“How’s that, Angie? Like all the rest of the knights on white chargers who’ve saved you from Daddy and the Klan? Get off it. What the hell’s that supposed to mean: you’re like all the rest?”
“You took what you could get back there in that barn.”
“I took what was offered. And why not? Does fucking you mean I inherit you? This isn’t the Orient, we’re not locked together forever by a bond of debt. Don’t be cute, kiddo: it didn’t mean any more to you than it did to me. You’re a big girl, and I’m a converted chauvinist pig, and this is the middle of the Seventies and we don’t owe each other anything.”
Then she tried to be sweet. “But, Harry…I want to go with you. You got me out of there, you saved my skin…”
“Call it even for the wonderful sex. But that’s it. When we get to Raleigh you go your way, and I go mine.”
“You’re too wild for that, Harry. You like the excitement.”
Harry hit the brakes. Air blew out, the rig fought the road, slowed, and Harry tooled it onto the shoulder. He let it idle in neutral as he turned to her.
“Okay, now here is what it’s really all about. Not the bullshit that’s swamping your brain, but what it’s really all about.
“My name is Harry Fischer. That’s Fischer with a ‘c’ in it; I figured I’d tell you that because you were too busy getting it on in that haystack to really catch the name; I mean, you were already trying to maneuver me into fucking you before you gave a shit who I was, except that I was a guy who could get you out of town. So the sex is about as big a debt as a hot roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and salad on the side.
“So pay attention: it’s Harry Fischer, and Tm forty years old, and I’ve got a terrific wife and three kids and I like them and they like me and the only reason I’m on this fucking suicide run lugging nitro is because it pays high-hazard and nobody else wanted the goddam job and I took it because the biopsy report came back three months ago and it says with treatment I’ve got maybe another year. Now can you piece all that together and understand that I’m not the fucking Lone Ranger, that I jumped in to ‘save’ your ass because of, hell, I’m not even sure, something I remembered from when I was a kid, and anybody can be a hero once, but I’m not John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or any damn body else, I’m just a forty-year-old truck driver who’s dying of cancer and I didn’t have as much to lose as some guys so I did it! But that don’t make me Sir Lancelot, and it sure don’t make me a gay, mad adventurer ready to go streaking off across the countryside with a lady who shoots her old man as many times as she can before I grabbed the gun. Does all of that penetrate, kiddo?”
She sat staring at him for a long time.
And after that long time she said, simply, “You prick.”
Harry nodded with resignation. “Right. I’m a prick. A tired old prick, little miss. And there’s an awful lot of your Daddy in you. But at least now we’ve been properly introduced.”
And he put it in gear, moved it off the shoulder, got it up to cruising speed, and went to Raleigh.
And after he let her out on a street corner in downtown Raleigh, and after she gave him the finger as the rig moved away from the curb, Harry Fischer with a c returned the truck to the company that had bonded bun, picked up his paycheck, and went home to his wife and kids.
TIRED OLD MAN
(AN HOMMAGE TO CORNELL WOOLRICH)
The hell of it is, you’re never as tough as you think you are. There’s always somebody with sad eyes who’ll shoot you down when you’re not even looking, when you’re combing your hair, tying your shoelace. Down you go, like a wounded rhino, nowhere near as tough as you thought.
I came in from the Coast on a Wednesday, got myself locked up in the Warwick to finish the book, did it, called the messenger and had him take the manuscript over to Wyeth the following Tuesday, and I was free. Only nine months late, but it was an okay piece of work. It was going to be at least three days till I got the call telling me what alterations he wanted—there were three chapters dead in the middle I knew he’d balk at—I’d cheated on the psychiatric rationale for the brother-in-law’s actions, had held back some stuff I knew Wyeth would demand I flesh out—and so I had time to kill.
I’ve got to remember to remind myself: if I ever use that phrase again, may my carbons always be reversed. Time to kill. Yeah, just the phrase.
