Set This House on Fire (40 page)

She raised her tear-stained face. “But where could he be?” she cried. “I’ve looked just
everywhere.
In the piazza, up by the Villa Constanza, in the market—everywhere! He’s never gone away like this before! Never! Oh—” Her face lit up suddenly, inspired. “Oh yes, I forgot. I know where he might be! He might have gone to Salerno with Luigi. They often—”

“I saw Luigi. He said he hadn’t seen Cass,” I had to tell her.

“Oh golly Moses,” she whispered, her face falling, looking desperate and scared. “Listen, Peter, I just know he’s mixed up in it all somehow.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

She was ashen-faced, and as she rose slowly from the chair I could have sworn I saw her teeth chattering. “Oh, I wish I could tell you! He’s so sick and all, you know. I mean, he’s an alcoholic as you doubtless know, and he’s got this ulcer and all and he shouldn’t drink, and then he’s been having these dizzy spells. What I mean is—”

“What
do
you mean, Poppy?” I insisted. “How could he be mixed up in anything—”

“I don’t know!” she blurted suddenly and tearfully. “Yes I do!” She had gone to the wall and pulled down a yellow rain slicker (it was not raining), and this, three sizes too large, she wrapped around her. “Women have premonitions, that’s all. I mean—” she said with quivering mouth, “I mean, I know Cass! It was probably a profound shock to him, knowing Mason and knowing Francesca, who worked for us and all. So knowing Cass, what he has doubtless done is to get drunk and raving, and has gone and said some ugly, insulting things to the
carabinieri
about their conduct of the case, and they’ve locked him up in jail! He hates that Sergeant Parrinello! Phooey!” she said, stamping her foot, adjusting her bandanna. “He’s so irresponsible, that Cass Kinsolving. Maybe,” she added, drying her tears and staring at me with an air of haughty, worn-out patience, “you know, just maybe he should be committed to the Alcoholics Anonymous or something.” She went to the door. “If the children should holler or anything, I’ll be back in
venti minuti.
I’m going down to see if I can’t get Cass out of jail. Just look in the icebox if you get hungry or anything.
Ciao!”
And with all her tender strength she slammed the door behind her. Her rapid queer reasoning, her motivation, left me flabbergasted, powerless to move: it suddenly occurred to me that she might be somewhat backward.

I went downstairs and got my luggage together. I could hear the children brawling in a bedroom: to hell with them, I thought, they could take care of themselves. I felt sticky and begrimed; as I sponged myself off in the bathroom I laid out for myself a plan for withdrawal. Money for me at that point was a minor concern; from a schedule I recalled seeing in the hotel lobby I knew the last bus to Naples had left, but I was certain that for the equivalent of ten dollars or so I could easily hire a car and driver to get me there. My boat to America, to be sure, did not leave until five days later, but I felt that it would not be unpleasant to mooch around Naples for a while, revisit the museum, go to Capri and Ischia and Ponza. And so I started to leave Sambuco. As I prepared to go upstairs I remembered the Austin: junk heap that it was, it had cost me thirteen hundred dollars, second hand, and I was not prepared to sacrifice it to the elements or to marauding Italians. But in the end I really didn’t care. Perhaps I would wangle out of Windgasser a hundred thousand lire for the wreck—enough to pay for my Naples sojourn; failing that, I would let it stay parked where it was forever, shat upon by pigeons.

I did not see Cass at first when I reached the top of the stairs and went back through the living room. He must have come in quietly, or maybe his entrance had been drowned out by the scuffling children: I was almost to the door when, startled, I heard a noise behind me and whirled around to confront him. I didn’t know what there was about Cass that made him seem at my first glimpse of him another—a different—person. It was Cass—he was dressed the same, in disheveled filthy khaki, and the beret was still cocked in fierce slant above his gleaming glasses—but it didn’t quite look like Cass, an indefinable weird displacement of himself, rather, as if he were his own twin brother. Otherwise all was familiar: he was drunk, as I had first seen him. A bottle of wine dangled from one limp big paw, and he could scarcely stand erect, propping his hip for support against the table, just perceptibly and limply swaying. In his other hand he held the butt of a shredded and beslobbered black cigar. Very plainly in the stillness I could hear his deep and heavy breathing. At first I thought there was menace in his eyes, so constant and searching was his gaze upon me, but then I realized that, profoundly discomposed by alcohol, they were striving merely to focus. Finally when he spoke his voice was thick-tongued, hoarse, barely articulate. “Well, by God,” he said slowly and deliberately, trying to master his tongue. “You caught me red-handed. Saw Poppy go out just now. Thought I could sneak in here and tend to my own business, unbeknownst to man or monster. Only I forgot all about you. I guess I’ll have to put you out of the way, like they do in the flicks. You know too much, buddy. Where you off to so fast? You look like you just robbed a race track.”

