Knight's Gambit (25 page)

Then Max stopped that too and stood looking down at his uncle’s profile with the hard flat eyes in which there was little of youth or peace or anything else that should have been in them.

‘All right,’ Max said. ‘You couldn’t prove an intention, design. All that you can prove, you wont even have to. I already admit it. I affirm it. I bought a horse and turned it into a private stable on my mother’s property. I know a little law too, you see. I probably know just exactly the minor and incorrect amount of it to make a first-class small-town Mississippi lawyer. Maybe even a state legislator, though probably a little too much ever to be elected governor.’

Still his uncle didn’t move, except for the thumb. ‘I’d sit down, if I were you,’ he said.

‘You’d do more than that right now if you were me,’ Max said. ‘Well?’

Now his uncle moved. He swung the chair around with the pressure of his knee against the desk, until he faced Max.

‘I dont need to prove it,’ his uncle said. ‘Because you are not going to deny it.’

‘No,’ Max said. He said it immediately, contemptuously. It wasn’t even violent. ‘I dont deny it. So what? Where’s your sheriff?’

His uncle watched Max. Then he put the stem of the cold pipe into his mouth and drew at it as if it had fire and tobacco in it; he spoke in a voice mild and even almost inconsequential:

‘I suppose that when Mr McCallum brought the horse out and you had him put it into Captain Gualdres’ private stable, you told the grooms and the other Negroes that Captain Gualdres had bought it himself and wanted it let alone. Which wasn’t hard for them to believe, since Captain Gualdres had already bought one horse which he wouldn’t let anyone else touch.’

But Max no more answered that than he had answered the other night when his uncle asked him about not being registered for draft. There was not even contempt in his face while he waited for his uncle to go on.

‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘When are Captain Gualdres and your sister to be married?’

And that was when he, Charles, found out what else it was in the flat hard eyes. It was despair and grief. Because he watched the rage blaze up and burn, scour, sear them out until there was nothing left in them but the rage and the hatred, and he thought how maybe his uncle was right and there are more ignoble things than hatred and how if you do hate anyone, it must surely be the man you have failed to kill even if he doesn’t know it.

‘I’ve been doing some trading lately,’ his uncle said. ‘I’ll know soon whether I did so bad at it or not. I’m going to make another trade with you. You are not nineteen years old, you are twenty-one, but you haven’t even registered yet. Enlist.’

‘Enlist?’ Harriss said.

‘Enlist,’ his uncle said.

‘I see,’ Harriss said. ‘Enlist, or else.’

Then Harriss began to laugh. He stood there in front of the desk, looking down at his uncle and laughing. But it never had touched his eyes in the first place, so it didn’t need to leave them: it was just his face which the laughter left, laughing itself gradually away from his eyes even if it hadn’t ever been there, until at last they looked like his sister’s had two nights ago: the grief and the despair, but without the terror and fear, while his uncle’s cheeks went through the motion of drawing at the cold pipe as though there were smoke in it.

‘No,’ his uncle said. ‘No “else.” Just enlist. Look. You are playing poker (I assume you know poker, or at least—like a lot of people—anyway play it). You draw cards. When you do that, you affirm two things: either that you have something to draw to, or you are willing to support to your last cent the fact that you have not. You dont draw and then throw the cards in because they are not what you wanted, expected, hoped for; not just for the sake of your own soul and pocket-book, but for the sake of the others in the game, who have likewise assumed that unspoken obligation.’

Then they were both motionless, even the void similitude of his uncle’s smoking. Then Harriss drew a long breath. You could hear it: the inhale and the suspiration.

‘Now?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘Now. Go back to Memphis now and enlist.’

‘I …’ Harriss said. ‘There are things—’

‘I know,’ his uncle said. ‘But I wouldn’t go out there now. They will allow you a few days after you are enlisted to come back home and say—put your affairs in order. Go back now. Your car is downstairs, isn’t it? Go back to Memphis now and enlist.’

‘Yes,’ Harriss said. He drew another of the long breaths and let it go. ‘Go down those steps and get in the car by myself, and leave. What makes you think you or the army or anybody else will ever catch me again?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it at all,’ his uncle said. ‘Would it make you feel better to give me your word?’

And that was all. Harriss stood there for another moment by the desk, then he went back to the door and stood there, his head bent a little. Then he raised his head and he, Charles, thought that he would have done that too: gone back through the anteroom where the others were. But his uncle spoke in time.