I called Bob Catlett, thinking we’d get together for dinner with his wife, the psychiatrist, if he was still seeing her. He said we could set it up for that night and by the way, why didn’t I come along for the monthly meeting of The Cerberus Club. I choked back a string of uglies. “I don’t think so, man. They give me a pain in the ass.”
The Cerberus is a “writers’ club” of old pros who’ve been around since Clarence Buddington Kelland was breaking in at Munsey’s Cavalier. And what had been a fairly active group of working professionals in the Fifties and Sixties was now a gaggle of burnt-out cases and gossips, drinking too much and lamenting the passing of Ben Hibbs at the Saturday Evening Post. I was thirty years past that time, a young punk by their lights, and I saw no merit whatsoever in spending an evening up to my hips in dull chatter and weariness, gagging on cigarette smoke and listening to septuageneric penny-a-word losers comparing the merits of Black Mask to those of Weird Tales.
So he talked me into it. That’s what friends are for.
We had dinner at an Argentinian restaurant off Times Square; and with my belly full of skirt steak and bread pudding I felt up to it. We arrived at the traditional meeting-place—the claustrophobic apartment of a sometime-editor who had once been a reader for Book-of-the-Month Club—around nine-thirty. It was packed from wall to wall.
I hadn’t seen most of them in ten years, since I’d gone to the Coast to adapt my novel, THE STALKING MAN, for Paramount. It had been a good ten years for me. I’d left New York with a molehill of unpaid bills the creditors were rapidly turning into a mountain, and such despair both personally and professionally I’d half accepted the idea I’d never really make a decent living at writing. But doing four months’ work each year in films and television had provided the cushion so I could spend eight months of the year working on books. I was free of debt, twenty pounds heavier, secure for the first time in my life, and reasonably happy. But walking into that apartment was like walking back into a corporeal memory of the dismal past. Nothing had changed. They were all there, and all the same.
My first impression was of lines of weariness.
Someone had superimposed a blueprint on the room and its occupants. In the background were all the moving figures, older and more threadbare than the last time I’d seen them gathered together in a room like this, moving (it seemed, oddly) a good deal more slowly than they should have been. As if they were imbedded in amber. Not slow motion, merely an altered index of the light-admitting properties of the lenses of my eyes. Out of synch with their voices. But in the foreground, much sharper and brighter than the colors of the people or the room, was an overlay of lines of weariness. Gray and blue lines that were not merely topographically superimposed over faces and hands, and the elbows of the women, but over the entire room: lines rising off toward the ceiling, laid against the lamps and chairs, dividing the carpet into sections.
I walked through, between and among the blue and gray lines, finding it difficult to breathe as the oppressiveness of massed failure and dead dreams assaulted me. It was like breathing the dust of ancient tombs.
Bob Catlett and his wife had immediately wandered off to the kitchen for drinks. I would have scurried after them, but Leo Norris saw me, shoved between two ex-technical writers (each of whom had had brief commercial successes twenty years before with non-fiction popularizations of space science theory) and grabbed my hand. He looked exhausted, but sober.
“Billy! For God’s sake, Billy! I didn’t know you were in town. What a great thing! How long’re you in for?”
“Only a few days, Leo. Book for Harper. I’ve been all locked up finish
ing it.”
“Well, I’ll say this for you, the Scott Fitzgerald Syndrome certainly hasn’t hit you out there. How many books have you written since you left, three? Four?”
“Seven.”
He smiled with embarrassment, but not enough embarrassment to slow the phony camaraderie. Leo Morris and I—despite his effusions—had never been close. When he had already been an established novelist, a fact one verified by getting one’s name on the cover of The Saint Detective Magazine, I was banging off hammer murder novelettes for Manhunt, just to pay the rent in the Village. There had been no camaraderie in those days. But Leo was now on the slide, had been for the last six or eight years, had been reduced to writing a series of sex/spy/violence paperbacks: each one numbered (he was up to #27 the last time I looked), pseudonymous, featuring an unpleasant CIA thug named Curt Costener. Four of my last seven novels had been translated into successful films and one of them had become a television series. Camaraderie.
