The end of the night (4 page)

He slowed the car, but it was several miles before he found a place that suited him. He pulled over and stopped. She could see a tumbledo^;^Ti barn with its roof making a sagging line against the stars.

She turned toward him, her back against the door on her side, and pulled her knees up onto the seat.

"Please don't say anything until I'm finished, Arnold. Somewhere, somehow, you got the ^Tong idea about us. I don't know whose fault it was. We've never even kissed. But you've got to get over it. You've got to stop dreaming, because the dreams aren't going to come true. You've got to stop bothering me. Fm in love with Dal, and I'm going to marry him."

She could not see his shadowed face. There was a long silence. She heard his deep, harsh laugh. "You got a couple things \\Tong there, Helen. It was you and me right from that first day."

"It never was! You were lonely. I thought you should have somebody to talk to. That's all."

"You have to keep on playing those games, don't you, right up to the end?"

"I'm going to marry Dal. Nothing can change that. And you must stop phoning me and writing me and following me."

"You got it all \^Tong. You're talking about the way it was, Helen. For all these weeks and weeks. Right up to tonight. It isn't that way any more. You have to understand that. It's different now. From now on, it's you and me."

Something in his voice gave her a chilly, uneasy feeling.

"Arnold, you have to try to understand."

"I understand that you're the only thing that can happen to me, Helen. The only possible way out. So it has to happen. It can't happen any other way. That's what you've got to understand. It's hke they say—a destiny."

"I guess you'd better take me . . ."

"Now it's time to tell you about the surprise I got."

"Surprise?"

"I planned it all out careful, honey, just the way you'd Uke it. This crate is all tuned and gassed. Smitty is going to run the station. I got a thousand bucks cash on me. First time in my life I ever carried that much. In the trunk is two brand-new suitcases, yours and mine. Both full of brand-new stuff. I know I got pretty things you'll like, and they'll fit. So you don't even have to go home again. We're going to drive on through to Maryland and get married there and go on up to Canada for the honeymoon. How's that for a surprise?"

She heard her own nervous laughter. "But I'm going to marry Dal . . ."

His big leathery hand closed suddenly on her wrist, so strongly that she hissed with pain. "That joke is over and I'm sick of it, Helen. I can't get no more laughs out of that old joke. So drop it from now on. We're taking off from here, right now. We'll wire your folks. We're going to drive right on through, so you see if you can go to sleep and rest up for getting married."

He released her and started the car. She heard the high, hard whine of a car coming along the road behind them, coming the way they had come. As the Olds jumped forward she turned and opened the door and plunged out.

She mude four or five giant running steps, fighting for balance, hearing a hoarse yeU and scream of brakes, and then

she tripped and dived headlong into a tumbled blackness where a sudden white light burst like a bomb inside her head, behind her eyes. . . .

THREE

DEATH HOUSE DIARY

I, KiRBY Palmer Stassen, stood last February—sixteen thousand years ago?—at a window on the second floor of a fraternity house, looking out at the curiously warm, mild rain that misted Woodland Avenue. I was wearing a dark-gray cashmere cardigan and gray flannel Daks. I was smoking a cigar. The window was open a few inches. I felt the damp breath of the day against the back of my hand. It was the best layout in the house, a two-bedroom suite, handy to the shower room. I shared it with Pete McHue. We were both seniors. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Pete was spread out on the couch behind me, wearing an old terry robe, plodding his way through an assigned book, spooning all that dead dry stuff into his head where it would remain forever.

I remember that I'd put some Chavez on the machine. I can't remember the name of the symphony, but it's the one Clare Boothe Luce commissioned him to write as a memorial to her daughter who got killed in an automobile thing, in California, I believe. If I'd put on the Chavez Toccata for Percussion it would have fitted my mood better, but Pete wouldn't have gone along with that. On the far sidewalk, headed east, was a dumpy httle girl in a red sweater, walking in slow defiance of the rain, hugging books with both arms, her rump jutting, damp brown hair bouncing. I wondered what she was thinking about.

