Collected Stories

  That was the slow and sententious way that Billy Spangler spoke of it. He gave the impression of knowing more about it than anybody else. When Gloria Butterfield was discussed, there was always some allusion to what Billy Spangler said. He was the unofficial expert on the case. He knows a whole lot about it that he’s not saying, was the popular opinion. And this Gloria Butterfield case, and his pretentiously cryptic utterances about it, had vastly enhanced the prestige of Billy Spangler as a sort of oracle upon the subject of spies.

  So much for screening question number one. If the girl passed it, that is, if she expressed a suitably adverse opinion on Gloria Butterfield and a sufficiently enthusiastic endorsement of the unknown but radical manner in which Gloria had been (allegedly) disposed of, Billy Spangler would then come up with his number-two inquiry which was very simple indeed; How do you feel about love? Usually the girls would relax a little and so would Billy when he asked this question. He would smile and expose his white teeth, teeth so perfect that they looked like a set of beautiful dentures except that you saw quite clearly that they were fitted into his healthy pink gums by nature. He would not only expose his beautiful teeth and gums when he asked this question but he would open his mouth sufficiently to expose the whole interior of his coral-pink mouth, glittering with spit like the interior of some little coral cave on the seashore that was filled and emptied to the rhythm of the tides. You saw his rather small pink tongue, the pink of which was a little darker than the pink of the gums, the tip of which was actually crimson and so smooth that the taste buds on it were almost invisible. It was like an artificial tongue of pink and crimson it was so perfect. And so when Billy Spangler opened his mouth and smiled and let his mouth hang a bit open after that foxy question, the girls would laugh with a little burst of pure joy, feeling that the really serious part of the interview was over. But actually Billy Spangler was still screening the girls at this point. Although the question appeared to be a light one and was asked in a playful manner, a wrong answer to it could terminate the whole interview on a very quick and negative note indeed. It was a serious question with Billy Spangler what the girls thought about love. He did not want a girl who thought too much about it nor did he want a girl who showed a neurotic antipathy to the idea of it. He wanted a girl to show a wholesomely light and joyous attitude toward it, as an abstract value, the sort of attitude that a boy has learned to expect from his mother, for instance. A clean-minded, openhearted attitude toward love in the abstract was what he looked for. And if, when he asked that question, the girl dummied up, he would know that something was amiss and he would say. Sorry, next girl!

  Now on this particular morning Billy Spangler was upset about things. He had not felt really well since the incident with Gewinner Pearce, and the thing that had happened that night with Big Edna had been a severe psychic jolt although it had ended in a moral victory on his part. That is, he had shown the firmness of character to give her the sack the next day. But this morning the interviews had not gone well. The girls were an indifferent-looking bunch for one thing, only one of them being what you would call a real looker. There was a sameness about them, a blank kind of neatness and trimness which made you feel a bit let down somehow. Sexiness was what they lacked, although Billy Spangler would hesitate to put it quite that way.

  This applied to all of the girls but one. One of them it did not apply to, not even slightly. That girl was a regular looker, a really outstanding good-looker, she was personable plus, and Billy had interviewed her first of the lot. But there was something not quite right in her reaction to the number-one question about Gloria Butterfield. She had betrayed no nervousness. Without a ghost of a hesitation she had said right off that she thought that Gloria Butterfield was a thoroughly contemptible person, not only ignoble but stupid, stupid because she had allowed herself to be caught at her ignoble action. And she certainly deserved what she got. Any girl who would be that treacherous and that stupid deserved to be torn to pieces by wild dogs.

  Now what bothered Billy Spangler was how this girl happened to make the remark about Gloria Butterfield being torn to pieces by wild dogs. Billy had never spoken of this bit of information. He knew of it from Braden Pearce, but under oath of secrecy, and only because of the extremely close buddy-relationship that he enjoyed with the great man across the road. He had never breathed a word of it to anybody and he was pretty goddamn certain that Braden would never have passed the information along to anyone else not in the inner circle of The Project. The fact that the girl betrayed her knowledge of it gave him quite a turn. He was noticeably startled when she came out with that remark. He thought he covered up his surprise pretty well but he could feel his face burning as he went quickly on to the next question. What do you think about love? The pretty girl’s answer to that one was also just a little bit offbeat.

