The Kind One (8 page)

Beau Jack was arrested and put in the local jail. That evening a mob formed and took him from the jail and out to the edge of town. They stood him in the back of a pickup truck under an oak tree with a big horizontal limb; Darla found out it wasn’t the first lynching that had happened there.

It seemed like the whole town turned out, and people were acting excited and happy, like it was the Fourth of July and they were waiting for the fireworks. Near the outskirts of the crowd Darla saw the mayor talking to the police chief; they were both laughing and smoking cigarettes. Some kids were playing Pop the Whip.

Crisp brown leaves covered the ground. It was very cold, and it was sleeting, and the sleet made a frying sound on the dead leaves.

The scene was lit up by the headlights of several cars. Beau Jack had his hands tied behind his back. He looked to be about thirty. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and well-muscled. He was naked. He was bleeding from many places. He’d been whipped and beaten, and his right ear and his private parts had been cut off.

He was shaking all over, whether from the cold or fear or the shock of his wounds Darla couldn’t say, but his face as he looked out over the crowd was completely blank. Somebody said: “Dumb nigger don’t even know what’s happening to him,” but Darla understood the blankness.

They put the rope over his neck, and somebody started up the truck. But there had been a lot of rain lately, and the truck only moved a foot or two before it got stuck in the soft ground. Beau Jack stumbled a little but regained his balance. Good natured jeers came from the crowd as they struggled to get the truck moving. The tires spun in the mud. A big fat guy named Donnie Collins unwisely got right behind one of the tires and was splattered head to toe with mud, which caused a lot of laughter. Finally the truck got traction and lurched away, and Beau Jack swung and jerked at the end of the rope for several minutes till he was still. Then people got out their cameras and posed in front of the dangling corpse.

Darla was there with Dr. and Mrs. Ames. Bathsheba Butler had been his patient and the life-long friend of both of them. Mrs. Ames couldn’t bear to watch, she hid her face in her husband’s chest, while Dr. Ames looked grim but he never turned away.

Darla told me she didn’t care what that poor coon had done, he didn’t deserve what had been done to him, at the very least he should have got a fair trial. And the whole town had just stood there and watched and nobody had said a thing, including her beloved Dr. Ames. And the people had brought out their own children to see the torture and killing of Beau Jack, and it was evil, purely evil, out there on the edge of town, evil in the leaves and evil in the sleet and evil in the headlights and the stark shadows and evil even in Darla, she had stood there with the rest and hadn’t said a word, it didn’t matter she was only thirteen she should have said
something.

At church that Sunday, she looked around at everybody, and she’d seen many of them at the lynching and if they’d been a bunch of naked wailing witches leaping around a fire at midnight she would’ve had more respect for them, it just made her sick them singing hymns about going to heaven and acting like they were so godly and so good.

She started having bad dreams about her and Beau Jack, although sometimes her eyes were open so they couldn’t be dreams: Beau Jack would be crouching in the bathtub as her father stood over him with a gun, Darla would be standing naked on the truck with the rope around her neck and the tires churning the mud and throwing it up into the headlights, she would be holding on to Beau Jack’s legs as Uncle Gideon beat him in the head with a hammer, and she and Beau Jack would be fleeing the hobo jungle, running away together into an eternal night.

Elwood, Indiana had seemed like a haven to her at first, but now it seemed a dark place, full of ghosts and sorrow. It seemed like Nebraska all over again, a place she needed to leave.

It was the Ameses’ habit every Sunday after church to go to the Totempole Grill for a fried chicken and waffles dinner. A few weeks after the lynching they were there when Darla overheard the waitress talking to a man at the next table; he said he was a traveling salesman for Morrill Meat and was just passing through. When he got up to leave, she excused herself, saying she needed to go to the restroom, but she followed the man outside. She asked him if he could give her a ride to the next town, and he looked her up and down and grinned and said you bet, hop in, and Darla never saw Elwood or the Ameses again.

