Markie shrugged.
"You want me to give it to somebody else?" Smith persisted. "Okay? What if I give it to the first guy I meet when I go home tonight, huh, kid? Can I do that?"
"Okay," Markie agreed.
"Well, okay then! Now go deliver my message. tell him I"ll get him his murderer. Go on, kid, make tracks!"
Markie turned and limped out. He went slowly down the stairs to the beach, holding on to the sticky metal handrail. It was late afternoon now and a chilly wind had come up; all along the beach families were beginning to pack up to go home, closing their striped umbrellas and collecting buckets and sand spades.
Mothers were forcing hooded sweatshirts on protesting toddlers and fathers were carrying towels and beach chairs back to station wagons. The tide was out; as Markie trudged along shivering he saw the keyholes in the sand that meant big clams were under there. Ordinarily he"d stop and dig up a few, groping in the sand with his toes; he was too tired this afternoon.
The sun was red and low over the water when he got to the dead trees, and the dunes were all pink.
The old man was pacing beside the water, in slow strides like the white bird. He turned his bright glare on Markie.
"He says okay" Markie told him without prompting. "He"ll get a murderer."
The old man just nodded. Markie thought about asking the old man for payment of some kind, but one look into the chilly eves was enough to silence him.
"Now, boy," said the old man briskly "Another task. Go home and open the topmost drawer of your mother"s dresser. You"ll find a gun in there. Take it into the bathroom and drop it into the water of the tank behind the toilet. Go now, and let no one see what you"ve done."
"But I"m not supposed to go in that drawer, ever," Markie protested.
"Do it, boy!" The old man looked so scary Markie turned and ran, stumbling up the face of the dune and back into the thicket. He straggled home, weary and cold.
Mama was sitting on the front steps with two of the other mothers in the courtyard, and they were drinking beers and smoking. Mama was laughing uproariously at something as he approached.
"Hey! Here"s my little explorer. Where you been, boyfriend?" she greeted him, carefully tipping her cigarette ash down the neck of an empty beer bottle.
"Hanging around," he replied, stopping and swatting at a mosquito.
"You seen Ronnie?" Mama inquired casually, and the other two mothers gave her a look, with little hard smiles.
"Uh-uh." He threaded his way through them up the steps.
"Well, that"s funny, because he was going to give you a ride home if he saw you," Mama replied loudly, with an edge coming into her voice. Markie didn"t know what he was supposed to say so he just shrugged as he opened the screen door.
"He"s probably out driving around looking for you," Mama stated. She raised her voice to follow him as he retreated into the dark house. "I don"t want to start dinner until he gets back. Whyn"t you start your bath? Don"t forget you"ve got school tomorrow."
"Okay." Markie went into the bathroom and switched on the light. When he saw the toilet, he remembered what he was supposed to do. He crept into Mama"s bedroom.
Karen was asleep in the middle of the bed, sprawled with her thumb in her mouth. She did not wake up when he slid the dresser drawer open and stood on tiptoe to feel around for the gun. It was at the back, under a fistful of Ronnie"s socks. He took it gingerly into the bathroom and lifted the lid of the toilet tank enough to slip it in. It fell with a splash and a clunk, but to his great relief did not shoot a hole in the tank. He turned on the water in the big old claw-footed tub and shook in some bubble flakes. As the tub was filling, he slipped out of his clothes and climbed into the water. All through his bath he half-expected a sudden explosion from the toilet, but none ever came.
When he got out and dressed himself again, the house was still dark. Mama was still outside on the steps, talking with the other ladies. He was hungry, so he padded into the kitchen and made himself a peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwich and ate it, sitting alone at the kitchen table in the dark. Then he went into his little room and switched on the alcove light. He pulled out the box of comic books from under his bed and lay there a while, looking at the pictures and reading as much as he knew vet of the words.
