Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

“Bring me that yellow shirt there,” Sandy said. She took it to him. He stood up and took his own shirt off. He was narrow and pallid, a spindly, rib-sharp whiteness in the sun, without a hair on his chest. He put the yellow shirt on and buttoned it. The shoulder seams came part way down his upper arms. It hung on his torso.

“It’s a gone color,” he said.

“It’s too big,” I told him.

“I can write it out, about the car,” Horace said. It was a talisman phrase, repeated like a prayer without hope. His mind was dulled by illness, fear, pain and exhaustion. “I can write it out.”

Sandy trotted to his rucksack and took out the automatic. His blue eyes were all a-dance behind the lenses of his glasses. The look of the gun in the sun changed it all again. I came slowly to my feet on cramped legs. Nan stood, her head tilted to the side. Shack was motionless, emotionless.

Sandy snatched up the shave bomb and flipped it underhand to Horace. It bounced off his chest onto the ground.

“Pick it up, Horace. That’s just fine. I love you, Horace. You’re the backbone of the new South. Move away from the pretty car. Further. That’s my boy! You’re a swingin’ thing, man. This is the William Tell bit. Make like you can hear the the drum roll, citizens. Balance the can on the head, Horace.”

Horace’s eyes seemed to actually bulge. “You can’t...”

“Trust me, man. I’m a dead shot. Get it up there! I love you , Horace Becher, sales manager, bowler, family man.”

Becher stood with his eyes shut and his hands at his sides. He swayed slightly. Sandy bit his lip. I saw the muzzle of the gun make small circles in the air. He held it at arm’s length, sighting carefully.

The gun made a snapping sound, a sound hardly more impressive than that of a child’s cap pistol. Horace flinched violently and the can fell to the ground. Sandy made him pick it up and put it back. He aimed again. The pistol made its little crack. A little black hole appeared high in Becher’s forehead, slightly off center toward the left. His eyes came open as the can fell off. He took one step to spread his feet wide, as though to brace himself. And then he went down easily, breaking the fall. He was braced on one elbow for a moment, before he rolled onto his back. His chest lifted high, and then the air went out of him with a shallow, coughing, rattling sound.

Everything was changed forever. We all knew it. We had been walking back and forth through a big doorway, and suddenly it had been slammed, locked, bolted, while we were on the wrong side of it.

Nan made a soft, tremulous sound. I looked at her. She was standing bent forward from the waist, her fists pressed hard against her belly. Her underlip sagged and her expression was totally empty and slack, as though in sensual release. She made that sound again.

Sandy went darting over and looked down at Horace Becher. He laughed in a high, wild way. He whirled toward us and fired one shot straight up into the air and stuffed the gun in his pants pocket.

“A hundred thousand guys so like him you couldn’t tell them apart with an electron microscope,” he said breathlessly. “I love every square one of them. I dig all their dull little lives. It doesn’t count, just one of them. You’d have to kill them all, digging them at the same time, and they’re like the marching Chinese, so you can’t.”

I don’t know if he aimed that shot to kill. It doesn’t really matter. We were going to kill him. We’d begun to smell death. His helplessness kept pushing us further and further. My legs were trembling as I got into the car. It had happened. The sky would never look exactly the same again. Once it had happened, it was as though it was what we had been looking for. It mattered, and yet it didn’t matter. I had helped soap a dirty word on the biggest window in the world. Yet nothing could ever be totally serious after that instant of looking at Kathy, bloodless gray on the blue tile floor.

We drove east. We made time. Sandy was behind the wheel, Nan beside him, Shack and me in back. Within five miles I knew Sandy was an expert. He held the wheel high and hard and sat with his chin thrust forward, and he was a part of the car.

“How are we swingin’, college man?” he asked me with a hard gaiety in his voice.

“We’re way out, Sandy.”

“Break out the portable pharmacy, Nano,” he told the girl. I swallowed my pills dry. The edges of the world had begun to blur. In fifteen minutes the D kick was reinforced, and reality was brilliant, steely and ludicrous. I thrummed like an open power line. We sped away from the sun that slid down the western sky, lengthening the shadows. We got right up there onto the curling edge of our big wave, and Sandy and I alternated making up verses to a requiem for Horace Becher, Sales Manager. We made Nan and Shack join in on the choruses. We bought gas boldly, and kidded around with the pump jockey, in the town of Seguin, beyond San Antone. Ole Horace was daid on the lone prairee, and they wouldn’t find him for a month, and we’d merely saved him from the coronary which would have gotten him anyway.

We had funds and a car which would float along at ninety, so that every minute brought us a mile and a half closer to New Orleans.

Shack went soundly asleep. We hammered an endless hole into the gathering dusk. Nan fooled with the car radio, changing stations with annoying frequency, keeping the volume high.

And, off the random dial, the name of Horace Becher roared out at us. The car swerved slightly as Sandy reached over, slapped the girl’s hands away, and turned the dial back to the station.

We picked up pieces of the story here and there, all over the dial. A woman from Crystal City, Texas, loved animals and despised buzzards. She had a habit on trips of watching for their slow circling over animals near death. When their area of interest seemed accessible, she would park and hike into the barren land. She had rescued colts and calves and sheep and hurt dogs. She took a carbine along to put the hopeless ones out of their misery. She had seen the black birds circling low, had walked in and found the dead man, the broken tile, tire tracks, the spilled suitcase, the wallet, and the bolder carrion birds already tearing at his face. She had shooed the birds off, gotten a heavy tarp out of her truck and covered him and weighted the edges down with stones. She had driven to the nearest phone and called the Rangers and guided them to the body. In a very short time, aided by the information in the wallet, they had put the car description and the plate number on the air. An hour later a truck driver had reported seeing a blue-and-white station wagon turn out onto the highway where the man had been found. I remembered a truck in the distance when we had turned out. It had been far away, but it had passed us while we were picking up speed, and soon we had passed it. He reported that this had happened at about one o’clock or a little later, that the station wagon had turned east, and there had been two men and a woman in it. The woman had found the body at twenty of three. The truck driver had reported at quarter to six.

We had all of it, more than we could use. Shack was cursing in a heavy, monotonous way. Sandy pulled way over onto the shoulder, turned off the lights, punched the radio off.

“We’ve got a car we don’t hardly need, man,” he said.

“We walk?” Shack asked.

“We should split up,” Nan said.

“We got the car and it’s night and we can make time,” Sandy said. “Getting far away is the deal. It’s important to make these fine miles. But the vehicle is torrid.”

“So?” I said.

“I don’t like the going east,” Sandy said. “Not enough roads through the swamp country. Too easy to check the cars. So let’s get off these big fat main roads. Let’s go to New York. It’s a good town. When you’re there, you’re lost.”