All These Condemned (24 page)

I wanted to tell them. I could hear them babbling about car keys and criminal investigation and newspaper reporters. It made me impatient. I wanted to stand up and roar for silence and then explain what I had discovered. If I could make them understand, then they could stop this babbling foolishness. They could not learn the methods and the plans, of course. But if they could follow my words, they could see how it had been given to me to open this new frontier. I put the books aside, those books that were merely
exhaustive records of failure, of the lack of comprehension. I sat there filled with contempt for them. No, you could not tell them. It was too intricate for them. Their standards were too mortal.

I felt the excitement coming, and I did not know why. I looked carefully around the room, looking for the source, knowing that this was, as it would always be, the first warning of a new design, a new creative act. The form was still new to me, so that it took me a long time to find my way through to the inevitable.

As with Wilma, it was ridiculously easy. They were mortal. They could not be convinced with words. But they could be convinced with deeds. With demonstration. Then they could see, all at once, the beauty and the significance of it. And then there would be no awkwardness and no delay in interpretation. Then we could discuss it calmly and I could explain to them why the form had to be exact each time, balanced to meet the symmetry of the moment, precise in its beauty, brilliant and deathless.

Mavis Dockerty sat six feet from me, her back to me. I felt differently toward her than toward Wilma. I felt grateful to Wilma. But I owed this woman nothing. It was I who would honor her, who would make her this gift that would provide an eternal moment of meaningfulness to her shallow life, so that, in effect, she would live forever.

I stood tall behind her, my feet planted strongly, and I took the godhead symbol from my pocket and held it tightly. I learned another thing in that moment. That it is important to achieve a special expression for the need of the moment. The face must be utterly slack and expressionless. All expression is in the muscular rhythm, so the face must
not detract. I waited until they began to notice me, to look at me rather oddly. Then, as with Wilma, I slipped my hand under her left arm, bringing it across to cup her right breast. She tensed in shock and in my mind I told her strongly to welcome this and not to resist it. I drove the symbol into her skull with one sharp blow, sensing that I must leave it there for a time. I stepped back and it was a gay wooden decoration, bedded perfectly. She bent forward from the waist in slow worship, and there was but one flaw to mar it. Her leg kept making a rather ridiculous kicking motion.

I looked up, waiting for their awe and their appreciation, hoping the flaw had not disturbed them, that the flaw had been overbalanced by the perfection of placement, and I saw her husband and the largest uniformed man running at me, while Steve Winsan bounded from the room.

The uniformed man yanked his gun from his holster and struck me across the side of the face. I fell heavily. I could not move, but I was aware of what was going on. It puzzled me. It seemed such a ridiculous thing to do. Ridiculous to hear the scream of a woman. And then, suddenly, I realized my own error. I had expected too much of them. The act had been truly beyond their comprehension. They would make no effort to understand. They had completely missed the significance of it. And I smiled inside and knew how I would punish them. Later, when they realized, they would beg and plead for an explanation. They had acted hastily. They had hurt me. So it was my right and my privilege to deny them access to me.

They pulled my wrists together and put handcuffs on me. They had moved my body. And that gave me a problem that bothered me. True, I could refuse to speak to them, but
even in the movements of my body there would be meaning for those who watched carefully. It was beyond my powers to do anything at all devoid of meaning.

After a time I resolved that difficulty. I would give them no clue, by word or movement. When they saw that I was conscious, they sat me in a chair. I gave them no help. Once they sat me there, I stayed there, far back inside myself, looking at nothing, and I was laughing at them. I would give them nothing. No matter how they pleaded, I would give them nothing. They kept at me, shouting at me, pulling me this way and that way. I assumed each position into which they pulled me, but I made no motion of my own. And soon I found a new talent that pleased me. I could make my thoughts loud, so that their voices came to me from far away, fuzzy and insignificant and without meaning. Once you are able to do that—and only very few, I am certain, can accomplish it—it destroys the meaning of the passage of time. A year is a minute, or an hour is a lifetime.

I was aware that others had come. New ones. Older ones with grave faces. I sat there. I stared at nothing. I let my mouth sag open. And I felt the rope of saliva from the corner of my mouth to my chest. I could shut them out entirely. They would get nothing from me. There were great depths in me, a thousand hiding places. Where no one could follow me and drive me out into the light.

And in one of the dark places I began to redo that picture of long ago. Every leaf. Each leaf had five points. It would take a very long time, and once it was done, I could do it over again. With the ultimate of care.

From a long way away somebody came to me and he took my chained hands and lifted them up so that they were
over my head. Then he let go of them. I held my hands there. I would not betray myself. I would hold them up there until they withered and died, until my shoulders locked in place, rather than betray myself by any conscious movement.

