Black Friday (11 page)

But he wasn't seeing her with his eyes. It wasn't her face and body he was seeing. It was something she sent to him, something he'd been waiting for through all the years of listless nights and meaningless days.

He started to say something. He was stopped by the voice from upstairs. It was Frieda, yelling to him, "I'm waiting, Al. I'm waiting for you."

15

There was a long moment of nothing at all. It was on the order of falling off a cliff.

Then he heard Frieda again. "Come on, Al. Come upstairs."

He closed his eyes and put his hand to his forehead.

"You coming?" Frieda yelled.

Good Christ, he said to himself.

"You better answer her," Myrna said.

"All right," he murmured. And he called to Frieda, "I'll be right up."

"How soon?" Frieda yelled.

"Couple minutes."

"Don't make it longer," with some affection in it, and some warning.

He sat there looking at the stairway and hearing Frieda's footsteps returning to the bedroom. Then he heard the door closing up there, and he blinked hard several times and waited for Myrna to say something.

But she didn't say anything and he knew she was waiting for him to speak.

He said, "I'll hafta go back to that room."

And of course that wasn't enough--it needed more telling, so much more.

"It's a ticklish situation," he said. "She has something on me. If I don't do what she says, she'll talk to Chariey and then it's the end."

"All right," Myrna said.

"You know it isn't all right."

"It's all right with me," she said. "Anything you do is all right with me."

"But not that."

"Yes," she said. "Even that."

He lowered his head. He said, very slowly, "God damn it."

"Now look," she said. "I can take it. I'm telling you I can take it."

He looked at her. "Thanks," he said, really meaning it. "It's awfully nice of you to say so."

She smiled. "It ain't no trouble at all. It's so easy to say nice things to you."

"Oh thank you. Thank you very much."

"Don't mention it," she said.

"All right." And he was walking slowly toward the stairway. "We'll catertosociety and call it unmentionable. From here on in it's classified tabu."

She didn't say anything.

He was on the stairs and he wanted to look at her, but he knew there was no point in that. And besides, she wouldn't want him to look at her right now. It would only make things tougher for her.

So the only thing to do was continue up the stairs, and then walk along the hall toward the door of the bedroom where Frieda was waiting.

He opened the door and saw the lamp was lit. Frieda was sitting up in the bed and smoking a cigarette. She shifted slightly to make room for him, then gestured for him to get into the bed.

But he walked on past the bed, going slowly toward the window overlooking the backyard. He looked out the window and saw the blackness of Germantown at half past four in the morning. He thought with an inward shrug: Well, the picture can't be any blacker than it is in here.

He heard Frieda saying, "You gonna get in bed?"

"All right." But he didn't move.

"Whatcha doing?" she asked.

"I'm just standing here thinking."

"About what?"

"You'd be surprised."

"Would I? That's nice. I like to be surprised."

"I'm thinking how convenient it would be if I had a bottle of knockout drops."

"For who?"

"You."

"That ain't no surprise," she said. "I figured you were thinking something like that."

He turned slowly and looked at her. He didn't say anything.

She said, "I knew it when I heard you walking up them stairs. The way you came up, so slow and heavy, like an old junkman when he carries too much weight on his back."

"I could make a pun on that," he murmured. "Except that it wouldn't be funny."

"You're damn right it wouldn't be funny." She sat up straighter. "I weigh exactly one-fifty-seven. That's too much weight for you, isn't it?"

"Let's not get statistical."

"Another thing," she said. "You're one of them educated people. I never made it past the ninth grade."

"That doesn't prove anything."

"The hell it doesn't," she told him. "It proves I didn't need schoolbooks to get the brains I got." She tapped a fat finger against the side of her head. "I got plenty in here."

"Really?" he murmured. "Then let's discuss Schopenhauer."

Her eyes narrowed. "You getting fancy with me?"

"I'm getting philosophical he said. "I think we could use some philosophy at tTiis point."

"You know what? You better come outta the trees."

