The Moving Target

20

I drove a half mile down the highway, turned, drove back again, and parked at the intersection diagonally across from The Corner. The deputy’s car was still in the parking lot.

The fog was lifting, dissolving into the sky like milk in water, and blowing out to sea. The expanding horizon only reminded me that Ralph Sampson could be a long way from there – anywhere at all. Starving to death in a mountain cabin, drowned at the bottom of the sea, or wearing a hole in the head like Eddie. The cars went by the roadhouse in both directions, headed for home or headed for brighter lights. In the rear-vision mirror my face was ghostly pale, as if I had caught a little death from Eddie. There were circles under my eyes, and I needed a shave.

A truck came up from the south and passed me slowly. It wheeled into the parking lot of The Corner. The truck was blue and had a closed van. A man jumped down from the cab and shuffled across the asphalt. I knew his rubber-kneed walk, and in the light from the entrance I knew his face. A savage sculptor had hacked it out of stone and smashed it with another stone.

He stopped with a jerk when he saw the black police car. Stopped and turned and ran back to the blue truck. It backed out with a grinding of gears, and turned down the road towards White Beach. When its tail light had dwindled to a red spark, I followed it. The road changed from black-top to gravel, and finally to sand. For two miles I ate his dust.

Where the road came down to the beach between two bluffs, another road crossed it. The lights of the truck turned left and climbed the slope. When they were over the rise and out of sight, I followed them. The road was a single track cut into the side of the hill. From the crest I could see the ocean below to my right. There was a traveling moon in the clouds, which were drifting out to sea. Its light on the black water made a dull lead-foil shine.

The hill flattened out ahead, and the road straightened. I drove on slowly with my lights out. Before I knew it I was abreast of the truck. It was standing in a lane with no lights showing, fifty yards off the road. I kept going.

The road ended abruptly at the bottom of the hill a quarter mile farther on. A lane meandered off toward the ocean on the right, but its entrance was blocked by a wooden gate. I turned my car in the dead end and climbed the hill on foot.

A row of eucalyptus trees, ragged against the sky, edged the lane where the truck was standing. I left the road and kept them between me and the truck. The ground was uneven, dotted with clumps of coarse grass. I stumbled more than once. Then space fell open in front of me, and I nearly walked off the edge of the bluff. Far down below, the white surf stroked the beach. The sea looked close enough for a dive, but hard as metal.

Below me to the right there was a white square of light I climbed and slid down the side of the hill, holding onto the grass to keep from falling. A small building took shape around the light a white cottage held in a groin of the bluff.

The unblinded window gave me a full view of the single room. I felt for the gun in my holster and approached the window on my hands and knees. There were two people in the room. Neither of them was Sampson.

Puddler was wedged in a chair cut out of a barrel, his broken profile toward me, a bottle of beer in his fist. He was facing a woman on an unmade studio bed against the wall. The gasoline lamp that hung from a rafter in the un-plastered ceiling threw a hard white light on her streaked blond hair and her face. It was a thin and harried face, with wide resentful nostrils and a parched mouth. Only the cold brown eyes were lively in it, darting and peering from the puckered skin of their sockets. I moved my head sideways, out of their range.

The room wasn’t large, but it seemed to be terribly bare. The pine floor was carpetless, slick with grime. A wooden table piled with dirty dishes stood under the light. Beyond it against the far wall were a two-burner oil stove, a sagging icebox, a rust-mottled sink with a tin pail under it to catch the drip.

The room was so still, the clapboard walls so thin, that I could hear the steady suspiration of the lamp. And Puddler’s voice when he said: “I can’t wait here all night, can I? You can’t expect me to wait here all night. I got a job to get back to. And I don’t like that police car setting up there at The Corner.”

“That’s what you said before. That car don’t mean anything.”

“I’m saying it again. I should of been back at the Piano already; you know that. Mr. Troy was mad when Eddie didn’t show.”

“Let him get apoplexy.” The woman’s voice was sharp and thin like her face. “If he don’t like the way Eddie does the job, he can stick it.”

“You ain’t in no position to talk like that.” Puddler looked from side to side of the room. “You didn’t talk like that when Eddie come sucking around for a job when he got out of the pen. When he got out of the pen and come sucking around for a job and Mr. Troy give him one–”

“For God’s sake! Can’t you stop repeating yourself, dim brain?”

His scarred face gathered in folds of hurt surprise. He drew in his head, and his thick neck wrinkled up like a turtle’s neck. “That’s no way to talk, Marcie.”

“You shut your yap about Eddie and the pen.” Her voice bit like a thin knife blade. “How many jails you seen the inside of, dim brain?”

His answer was a tormented bellow. “Lay off me, hear.”

“All right then, lay off Eddie.”

“Where the hell is Eddie, anyway?”

“I don’t know where he is or why, but I know he’s got a reason.”

“It better be good when he talks to Mr. Troy.”

“Mister Troy, Mister Troy. He’s got you hypnotized, hasn’t he? Maybe Eddie won’t be talking to Mr. Troy.”

His small eyes-peered at her, trying to read her meaning in her face, and gave up. “Listen, Marcie,” he said after a pause. “You can drive the truck.”

“The hell you say! I want no part of that racket.”

“It’s good enough for me. It’s good enough for Eddie. You’re getting awful fancy-pants since he took you off the street–”

“Shut up or you’ll be sorry!” she said. “The trouble with you is you’re yellow. You see a patrol car and you wet your pants. So you try to get a woman to take your rap, like any other pimp.”

He stood up suddenly, brandishing the bottle. “Lay off me, hear. I don’t take nothing from nobody. You was a man, I spoil your face for you, hear.” The beer foamed out on the floor and over her knees.

She answered very coolly. “You wouldn’t say that in front of Eddie. He’d saw you to pieces, and you know it.”

“That little monkey!”

“Yeah, that little monkey! Sit down, Puddler. Everybody knows you’re a powerful battler. I’ll get you another beer.”

She got up and moved across the room, stepping lightly and furiously like a starved cat. Taking a towel from a nail beside the sink, she dabbed at her beer-stained bathrobe.

“You drive the truck?” Puddler said hopefully.

“Do I have to say everything twice, the same as you? I’m not driving the truck. If you’re afraid, let one of them drive.”

“Naw, I can’t do that. They don’t know the road; they get knocked off.”

“You’re wasting time, then, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He moved towards her uncertainly, casting a huge shadow on the floor and wall. “How’s about a little something before I go? A little party. Eddie’s probably in the sack with somebody. I got plenty what it takes.”

She picked up a bread knife from the table, the kind with a wavy cutting edge. “Take it away with you, Puddler, or I’ll love you up with this.”

“Come on now, Marcie. We could get along.” He stood still, keeping his distance.

She gulped to control her rising hysteria, but her voice came out as a scream. “Beat it!” The bread knife moved in the glaring light, pointed at his throat.

“O. K., Marcie. You don’t have to get mad.” He shrugged his shoulders and turned away with the hurt and helpless look of any rejected lover.

I left the window and started up the hill. Before I reached the top, a door swung open, projecting an oblong of light on the hillside. I froze on my hands and knees. I could see the shadow of my head on the dry grass in front of my face.

Then the door closed, drawing darkness over me. Puddler’s shadow came out of the pool of shadows behind the house. He went up the steep lane, scuffing the dust with his feet, and disappeared behind the eucalyptus trees.

I had to choose between him and the blond woman, Marcie. I chose Puddler. Marcie could wait. She’d wait forever before Eddie something came back.