“He has a gun!” Catherine screamed.
“In the house, the house!” shouted Peten Peter backed through the porch doorway, as I did the same across the gravel drive. I heard him tell her to bring him something. Then he came right out to the banister again. This was damn brave. He threw out his arms, and began making a sort of speech. I was in the dark, but I had fallen in a coil of those same bushes in the middle of the driveway that the back end of my T-bird had been in.
“How many of you are there? Do you know there is a young woman here? What can you want? Show yourself! Are you such cowards?” and so on. I ran across the other side of the driveway then and got into the trees near the fence. He was still declaiming, framed perfectly in the light. He was in shirt and tie and his legs were far apart and his pants were baggy. God help him if there’d been somebody in the yard really wanting to shoot him. Then he met Catherine at the door. Her little arms were full of guns. I’d always known he had them. He came forth with a shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other.
He began shooting at the hedge right down from him, and then toward the gate. I hoped Silas had made it out of the yard. I heard the bullets skinning the road outside the gate, nowhere near me. He snapped the pistol. He was empty. I think it was a.22. Then he walked off the veranda and pounced into the yard, in front of his car. I ran out the gate then. I’d waited too long, wanting to see her again. But I was always fast on my legs.
First thing I heard was a triumphant shout and a blast from the big gun, then another and another. Two more. Rooooooom, Rooooooom. Then there was a bigger ruff sound, and I looked around to witness a rose-shaped explosion of flame in the yard. The Chrysler seemed to lift, on fire. The flame was twenty feet high and awfully close to the veranda. I was making a dash, but even running I could guess what had happened. The bastard had shot the gas tank on his own car. There were more shotgun blasts. He’d reloaded. He was taking care of those of us who had not fled the light of the flames. He was flushing out the last coward.
The Pontiac wasn’t there when I got to the blacktop. Then it came toward me, from the direction of Canton, slowly. Silas was driving. I was hacked. They seemed on the verge of not even letting me in.
“Harry, Harry! What did you do?” asked Bet.
“Nobody was expecting this, with damn guns and fire. What’d you do, throw a match down the gas tank of his car, didn’t you. You killed him, you shot …” Silas said.
As we drove off I looked out, and what a scene over the little hill — there was a pulsing orange glow fifty feet over Peter’s house. They had been looking at this for several minutes. The house was burning.
I swore I had not done it. Really, honestly, believe me, trust me, I begged them. I told them they had to be on my side in this thing.
“Fleece wanted to leave you. He was the one. He said we should forget your damn name,” said Silas.
“He set it on fire himself,” I said. I stared at Fleece, and Fleece stared murderously at the back of Silas’s head.
While we were deciding what to do, the fire truck from Canton came screaming up the road behind us and Silas took us away.
“What you’ve got to do is simply forgive me for a simple act of cowardice.”
“I don’t have to do that. No I don’t.”
“I never said forget your name. Silas embellished that one on. Don’t just sit there on the bed cleaning your gun.”
“What would you do?”
“Throw it in a lake.”
“Nope.”
“Do real hombres say that? ‘Nope’?”
I kept rubbing the gun. If I rubbed long enough, Geronimo appeared in my head, like a genie. He sat down and lay back as if in some chair of my soul and said, What can you show me? What have you done with your hair, your leg, your arm, your fire power, your fire water? There was a fine, private, steady security having him there. How have you exasperated the man or men you despise? How are you going about getting your woman? He watched me, leaning back in his chair with the pleasure of an old ghost who had nothing to lose. And mainly he said: brood—that’s it, your natural state, not think, you know what a fraud that is for you; brood, and take my shape. Brood on the despair of not being me, that too; and brood on the fact that even though you ain’t me, cheap fame is some fame.
“Well, you do have this,” said Fleece, picking up the pink edition of The Jackson Daily, where on the second page it read.
gunman or gunmen he routed after a molotov cocktail type gasoline explosive was thrown on his porch, said Lepoyster. Lepoyster said he replied at first with his own pistol and then took his shotgun to the front yard, which was afire. “I revolved amid fire seeing that the house was an inferno and rushed back to assure the safety of my niece. My last act was to telephone the Canton fire house. Thank God the wires ran in back of the house and I was able to make fruitful connection. My niece and I withdrew to the old well with naught but clothes on our backs, myself armed, I assure you. They had taken to their heels, whoever they were.”
Lepoyster said his niece was upset and unavailable for comment. He said she saw a man “of indefinite race” in a bright multi-colored garment near the porch and sounded the alarm.
“Our home is half gone in flame and it was the home of fond memories for us both. We could not buy it back. I shall not mention our future quarters.”
Asked if he had any idea as to the identity of the attackers or their motives, Lepoyster replied, “I shall remain alert and armed.”
“That’s right,” I said. “No one can take that away from me.” I was beginning to feel easy in the cheap fame and the fear of it. I mean the fear of the police, and the fame of having ignited this baroque stream of fraudulent melodrama in Colonel Lepoyster. Getting his sentences all together, Peter had probably not had time to touch his niece for several days.
“It’s even nice and pink, for your scrapbook.”
“What more could a gunman or gunmen want?”
“You say you fired first, but up in the air. You just popped up and shot, twice. You didn’t say anything.”
“I never said that.” In truth, I’d just recalled that I had said something. “I yelled, ‘Stop!’ twice.”
“You don’t mean Peter yelled ‘Stop! Stop!’? Now he, that’s exactly his variety of …” Fleece held up a finger.
“I know. But it was me.”
“Stop what? Was he pawing her?”
“No. Or not yet. But he had her under his wing, and that fern, that damn fern, was so large, spread out, it looked like they were in a jungle alone from where I was looking at them. They were drinking liquor; she could hardly drink it it was so strong, the girl. Remember he’d just seen her in the musical like I had. Remember the speed he drove over there…”
“Would you forgive me if I said I could understand all that? You love the girl, don’t you?”
I avoided that one for a moment. “No, I can’t forgive you for wanting to leave me. If I forgave you for that, where would it end, forgiving you? Vomiting on me, damn you, and—”
“Ah shut up! I don’t have to beg. I don’t have to apologize to anybodyl Silas heard that stupid slut you’re so hot for. He said she was a real spelling-bee queen.”