"But it's nice up here. It's very pIeasant."

"That ain't what you mean." Her eyes were narrowed almost to slits, giving her fat face a piggish cast. "You mean it's clean up there. That is, it's clean compared to this bed."

"So now we're on hygiene?"

"Don't," she said. "Don't stretch it too far." Her voice was a mixture_of menace and pleading. "You keep stretching it, it's gonna break."

He shrugged. "I didn't start this."

"Not much you didn't."

There was a chair near the window and he sat down in it and looked at the floor.

He heard Frieda saying, "You started it when you heard her screaming downstairs and you jumped out of bed. I told you to stay in this room but you didn't hear me. You hadda go down there to see what was happening to her. And then it's Prince Valiant riding to the rescue."

"Make it Moon Mullins. It was more along that line."

"You wish it was." She said it very slowly.

He looked at her. He opened his mouth to build some sort of a denial, but nothing came out.

Frieda said, "I was watching you. I saw the way you were looking at her."

He murmured, "You're very quick to draw conclusions."

"Not when I'm seeing something right there in front of my eyes."

His mouth remained stiff and tight but the corners went up just a little. It wasn't really a smile, it was more of a calculatthg.Jook, nothing personal in it, the emphasis on mathematics as he tried to figure the odds. But the odds were awfully high, like a very high mountain telling the climber he might as well give up.

But then he saw Frieda's eyes widening, and she was biting the side of her lip. And he thought: She's reading me wrong, she thinks I'm sitting here making plans for a drastic anti-Frieda campaign; could be she's got me listed as one of the one-track-mind lads who move very slowly toward a decision and then can't be swayed from it. So now it's very interesting the way the table turns and she's scared silly I'm scheming to do her in.

He concentrated on keeping that look pasted to his face. He managed to keep it there and saw the slight shiver that passed across Frieda's shoulders. Now the fear in her eyes was definite and acute. Her voice tried to hide it, making the synthetic command, "Don't get any clever ideas."

The thing to do, he told himself, is keep quiet and let her go on guessing and worrying.

"Because you're really not clever," she went on with the camouflage that didn't get across. "If you were, you wouldn't have given Charley that phony story that I saw through. Me with no high school diploma, I'm a hell of a lot smarter than you and I got you in the palm of my hand and don't you forget it."

He made no reply, not even with his eyes. The smile that wasn't really a smile went floating across the room to Frieda and caused her to shiver again.

"Well?" she demanded. "What's it gonna be?"

He looked away from her. Then he made a vague, indecisive gesture, as though to say: There's no rush, I got plenty of time to make up my mind.

"Now look, I'm getting tired," she said. "I wanna go to sleep."

"That sounds practical," he murmured.

She beckoned. "Come on get in bed," saying it quickly and matter-of-factly as though the other matter was shelved.

He shook his head.

"Whatcha gonna do?" She spoke a trifle louder. "You gonna sleep in that chair?"

"I won't be sleeping," he said. "I'll just sit here and think for a while."

She tried a light laugh and missed with, "Well, I guess you got plenty to think about."

"True." And he nodded solemnly.

"But don't let it throw you," she advised with a forced grin.

He watched her as she pressed her cigarette into the ashtray and put the ashtray on the floor. Then she reached toward the lamp to cut off the light. Her fingers took hold of the cord and she started to pull it, then let go and said, "I think I'll sleep with the light on."

Then she looked at him and he knew she was waiting for a comment. He made no comment.

She said, "Some nights I like to sleep with the light on."

He shrugged. "Suit yourself."

"Another thing about me," she said, "I'm a very light sleeper. The slightest noise wakes me up."

"They sell pills for that."

"I don't need them kind of pills. It ain't like not being able to sleep." She said it slowly and sort of arranging the words to make it a defensive weapon that covered all territory of possible assault. "It's just that I'm a restless sleeper, and if I get waked up all of a sudden I start to yell."

"That's a bad habit."

"Not all the time. Sometimes it comes in very handy."

