Bright Orange for the Shroud (24 page)

Quite a few lights were on in the house. And just as I passed it, I saw, in the darkness of the side lawn beyond the carport, something that made me give a little sound of surprise.

“What’s the matter?” Arthur said in a strained voice.

“Good ol’ Boo’s white Lincoln tucked nearly out of sight at the side there. Top down. See it?”

“Yes, I see it. My God. We better go back, don’t you think?”

I did not answer him. I turned left onto the next street and after the first few houses, there was nothing but the emptiness of development land, where asphalt turned into damp dirt
with deep ruts. I backed and filled and got the car turned around, and on the last swing I turned the lights off, proceeded slowly by faint watery moonlight. I bumped it up over curbing and tucked it into the shadows of a clump of cabbage palm. In the silence a slight wind rattled the fronds, making a rain sound.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. There was a tremor in his voice.

“Take a look. Both the Wattses’ cars are there. I’ll cut across and come out behind the house. That’s it, over there. The lighted one. You wait for me right here.”

“And what if you g-get into trouble, Trav?”

“I’ll either come back on the double, or I won’t. Then, if I don’t, if you think you can handle it, get as close as you can and see what you can see. Don’t take any chances. Use your judgment. Here.” I took the pistol out of my jacket pocket and shoved it into his hands. Morale builder. I had to turn my frail reed into something stauncher, just in case. Even at the expense of making me feel naked.

“I don’t like this,” he said. He was not alone in that appraisal.

“If it turns very very sour, go and get Chook and get out of the area fast. Use this car and drive all night, right up to Tallahassee. In the morning get hold of a man in the State Attorney General’s office. Remember this name. Vokeler. Truman Vokeler.” He repeated it after me. “Don’t talk to anyone else. If he’s away, demand he be sent for. And you and Chook level with him. Everything. He’ll take it from there. Trust him.”

“Why don’t we just …”

I got out of the car and closed the door. I walked fifty feet into the field, stopped and waited until I had enough night vision
to pick up the contour of the ground, and keep from falling over palmetto and small bushes. I kept the vision by not looking directly at the house lights. Brush was thick beyond their rear property line and I moved toward a gap and came upon a woven cedar fence, low enough to step over. Once in the back yard, I stopped in the shadows, examining the house, refreshing my memory of the layout. Kitchen windows were lighted. Light from the living room shone out into the cage, on plantings and shadowy terrace furniture. I could hear no sound. There was an odd flickering light which puzzled me. After moving a little way to the side, I could see through the cage and into the living room. Crane Watts was slumped in a big green leather wing chair, legs sprawled on a hassock, head toppled to the side. I could detect no sound or movement in any part of the house, nor see any other person.

I moved around toward the carport side, crouched and ran to the side of the convertible, waited there, resting on one knee, listening. I came up cautiously and looked into the empty car, then leaned and felt cautiously. The keys weren’t in it. I went to the rear, crouched and felt the nearest tail pipe. There was just a slight residual heat. Recalling how he drove it, I could guess it had been there some time. I moved close to the house and around the corner and along the front of it, ready to flatten myself among the unkempt plantings should a car come down the street. The awning windows across the front of the living room were almost wide open. I crouched below them, raised cautiously. I saw Crane Watts from another angle. All I could see of him was the sprawl of legs on the hassock, one hand dangling. The chair faced the television set. It accounted for the flickering light. The sound was completely off. A handsome Negro girl was singing. The camera
had moved in for a closeup, the white teeth, tremolo of tongue, effortful throat, vast enunciations of the lips. All in a total silence, total until I heard a faint buzzing snore from the man in the green chair, and another.

I ducked down and continued across the front to the far corner. As I went around the corner I saw the long shadow I cast, and knew that I was outlined against the single streetlight on the other side of Clematis Drive, and knew it would be a Very Good Thing to get back where I had been. Out of darkness ahead came a sound. THOP. And with it a whisper of air movement touching the right side of my throat, and immediately thereafter the workmanlike chud of lead into a palm trunk a hundred yards behind me.

They would say, when Whitey Ford made that incredible motion to nip the base runner off first, that the man was caught leaning. The man was leaning one way, and realized what was happening, and yearned to go the other way, but he had to overcome the inertia of himself before he could move back. I was off balance. I yearned for the safety I had left. Either it was a cheap silencer he was using, or a homemade one, or a good one used too many times. Good ones go THUFF. Not THOP. I did not review all my past life in a micro-second. I was too busy changing balance and direction, and thinking, How stupid, how idiotic, how … Arthur-like. I did not hear the next THOP. I heard only the monstrous tearing blast as the slug tore the whole top left side of my head off with such finality, the world ended in whiteness without even any residual sense of falling.

