“I suppose you’ve got a million questions to ask me?”
“Have I asked you any?”
“Not a one.”
“Jan, two people have to have some sort of a code. Let’s make ours a code of no questions. When either of us wants the other to know something, we’ll tell it without waiting for questions. Okay?”
She put her hand on his arm, stopped him. She held her hand out. “Shake on it, mister.”
He took her hand quickly. Her clasp was firm and warm.
“No questions?” she asked.
“No questions,” he said, smiling down at her.
“And no regrets?”
“No regrets, Jerry,” he said.
“Mister, right there is where you buy me that beer.”
A Corpse in His Dreams
(Mystery Book Magazine, Spring 1949)
In his dream, as in a thousand dreams before, Alicia Crane called to him, her voice thin, sweet, clear.
“Matthew! Matthew, darling. Matthew Otis!”
“But you’re dead!” he said in his dream. “Dead, dead, dead, dead.”
Odd that she couldn’t or wouldn’t believe. And what was she doing here in China? There was a battle coming up.
Above the sound of her voice he could hear the sound of battle. The distant slap of rifles, the surly crump of mortar, the guttural whack of a grenade.
“You’re dead, Alicia Crane! Dead!”
But he couldn’t make her hear. “Matthew! Matthew, darling!”
He awoke, his leg cramped from being braced against the green plush of the seat in front of him. The train, huffing laboriously along the coast toward Cranesbay, rocked and jolted on the uneven railbed. The vivid dream made everything unreal. Yes, Alicia was dead. He had killed her just nine years before. Nine years this month.
November 1939.
He turned to peer out into the darkness. The lights of a farmhouse appeared, then fled off into the night.
He picked the magazine up off the littered floor, and turned to the article he had been reading when he fell asleep. “Cheap Death in China,” by Matthew Otis. With a wry smile he reread the editor’s introduction:
As this is being printed, Matthew Otis is on his way back to this country after three long years with the Chinese armies. In order to gather the news, Mr. Otis has lived as a Chinese soldier. Only those who have seen the Chinese armies know the incredible hardships that Mr. Otis has endured in order to bring you factual reporting of the Chinese Civil War. Matthew Otis is a tall, powerful man who looks older than his thirty-two years. His face is tanned, and in his gray eyes is a dim reflection of the misery he has witnessed in his...
Matthew yawned and put the magazine on the seat beside him. Maybe one day he’d write an article that would tell them the motivation behind his efforts. Maybe one day he’d tell them he had lived in the distant places of the earth because he fled from a girl who would not stay properly dead.
And he would have to tell them that he was returning to Cranesbay for the first time since it had happened, hoping that in some way he would be able to rid himself of the nightmare that had been his ever since the day of her death. The night of her death.
He smiled. That would be a fine article. He would tell how during that first year he had carried her, fresh and vivid, in his mind. The tone of her voice. The warmth of her lips. The proud, high way in which she carried her head.
But in nine years his memories had grown more, rather than less, vivid. He could not escape her. She made all his days of danger tasteless, his vain seeking of delight insipid.
He knew that he was afraid to come back.
And yet if he was ever to be able to live in the present and in the future, it had to be done.
Guilt is a hand across the eyes, a knife at the heart. There can be no peace, no joy, no ecstasy, no pride in accomplishment. With guilt all there can be is a pseudo-life where one goes through the motions expected of an adult, and carries in his mind the horrors imagined by a child.
The aged coach jolted and the gray smoke hung in wet strands across the stale air yellowed by the coach lights. Across the aisle a doughy woman reached for a whining child that fought to get away from her. In the seat ahead two sailors, two tired blue-and-white memories of wartime, slept noisily with their mouths open.
He felt the rising tide of excitement, a chill that ran down his back, a hollow feeling in his stomach. But it was the excitement of a man who, alone in a factory at night, has caught his fingers in slow-moving gears and knows that the gears will inevitably pull in his arm, elbow, shoulder, killing him at last.
The excitement of a man whose car is plunged into a dizzy skid across sheer ice toward the inevitable precipice.
Matthew Otis on vacation!
Matthew Otis returning to appease the ghosts of long ago. A private Munich.
Matthew Otis returning to the overgrown village of Cranesbay, where he had become an adult, fallen in love with Alicia Crane and killed her.
The train’s whistle was a lonesome call at a deserted crossing. Out there in the darkness was the ocean. To his left were the high hills, shrouded by night. Ahead would be the crescent of Cranesbay, a city carelessly arranged on the shelf of land between the hills and the sea. The train whistled again and something within him answered the lonely cry.
There was no way to leap out into the night rain, turn back across half the earth. It was done. The symbol of fulfillment was the little orange cardboard ticket wedged into the window lever. In his mind was the memory of her echoing voice in his dream.
It was mingled with the memory of long ago, when her voice had been different. When her eyes had looked on him and found him good. When her hand...
Alicia Crane reached her hand across the table and traced the blue vein on the back of his hand.
The dance floor was crowded and the band was giving a not ineffective imitation of Goodman.
“Matt,” she said softly, “what are the words you use when two people are like this?”
He smiled at her. “Meant for each other.”
“Don’t sound so flip, darling,” she said.
“I can’t help it, Alicia. Nineteen thirty-nine is a wisecrack period. A hundred years ago I’d be swearing eternal devotion and getting my tight pants all dirty by kneeling in front of you, my right hand over my heart.”
“Couldn’t you do that now, Matt?”
“Sure, but you’d think I was clowning. No, honey. I have to tell you I love you as though it were the punch line in a wisecrack and then you believe me. I love you, honey.”
“I want to be kissed,” she said firmly.
He began to get up, saying, “We can take a walk out to the car.”
“Yes, but later, Matt. When I was a kid I always saved the icing until last. Let’s just sit and think of how nice that kiss is going to be. Then it will taste even better.”
She smiled and something about the way her gray eyes looked made his heart pause in its beat.
Suddenly the smile faded as she looked toward the door.
“What is it?”
“Roy Bedford, Matt. I was afraid for a minute he was drunk. He hates you, Matt.”
“I don’t blame him, honey. He had the nicest girl in the world and she belongs to me now. Let him hate me.”