Bill shook his head.
“Let me know when he gets here,” Alice said. “I’ll go put the finishing touches on the dining room.” She left.
Bill wasn’t at all sure that Cortland would get back. Or the two officers, either. He found himself wondering if Magee and Smithson had families. Maybe right now several little kiddies were crying for their daddies to come home. Bill stared bleakly at the spot where the three men had stood.
“I’ve got to turn myself in,” he said to himself. “I’ll call and tell them to come get me.”
He wasn’t sure just what he would say. As he waited for his call to be transferred to the police lieutenant, he tried to formulate something that wouldn’t brand him immediately as an absolute nut. What could he say? “See, I’ve got these magic fingers—”
“Lieutenant Hargrove,” said a gruff voice on the wire. There was a pause,
“Lieutenant Hargrove,” repeated Bill. There was another pause.
“I’m Lieutenant Hargrove,” the voice said, a wary note coming into it, as if Lieutenant Hargrove were girding himself to deal with an addled brain.
Bill cleared his throat and considered hanging up. “Well, you see, Lieutenant Hargrove,” he said, “these two officers came to my house to investigate a strange occurrence, and I don’t know what happened to them.”
Lieutenant Hargrove asked quickly, “Which two officers was that?”
“I believe their names were Magee and Smithson.”
“Oh, those two loonies,” said Lieutenant Hargrove. “They just called from Palm Springs. Said they didn’t know how they got there. Couple of nincompoops. Get lost crossing the street.”
Bill clutched the phone. “Palm Springs, you say? Are they all right?”
“Sure,” said Lieutenant Hargrove. “Physically, at least. Say, did you get that strange occurrence taken care of?”
“Yes,” Bill said hastily. “Yes. Oh, yes. Thanks.” He hung up quickly. No reason to be thought a nut if everyone was all right. Of course there was still Cortland. But he would undoubtedly show up somewhere. San Francisco, maybe. Probably figure the State Department sent him on a rush mission or something.
Bill started to whistle. He walked to the mirror that Alice kept on the wall just inside the kitchen door. He was quite a guy, he thought, peering at his reflection. But he didn’t look any different. He sort of thought he might, considering his newly discovered talent. And what a talent! Just let Alice’s old boy friends come nosing around now. Just a flick of the fingers, and away they’d go. Even Paul Newman couldn’t do that.
Bill smiled at himself in the mirror. Just let them come. He could take care of them. He flicked his fingers at his reflected image. “Poof,” he said, “you’re gone!”
“Bill,” Alice said, coming in from the dining room. “I think we’d better go ahead and eat before the roast dries out.”
She looked around the empty kitchen. “Bill?” she said. “Bill? Where are you?”
The Chicken Player
by Joe L. Hensley
Jamie pulled the dusty, black T-bird onto the shoulder of the road he’d been cruising and sat there waiting. The radio was off because on a still day he could hear a car from further away than he could see it.
In that hour of cruising he’d checked the road carefully. It wasn’t in top condition, but it was all right, better than many he’d played the game on, and it had the advantage of sparse traffic, perhaps too sparse. The only other car he’d seen during that hour of driving was an old Chevy, worn out, down at the springs, driven by a man with white hair. Not very good prey, but a possible. The old man had driven by without a glance, moving very slowly. Jamie was still debating with himself whether to follow when he’d seen a child’s curious face appear in the rear window of the old car.
That had ruined it. He was superstitious about kids and there’d been enough bad luck recently. Thursday, he’d almost been arrested by a State Trooper, but had managed to outrun him. Friday, the transmission had gone out of the T-bird and he’d been dismounted the whole weekend. Now, deep inside, he felt he’d about worn out this part of the country and it was time to move on. People were starting to look familiar to him, remind him of people he’d known before in other places and at other times. It was kooky how so many faces reminded him of Mr. Kelly. Mr. Kelly was thousands of miles away, back in New York State. Mr. Kelly was five years before in time.
Jamie remembered with narcissistic nostalgia that he’d been an amateur then, just learning the game. Then it had been a game of half-grown kids, played on deserted roads, with sentries out to warn if police came near. The Chicken Game. God, it had grabbed him even then.
The run at Mr. Kelly’s car had been a lark, an impulse, a broadening of the game to include the world around Jamie. He’d have gotten away if he hadn’t blown a tire at the critical moment. That had thrown him into the Kelly car when he thought himself safely past and it had jumbled his hopped up Ford into a junk pile, but he’d scrambled out unhurt.
He would not have thought that a kid could scream as much or as long as the Kelly boy had. Mr. Kelly had been thrown clear and he was unconscious, so only Jamie had to listen to the screams from the burning Kelly car. He had listened and felt strange inside and when the screams stopped he’d giggled a little.
After awhile there’d been lots of police and questions.
“I lost control,” he told them. “The tire blew and I lost control.” He repeated it and repeated it, and stubbornness and the good lawyer his Aunt hired made the difference. The jury turned him loose.
Only Mr. Kelly knew. Jamie remembered the eyes that had burned right through him during the trial.
When it was done and Jamie was free, he moved on. It was an act of protection, not fear. By that time he’d played again and again and without the game there was nothing. No angry, vengeful man was going to take the game away.
So now he was twenty-three years old and he’d been playing the game for a long time. It was now a professional thing, done carefully, accomplished at rare, safe intervals when the desire became overpowering. The game was more than anything else, more than the sum total of all the rest. It was more than love, greater than sex, better than drugs, and stronger than the fear of death.
Sometimes when Jamie was around other people who were his age, he could have screamed. The talk was mundane, the pleasures crude, and there was an eternal sameness to each scene. Sometimes he was sure that the only time he was really alive was when he was behind the wheel of the T-bird, alone, hunting. The rest of it was just the scene, all papery and fragile.
The game was simple, but there were rules. The other car was the mark. You passed it and accelerated away, making sure the highway was clear. A mile or so ahead you turned and came back at the mark, twisting right lane to left lane until the mark saw you. Then you took his lane, going straight for him, foot deep in the accelerator, forcing the mark to turn away, to chicken.
The rest of the game was of his own variation. When the mark turned away, Jamie followed, while the brutal, delicious fear rose within him.
Sometimes other drivers froze and stopped dead in the road, and that filled Jamie with contempt. More often they came on erratically until he forced them from the road. Two months back, he’d run a lone, male driver down a steep hill and seen him roll, metal shrieking, against rocks and trees until all sound stopped. That had been a very good one.
The game took nerve and a sure knowledge of the condition of the highway and an instinctive feel for what a car would do, but the shuddery exultation was worth all of it.