Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

He jammed the gun into my head again. His breath was coming in heaves that were almost sobs. "You're gonna help me to my car, man."

"Sure, Chuck."

"You're gonna help me or I'm gonna kill you."

All it took was ducking a little to the right. He got a shot off but it went wild. Just what you'd expect from a sad, desperate man like Chuck Lane.

I got him up clean, just under the sternum, and I put it all the way in and I twisted it twice, liking the sound of his surprise, and the sound of death.

"Jesus," he said.

And then I saw his face and I had to look away.

"Jesus," he said again. But he wasn't cursing. He was praying.

"You gotta help me, Dwyer," he said.

"There's nothing I can do, Chuck." I still couldn't look at him. All I could do was shake my head.

He started to cry and then he started to vomit and then he started to scream and then he just went silent. Like that, silence.

I knelt there, my back to him, soaked now, listening to the night, the rattle of rain against the trees, a factory whistle announcing a change in shifts.

The fire that had been the Mercedes was burning lower.

I got up then and walked around and stared at each one of them.

In the distance I could hear sirens.

I went back to doomed Chuck Lane, the screw-up. He was still piled up against the boulder. His eyes were open. I got down on my haunches and closed them for him and then I put my hand on his shoulder and said a prayer, a long one, and it was only partly for the men who'd died here tonight. A lot of it was for me, a whole lot of it, and what might be happening to me, the way I hadn't minded taking off Haskins' face, the way the shiv felt right and good jamming up inside Chuck Lane.

The sirens got closer.

"So they raped her?" Edelman asked me two hours later.

We sat in Malley's. Dolly Parton was on the jukebox. The pool balls were clacking. The rain ran like mercury down the front window. It just wasn't going to stop.

"Forester and Haskins and Price and Sonny Howard," I said. "She hung around them because she was trying to move up the social ladder, get out of the Highlands any way she could, and so she went to their parties and dated Forester sometimes and dated Price others. And then one night they all got drunk and they took her up to Pierce Point and they showed her what poor girls were really worth."

By the end I was making fists.

"You don't sound real sorry they're dead," Edelman said softly.

"I'm trying real hard," I said and without irony. "But I don't know if I'm going to make it."

He nodded to my shell. "How about another one?"

"How about six more?"

"Six more is fine by me."

So we started our way through six more, having shots brought along. "What the hell," Edelman said. "I always secretly wanted to be blue collar anyway." So he knocked back the bourbon and made a terrible face and said, "That was great."

"Right."

He sipped at his beer. "So this Evelyn thought that Karen Lane killed her cousin Sonny?"

"Right."

"Did she?"

"No. After the rape, Sonny started hanging around Karen, and he fell in love with her. He was very guilty about being involved in her rape. So guilty that Forester and the other two were afraid he was going to go to the police and confess. They were the ones who pushed him off Pierce Point. They killed him."

"You ready for another?"

"You're going to?"

"Why not?"

"I'm sure glad you got the other boys to spell you tonight."

"Let them clean things up for once. I usually get the shit detail, anyway." He signaled to Malley for another round.

I thought of what Pierce Point must look like by now. Ten emergency vehicles, red-and-blue lights startling in the gloom, the, dead bodies.

He knocked this one back too, except he coughed. "Christ," he said. Then he smiled. "Being blue collar isn't as easy as it looks."

"Wait till you have to get up some morning and go punch in at some factory. Staring at stiffs sounds like fun all of a sudden."

He took a handful of peanuts from the red plastic bowl in front of him and said, "So she blackmailed them?"

"She and her brother. Over the years. Never for a lot, a few thousand here, a few thousand there. Then her brother got greedy."

"'He took the suitcase. From Doctor Evans?"

"Right."

He paused. "You going to let me see it?"

"I don't think so."

He sighed. Put his hand on my shoulder. "Its evidence."

I put my head down and thought about what I'd found in the suitcase. The story for one thing, the story she told Gary Roberts she wanted him to "touch up" for her, the story that laid it all out. Terrible writing. Confession-magazine stuff crossed with the worst sort of Holly Golightly daydreams. But it told it all-the rape, the blackmail, the brother she'd helped drag through life.

But it wasn't the story I'd remember.

It was the clothes. In the Highlands there was a tradition, brought over from the old country, and officially frowned on by the priests, of being buried with any limbs of yours that you might have had amputated during your life. I knew of an old Highlands Irishman who kept the bones of his cancer-riddled leg for forty years till he died, then he instructed his son to throw it into the casket with him.

What Karen Lane had done was not unlike that.

She'd kept the clothes she'd worn the night of the rape. All these long years later the blood soaks were almost black and the torn cotton material faded. She'd even kept her underpants. They'd been in shreds. I'd never know now if she wanted them as evidence or if she wanted to be buried with them, the way some Highlanders would want to be. I'd never know now what to think of her. She would always remain just on the outer edge of understanding, unknowable.

"I better go call my old lady," Edelman said.

I laughed.

"Just wanted to see if you were paying attention."

"Wait till I tell your wife you referred to her as your 'old lady.'"

"I'm just talking the same way everybody else here does." I noticed he swayed slightly walking to the pay phone. I went back to my beer. I stared at all the stuff Malley sold behind the counter, combs, razor blades, breath spray, aspirin, potato chips, decongestants. He was turning the place into a 7-Eleven. Then I noticed his new hand-painted sign listing the prices for his most popular drinks, including 7 and 7s, wine coolers, pink ladies, and shell-and-shot. ("I get tired of being a frigging human menu," Malley always said.)

Then Edelman came back. "I told her I called her my 'old lady.'"

"She laugh?"

"Nope."

"You got problems, my friend."

"I told her you said it first."

"Thanks a lot."

He had some more beer and said, "One more thing bothers me."

"What?"

"Why did Karen hire you to get the suitcase?"

"Because she wanted to stop her brother from really putting the big arm on Forester and the other two. She planned to leave for Brazil next year and she wanted to put the last huge shot on them herself."

"Why Brazil?"

"It's where Holly went."

"Who's Holly?"

"Somebody who never existed, or shouldn't have, anyway."

"You're getting drunk," he said, wiggling a finger at me.

I smiled."So's your old lady."

Ispent the night at Donna's. We had popcorn and then we had underwear inspection and then we watched an "Early Bird" movie called Curse of the Vampire , which was actually sort of scary, and then it was dawn and we slept, one of those rare times when she let me sleep touching her (she likes me to have my side of the bed and her to have hers), and then we woke up because she had to go in to the office early and so I sat in bed while she took a shower and kind of scratched myself in various places and picked at myself in others and all the time something kept bothering me, really bothering me, but I couldn't think of what it was. And then I remembered Malley's sign from last night, the one listing all the drinks and prices, the one including pink ladies, and then I recalled what Karen Lane had said right before she died; "One of the pink ladies brought me my drink." And then I remembered something else, too, so I got up and found the phone book and looked up the name of the woman who'd been checking off names at the reunion dance that night, and we had a few words of this and that and then I asked her my question and she said, "Boy, that's a weird one," but she answered it nonetheless and I said thank you and hung up fast.