Ross MACDONALD - The Underground Man

She went down after him, looking strained and intent, like a woman descending voluntarily into hell. Their voices floated up the stairs, clearly audible in the intervals between the sounds of the surf.

“Don’t be angry,” she said.

“I’m not angry.”

“You can have the Mercedes.”

“I need some transportation,” he said reasonably. “Not that I’m going anywhere.”

“No. You stay with me. I felt absolutely ghastly when the house burned. I felt as if my life was burning down. But it wasn’t, was it?”

“I don’t know. What’s this about going to Yugoslavia?”

“Don’t you want to go?”

“What’s in Yugoslavia?”

“We’ll stay here then. Does that suit you?”

“For the present,” he said. “I may have had it with this town.”

“On account of the girl? What’s her name – Susan?”

“Listen. Do we have to go on about her? I never even saw her.”

A door closed, and their voices became muffled. I began to hear more private sounds, and decided to go outside.

It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the beach was littered with bodies. It was like a warning vision of the future, when every square foot of the world would be populated. I found a place to sit in the sand beside a youth with a guitar who lay propped against a girl’s stomach. I could smell her sun-tan oil, and I felt as if everybody but me was paired off like the animals in the ark.

I got up and looked around me. Under the stratum of smoke which lay over the city, the air was harshly clear. The low sun was like a spinning yellow frisbee which I could almost reach out and catch.

The thrusting masts of the marina looked dark and calcined against the light in the west. I took off my shoes and socks and carried them along the beach in that direction.

A concrete breakwater extended by a sandbar curved like a sheltering arm around the harbor and marina. A few boats, under motor or sail, were coming in from the sea through the marked channel. A multitude of other boats lay in the slips, from racing yachts to superannuated landing craft.

I walked along beside the high woven-wire fence which divided the marina from the public parking lot. There were several gates in it but they all had automatic locks. I found a boat rental dock near the foot of the breakwater and asked the man in charge how to get to Ariadne .

He gave me a suspicious look which took in my bare feet and the shoes I had tied together and slung over my shoulder.

“Mr. Armistead’s not aboard, if he’s the one you’re looking for.”

“What about Jerry Kilpatrick?”

“I wouldn’t know about him. Go down to the third gate and try giving him a yell. You can see the boat from there, about halfway along the float on the left.”

I put on my shoes and found the gate and the boat. She was a white sloop, poised on the quiet water in a way that made my breath come a little faster. A thin young man with straggling hair and a furred lower face was working over the auxiliary motor near her stern. I called to him through the locked gate.

“Jerry?”

His head came up. I waved him toward me. He jumped down onto the slip and moved along it in a swift barefoot shamble. He was naked to the waist, and he walked with his bearded head thrust forward as though to cancel out his boy’s shoulders and his narrow hairless chest. His hands were so fouled with engine oil that he seemed to be wearing black gloves.

He regarded me somberly through the wire gate. “What can I do for you?”

“You lost your book.” I got out the copy of Green Mansions with his name on the flyleaf. “This is yours, isn’t it?”

“Let me see.” He started to open the gate, then clicked it emphatically shut again. “If my father sent you, he can drop dead. And you can go back and tell him that I said that.”

“I don’t know your father.”

“Neither do I know him. I never knew him. And I don’t want to know him.”

“That takes care of your father. What about me?”

“That’s your problem.”

“Don’t you want your book?”

“Keep it, if you can read. It’ll improve your mind, if you have a mind.”

He was a very hostile young man. I reminded myself that he was a witness, and there was no point in getting angry with him through a fence.

“I can always get somebody to read it to me,” I said.

He smiled quickly. The smile in the midst of his reddish beard seemed extraordinarily bright.

I said:

“There’s a small boy missing. His father was killed this morning–”

“You think I killed him?”

“Did you?”

“I don’t believe in violence.” His look implied that I did.

“Then you’ll want to help me find whoever killed him. Why don’t you let me in? Or come out and we can talk.”

“I like it this way.” He fingered the wire gate. “You look like the violent type to me.”

“The situation isn’t funny,” I said. “The missing boy is six years old. His name is Ronald Broadhurst. Do you know anything about him?”

He shook his tangled head. The beard that covered his lower face seemed to have overgrown his mouth and left him only his eyes to speak with. They were brown, and slightly starred, like damaged glass.

“A girl was with him,” I went on. “She was reading this book of yours last night in bed. Her name is Sue Crandall.”

“I don’t know her.”

“I’ve been told you do. She was here night before last.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“I think you would. You lent her this book, and you lent her Armistead’s Mercedes. What else did you lend her?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“She got stoned on something and climbed the mast. What did you give her, Jerry?”

A shadow of fear crossed his face. He converted it into anger. His brown eyes became reddish and hot, as if there was fire behind them. “I thought you were fuzz,” he said in a stylized way. “Why don’t you go away?”

“I want to talk to you seriously. You’re in trouble.”

“Go to hell.”

He trotted away along the slip. His hairy head seemed enormous and grotesque on his boy’s body, like a papier-mâché saint’s head on a stick. I stood and watched him vault into the cockpit of the boat and go back to work on the motor.

The sun was almost down now. When it reached the water, the entire sea and sky seemed to ignite, burning red in a larger fire than Rattlesnake.

Before it got dark I went through the parking lot looking for Fritz Snow’s old Chevrolet sedan. I couldn’t find it, but I had a persistent feeling that it had to be in the neighborhood. I began to search along the boulevard which paralleled the shore.

The western sky lost its color like a face going suddenly pale. The light faded gradually from the air. It clung for a long time to the surface of the water, which stretched out like a faint and fallen sky.

I walked for several blocks without finding the old Chevrolet. Street lights came on, and the waterfront was bleakly lit by the neon signs of motels and hamburger joints. I crossed to one of the latter and had a double hamburger with a paper sack of French fried potatoes, and coffee. I ate and drank like a starved man, and remembered that I hadn’t eaten since morning.

When I turned away from the bright counter, it was almost fully dark. I glanced up at the mountains, and was shocked by what I saw. The fire had grown and spread as if it fed on darkness. It hung around the city like the bivouacs of a besieging army.

I took up my search for the Chevrolet again, working through the motel parking lots and up the side streets toward the railroad tracks. As soon as I left the boulevard, I was in a ghetto. Black and brown children were playing quiet games in the near-darkness. From the broken-down porches of the little houses, their mothers and grandmothers watched them and me.