I picked it up right away and lit his Chesterfield for him.
“Thanks,” he said, weakly.
Pretty soon, he was unconscious again and as I sat there staring at him in the beam of my flashlight, I saw that even when he was sleeping he looked a lot like Mitch.
I picked up the flashlight and moved the beam real close to his wound and got a good look at it. The pussy stuff covered the blood now like an oil slick. His whole body trembled. The smell was awful.
I knew what I was seeing, of course. I was seeing a man in the final stages of his life. I felt sorry as hell for him.
“Barney?” I said.
A moment later he was in the doorway. “Look at him.”
“God, he looks terrible.”
“You know what we have to do?”
“Yeah. How long you think he’s got?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But not long if we don’t get an ambulance and a doctor real soon.”
We took a last look at Roy. He just sat there. His body was still twitching, his right leg especially. Even his eyelids, closed in sleep, twitched a little.
Then we got out of there.
We were going to get Roy some help and right then we didn’t think of him having to stand trial or going to prison or anything. We just wanted him to live.
We were a few hundred yards from the warehouse when the two shots rang out somewhere behind us in the prairie night.
And then I was running, running faster than I ever had in my life, down to the creek and across the grassy flat to the warehouse, and then straight up to the warehouse window. Barney was right behind me.
By the time I reached the closet, my lungs were heaving so hard I thought I might throw up.
Then I knelt next to Roy and played the flashlight over his face and chest. Touched the artery on his neck. Touched the artery in his wrist.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Barney said.
“Yeah.”
“Sonofabitch. Money’s gone, too.”
I looked. He was right. The money satchel was gone.
I brought the light down Roy’s torso, to see where he’d been shot. The first wound had been in his side. This one was right in his chest. There was a tiny black hole right in the center of this huge blooming flower of blood.
I shone the light to the floor where his right hand lay turned up, his gun grasped in his fingers.
I thought of him being unconscious when we left, of him being so weak that he couldn’t hold his lighter up.
There was no way he’d come to and grabbed his gun. Even a dumb teenager like me could figure out what had happened here.
“Cushing killed him in cold blood and then put that gun in Roy’s hand,” I said.
“And took the money.”
“And took the money.”
I guess until then the whole thing had been an adventure. When you grow up in a small town like Somerton, you keep hoping that something really remarkable will happen to you. And it sure did for us, finding Roy and all, and bringing him food and helping him hide out.
But now it was different. Now it was scary. One day outside one of the downtown taverns I saw two drunks get into it so viciously that one bit a piece of an ear off the other. Nobody could seem to get them apart. Finally, the tavern owner had to get out a hose and spray them down the way he would have two angry dogs. I remember thinking that for all the movie violence I’d seen, I really didn’t know much about the real thing — the way men beat on each other with a frenzy and a relish that makes me sick inside.
The way Roy had been killed made me sick inside. The way Cushing made me sick inside.
“What’re we gonna do?” Barney said.
“Tell the chief.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
Barney and I took one last look at Roy, bloody and waxen and dead, propped up sad and awkward against the wall. There was just this silence, a deeper silence than I’d ever heard before, and then I figured out what I was listening to — eternity. That’s what I was hearing, something I’d always heard about but never heard for myself before. Eternity.
iii
On the way in, Barney and I decided to tell our dads first — and let them tell the chief. It would be better that way, at least for us, even though telling Clarence and George wasn’t going to be easy.
There was a fight on TV when I reached the front porch. Clarence was a boxing fanatic. He sat there in those purple Bermudas of his and whaled away at empty air just like he was Marciano whaling away at an opponent. He liked Negro boxers fine, especially if they reminded him in any way of Joe Louis, whom he inevitably called “poor Joe Louis,” but for some reason he hated Mexican fighters. Maybe a Mexican beat him up once or something.
Anyway, that was the scene when I got home that night, Clarence alone in the living room in his purple Bermudas throwing lefts and rights and jumping up and down in his recliner and grunting and groaning loud enough to make the family cat look real spooked. Mom and Debbie were long gone, of course. They knew better than to watch Clarence at the fights.
Anyway, Clarence in his purple Bermuda shorts and throwing punches with great and noisy abandon — he turned and looked at me and said—
“Somethin’ wrong, son?”
“I need to talk to you, Dad.”
“Son, there’s a fight on.”
“I know there’s a fight on.”
“It’s Hurricane Jackson. He’s getting ready to throw his bolo punch.”
“Dad—”
His attention roamed back to the screen where two Negroes were pounding on each other.
“Dad—”
Glancing over at me desperately: “Son, is it anything that can wait?”
“No, Dad, I’m sorry but it can’t.”
“Is this real serious or something?”
“Real serious, Dad.”
“You want me to get your mom?”
“No, Dad. I just want to talk to you. Alone.”
“Then let’s go out to the kitchen. I need a beer.”
So we went out to the kitchen and sat down and—
He had a beer and I had a Pepsi.
“So, son, what is it?” Clarence said as we sat in the kitchen where it was at least ten degrees hotter than the living room. The kitchen was great in the winter but in the summer it was a sweat box with only one tiny window for a breeze.
“You know that money I told you I found?” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I didn’t find it. Somebody gave it to me.”
“Gave it to you? Who gave it to you?”
So I told him. Every single bit of it, right up to tonight where we left Roy dead in the warehouse.
“And Cushing killed him?”
“Yessir.”
“And it wasn’t self-defense, you don’t think?”
“Nosir, Roy couldn’t even hold up his lighter a few minutes earlier.”
“So Cushing murdered him in cold blood?”
“Yessir.”
“And then took the money?”
“Yessir.”
“You don’t have any doubt about that?”
“Nosir.”
He pawed sweat from his face. “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble, son.”
“Yessir.”
“Why the hell’d you help out a bank robber, anyway? And don’t tell me it was because he looked like Robert Mitchum. That’s the craziest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard of.” He shook his head. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, because he looked like fucking Mitch?”
Until that very moment in my young life, I had never heard Clarence use the F word. And issuing from his lips, it sounded both more vile and more silly than it ever had before.
“Chief Pike’ll probably bring charges against both you and Barney.”
“I know.”
“This is going to be pretty embarrassing at the Rotary.”