The Perfect Host (31 page)

Crispin barked, “You play trumpet. How’d you feel if someone sliced off your lip?” Then he said, “I’m sorry, Riff.”

Riff said, “Gosh, that’s okay.”

They took their places. Fawn looked like the first week after Baton Rouge. Giondonato started for the guitar. Crispin waved him back. “Stand by, Johnny.” He glanced at the guitar. It was ready to go, resting neck upward on the seat of Skid’s chair. Crispin touched it, straightened it up a bit, lovingly. He bent and shifted the speaker outward a little. Then he went to his luggage. “Theme,” he said. He looked over at me. I picked up my mike, puffed into it, adjusted the gain.

Crispin gave a silent one-two. Fawn stroked a chord. The brasses swung right:
Hoo

And left:
Ha

Fawn crowded the beat with her chord. I looked at her.

For the very first time she wasn’t looking at that spot on the floor in front of the band. She was looking at Crispin.

Hoo Ha

Moff raised his clarinet, tongued it, laid his lips around the mouthpiece, filliped the stops nervously, and then blew.

And with the first note of the clarinet, shockingly, came the full, vibrato voice of Skid’s guitar:
Daboo, Dabay, Dabay, Daboo
 …

And right on top of it there was a thunderous, animal, coughing gasp, and a great voice screaming, screaming, sobbing like peals of laughter. The sound was huge, and crazy, and it dwindled to an echoing, “He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead …”

And then I had to breathe, and I realized that the sounds had come from me, that I was standing frozen, staring at Skid’s glittering guitar, with the mike pressed close to my cheek. I began to cry. I couldn’t help it. I threw down the microphone—it made a noise like thunder—and I took the rolled-up handkerchief out of my pocket and hurled it at the guitar, which was playing on and on and on,
Lutch’s theme, the way Lutch wanted it played, by somebody else. The handkerchief opened in the air. Two of them hit the instrument and made it thrum. One stuck to the cloth and went cometing under the chair.

Moff ran over there. I was screaming, “Use these, damn you!” Moff bent as if to pick up something, drew back. “Crispin—it’s the—the fingers …” and then he folded up and slumped down between the chairs.

Crispin made a noise almost like the first one I had blown into the mike. Then he rushed me. He caught me by the front of the coat and the belt and lifted me high in the air. I heard Fawn scream,
“Don!”
and then he threw me on the floor. I screamed louder than Fawn did.

I must have blacked out for a moment. When I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor. My left arm had two elbows. I couldn’t feel it yet. Crispin was standing over me, one foot on each side. He was shoving the rest of them back. They were growling like dogs. Crispin looked a mile high.

“Why did you do that to Skid?” Crispin asked. His voice was quiet; his eyes were not. I said, “My arm …” and Crispin kicked me.

“Don! Don, let me—” and people began to jostle and push, and Fawn broke through. She went to her knees beside me. “Hello, Fluke,” she said, surprisingly.

I began to cry again. “The poor thing’s out of his mind,” she said.

“The poor thing?” roared Stormy. “Why, he—”

“Fluke, why did you do it?”

“He wouldn’t die,” I said.

“Who wouldn’t, Fluke? Skid?”

They made me sore. They were so dumb. “Lutch,” I said. “He wouldn’t be dead.”

“What do you know about Lutch?” gritted Crispin.

“Leave him alone,” she blazed. “Go on, Fluke.”

“Lutch was living in Skid’s guitar,” I said patiently, “and I had to let him out.”

Crispin swore. I really didn’t know he ever did that. My arm began to hurt then. Fawn got up slowly. “Don …”

Crispin grunted. Fawn said, “Don, Lutch used to worry all the time about Fluke. He always wanted Fluke to know he was wanted for himself. Fluke had something that no one else had, but he wouldn’t believe it. He always thought Lutch and the rest of us were sorry for him.”

The guitar was still playing. It rose in crescendo. I twitched. “Skid—” I yelled.

“Moff, turn that thing off,” said Crispin. A second later the guitar stopped. “I knew it would trap somebody,” he said to me, “but I never thought it would be you. That’s a recording played through the guitar amplifier. I made hundreds of ’em when I was running tests on Skid’s guitar. I’ve been worried for a long time about the luck we’ve been having—a choir missing this night, a side missing that night, a combo out the next night. The more I thought of it the more it took a pattern. Someone was doing it, and when that happened to Skid, I had an idea that someone’d give himself away, if only for a second, when that guitar began to play. I never expected
this!
”

“Leave him alone,” said Fawn tiredly. “He can’t understand you.” She was crying.

