Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

"I can't watch this," she said, starting to pace in hysterical little circles. In her blue jersey jumper and white beads, she resembled a society woman who has just been informed that the entire family fortune has been embezzled.

Then, gathering herself, she went over to him and said, "Are you all right, Larry?"

"What the hell you doing with him?"

"He's helping me find something."

"What?"

"It needn't concern you." She sounded as prim as a schoolmarm. "I merely asked if you were all right."

But now he didn't pay any attention to her. He struggled to his feet, leaning back a bit from the booze. He was more sober now. Losing some blood and throwing up can occasionally work wonders.

"You think you're going to get away with this, Dwyer, you're really crazy. Really crazy." Then he turned on her and said, "You too, bitch. You too."

He left.

He walked bowlegged the way Oliver Hardy had in Way Out West . He wanted to walk mean because he was a basically mean guy and booze only enhanced his anger. But right now all he could do was look like Oliver Hardy and it didn't scare me and it didn't impress me and I'd already decided that if he came back, I was going to put a few more fists into him.

"That wasn't necessary."

"Sure it was," I said.

"You don't understand the situation here."

"I understand that Larry Price is a jerk and always has been."

"But that's all you understand."

"I met Dr. Evans."

Her eyes narrowed. "He was there when you went into the apartment?"

"He was there all right. Unconscious."

"What?"

"And bleeding."

She sighed. Shook her head. "So he did try?"

"Try what?"

"Suicide."

"Sorry."

"What?"

"Somebody hit him across the back of the head. Very hard. And several times. Guess what they were looking for."

"His money, probably. Some junkie or something."

"God, you're just going to keep it up, aren't you?"

"Keep what up? What are you talking about?"

"Keep up this guise that there's something very innocent in the suitcase and that you just kind of want it back for old times' sake. Are you dealing drugs?"

"My God, what kind of person do you think I am?"

"Did you do some jewelry salesman out of his ruby collection?"

"I don't want to hear any more."

"Somebody wants whatever's in that suitcase badly enough to risk B and E and assault with a deadly weapon. Those are heavy raps. “I grabbed her by the shoulder-thinking that Glendon Evans had told me he'd hit her-and I dug my thumb and forefinger into her gentle and wonderful flesh. “You owe it to me, Karen."

"What?"

"The truth."

She laughed without seeming at all amused. "Oh, I wish I knew the truth, Jack. How I wish I knew the truth."

But I was in no mood for philosophy. "What's in the suitcase?"

"Would you make me a promise?"

"What?"

"If we went back into the gym and danced the slow dance medley, would you promise not to step on my feet?"

"Don't try to buy me off, Karen. I want to know what the hell's going on. You're in trouble, whether you know it or not."

"You used to be a terrible dancer, Jack, and for some reason I suspect you still are." She leaned up and kissed my cheek and I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. "But then you're cute and you're sincere, and sometimes those things are even more important than the social graces."

"Have you always been this superficial?"

"No," she said, and there was an almost startling melancholy in her voice. "No, Jack, I've had to work at it. I really have."

Then she took my arm and led me back inside the gym where in tenth grade she'd given me a lingering public kiss right there on the dance floor. Robert Mitchum had nothing on me.

So we started dancing, a little formally at first, as the band went through some Connie Francis numbers and then some Johnny Mathis numbers and then some Teddy Bear numbers, and I started looking around the shadows of the gym at the joke being played out before me.

Here were the kids I'd made my First Communion with and played baseball with and walked home from school with along the railroad tracks that smelled of grease and swapped comics with (Batman was always worth two of anything else) and watched change from little girls into big girls with powers both wonderful and terrible over me and little boys into half-men with a hatred that could only come from growing up in the Highlands-but whatever else we'd been, we'd been young and it had all been ahead of us-the great promise of money and achievement and sex, God yes, sex. But these people were trying to trick me now, they'd gone to some theatrical costume shop and gotten gray for their hair and padding for their bellies and rubber to create jowls, these very same people in my First Communion photo.

"You scared?" she said.

But I'd been lost in my thoughts and all I could give her was a dumb expression. "What?"

"Are you afraid?"

"Of what?"

"Look around."

"That's what I'm doing."

"In twenty years a lot of these people will be dead. Maybe even us."

"I know."

"It went so fast."

I was getting one of those seventh-grade erections, the kind you get but don't really want because it's embarrassing and you don't really know what to do with it. I was getting a seventh-grade erection there dancing in the darkness of our middle age.

"Why don't we go back to your apartment and go to bed?" she said. Her voice was curiously slowed. I wanted to attribute this to the incredible sexual sway I held over women but somehow I didn't think so.

I said, "You're drunk."

"No, I'm not. I only had two drinks tonight."

"Something pretty potent?"

"No, one of the pink ladies fixed me a Scotch and soda is all."

"Pink ladies?"

"Waitresses."

"Ah." And true enough, I had seen waitresses buzzing around. "They must have had some kind of incredible effect on you."

"Why?"

"You sound groggy."

"That's what's funny."

"What?"

"I sort of feel groggy, too."

"You want to sit down?"

"No, just hold me a little closer, will you?"

I sighed, pulled her closer. "Karen, I want you to tell me about the suitcase."

"Not now, all right?"

And she put her face into my shoulder and we danced as I once dreamed we would dance, eyes closed, even the tinny music melodic and romantic, and I felt her eminent sexual presence but also her odd vulnerability, and I held her for the girl she'd been and the woman she was, and I let my lips find her cheek and felt her finger tender on the back of my neck.

And for a time, moving just like that in the Shamrock gym, in unison with all the people in our First Communion picture, I forgot all about Dr. Evans and how he'd been knocked out and forgot all about a curious figure in black on a black Honda motorcycle and all about a suitcase that nobody seemed to possess but that somebody seemed to want very, very badly.

I wasn't thinking of anything at all really, just floating on her perfume and the darkness and the music, and at first I was scarcely aware of how she began to slip from my arms to the floor.

"Karen?" I said. "Karen?"

People around us were looking and a few giggling, making the assumption she was drunk, but I didn't think so.

She was dead weight in my arms. And that was exactly what I thought: dead weight.

And then one of those quick bursts of panic, some sort of concussion, went off inside me and I heard myself shouting for lights up and for people to clear space and I knelt paramedic-style next to her feeling for pulse in neck and wrist, touching the tepid, sweaty skin of her body.

I found no pulse.

A priest and a fat man in a dinner jacket whom I recognized as our class president came running up and said, "What's wrong here?"