For the next several years she wandered around the middle part of the country, making it a rule never to return to a place once she’d left. By the time she was fourteen she looked twenty; she lived her life as an adult, and thought of herself as one too. She had little trouble getting a job as a waitress at one greasy spoon or another. Sometimes when she left a job she’d clean out the cash register on her way out; she said she’d steal a hot stove in those days. She got caught by the law once, but she slept with the sheriff and he let her go.

She turned eighteen in Aurora, Illinois. One day she was at a picture show, watching
Hills of Peril,
a Buck Jones western. She was nearly the only person there. After the movie was over she started talking with the owner; the place was named the Dream Theater, and she asked him why it was called that. He told her it was because he thought “dream” was the most beautiful word in the English language.

Darla started going to the theater at least once a week, and she found herself looking forward as much to seeing the owner as the picture. His name was Goldsborough Bruff. He was forty-eight. He got around on crutches, because one of his legs was missing just below the hip. He had dark wavy hair with gray streaks in it.

One night he told her his ticket girl had just quit and did she want the job? And so Darla gave up waitressing and began working in the Dream Theater.

It was an old drafty building that leaked in the rain and there never seemed to be very many customers but she loved it there. She sold tickets and candy and soda pops and popcorn and helped Mr. Bruff change the titles on the bright marquee and put his messy office in order. She would come in even on her days off to help him out.

Bruff didn’t have a wife or any close relatives. He told her he had grown up in a wealthy family but his father had lost everything in the Panic of ’93. When the Spanish-American War started he joined the Army, and was very disappointed that the fighting was over before he could get into it. But eventually his outfit got shipped to the Philippines to fight the rebels there. One day a donkey wandered into their camp. He and some other soldiers went over to take a look at it. The donkey was carrying some packs on its back, and Bruff saw smoke curling up out of one of the packs an instant before the donkey exploded. Several soldiers were killed, and a dozen or so were wounded; Bruff woke up without a leg.

Darla told him a little of what had happened to her, and she saw tears welling up in his eyes as he listened, and she thought she had never known anyone so kind.

She’d been working there about three months and she was up in the projection booth with Bruff helping him get the picture ready for the Saturday matinee, when she sensed that he wanted to kiss her. She said it’s okay, Mr. Bruff, go ahead, and he did so. He said he was in love with her and wanted to take care of her forever and for her to be his wife but there was something she needed to know: his war wounds had left him unable to father children. She said the last thing she wanted was to have a bunch of bratty kids and as far as what went along with having children she’d already had more than enough of that and could live without it just fine and she loved him too and the answer was yes.

Darla said they were very happy for a while as they planned their wedding and honeymoon, but then he started acting sad and glum. He said she was a beautiful young girl with her whole life ahead of her, and it was selfish of him to allow her to join up her life with that of an aging cripple running some falling-apart picture show that barely made a dime. She said she was old enough to know her own mind and they loved each other and that’s what counted and she didn’t want to hear anything more about it.

One day she came in for work and didn’t find Bruff in his office, then went up to the projection booth and that was empty too. But then she looked down and saw Bruff sitting in one of the seats, right square in the middle of the big empty theater, facing the curtained screen.

She went downstairs. Bruff’s crutches were propped up on the seat beside him. His eyes were closed and his chin was on his chest. She thought he was asleep, but then touched his shoulder and knew he was dead.

The doctor said it must have been a heart attack, but Darla wasn’t so sure. She said that Bruff was still often in terrible pain because of his war injuries, and he’d take such great quantities of morphine he’d be so woozy he could barely keep his eyes open. She thought that maybe he’d accidentally taken too much.

Darla discovered that Bruff before he died had changed his will and left her everything—which basically meant his little house and the Dream Theater. She knew she couldn’t stay in Aurora with him gone, so she sold the theater and the house, and after the bank loans were paid off, she was left with a little over 3500 dollars.

Around that time she happened to read an article about Los Angeles in a magazine. The article’s name was “The Newest City in the World.” That sounded good to her, and so she booked a seat on the Santa Fe Chief.

   “How old are you, Danny?” asked Darla.

We were still in the Mitsouko-smelling car, heading north on La Brea.