And then somebody took my hands quite gently and lowered them back to my lap. I knew then that I had defeated all of them. It was the final test.

Now they would leave me alone. I would never let them know how. Then I would be the only one who had ever found out, in all the history of the world.

ROY CARREN DROPPED ME OFF
at Shattocks’ Pine Tree Restaurant. It’s just down the road from the barracks. By then it was eleven o’clock in the morning. Sunday morning. I watched him drive down the road. Slow. I felt like somebody had peeled the skin off my face and stuck it back on again, using too much glue. When I rubbed my jaw I felt the whiskers. I felt real strange. It made me remember a time when I was a little kid. I had to go to a Halloween party all dressed up funny in the daylight. I had to go alone with everybody laughing at me. All the grown-up people.

I went on into the restaurant. On Sunday they serve a big breakfast and serve it up until noon. Usually I sit at the counter. But as soon as I got in the door and saw them all looking at me, I knew that if I sat at the counter they were going to start asking all those questions. Usually I don’t mind all that. I guess maybe I sort of like knowing what has
gone on. Like with a bad accident on the main route or something. I go in and they ask me about it and I tell them. But I could see they wanted to know all about the drowning and those people and all, and I just didn’t want to talk about it. So I turned and went on over to one of the booths and slid in and hiked the holster around so the gun wasn’t digging into me.

I guess I didn’t look so friendly. Benny, from the garage, came over to the booth sort of uneasy and stood about four feet away and said, “Guess it was kind of a mess out there, that guy going crazy and everything, eh?”

I gave him a look and nodded and picked up the menu and opened it, even though I knew I was going to have what I always have on Sunday when I go in there. Sunnyside up with ham and a double order of toast with the wild strawberry jam Mrs. Shattock makes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him stand there and then go away.

I looked at the menu but I didn’t see the printing there. I kept seeing that crazy one, and me moving in slow motion while he stuck that thing in the woman’s head. Roy told me a hundred times I couldn’t have risked a shot, and even if I had, I couldn’t have squeezed it off fast enough, but it’s a thing you remember and wonder about.

Janey Shattock came over and stood by me. I looked up at her and tried to grin at her like always, but it didn’t work right.

“The usual, Janey,” I said, and my voice was too loud. It was as though the other people in the place weren’t talking the way they always do. And there didn’t seem to be the usual noise coming from the kitchen. They seemed to be looking at me as if I was some sort of a freak or something.

She brought my order after a while and I said, “Bring yourself some coffee and sit down, Janey.”

She did. She sat across from me. I looked at her and I knew she wasn’t going to ask any questions. I said in a low voice, “It was bad and I can’t talk about it yet.”

“I know by looking at you it was bad, Joe,” she said.

It was only after I started eating I knew how hungry I was. She was quiet, the way I wanted her to be. She’s a strong girl. She’s big, and I thought when I glanced across at her that she really isn’t plain. She isn’t pretty and she isn’t plain either. Maybe handsome, if you can call a girl that.

And I felt ashamed all of a sudden. Ashamed of me. Ashamed of Joseph Maleski. Because this is what I have been doing: dating Janey and not liking some things about her. Like how her hands are sort of rough and red-knuckled, and she all the time hides them in her lap when you’re out with her. And how, unless she has just washed her hair, there’s a little kitchen smell in it, because they serve a lot of fried stuff and she’s in and out of the kitchen all day.

What did I want? My God, one of those females at the place where I’d spent the night? What the hell was I? I kept eating and looking at her in a new way. There I’d been dating her, and not liking the things that meant she was a good kid because the family had it tough getting the place going good, and she worked like a dog.

Being with her, it made me feel good and clean, like I had already taken the shower I was going to take before I hit the sack. I finished and pushed the plate away and she poured my coffee cup full again and put the pot down and started to pull her hand back into her lap, but I grabbed it. I held her
hand tight. She got red and I knew they were looking at us and I knew it was Sunday morning.

I wanted to kid around. I wanted to give her some kind of a line like I always do. But I sat there like a big dummy and I held her hand hard and I said, “Janey.” A great line that is! Lots of laughs.

My eyes began to sting like I was a little kid again. I let go of her hand and she put it in her lap. And I couldn’t even look at her any more. I walked all the way to the barracks before I remembered I had walked out without even paying.

When I hit the sack I was hoping when I woke up all those people would be like people in a dream. Not real and alive and warm. Like Janey. Like Janey and me.

J
OHN
D. M
ACDONALD
was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.