• • •

 … my head was in a fish bag, in a fetid closure of stink, laced with engine oil. My hand was way off, around a corner, down another street, utterly indifferent to the master’s demands. So if you won’t come, I told it, wiggle a finger. It wiggled a finger. No problem, boss. Try the other hand. The right hand. The good one. But that is im-possible, en-tirely. Cleaved I am, from crown to crotch, the right half discarded, wound fitted with plexiglass so they can see all the moving parts in there, all the little visceral pumps and pulses.

The rebel hand floated up and came drifting, unseen, all the way back, caught upon something, pushed, and the fish bag was gone and I lay in a black fresh wash of air, made one little hitch, another, looked at two moons riding, two half moons absolutely identical. Well now. That
is
unusual. Each star had a twin, both in the same relationship as were the twin moons. I struggled with some massive concept of duality, something which, could I but grasp it and put it into coherency would alter the whole future of mankind. But some nagging little temporal worry kept trying to intrude. A graveyard slab was over me, tilting. Actually two of them, one merging into the other. I stared and the slab became two white leathery backs of a front seat, merged in the same way, and by painful deduction I established that I was on the rear floor of a car. And suddenly it was Boone Waxwell’s car, and I was dead. Caught leaning. I got my hand up there to find out how I died. It felt very bad up there, and very tall. All caked and torn meat. Stickiness and miscellany which could not be me. I tried to find the other half of myself. The hand, more docile and obedient, went a searching. It found a dull dead meat, and I thought someone was tucked in there with me. But when I prodded it and
squeezed it, there was some deep and muffled tenderness announcing itself as my right arm. My efforts brought the edge of the stinking tarp flapping down over my face once more, and I pushed it down and away. Dead was one thing. Becoming crab food was a further unpleasantness. The fellow was certainly casual about it. Kill me, dump me in his car, throw a tarp over me, take care of the body when he found the time. But if the body happened to be gone.…

Reaching up, I found the release on the rear door. It clicked and I shoved with my good leg. I slid over the sill a little, forcing the door open. I pushed again and again until my shoulders were over the sill, but my head hung down. I got the good hand under the back of my head, pulled it up, shoved again, and I slid out until my shoulders were on turf, hips still up on the sill. Two more shoves and my hips fell onto the ground. Then I could push against the outside of the car with the good leg. The dead leg followed me out. Rolling over was a major feat, requiring careful planning, proper shifting of dead parts into positions where leverage would work. Twice I got up to the balance point and the third time I flopped over.

Rested, then with the help of my hand, got my head up to take a look. Two of everything. Far things were doubled. Close things were two things merged, blurred into each other. Blinking did no good. It was between his convertible and the side of the carport. I had begun to wonder if I might not be entirely dead. The raw scrubby land out back would be
that
way. Worry about the fence when I got to it. If I got to it. Go that way. Get to back corner of carport, turn left. Go along back wall of carport and house. Come to cage. Turn right. Go along edge of cage and then straight out across yard.

In a little while I found the only possible method of locomotion. Roll onto the dead side, stay propped up by pressure of left hand against ground. Bring left knee up as far as I could get it. Use leg as brace and reach as far ahead as possible with left hand. Dig fingers into soil. Then pull with hand, and push with edge of left shoe, and slide on the dead side. Not quite as dead. It had begun to tingle in a very unpleasant way. Pins and needles. But it wouldn’t respond to command. I estimated that five or six good efforts took me my own length. I awarded myself a brief rest at the end of each McGee-length. Four rests brought me to the carport corner. Four more rests and I seemed to be halfway to the cage. It seemed to me that a long time had passed since he had shot me in the head. There seemed to be only one light in the house. I felt I was rustling the half-dead leaves of the plantings too loudly. At least I was in moon-shade on the back side of the house.

I stopped for an earned rest, facedown in moist grass. I was ordering a dead-hand finger to wiggle when, directly over me, in a voice that was half a hard resonance and half a husky whisper, with a dreadful, intimate jocularity, Boone Waxwell said, “Gone play dead now, hey?”

I waited to feel the cool fat end of that silencer against the nape of my neck.

