Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

Not for me, I thought. I shall never be suckered by that cold-hearted routine. And I suddenly realized that I had gone well beyond the point of choice. Even if I changed my mind and decided to fall in step with everybody else, it was now too late. Only in the animated cartoons could a small creature fall off a mountain, look down, register surprise, and climb back up through the empty air to safety.

She woke twice during the long night ride and each time she complained in a sleepy child voice about wanting to be home in her own bed.

Sandy found the place we would stay, shabby dusty cottages at a resort area called Seven Mile Lake. He had a special genius for picking safe places. It was good to hole up. He’d had the radio on a few times, and it sounded as if the whole world was looking for us. The radio told us we had grabbed the daughter of a wealthy surgeon, and she had been planning to marry an architect. We learned for the first time how two witnesses had watched us kill the man. We found out his name was Arnold Crown, and that he had owned a service station. The world told us that we were despicable, heartless monsters, crazed by drugs, on a cross-country slay-fest.

We could not identify ourselves with the people they were describing. Sandy put it in words when he said. “They shouldn’t oughta let people like that run around loose.”

It broke us up.

I had no trouble with the slob woman who rented me the cottage. All she had eyes for was the twenty-five dollars. We got our stuff out of the car trunk and went in and turned some lights on. The bedrooms were off either side of the small sitting room. Nan escorted Helen to the bathroom, with Sandy warning her not to try anything cute with the blond. Sandy and I sat on a sagging couch, leaning back, our heels on a coffee table. Shack stood with the gin bottle and tilted it high, heavy throat pulsing. He lowered it and looked at Sandy. The tension was there, and it was building, and it made the pit of my stomach crawl. Shack’s eyes were small, bright, hooded, vulgar — with long lashes, reminding me of the eyes of an elephant.

“How about it, Sandy? How about it?” he asked.

“Shut up a while,” Sandy told him.

“Sure, Sandy. Sure thing.”

Nan brought Helen back. Gray was coming in the windows, feebling the lights we’d turned on. There is a way a woman stands, and there is a way a child stands. Helen stood, toeing in slightly, chewing the first knuckle of her right hand, plucking at the side of her skirt with the other hand, regarding us solemnly. The look of her made the look of her breasts incongruous, so round against the green of her sleeveless blouse. Her diamond caught the light, refracting sharp glints of color. Her white skirt was of the material I believe is called dacron fleece. It had two high slash pockets, with a large green non-functional button on each pocket. Her green shoes were very pointed, with those tall, spidery heels, tipped with brass.

“Sit down, honey,” Sandy told her. “Join the group.” She sat in a wicker chair, plumping herself down as a child does.

“This isn’t home,” she said accusingly. “You promised.”

“Be a good girl or you’ll get a spanking,” Sandy said.

Nan sat in another chair and pulled her legs up into the chair and watched the scene with a dark and sulky amusement.

Shack moved restlessly, nervously, lifting his knees curiously as he walked, fists balled, face dark and sweating, neck bowed. “How about it, Sandy?” he begged.

I suddenly remembered what he reminded me of. Long ago in a summer camp in Vermont, three of us sneaked away to watch a farmer breed a mare. When we got there, breathless after a long run down the country road, the stallion was in a corral beside the barn. The mare was in the barn, in a box stall. The stallion was pacing back and forth as close to the barn as he could get, ears back, nostrils distended, whinnying and blowing. From time to time he would trot in a curious compact way, lifting his knees high, bowing his neck. I learned much later that this is one of the basic steps of that art of horsemanship known as dressage.

They wouldn’t let us into the barn. But we waited and we heard the stomping of hoofs and the men yelling excited instructions to each other, and the whistling, triumphant scream of the stallion.

“Jesus Christ, Sandy!” Shack said with growing indignation.

“Shut up, monster,” Sandy said. He turned toward me, his blue eyes dancing bright with malicious curiosity. “You had a lot to say in Del Rio, boy. You said you’d come to the end of all crud. You said emotion was something you could do without from here on in. You said nothing meant a damn to you, and nothing ever would. Remember?”

“Certainly I remember.”

“No sentiment, boy. But Nashville gave you the jumps.”

“Did it?”

“Maybe you’re a faker, college boy.” It was the last time he ever called me that.

“How so?”

“You’re just playing a game with yourself, maybe. And inside you’re still loaded with crud.”

“All this talk talk, for God’s sake!” Shack said.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, Sandy,” I said, but I knew which way he was going, and what he was doing, and I didn’t know if I could take it. I just didn’t know.

“Let’s kick over a baby carriage, and see if you’re kidding yourself. All you got to do is say the word, Kirboo, and we can stop it right there. Okay, Shack. Put baby to bed.”

Shack grinned like a shark and whirled toward the girl. “Come on, baby. Come on! ” he said.

She looked at him with a childish dubiousness and distaste. He took her by the wrist and pulled her up out of the chair. She tried to pull away from him, her mouth beginning to make the shape of tears to come.

“Come on , doll,” he said, his voice so thickened it was barely comprehensible, and spun her and got a thick arm around her waist, the heavy, hairy hand clamped on slenderness. He walked her with an almost grotesque tenderness toward the open door of the bedroom.

She tried to hang back, saying thinly, “I want to go home. Please, I want to go home.”

I told myself that it didn’t matter a damn to me. I told myself it was just an interesting play on beauty and the beast. I told myself that one more rape in the history of the world was hardly significant. I told myself that she was too dazed to have much knowledge of what was happening to her, and it was unlikely that she would remember any of it. I told myself that people were dying in agony as I sat there. I told myself that I had given up pity and sentiment and mercy. I’d stared at Kathy, gray and shrunken, pasted to the tile floor by her own cooling blood, and that had been the end of all mercy.

They had reached the doorway. Helen had begun to whine in the hopeless way of defeat and fear. Nan chuckled, and the sound of it sickened me.

“You win,” I said to Sandy. “You win, brother.”

He gave one yelping, derisive laugh and said, “No dice today, Shack. Break it off, monster. It’s Kirboo’s baby.”

But, of course, it was too late. We should have known it was too late. Sandy had been testing that blind loyalty, putting an ever-increasing strain on it, always demanding, never giving. And so it snapped.

Shack thrust the girl into the room with such force that we saw her stumble, then heard her fall where we couldn’t see her. He turned, filling the doorway, staring at Sander Golden and seeing a stranger.

“Go to hell!” he said thickly. “It’s mine.”

Sandy bounced to his feet and stepped over the coffee table. “You don’t want me to be mad at you, Shack.”

“Get back. Get back or I’ll kill you, pal.”

I got up and moved slowly, angling toward him, walking on the balls of my feet. He stood with his chin on his chest, eyes flicking back and forth from me to Sandy.