Later he heard Mama sobbing loudly, and begging the two other mothers to stay with her, and their gentle excuses about having to get home. Heart thudding, he got up and scrambled into his cowboy pajamas, and got under the covers and turned out the light. He lay in a tense knot, listening to her come weeping through the house, b.u.mping into the walls. Was she going to come in and sit on his bed and cry again? No; the noise woke up Karen, who started to scream in the darkness. He heard Mama stumbling into the bedroom, hushing her, heard the creaking springs as she stretched out on the bed beside the baby. Markie relaxed; he was going to be left in peace. Just before he fell asleep, he wondered where Ronnie was.
Ronnie had played badly in the back room of the Red Rooster, all afternoon. He"d come out at last and lingered on the streetcorner, not wanting to have to go home and explain why he wasn"t going in to work the next day. As he"d stood there, an old man had come up and pressed a bottle of beer into his hand and walked quickly on, chuckling. Ronnie was too surprised to thank him for the gift, but he was grateful; so he went off and sat on the wall Two Old Men 749 behind the C-Air Motel, sipping his beer and watching the sun go down. From there he went straight into Harry"s Bar and had more, and life was good for a while.
But by the time he crawled into his truck and drove out to the old highway, he was in a bad mood again. He was in a worse mood when he climbed from his truck after it ran into the ditch. As he made his way unsteadily through the darkness, a brilliantly simple solution to his problems occurred to him. It would take care of the truck, the lost job, Peggy and the baby, everything. Even the boy. All their problems over forever, with no fights and no explanations. It seemed like the best idea he"d ever had.
He crept into the house, steadying himself by sliding along the wall. Once in the bedroom he groped around in the dresser drawer for a full two minutes before he realized his gun wasn"t in there. Peggy was deep unconscious on the bed, and didn"t hear him. He stood swaying in the darkness, uncertain what to do next. Then he got mad. All right; he"d show them, and they"d be sorry.
So he left the house, falling noisily down the front steps, but n.o.body heard him or came to ask if he was all right. Growling to himself he got up and staggered out to the woods, and lay down on the train tracks with a certain sense of ceremony He pa.s.sed out there, listening to the wind in the leaves and the distant roar of breakers.
The freight train came through about twenty minutes later.
The Summer People.
Don"t you call me a townie! I"m too big for this town. I"m too- what"s that word? Too intense.
You watch me at Harry"s Bar on Karaoke Night, now; I burn up that place. I got the audience in the palm of my hand. Born with talent! That"s why I didn"t go into the family business. What? Firewood delivery and seasonal specialties. Not how you get rich.
A loser like my cousin Verbal likes that kind of work. He"s got no ambition at all. He"ll just sit there in the flocking shed drinking beer through his face mask until somebody wants a Christmas tree flocked.
Now and then he"ll have to get up off his a.s.s to go nail on a tree stand or something. Same thing with the pumpkin patches. He"ll drive the tractor for the hayrides, he"ll load pumpkins off the truck, or firewood.
That"s about all he"s good for.
Not like me. I like a challenge, and also I just am not made to spend my life around clowns like Verbal.
Suellen didn"t understand that, though. You"d think, with me bringing home meat for the table and the deck I built for the trailer, plus keeping her satisfied which I did and enough said, you"d think she"d see it was a fair division of labor. But every time she brought home a paycheck she"d start in on me about her brother at the fish packing plant and how he"d hire me.
He"d hire me, sure; but I know how it would go after that. He wants somebody just smart enough to hold on to the right end of the gutting knife, not an idea man who can show him how to run the plant better. Somebody was telling me Einstein didn"t do real good in school, and I"m the same way. Too original, you see?
The meat for the table? Well, how do you think I get it? Same way as primeval Man, before there was any Department of Fish and Game. I have been up in front of the judge a few times for poaching but that"s chickens.h.i.t stuff, and I"d a lot rather do County time for poaching deer than that poor 757 SOB who was up before me once, who got caught poaching mushrooms! Not even the psychedelic kind.
Besides, poaching was how I got my big break. Almost.
I"ll tell you about that.
