Mr. Vertigo (27 page)

And there we were, marooned in the Mojave Desert. The car was wrecked, we had no water, and the closest town was forty miles away. That was bad enough, but the worst part of our predicament was the master’s wound. He’d lost an awful lot of blood in the past two hours. Bones were shattered inside him, muscles were torn, and the last bits of his strength had been spent on crawling out of the car. I sat him down in the shade of the Pierce Arrow and then ran off to collect some of the clothing scattered about on the ground. One by one, I picked up his fine white shirts and custom-made silk ties, and when my arms were too full to hold anymore, I carried them back to use as bandages. It was the best idea I could think of, but it didn’t do much good. I linked the ties together, tore the shirts into long strips, and wrapped him as tightly as I could—but the blood came seeping through before I was finished.

“We’ll rest here for a while,” I said. “Once the sun starts going down, we’ll see if we can’t stand you on your feet and get moving.”

“It’s no good, Walt,” he said. “I’m never going to make it.”

“Sure you will. We’ll start walking down the road, and before you know it, a car will come along and pick us up.”

“There hasn’t been a car by here all day.”

“That don’t matter. Someone’s bound to turn up. It’s the law of averages.”

“And what if no one comes?”

“Then I’ll carry you on my back. One way or another,
we’re going to get you to a sawbones and see that he patches you up.”

Master Yehudi closed his eyes and whispered through the pain. “They took the money, didn’t they?”

“You got that one right. It’s all gone, every last penny of it.”

“Oh well,” he said, doing his best to crack a smile. “Easy come, easy go, eh Walt?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Master Yehudi started to laugh, but the jostling hurt too much for him to continue. He paused to get a grip on himself, and then, apropos of nothing, he looked into my eyes and announced: “Three days from now, we would have been in New York.”

“That’s ancient history, boss. One day from now, we’re going to be in Hollywood.”

The master looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Then, unexpectedly, he reached out and took hold of my arm with his left hand. “Whatever you are,” he finally said, “it’s because of me. Isn’t that so, Walt?”

“Of course it is. I was a no-good bum before you found me.”

“I just want you to know that it works both ways. Whatever I am, it’s because of you.”

I didn’t know how to answer that one, so I didn’t try. Something strange was in the air, and all of a sudden I couldn’t tell where we were going anymore. I wouldn’t say that I was scared—at least not yet—but my stomach was beginning to twitch and flutter, and that was always a sure sign of atmospheric disturbance. Whenever one of those fandangos started up inside me, I knew the weather was about to change.

“Don’t worry, Walt,” the master continued. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“I hope so. The way you’re looking at me now, it’s enough to give a guy the heebie-jeebies.”

“I’m thinking, that’s all. Thinking things through as carefully as I can. You shouldn’t let that upset you.”

“I ain’t upset. As long as you don’t pull a fast one on me, I won’t be upset at all.”

“You trust me, don’t you, Walt?”

“Sure I trust you.”

“You’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure, you know that.”

“Well, what I want you to do for me now is climb back into the car and fetch the pistol from the glove compartment.”

“The gun? What do you want that for? There’s no robbers to shoot now. It’s just us and the wind out here—and whatever wind there is, it ain’t much to speak of.”

“Don’t ask questions. Just do as I say and bring me the gun.”

Did I have any choice? Yes, I probably did. I probably could have refused, and that would have ended the matter right then and there. But the master had given me an order, and I wasn’t about to give him any lip—not then, not at a time like that. He wanted the gun, and as far as I was concerned, it was my job to get it for him. So, without another word, I scrambled into the car and got it.

“Bless you, Walt,” he said when I handed it to him a minute later. “You’re a boy after my own heart.”

“Just be careful,” I said. “That weapon’s loaded, and the last thing we need is another accident.”

“Come here, son,” he said, patting the ground next to him. “Sit down beside me and listen to what I have to say.”

I’d already begun to regret everything. The sweet tone in his voice was the giveaway, and by the time I sat down, my stomach was turning cartwheels, pole-vaulting straight into my esophagus. The master’s skin was chalk-white. Little dots of sweat clung to his mustache, and his limbs were trembling with fever. But his
gaze was steady. Whatever force he still had was locked inside his eyes, and he kept those eyes fixed on me the whole time he talked.

