Highsmith, Patricia (19 page)

He took the knob in his left hand, and his right moved automatically to the gun in his pocket. He felt like a machine, beyond danger and invulnerable. He had been here many, many times before, had killed him many times before, and this was only one of the times. He stared at the inch-wide crack in the door, sensing an infinite space opening out beyond, waiting until a feeling of vertigo passed. Suppose he couldn’t see him when he got inside? Suppose the old man saw him first? The night light on the front porch lights the room a little bit, but the bed was over in the opposite corner. He opened the door wider, listened, and stepped too hastily in. But the room was still, the bed a big vague thing in the dark corner, with a lighter strip at the head. He closed the door, the wind might blow the door, then faced the corner.

The gun was in his hand already, aimed at the bed that looked empty however he peered at it.

He glanced at the window over his right shoulder. It was open only about a foot, and Bruno had said it would be open all the way. Because of the drizzle. He frowned at the bed, and then with a terrible thrill made out the form of the head lying rather near the wall side, tipped sideways as if it regarded him with a kind of gay disdain. The face was darker than the hair which blended with the pillow. The gun was looking straight at it as he was.

One should shoot the chest. Obediently the gun looked at the chest. Guy slid his feet nearer the bed and glanced again at the window behind him. There was no sound of breathing. One would really not think he were alive. That was what he had told himself he must think, that the figure was merely a target. And that, because he did not know the target, it was like killing in war. Now?

“Ha-ha-ha-a!” from the window.

Guy trembled and the gun trembled.

The laugh had come from a distance, a girl’s laugh, distant but clear and straight as a shot. Guy wet his lips. The aliveness of the laugh had swept away everything of the scene for a moment, left nothing in its place, and now slowly the vacuum was filling with his standing here about to kill. It had happened in the time of a heartbeat. Life. The young girl walking in the street. With a young man, perhaps. And the man asleep in the bed, living. No, don’t think! You do it for Anne, remember? For Anne and for yourself. It is like killing in war, like killing— He pulled the trigger. It made a mere click. He pulled again and it clicked. It was a trick! It was all false and didn’t even exist! Not even his standing here! He pulled the trigger again.

The room tore up with a roar. His fingers tightened in terror. The roar came again, as if the crust of the world burst.

“Kagh!” said the figure on the bed. The gray face moved upward, showing the line of head and shoulders.

Guy was on the porch roof, falling. The sensation awakened him like the fall at the end of a nightmare. By a miracle an awning bar slid into one of his hands, and he fell downward again, onto hands and knees. He jumped off the porch edge, ran along the side of the house, then cut across the lawn, straight for the place where the milk crate was. He awakened to the clinging earth, to the hopelessness of his pumping arms that tried to hurry his race against the lawn. This is how it feels, how it is, he thought—life, like the laugh upstairs. The truth was that it is like a nightmare when one is paralyzed, against impossible odds.

“Hey!” a voice called.

The butler was after him, just as he had anticipated. He felt the butler was right behind him. The nightmare!

“Hey! Hey, there!”

Guy turned under the cherry trees and stood with his fist drawn back. The butler was not just behind him. He was a long way off, but he had seen him. The crazily running figure in white pajamas wavered like leaping smoke, then curved toward him. Guy stood, paralyzed, waiting.

“Hey!”

Guy’s fist shot out for the oncoming chin, and the white wraith collapsed.

Guy jumped for the wall.

Darkness ran up higher and higher about him. He dodged a little tree, leapt what looked like a ditch, and ran on. Then suddenly he was lying face down and pain was spreading from the middle of him in all directions, rooting him to the ground. His body trembled violently, and he thought he must gather up the trembling and use it to run, that this wasn’t where Bruno had said to go at all, but he could not move. You just take the little dirt road (no lights there) eastward off Newhope south of the house and keep going across two bigger streets to Columbia Street and walk south (right)… To the bus line that went to another railroad station. All very well for Bruno to write his damned instructions on paper. Damn him! He knew where he was now, in the field west of the house that never in any of the plans was to be used! He looked behind him. Which way was north now? What had happened to the street light? Maybe he wouldn’t be able to find the little road in the dark. He didn’t know whether the house lay behind him or to his left. A mysterious pain throbbed the length of his right forearm, so sharp he thought it should have glowed in the dark.