Everybody knows about the big newspaper man who built the castle up there where all the movie stars came, the one that"s a museum or something now, right? But back then lots of rich people did that.
There"s a lot of big fancy houses on this coast, sitting off private roads that ain"t paved, cut with kelly ditches, and the gates and padlocks are all rusted because n.o.body ever comes up from Beverly Hills except in the summer for a couple of weeks.
My other cousin has a caretaking service, he"ll go and fill the propane tanks or get the powerhouses started up, WD-40 all the locks, make sure the water"s turned on and the pools are filled-me and Verbal worked for him for a month once and you should see the palaces back up in those hills! Every one of them on a hundred acres easy, sometimes more.
So the Forestry Service don"t go there, Department of Fish and Game either, because it"s all private property! And it"s just over the county line too. See where I"m going with this? And why should anybody mind, if you don"t try to break into the house or nothing? Go at night, with a night sight on your gun.
Moonlight"s the best time. That part of the coast"s not patrolled after dark and with a good moon you don"t run the risk of falling down a mountain. Take a buck, plenty of meat for the freezer.
So I was going up to this one place one bright night in the middle of summer and got a flat tire on Highway 1, in about the worst part where you got the cliff at your back and a thousand-foot drop to the ocean on the other side. I had just room to get the F150 over so I could change the tire. I was crouched down working the jack when I heard them coming, and flattened myself against the truck, because you never know when somebody could swerve over the line and smack you right out of this world.
Around the curve they came with the moonlight sliding off them, big new shiny cars, gleaming like every polished thing you ever saw. I was close enough so I could look into the windows, each one as they went by so quiet, so smooth the motors weren"t even purring. Only the whoosh of air and some perfume.
The people inside were just black silhouettes sharp as cut out of black paper, but elegant, you know? And in the last one, a lady had her window down and her white arm resting on the door. It shone in the moonlight like it was made of marble or something. I couldn"t see her face but for a second or so, but that was enough to tell me she was from Hollywood.
So I knew then they were summer people up from there, going to some big party probably on one of those estates. I stood up slow and watched after the last one had gone by, and for a few minutes I could see the red lights winding away up the coast road, the moon sparkling on the glossy cars the way it would on bubbles, and the long beams of the headlights winking in and out.
And there I was haying to swap bald tires on a rusted-out 1972 F150. But I just told myself, one day that"d be me in one of those fine cars, I"d be one of those summer people, and it"d be my old lady-not Suellen either- with the night air washing in like silver water and floating her perfume out the window. Some people would feel mean and cheap watching all those shiny cars, but not me. If you don"t see something like that now and then to tell you what you"re missing, you"ll be happy selling firewood all your life.
I changed the tire and went on my way, up to this access road the Forestry Service don"t maintain anymore, so you can"t hardly see it for the brush, and you don"t have to park far up the canyon to be hidden from the highway. There"s a place where the oaks and the laurels are real thick and there"s a leaning old wire fence, which is my favorite place to get in. I took my gun and snaked under and got to cover real fast, walking bent over through the black shadows and moonlight dapples under the bushes, and I fitted up my sight and got to hunting in earnest.
Usually I get what I"m after in no time at all, I"m that good. This one time, though, the deer must have all been over on the Jolon side of the mountains, because I couldn"t raise squat. So I went farther up this hill than I usually go, high enough so I could look down on the mist coming in from the sea, white on fire with that moon, and out in the open so I could practically see color like it was day.
Then I heard music coming from somewhere and I turned around, thinking maybe somebody had driven up the Forestry Service road with their radio loud, but I saw the window lights and I thought, oh s.h.i.t.
All the times I been up there I never even seen the house, back in the trees like it must have been and dark and shut up, but there it was large as life now with every window blazing away and music inside. I picked a bad night to hunt, because obviously this was where the summer people had come to party.
I stepped real quick back under the trees, planning on going away quiet, and I can move like one of those ninjas when I have to but this time it didn"t do me jack good, because there was somebody standing right there in the woods with me.
