Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

“Kirby Stassen.”

“Sit, Kirboo, and we’ll talk up a storm. I’ve fallen among dull comrades. I’m Sander Golden, poet, experimenter, cultural anthropologist. I dig the far pastures of the spirit. Sit and browse.”

I sat. My eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Shack was an ugly-looking monster. Sander Golden was a soiled, jumpy and amusing phony, a little older than the rest of us, close to thirty I decided. His heavy glasses were repaired with tape, and sat crooked on his thin nose. His teeth were not good and he was going bald. Nan was a sulky, sultry broad with too much hair and a practiced way of staring directly into your eyes. It was a corner table with four chairs.

In trying to write this down, I find that there is one special problem I cannot solve. I cannot put down the unique flavor of Sandy’s conversation. When I try to put down his words, they sound flat. His mind with always racing ahead of his words so that at times he was almost incoherent. And there was a flavor of holiday about him. That’s the best word I can find. He was living up every minute, enjoying hell out of it, and he pulled you along with him. You were certain he was a ludicrous type, and you kept wondering what he would say and do next. He was ludicrous, but he was alarming too. He was making up his own rules as he went along.

They had a bottle of tequila añejo on the floor. Sandy and the girl were drinking it very sparingly out of little porcelain sake cups which had come out of his beat-up, bulging rucksack, I found out later. Shack was belting it down. I bought a house setup and, on invitation, started belting along with him.

Shack and Nan took no part in the conversation. They stared at me from time to time without approval. I was the outsider. And, way in back of all Sandy’s effusiveness, was a disdain which also marked me as one who was not of the group. I was a sample of the outside world, and they were examining me.

The conversation with Sandy spun in a lot of dizzy directions. He was showing off, I knew, and I was waiting for a chance to trap him. I didn’t get it until he got onto classical music. Do not ask me how we got onto that. I remember dimly that the conversation went from Brubeck to Mulligan to Jamal and then jumped back a century or so.

“All those old cats borrowed from each other,” he said. “They dug each other and snatched what they liked. Debussy, Wagner, Liszt — hell, they admitted taking stuff off Chopin. Take that Bach character. He lifted from Scarlatti.”

“No,” I said flatly. The tequila was getting to me.

“What do you mean — no?”

“Just plain old no, Sandy. You missed the scoop. Vivaldi influenced Bach, if that’s who you’re thinking of. Antonio Vivaldi. Alessandro Scarlatti was the opera boy. He influenced Mozart, maybe. Not Bach.”

He sat as still as a bird on a limb, staring at me, then suddenly snapped his fingers. “Scarlatti, Vivaldi. I switched wops. You’re right, Kirboo. What goes with education? I thought all you types learned was Group Adjustment and Bride Selection.” He turned to the others. “Hey, maybe I got somebody to talk to, you animals. Shack, hand me the sack.”

Shack bent and picked the rucksack off the floor. Sandy held it in his lap and opened it. He took out a plastic compartmented box. It was about eight inches long, two inches deep, four inches wide, with six compartments in it. The compartments were almost full of pills.

He looked at his watch, took two pills out, two different ones, and pushed them over in front of Nan. She took them without comment. He put two aside for himself. Then he selected three and pushed them over to me. One was a small gray triangle with rounded corners. One was a green-and-white capsule. The third was a small, white, round pill.

“Eat in good health,” he said.

I was aware of how intently the three of them were watching me. “What are they?”

“They’ll put you way out in front, college boy. They’ll get you off the curb and into the parade. They won’t hook you. Miracles of modern medical science.”

If I had anything left to lose, I couldn’t remember what it was. I washed them down with tequila. “You’ve got a supply there,” I said.

Nan joined the conversation for the very first time. “Chrissake, he had those prescription pads in L.A. and any time anybody goes any place, they got to hit a new drugstore for Doc Golden. He papered the town.”

“In old Latin,” Sandy said, patting the box. “It gives me this deep sense of security.”

“What’ll they do to a square?” Nan asked.

“That’s what we’re checking out, man,” Golden told her.

As we talked I waited for something to happen. I didn’t have any idea what to expect. It all happened so gradually that I wasn’t aware of the change. Suddenly I realized that my awareness of everything around me had been heightened. The golden color of the sun outside, the stale beery smell of the low-ceilinged room, Nan’s bitten nails, Shack’s thick hairy wrists, Sandy’s eyes quick behind the crooked lenses. The edges of everything were sharper. The edge of my mind was sharper. When Sandy talked I seemed to be able to anticipate each word a fraction of a second before he said it, like an echo in reverse. There was a steady tremor in my hands. When I wasn’t talking, I clenched my teeth so tightly they hurt. When I turned my head it seemed to be on a ratchet, rather than turning smoothly. I had a constant butterfly feeling of anticipation in my gut. And everything in the world fitted. Everything went together, and I knew the special philosophical significance of everything. Sometimes I seemed to see the three of them through the wrong end of a telescope, tiny, sharp, clear. Then their faces would swell to the size of bushel baskets. Shack was an amusing monster. Nan was loaded with dusky glamour. Sandy was a genius. They were the finest little group I had ever met.

And the talk. My God, how I could talk! The right words came, the special words, so I could talk like poetry. I didn’t need the tequila. I got onto a talking jag. I put my trembling fists on the table and, leaning forward, I told them the Kathy story, all of it, and I knew as I was telling them that it was a pitiful shame there was no tape recorder there so it could all be saved. I told it all, and I finally ran down.

“He’s really humming,” Sandy said fondly.

“Too much D?” Nan suggested.

“He’s big. He can use a heavy charge. So you’re headed no place at all, Kirboo?”

“No place, on my own time, free as a fat bird,” I said. My ears were ringing. I could hear my heart, like somebody hammering on a tree.

“We’ll go to New Orleans,” Sandy said firmly. “I’ve got wild friends and playmates there. It’ll be a long ball. We’ll scrounge a pad and live fruitfully, man.”

“This party gets bigger, we can rent a Greyhound,” Nan said sourly.

“Look at all he can learn,” Sandy said. “We can take his mind off his problems, Nano. Where’s your milk of human kindness?”

“We don’t need him,” Nan said.

Sandy, quick as light, thumped her so hard on top of the head with his fist that for a moment her eyes didn’t track.

“You’re a drag,” he said, grinning at her.

“So we need him,” she said. “You don’t have to clop me on the skull, man.”

“I can let Shack do it, you like that better, doll.”

I didn’t know at that time where she kept the knife, but it appeared with a magical swiftness, clicking, the blade lean, steady, pale as mercury, ten inches from Shack’s thick throat.

“Hit me one time, Hernandez,” she said, barely moving her heavy mouth as she spoke. “Just one time.”

“Aw, for Chrissake, Nan,” he said unhappily. “Put it away, huh. I haven’t done nothing.”