Clay returned the smile.
“I’d have known already if he was,” he said.
Willy saw a sudden burst of white among the pines up ahead.
For a moment he thought it was a large white bird swiftly moving through the tangled vegetation. There was a sudden flutter, like that of wings, and then an unexpected silence — whatever was in the thicket had been observed, but had observed as well. The silence lengthened. He heard an insect buzzing somewhere off to the side of the road, and then there was movement again, lower, more cautious this time, a stealthy measured crawl — that was a human being in there. Willy pulled back the bolt on his rifle and eased a cartridge into the firing chamber.
“Who’s there?” he said.
There was no answer.
He moved down the road quickly, taking up a position near where he had spotted the intruder. He held the butt of the rifle in tight against his hip, the muzzle pointing into the scrub palmettos, his finger curled inside the trigger guard. His thoughts of the girl in the Stern house and his first talk with Clay, and now this unexpected encounter with someone, the prospect that he might within the next few moments be squeezing the trigger again, be killing again, filled him with an almost unbearable excitement.
“Who is it?” he said again, and again received no answer but the whispering friction of someone crawling swiftly through the tangle. He wet his mustache with his tongue, and left the road.
The mosquitoes were upon him instantly. They swarmed up from a thousand hidden pores and filled the air in a dense humming cloud. He swatted at them and swore loudly, tripping on exposed pine roots, pushing his way deeper into the thicket, the muzzle of his rifle brushing aside the fans of palmetto leaves. There was cactus too in the tangled confusion of the thicket, and always the high omnivorous hum of the mosquitoes and beneath that in the distance the sound of a human being pushing steadily toward the main highway. There was a sudden loud crashing sound, a startled moan, the flutter of wings, the strident note of a bird in flight — and then silence.
He’s fallen, Willy thought.
Something quickened inside him. He thought again of the man in the bed, waiting to be killed, daring Willy to kill him, and somehow he equated him with the fallen man ahead. The tangled vegetation became a willful adversary now as he chopped his way through with the muzzle of his rifle, the mosquitoes a formidable enemy determined to overwhelm him as he swatted and slapped and swore and stumbled. There was a patch of white in the clearing ahead. Willy’s heart began pounding fiercely. He swallowed and came closer; his hand on the muzzle of the Springfield was cold with sweat.
He pushed into the clearing.
It was a woman.
She was lying unconscious on the ground, a cut on her forehead, the blood trickling down slowly past her eyebrows and along the side of her nose. She wore white, rubber-soled flat shoes. Her nylons had been ripped by the cactus, tom to their gartered tops which showed where the white skirt of her uniform had pulled back over her thighs.
8
Marvin’s gaze roamed the walls of the paint shop in secret, brown eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, searching. He had never before realized how much junk there could be in a room, and his eyes recorded the trivia as dutifully as a ribbon clerk preparing inventory.
He was looking for something he could use.
He did not know what this was all about, nor did he particularly care. He knew only that he was a prisoner. Being a prisoner, he automatically planned escape. He did not know how he would escape or when he would escape, but he knew that he would. That was the only thing on his mind. Escape.
He knew he would have to do it alone.
He could not count on Costigan because he was a cripple. He could not count on his mother or father, or on Selma, either, though a man was certainly supposed to be able to count on his wife. Nor could he count on the old guy they’d dragged in, who looked like a prime example of a Bowery bum if ever Marvin had seen one. As usual, it got down to a simple fact, and the fact was that Marvin Tannenbaum, B.A., M.A., and working for his Ph.D. at Columbia University in the city of New York, Marvin Tannenbaum, as had always been the case throughout his entire life, from when his father was a general practitioner on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, and then after that to when his father began specializing and they moved to the Grand Concourse just off 183rd Street, all those years Marvin Tannenbaum — B.A. from City College, M.A. from Columbia — had been looking out for number one, and there was no one he could count on now but number one.
He had married Selma Rosen because she was a helpless fluttering sort of girl who wouldn’t know which subway to take to school if he didn’t direct her, had loved her for the very scatterbrained cute puzzled way she had of turning life’s simplest matters into vast and complex mysteries. The teen-age girl who was Selma Rosen was very pleasant to have around. There was a nice wholesome quality about her clean-scrubbed face and brushed brown hair, her lithe body, legs long and coltlike, breasts comfortably pleasant but not too enticing to other fellows, almost a shiksa look about her, almost. She was a cute teen-age kid when they got married, nineteen years old and both of them still in college, and he loved the open-eyed innocence of her in bed, the giggling sweetness she brought to the act of love, the kooky college-girl things she said, the odd shocked way she had of laughing at even a mildly dirty joke. She was a frolicsome teen-ager when they were graduated from City College together, twenty-two years old and cute as a button, moving impulsively and with an awkward grace, brimming with plans that were nutty and unrealistic. She was still a frisky little teen-ager — but she happened to be twenty-six years old.
Marvin did not know when he had become a father to the world at large, but he knew he did not enjoy the role. He was twenty-eight years old, and he had been playing father to Selma from the moment he’d met her, and father to the elder Tannenbaum ever since he had had his coronary. Marvin wanted a father of his own who would pick him up in his arms and carry him up the three flights of stairs to their third-floor apartment on Bathgate Avenue; he wanted a father with strong arms; he wanted someone he could go to and say, “Pop, I’m having trouble with Selma. Pop, I don’t love her. What shall I do?”
“What is the trouble, son?” his father would say.
Pop, he would say, she’s still a teen-ager. Pop, I don’t want a teen-ager in my bed any more. I don’t want to come home at the end of the day and listen to all these cockamamie problems she’s made up out of nothing. I’m tired when I get home, I want to rest. She’s always crying, Pop. She cries about everything. If she can’t get the car in the garage she starts bawling. Pop, I can’t stand it any more. That’s why I came down here; I had to talk this over with you. I want to divorce her, Pop. I can’t deal with everything all alone any more, I need some help, she’s too goddamn helpless, I’m sick of it. That big wide-eyed crap in bed. Pop, we’ve been married close to six years. When the hell is she going to become something more than a person I do things to, a person who lies back on the pillow with a shocked awed almost religious look on her face? I’m sorry, Pop, but isn’t marriage supposed to be something special? Isn’t it? Pop, I don’t love her, I want out!
He didn’t have a wife, and he didn’t have a father either.
Oh, God, he wanted to be on a tropical island someplace.
He wanted sixteen girls to wait on him hand and foot and bathe him in oil and feed him coconut and pineapple and make love to him with the ocean murmuring against the shore and the breeze wafting through the palm fronds, balmy. God, oh God, he did not want to carry the whole damn world, he wanted to rest, he wanted to relax, he wanted to escape.