Golly, he thought, she's really scared, she looks like she's freezing with it.

She lowered her head to the pillow and pulled the sheet and blankets up to her shoulders. Then very slowly she turned over on her side. Her hand came up to her face, and made a careful maneuver that brushed the platinum blonde hair away from her closed eye. Or maybe that eye wasn't closed all the way. He told himself to quit looking at her, and maybe-she'd fall asleep and he could begin to think with no one watching him. It needed some proper thinking now, and the important thing was solitude. Or solitaire, he thought. It'll have to be solitaire, and that's one game you can't cheat or bluff, it's got to be played straight, so straight that it hurts. So it isn't a happy game and you're in for a bad time playing it. There's no getting away from it, it's going to be you dealing the cards to you, and naturally that includes Myrna. This one lifeyou got has two people in it now. That makes it a load you're carrying. And that feminine half is preciqu material, it's a package marked fragile and please be careful, mister. I'm begging you, mister, please be very careful the way you deal these cards.

16

He sat there in the chair near the window and waited for Frieda to fall asleep. Some minutes passed and her breathing became heavy with the slumber rhythm. It occurred to him she might be pretending, and he shifted the chair so that its legs scraped the floor. But the noise did not reach her and he knew she was really asleep. Another thing he knew, it wasn't true she was a light sleeper, like she'd claimed. What he saw there in the bed was a fat blonde sound asleep, a chunk of sleeping animal that had no connection with him. So now he felt the solitude and he told himself to start thinking.

And where do we begin? he asked himself. What's the jumping-off place? Or let's forget that for the moment and try to figure where we're headed. Referring to the two of us, the girl named Myrna and the man named Hart. If we try to leave this house, it's a sure bet we'll be stopped. But just for the sake of argument, let's assume that Myrna and Hart can negotiate a getaway. Then what happens? The Law h appens, that's what. The Law moves in and we're finished. That makes two patterns that offer no exit. Is there another pattern? There better be. And make it more definite than that, say to yourself there's got to be a way out of this, keep saying it and for Christ's sake try to believe it.

But what you're doing here is looking for a short cut, or giving yourself a head start. And that's a privilege you don't get in this game. According to the rules you got to start from scratch, and that means New Orleans. You'll have to start with your brother Haskell and the way you killed him and your reason for killing him. The method was simple enough, it was a bullet going into his brain. And the reason? That wasn't so simple. It was eutha nasia and that's never simple.

In plain words, it was a mercy killing and whether Heaven has it listed as right or wrong, you'd do it again under the same conditions. Because the conditions were unbearable for Haskell and every day he was allowed to live was a hideous.session that had him weeping and begging it to stop. But of course it wouldn't stop.

It was a family of snakes crawling through the nerves of his body and eating him up.

It was multiple sclerosis.

And even though the medics are agreed it can't be cured, even though they come right out and admit it's a horrible sickness, they gotta go along with the First Commandment. But you did what he wanted you to do, what he pleaded for with the groans that you can hear yet.

Because you knew he would do it to himself if he could. He told you so. And wept it from eyes that could barely make me out, it's a sickness that hits the eyes as well as other parts of the framework. So he couldn't see where to search for a vial of poison, or a breadknife to use on his wrists. And even if he could see, he couldn't move in that direction, his legs were dead.

And his arms were dead. And his hands, and his fingers.

God yes, it sure had him. All his boyhood and young manhood he'd been the athletic type; at Tulane he won three letters. He was five-eleven and weighed two-twenty and it was packed solid. And a brain, too. And looks. With the kind of personality you don't come across very often. The genuine kindliness, carrying it so far sometimes that people took him for a sucker.

He had an awful lot of money, an approximate estimate would be around three million. And you were next in line to inherit it. So according to the District Attorney the motivation is cash. And in court you stand no chance at all of getting off, and even if some fluke took place and they erased the cashmotivation, the law they got against euthanasia is a rigid law and at the very least you'd get seven years.