Crispin turned to her. “What do you want to do with him? Kiss and make up?”

“I want to kill him!” she shrieked back at him. She held out her polished nails, crooked, like claws. “With these. Don’t you know that?”

Crispin stepped back, stunned.

“But that doesn’t matter,” she went on in a low voice. “We can’t stop saying it now, of all times—What would Lutch want?”

It got very quiet in there.

“Do you know why he was rejected from the army during the war?” she asked.

Nobody said anything.

Fawn said, “Extreme ugliness of face. That was a ground for deferment. Look it up if you don’t believe me.” She shook her head slowly and looked at me. “Lutch was always so careful of his feelings, and so were we all. Lutch wanted him to have his face made over, but he didn’t know how to suggest it to Fluke—Fluke was
psychopathically sensitive about it. Well, he waited too long, and I waited too long, and now look. I say let’s have it done now, and save what little is left of the—creature.”

Stormy said, “This good-for-evil kick can go just so far.” The rest of them growled.

Fawn raised her hands and let them fall. “What would Lutch do?”

“I killed Lutch,” I said.

“Shut up, you,” said Crispin. “All right, Fawn. But listen. After he gets out of the hospital, I don’t care if he looks like Hedy Lamarr—he stays out of my way or by God I’ll strap him down and take him apart with a blunt nailfile.”

At long, long last I blacked out.

There was a time of lying still and watching the white, curve-edged ceiling stream past, and a time of peeping through holes in the bandages. I never said another word, and very little was said to me. The world was full of strangers who knew what they were doing, and that was okay with me.

They took the bandage off this morning and gave me a mirror. I didn’t say anything. They went away. I looked myself over.

I’m no bargain. But by the Lord I can cite you hundreds of people now who are uglier than I am. That’s a change from not knowing a single one.

So I killed Lutch Crawford?

Who was the downy-clown, the wise-eyes, the smarty-party, the gook with a book and his jaws full of saws, who said, “The evil that men do lives after them …”? He didn’t know Lutch Crawford. Lutch did good.

Look at the guy in the mirror. Lutch did that.

Lutch isn’t dead. I never killed anybody.

I told you and told you and told you that I want to make my own damn way! I don’t want this face! And now that I have all this written down I’m going out. You couldn’t make me a big guy too, could you, Lutch? I’m going out through the top sash. I can get through. And then six floors, face first.

Fawn—

A
GNES VAN
C
REEFT
moved noiselessly to the doorway and peered inside. Jessie was lying quite still—no, not quite; her long nervous hands palmed and stroked the blanket as if they could not get enough of the touch of it. Jessie had lived every hour of her forty-odd years in this same hungry, tactile way, and she would, to the end. There were few enough hours left. The electric vitality of the woman was dimmed, but definitely present in the room; a glowing rebellion, a refusal to accept—not death; she seemed not to mind that—but dying.

The corners of Jessie’s deep-set eyes told her, apparently, that there was more in the doorway than the bulk of drapes. Her head jerked to it, swift as always.

Agnes was tall, large, with a soft face and a hard mouth. She came into the room with small motions of silent feet. “Jessie?” she murmured. “You’re awake?”

Jessie turned on her side and propped herself on one elbow. “Agnes! Well, what do you know. Where’s Tommie? Come in, girl. Sit down. No, here on the bed. Smoke? Oh, that’s right; you don’t smoke. Or drink. Or—what was that other thing?” She grinned up puckishly.

“I suppose you mean dance,” said Agnes. She sat carefully on the edge of the bed. “I sent Tommie on an errand. I wanted to talk to you.… Really, Jessie, you should take better care of yourself—bouncing and shouting like this.”

“What for?”

“You’re a very sick woman,” said Agnes. “I think you should have stayed at the hospital.”

“What for?” Jessie said again. “I want to be here with my own things while I—wait. You’re sitting between me and my ashtray.”

Agnes turned troubled eyes to the wide night-table. On it was a black-enamelled, pedestalled figurine of softly gleaming bronze—a seated nude, with the legs crossed above the knees, the shoulders tilted, the arms raised, bent, holding the palms out to right and left, delicately. The face, bland and secretive, pouting, would have been staring straight into Agnes’s had the carven eyes been open. Agnes made a small grimace and reached around the thing, being careful not to touch it, to get the heavy smoking-set which lay beside it.

