To which Frank Beachum answered: “I don’t want to die, Harlan.” And he began to cry. He buried his face in his hands and shook. Tears dripped out between his fingers. “Don’t let em kill me, man. I didn’t do anything. I swear to God, I don’t want to die.”
The Reverend Flowers put his arm around the crying man. He rested his cheek against his damp hair. He closed his eyes and prayed to God to give Beachum strength and comfort and peace. He wished he were stronger himself, more able in himself to do the job he was supposed to do.
And he wished this night were over. He hated himself for it, but God knew the truth, and he wished this night were done.
4
As for me, I was getting drunk. Right about that time, right about ten-twenty. My butt was planted solid as a tree trunk on a barstool in Gordon’s and I was knocking those beauties down as if Prohibition were about to come back in style. It didn’t take much to start me floating. I’d hardly had anything to eat all day. Midway through my fourth double whisky, I was feeling the tavern swing to and fro under me like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.
Gordon’s was a restaurant-bar on a tree-shaded corner of Euclid Avenue. The faded brickface under the green awning outside, the warm wooden interior hung with lanterns and a large selection of fashionable beers had made the place a regular hangout with young city suits and the women they hoped to love. It was often crowded, and sometimes the dart and reek of the sexual hunt could get distracting to a man with his mind on liquor. But on a summer Monday, it was quiet enough, with a soft murmur of conversation drifting out of the dining room, and the bar empty except for me and a guy watching the Cardinals on the TV hung above the bar’s far end.
“Neil!” I called. I rapped the bottom of my glass against the oakwood. “Neil-o! Neil-o-rama!”
Neil was the owner but a bartender by nature, and he was tending bar tonight. A lean, pale man with a thin, aesthetic face behind round wire-rimmed spectacles, he looked like Jean-Paul Sartre a little, only with a ponytail and a flowered shirt. He left his post under the TV and snagged a bottle of Johnnie Walker as he came toward me.
“You hear that ice clink, man, and you gotta come running. For mercy’s sake,” I said.
He tipped the bottle over my glass, poured out a generous helping. “You’re working at it tonight, Ev,” he said in his quiet, even voice. “I hope you left your car at home.”
“Hey,” I said. I lifted the glass, swirling it under my nose. “I am the greatest driver on the continent.”
“Uh-oh.”
“On any continent.”
“I’m talking to a dead guy,” said Neil. “Would you leave me your stamp collection?”
I drank and set the glass down. Laid a finger on the rim of the empty pretzel bowl. “Madder music and more munchies,” I said. And I drank again.
He swept the empty bowl away and replaced it with a full one. I grabbed a handful of pretzels.
“Haven’t eaten hardly all day,” I said.
Neil glanced longingly at the ballgame. Then, resigned, he leaned against the bar and did his best to concentrate on me.
“Too busy, that’s why,” I told him. “Too busy ruining my wife-my life, I mean. My wife and my life. And my job.”
“All in one day? You are a busy guy.”
“A tragedy should take place within the walls of a single city on a single day,” I told him. “Aristotle said that.”
“Yeah, he’s always in here saying that. Kooky old Aristotle, we call him. Crazy A.”
“Life imitates art.”
“Yeah. Does a pretty good Sophie Tucker too.”
“Right,” I said. I had no idea what either of us was saying but I nodded profoundly. Then I lit a cigarette. Then I drank some more scotch. “Did you hear the ice clink?” “Nope.”
“I thought I heard a little tinkle, a little … Ah, maybe not. What was I about to say?”
“You were about to tell me that women were different from men.”
“Oh yeah. Women and men, man-completely different.”
“Really?” said Neil. “I’ve never heard that before.”
“True,” I said. “Completely.” And I waved my cigarette around vaguely to show how different they were. “A man, see, his dick stands up, his head buries itself in the ground. That’s all he cares about. In and out. Done. Finished. A woman, see, she thinks it’s all supposed to mean something.”
“Probably because they have children,” said Neil, stifling a yawn with his hand.
“It’s cause they have children,” I said, pointing the cigarette at him. “Makes em worry alla time. Makes em think everything’s gotta be a certain way. Right and wrong, good and bad. What difference it make? Does it make. We all die anyway. We should have fun. Tomorrow we may die.”
With a glance at the TV, Neil nodded. “You’re a profound guy, Ev. I’ve been tending bar most of my life and no one’s said that to me since nine-thirty.”
“So I fucked the boss’s daughter-no, his wife this time. No, wait, his daugh-yeah, his wife, yeah. So what does that mean? That mean I gotta lose my job? That mean my wife gotta throw me out?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Naaaaaah,” I said. “S’judgmental … ness.” I drained my glass and set it down hard to make the ice shake. “That time.”
“Yeah, I heard it.” He brought up a scoopful of ice from the bin beneath the bar. Dumped it in the glass as he upturned the scotch bottle. I held the cigarette to my lips and watched the operation through curling smoke.
“Judgmental,” I said again. “Everybody saying this one’s right, this one’s wrong. You killed somebody, you gotta get the needle. You fucked somebody, you gotta get the shaft. All bullshit. All bullshit, Neil-o. Makes everybody unhappy. Nothing’s good or bad but thinking makes it so. William Shakespeare. Billy Big-Boy said that himself.”
“He knew a thing or two, all right.”
“Judge not lest you be judged. That was Jesus Christ, for Christ’s sake, wasn’t it?”
“Old Mr. J. Haven’t seen him around here much lately.”
“See, that was the problem with my parents. My dopted parents,” I said. “Big lawyers. Big liberal muck-a-muck-a-mucks. A-mucks. Always knew the right thing, always knew who was the bad guy, who was the good guy. Always on the side of the angels. And how do they know? See what I’m saying? Wha’s right, wha’s wrong? How do they know? Who told them?”
“Uh, Plato?”
I whiffled like a horse.
“Just a guess,” said Neil. “We hadn’t done Plato.”
I took another toke of nicotine, but it had lost its talent to amuse. It seared my throat and I crushed the cigarette weakly in the glass ashtray, left it there bent and fuming. I bowed my head over my glass and studied the ice floating in the amber. I nodded at it somberly. I had reached that stage of inebriation when you start to have Ideas about Life; Life with a capital L, Ideas with a capital I. I had reached that stage when these Ideas seem to link together in a chain of perfect sense or, that is, when the links forged in the smithy of creation become clear to you through the veil of mortality and time. Or something. Anyway, as I sat there, with my neck limp and my chin bouncing lightly above the hollow of my throat, the Idea came to me clearly that Life is a pretty bum affair in which a guy hardly gets a break at all. Happen-stances that, through generations out of living memory, have combined themselves into a history all but unknown, coalesce at the moment of your conception into a clockwork of inevitability. What seem to you like decisions, opinions, revelations, growth are really only the ticking of the mechanism, relieved by the occasional accident or two-if they are accidents-and made sonorous and mournful by the ever-present suspicion that there is no breaking the machinery of fate. Well, it seemed to make sense at the moment anyway. It seemed mournful and profound. And when I imposed this Idea over the events of my existence-as one generally does impose one’s ideas-those events-as they generally do-were forced to fall into line with the Idea which, therefore, seemed to explain everything to perfection.