Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

I went after him and waited over him till he got up. Then I hit him with my left. One of his teeth showed through his upper lip. He saw that I aimed to kill him and closed with me groping for a headlock. He caught my head in a thick arm and for a minute I teetered on his hip. I set all the strength I had left against his weight, which was greater than mine. Finally I slipped my head free. I put my knee in his back and dragged him backwards with my arm around his throat. He fell heavily with me on top of him.

When he got up I hit him again with my left. The lower half of his face was bright with blood. Now a flap came loose over his eye and hung down showing the white bone. I hit him again with my left and he went down moaning. I pulled him to his feet and hit him again with my left. He kicked at me but lost his balance and fell on his back. I helped him to his feet and hit him again. My fist caught him in the center of the throat and broke his larynx. I heard it snap. When he fell down I let him lie. I was very happy.

Hector Land came down off the verandah then. He walked slowly and the blood ran down one side of his face from a bullet track across his temple. But when he pushed me out of the way I staggered my own length and fell in the dust.

I lay there and watched him kick Anderson to death. Anderson’s head became shapeless and muddy. There was nothing I could do and nothing I wanted to do. I was afraid of Hector Land and I wanted to see Anderson die. When I had seen him die I crawled around the corner of the house and sat in the shadow nursing my broken left hand.

AFTER a long time, during which my body was stiffened and chilled by the mountain air, I moved from my seat in the shadowed dust and looked cautiously around the corner of the house. Anderson lay where he had fallen, his face in the moonlight half-returned to indistinguishable earth. There was no trace of Hector Land except the destruction which I had begun and he had ended.

I left my hiding place and crawled in the dust below the verandah, clawing through it square foot by square foot, searching for the gun which Anderson had dropped. Not even the war had been able to convince me, but I was convinced now, that a gun was more precious than anything else. In a world of violence and terror a gun was the staff of life. My nerves were so shaken that I should not have been astonished if the mountains had spoken and threatened me, or if armed men had sprung up out of the ground. I sifted the dust for the gun as a prospector sifts gold-bearing sand, but I couldn’t find it.

Then came the one remaining thing which had power to astonish me, and the mental horror was added to the physical horror. Far off among the mountains I heard the hum of an automobile engine like a drone of insects, which grew louder as the car climbed the road towards the valley. I could see the beam from its headlights, first like a small faint dawn working its way across the brow of the pass into the valley, then like a white flare of torches flung intermittently against the night. Before the car itself came into sight I went back to my lair and squatted down to watch. With my whole body weak and sore, and without a gun, I felt helpless and declassed, without rights or hopes in a world which struck unpredictably against anyone who did not have a weapon and the will to use it.

The car bounded casually over the last ridge as if it were on a familiar track. When it began to descend into the valley I saw that it was a light roadster with the top down. When it reached the bottom of the hill and stopped, I saw that a woman was driving. When she stepped out of the car I saw that it was Mary Thompson.

“Mary!” I shouted, and ran towards her on knees which were almost unhinged by relief and reaction from shock and fear. She walked quickly towards me. Her hair, ashy in the moonlight, was blown by the wind.

She said, “Sam! What’s happened?”

I pointed to the body in the dust.

“Who is that?”

“It’s Anderson. Lorenz Jensen.”

Her mouth opened to scream and the tendons of her neck came out like fingers in bas-relief. She made no sound.

“Don’t look,” I said, and put out my hand to her shoulder to turn her away. But when she turned to me she had a small revolver in her hand. A wave of nausea swept through the middle of my body. It was almost more than I could bear to stand in a line of fire again, and to be invaded by the thoughts which sprang up full-fledged in my mind after long repression.

“How did you get here?” I said.

She put the hand which held the gun in the pocket of her coat. “I drove here to find you. I got your message from the taxi driver.”

“How did you know where to come?”

“The police raided Miss Green’s house. She told them where you were.”

I was so grateful for her explanation that I almost wept. For a moment of terrible stillness, during which the mountains had seemed as unreal as cardboard and the moon a silver coin pasted to a low hollow ceiling, I had imagined that she was another enemy. The sky expanded again into infinite pure space and the mountains resumed their solidity.

Then the whole fabric collapsed, with a grinding like bone being crushed in my head. “Why didn’t the police come?” I said.

While she was still hesitating on the point of speech, I struck at her. She stepped back out of my way and brought the gun out of its pocket. “Raise your hands. Walk ahead of me slowly into the house. Where’s Hector Land?”

“He ran away,” I said. “He killed Anderson and ran away.”

“Land killed Anderson?”

“I told him Anderson murdered Bessie. But you killed her, didn’t you?”

A sudden Gestalt which must have been preparing in my unconscious for a long time, held down by the will to believe in Mary Thompson, illuminated the past month in bitter colors. “That was why you had a headache and had to go back to the hotel. So that you could catch Bessie Land when she came home from the bar, and quiet her for good.”

Her face groped for an attitude. It is terrible to see a human face empty of meaning. Her face was still beautiful, but I saw for the first time its essential lack of humanity. It was like a silver face cast on a screen, sustained in beauty by the desire of the onlooker who wishes away its unreality.

“Turn around and walk into the house as I told you. I want to talk to you, Sam.”

I had thought that I knew her intimately, but for the first time I saw into her mind. She could pull the trigger easily because she could not imagine the consequences of killing, because to her human bodies were organic matter to be disposed of when it became inconvenient. She could betray her country because she had no country to betray. She could kill me easily because lovers were easy to find. I did as I was told.

The front door of the ranchhouse opened directly on the living room, a wide low room, heavily furnished with thick black furniture. There was a cavernous stone fireplace at one end, and before it a refectory table flanked by chairs with carved backs. The room was dimly lit by a kerosene lamp on one end of the table. Facing the fireplace, at the other end of the room, was a door which opened on darkness.

“Sit down there,” she said, pointing the revolver towards a chair at the end of the table.

I sat down and she sat facing me, with her back to the dead fireplace. I began to plan to overturn the table on her.

“Keep your hands on the table,” she said. “If you don’t I’ll have to shoot you.”

That repeated threat was beginning to lose its terror for me, but I put my hands on the table. My left hand was swollen and blue and almost rigid. My right hand was crusted with blood where the rope had torn the flesh.

“You’re having a bad time of it, aren’t you?” she said.