“Jesus.”
“In the arm, maybe. Or the shoulder.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never shot a man before.”
Stoddard smiled. “Then it’s probably the only thing you haven’t done before.” Stoddard tried to know things about everybody he worked with. “You’ve developed yourself quite a reputation. Even for a man in your line of work. You get in and out, and there’s supposed to be no trouble.”
“After this is all over, I have to live in this town.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if there’s violence, the police are going to be looking for the thief double hard.”
Stoddard took out a cigar and lit it. The afternoon light was dying in the window. A pretty barmaid passed by just now. He did not want to be talking to this frightened little man.
“You might even enjoy it, Reynolds.”
“I doubt it.”
“Some men get accustomed to it.”
“I’m a thief,” he said again with a certain obstinate pride.
“I don’t want to have to worry about you. You’re getting a nice little nut for half an hour of work.”
“I don’t have any objections to the nut, Mr. Stoddard.”
“Good. Then you’ll do it?”
Reynolds smiled. “You’re a cold son of a bitch.”
“I just want to relax and have a quick drink here before I have to go back upstairs. And I can’t relax if I think you’re not going to do it right tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m going to do it right.”
“You’re going to shoot him?”
Reynolds hesitated only a moment. “I’m going to shoot him.”
“Good, then. It’s settled.”
“You really are a cold son of a bitch, you know that?” Reynolds said. But his words were not without a certain harsh admiration.
Chapter Eleven
Victor Sovich said, “You want to come with me?”
The woman looked at him. “Where you have in mind?”
“The next town, wherever that is.”
“My children?”
“Your mother’s across town.”
“I leave my children?”
“It’s no life for them, believe me.”
“But my children. I love them.”
“We’d come back through here every three or four months. The Midwest is good for me. I’d have to come back through here anyway.”
They were in bed. The sheets smelled of their sweat and their lovemaking and the wine they’d had just before. He sat propped up against the wall and took in the smells. He enjoyed them. In the window the light was dying. It had turned yellow and pink. Now it was purple dusk. Through the smashed window he could see the quarter-moon. He smiled to himself. She was going to go with him. Oh, she would protest and tell him what a good mother she was. They always did. They needed that dignity. There was no other way they could face what they were about to do. He knew they wouldn’t last long. These women never did. There would come a night or afternoon, some idle moment when he was shaving or bathing or reading a magazine, when he would suddenly have had enough of her, and then he would want to see her no longer. Then he would not be able to endure her touch or look at her body, clothed or unclothed, ever again.
“You like Maria.”
“She’s cute.”
“Couldn’t we at least take Maria?”
“I’d like to. It just wouldn’t be good for her.”
“Bobby, then. Perhaps it would be more appropriate for a boy to travel.”
“It wouldn’t be good for him, either.”
Now was her time to sulk. She rolled over in the bed, away from him. He put his hand on her warm back, feeling the graceful curve of it, how it so fetchingly gave way to her plump, tender buttocks and the magnificent sweep of her long legs.
“Don’t,” she said.
Now it was his turn to roll away.
He lay on his side, staring at the wall. He could see the dirty handprints the kids had left on it. He could smell where the cat shit in the corner. Maybe he didn’t want to take her with him tomorrow after all.
He kept staring at the quarter-moon and wondering about tomorrow. The nigger. He hated niggers and he wasn’t even sure why. Something happened to him when he fought colored men. Something even he was slightly afraid of. He never liked to feel out of control, but with niggers in the ring that was usually the way he felt, out of control.
He remembered the first time he’d killed one. How the crowd had become silent so abruptly, how the referee kept saying, “Goddammit, boy. Goddammit, you wake now, you hear?” But the nigger had been dead already. The way all niggers should be.
After the fight a reporter came back to his dressing room. The reporter kept asking him how he felt. He knew Stoddard would get angry if he said the wrong thing. There had been more than one hundred ring deaths in the past two years, and church groups were really protesting prizefights. He did not say anything stupid. His livelihood depended on his not saying anything stupid. He said instead the expected things. That he was sorry. That he hoped the boy’s family would understand. That he would say a prayer for the boy, in fact.
By the second time he had killed a colored boy, it was something most desirable for him to do. And not only for Stoddard’s sake, but for his own. He enjoyed killing.
She was crying now.
He said, “You’re a good mother. It’s not like you’re deserting them.”
“They’re my children.”
“We’ll see them often. I promise.”
“What would the priest think?”
He scowled. “The hell with the priest.” He remembered watching his sister die from smallpox. How the priest hovered. How the priest swooned. How the priest talked about an afterlife as if he really believed in it. As if we weren’t like cats and dogs and rats, animals that died and rotted. He had had no time for priests ever since.
She only cried all the more. “I suppose you would like me to give up my faith, too?”
He stayed on his side, looking at the quarter-moon.
It was always like this with them. They cried and then they got indignant and then they got angry. But they always came along.
Always.
Stephen Stoddard liked to walk the streets at dusk, just as the first fireflies appeared in parks and the electric lights appeared on the streets.
He passed from the downtown, with its barbershops and millinery stores and banks and jewelers and ice parlors, to an address he’d found in the newspaper.
Most cities these days had Evening Home Clubs, where young men could gather to discuss the issues of the day without consorting with the type of people you met in pumprooms and taverns.
He was most interested in discussing the gold standard, finding it the one topic that always provoked immediate and prolonged conversation.
Given the letter he carried in his suit coat, however, he wondered how able he would be to focus on a debate.
Now, as he walked, Stephen Stoddard shook his head. Incredibly the ex-Pinkerton he’d secredy hired a year ago had finally found Stephen’s mother. She lived in Portland, Oregon, half a continent away, and in the ten years since he’d last seen her, she’d gone on to start a whole new family. According to the photograph the ex-Pinkerton had enclosed with the letter, his mother was now plump, gray-haired, and surrounded by children bobbing around her like apples in a barrel.
His mother. He remembered soft, slender fingers and sweet songs hummed in the darkness. He remembered bread baking in the oven and the wet, clean scent of her long auburn hair just after she’d washed it. He remembered the sunlight on the new bicycle she’d bought him and moonlight on the silver ice of the skating rink.
He remembered her tears, too, how he’d been unable to stop them and felt the lesser for being so unable. The harshness of those tears. The increasing frequency of those tears.
Then she’d been gone, and gone forever.
Why, he’d never been able to understand exacdy, nor had his father been able or willing to explain.
Now he held in his possession a letter that promised to tell him. The letter had come the day before yesterday. He had still not opened it. He did not know if he was frightened or simply savoring this first word from his mother in all these years.