David Markson - Epitaph For A Dead Beat

“You won’t shoot me, Fannin.”

“Won’t I? Ha! I shoot poets just for practice. Bing — smack in the middle of the iambic pentameter—”

He stepped over the sill.

“Damn it,” I said.

“People don’t kill other people,” he said.

“Sure they don’t. How many of your ex-girlfriends are dead who were reading Dylan Thomas within the week? Listen, they shot Gandhi, didn’t they? They shot Draja Mikhailovitch and Private Prewitt. They even shot Eddie Waitkus — you remember, that first baseman—”

“People are good, Fannin. People have beautiful souls.”

“Come back here, Ephraim.”

“You won’t shoot.”

“Come back,” I said. The door closed. I started to laugh again, like a maniac. “Shane,” I said. “Come back, Shane—”

I had one last fast one for Brandon deWilde before I followed him.

I didn’t run. The stairway was treacherous enough without my showing off. My chest was burning. When I reached the sidewalk a lamppost fell against my shoulder so I held it up for a minute, listening to it wheeze.

There was something under my feet at the curb. An abandoned canvas deck chair. If the fire in my ribs spread, I could be the boy who stood on the burning deck chair.

Ephraim was a block away, trotting toward Seventh Avenue. I made it across to the Chevy.

Was I in shape to handle a car? Don’t bother me with foolish questions when I’m driving. Clutch in, brake off, starter down and we’re rolling. Rolling? Hmmm…

I put the key in the ignition.

Come on, Ahab, get those lifeboats over the side, eh? I swung out sharply, reversed, then made a U-turn that put me facing the wrong way in a one-way street. Signs, signs, everyplace signs. But what did they mean in a spiritual sense, what did they say about man’s true estate? Anyway there wasn’t any traffic.

I saw him cut across Seventh on an angle, turning north. I tooled up there and then slowed again, nosing just far enough into the intersection to get a look. Peek-a-boo. Ha! He was a hundred yards off, turning east again.

I waited a few seconds and then followed him, cruising in low gear with no lights. He glanced across his shoulder once or twice, but only along the sidewalk. Old Ahab, I’d forgotten to drink to his hollow leg. My own wasn’t hollow, but some things would have to wait.

I pulled up at each crossing, idling for as long as I could see that barley hair bouncing above the parked cars, then moving ahead. He made several turns, keeping to back streets except to cross Sixth, working steadily north and east. He had slowed to a walk.

When he hit Macdougal he cut south again. And then I lost him.

I gunned up fast. His head had been clearly visible and now it wasn’t. I stopped, listening.

He’d evaporated like Marley’s ghost.

Marley? Oh, sure, Marley was dead, dead as a doornail. A cliché, or had Dickens invented it? You’re not that potted, Fannin. Poets don’t just vanish.

Up? There were stairways rising to first floors, but the doors were all above the level of the cars. Not up.

Down? Hmmm, down. More stairs, leading into basements and storage cellars. Almost every one of the entrances was blocked by a chain. One of them was swinging slightly, almost imperceptibly. Come back, chain.

Was that sleuthing or wasn’t it?

You down there, Jacob Marley? Don’t try to kid me, Jacob. Not your old partner, not Ebenezer Scrooge.

Darkness. There would not be more than five or six steps, but I could not see the last of them. Hungry aardvarks might have been prowling in a pit at the bottom, wooly bears, boll weevils.

Did it frighten me? Nothing frightened me. People were good, people had beautiful souls. My baby-faced Byron had told me so. My bow-legged Baudelaire. I took out the gun I wasn’t going to shoot any beautiful souls with.

I bent myself under the chain. My shoes squeaked.

Five steps, and then a flat concrete landing. A wooden door swung inward at the barest touch.

The mouth of an alley, very much like the one which had led to McGruder’s. Darkness here also, but not absolute darkness. Back at the right an oblong shaft of light, spilling out of a window at ground level. A high brick facade unbroken along the left. Silence.

Marley? Bob Cratchit? Tiny Tim?

Humbug.

I went down on a wet knee at the window, bracing one arm against my ribs. Miss Fannin’s gowns by Davy Jones, special effects by Oliver Constantine. The miseries of the hero in no way reflect the interests of the sponsor. The window was the type that hinges inward. It was propped open by a paperback book.

Dr. Zhivago? Dr. Spock? Wrong as always. Not even The Metaphysical Speculations of Tuesday Weld. Something called Walk the Sacred Mountains, by one Peter J. Peters. There was an L.P.. record on the ledge beneath it, a session by Thelonious Monk.

I looked in. A small room, a bulb inverted from a cord in the ceiling. A black ceiling. Black, Ebenezer? Certainly black, saves on cleaning costs. Black walls also.

There was a cot opposite me, draped in a bleached sheet which hung to the floor. The only other inanimate object in there was a fluffy, snow-white rug, with two men and a woman sitting on it.

They were sitting cross-legged, like Burmese idols. The woman was a spindling, horsey blonde I might have noticed at the party. One of the men I didn’t know. The other was Don McGruder.

Dashing Don McGruder, mournful footnote from a psychiatrist’s case book. Whatever the diagnosis was, it was catching. This time the other two didn’t have any clothes on either.

God bless us, every one. For this I’d struggled out of a sickbed. But maybe I’d write a book now myself. By H. Fannin-Ebing.

There was an oriental water pipe in the middle of the rug, and they were passing its stem from mouth to mouth. I watched the blonde suck in smoke, then hold her breath. She had a bosom like a mine disaster. Even through the window the sweet stench of the marijuana was overpowering.

“They don’t comprehend,” the girl said. She slurred the words. “‘Get married, Phyllis’—that’s all I hear. What a drag. I love them, I really do, but they don’t dig me, you know? They just weren’t with it at all when I asked for the money for the abortion—”

“This isn’t swinging me tonight,” McGruder said. “It simply isn’t. I’m not high in the least.”

“Recite us some Kerouac then, Donnie. You do him so passionately. The part where he talks about how they make love in the temples of the East—”

“If you really want me to—”

She wanted him to. By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy to the sea, there’s a Beatnik girl a-settin’, and she’s gettin’ high on tea. I was sorry I couldn’t stay, but I had a previous appointment.

I had an appointment with Fagin. We were going to teach a few middle-class youngsters some of the nicer subtleties of felonious assault.

I wondered if they would have a jazz band at that monastery when I got there. If I stole the instruments, would that make me a felonious monk?

There was a turn farther back as I’d anticipated, but at the rear of the building I was in total darkness again. I found a door frame by touch. The door was open.

A hallway. Fifteen or twenty feet inside I saw a tiny wedge of light which would be the room I’d been watching. There could have been other doors in there.

I hesitated a minute, feeling dizzy. I couldn’t hear them from across in that room. I pulled back the hammer on the revolver, making noise with it, then uncocked it again soundlessly.

“Ephraim?” I said softly. “That’s that Magnum, Ephraim.”

The place was as quiet as an unlit cigarette.