He felt as if he had been shattered apart with the explosion of the gun, that he could never gather the energy to move again, and that he really didn’t care. He remembered his being hit in the football game in high school, when he had lain face down like this, speechless with pain. He remembered the supper, the very supper and the hot-water bottle his mother had brought to him in bed, and the touch of her hands adjusting the covers under his chin. His trembling hand was sawing itself raw on a half-buried rock. He bit his lip and kept thinking vacuously, as one thinks when only half awake on an exhausted morning, that he must get up in the next moment regardless of the agony because he wasn’t safe. He was still so close to the house. And suddenly his arms and legs scrambled under him as if statics had built up a charge abruptly released, and he was running again across the field.

A strange sound made him stop—a low musical moan that seemed to come from all sides.

Police sirens, of course. And like an idiot he had thought first of an airplane! He ran on, knowing he was only running blindly and directly away from the sirens that were over his left shoulder now, and that he should veer left to find the little road. He must have run far beyond the long plaster wall. He started to cut left to cross the main road that surely lay in that direction, when he realized the sirens were coming up the road. He would either have to wait—He couldn’t wait. He ran on, parallel to the cars. Then something caught his foot, and cursing, he fell again. He lay in a kind of ditch with his arms outspread, the right bent up on higher ground. Frustration maddened him to a petulant sob. His left hand felt odd. It was in water up to the wrist. It’ll wet my wristwatch, he thought. But the more he intended to pull it out, the more impossible it seemed to move it. He felt two forces, one that would move the arm and another that would not, balancing themselves so perfectly his arm was not even tense. Incredibly, he felt he might have slept now. The police will surround me, he thought out of nowhere, and was up again, running.

Close on his right, a siren shrieked in triumph as if it had found him.

A rectangle of light sprang up in front of him, and he turned and fled it. A window. He had nearly run into a house. The whole world was awake! And he had to cross the road!

The police car passed thirty feet before him on the road, with a blink of headlights through bushes. Another siren moaned to his left, where the house must be, and droned away to silence. Stooping, Guy crossed the road not far behind the car and entered deeper darkness. No matter where the little road was now, he could run farther from the house in this direction. There’s sort of unlighted woods all around to the south, easy to hide in in case you have to get off the little road…. Do not try to get rid of the Luger no matter what happens between my house and the RR station. His hand moved to his pocket and felt the cold of the little revolver through the holes in his gloves. He didn’t remember putting the gun back in his pocket. It might have been lying on the blue carpet for all he knew! And suppose he had dropped it? A fine time to think of it!

Something had caught him and was holding him. He fought it automatically with his fists, and found it was bushes, twigs, briars, and kept fighting and hurling his body through it, because the sirens were still behind him and this was the only direction to go. He concentrated on the enemy ahead of him, and on both sides and even behind him, that caught at him with thousands of sharp tiny hands whose crackling began to drown out even the sirens. He spent his strength joyfully against them, relishing their clean, straight battle against him.

He awakened at the edge of a woods, face down on a downward sloping hill. Had he awakened, or had he fallen only a moment ago? But there was grayness in the sky in front of him, the beginning of dawn, and when he stood up, his flickering vision told him he had been unconscious. His fingers moved directly to the mass of hair and wetness that stood out from the side of his head. Maybe my head is broken, he thought in terror, and stood for a moment dully, expecting himself to drop dead.

Below, the sparse lights of a little town glowed like stars at dusk. Mechanically, Guy got out a handkerchief and wrapped it tight around the base of his thumb where a cut had oozed blacklooking blood. He moved toward a tree and leaned against it. His eyes searched the town and the road below. There was not a moving thing. Was this he? Standing against the tree with the memory of the gun’s explosion, the sirens, the fight against the woods? He wanted water. On the dirt road that edged the town, he saw a filling station. He made his way down toward it.

There was an old-fashioned pump beside the filling station. He held his head under it. His face stung like a mask of cuts. Slowly his mind grew clearer. He couldn’t be more than two miles from Great Neck. He removed his right glove that hung by one finger and the wrist, and put it in his pocket. Where was the other? Had he left it in the woods where he tied his thumb? A rush of panic comforted him with its familiarity. He’d have to go back for it. He searched his overcoat pockets, opened his overcoat and searched his trousers pockets. His hat fell at his feet. He had forgotten about the hat, and suppose he had dropped that somewhere? Then he found the glove inside his left sleeve, no more than the seam of the top that still circled his wrist, and a tatter, and pocketed it with an abstract relief like happiness. He turned up a trousers cuff that had been torn ~ down. He decided to walk in the direction he knew was southward, catch any bus farther southward, and ride until he came to a railroad station.

