Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“I wasn’t asking you, Dick.”

“Oh? Oh? Oh?”

The little grin kept coming and going, and Mr. Legg kept licking his lips and looking at the gun. I don’t smoke, but there was a package of cigarettes in the sand and I picked it up and stuck a cigarette in my mouth and began slapping myself like I wanted a match. Then I stepped over toward Mr. Legg, like I would borrow one from him. Dickie paid no attention. I caught him on the chin with everything I had and he went down soft, which meant he was out. I unbuckled the holster, pulled it clear, then gave him some toe under the ribs. He rolled over. “Get up.”

“What are you doing to me, you big—”

“I said get up.”

I yanked him to his feet and he staggered around a little but pretty soon he could stand. Out of the tail of my eye I could see another boy, about his age but quite a lot bigger, come out of the Finley house and stand there watching. I gave Dickie a cuff on the jaw and said: “Now you cheeky little louse, suppose you get out and stay out or there’ll be more of the same, only a lot more. And leave Helen alone. Don’t speak to her or look at her or think about her, or it’s going to be most unfortunate. And don’t bring any more guns. What do you say?”

“So O.K., you hit me when I wasn’t looking, you—”

I clipped him again and he went down and when he got up I impressed on his mind he was to call me sir and he did it. Then he went stumbling through the sand to his house and the pal began looking at the marks on his face. Mr. Legg said: “Thanks, Jack.”

“Sometimes it’s the only way.”

“I’ll take that gun. I’m making an issue with Finley about it. This thing has gone far enough.”

“I’ll save you the trouble.”

I swung the holster and gave it a heave and it and the gun went flapping through the air about a hundred feet out into Chesapeake Bay. That was the one dumb thing I did. Because I was no sooner unarmed than the pal said something and here the two of them come, one piling in on one side, one on the other. They hit me and I went down but jumped up and backed away. Mr. Legg said something about phoning the state police and Margaret and Mrs. Legg ran into the house. A shell clipped Dickie on the head and he ripped out some cussword and turned. My heart jumped when I saw it was Helen that had thrown it. Mr. Legg began shooing her into the house.

All that took maybe one second, maybe two or three. After I went down, Dickie did, and his pal did, and nobody moved fast, because in the sand you slid and lurched and tripped yourself. I backed, though, some kind of way, and they plowed along after me. I felt damp sand under me and then I was in the water, and they were, but getting closer, as they could see where they were going and I couldn’t. Then I did something I’d seen linemen do on many a football field. I grabbed for their heads, but instead of headgears, I caught hair. I jerked them off their feet, and when their faces went in the water I held. They began to wriggle and kick and I held and kept on holding. Bubbles came up and the kicks got slower. By now, in addition to Mr. Legg and Helen, quite a few people, maybe seven or eight, were there, most of them yelling at me to let them have it, it served them right. Then a guy that seemed to be Dickie’s father splashed in and began shaking me and screaming I was murdering his boy. I let them up and dragged them out. They had water in their lungs and I put Pappy to working it out, with artificial respiration. When they could get up I let them have a couple of kicks and chased them out of there. Next thing, I was on the porch and Mr. Legg was pouring me a drink and people were arguing about it and it was pretty unanimous I had done a good thing for the island. Mr. Legg kept saying it was “magnificent,” and apologizing for not doing more to help me out. Then he told Helen to tell Margaret there was no need for the police, and to stop calling them, and she went inside. But before she did she gave me a funny, sidelong look, like she was seeing me for the first time. Mr. Legg kept on talking: “Jack, I can’t tell you what it did to me. I wouldn’t be capable of it in a million years, I may as well admit it.”

“It’s mostly muscle.”

“More than that.”

“And practice. I’ve spilled a few guys.”

“It’s more than muscle and more than practice. It’s — what they used to call courage and now they call guts.”

“Well — who am I to—”

I tilted the drink and he went on. He was, as I’ve said, a small, pink man with a little white mustache, and I don’t know how he ever expected to be much good in a fight. People began going home, and in a few minutes it was all awful quiet. Mr. Legg was worried about what Finley might be up to, and he kept watching. Then after a while he said: “Just the same, I think I’ll send her back. At the hotel Mrs. Brems will look out for her perfectly well, and if she’s not here the main source of trouble will be out of the way.”

“You mean — Helen?”

“Yes. I see it now. He’s showing off for her.”

“And the rest of you will stay here?”

“It’s not fair to ruin everybody’s summer.”

So I sat right in the boat, watched it drift out from the bank, turn in the current, and head for Niagara Falls, without lifting a finger to stop it or steer it or sink it. What was I thinking of, to do a thing like that? Who says I was thinking? Maybe I’d lost the capacity to think. For three years I’d been living in a dead house in a dead city in a dead state, going to a dead school studying the dead history of a dead country. Maybe you’ve forgotten 1930, 1931, and 1932, but I haven’t. All the things I’d been taught, about life and love and what it was all about, those lights I was to steer by, had turned into fish scales on me until they were just stuff for guys in college to gag about when they were half shot with beer. If I’d had the money I’d earned, that might have helped, anyway until I could figure out where I was at. But it was gone, because the things my father had learned had turned to fish scales on him, and it didn’t help much that the broker had been gentleman enough to knock himself off with a gun. So I’d let myself in for this marriage I didn’t want to a girl I didn’t want and a job I didn’t want, because I had as much use for the hotel business as a fish has for grass. All the thinking I was doing, I’d say, was thinking how not to think. If that meant drifting down the stream with this child, who was almost as unhappy as I was, it later turned out, picking flowers off the bank, listening to the bees, and watching the moon come up, then I was a sap all right, no argument about that. But all it meant at the time, so far as either one of us knew, was that it took two minds of what was weighing down two hearts, and wasn’t due to last any longer than the landing we were headed for, that would put an end to the trip. That we might shoot past it, that anything lay beyond it, never once entered my mind, and I’m sure it didn’t enter hers.

Not that I told her anything about it, or touched her or kissed her or did anything out of line, or even wanted to, that I remember. It was just that I was with her all the time, when I lived in a misty gold dream, and when I wasn’t with her I wasn’t even living. By now, she was growing to a woman so fast it made you catch your breath. Her hair had lost that ratty, kid look it had sometimes had, and was soft and glossy over its red-gold color. There were dark circles under her eyes and she had an expression like you see in the paintings of Madonnas. Her movements, that had been quick, all slowed down, so she was the most graceful thing in skirts I think I ever saw. Every motion she made was controlled, it began the right way and ended the right way, it wasn’t too fast and it wasn’t too slow.