“Here’s how it is, Walt. We’re in a nasty spot, and we have to get ourselves out of it. If we don’t do it pretty soon, we’re both going to croak.”

“That could be. But it don’t make sense to leave until the temperature cools off a bit.”

“Don’t interrupt. Hear me out first, and then you’ll have your say.” He stopped for a moment to wet his lips with his tongue, but he was too low on saliva for the gesture to do him any good. “We have to stand up and walk away from here. That’s definite, and the longer we wait, the worse it’s going to be. Problem is, I can’t stand up and I can’t walk. Nothing’s going to change that. By the time the sun goes down, I’ll only be weaker than I am now.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“No maybes about it, sport. So instead of sitting around and losing precious time, I have a proposition for you.”

“Yeah, and what’s that?”

“I stay here, and you go off on your own.”

“Forget it. I ain’t budging from your side, master. I made that promise a long time ago, and I intend to stick by it.”

“Those are fine sentiments, boy, but they’re only going to cause you trouble. You’ve got to get out of here, and you can’t do that with me dragging you down. Face the facts. This is the last day we’re ever going to spend together. You know that, and I know that, and the faster we get it into the open, the better off we’re going to be.”

“Nothing doing. I don’t buy that for a second.”

“You don’t want to leave me. It’s not that you think you shouldn’t go, but it pains you to think of me lying here in this
condition. You don’t want me to suffer, and I’m grateful to you for that. It shows you’ve learned your lessons well. But I’m offering you a way out, and once you think about it a little bit, you’ll realize it’s the best solution for both of us.”

“What’s the way out?”

“It’s very simple. You take this gun and shoot me through the head.”

“Come on, master. This is no time for jokes.”

“It’s no joke, Walt. First you kill me, and then you go on your way.”

“The sun’s got to your head, and it’s turned you bonkers. You caught a bullet in the shoulder, that’s all. Sure it hurts, but it’s not as though it’s going to kill you. The docs can mend those things one, two, three.”

“I’m not talking about the bullet. I’m talking about the cancer in my belly. We don’t have to fool each other about that anymore. My gut’s all mangled and destroyed, and I don’t have more than six months to live. Even if I could get out of here, I’m done for anyway. So why not take matters into our own hands? Six months of pain and agony—that’s what I’ve got to look forward to. I was hoping to get you started on something new before I kicked the bucket, but that wasn’t meant to be. Too bad. Too bad about a lot of things, but you’ll be doing me a big favor if you pull the trigger now, Walt. I’m depending on you, and I know you won’t let me down.”

“Cut it out. Stop this talk, master. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Death isn’t so terrible, Walt. When a man comes to the end of the line, it’s the only thing he really wants.”

“I won’t do it. Not in a thousand years I won’t. You can ask me till kingdom come, but I’ll never raise a hand against you.”

“If you won’t do it, I’ll have to do it myself. It’s a lot harder that way, and I was hoping you’d spare me the trouble.”

“Jesus God, master, put the gun down.”

“Sorry Walt. If you don’t want to see it, then say your goodbyes now.”

“I ain’t saying nothing. You won’t get a word out of me until you put that gun down.”

But he wasn’t listening anymore. Still looking into my eyes, he raised the pistol against his head and cocked the hammer. It was as if he was daring me to stop him, daring me to reach out and grab the gun, but I couldn’t move. I just sat there and watched, and I didn’t do a thing.