"Nice night, isn"t it?" he says, and there"s a little flare-up of light from a lighter or something and I look into his eyes as he puffs on this green cigarette. Then there was just the red dot in the darkness but I could still tell he was there.
I thought it was that p.i.s.sy-faced little boy actor with the fancy name, you know? That"s who he"d looked like in that split second I saw him. So I said how I was sorry, I didn"t mean to trespa.s.s, I must have got lost in the dark and all, and his voice was real friendly. He said it was okay. He said the garden had gone so wild it was easy to mistake it for the federal land, and I said, "There"s a garden up here?" and he laughed and said, "See, you can"t even tell," and I said, "d.a.m.n! I"ve lived here all my life and I never knew that," and he said, "You want to come see?"
Which put me in a dilemma because I figured he was maybe coming on to me. But I was twice as big as him and had a gun and a knife besides. And I was beginning to get some ideas about getting myself discovered, see what I mean? Like he might know a talent scout or somebody.
So I walked on with him, following the little red floating light, further back into the trees, closer to the lights of the house, and son of a b.i.t.c.h if somebody hadn"t done some old fancy landscaping up there at one time. Big flowering rhododendron bushes grown up into trees practically and lots of cement statues and stepping stones and pools all choked with dead oak leaves, and one fountain where you couldn"t see what it was supposed to be, there was so much moss, with just a little green slimy water trickling down.
All the spots and blobs of moonlight were enough so we could find our way pretty good.
I explained how I was an entertainer too-told him all about my Elvis routine. He just smoked his cigarette, so the red light brightened and dimmed, and I figured he thought he was too good for me, but then he got more friendly and kind of opened up.
It turned out he wasn"t that actor at all, even if the house was full of big celebrities. He was just somebody"s friend, the good-looking kind they keep around to housesit for them and skim the leaves off their pools and all that! Like that Kato guy. I felt a lot better when I knew that and asked him if there was any way I could maybe meet some of those people in the house who might know if I could get one of those, you know, auditions.
He sounded gloomy and said it wasn"t much of a party right now, as the lady in charge and her husband had just had some kind of screaming hissy-fit at each other, which was why he"d ducked out to the garden. But then his cigarette got real bright, I could tell an idea was. .h.i.tting him, and he said I should come in anyway-maybe I could sing for them and cheer everybody up.
Well, that took my breath away, and I was wishing like h.e.l.l I"d shaved that morning when he came real close, solid suddenly out of the shadows, and took me by the arm and said, "But we"d better give you a makeover first, okay?"
I didn"t know whether he meant something gay or what, but he was explaining as we went along about Henri-Luc probably having a suit my size, and I could use one of the guest bathrooms to shower and blow-dry my hair, and I caught on. I was kind of sweaty and I"d been changing a tire and all. I wished I"d had my powder blue Karaoke clothes, but he told me it"d be an Armani suit. You know what those are? Real nice.
So anyway we went in the house, through a back entrance, and I could hear the music and smell the perfumes, and I never was nervous before but I was now. It was dark and big in there, kind of dusty but lots of arches and purple drapes and antiques. Bobby, that was my friend, was starting to giggle about what a good idea this would be after all.
He took me to a big old bathroom where, I swear to Jesus, the sink and toilet were purple china and the hardware was all gold. It was even purple tile in the shower stall. When I came out I grabbed for a towel pretty fast but Bobby wasn"t around anywhere. He"d left out a suit and everything I needed, though. I got the clothes on and then he came back in and, uh, fussed with my hair and I was starting to get uncomfortable until I saw he was fixing my hair to look like The King"s.
He did a real good job too, and did some of those tricks they call slight of hand, pretending to pull combs and hairspray out of nowhere. I guess boys like him have to learn all kinds of ways to make those celebrities laugh, so they can keep on living in their guest houses and don"t have to go to work in hair salons.