When you look back on the moments that change your life, you get good recall. I was thinking about that good Spanish word Hemingway used a lot. Nada. Nothing. Pronounced with accent on first syllable. First syllable is dragged out, sneered, with a lift of the lips. The d is soft—^halfway between

a d and the th sound. Naaaada. Truly, Mother, it is nothing. En su leche. And that day, that week, that month of my twenty-second year, the word could have been suitably embroidered across my groin.

My college career made a nice, neat chart. I'd come busting onto the scene as a hotshot from Hill, ready to slay the university, but nobody seemed to appreciate my significance and importance. So I went after them, buckety-buckety. So draw the chart in a nice upward curve from the base line, right up to a peak that comes about the middle of the junior year. Kirby Stassen, large man on campus. Background sounds of continuous applause.

Then sag it off. No more honors. No athletic participation. Maximum cuts, and then some. And, for the first time, I found myself on academic probation. And it was raining. And in the rain was a ghostly whiff of spring. Chavez rounded off the coda and the player clacked off, and let some of the sounds of the world come into the room. Traffic on the avenue. Underclassmen horsing around downstairs.

"It's all crap," I said.

*'What?" Pete asked vaguely.

*'Nada. Zero times zero equals square root of minus zero."

"For Chrissake, Stass, stop standing around here fingering yourself. Go get drunk. Go get banged. You've been a drag for weeks."

"I bother you?" I asked him poHtely.

"You bother everybody," he said, and plunged back into his book.

And exactly at that moment is when it happened. For the first time in a long gray time there was a little queasy wiggle of excitement way down there on the floor of my soul. What the hell was keeping me there? What was the Christ name good of coasting through to a degree, which I could manage to do, and then signing up for that Executive Training Program the old man had all lined up for me?

It is like something going click in your head. I had been part of it—part of Pete, part of the guys horsing around downstairs, part of the traffic on Woodland, part of the strange girl in the red sweater. And all of a sudden, without having made a move, I was on my way. I had peeled myself loose from my environment. Once it was done, in that instant, I knew I couldn't ever go back. I even had a feeling of nostalgia. Good old Pete. It was as if I'd come back to visit one of the places where I had

grown up. I stood like a stranger in the middle of my own life, with that excitement coiling and imcoiling way down inside me, making my breath a little short.

I went up into the storage place in the attic and located my foot locker and suitcases and brought them down to the room.

*'Now what the hell are you doing?" Pete asked.

•Taking off."

**You look like you're planning one hell of a long weekend, old buddy."

"As long as they come. I'm off for good.*'

"With only four months to go? You're nuts!"

"I'm off to seek my fortune, sir."

He went back into his book, but I was aware of him pausing from time to time to stare at me. I was very neat. I would take one suitcase. I tagged the locker and the other suitcase for express shipment to 18 Burgess Lane, Huntstown. I sorted books, clothes, records, and made a discard pile. Four years of frivolous accretion.

"Pete? Come here and pay attention." He ambled over and saluted. "Please have Railway Express pick these up and ship collect. Take first choice of anything you want in this pile, and distribute the balance among the needy brothers."

He squatted and pulled out a white cablestitch sweater. "We po' folk are humbly grateful, squire."

I shook hands with him. When I left the room he was once again squatting, prodding at the pile. It was my intention to go from room to room and exchange the fraternity grip and bid a sturdy masculine farewell to the brotherhood in residence. But instead I went right down the stairs and out the back of the house, got into the Impala and drove away from there. My checking account was down to about eighty doUars. So, on a slow circuit of the commercial strip next to the campus, I cashed three twenty-five-dollar checks at places where I was known and, ninety minutes after the moment of decision I was clear of the city, singing right along with Doris Day on the car radio as I made a hundred and ten feet a second on the way to New York.

That's what the newspaper types have kept asking me—how did this all start? How did such a clean-cut, privileged, American youth embark upon such a career of violence? The women ^-do they call them sob sisters still?—are the worst. They are getting a sexual whee out of it. You can tell from their eyes.