The suitcases slipped from my hands and clattered to the floor. “I—I don’t know,” I began “I was just—”

He cut me off with a wave of the wine bottle. “By God, it’s good to see you, Pete,” he said with a flabby-mouthed grin. “Man I can trust. Man I can talk to. Thought you was one of those wise movie-boys for a while. Southern boy, ain’t you? Georgia? Loosiana? Ole Virginia? Knew I could tell by that sweet corrupt look you got around the jowls. But then—ah, loving God!”

“What’s the matter?” I said, in place of anything else. “Can I help you, old man?”

He recovered himself momentarily, focusing upon me his hot drowned eyes. “Yes, I’ll tell you how you can help old Cass,” he said somberly. “Now I’ll tell you, my bleeding dark angel. Fetch him the machine, fetch him the wherewithal—a dagger, see, a dirk, well honed around the edges—and bring it here, and place it on his breastbone, and then with all your muscle drive it to the core.” He paused, swaying slightly from side to side, never removing his gaze from my face. “No bullshit, Pete. I’ve got a lust to be gone from this place. Make me up a nice potion, see? Make it up out of all these bitter-tasting, deadly things and pour it down my gullet. Ole Cass has had a hard day. He’s gone the full stretch and his head aches and his legs are weary, and there’s no more weeping in him.” He held out his arms. “These limbs are plumb wore out. Look at them, boy. Look how they shake and tremble! What was they made for, I ast you. To wrap lovely ladies about? To make monuments? To enfold within them all the beauty of the world? Nossir! They was made to destroy and now they are plumb wore out, and my head aches, and I yearn for a long long spell of darkness.”

I tried to speak but my tongue clung to the roof of my mouth as slowly and ponderously he shuffled toward me, dropping the wine bottle which broke in splinters on the floor. He jammed the cigar butt into his mouth; his glasses made shiny half-dollars of reflected light. And as he came near me he seemed so full of clumsy sodden threat that I poised myself on the balls of my feet, ready for precipitate escape. But with astounding speed, quick as the strike of a rattlesnake, his arm went out and I felt my wrist go numb in the engulfing, savage grip of his hand. Reeking of sweat, pressing close, he held me more now by his grasp than by his wild drink-demented gaze.

“Seddow,” he said, releasing me.

“What!”

“Set down!”
he commanded.

And I sat, transfixed.

“Well, he went and done it, didn’t he?” he said, breathing hard. “At long last he went and done it.”

I began to say something but he cut me off, swaying, let loose a tremendous belch, and then spat on the floor. “You’d think the bugger’d known better, wouldn’t you?” He began to say something else, then came to a halt, his eyes wide and wild, lips apart. Then very slowly he said: “He couldn’t die but once, and that’s the bleeding pity of the matter. One time—”

“Take it easy,” I mumbled, rubbing my wrist. I got up. “Loosen up, Cass. Just take it easy, will you?” Gingerly I patted him on the shoulder, trying to calm him, but he pulled away from me with a jerk and then slowly sank into a chair. He thrust his head into one hand and for a while was silent and still; squatting rigid and immobile, his muscles tightly contorted beneath his wet stained shirt, he looked almost as if he were sculpted there, a great aching lowering figure like Rodin’s “Thinker,” caught in an attitude not of meditation but grief. I listened to his breath escape whistling and tortured through his nostrils; far off beyond the walls the tolling bells rose muffled, clangorous, doleful.

“What happened to the flicker creeps?” he said.

“They’re gone.”

I thought he grinned. “When the old boat founders it’s the rats that’s first to go.”

Then again he fell silent. When at last he spoke, in a dull, hoarse monotone, his words made so little sense to me that I felt that it was not wine which had so bested his mind, but something far more unhinging and profound:
“Exeunt omnes.
Exit the whole lousy bunch. Enter Parrinello, gut throbbing, with a fat theory.
Gentilissimi signori, tutto è chiaro!
With his own remorse he slew himself. Mother of God! A brain stuffed with mohair soaked in piss. Show me a smart policeman and I’ll show you a girl named Henry.” His shoulders began to heave with laughter, only I could see—as he slowly raised his face—that it was not laughter at all; his convulsions were those of a man who was weeping, if it is possible to weep without shedding tears. Dry-eyed, racked by spasms of grief, he arose and cast me such a look of envenomed wrath that I flexed myself once more for quick flight from the room.