Seven years for what? All right, don't get sour. It isn't their fault. But God damn it, there ought to be some way to see a thing for what it is, not what Law says it is.

Law calls me a heel and a louse and a murderer. Law says here's a party who did away with his own brother. And the newspapers jump on the wagon and call me worse names, like fiend and demon and dig up stories about how generous Haskell was to me--how he gave me a car and a yacht, and look how I repaid him.

Truth is, he gave me the gifts because he enjoyed giving. I didn't want that automobile and sure as hell I didn't need that yacht. But I drove the car and I sailed the boat and made out I was overjoyed. And that made Haskell happy. It always gave him happiness when he could bring joy to people, whether it was his younger brother or some panhandler on Ransome Street.

You see a man like that, a big fine healthy man with a wholesome yen or living and giving, a man whose only enemies were the envious, a man who was Grade-A clear through, and Mother Nature plays this trick on him. One morning he wakes up with a funny heavy feeling in his left leg.

That's the way it starts, and from there on there's nothing can be done, it gets the leg and later it's both legs out of commission, both arms, the snakes in there multiplying to strangle this and strangle that. He sits there in the wheelchair and you wheel him to the bathroom. And then it gets to the point where the wheelchair is too much for him, he can't sit up. So now he's in the bed and he's getting the weeping spells. You never saw him weepbefore. In the hall you talk to the doctor, the twentieth or thirtieth in a long line of doctors. You remember this one flew in all the way from Seattle. He sighs and shakes his head and says, "It's hopeless. This multiple sclerosis thing, it's a hellish proposition--" And then, before he can pull it back it comes slipping out, "He'd be better off dead."

It was a statement coming from the mouth of a specialist in the science of keeping people alive. He didn't want to say it, he didn't mean to say it, but he said it.

So you hear it and it's the seed of an idea going into you and staying, and growing. You try to smother it but that same day you hear Haskell saying, "I don't want to live--"

And some days later he says, "You want to know something? Whenever I go to sleep I pray I won't wake up."

"That's no way to talk," you say. "You got to fight this thing."

"With what?"

"Now look, Haskell. You're going to get well. They'll discover something. They got people working on it. They're bound to--"

"I'm tired, Hart. I'm so tired."

You look at him there in the bed. He weighs exactly onetwenty-seven. You think of the three-letter man from Tulane who weighed two-twenty, the discus thrower who came in third in the Southern Conference championships.

One night a week or so later he puts it to you straight. He says, "I want you to do me a favor."

"Yes?"

"I want you to kill me."

You don't say anything. You can't look at him.

"Please do it," he says. "Please--"

But then the nurse comes into the room with the tray and while she starts feeding him like an infant gets fed you walk out quietly. You go out of the mansion and while you walk around the grounds, past the tennis courts and toward the dock that overlooks a moonlit Mississippi, you're thinking. It would be merciful--

But no, you say to yourself. You can't do that. That's unthinkable.

Except that you can't let Haskell suffer like this, you can't stand by and watch him wasting away.

But listen now, they might really discover a cure. Let's hope and pray. Let's picture them working with the microscopes and the test tubes--

But you don't get that picture. It fades out and all you see is Haskell in that bed, not able to move.

You went through night after night of sitting alone and drinking and really swilling it down but not getting plastered, the alcohol washing all non-essentials out of your brain, all the average-man rules and regulations that state it's a crime, it's the worst sin of all, you mustn't do it, friend, you'll be sorry later. Your reply was: The hell with what society thinks, he's my brother and he needs relief and there's only one way to bring him relief.

Now then, here's a creepy angle. During all this time of coming to that decision but somehow unable to go through with it, the same decision had been reached by your other brother Clement. And that was a surprise, that really knocked you flat. For Clement was never much of a participant in family matters. Fact is, Clement never participated in anything requiring a plus of effort. He was strictly for the hammock and staying home nights with his wife and three children, getting fat and getting bald and the only thing that ever seemed to worry him was his golf score. But Clement was making many visits to the mansion, and for hours he'd sit at the bedside and read to Haskell from
Town and Country
, and
Fortune
, and
Holiday
, and the sports pages of the local newspapers. Then one night you're out on the grounds looking at the tennis courts and thinking of the tennis that Haskell liked to play and would never play again, and Clement comes up and gives itto you blunt and fast, no preliminaries.

