I was rewarded, if you can call it that, by seeing an unflattering but not too unfaithful sketch of myself, stuck to a clipboard attached to the dashboard. Even as I looked at it, I did not forget what I was about. The fog grew thicker, and seemed to pour into the car; it did not obscure my vision.
The sketch was on a clean, white piece of paper, with today’s date written in the upper left corner. There was a number (4-282-6315) hand-lettered in the upper right. Below the sketch were some notes to the effect that I was five eight (I’m actually five six, but I dress to look tall), weigh about a hundred and twenty (more like a hundred and thirty, friend, but thanks), had black hair, black eyes, should be considered armed and dangerous (I’m never armed, but I’m never unarmed either) and that I was a suspect in a homicide investigation at
Damn it to Hell. I just now realized why that address was familiar, which means I know how they must have gotten my description: that fat man who had let me into Young Don’s place. But never mind that now.
I read more of what I was supposed to look like until I heard rapidly approaching footsteps on the street behind me.
There is, as many have noted before me, a strength that comes with anger. I felt it then, overcoming my weakness. As the policeman’s face became clear in the fog, I had the sudden impression of pale blue eyes and a light-colored mustache, and I know that he had something in his hand, though whether it was a stick, a gun, a radio, or something else entirely I do not know.
But I backed out of the car and faced him faster, I think, than he expected me to; and I know he did not expect me to be on him before he had time to do anything. With one hand I took his arm and with the other his leg. I think I was going to dash him to the street, which would certainly have crushed the life out of him, but in the end I merely threw him as far from me as I could. He gave a cry as he flew, then he hit the ground with a thud and a tinkle of gear, as if I’d thrown a tin soldier.
I stopped and listened carefully. I could hear moaning from the policeman I had thrown, and, even as all of this was happening I was relieved that I had not killed him, but I could hear more sounds-people running, purposefully, in my direction. They were closing in around me.
Even as I noticed that, I saw spotlights attempt to pierce the winter fog. A wild notion came upon me to get into the car and attempt to drive it (were the keys even in it? I never looked, nor did the question cross my mind until now), but my skills with such machines are poor at best, and this would leave me limited, and fighting on their terms.
So I would fight on mine.
I knew they could not yet be completely organized, and they certainly couldn’t know what was going on, so, with no hesitation, I charged out at them with all the speed I could manage. I got a glimpse of a couple of confused faces, and I ran into one policeman who had a drawn pistol in his hand and was in the act of leveling it at me; in fact, I leveled him and continued.
There were shouts of “There he goes,” and “Call for more backup,” but it was, to my ears, more like the bleating of sheep than the baying of hounds. The fog still protected me as I crossed the street and climbed up onto the second story porch of a tall old house; a house that, now that I think of it, is not too dissimilar to Jim’s.
I scrabbled up onto the roof (I wonder if anyone in the house heard my footfalls, and, if they did, what they thought was happening) and from there managed, just barely, to reach the roof of the house next to it. I’m glad the houses are close together in that part of the city, and insert same parenthetical remark as above.
There was, by now, a great deal of activity below me; I could make out the flashing lights of several police cars, and I could see where their headlights cut the fog; but they would not look at the rooftops. I took the time to catch my breath, wanting suddenly to laugh aloud at them scurrying around down there like so many ants whose overworked simile has been disturbed.
I didn’t laugh, however. After a few moments to recover I made my way home. I was as careful as I could be in my state of anxiety, exhaustion, and weakness; at all events I made it safely into the house without any other incidents.
Jim took one look at me and I think he almost swore. “What happened?” he said.
I closed the window and sank down into the bloodstained gray chair. “The police know what I did-at least some of it-and know what I look like.”
He whistled. “Do they know where you live?”
“I don’t think so, although, now that you mention it, there are neighbors who know what I look like, and the police are already suspicious of this house, so they might put things together.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. That is, I don’t know in the long run.”
“What about the short run?”
“For one thing, I’m going to visit Jill first thing tomorrow.”
“I would imagine. What else?”
I didn’t answer, but I suppose I must have looked disgusted, because Jim said, “What is it?”
“It’s how they identified me, curse them. I wouldn’t mind all the rest, but…”
When I didn’t go on, he said, “But what?”
“They know what my coat looks like. I’m going to have to stop wearing it, damn it to Hell.”
Predictably, Jim looked disapproving at the profanity, but he also laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
“Some guys sure got it rough,” he said.
“Go suck astral eggs,” I told him, and came up to the typing machine to set it all down.
ELEVEN
a byss n. 1. a. The primeval chaos. b. The bottomless pit; hell. 2. An unfathomable chasm; a yawning gulf. 3. Any immeasurably profound depth or void.
A sense of perspective would be helpful now. It is not the end of the world that the police know what I look like. If I can’t evade a few cops, I don’t deserve to. Can they see in the dark? Can they peer through walls? Hell, I can see them coming well before they see me, if I stay at all alert.
They don’t know where I live. They don’t where Susan lives. They don’t know where I play cards. They don’t know the street corners where I pick up hookers; or even that I do so. They know I have a really nice coat, and that means I won’t be able to wear it any more. A shame, but I’ve lived through worse.
Once Laura and I had to hide out in a Paris sewer for three nights and three hellish days; I thought I was going to die. She never told me from whom or what we were hiding. The rats would come and do tricks for us, and moths would fly down and arrange themselves in pretty aerial patterns for us, Laura would tell me stories, and I would make up poems for her, and that was the sum total of our entertainment.
Come to think of it, that was when she told me I ought to be a poet, and after that she made me write every day, which I continued to do until she left me, after which I stopped until just recently.
But that is neither here nor there. What I remember most clearly is that each day I would get weaker, and hungrier; and by the end of the third day, when she decided it was safe again, I couldn’t move at all; I just lay there and moaned. She had to carry me out, and she was in scarcely better shape than I was. I remember her warning me on the first day that a knife wound, or even a beating, could be fatal during the hours of daylight, and I thought that it hardly needed any sort of injury at all. She brought us up, somewhere, in an alley, and we lay there together until a drunk stumbled over us, cursing, and that was how we survived.
If I could live through that, I should not be unduly afraid of a couple of police officers who don’t even know what they’re looking for.