Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“How’s the other guy?” Jimmie asked.

Biff looked startled.

Mr. Bailey said, “It was clearly a piece of reckless driving on the other man’s part.

Biff crept out of the side street—and was smashed into!”

Jimmie nodded. In his mind’s eye he could see his brother, at the end of a day of helpless rage at having to be in the army, driving along the dusky side street, slowing at some distance from the stop-line, and hearing the high whine of an approaching car. A car coming illegally fast. Jimmie could imagine his brother’s face. It would go slack and sullen—and then convulse with purpose. His brother’s car would not turn, cautiously, in the path of the oncoming car. It would shoot out, in high, the motor racing, and scarcely turn at all—making an unavoidable obstacle on the road. The other car-brakes grinding, wheels sliding—would strike at an angle. It wasn’t an attempt at suicide, exactly. It wasn’t, even, a conscious effort at self-mutilation. But some such thing, in a more shadowy form, had motivated Biff. He had entertained for one paroxysmal instant the thought, I’ll get hurt—and then they can’t take me! In the next instant he had been getting hurt.

Jimmie knew that such “accidents” were shockingly common. But deliberateness could not be proven. No jury would recognize escapism as a punishable motive.

Sometimes the author of such an accident would confess the impulse—long afterward.

Sometimes a psychiatrist would uncover such an impulse in a patient. Mostly, however, smashups like Biff’s were attributed to related factors, such as high speed, or to “pure accident”—a phrase which, excepting for coincidences in time, is a pure lie.

Such things had been in Jimmie’s mind as he had walked to the hospital. To review them, to confirm them by Biff’s appearance and behavior, took seconds only.

Jimmie let himself smile as if with a sudden thought.

“Anyway, Biff, you’re out of the army!”

The younger man’s eyes moved slowly toward Jimmie and held with faint surprise. “So I am. Funny. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“For a few weeks, anyhow,” Jimmie said, watching the eyes. They did what he had expected. They dilated with alarm and widened further with rage—for the time between fingers naps. Then they were blank again. They moved toward Mrs. Bailey.

Biff had said he “hadn’t thought” about being out of the army. That—and his eyes—were the final clinching proofs. If it had been an honest accident Biff would have thought of his delivery at once—and admitted it. Whooped about it. Crowed over it. But Biff had prepared that little disavowal—for the first person who reminded him that his misfortune was not untinged with good luck.

Mrs. Bailey, realizing that Biff’s gaze was resting on her and that he vaguely wanted something done or said, crossed the room to Jimmie’s side. “You mustn’t make him talk so much! He’s in agony!”

“I’m all right,” Biff protested. His voice grew weaker. There was a tremor in it.

“Jim, old kid. I’m sorry I socked you this morning.”

“It’s okay. Forget it.”

“I want you to know I’m sorry—that’s all. I’ll be getting the old whiffaroo pretty soon, and Doc Cather will be going over me, and if the works slip—anyhow, I want you to know.”

Jimmie nodded. He was looking straight at Biff. Biff looked away.

Mrs. Bailey was streaming tears.

Mr. Bailey blew his nose, sumptuously.

Sarah said shrilly, “Why isn’t the doctor here! Why isn’t anything being done! He may even be—right here before our eyes!”

Mr. Bailey said, “Quiet, Sarah. He’ll be along any minute. The intern says Biff’ll keep the way he is, a while.”

Sarah began to bawl.

Jimmie walked closer to his brother. His grin was amiable, only a little bit sardonic. “Your pretty puss is unscratched, anyhow!”

“I must have thrown my hands over my face at the time. A protective reflex. I dunno….”

Then the surgeon arrived. He was dressed in white and he walked fast, like a man entering from the wings, for an act. “Well!” he exclaimed. “What have we here?” Jimmie thought it was close to tops for asininity.

Mr. Bailey said, “My son’s pretty badly hurt, Doctor Cather. It goes without saying, of course, that no expense is to be spared. Specialists from Chicago, New York, by air—if they can help you in any way. Everything!”

The surgeon was grinning at his patient. Biff grinned back. His mother said, “Money doesn’t mean a thing, doctor!”

Then the surgeon said something that revised Jimmie’s opinion of him. It made Jimmie think that he was probably a whacking good surgeon. “Oh, I’ll send you a stiff bill, Mrs. Bailey. Never worry about that!” He took the hem of the blanket that covered Biff. “You folks better run along while I have a look. Come back after dinner. Say around nine, ten o’clock.”

Jimmie glanced at the intern. He had not in any way noticed the man until then.

The intern was stepping forward to help the surgeon. It ran through Jimmie’s mind that the intern was a shrewd-looking duck, with wide, apperceptive eyes, the pointed nose of the curious, and an air about him of knowledgableness. Jimmie also thought that he’d been standing there, watching everything, all that time. As the intern began a swift, technical explanation of his findings, he winked at Jimmie….

Supper began mordantly. For one thing, Mrs. Bailey was weeping steadily. For another, the food was overcooked-caked and dry. Mrs. Bailey kept apologizing for her tears.

“He’ll be all right,” Sarah said. “He’s tough. Tough as Jimmie—almost.” Her blue gaze met Jimmie’s violently—and he wondered why.

“We must eat,” Mr. Bailey said earnestly. “We’ll need our strength.”

Jimmie was eating right along. In fact, he found himself hungry. That surprised him. He had been through a lot that day. For a mere Midwestern town, Muskogewan was unreasonably productive of excitement.

“The poor boy!” said Biff’s mother. “The poor, poor boy!”

“Popinjay, that doctor,” said Mr. Bailey. “Wonder if he’s as good as his reputation?”

“Where were you?” Sarah asked bluntly of Jimmie.

“Me? Working.”

“They said you left the factory about five. They said a dame drove you away.”

“That was a British spy,” Jimmie answered calmly.

His mother raised her voice. “Don’t make jokes!”

“All right. It was a gal that works at the plant. She offered me a ride home.”

Sarah became alert. “But she didn’t drive you home!”

“Where did you go?”

“Guess!”

Sarah said, “Some roadhouse, I bet.”

“That’s exactly right. Olga—her name is Olga, and she’s a Hungarian spy, really—drove me to the Four Flamingoes. We had saki —that’s rice wine—with some cousins of the Emperor of Japan who work around here as butlers—” he looked up somberly—“Pardon the slur, Westcott, on an honorable profession—”

Mrs. Bailey said, “How can you two—? When—” Sarah said, “Is she pretty? And what’s her name?”

“Dinah,” said Jimmie. “She’s black. An Abyssinian spy—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said his father.

“Anyhow,” his sister observed, “you feel pretty good.”

Jimmie suddenly realized that he did feel pretty well. He could not, for the life of him, figure out why. Certainly he was not taking any excessive pleasure out of Biff’s revenge on himself. Certainly he had not grown so cold toward his family in two days that he enjoyed seeing them suffer. But he felt an unmistakable rise of his spirits.

He let them rise while his parents and his sister sank into a fresh morass of silence. Presently his mother whispered, “Right now, he might be—!”