The biggish head rolled a little to one side on the little stem of a neck as he looked up at me and the face began its painful twitching. "Yeah," he said, "yeah–the son-of-a-bi-bi-bitch and I-I-I shot him."
"Yeah," I said, "you shot Stanton–" and I thought with an instantaneous stab of Adam Stanton alive a long time back and now dead, and I hated the malformed, sad little creature before me–"yeah, you shot him.
The head rolled slightly and tiredly on the neck, and he repeated, "I-I-I shot him."
But suppose you don't know," I said, leaning, "suppose there was somebody behind Stanton, somebody who framed him to do it."
I let that sink in, and watched his face twitch while no sound came.
"Suppose," I continued, "suppose I could tell you who–suppose I could prove it–what would you do?"
Suddenly his face wasn't twitching. It was smooth as a baby's and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.
"What would you do?" I demanded "I'd kill the son-of-a-bitch," he said. And he had not stuttered at all.
"They'd hang you," I said.
"I'd k-k-k-kill him. They couldn't h-h-h-hang me before I killed him."
"Remember," I whispered, leaning closer, "they'd hang you."
He stared up at me, prying into my face. "Who-who-who is it?"
"They'd hang you. Are you sure you'd kill him?"
"Who-who-who–" he began. Then he clutched my coat. "Y-y-you know–" he said, "y-y-you know something you ain't t-t-t-telling me."
I could tell him. I could say to him, meet me here at three o'clock, I want to show you something. I could bring the stuff from Sadie, the stuff that lay up in my room in a desk, and he would take one look. One look. It would be like touching a trigger.
His hands were clutching and clawing at my coat. "T-t-tell me," he was saying.
One look. It was perfect. I could meet him here in the afternoon. We could step into the latrine and he could take one look, and I would go home and burn the stuff. Hell, why burn it? What had I done? I even warned the little burger they'd hang him. They had nothing on me.
He was clawing at me, importunately and feebly, saying, "T-t-tell me, you better t-t-tell me now."
It would be too easy. It was perfect. And the perfect mathematical irony of it–the perfect duplication of what Duffy had done–struck me, and I felt like laughing out loud. "Listen here," I said to Sugar-Boy. "Stop clawing on me and listen here and I'll–"
He stopped clawing and stood meekly before me.
He would do it, I knew he would do it. And it was such a joke on Duffy I almost laughed out loud. And as the name of Duffy flashed across my mind I saw Duffy's face, large and lunar and sebaceous, nodding at me as at the covert and brotherly appreciation of a joke, and even s I opened my lips to speak the syllables of his name, he winked. He winked right at me like a brother.
I stood there stock-still.
Sugar-Boy' face began to twitch again. He was going to ask again. I stared down at him. "I was kidding," I said.
There was absolute blankness on his face, and then an absolute murderousness. There wasn't any flare of fury. It was a cold and innocent and murderous certainty. It was as though his face had suddenly frozen in a split second in that certainty, and it looked like the face of a man who had been trapped and had died in the snow long ago, centuries ago–back in the ice age, perhaps–and the glacier brings it down all those centuries, inch by inch, and suddenly, with its primitive purity and lethal innocent, it stares at you through the last preserving glaze of ice.
I stood there for what seemed forever. I couldn't move. I was sure I was a goner.
Then the ice face wasn't there. It was just Sugar-Boy's face on a head to big for the neck, and it was saying, "I-I-I durn near d-d-done it."
I ran my tongue over my dry lips. "I know it," I said.
"Y-y-you oughtn't d-d-d-done me that way," he said in humble complaint.
"I'm sorry."
"Y-y-you know h-h-how I feel, and y-y-you oughtn't d-d-done me like that."
"I know how you feel," I said. "And I'm sorry. I really am."
"F-f-ferget it," he said. He stood there, seeming smaller than before, slumped and forlorn as though he were a doll that had lost some of his sawdust.
I studied him. Then I said, as much to myself as him, I suppose, "You really would have done it."
"It w-w-was the B-B-Boss," he said.
"Even if they'd hang you."
"They w-w-wasn't n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss. And they k-k-killed him. They h-h-had to go and k-k-kill him."
He shuffled his feet on the cement floor and looked down at them. "He could t-t-talk so good," he half-mumbled with his stuttering. "The B-B-Boss could. Couldn't nobody t-t-talk like him. When he m-m-made a speech and ev-ev-everybody y-y-yelled, it looked l-l-like something was gonna b-b-bust inside y-y-you." He touched his chest with his hand to indicate where something looked like it might bust inside you. Then he looked questioningly at me.
"Sure," I agreed, "he was a great talker."
We stood there for half minute more without anything to say to each other. He looked at me and then down at his feet. Then back at me, and said, "W-w-well, I reckon I'll b-b-be getting on."
He put out one of his hands to me and I took it and gave it a shake.
"Well, good luck," I said.
And he went up the stairs, bending his knees excessively for the stairs, for his legs were stumpy. When he used to drive the big black Cadillac he always had a couple of flat cushions–the kind you take with you on picnics or in a canoe–to prop behind him so he could properly work the clutch and break pedals.
So that was the last I saw of Sugar-Boy. He had been born over in Irish Town. He had been the runt the big boys shoved around in the vacant lot. They had played baseball, but he hadn't been good enough to play. "Hey, Sawed-Off," they'd say, "go git me that bat." Or, "Hey, Sawed-Off, go git me a coke." And he had gone to get the bat or the coke. Or they'd say, "Aw, dry up, Mush-Mouth, write me a letter." And he had dried up. But somehow, sometimes, he had learned what he could do. Those stubby arms could flip the steering wheel of a car as clean as a bee martin whips around the corner of a barn. Those pale-blue eyes, which didn't have any depth, could look down the barrel of a.38 and see, really see for one frozen and apocalyptic instant, what was over yonder. So he had found himself one day in the big black Cadillac with a couple of tons of expensive machinery pulsing under his fingers and the blue-steel.38 riding in the dark under his left armpit like a tumor. And the Boss was by his side, who could talk so good.
"Well, good look," I had said to him, but I knew what his luck would be. Some morning I would pick up the paper and see that a certain Robert (or it was Roger?) O'Sheean had been killed in an automobile crash. Or had been shot to death by unidentified assailants while he sat in the shadow outside the Love-Me-and-Leave-Me roadhouse and gambling hell operated by his employer. Or had that morning walked unassisted to the scaffold as a result of having been quicker on the draw than a policeman named, no doubt, Murphy. Or perhaps that was romantic. Perhaps he would live forever and outlive everything and his nerve would go (likker, dope, or just plain time) and he would sit, morning after morning while the gray winter rain sluiced down the high windows, in the newspaper room of the public library, a scrawny bald little old man in greasy, tattered clothes bent over a picture magazine.
So perhaps I hadn't done Sugar-Boy any favor after all in not telling him about Duffy and the Boss and allowing him to whang straight to his mark and be finished like a bullet when it strikes in.. Perhaps I had robbed Sugar-Boy of the one thing which he had earned out of the years he had lived and which was truly himself, and everything else to come after, no matter what it was, would be waste and accident and the sour and stinking curdle of truth like what you find in the half-full bottle of milk you had left in the ice-box when you went away for your six-week vacation.