“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” said the man in the business suit.
“This boy lies,” the chief said. “He lied before and he’s lying now. He’s a punk from New Jersey who we found with a gun and the widow’s insurance money in his kick. He’s making this all up.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I made up Tommy Crapo and I made up Crapo Industrial Services, didn’t I? Or did I get it from the newspaper? That must be it, they must advertise in the newspaper. I can give you Red James’ op number, the one he put on his reports, but that’ll be made up too. I can give you the Illinois plate number of a cream-colored La Salle coupe with white sidewalls, but that’s made up too. It’s all made up. Buster is made up too, he doesn’t exist.”
“Who is Buster?”
“Buster who got Mrs. James to waive her rights for two hundred and fifty Industrial Services’ dollars. Oh listen, mister, why doesn’t anyone ask the right questions around here? Look at this, a roomful of ace detectives and not one of them thinks to ask how I know so much, how I knew Lyle James, how I got to be his friend, what I’m doing in this lousy town. Is it an accident? Do you think I like going around getting my arm broken and stitches taken in my face? Do you think I do this for laughs?”
An amazing current, a manic surge, I couldn’t stop talking, listen Clara, listen! “I wonder at the human IQ when professionals cannot see through disguises. But if I was wearing a regular suit like this gentleman, if I was wearing my own suit and tie and my face was washed and my hair combed, then you would listen, oh yes. And if I told you Lyle Red James was not just an operative for Crapo but a double operative, that he really worked for the union, that they made him not two weeks after he came to this town, because you know, don’t you, he was not much good, he was a fool, a hillbilly, a rube, I mean they saw him coming! And they made him, and showed him how if he kept working and nobody the wiser, he’d get not only his pay envelope from Bennett and not only his salary from Crapo but his payoff from the union’s cash box! Why, this strike at Number Six was a decoy! They never intended to strike Jacksontown, that was to send the company on a wild-goose chase shipping its damn machines every which way. Oh yes, gentlemen, when that strike comes, and it is coming, the birds will be singing in Jacksontown, it will be a peaceful day at Number Six and you won’t know a thing till you hear it on the radio.”
“What’s this?” the businessman said. “What strike? Where?”
“Or maybe that isn’t a good enough reason for taking care of Lyle Red James, that he was a dirty double-crossing Benedict Arnold.”
It was an amazing discovery, the uses of my ignorance, a kind of industrial manufacture of my own. And the more it went on, the more I believed it, taking this fact and that possibility and assembling them, then sending the results down the line a bit and adding another fact and dropping an idea on the whole thing and sending it on a bit for another operation, another bolt to the construction, my own factory of lies, driven by rage, Paterson Autobody doing its day’s work. I was going to make it! This was survival at its secret source, and no amount of time on the road or sentimental education could have brought me to it if the suicidal boom of my stunned heart didn’t threaten my extinction.
“What strike, how do you know these things!” The businessman was beside himself. “Who is this fellow?” he said. “Damn it all, I want the truth. I want it now.”
The police chief went back behind his desk and sat down. He looked at me, fingered the corners of his mouth. He lifted his hat and ran his fingers through his hair and put his hat back on.
“You don’t like Crapo very much, do you?”
“We fancy the same girl,” I said.
“And that’s why you’re fingering him — or trying to?”
“No more than he’s done to me, Chief,” I said. “But I got a better reason: I don’t condone killing and neither does Mr. Bennett.”
“Mr. who Bennett?” he said, frowning terribly.
“Mr. F. W. Bennett of Bennett Autobody. Is there any other?”
Here the man in the suit found a chair near the wall and sat down and glared at me.
“I’m a special confidential operative,” I said. “I was sent here by Mr. F. W. Bennett personally to check on the Crapo organization. Their work has been falling off lately. Mr. Bennett takes nothing for granted, especially not the loyalty of gangsters. I worked into the confidence of Crapo’s chief man in Number Six, Lyle James. Mr. Bennett himself arranged for the next door to be available. He thought I had a better disguise to be married and so I brought with me a lady”—here I faltered—“I happened to be serious about. This is the unofficial part, Chief, and I expect every man in this room to keep quiet about this part. I met this lady when she was with Mr. Crapo and we took to each other. We couldn’t help it. And, well, he is not a man to forgive, as you can see by my condition and the circumstance of my being here before you.”
And now there was silence in the room.
“You are awful young to be what you say,” said the police chief. He turned to the others. “It’s too crazy. Jacksontown don’t need stuff like this. There are so many holes in this story it’s like a punchboard. Why should Mr. Bennett need to do these things, you tell me? And if he did them, why would he find some kid like this not old enough to wipe the snot from his nose? No, I’m sorry, Mr. Paterson,” he said, “you’re smart enough to throw the names around, but you were a punk when we pulled you in and as far as I’m concerned you’re still a punk.”
“My name isn’t Paterson,” I said. I smiled and looked at the man in the suit and vest. “It’s easy enough to check,” I said. “In my billfold on a piece of paper is the phone number of Mr. Bennett’s residence at Loon Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. You may not know about that place, it’s his hideaway. Call him for me. I get a phone call of my choosing anyway, isn’t that the law? That’s who I choose to call. Tell him also I’m sorry about the Mercedes. It may be on the lot of Buckeye State Used Cars in Dayton, Ohio. But it may not. Tell him I’m very sorry.”
I thought in the silence that ensued they could hear my heart beating its way back to survival.
“Yes, sir,” the chief said, “and who should we say is calling?”
One of the men laughed. I was livid with rage. Oh Penfield. Oh my soul. I could barely get the words out. “You stupid son of a bitch,” I said to the chief. “Tell Mr. Bennett it’s his son calling. Tell him it’s his son, Joe.”
41
I don’t remember the names of towns I remember the route, southwest through Kentucky and Arkansas, across northern Oklahoma and the top of the Texas Panhandle and then into New Mexico, a spooncurve that I thought would drop us gently into the great honeypot of lower California.
We drove through small boarded-up towns, we drove down dirt rut roads and through hollows where shacks were terraced on the hill beside the coal tipple. We drove through canyons of slag and stopped to pick up chunks of coal to burn in the stoves of our rented cabins. The road went along railroad tracks, alongside endlessly linked coalcars loaded and still.
We drove over wood-paved iron bridges I remember rivers frozen with swirls of yellow scum I remember whole forests of evergreen glazed in clear ice, shattered sunlight, I had to strap a slitted piece of cardboard over my eyes to see the road.
In January the thaw and false spring in the Southwestern air and when we were stopped at a roadside picnic grove for our lunch we could hear the thunderous cracks and groans of rivers we couldn’t see. But then it froze again, cold and snowless and I remember stretches of brown land treeless swells of hardscrabble imbedded with rotted-out car frames and broken farm tools.