When he was done he yelled Presto and jumped back. I looked in the mirror at myself in that suit and it was like I saw the real Me, the way I was supposed to look, and G.o.d-d.a.m.n I felt ten feet tall! No wonder I get all those girls coming up to me after I step down from the mike. I could even have understood if Bobby had patted me on the a.s.s, the way I looked right then. Though he didn"t; he just grinned and said, "Let"s go introduce you."
So we went out into the big room where the party was going on.
And that was some room, there was a grand piano in one corner and lots of those big potted palms and more antiques and purple velvet drapes. Big mirrors on the walls, but so old they reflected things funny and cloudy. There was so many people in there I could tell right then n.o.body"d mind a crasher, and I was better-looking than half the men anyhow.
But Bobby was right; it wasn"t much of a party, what with the quarrel and all. People seemed sort of scared. A tiny little hunchbacked guy, bald as an egg, sat at the piano and played show tunes, but he was mostly ignored by the lady. Her, you couldn"t ignore.
She was the woman I"d seen in the shiny car. She was just as beautiful as she was in the movies, though I couldn"t remember what movies she was in but I knew she was somebody She had on a white dress cut real low, but when I say white I mean that shimmery pearly color like... like pearls, I guess, or the moon. She was sitting under a lamp, sitting on a big white sofa which had draped over it a white tigerskin rug. She"d kicked off her shoes and curled her feet under her, had one arm stretched out along the back of the chair, and her head turned sharp to glare across at the man way across the room.
He was standing way back in the shadows, leaning against a marble column, and he was real dark and wore a dark suit cut almost as nice as mine. He had his arms folded but with one hand up to hold a cigarette between his first two fingers, kind of in a way that looked gay to me, and it was one of those fancy colored cigarettes like Bobby was smoking. No wonder his old lady was mad! He just stared out through the shadows at her with cold black eves, and every so often he"d flick some ash from that green cigarette.
Between them all the other show people sort of wandered back and forth trying to pretend they were having a good time. There were a lot of little cute boys like Bobby, and some really ugly old women and men, and a whole lot of pretty girls, though some of them seemed awfully young, and none of them were much to look at next to the lady. And everybody had those green cigarettes so the air was all full of swirls of smoke, and it had a sweet smell like perfume. I figured they must be those clove cigarettes, because it wasn"t pot. Pot stinks like Rainier Ale, you ever notice?
There were a couple of waiters in green jackets and, it was the d.a.m.ndest thing you ever saw, they were identical twins and must have been seven feet high! And they were bald too. I had to stare when one of them came up to us with a tray and offered me a drink without saying a word, and then I remembered that you don"t talk to help, so I just took a gla.s.s and nodded. Bobby winked and nudged me.
"See what I mean? Everybody"s on edge. This was supposed to be her big birthday blowout, and it"s tanked. Baravelli isn"t helping any, either. Rodgers and Hammerstein, for G.o.d"s sake! Could anything be duller? I knew this was a good idea. Why don"t I go see if he knows your material?"
"Okay," I said, and took a big slug of my drink and nearly choked, because instead of it being champagne like I figured it was some kind of G.o.d-awful salty bubbly water. I shook my head and Bobby stopped to look back at me. He said, "Oh, no, is there something wrong with the Perrier?"
That was when I realized what it was and I remembered I"d seen it in markets and it comes from France and all, so I just shook my head and waved for him to go on. He winked again and said, "We"re all very health-conscious since she got that guru." Then he went on to go whisper to the piano player and I tried my drink again, and I see why it costs so much if it"s got minerals in it, but I couldn"t help thinking the party would have livened right up if they"d iced a few twelve-packs of Miller High Life.
And if they were so set on health, how come everybody was smoking?
I could see Bobby talking to the little bald man, who was nodding and tipping ash from his cigarette into a big ashtray shaped like a skull. Then one of the ugly old ladies came up to me, and gave me the once over and liked what she saw, if you know what I mean. She was dressed real good, by the way, and I figured she must be one of those New York intellectuals, or may-be a gossip columnist. She said, "My goodness, I haven"t seen you here before," and she had a smart voice, but I could tell she"d had a lot of whiskey in her time, she was kind of hoa.r.s.e. She took a long suck on her cigarette holder and puffed smoke at me in a teasy way.
