Vanish in an Instant

10

He found Loftus in a small room across the hall from the Sheriff’s office. Loftus was alone, and not under restraint of any kind, though there was a policeman outside in the corridor.

Meecham knew the policeman. His name was Samuels; he was nearing retirement age, his legs and feet bothered him, and he suffered from attacks of hiccups that sometimes lasted for hours. Whenever Samuels got the hiccups his colleagues planned intricate, and occasionally hilarious, ways of scaring them away. None of them worked.

“Hello, Samuels,” Meecham said. “How are things?”

“Bad. You got here just in time. They’re taking your boy in there away.”

“Where to?”

“The doc says he should be in a hospital. So as soon as I get the transfer papers, that’s where I’m taking him, out to County.”

“I’ll talk to him first. Mind if I close this door?”

Samuels shrugged, a magnificently eloquent shrug which implied that as far as he was concerned every door in the place should be shut and the whole building blown up.

Meecham went inside and closed the door. The room was very small, furnished with a card table and three folding chairs, all different, a bridge lamp, a davenport with two broken springs, and a swivel chair with a cracked and worn leather seat. Everything in the room seemed to be discards from other rooms and offices, including the pictures that lined the windowless walls: photographs of the Detroit Red Wings, Abraham Lincoln, a sailboat, Dizzy Dean, and a score of unnamed and unremembered magistrates and judges and policemen.

Loftus was sitting in one of the folding chairs, staring up at the ceiling ventilator, his eyes strained and supplicating, as if they saw, beyond the ventilator, the sky; and beyond the sky the great hole of eternity already open for him.

Meecham said, “Loftus?”

Loftus moaned, faintly, the protesting sound of a man returning from a dream.

“Sorry I’m late, Loftus. Are you feeling all right?”

“I’ve been trying to pray. My mind won’t let me, it keeps flying, flying through space.” He lowered his head, and his eyes met Meecham’s. “They’re taking me away. I think I’m dying.”

The ventilator whirred like wings.

“No. No, you’re not, Loftus. Cordwink thinks you’ll be more comfortable in the hospital, have more care, better food.” He spoke too heartily, in an attempt to cover his conviction that the care and comfort were too late, the food useless to a man who couldn’t eat.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital. Please. I don’t want to go, Mr. Meecham.”

“I can’t prevent them doing what’s best for you.”

“It’s not best. I hate that air, smelling of sickness. I... well, I’ll go, of course. I’ll go. There’s no choice.” He glanced down at the suitcase beside his feet. It was the first time Meecham noticed it. “Emmy came to see me this morning.”

“Mrs. Hearst?”

“Yes. They wouldn’t let her in, but they let me have the stuff she brought me, some of my clothes and my radio. I don’t know how she got the radio. I sold it yesterday.”

“She bought it back from Devine this morning.”

“She? God! She must have found out about the name I... I used.”

“Maybe not,” Meecham said. “I did, though.”

“Duane Desmond. How do you like that for a grown man, eh? Funny, isn’t it? I don’t know what got into me. Duane Desmond. God!” He pounded the flimsy card table with his fist. One of the hinged legs collapsed and the table sagged but didn’t fall. Loftus bent down and straightened the hinge, looking a little ashamed of himself. “You won’t tell Emmy.”

“Why should I?”

“She mustn’t find out. She doesn’t know I’m a fool.” He rested his head on his hands. Meecham saw then the toothmarks on the knuckles of both of Loftus’ hands. Even in the dim yellow light of the old bridge lamp they were plainly the marks of teeth, and one of them was bleeding. The blood looked like any other blood to Meecham. But he knew that this blood was venom, and that the long night — when Loftus had sat in silent frenzy biting his knuckles — was only the beginning of a longer night.

Meecham was seized by a sensation of incredible helplessness. He wanted to communicate with Loftus, to express sympathy and friendship, but the words he knew were inadequate as all words are inadequate in the imminence of death. For the first time in his life Meecham experienced a sense of religion, a feeling that the only way he and Loftus could communicate with each other was through a third being, a translator of the spirit.

Loftus turned his head suddenly. “You went to Devine’s to check up on me, Mr. Meecham?”

“I had to find out what happened to the articles that were missing from your room, whether you’d given them away, pawned them, sold them.”

“Is that so important?”

“It’s important because Cordwink has — or had — an idea that someone paid you to kill Margolis.”

“Is that your idea too?”

“No. I think you sold the stuff to Devine because you were broke. If you were broke, obviously you weren’t paid.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Certainly. You could tell me anything you like but it wouldn’t necessarily be the truth.”

“You think I’m a liar, Mr. Meecham?” he said, anxiously.

“You’re human.”

“All this checking up on me, it’s not necessary. I ask no favors. I’m a guilty man and I’m willing to take my punishment. But this prying — this unnecessary...”

“What you say isn’t evidence unless it’s backed by what you’ve done.”

“I guess you’re right. But whatever you find out, don’t tell Emmy.”

“What is there to find out?”

Loftus didn’t answer. He was gnawing on his bleeding knuckles again.

“She’s very fond of you, Loftus.”

“She is, yes, I’m sure she is. I... What did...? You were talking to her last night, what did she say about me?”

“She was full of praise, of course; how kind and thoughtful you were, and a little bit about your history.”

Footsteps passed in the corridor beyond the door. They sounded faint and far away.

“It’s hard to admit you’re nothing,” Loftus said. “I’m admitting it now. My life has been without meaning or purpose or satisfaction. I should never have been born; my father didn’t want children and my mother felt trapped by the responsibility. The whole thing has been a mistake from beginning to end. I am afraid of my moment of dying, terribly afraid. But I will be glad to be gone. You don’t read poetry, Mr. Meecham?”

