Barbary Shore (37 page)

“You’ve hurt a fellow’s feelings,” Hollingsworth said in the mildest voice I had ever heard him use, “and that is why I am forced to punish you.”

Perhaps it was the way he said this, perhaps the hush which followed. But now the silence was impossible to bear. I heard the smallest creak of a step, and I could almost see the weapon uncovered and the slow rapt movement of each man about the other. There was some sound of attack, a thick cry which followed, and at that moment I flew against the door and came careening into the room to see McLeod collapsing before me. That in the fraction of a glance, and an instant later I must have been struck from behind, for something seemed to burst in my head, and I saw the floor rushing to my face, fell headlong with force enough to shatter consciousness.

So, helplessly, my arms groped before me while the floor yawed to my half-shut eyes like a raft floating on the swell. And with the shrieking and caterwauling of animals washed over the dam, I heard voices screeching: Guinevere, from a long way off,
“I’m doomed, I’m doomed,” and Hollingsworth cursing and weeping, running first to one corner of the room, and then pacing to the other. “The car is ready,” I heard him cry, “and now we must go,” and an attack of sobbing which followed it. “Leave me here,” a woman’s voice was begging, Guinevere’s I knew at last, “just leave me here and let me lay,” whimpering in a panic, until he must have seized her with his arms and borne her to the door. “It’s off we go,” he said hoarsely, “and no time to lose, and now nobody will ever have it,” blubbering this, “nobody will ever have it, and what have I done?” until he screamed, “Come here, get the child, get her, I tell you.” Over my paralyzed head tumbled the chase, Monina yipping in fright, and the breath of the others sobbing at her neck. With a thump she was caught and with another hauled into somebody’s arms, and then I heard them stumbling out the door, and Guinevere crying, “It can’t have happened, it never does,” and a moment later or so I thought, the floor revolving with me, I heard the motor of some machine, an automobile I knew, and they were driving away, and into my head with a clarity which makes me certain it was said, Monina’s voice gave one last bleat.

“I want my daddie,” she wailed.

And the car disappeared, and the floor came up like a grappler, threw me off my knees and gasping on my back.

F
INALLY
, I managed to stand, and if I extended my arms far enough, the room would balance. I navigated the floor, and kneeled beside his body. The long thin arms covering his face, I did not try to see with what heart and what loss he had received his death. I touched the flaccid fingers and then I reeled away and stood leaning against the wall, remembering once to touch the envelope he had given me.

Lannie came through the door. Dressed in the sodden black rags of what had been once her pajamas, she wandered aimlessly back and forth, hair fallen over her eyes, and mouth crooning a tuneless song. She saw McLeod before she saw me, and stood singing tonelessly, her frail body lost in its wrapper. Then she drifted forward and looked into my face.

“Oh, you are my brother,” she said softly, “for there is blood on your cheek, and so we are wed.” And she gave me her hand.

We stood together against the wall, while outside the sound of automobiles descended upon us. One motor came racing down the street, braked to a halt, and its light which had traced a swath across the room, blinked out, and was replaced by the glare of a second car, which birthed from its twin, must come racing, braking, and blinking into position behind the other. When a
third car turned the corner and roared to follow the others, I slipped away from the wall and drew Lannie after me into the bedroom.

After thirty seconds in which car doors slammed and men’s feet drummed upon the pavement, and my head absorbed them both, the iron gate to Guinevere’s apartment clanged open, and agents of the country we live in ran through the door. Three men with athletic bodies and business suits and gray felt hats came into the foyer. I sought Lannie’s mouth too late. She had begun to croon again, and even as they were looking dumbly at one another, she moved out of the darkness toward them. “You’ve come, I see,” she said in a loud clear voice as though they were deaf. “And I have decided to meet you.” As she raised her wrist the stigmata of cigarette burn was revealed upon it.

One of the men looked at her carefully.

“Book her,” he said.

When the others came forward, she smiled. “I love you even if you torment me, for you suffer,” she said. But as she passed with them through the door, light and shadow rippled across her face and terror with it. “Oh,” she said in a piteous little voice. And for a moment she must twist her body free.

“Oh,” she whispered, “I run through a field of tall grass and I fall. Does it choke me or do I sleep here?”

They led her onto the street and other men took their place. But I could hardly attend them. For as they entered the front door I was stealing through the back window, and when hubbub broke at the sight of the dead man on the floor I must have been halfway down the alley.

T
HE
envelope contained McLeod’s will:

Almost as an afterthought he had scrawled:

So the heritage passed on to me, poor hope, and the little object as well, and I went out into the world. If I fled down the alley which led from that rooming house, it was only to enter another, and then another. I am obliged to live waiting for the signs which tell me I must move on again.

Thus, time passes, and I work and I study, and I keep my eye on the door.

Meanwhile, vast armies mount themselves, the world revolves, the traveller clutches his breast. From out the unyielding contradictions of labor stolen from men, the march to the endless war forces its pace. Perhaps, as the millions will be lost,
others will be created, and I shall discover brothers where I thought none existed.

But for the present the storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.
The Castle in the Forest
, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,
The Armies of the Night
, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for
The Executioner’s Song
and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

The Naked and the Dead

Barbary Shore

The Deer Park

Advertisements for Myself

Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

The Presidential Papers

An American Dream

Cannibals and Christians

Why Are We in Vietnam?

The Deer Park—A Play

The Armies of the Night

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Of a Fire on the Moon

The Prisoner of Sex

Maidstone

Existential Errands

St. George and the Godfather

Marilyn

The Faith of Graffiti

The Fight

Genius and Lust

The Executioner’s Song

Of Women and Their Elegance

Pieces and Pontifications

Ancient Evenings

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

Harlot’s Ghost

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

The Gospel According to the Son

The Time of Our Time

The Spooky Art

Why Are We at War?

Modest Gifts

The Castle in the Forest

On God
(with J. Michael Lennon)

Mind of an Outlaw