To the very best of my knowledge, sob sisters, it started that February day, with rain and Chavez and nada.

It is strange that while I am trying to fit my mind around the enormity of what they are going to do to me—strap me down and turn out all my lights—precious, unique, irreplaceable little ole me—I can still feel intense indignation toward whatever newspaper clown invented that Wolf Pack designation. How banal and tiresome and inaccurate can you get?

It is as though I expected more dignity out of electrocution, which is in itself a drab and tragicomic thing. It is the suitable terminal incident in the lives of people named Muggsy Spinoza —or Robert "Shack" Hernandez?—but seems unsuitable for a Kirby Palmer Stassen. I resent my pending abrupt demise being labeled a Wolf Pack Execution.

Perhaps any attempt to comprehend what they are going to do to me is as footless as a chipmunk trying to tuck a coconut into his cheek. Objectively I know it is going to happen. But subjectively I know the cavalry will ride over the hill, the redskins will skulk off into the brush, the warden will give me a new suit, a train ticket and a handshake, and I will stride oQ into the sunset as noble music swells and rises on the sound track.

Another sore point in the newspaper coverage—should I have hired a public relations specialist?—has been the half-ass attempts at amateur psychoanalysis. The favorite conclusion has been to label me a constitutional psychopath. Obviously this takes society off the hook. If I can be labeled as something different—a deviation from the norm—then it is evident that the culture is not at fault. I am sick, they say. I have been sick from the beginning, I hid all my wicked violence behind the bland mask of conformity. I was an impostor. That is the implication. And so all the schools and group adjustment programs and cultural advantages are blameless.

I never felt like an impostor.

I have tried to go all the way back through my years, and down into myself, to see if I can find any stray morsel of proof of the correctness of their classification. I find no thirst for blood. I have nearly racked up an automobile trying to avoid a chipmunk, and once I drove behind a car which swerved deliberately to hit a farm dog, and it filled me with a sick, helpless anger.

I can find but one incident I do not clearly understand, and it was buried deeper than it perhaps should have been.

I am twelve. It is late summer. Ever since my birthday I have owned a 22-caliber rifle, but it has been taken away from me by my father because I lied to him. He is angry at me this year. I lost a fight and came home weeping and so he whipped me and ordered me to stay in the house for a week. My mother hugs me and says he is too hard on me. I think I hate him this year. He seems to be cruel to both of us, to my mother and to me. My friends are out somewhere in the sunshine. I am alone in the house. I am restless. I do not know what I was pretending, but I hid in my mother's closet, and I fell asleep on the closet floor, with one of the sliding doors open a few inches.

I am awakened by nearby sounds. I know at once that it is late afternoon. The blinds are closed. The bedroom is filled with a strange golden light. I know I should not be where I am. I get up onto my knees. I look through the crack where the door is open, and look across into the mirror of her dressing table and see reflected there the two of them, and see that they are making the sound which awakened me and which I could not identify. At first I am stunned with horror, believing that he is killing her in some horrible way, that she is fighting for her hfe, that they are gasping and writhing in mortal struggle. She makes a long, sighing moan, and I come dangerously close to screaming in panic, believing that she is resigning herself to death.

But the dirt-talk of the playground and the boys' room is forcing itself into my mind. As my eyes become more accustomed to the golden light, and the mists of sleep bum off my brain, I see how they match the sniggering descriptions I have been given. They told me that my mother and father did it, but I could not believe they could secretly indulge in such a Hastiness.

They are still. I can sense her horrible shame. She is the most beautiful woman in the world and, being his wife, she must submit to his vileness, to this naked degradation. I vow that when I get my rifle back I wiU kiU him and she will be forever free of the pain that made her cry out.

To my astonishment she gets up from the bed and bends to kiss him lightly and tells him in a teasing way that she loves him. She is smiling. She gets cigarettes and gives him one, and lights his and her own, and then comes toward the closet. In silent panic I move back into the farthest comer, beyond the silk and scent of her dresses. She slides the door open, takes a dressing gown from a hanger and closes the door. I cannot