“You answer ol’ Boo now, hear?” he said in that same wheedling, jolly imitation of affection. “Gone play dead? Little ol’ country club pussycat gone try that little game that didn work the other times neither?”

And suddenly it was all clarified by the thin, faint, weary sound of Vivian’s voice. I could not hear the words. It was utter hopelessness. I turned my head slowly and looked up at
the side of the house. Even with the irritating double vision I could see what the situation was. Sliding glass bedroom doors were open. The screening was not eighteen inches from my face, and the terrazzo floor level perhaps eight inches above ground level. In a faint illumination through a half-open door to the hallway, I could see the bottom corner of a bed, possibly twelve inches from the other side of the screen.

My impulse was to scramble away like a crippled bug before he looked out and saw me. Realization of the situation was like smelling salts, pushing the mists out of my mind, bringing me from stubborn dreamy labor of escape up to a vividness of alarm, awareness of life. At the edge of panic I heard, distinctly, a rustle, slow shift of weight, sigh, whispery sound of flesh stroked. And if I could hear them so distinctly, it was only wild luck he had not heard my labored squirming.

“Now why’d I want to go away, pretty pussycat?” he asked in mock astonishment. “What for I’d do that when we ain’t even half finished off?”

Again her begging, toneless plaint, her tired whining.

“Pore little dead pussycat, thinks she’s all wore down. Ol’ Boo, he knows better. Such a sweet piece you are now. And you do so fine, so real fine.”

I heard an aimless shifting, rustling, small thud of elbow against wall or headboard, a sudden huff of exhalation, a silence. Then he said, in the voice people use to play games with small children. “What’s this! And this here? How in the worl’ can this be a-happenin to a pore dead pussycat? It beats all!”

There was a small thrashing, a silence, a whine, another silence.

In a voice suddenly tightened and gritty with effort, he said, “Now how this for you?”

There was a scampering rustle, a loud whimper, a restraining clap of hand onto flesh. And a silence longer than before.

“AAAAAAA,” she said. And again. “AAAAAAA.” It was not a sound of pain or of pleasure, of fright, of want, or of denial. It was simply the sound of sensation, purified, dehumanized, so vivid that I could visualize her head thrown back, eyes wide blind staring, mouth wide and crooked.

And the random and meaningless sounds of motion began a cyclic repetition, steadying into a slow heavy beat.

Across that beat, in a rhythmic counterpoint, she cried “OGodOGodOGod!” in a voice of that same clarity and formality and impersonality I had heard her use to call Love and Ad and Game and Let.

“Stay with it,” he gasped.

And, released from my unwilling voyeurism by the sounds of them, I went hunching and scrabbling along, turning away from the house, heading out across the open yard, aching to get out of earshot of what they had built to, away from that furnace-gasping, whumpety-rumpety, plunging, wall-banging, flesh-clapping prolonged crescendo of the pre-wearied flesh, crawling and hitching, weeping inwardly sick weak tears for the plundered wife, wondering how in God’s name I’d ever had the benign stupidity to formulate the jackass theory that the sounds of love could never be sickening. This was as pretty as the raw sound of a throat being cut. Or the sound of the great caged carnivore at feeding time.

The hurt on the dead side was beyond pins and needles. Though the surface felt numbed, each pressure brought a dead aching pain, as though I had been burned. I felt as if each grunt of effort was tearing the inner lining of my throat. Finally, reaching, I stubbed my outstretched fingers against the fence.
I hitched closer to it, reached up and got my hand around the top edge of it. I rested there, breathing hard. Distance had faded the sounds of them, losing those sounds in bug shrilling, frond clatter, mockingbirds, a dog barking two streets away. The little fence was improbably high. I had an arm ten feet long, thin as a pencil reaching up and up to take a weak grasp on the roof-edge of a building, and any idea I could hoist myself up and over was absurdly optimistic. From the mortgaged house came the finishing cry of the tennis player, a tearing hypersonic howl like a gun-shot coyote. Her eyes were a very dark blue, and with sun-coin on the tawny forearm, she had closed her eyes and shuddered at the thought of any Waxwell touch. I borrowed from her cry the energy of desperation, pulled myself up and up, hooked my chin over the bruising wood, and got just enough response from the dead arm to swing it up and over, fence edge biting into armpit. I writhed and pushed and worked, hung there with the edge across my belly, reached and found a tough curl of root, pulled, tumbled, rolled onto my back on the slight slope beyond the fence.