“Twenty-five,” I was pleased to be able to say.

“Me too. Think you’ll live to be thirty?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.” I thought about it. “I guess so.”

“I think I’ll be real lucky if I live to be thirty. I don’t think the odds are in my favor at all.”

“That’s just plain dumb. Why would you say that?”

Darla shrugged. La Brea crossed Franklin then ran up a little hill and ended right in front of Bud’s house. I stopped the car. Usually someone was around to open the gate, but I didn’t see anybody.

I tooted the horn, and someone came running.

   “SO YOU DON’T remember a thing,” said Dulwich.

“Not before about ten months ago,” I said. “They told me a bunch of guys jumped me in Ocean Park, and one of them hit me in the head with a lead pipe. But all I remember is waking up in a hospital and seeing a nurse putting some flowers in a vase. And I said: ‘Those are beautiful flowers,’ and she gave me this big smile and said: ‘Weeellll…welcome back, honey!’”

“Do you know why you were beaten?”

“No. Nobody knows who the guys were. My wallet was missing. Maybe they just wanted to rob me. Or maybe they knew me. Maybe they wanted to get even with me for something.”

“Who took care of you afterwards? Do you have family members here?”

“The guys I work with. They took care of me.”

“The guys at the…what was the name…the Los Angeles Projects Corporation.”

I nodded. I sipped my tea. It was in a delicate cup that had a red and blue oriental dragon twisting around it.

We were in Dulwich’s living room. Aubrey Joyce smiled musingly at us from his perch atop the cabinet radio. There were some tasty little sugary cookies on a saucer on the coffee table. Next to the saucer was a book, lying open and facedown:
Is China Mad?
by Baron Auxion de Ruffe.

“You ever hear of Bud Seitz?” I said.

“The hoodlum?”

“I guess so. That’s who I work for.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.”

Dulwich looked at me with interest as he nibbled on a cookie.

“I sunk a ship once.”

Dulwich looked surprised. “An entire ship?”

“Yeah.”

“Just you?”

“No, me and some of the boys. It was a gambling ship. The
Monfalcone.
”

“Oh, I remember that. It was about four years ago, wasn’t it? It went down near Long Beach.”

“Right.”

“But I remember it being an accident. An inebriated cook, a fire in the galley, something of that sort.”

“It was no accident. It was a heist job and a sink job. ’Cause Bud had a beef with the owner.”

“Is it tea time, old chap?”

We looked toward the door. Sophie Gubler was standing there, peering in through the screen, her hands cupped around her eyes to block out the sunshine.

“It is indeed,” said Dulwich. “Would you like to join us?”

Sophie came in and eyed the coffee table. “I’ll join you in cookies,” she said, and took one.

“Why aren’t you in school?” said Dulwich.

“It’s summer, dummy. School’s over.” She took another cookie while still chewing on the first one. “Well, is it?”

“Is what what?”

“Is China mad?”

“The whole world’s mad.”

“You shouldn’t put a book down like that. It’s terrible for it. It’ll break its back.”

“You’re quite right.” Dulwich picked the book up, turned down the corner of a page, and closed it.

“You shouldn’t bend a page like that—”

“Oh, that’s enough. Be quiet.”

Sophie looked at me for the first time.

“Hi, Danny.”

“Hi, Sophie. How are you today?”

“Fine.” She plucked at her dress. She suddenly seemed a little shy. She turned back to Dulwich. “Where’s Tinker Bell?”

“The last confirmed Tinker Bell sighting was on the foot of my bed, where she was observed to be taking one of her not infrequent catnaps.”

“Can I go see her?”

“Of course.”

Dulwich waited till Sophie disappeared into his bedroom, then said softly: “Poor girl. She loves animals, but that beastly mother of hers won’t let her have a pet.”

I’d seen her mother a few times in the courtyard, usually hearing her first, clicking quickly down the sidewalk on her very high high heels. She wasn’t much older than me. She was pretty in a trampy way, with wiggling hips and platinum blonde hair obviously out of a bottle. Her name was Lois.