‘The window,’ his uncle said, and got up himself from the swivel chair and went and opened it, onto the outside gallery from which the stairs descended to the street, and Max stepped through it and his uncle closed the window and that was all: the feet on the stairs for a moment, but no shriek of tires now nor fading wail of the horn either this time, and if Hampton Killegrew or anybody else ran after him yelling this time, he and his uncle never heard that either. Then he went to the anteroom door and opened it and asked Captain Gualdres and the sister to come in.

Captain Gualdres still looked like bronze or metal of some sort even in the double-breasted dark suit any man might have worn and most men owned. He even still looked like horses too. Then he, Charles, realised that this was because the horse was missing: and that was when he first noticed that Captain Gualdres’ wife was a little taller than Captain Gualdres. It was as if, without the horse, Captain Gualdres was not only incomplete as regarded mobility, but in height too, as if his legs had not been intended for him to be seen and compared with others while standing on them.

She was in a dark dress too, the dark blue in which brides ‘go away,’ travel, with the fine rich fur coat with a corsage (Orchids, of course. He had heard of orchids all his life, so he realised that he had never seen them before. But he knew them at once; on that coat and that bride they could be nothing else.) pinned to the collar and the thin thread from the Cayley girl’s fingernail still showing on her cheek.

Captain Gualdres wouldn’t sit down, so he and his uncle stood too.

‘I come to say good-bye,’ Captain Gualdres said in English. ‘And to receive your—how you say—’

‘Felicitations,’ his uncle said. ‘And to you, congratulations. You have them a thousand times. May I ask since when?’

‘Since—’ Captain Gualdres looked quickly at his wrist ‘—one hour. We just leave the padre. Our mama has just return home. We decide not to wait. So we come to say goodbye. I say it.’

‘Not good-bye,’ his uncle said.

‘Yes. Now. By one—’ again Captain Gualdres looked at his wrist ‘—five minutes we are no more for here.’ (Because, as his uncle had said, there was one thing about Captain Gualdres: he not only knew exactly what he thought he was going to do, he quite often did it.) ‘Back to my country. The
Campo
. Maybe I do not ought to have left him to begin. This country. Is magnificent, but too strong for simple
gaucho, paysano
. But for now, no matter. For now, is done. So I come to say one more good-bye and one hundred more
gracias.’
Then it was Spanish again. But he kept up: ‘You have Spanish. My wife, having been educated only in the best of European convents for rich young American ladies, has no language at all. In my country, the campo, there is a saying: Married; dead. But there is another saying: To learn where the rider will sleep tonight, ask the horse. So no matter about that either; that’s all finished too. So I have come to say good-bye, and thanks, and to congratulate myself that you had no stepchildren also to be placed for life. But I really have no confidence even in that condition because nothing is beyond a man of your capacity and attainments, not to mention imagination. So we return to my—our—country in time, where you are not. Because I think you are a very dangerous man and I do not like you. And so, with God.’

‘With God,’ his uncle said in Spanish too. ‘I wouldn’t hurry you.’

‘You cant,’ Captain Gualdres said. ‘You dont even need to. You dont even need to wish you could.’

Then they were gone too: back through the anteroom; he and his uncle heard the outer door, then watched them pass across the gallery window, toward the stairs, and his uncle took from his vest the heavy watch with its loop of chain and the dangling golden key and laid it face-up on the desk.

‘Five minutes,’ his uncle said. Which was time enough, moment enough for him, Charles, to have asked exactly what was the other side of that bet his uncle had made last night with Captain Gualdres, except that he knew now he didn’t need to ask; in fact, he realised now he had begun not to need to ask that at that instant Thursday night when he shut the front door after Max Harriss and his sister and came back to the sittingroom and found that his uncle had no intention of going to bed.

So he said nothing, merely watching his uncle lay the watch on the desk, then stand over it, his arms spread a little and braced on either side of the watch, not even sitting down.

‘For decency. For moderation,’ his uncle said, then, already moving and even in the same breath, his uncle said, ‘Or maybe I’ve already had too much of both,’ taking up the watch and putting it back into his vest, then through the anteroom, taking up the hat and overcoat, and through the outer door, not even saying backward over his shoulder: ‘Lock it,’ then down the stairs and already standing beside the car, holding the door open, when he, Charles, reached it.

‘Get in and drive,’ his uncle said. ‘And remember this is not last night.’

So he took the wheel and drove on through across the crowded Saturday Square, still having to dodge among the homeward-bound cars and trucks and wagons even after they were clear of downtown. But the road itself was still open for a little speed—a lot of it if he had been Max Harriss going home instead of just Charles Mallison driving his uncle backward.