Clement says, "I'm going to put a stop to this."

You look at him. You don't say anything.

"The way it's going, it's ridiculous," he says. "It's absolutely ridiculous he should have all that agony."

He says it quietly and sort of tonelessly, and you know he's been giving this a lot of thought.

You hear him say, "I've made up my mind. I'm going to get him out of it."

You wince. This can't be Clement talking.

"I'm telling you and only you," Clement says. "Tomorrow I'm buying a gun."

"Don't talk like an idiot."

"I'm buying a gun and I'm going to shoot him."

"You realize what you're saying?"

You see him nodding slowly and solemnly. And he says, "I'm going to shoot him and then I'll turn myself in. I don't care what they do to me."

"Oh look, you're just talking. Why don't you go home and get a good night's sleep?"

"I haven't had a good night's sleep in three months."

"Why don't you go on a trip? Now there's an idea. You need it, Clement, you need a change."

He smiles. You've never seen him smile like that before. It's the kind of smile they wear when they volunteer for a rescue mission that gives them very little chance of coming back.

He shakes his head. "You can't sell it, Hart. You might as well quit trying."

He stands there, slowly shaking his head, his eyes telling you he's bound to this, it's a sacred vow he's made to himself and there's no way to pull him away from it.

That is, unless--

Unless you move in first and beat him to the punch.

Your brain spins with the thought and you scarcely pay attention as he walks away. You think of this sacrifice he's decided to make, the loss of his status as solid citizen, the ruination of his home, the doom he's bringing upon himself and his wife and children.

But of course you won't let him do it.

From that moment on it's all mechanical, your legs are like wheels on tracks headed straight ahead. You go to the four-car garage and climb into your pale blue Bugatti and some twenty minutes later you're in that particular section of New Orleans where the late-night action is fast and frantic yet somehow on the quiet side because it's mostly illegal trade. In less than a half-hour you've made a connection and the man sells you the gun.

As you drive back to the mansion your hands are steady on the wheel.

You do it very quickly, and there's no strategy, no caution. You go into Haskell's room and he's sleeping. You take out the loaded gun and shoot him twice in the head. As you leave the room you see the nurse coming down the hall and she comes faster and asks you what that noise was. You look at her as though she's asked a foolish question, and you answer, "I shot him."

Then it occurs to you that now you're a fugitive and you'd better start to run.

Jesus, it's been a long run. It's really been no rest for the weary. And the thing that's kept you going and allowed you to live with yourself was the jury inside you, which says, "Not guilty" because what you did was not for cash, not for any personal gain, oh certainly not for that. But even so, it paid off rather nicely for your brothers. It took Haskell out of his misery and it took Clement away from catastrophe. That makes it all right.

Yeah, that makes it just dandy. You better stop rationalizing and come back to these cards on the table, these solitaire numbers and pictures that you can't argue with, can't re-arrange. All you can do is look at the setup and see it for what it is.

And what you see most clearly now is the time element that announces today is Thursday and tomorrow is the black dayivhen you step over the line from amateur to professional. It's gonna be strictly professional up there in Wyncote at the Kenniston mansion. And you damn well better do everything correctly. All right, stop worrying, it isn't Friday yet, you've still got Thursday to brace yourself and develop a purely pro viewpoint.

So let's say that now the only factor is cold cash, that is, the cash is important because travel takes currency and maybe with some luck it'll soon be travel for you and her, to a place where they'll never find you. That kind of travel needs an awful lot of money but I think your share of the Kenniston haul will more than cover it. You're only doing what you gotta do to stay alive and hold onto this girl.