But what is the alternative? I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism-all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.
All that remains for the McGee is an ironic Knighthood, a spavined steed, second class armor, a dubious lance, a bent broadsword, and the chance, now and again, to lift into a galumphing charge against capital E Evil, his brave battle oaths marred by an occasional hysterical giggle. He has to carry a very long banner because on it has been embroidered, by maidens galore, The Only Thing in the World Worth a Damn is the Strange, Touching, Pathetic, Awesome Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit. The end of the banner trails on the ground way the hell behind his horse, and people keep stepping on it.
So in polarinzing the lady, I had at least given hera simplification she could live with and, if the need should arise, die for. But when I looked into the depths of her dark eyes, there was something there which made me wish I hadn’t pushed that particular button. I had created something which perhaps I could not control.
Branks phoned at eleven-fifteen and came by at quarter to twelve.
She had dressed by then. Her heart said black, but she dressed in pink, a pleated skirt, an angora sweater, a mouth red for polite smiling.
Just a friend, she said. And it seemed like a kick to go visit him at such a crazy hour. But it was the sort of thing he would do. And Beanie had phoned her because she knew Nora used to run around with the guy sometimes. And McGee was an old friend too. It was just for kicks. Welcome home. You know. But, God, who ever thought we’d walk in on anything like that! Oh, yes, I went all to pieces completely. I never saw anything so horrible in my whole life, never. Maybe I should have stayed there, but I couldn’t, really.
Branks thanked her and thanked me again. He said that Beanie had said Taggart was alone when she had seen him, eating at the counter. The owner of the cabins, who ran the gas station also, had seen Taggart drive out about seven and when he had closed at nine, Taggart had not returned.
“We’ll find him,” Branks said with absolute confidence. “You’ll see it in the paper one of these days.” As he drove out, Nora’s casual smile crumpled. She clung to me, asking if she had done all right. She got a case of hiccups. I patted her and said she had done fine. Just fine, honey. Slowly, with a labored effort, she pulled herself together, a nerve at a time. It was a valiant thing to watch.
“F-Find out about services for him, Trav. All that.”
“Courtesy of the county.”
“No!”
“Honey, just what difference does it make to Sam now?”
She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking. “I’ve been tucking money away, for the time when he’d come back. He came back. What do I do with the money? It doesn’t mean anything.”
“What do you want to do? Buy a plot? And bronze handles. Hire a hall? For two mourners?”
“I just… want it to be nice.”
“All right. We’ll do what we can, in a quiet way, Iike a hundred dollar way. On top of the county procedure, so that if Branks should ever wonder or ask, we took up a collection. Flowers, and a lengthy reading at the graveside, and a small marker.”
I stalled her on the other until after the small ceremony. Six of us there, under the beards of Spanish moss blowing wildly in a crisp wind on a day of cloudless blue. Shaj, Nora and me, a pastor and two shovelers. The wind tore the old words out of his mouth and flung them away, inaudible.
The single floral offering bothered me, a huge spray of white roses, virginal, as a huge bride might carry. Death is the huge bride, and the night of honeyinoon is eternity. The stone would be placed later, one just big enough for his name, date of birth, date of death.
We took her home, bleached with grief, moving like an arthritic. She was pounds lighter than on the night we had gone to see him. Shaj hastened back to the shop. I set out a gigantic slug of brandy for Nora Gardino. Then I told her everything I knew.
Her numbness turned slowly to anger. “That is all you know? What does that mean? What can we do about that, for God’s sake?”
“He wanted me to help him, and then because of you he changed his mind and decided to make a deal with them.”
“But you’ve let me think it was… somebody we could find right here, right now!”
“There’s something to go on.”
“But how far?”
“I don’t know how far. I don’t know until I try. If you don’t like it, give up right now, Nora. I’ve gotten into things with less leverage than I have on this one.”
“I’ll never give up!”
“Do you want it all handed to you, wrapped and tied and labeled?”
“I didn’t say that. You made me believe…”
“That it would be easy? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“But… ”
“Nora, do you want to play or don’t you? It can be long and expensive, and it can all come to nothing, or it could get somebody killed. I have a hunch two will work out better than one on this thing, less conspicuous. I’ll pick up my end of the tab. But one thing clear, right now. You take orders. And if we make a recovery, of what Sam said was his, if we are convinced by then that it was his, then we split it down the middle.”
“That’s what you’re in this for?”
“Certainly. That’s why I said no thanks, when Sam invited me in.”
“I’m sorry, Trav.”
“I can tell you one thing. From what we know right now, if we handle ourselves well, if you follow orders, we can get close.”
Her right hand turned into a claw. “I would like that.”
“Close is all I can promise. Remember this, Nora. Sam was tough and quick and smart. You saw what he got out of it.”
“Don’t. But… where is the starting point?”
“Finding out just what it was that he thought was his. That’s my job. While I’m doing that, you get Shaj set up so she can run the store on her own.”
Professor Warner B. Gifford was a fat, sloppy, untidy young man. He was not the tenant the architects had in mind when they had designed that particular building for Florida Southwestern. The building, I guess, was for dynamic scholastic living, for Communications courses, whatever they are, for machines to grade multiple choice questions, for that curious union of Madison Avenue, the N.A.M., foundation monies and the education of the preadjusted young which successfully emasculates all the factors thereof. It was a building to house the men who could turn out fabulous technicians with that contempt for every other field of human knowledge which only the truly ignorant can achieve. It was a place to train ants to invent insecticides.
But Warner B. Gifford was unaware of that. They had given him a weatherproof cube to work in, and he had managed to make it look and smell like the back room of a London hock shop. He goggled vacantly through thick lenses in frames mended with Band-Aids. He committed all the small offenses he had no best friends to tell him about. He worked at a rickety little table amid piles of paper and unidentifiable junk, rank, scurfy, soiled and absolutely unconcerned with everything in the world except the expertise of taking one tiny fragment of the remote past and fitting it into another little fragment, and thereby filling that tiny gap in the continuity of the history of the human animal. If, in his total career, he could infect two or three other individuals with that same compulsion, I had the feeling he would be worth a round dozen of the tailored golfers who gave brilliant lectures which could have been printed intact in the Reader’s Digest, and probably were.