“Longer’n I can remember,” he said in a whisper, “I been hungering for my own end. Longer’n I can remember! Now there’s a justification. Give me odds, boy. Give me odds! Listen. Tell me. Tell me that ten million times I got to die, to find beyond the grave only darkness, and then be born again to live out ten million wretched lives, then die again and so on, to find ten million darknesses. Listen, boy! Tell me this! But tell me that
once
in ten million deaths I’ll find no darkness past the grave, but
him,
standing there in the midst of eternity, grinning if you please like some shit-eating dog and ready for the fury of these hands, then I’ll take your bet, boy, straight off, and be done with living in half a minute. Oh, I should not have let him off so easy! Oh!” he repeated. “I should not have let him off so easy!”

“What do you mean?”

“Nossir,” he said, in a remote voice now. “Can’t get
to
the bugger. Old Mason’s dead as a smelt.”

He staggered to his feet. He made a curious, importuning gesture with his hand, as if beckoning me toward him, then clapped it against his brow. His voice as he stood swaying there remained distant, ruminative: “You know, it seems to me that today sometime I was laying on the high slopes above Tramonti, up there where the cool winds blow and the earth is full of columbine. And streams of water, boy—streams of cool water coming down from the hills! And I dreamt that my love was in my arms and we was all home at last. Then along came this here doctor, rousing me out of sleep, this doctor with a long bush of a beard and a boutonniere and a red nose. And do you know what he said to me as I lay there, this old doc? Know what he said?

I couldn’t speak.

“Said he: Have you heard that your lady, who was so fair, is slain? And he put ice on my brow and he cooled my fever, and I said to him: Estimable Signor Doctor, do not fool with old Cass. Bleeding doctor! Say that his lady still lives, she whose solitary footprint in the dust was more precious than all the treasures of the world! But it seems to me that then he said: No, it is true, your lady is truly dead. And then I knew it was true enough.”

He ran a limp hand slowly across his eyes. Suddenly his arm snaked out for a wine bottle on the table, an awkward motion which, unbalancing him, set him teetering against the chair, where for a split second he swam with his legs out in mid-space at an impossible gravity-defying angle before coming down hard upon the floor, legs and arms asprawl and upsetting the ponderous easel with a crash. He lay inert and motionless on the floor in a spreading, shimmering cloud of dust. Rigid with horror, I could not move to help him, stood there wondering if indeed at last he had killed himself. After a time, though, he stirred and with great effort, still prone and akimbo, composed his limbs and slowly pried himself up into a sitting position on the floor. He shook his head dazedly, pressing his hand to his brow, where, through his open splayed-out fingers, I could see trickling a tiny stream of blood. I spoke to him: he said nothing. Behind me I could hear a slow clumsy patter of feet, and I turned: aroused, I suppose, by the crashing easel, two children came into the room with frightened eyes. “It’s Daddy. Oh look, he hurt himself!” They stood watching him for a moment. Then silently, ghostlike, as if wafted toward him by the breeze which suddenly blew up the slope and set some shade or blind to chattering in a remote corner of the room, they crept weightlessly into his arms.

Bloody, with dazed and glassy eyes, he drew the children next to him in a smothering embrace. “Press close to me on either side—” he began, then ceased. Abruptly, gently, he pushed them aside and struggled to his feet. He looked at me but he no longer saw me, I’m sure, his eyes fixed instead through me and beyond me upon some vista mysterious and distant and sufficient unto itself. His lips moved, but made no sound.

Then as swiftly as his lurching gait could move him, he shouldered past me to the door. There, ignoring Poppy, who had just returned, ignoring both her shrill squeal of anguish—“Oh, Cass! You’ve changed!”—and her tumbling collapse as she fell forward toward him, swooning, in a crumpled heap upon the floor, he staggered past her through the courtyard and out of sight. And it was only seconds later, bending over Poppy (watching her eyelids slowly part as she murmured to me, “Oh, Cass, you’ve changed"), that I realized at last that all this time his face had been a face which, in the space of a day, had aged a dozen years.