‘Now what?’ his uncle said. ‘What’s wrong with it? Or has your foot gone to sleep?’

‘You just said it’s not last night,’ he said.

‘Of course it’s not,’ his uncle said. ‘There’s no horse waiting to run over Captain Gualdres now, even if the horse was necessary. He’s got something this time a good deal more efficient and fatal than just an insane horse.’

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘A dove,’ his uncle said. ‘So what are you poking along for? Are you afraid of motion?’

So they went then, almost half as fast as Max Harriss, over the road which the baron hadn’t had time to concrete but which he probably would have dropped other things to do if he had just been warned in time, not for his own comfort because he didn’t travel it; he went and came from New Orleans in his own airplane so that when Jefferson saw him it went out there to do it; but for the uniqueness of spending that much money on something not only not his but which all who knew him would not even expect him to use, just as Huey Long in Louisiana had made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere, without ever once looking inside it probably nor even caring what the people who wrote and edited it thought of him any more than the baron did what the farmers thought of him whose straying livestock leaped and shrieked and died under the speeding wheels of his guests; they were going fast now through the early December afternoon—the winter afternoon, the sixth day of winter the old folks called it, who counted from the first of December.

And it (the road) was older than gravel too, running back into the old time of simple dirt red and curving among the hills, then straight and black where the rich land flattened, alluvial and fertile; niggard in width since the land was too rich, too fecund in corn and cotton, to allow room for men to pass one another almost, marked only by the thin iron of carriage- and wagon-rims and the open O’s of horses and mules when the old owner, the baron’s father-in-law, would leave the Horace and the weak toddy long enough to come in to town the two or three or four times a year, to vote or sell the cotton or pay the taxes or attend a funeral or a wedding, and then be driven back to the toddy and the Latin pages again, along the simple dirt in which even hooves, unless running, made no noise, let alone the wheels or anything other than the creak of harness; back to the acres which were hardly bounded then except in his own recollection and holding and belief and that of his neighbors, not even fenced always, let alone in carefully panelled and railed oak and hickory designed in Virginia and Long Island and handicrafted in Grand Rapids factories, the lawn which was a yard of shabby oaks then, innocent of shears and pruners and clippers and borderers in a light mist of gasoline fumes, to the house which was just a house to back a front gallery for him to sit on with the silver cup and the worn calf; a garden which was just a garden, overgrown, shabby too, of old permanent perennial things: nameless roses and lilac bushes and daisies and phlox and the hard durable dusty bloom of fall, itself in the tradition of the diluted whiskey and the Horatian odes: unassertive, enduring.

It was the quiet, his uncle said. This, the first time, the only time his uncle actually said it, was twelve years ago when he, Charles, was not even quite six yet, just old enough to listen: which in fact his uncle even mentioned: ‘Not that you are old enough to hear it, but that I’m still young enough to say it. Ten years from now, I wont be.’ And he said,

‘You mean ten years from now it wont be true?’ And his uncle said,

‘I mean that ten years from now I wont say it because ten years from now I will be ten years older and the one thing age teaches you is not fear and least of all more of truth, but only shame.—That spring of 1919 like a garden at the end of a four-year tunnel of blood and excrement and fear in which that whole generation of the world’s young men lived like frantic ants, each one alone against the instant when he too must enter the faceless anonymity behind the blood and the filth, each one alone’ (which at least proved one of his uncle’s points, the one about truth anyway) ‘with his constant speculation whether his fear was as plain to others as to himself. Because the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds have no friends or comrades any more than the hog at the trough or the wolf in the pack has. And when the corridor ends at last and they come out of it—if they do—they still have none. Because’ (but at least he, Charles, hoped his uncle was right about the shame) ‘they have lost something, something of themselves dear and irreplaceable, scattered now and diffused and become communal among all the other faces and bodies which also survived: I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also Joe Ginotta of East Orange, New Jersey, and Charley Longfeather of Shoshone, Idaho, and Harry Wong of San Francisco; and Harry and Charley and Joe are all John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi too. But that composite is each still us, so we cant repudiate it. And that’s why American Legions. And though we may have been able to face and lie down what we had seen Harry and Joe and Charley do in the person of John Doe of Jefferson, we cant face down and lie away what we saw John Doe do as Charley or Harry or Joe. And that’s why, while they were still young and had faith in breath, American Legions got mass-drunk.’