His hand was shaking and sweat was pouring off his forehead, but his eyes were still steady and clear. “Remember the good times,” he said, “Remember the things I taught you.” Then, swallowing once, he shut his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

I
t took me three years to track down Uncle Slim. For more than a thousand days I roamed the country, hunting the bastard in every city from San Francisco to New York. I lived from hand to mouth, scrounging and hustling as best I could, and little by little I turned back into the beggar I was born to be. I hitchhiked, I traveled on foot, I rode the rails. I slept in doorways, in hobo jungles, in flophouses, in open pastures. In some cities, I threw my hat on the sidewalk and juggled oranges for the passersby. In other cities, I swept floors and emptied garbage cans. In still other cities, I stole. I pilfered food from restaurant kitchens, money from cash registers, socks and underwear from the bins at Woolworth’s—whatever I could lay my hands on. I stood in breadlines and snored through sermons at the Salvation Army. I tap-danced on street corners, I sang for my supper. Once, in a movie theater in Seattle, I earned ten dollars from an old man who wanted to suck my cock. Another time, on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, I found a hundred-dollar bill lying in the gutter. In the course of those three years, a dozen people walked up to me in a dozen different places and asked if I was Walt the Wonder Boy. The first one took me by surprise, but after that I had my answer ready. “Sorry, pal,” I’d say. “Never heard of him. You must be confusing me with someone else.” And before they could insist, I’d tip my cap and vanish into the crowd.

I was pushing eighteen by the time I caught up with him. I’d grown to my full height of five feet five and a half inches, and Roosevelt’s inauguration was just two months away. Bootleggers were still in business, but with Prohibition about to give up the ghost, they were selling off their last bits of stock and exploring new lines of crooked investment. That’s how I found my uncle. Once I realized that Hoover was going to be thrown out, I started knocking on the door of every rum-runner I could find. Slim was just the sort to latch onto a dead-end operation like illegal booze, and the odds were that if he’d begged someone for a job, he would have done it close to home. That eliminated the east and west coasts. I’d already lost enough time in those places, so I began zeroing in on all his old haunts. When nothing happened in Saint Louis, Kansas City, or Omaha, I fanned out through wider and wider swatches of the Midwest. Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit. From Detroit I went back to Chicago, and even though I hadn’t turned up any leads on three previous visits there, the fourth one changed my luck. Forget about lucky three. Three strikes and you’re out, but four balls and you walk, and when I returned to Chicago in January of 1933, I finally got to first base. The trail led to Rockford, Illinois—just eighty miles down the road—and that’s where I found him: sitting in a warehouse at three o’clock in the morning, guarding two hundred smuggled cases of bonded Canadian rye.

It would have been easy to shoot him right then and there. I had a loaded gun in my pocket, and seeing that it was the same gun the, master had used on himself three years before, there would have been a certain justice in turning that gun on Slim now. But I had different plans, and I’d been nurturing them for so long, I wasn’t about to let myself get carried away. It wasn’t enough just to kill Slim. He had to know who his executioner was, and before I allowed him to die, I wanted him to live with
his death for a good little moment. Fair was fair, after all, and if revenge couldn’t be sweet, why bother with it in the first place? Now that I’d entered the pastry shop, I aimed to gorge myself on a whole platterful of goodies.

The plan was nothing if not complicated. It was all mixed up with memories from the past, and I never would have thought of it without the books that Aesop read to me back on the farm in Cibola. One of them, a large tome with a ragged blue cover, was about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Except for my namesake Sir Walter, those boys in the metal suits were my top heroes, and I asked for that collection more than any other. Whenever I was most in need of company (nursing my wounds, say, or just feeling low from my struggles with the master), Aesop would break off from his studies and come upstairs to sit with me, and I never forgot how comforting it was to listen to those tales of black magic and adventure. Now that I was alone in the world, they came back to me often. I was on a quest of my own, after all. I was looking for my own Holy Grail, and a year or so into my search, a curious thing started to happen: the cup in the story started turning into a real cup. Drink from the cup and it will give you life. But the life I was looking for could only begin with my uncle’s death. That was my Holy Grail, and there could be no real life for me until I found it. Drink from the cup and it will give you death. Little by little, the one cup turned into the other cup, and as I went on moving from place to place, it gradually dawned on me how I was going to kill him. I was in Lincoln, Nebraska when the plan finally crystallized— hunched over a bowl of soup at the Saint Olaf Lutheran Mission—and after that there were no more doubts. I was going to fill a cup with strychnine and make the bastard drink it. That was the picture I saw, and from that day on it never left me. I’d hold a gun to his head and make him drink down his own death.