“Seven books in what—ten years?—that’s damned good.”
I didn’t say anything. I was looking around; indicating I wanted to move on. He didn’t pick up the message.
“Brett McCoy died, you know. Last week.”
I nodded. I’d read him, but had never met him. Good writer. Police procedurals.
“Terminal. Inoperable. Lungs; really spread. Oh, he’d been on the way out for a long time. He’ll be missed.”
“Yeah. Well, excuse me, Leo, I have to find some people I came with.”
I couldn’t get through the press near the front door to join Bob in the kitchen. The only breeze was coming in from the hallway and they were jammed together in front of the passage. So I went the other way, deeper into the room, deeper into the inversion layer of smoke and monotoned chatter. He watched me go, wanting to say something, probably wanting to strengthen a bond that didn’t exist. I moved fast I didn’t want any more obituary reports.
There were only five or six women in the crowd, as far as I could tell. One of them watched me as I edged through the bodies. I couldn’t help noticing her noticing me. She was in her late forties, severely weathered, staring openly as I neared her. It wasn’t till she spoke, “Billy?” that I recognized the voice. Not the face; even then, not the face. Just the voice, which hadn’t changed.
I stopped and stared back. “Dee?”
She smiled no kind of smile at all, a mere stricture of courtesy. “How are you, Billy?”
“I’m fine. How’re you? What’s happening, what’re you doing these days?”
“I’m living in Woodstock. Cormick and I got divorced; I’m doing books for Avon.”
I hadn’t seen anything with her name on it for some time. Those who haunt the newsstands and bookstores out of years of habit are like sidewalk cafe Greeks unable to stop fingering their worry beads. I would have seen her name.
She caught the hesitation. “Gothics. I’m doing them under another name.”
This time the smile was nasty and it said: you’ve had the last laugh; yes, I’m selling my talent cheap; I hate myself for it; I’ll slice my wrists in this conversation before I’ll permit you to gloat. What’s more offensive than being successful when they always dismissed you as the least of their set, and they’ve dribbled away all the promise and have failed? Nothing. They would eat the air you breathe. Bierce: SUCCESS, n. The one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. Unquote.
“Look me up if you get to Los Angeles,” I said. She didn’t even want to try that one. She turned back to the three-way conversation behind her. She took the arm of an elegant man with a thick, gray mop of styled Claude Rains hair. He was wearing aviator-style eyeglasses, wraparounds, tinted auburn. Dee hung on tight. That wouldn’t last long. His suits were too well-tailored. She looked like a tattered battle flag. When had they all settled for oblivion?
Edwin Charrel was coming toward me from the opposite side of the room. He still owed me sixty dollars from ten years before. He wouldn’t have forgotten. He’d lay a long, guilt-oozing story on me, and try to press a moist five bucks into my hand. Not now; really, not now; not on top of Leo Morris and Dee Miller and all those crinkled elbows. I turned a hard right, smiled at a mom-and-pop writing team sharing the same glass of vodka, and worked my way to the wall. I kept to the outside and began to circumnavigate. My mission: to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Everyone knows, it’s harder to hit a moving target.
And miles to go before I sleep.
The back wall was dominated by a sofa jammed with loud conversations. But the crowd in the center of the room had its collective back to the babble, so there was a clear channel across to the other side. I made the move. Charrel wasn’t even in sight, so I made the move. No one noticed, no one gave a gardyloo, no one tried to buttonhole me. I made the move. I thought I was halfway home. I started to turn the corner, only one wall to go before the breeze, the door, and out. That was when the old man motioned to me from the easy chair.
The chair was wedged into the rear corner of the room, at an angle to the sofa. Big, overstuffed, colorless thing. He was deep in the cushions. Thin, wasted, tired-looking, eyes a soft, watery blue. He was motioning to me. I looked behind me, turned back. He was motioning to me. I walked over and stood there above him.
“Sit down.”
There wasn’t anywhere to sit. “I was just leaving.” I didn’t know him.