"That"s because I"m the latest thing, honey," I said, pouring on the charm, and I took her skinny old hand and kissed it and she sure had a lot of big rings. She said, "Oo! And he"s got manners, too. Are you a friend of Bobby"s?"
I leaned real close and said, "Not that kind of friend, Ma"am-if you get my drift." And she laughed, husky, and waved her cigarette holder at them all and said, "What do you think of our little party?" And I said, "Well, if you ask me, sugar, it could use some excitement. But I hear there"s been some quarrel, and that always pees on a parade."
She chuckled and waved away smoke. "It"s always something. This particular evening Madam Queen has got it through her beautiful head that she wants to adopt a Romanian orphan. Mister over there hit the ceiling. Children are not in the pre-nup, as I understand it. And, you know, the poor little things die on you anyway; they"ve all got health problems. But he had the very bad judgment to tell her she was too old for this kind of thing."
I glared over at Mister where he stood in the gloomy corner. "He did? That"s just sheer stupid mean.
Too old! Why, she ain"t a day over thirty."
The old lady arched her penciled-in eyebrows at me. She didn"t say anything for a minute and then she put her hand on my arm and said, "My dear, I see you have a bright future ahead of you ."
Which made me feel so good I almost forgot to hate Mister for a second. We watched as he lifted his hand and beckoned to Bobby, who jumped away from the piano and hurried over to see what he wanted. They talked for a minute real quiet and I could see Mister pointing to the lady, and Bobby turning to look and saving something with a kind of half-a.s.sed grin. He nodded in my direction and I stood tall and looked hard at Mister, letting him know that I was just as good as him.
Mister just sort of looked through me. I knew right then I"d settle with him, somehow. Bobby said something else and ducked out of the room, but a split second later he"d come back with whatever he"d fetched. He started across the room to us.
"Bobby darling!" said the old lady, and she and he sort of kissed cheeks like those folks do, mwah-mwah dry-kissing, and she pulled back and said: "They"re keeping you running tonight, I see," and he rolled his eyes and said, "Up and down." Then he turned to me and said, "So! I talked to Baravelli. He knows the King"s standards. Like to give it a shot?"
"You are d.a.m.n right I would," I said, and handed my gla.s.s to the old lady and marched over to the piano. Bobby ran after me, laughing, and said: "Hold on, Handsome, I"ve got to fix your boutonniere." He held up this purple orchid, pulling it out of nowhere like the combs, and stuck it in my b.u.t.tonhole. I don"t wear those things but I could tell this was expensive, so I let him arrange it there, and then he turned up his little grinning face and said, "Let me do your intro, okay?"
He jumped up and got everybody"s attention, and made a real nice speech. I felt bad about thinking he was a snippy little you-know, because he told everybody what a fabulous artist I was and how I"d played Vegas, which wasn"t true but only because I hadn"t had the chance, and it was sure nice of him. I began to wonder if maybe he hadn"t caught my act at Harry"s, he described it so well.
Then he stepped aside, everybody was applauding and smiling, and I looked around for a mike, because there wasn"t one that I could see. Bobby pushed something into my hand and for a second I thought it was just a Perrier bottle, but then I saw it was one of those cordless mikes, only green instead of black for some reason.
And it worked fine when I said, "Thankew, thankew ver"much," just the way the King always did.
The minute I said that the lady turned her beautiful head, like she"d only right then noticed me, and stared. Her eyes were blue like jewels, and hard too but... but like she had character, you see what I"m trying to say?
I started into "Heartbreak Hotel" and her eyes got real wide, and not once through that whole song did she ever turn her face away from me.
I might have been nervous before, but I tell you -I had the magic, as usual. I had everybody spellbound! All the gloom went straight out of there, I had those people grinning and hugging themselves.