“No.”

“There’s a phrase that Yeats used. I have it written down in my book.” He took a little black notebook from his shirt pocket and leafed through it. Each page that Meecham could see was crammed from top to bottom with writing, writing so small that it seemed impossible to read with the naked eye. He wondered whether this was Loftus’ natural handwriting, or whether he wrote that way deliberately to save space in the little book.

“Here it is,” Loftus said. “I’m not sure exactly what it means, it’s out of context. But this one phrase keeps cropping up in my head lately: ‘That this pragmatical preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.’

“‘Pragmatical preposterous pig of a world,’” he said, spitting out the words like pits that he’d been chewing too long. “That describes it. I will be glad to leave.”

He lapsed into silence again. The only sound in the room was the whirring of the ventilator, though there was a sensation of sound and movement, as if beyond the closed door many things were happening, preposterous things.

Meecham said, “Why did you ask me to come here?”

“I want to hire you. Oh, not to defend me, that won’t be necessary. But there are one or two little things that I won’t be able to take care of. I’d like you to do them for me.”

“What are they?”

“I have some money. I sold my car and a few little articles. It amounted to $716.00 I want my mother to have it.”

“Where is it?”

“Emmy will give it to you. It’s in an envelope in the middle of a package of letters. Deduct your fee, whatever it is, and give the rest of the money and all the letters to my mother. They’re her letters. She wrote them to me when I came here. Tell her...” He hesitated, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Tell her to reread them, every one of them, to see... No. No, don’t tell her that. Let her do what she likes with them. It’s too late anyway. Just give her the money and tell her to go away somewhere for a while.”

“Why?”

“She can’t... can’t face things very well. It’s better if she goes away. Her address was in one of the morning papers. That’s bad. She may be hounded by reporters or — well, Kincaid is a small cruel town.”

“I’ll deliver your message. I don’t guarantee that I can persuade her to leave.”

“You can try. Here, I’ll write the address down for you.”

“Don’t bother, I saw the papers,” Meecham said. He remembered the address, not from any newspaper, but from the Railway Express consignment slip that had been pasted across Loftus’ suitcase: From Mrs. Charles E. Loftus, 231 Oak Street, Kincaid, Michigan, to Mr. Earl Duane Loftus, 611 Division Street, Arbana, Michigan. Contents valued at $50.00.

“I know it’s asking a lot, Mr. Meecham. But if you could go sometime today, get to her first — it’s only a hundred miles...”

“I’ll go today.”

“Thank you.” Loftus rose, clumsily, supporting himself by leaning one hand on the card table and the other on the back of the chair. “Thank you very much.”

“Why didn’t you keep her picture, Loftus?”

“I wanted to be alone. Entirely alone, without even a picture. Can you understand that?”

“It isn’t a good thing to be alone. Relatives have a way of standing by in emergencies. Haven’t you got any, except your mother?”

“I had a wife once. She left me, got a divorce. I can’t blame her. She was a big, strong, healthy woman. At least she was then, I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

“Has it occurred to you that your mother might want to come here to see you?”

Loftus shrugged, wearily. “She won’t come. Oh, she’ll want to come, she may even plan to come, have everything arranged, suitcase neatly packed, everything. She may even get as far as the bus depot. Then she’ll take a little drink to calm her nerves. You can guess the rest.”

“Yes.” He recalled the number of books about alcoholism that Loftus kept in his room.

“She was always death against liquor. She never had a drink until she was nearly fifty. My father had run out on her by that time, and one day she went out and bought a bottle of wine to calm her nerves. It happened right away. One drink, and she was a drunk. She’d been a drunk for maybe thirty years and didn’t find it out until then. For her the world vanished in that instant. She has never seen it since. She never will again.”

“Perhaps. There are cures.”

Loftus only shook his head.

“I’ll see to it personally that she comes to visit you, if you want her to.”

“No, thank you,” Loftus said politely. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

The door from the corridor opened and the policeman, Samuels, came in. He had taken his handcuffs from the leather case fastened to his belt and he was playing with them, clicking them from wide to narrow and back again, the way Miss Jennings played with her ring of keys and for the same reason, because he was bored and a little embarrassed.

“All through, Mr. Meecham? We got orders to be on the move.”

Meecham turned to Loftus. “Are we all through?”

“I think so,” Loftus said.

“If something else comes up, let me know. In any case, I’ll be around to see you when I’ve transacted the business we discussed. Perhaps early in the morning.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll see Emmy right away.”

“Tell her not to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“I will. Good luck.”

Meecham stood in the doorway of the small windowless room and watched the two men go down the corridor, handcuffed together, walking slowly and in step. Then he turned, abruptly, and walked as fast as he could in the other direction and out the rear entrance.

It was noon, but there was no sun. The sky hung close over the smoky city like a sagging tent top that would some day blow away, exposing the vast blackness of space.

Meecham waited for the traffic signal to change. A car went through the yellow light and almost sideswiped another car. Both drivers began to curse, ineffectually through closed windows, like little boys hurling threats from the safety of their own doorsteps. A woman came out of the supermarket across the street, jerking the arm of the crying child staggering along behind her. An old man on crutches inched his way across the icy sidewalk to the curb and stood eyeing the speeding cars with hate and fear.

A column of bitterness rose like mercury in Meecham’s throat. Pig of a world, he thought. Preposterous pig of a world.