“Sit down, we’ll talk. There’s time.”
A spot opened at the end of the sofa. It would have been rude to walk away. He nodded his head at the open spot. So I sat down. He was the most exhausted-looking old man I’d ever seen. Just stared at me.
“So you write a little,” he said. I thought he was putting me on. I smiled, and he said, “What’s your name?”
I said, “Billy Landress.”
He tested that for a moment, silently. “William. On the books it’s William.”
I chuckled. “That’s right William on the books. It’s better for the lending libraries. Classier. Weightier.” I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing softly. Not to myself, right into his face. He didn’t smile back, but I knew he wasn’t taking offense. It was a bemusing conversation.
“And you’re…?”
“Marki,” he said; he paused, then added, “Marki Strasser.”
Still smiling, I said, “Is that the name you write under?”
He shook his head. “I don’t write any more. I haven’t written in a long time.”
“Marki,” I said, lingering on the word, “Marki Strasser. I don’t think I’ve read any of your work. Mystery fiction?”
“Primarily. Suspense, a few contemporary novels, nothing terribly significant. But tell me about you.”
I settled back into the sofa. “I have the feeling, sir, that you’re amused by me.”
His soft, blue eyes stared back at me without a trace of guile. There was no smile anywhere in that face. Tired; old and terribly tired. “We’re all amusing, William. Except when we get too old to take care of ourselves, when we get too old to keep up. Then we cease to be amusing. You don’t want to talk about yourself?”
I spread my hands in surrender. I would talk about myself. He may have conceived of himself as too old to be amusing, but he was a fascinating old man nonetheless. He was a good listener. And the rest of the room faded, and we talked. I told him about myself, about life on the Coast, the plots of my books, in précis, what it took to adapt a suspense novel for the screen.
Body language is interesting. On the most primitive level, even those unfamiliar with the unconscious messages the positions of the arms and legs and torso give, can perceive what’s going on. When two people are talking and one is trying to get across an important point to the other, the one making the point leans forward; the one resisting the point leans back. I realized I was leaning far forward and to the side, resting my chest on the arm of the sofa. He wasn’t sinking too far back in the soft cushions of the easy chair; but he was back, in any event. He was listening to me, taki
ng in everything I was saying, but it was as though he knew it was all past, all dead information, as though he was waiting to tell me some things I needed to know.
Finally, he said, “Have you noticed how many of the stories you’ve written are concerned with relationships of fathers to sons?”
I’d noticed. “My father died when I was very young,” I said, and felt the usual tightness in my chest. “Somewhere, I don’t remember where, I stumbled on a line Faulkner wrote once, where he said, something like, ‘No matter what a writer writes about, if it’s a man he’s writing about the search for his father.’ It hit me particularly hard. I’d never realized how much I missed him until one night just a few years ago, I was in a group encounter session and we were told by the leader of the group to pick one person out of the circle and to make that person someone we wanted to talk to, someone we’d never been able to talk to, and to tell that person everything we’d always wanted to say. I picked a man with a mustache and talked to him the way I’d never been able to talk to my father when I was a very little boy. After a little bit I was crying.” I paused, then said very softly, “I didn’t even cry at my father’s funeral. It was a very strange thing, a disturbing evening.”
I paused again, and collected my thoughts. This was becoming a good deal heavier, more personal, than I’d anticipated. “Then, just a year or two ago, I found that quote by Faulkner; and it all fitted into place.”
The tired old man kept watching me. “What did you tell him?”
“Who? Oh, the man with the mustache? Hmmm. Well, it wasn’t anything that potent. I just told him I’d made it, that he would be proud of me now, that I had succeeded, that I was a good guy and…he’d be proud of me. That was all.”
“What didn’t you tell him?”
I felt myself twitch with the impact of the remark. I went chill all over. He had said it so casually, and yet the force of the question jammed a cold chisel into the door of my memory, applied sudden pressure and snapped the lock. The door sprang open and guilt flooded out. How could Marki have known?