With the tray in her hand, Agnes checked herself. “Jessie, do you think you really ought—”

“Give it here,” said Jessie, scooping it up and thumping it on the sheet beside her. She thumbed out a cigarette and lit it, drawing quickly and hard with her cheeks. The pulsing hollows and the surmounting double arches of her deep eye-sockets stressed her emaciation, and Agnes felt the familiar helplessness which had keyed her regard for this swift, slender, wiry creature ever since they had met. “Jessie, smoking can’t possibly—”

“Can’t possibly make me any worse than I am unless I set fire to my bed, and I can’t do that while I’m chaperoned. Now, Aggie, what’s on your mind?”

Agnes made her mouth even smaller. “Well, I—it’s a delicate sort of—I mean, I don’t want to intrude, Jessie, Tommie’s a grown man and all that, but he is my brother, and I have only his best—his best—and there’s not very much, that is, very long …” She floundered to a stop.

Jessie regarded her quizzically. “ ’Sometimes I feel so
sorry
for you, Aggie. Great day, woman! Life gets so complicated even when a person
tries
to keep it simple! You know what you want to say, and yet you’re all fouled up with your sensibilities. Keep it clean, kid. Let’s have it.”

Agnes took an immaculate, preparatory handkerchief from her buttoned sleeve. “I—hardly know how to begin.”

“I can see that,” said Jessie dryly. “Maybe I can help. The day after tomorrow, or the day after that, I’ll be dead.”

Agnes winced. “Please, Jessie—”

“And you want me to do something before then. What is it?”

“You—you quite take my breath away, Jessie. But then, you always did. I never could understand you.”

“I know. What do you want me to do?”

“You—you’re very hard to deal with, Jessie. You make it quite difficult for me.”

“I’m very reasonable to deal with and I’m making it very easy. Now, then … Come on, girl! You’re wasting time. You don’t want to waste time, do you, Agnes?”

Agnes felt trapped—trapped into the very thing she had come here to do. She was ten years older than Jessie, and yet Jessie had always been able to rap her knuckles, to make her stand in the corner like a bewildered child. “I want you to marry Tommie,” she blurted.

Jessie turned her head until she was looking straight upward from the wide pillow. “Well, for Pete’s sake,” she breathed. Slowly she began to smile. “What on earth for?”

“Oh, it would be so much better—can’t you see, dear? In every way; the way Tommie would remember you, the way all his publishers and—and—”

“And his sister?”

“That has nothing—” Agnes faced those deep eyes; and for all their smiling, for all their incorruptible clear-sightedness, there was no mockery there. She finished, “Well, yes. For me too, of course.”

“Was this Tommie’s idea?”

“No.”

“His publishers ask you to come around?”

“No! How could they? Why should you ask a thing like that?”

“Those happened to be the people you mentioned. That leaves you. Why should I do a thing like this for you?”

Agnes moved her lips but they made no words.

“Agnes, why fret about it at this late date? I am Mrs. Thomas Davis van Creeft. That’s the way I’ve been getting my mail for twenty-two years. I’m Tommie’s wife; even under the law it’s all nice and legal—now.”

And they both turned to look at the figurine—Jessie lovingly,
Agnes inadvertently. Then Agnes moved, on the edge of the bed, so that she presented a large curved back to the object. “I know
that
story,” she said.

“No you don’t,” said Jessie, and shook her head. “You couldn’t … anyway,” she added abruptly, “it doesn’t make any difference now. We’re married—ask anyone.”

“Anyone won’t do,” said Agnes stonily. “Tommie told me about it years ago.”

“I know he did.” She laughed, “Poor Tommie! Always defiant, and the defiance was not good unless he could jolt somebody with it. Generally, you.”

“Generally—me.”

The warmth crept back into Jessie’s voice. “It was one of the things—the many, many things—he could depend on you for, Agnes. He shocked you, and frightened you, and worried you, but you never stopped being devoted to him, and he knew it. And you never tried to interfere once he had made up his mind.”

For the first time since she had entered the room, Agnes smiled. It was a surprisingly full smile, and was proper to the lines of her gentle face. “It wouldn’t have made much difference,” she said.