As soon as he realized his objective, pain set in. How could he walk the length of this road with these knees? Yet he kept walking, holding his head high to urge himself along. It was a time of dubious balance between night and day, still dark, though a low iridescence lay everywhere. The dark might still overcome the light, it seemed, because the dark was bigger. If the night could only hold this much until he got home and locked his door!

Then daylight made a sudden thrust at the night, and cracked the whole horizon on his left. A silver line ran around the top of a hill, and the hill became mauve and green and tan, as if it were opening its eyes. A little yellow house stood under a tree on the hill. On his right, a dark field had become high grass of green and tan, gently moving like a sea. As he looked, a bird flew out of the grass with a cry and wrote a fast, jagged, exuberant message with its sharp-pointed wings across the sky. Guy stopped and watched it until it disappeared.

Twentyfour

For the hundredth time, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror, patiently touched every scratch with the styptic pencil, and repowdered them. He ministered to his face and hands objectively, as if they were not a part of himself. When his eyes met the staring eyes in the mirror, they slipped away as they must have slipped away, Guy thought, that first afternoon on the train, when he had tried to avoid Bruno’s eyes.

He went back and fell down on his bed. There was the rest of today, and tomorrow, Sunday. He needn’t see anyone. He could go to Chicago for a couple of weeks and say he was away on a job. But it might seem suspicious if he left town the day after. Yesterday. Last night. Except for his scratched hands, he might have believed it one of his dreams that he had done it. Because he had not wanted to do it, he thought. It had not been his will. It had been Bruno’s will, working through him. He wanted to curse Bruno, curse him aloud, but he simply had not the energy now. The curious thing was that he felt no guilt, and it seemed to him now that the fact Bruno’s will had motivated him was the explanation. But what was this thing, guilt, that he had felt more after Miriam’s death than now? Now he was merely tired, and unconcerned about anything. Or was this how anyone would feel after killing? He tried to sleep, and his mind retraced the moments on the Long Island bus, the two workmen who had stared at him, his pretense of sleep with the newspaper over his face. He had felt more shame with the workmen….

His knees buckled on the front steps and he almost fell. He did not look to see if he were being observed. It seemed an ordinary thing he did, to go down and buy a paper. But he knew also he hadn’t the strength to look to see if he were being observed, the strength even to care, and he dreaded the time when the strength would come, as a sick or wounded man dreads the next inevitable operation.

The Journal-American had the longest account, with a silhouette of the murderer, composed from the butler’s description, of a man six feet one, weighing about one hundred and seventy to eighty pounds, wearing a dark overcoat and hat. Guy read it with mild surprise, as if it might not have been about him: he was only five nine and weighed about a hundred and forty. And he had not been wearing a hat. He skipped the part of the story that told who Samuel Bruno was, and read with greatest interest the speculation about the murderer’s flight. North along Newhope Road, it said, where it was believed he lost himself in the town of Great Neck, perhaps taking the 12:18 A.M. train out. Actually, he had gone southeast. He felt suddenly relieved, safe. It was an illusion, he warned himself, safety. He stood up, for the first time as panicked as he had been when he floundered in the lot beside the house. The paper was several hours old. They could have found their mistake by now. They could be coming for him, right outside his door, by now. He waited, and there was no sound anywhere, and feeling tired again, he sat down. He forced himself to concentrate on the rest of the long column. The coolness of the murderer was stressed, and the fact it seemed to be an inside job. No fingerprints, no clue except some shoe prints, size nine and a half, and the smudge of a black shoe on the white plaster wall. His clothes, he thought, he must get rid of his clothes and immediately, but when would he find the energy to do it? It was odd they overestimated his shoe size, Guy thought, with the ground so wet.”… an unusually small caliber of bullet,” the paper said. He must get rid of his revolver, too. He felt a little wrench of grief. He would hate that, how he would hate the instant he parted from his revolver! He pulled himself up and went to get more ice for the towel he was holding against his head.