Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

His calm blue eyes looked down into mine. I could feel the coldness of his innocence.

“One night I beat her once too often. She picked up the kitchen lamp and threw it at my head. I ducked, but the kerosene splashed on the hot stove and set fire to the kitchen. Before I got the fire out, most of the house was gone, and so was Etta.”

“You mean she burned to death?”

“No, I don’t mean that.” He was impatient with me for failing to divine his thoughts. “She ran away. I never saw hide nor hair of her again.”

“What happened to your son?”

“Jasper? He stayed with me for a while. This was right at the beginning of the depression. I got a government job working on the roads, and I found some boards and bought some tarpaper and roofed over what was left of the house. We lived there for a couple more years, little Jasper and me. I was treating him better, but he didn’t like me much. He was always scared of me, I can’t say I blame him. When he was four he started to run away. I tried tying him up, but he got pretty good at untying knots. What could I do? I took him to his grandparents in L.A. Mr. Krug had a watchman job with one of the oil companies and they agreed to take him off my hands.

“I went down to see Jasper a few times after that, but he always got upset. He used to run at me and hit me with his fists. So I just stopped going. I left the state. I mined silver in Colorado. I fished for salmon out of Anchorage. One day my boat turned over and I made it to shore all right but then I came down with double pneumonia. After that I lost my poop and I came back to California. That’s my sad story. I been here going on ten years.”

He sat down again. He was neither sad nor smiling. Breathing slowly and deeply, he regarded me with a certain satisfaction. He had lifted the weight of his life and set it down again in the same place.

I asked him: “Do you know what happened to Jasper?” The question made me conscious of its overtones. I was fairly sure by now that Jasper Blevins had died under a train fifteen years ago.

“He grew up and got married. Etta’s parents sent me a wedding announcement, and then about seven months after that they sent me a letter that I had a grandson. That was close to twenty years ago, when I was in Colorado, but that seven months stuck in my mind. It meant that Jasper had to get married, just the same as I did in my time.

“History repeating itself,” he said. “But there was one way I didn’t let it repeat. I kept away from my grandson. I wasn’t going to make him a-scared of me. And I didn’t want to get to know him and then get cut off from seeing him either. I’d rather stay alone right on through.”

“You wouldn’t have that letter, would you?”

“I might. I think I have.”

He untied the brown shoelace that held his bundle of letters together. His awkward fingers sorted them and picked out a blue envelope. He took the letter out of the envelope, read it slowly with moving lips, and handed it to me.

The letter was written in faded blue ink on blue notepaper with a deckled edge:

Mrs. Joseph L. Krug

209 West Capo Street

Santa Monica, California

December 14, 1948

Mr. Albert D. Blevins

Box 49, Silver Creek, Colorado

Dear Albert:

It’s a long time since we heard from you. Here’s hoping this finds you at the same address. You never did let us know if you got the wedding announcement. In case you did not, Jasper married a lovely girl who has been staying with us, nee Laurel Dudney. She’s only seventeen but very mature, these Texas girls grow up fast. Anyway they got married and now they have a darling baby boy, born the day before yesterday, they called him David which is a biblical name as you know.

So now you have a grandson, anyway. Come and see him if you can, you really should, we’ll all let bygones be bygones. Jasper and Laurel and the babe will be staying at our house for a while, then Jasper wants to have a try at ranching. We hope you are taking care of yourself, Albert, in those mines. Your loving mother-in-law,

Alma R. Krug,

P.S. We never hear from Etta.

A.R.K.

“Do you have the wedding announcement?” I asked Blevins.

“I had, but I gave it to the other fellow. I threw it in along with the birth certificate.”

“Whose birth certificate?”

“Jasper’s. Jasper is the one he’s interested in.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. This Fleischer fellow plays his cards very close to his vest. Is he really a policeman?”

“An ex-policeman.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what’s in it for you,” Blevins said. “You didn’t come here to listen to the story of my life.”

“I sort of have, though, haven’t I?”

“I guess you have.” He smiled, so widely I could count his six upper teeth. “This business of Jasper churned up a lot of memories. Why is everybody so interested in Jasper? Why are you fellows willing to pay me money? Or are you?”

Instead of answering his questions, I took three twenties from my wallet and spread them out on a bare part of the table. Blevins opened the front of his shirt and pulled out an oilskin pouch which hung around his neck on a piece of soiled rawhide. He folded the twenties small and put them in the pouch, replacing it against the sparse gray fur of his chest.

“That’s twenty-five for the marriage certificate,” I said, “twenty-five for the letter, and ten for the autobiography.”

“Come again?”

“The life story,” I said.

“Oh. Thank you very much. I been needing some warm clothes. Sixty dollars goes a long way at the rummage stores.”

I felt a little cheap when he handed me the letter and marriage certificate. I put them in my inside breast pocket. My hand came in contact with the picture Mrs. Fleischer had given me. I showed it to Albert Blevins, remembering with a pang that Laurel was newly dead.

“Do you recognize her, Mr. Blevins?”

“No.”

“It’s the girl Jasper married.”

“I never met her.”

Our hands touched as he gave the picture back to me. I felt a kind of short-circuit, a buzzing and burning, as if I had grounded the present in the actual flesh of the past.

Time blurred like tears for an instant. Davy’s father had died a violent death. His mother had died in violence. Davy the child of violence was roaring down the trail which led back to Albert Blevins. In the buzzing and the burning and the blur I got my first real feeling of what it was like to be Davy, and it jolted me.

“No,” Blevins said, “I never saw Jasper’s wife. She’s a handsome filly.”

“She was.”

I took the picture and left before either of us could ask the other more questions.

I TOOK A CAB back to Willie Mackey’s office, buying a paper on the way. Stephen Hackett’s disappearance had made the headlines. The story underneath was weak in detail. I did learn from it, though, that Hackett was alleged to be one of the richest men in California.

From Willie Mackey I learned that Jack Fleischer had checked out of the Sandman Motor Hotel and headed south. Willie’s operative had lost Fleischer on the highway above San José.

I talked to the operative when he came in. He was an earnest crew-cut young man named Bob Levine, and he was deeply frustrated. Not only had Fleischer eluded him; Fleischer’s car was faster than his. He looked ready to kick Willie’s ornate red-upholstered office furniture.

“Don’t take it so hard,” I told Levine. “I know where Fleischer lives, I can pick him up down south. It would have been a wasted trip for you.”

“Really?”

“Really. During the time you tailed him, did Fleischer visit anyone besides Albert Blevins?”