David Markson - Epitaph For A Dead Beat

I didn’t answer him. I could feel Klobb breathing behind my ear.

“I asked you if you know what this means to me, Fannin—”

Constantine poked me with the Colt so I nodded. “I know,” I told him. “I’m sorry. You might have to go to work for a living.”

He was going to satisfy those aggressions sooner or later anyhow. He hit me in the stomach with a fist like a runaway Greyhound bus and I doubled over, heaving sickly.

“Twenty-three girls. And if I have to lay low too long every damned one of them will be running for somebody else. All because of a punk halfback I used to punch holes for. Damn it to sweet hell—”

He was standing a foot in front of me when I got myself straightened up. He was pretty much oblivious to the cannon at his side, breathing hard and nurturing his hate, and it was a moment for heroics on my part. It was a swell moment, for noticing that Margaret would have had to tilt the Beretta about a sixteenth of an inch to take out my eye. I let him hit me in the stomach again.

He liked the way I folded in half. He liked the sounds I made, like cats being squashed. He liked the color of my face when I got it lifted. When I couldn’t lift it anymore Klobb did it for me, jamming a knee into my back and using it for a fulcrum, and he liked that too.

When he quit, Klobb stepped back and I sank to my knees like something sticky being poured down a drain.

I vomited everything I’d had to eat since they took me off formula.

“The lad who was going to make them forget Tom Harmon.” Constantine laughed, turning away. “Let’s get out of here now, huh?”

“Half a moment,” Margaret said. She might have been stifling a yawn. “I didn’t mention it earlier because you said he was a friend, but he didn’t just take the gun away from me at Audrey’s. If I hadn’t convinced the poor sap it would mean his life, I would have been raped on the floor.”

“Well, now. Well, how about that, now?” Constantine was gripping the Colt by the snout when he turned back. Margaret was being careless with the Beretta also, and Klobb seemed to have wandered off. I couldn’t be sure, but I was beyond caring. I threw myself at Constantine with every remnant of strength I could muster.

H. Fannin, realist of the old school, like Walter Mitty. The big man took a quick short step to the side, slammed a palm like a spade against my chest, yanked me to my feet, ran with me, and then slapped me against a wall like a trowel full of wet cement. He propped me into place with all the effort of Pancho Gonzales hoisting one for the serve, and then the checkered stock of his thirty-nine-ounce automatic mashed its way into my cheek like a fork through over-cooked potatoes. I saw constellations that Galileo never dreamed of, and after that I tasted blood and frustration and immeasurable sadness all at once, staring without belief at the one hand he was holding me with. The one hand. My head rolled, and he raked the gun across my face from the other side.

There was blood in my eyes also, but I thought I saw that resplendent orange hair bobbing in the vapors near me. My madonna of the rooftops. I even thought I saw a smile on those vengeful orange lips. “Darling,” someone muttered. It was me, with all I had left. Words. “Audrey and her roommate aren’t here. We’ve got time, darling, we’ve got time—”

Colors flashed, only some of them in my imagination. The Beretta jumped across Constantine’s forearm and slashed down at my temple. He let her hit me twice more. Then he threw me aside like so much rank bedding, onto what might have been left of my face.

I kept on bleeding, which seemed a logical result of my activities. A pool of it grew under my nose, but it was only a small pool, like Tanganyika. There was quiet talk, but it did not interest me, not even as much as the latest article on Bing Crosby’s sons. I’d be leaving such mundane things behind anyhow, as soon as they took action on my application to that monastery, the one that honored credit cards. I wasn’t even going to write anymore letters to sportswriters about why they didn’t elect Arky Vaughan to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Arky Vaughan, my all-time favorite shortstop who was long, long gone, who had drowned in a lake.

Someone stooped near me, and I saw those desert boots out of half an eye. I wondered remotely if he’d ever worn them in the desert. Zen Bootism. He was fumbling at my hip, and I had the curious sensation that he was shoving the Magnum back into my holster. He hadn’t said a word since I’d come to call, not one. I’d hardly gotten a look at that incipient fascist face.

“I’m returning your pistol,” he told me. “Solely in the hope that you might decide to blow your stinking brains out, old chap.”

He stepped over me, and the roof door closed. Footsteps echoed in the stairwell, going away.

They’d left me, without a single chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Someone had invented a magic time machine which gave men back their youth, and now in the machine Michigan’s all-time football team was playing Notre Dame in a stadium on the moon. Tom Harmon was on the field, and Willie Heston and Germany Schultz were twenty again, and Harry Fannin was all in one piece. Quarterback Bennie Friedman called the signals for my wide sweep to the right, the ball was snapped back, and up ahead a hulking lineman named Oliver Constantine pulled out to lead my interference. The screams of a hundred thousand fans thundered in my ears. “Go, Fannin, go—”

I lifted my face out of the blood.

We went back into the huddle. Ducky Medwick was calling the plays now. Ducky Medwick hadn’t gone to Michigan. On top of which he’d played baseball, not football. Did it matter? It was only a private fantasy anyhow. “Take it again, Harry, we’ll go all the way this time—”

I dropped my face back into the blood.

They shipped me down to the junior varsity, and I couldn’t make first string there either. I sat on the bench and glared at the players who beat me out, like Truman Capote, Liberace, Clifton Webb. I turned in my uniform.

This was ridiculous. Klobb’s studio was less than ten yards away. What would have become of western civilization if a little travel had ever fazed Leif Ericson, say, or Linda Christian? Come on now, Orville, you can get that thing off the ground.

I crawled to the studio. It didn’t take any longer than the voyage of the Pequod. I was carrying Moby Dick on my back and Moby was carrying Captain Ahab on his. Why the hell should I carry Ahab? All he had to complain about was a wooden leg, and I had a wooden head. Splintered. I dragged myself through the door, across a large room which reeked of turpentine, into a bathroom. Ahab, you hab, he hab. All God’s chillun hab, except Harry.

I lay there, not wanting to get up and wondering why I’d thought of Ducky Medwick when I had football in mind. Oh, sure, because I’d seen him get smashed in the skull by a pitched ball when I was a kid. They’d carried him off the diamond and I’d cried because I thought he was dead. But he’d come back to play again.

There seems to be a moral there, Fannin, if you’ve got sufficient wit to find it.

I was staring at a bathtub. I got the faucets turned for the shower, and then I squirmed over the side, flopping. That was ridiculous too. Let’s go, Ishmael, on your feet. The white whale was still on my shoulders so 1 hoisted him also, clinging to a towel rack.

I remembered the revolver Klobb had returned. And my wallet, with all those engraved pictures that ought to have been of Marilyn. I fished them out of my clothes and dropped them onto a mat. My ribs felt as if they were removable also, but I didn’t experiment.

The roof of the john was glass, like the rest of the structure. Jolly. Nothing like a shower under the stars at five in the morning, especially in your best suit.