♦
Henderson Dores walks briskly down Park Avenue towards the forties. It looks quite different now the rain has stopped and the warm midday sun makes everything steam and exhale. He finds it hard to believe that a few hours ago he was creeping through the neat shrubs of the central reservation, clad only in a cardboard box. It might have happened to a different person…
He cuts over on Fifty-seventh and then down Fifth. Huge puddles still prove obstacles to traffic and there is much irate hooting of horns, and colourful oaths fill the air. He turns onto Forty-seventh at the Eastern Airlines building and walks along it until he sees the delicatessen where Irene goes for lunch. He walks with measured purposeful tread.
If everyone wants to be happy, and everyone is going to die, then there’s really no option, he tells himself, suddenly seeing everything with a new clarity. The whole can of worms took on some sort of focus; the immense hill of beans arranged itself in some sort of order. Teagarden and his zencing, his own shyness, Beckman’s blinks, Melissa and her dogs, Bryant’s breasts, Gage’s boxing, Shanda’s baby, Cora’s sadness, the general’s WAC, Demeter and Baubo, and, finally, his own father’s fatal encounter with a flying tin of pineapple chunks one hot day in the Burmese jungle in 1943.
He pushes open the door. Irene sits with a pleasant young man, not unlike Pruitt Halfacre. Henderson approaches.
“Irene,” he says, “I’m back. It’s all over.”
Irene swings round, an ambiguous expression on her face.
“DORES, YOU BASTARD!”
People scream, plates drop with a crash. Henderson crouches instinctively and the first shot smashes into the plasti-pine veneer above Irene’s booth.
Duane stands in the doorway, his fat face shiny with hot tears, shaking gun in both hands.
“YOU STOLE HER YOU BASTARD!”
Henderson, bent double, plunges through the bright plastic strips that hang from the lintel of the kitchen door. Various oriental chefs in damp singlets are surprised to see him scramble through the cookers and kitchen units towards the rear exit. From behind him come more screams and crashing furniture as Duane pursues.
Henderson explodes into the mean alleyway between Forty-seventh and Forty-sixth, barging heavily into a tramp picking through the trash cans.
“Sorry,” Henderson gasps, regaining his balance.
The tramp’s face is familiar. The shades, the trilby, the raincoat…
“The furrier at midnight—”
“I know,” Henderson yells. “I know all about that now!”
He turns and runs up the alleyway, running as though his life depended on it (and it does), his legs pounding, his hands clawing air, striving with all his might and all his effort to reach the distant, sunlit vision of the teeming streets ahead.
EOF