The Moving Target

22

They marched me out to my car. Troy’s Buick was standing beside it. The truck was gone. Claude and the brown men were gone. It was still black night, with the moon at its lower edge now.

Puddler brought a coil of rope from the shack beside the adobe.

“Put your hands behind you,” Troy said to me.

I kept my hands at my sides.

“Put your hands behind you.”

“So far I’ve been doing my job,” I said. “If you push me around some more, I’ll have a grudge against you.”

“You talk a great fight,” Troy said. “Quiet him, Puddler.”

I turned to face Puddler, not fast enough. His fist struck the nape of my neck. Pain whistled through my body like splintered glass, and the night fell on me solidly again. Then I was on a road. The road was crowded with traffic. I was responsible for the occupants of every car. I had to write a report on each, giving age, occupation, hobby, religion, bank balance, sexual proclivities, politics, crimes, and favorite eating places. The passengers changed cars frequently, like people playing musical chairs. The cars changed numbers and color. My pen ran out. of ink. A blue truck picked me up and changed to funeral black. Eddie was at the wheel, and I let him drive. I was planning to kill a man.

The plan was half complete, when I came to. I was wedged on the floor of my car between the front and back seats. The floor was vibrating with motion, and the pain in my head kept time. My hands were bound behind me again. Puddler’s wide back was in the front seat, outlined by the reflection of the headlights. I couldn’t get to my feet, and I couldn’t reach him.

I tried to work my hands loose from the rope, twisting and pulling until my wrists were raw and my clothes were wet. The rope held out better than I did. I threw my plan away and started another.

By dark untraveled roads we came down out of the mountains and back to the sea. He parked the car under a tarpaulin stretched on poles. As soon as the engine died I could hear the waves below us beating on the sand. He lifted me out by my coat collar and set me on my feet. I noticed that he pocketed my ignition key.

“Don’t make no noise,” he said, “unless you want it again.”

“You’ve got a lot of guts,” I said. “It takes a lot of guts to hit a man from behind while somebody else holds a gun on him.”

“You shut up.” He spread his fingers across my face and hooked them downward. They tasted of sweat, as rank as a horse’s.

“It takes a lot of guts,” I said, “to push a man in the face when his hands are tied behind him.”

“You shut up,” he said. “I shut you up for good.”

“Mr. Troy wouldn’t like that.”

“You shut up. Get moving.” He put his hands on my shoulders, turned me, and pushed me out from under the tarpaulin.

I was at the shore end of a long pier that was built out over the water on piles. There were oil derricks on the skyline behind me, but no lights. No movement but the sea’s, and the systole and diastole of an oil pump at the end of the pier. We walked toward it in single file, with Puddler at the rear. The planks of the footwalk were warped and badly put together. Black water gleamed in the cracks.

When we were about a hundred yards from shore I made out the pump at the end of the pier, rising and falling like a mechanical teeter-totter. There was a tool shed beside it, nothing but ocean beyond.

Puddler unlocked the door of the shed, lifted a lantern off a nail, and lit it.

“Sit down, mug.” He swung the lantern toward a heavy bench that stood against the wall. There was a vise at one end of the bench and a few tools scattered along it: pincers, wrenches of various sizes, a rusty file.

I sat down on a clear space. Puddler shut the door and set the lantern on an oil drum. Lit from below by the yellow flaring light, his face was barely human. It was low-browed and prognathous like a Neanderthal man’s, heavy and forlorn, without thought. It wasn’t fair to blame him for what he did. He was a savage accidentally dropped in the steel-and-concrete jungle, a trained beast of burden, a fighting machine. But I blamed him. I had to. I had to take what he’d handed me or find a way to hand it back to him.

“You’re in a rather unusual position,” I said.

He didn’t hear me, or refused to answer. He leaned against the door, a thick stump of a man blocking my way. I listened to the thump and creak of the pump outside, the water lapping below against the piling. And I thought over the things I knew about Puddler.

“You’re in a rather unusual position,” I said again.

“Button your lip.”

“Acting as jailer, I mean. It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it? You sit in the cell while somebody else watches you.”

“I said button your lip.”

“How many jails you seen the inside of, dim brain?”

“Fa Christ sake!” he yelled. “I warned you.” He slouched toward me.

“It takes a lot of guts,” I said, “to threaten a man when his hands are tied behind him.”

His open hand stung my face.

“The trouble with you is you’re yellow,” I said. “Just like Marcie said. You’re even afraid of Marcie, aren’t you, Puddler?”

He stood there blinking, overshadowing me. “I kill you, hear, you talk like that to me. I kill you, hear.” The words came out disjointed, moving too fast for his laboring mouth. A bubble of saliva formed at one corner.

“But Mr. Troy wouldn’t like that. He told you to keep me safe, remember? There’s nothing you can do to me, Puddler.”

“Beat your ears off,” he said. “I beat your ears off.”

“Not if my hands were free, you poor palooka.”

“Who you calling palooka?” He drew back his hand again.

“You fifth-rate bum,” I said. “You has-been. Down-and-outer. Hit a man when he’s tied – it’s all you’re good for.”

He didn’t hit me. He took a clasp knife out of his pocket and opened it. His little eyes were red and shining. His whole mouth was wet with saliva now.

“Stand up,” he said. “I show you who’s a bum.”

I turned my back to him. He cut the ropes on my wrists and snapped the knife shut. Then he whirled me toward him and met me with a quick right cross that took away the feeling from my face. I knew I was no match for him. I kicked him in the stomach, and he went to the other side of the room.

While he was coming back I picked up the file from the bench. Its point was blunt, but it would do. I clinched with him. Holding the file near the point in my right hand, I cut him across the forehead with it from temple to temple. He backed away from me. “You cut me,” he said incredulously.

“Pretty soon you won’t be able to see, Puddler.” A Finnish sailor on the San Pedro docks had taught me how Baltic knife-fighters blind their opponents.

“I kill you yet.” He came at me like a bull.

I went to the floor and came up under him, jabbing with the file where it would hurt him. He bellowed and went down. I made for the door. He came after me and caught me in the opening. We staggered the width of the pier and fell into space. I took a quick breath before we struck. We went down together. Puddler fought me violently, but his blows were cushioned by the water. I hooked my fingers in his belt and held on.

He threshed and kicked like a terrified animal. I saw his air come out, the silver bubbles rising through the black water to the surface. I held on to him. My lungs were straining for air, my chest was collapsing. The contents of my head were slowing and thickening. And Puddler wasnt struggling any more.

I had to let go of him to reach the surface in time. One deep breath, and I went down after him. My clothes hampered me, and the shoes were heavy on my feet. I went down through strata of increasing cold until my ears were aching with the pressure of the water. Puddler was out of reach and out of sight. I tried six times before I gave him up. The key to my car was in his trousers pocket.

When I swam to shore my legs wouldn’t hold me up. I had to crawl out of reach of the surf. It was partly physical exhaustion and partly fear. I was afraid of what was behind me in the cold water.

I lay in the sand until my heartbeat slowed. When I got to my feet the derricks on the horizon were sharply outlined against a lightening sky. I climbed the bank to the shelter where my car was and turned on the lights.

There was a piece of copper wire attached to one of the poles that held the tarpaulin. I pulled it loose and wired my ignition terminals under the dash. The engine started on the first try.