “Good evening, Pat,” he said without expression, replacing the lighter in the pocket of his white jacket. “What are you gentlemen drinking?”

“Bushmill’s for him. A whisky sour for me.”

He nodded and moved away, narrow-hipped and poised as a ballet-dancer.

“Tony’s a cold-blooded bastard,” Reavis said. “He’ll take your money for six months and then cut you off with a cup of coffee if he thinks you’re eighty-six. Now I’m not Jesus Christ—”

“Excuse my mistake.”

“You’re a right gee, Lew.” He smiled the big raw smile again, but he got to first names too quickly. “What do you say we pull the rag and have ourselves a time? I got me a neat blonde stashed over at Helen’s. Gretchen can find you a playmate. The night’s still young.”

“Younger than I am.”

“What’s the trouble, you married or something?”

“Not at present. I have to hit the road early tomorrow.”

“Aw, come on, man. Have a couple of drinks and you’ll feel better. This is a wide-open town.”

When our drinks arrived he took his quickly and went out through a swinging door named Gents. The bartender watched me sip my whisky sour.

“Good?”

“Very good. You didn’t spend your apprenticeship in Nopal.”

He smiled bleakly, as a monk might smile over the memory of an ecstasy. “No. I began at fourteen in the great hotels of Milan. I graduated before twenty-one to the Italian Line.” His accent was French, softened by a trace of native Italian.

“All that training so you can mix ’em for a gang of oilfield winos.”

“Nopal Valley is a fine place to make money. I bought this place for thirty-five thousand and in one year paid off the mortgage. Five years and I can retire.”

“In Italy?”

“Where else? You are a friend of Pat Reavis?”

“Never saw him before.”

“Be careful then,” dryly and quietly. “He is a very pleasant boy most of the time, but he can be very unpleasant.” He tapped the side of his lean skull. “There is something wrong with Pat: he has no limit. He will do anything, if he is drunk or angry. And he is a liar.”

“Have you had trouble with him?”

“Not me, no. I don’t have trouble with anybody.” I could see why in his face. He had the authority of a man who had seen everything and not been changed by it.

“I don’t have much trouble myself,” I said, “but thanks.”

“You are welcome.”

Reavis came back and draped a ponderous arm over my shoulder. “How you doing, Lew boy? Feeling younger now?”

“Not young enough to carry extra weight.” I moved, and his arm dropped away.

“What’s the matter, Lew?” He looked at the bartender, who was watching us. “Tony been running me down as usual? Never believe a dago, Lew. You wouldn’t let a dago spoil the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“I like Italians very much,” I said.

The bartender said slowly and clearly. “I was telling the gentleman that you are a liar, Pat.”

Reavis sat and took it. The lips drew back from his fine white teeth, but he didn’t say a word. I put a cigarette in my mouth. The lighter flicked under my nose before I could reach for a match.

Normally I objected to being waited on. But when a man was perfect in his role it was a pleasure to see him walk through it.

“Two more of the same,” I said to his slim impassive back as he walked away.

Reavis looked at me like a grateful dog. Which I was observing for rabies.