  She looked Billy Spangler right straight in the eyes without the flicker of an eyelash and she said to him. Well, frankly, I have not had much experience with it but I think the idea is great!

  No, that wasn’t quite the way for a girl to answer the second question, but it was not seriously wrong. It was the answer to the Gloria Butterfield question that disturbed him, and yet Billy Spangler somehow could not bring himself to dismiss the girl immediately. He knew that he should but he didn’t.

  What he said to the girl—to quote him exactly—was. Stick around a little.

  Where? she asked him, and he told her to sit down at the end of the counter and have a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

  The girl smiled brightly and obeyed his instructions and Billy’s eyes followed her body as it moved away from him. She had on a checkered wool skirt that fitted her real close across the hips and the hips were the shape that he had liked in Big Edna so fatally well, except that they were just a little bit smaller and possibly firmer. The breasts were even superior to Big Edna’s. “Ripe boobies” was not exactly the word for her breasts in that shameful secret vocabulary of Billy’s. No, a perfect phrase for them was “A nice handful!”

  Well, the interviews went along pretty briskly but Billy found something wrong with each one of the other applicants, and inside of half an hour the girl who gave the wrong Gloria Butterfield answer was the only one left of the bunch. She had finished her coffee and she had also ordered a piece of butterscotch graham pie, which is a pie that is very rich and gooey with a crust of graham crackers, certainly not a dessert that a girl would order if she had any apprehensions about her figure. This girl obviously had none. What a trim little figure she had on her, and the breasts were a nice little handful and that was for sure. She had now pivoted around on the counter stool and was smiling expectantly the length of the drive-in at Billy Spangler who had planted himself self-consciously behind the cash register now that he found himself alone with her. It was the slow part of the morning now, the part between ten and twelve, and the two girls already working were sitting outside on the bench in front of the drive-in, looking fresh and inviting as Billy always expected his girls to do. So now there was plenty of time to give this applicant a really close screening. She had so much to recommend her, and the odd surprise that she had handed him on the Gloria Butterfield question might be very simply and easily explained.

  Now, honey, he said—always treating his girls with that sort of comfortable affectionate familiarity like a big brother’s—you said one thing that bothered me a little and I guess you know what it was. Now how did you happen to mention the “wild dogs” thing?

  The girl stopped smiling. Oh, she said. She got up from the counter and started toward the door, her face looking flushed and her movements rather jerky.

  Where are you going, asked Billy.

  Home, said the girl. I don’t think I want a job bad enough to work for a man who might be suspicious of me!

  Now hold your horses, said Billy. You are going off half-cocked. Just because I was a little surprised because you knew of something that is known of by only a few people very closely connected with The Projec
t is no good reason for you to blow up and say I am being unduly suspicious of you.

  He had crossed to the door. The girl was trying to open it but Billy Spangler was leaning against it so that she couldn’t.

  Again the girl looked him straight in the eyes. Do you or do you not think I can be trusted? she demanded in a sharp tone.

  Trusted? Why, honey. I’d bank every cent in my possession on that smile of yours, said Billy, that wonderful frank and open smile of yours and that pair of baby-blue eyes! Now you let go of that door and sit back down and—Henry!—he called in to the Negro cook in the kitchen.

  Henry, he called, how about that fresh coffee? Bring two cups out here, and bring me out a piece of that fresh apple pie!

  Billy Spangler was all smiles, he was wreathed in cherubic smiles that made him look like a butch and tender angel of honest-to-goodness young, sweet, pure-hearted manhood.

  The girl responded. Who wouldn’t? She sat back down again and opened her mouth so that Billy could look right into the coral pink interior of it, as wet and smooth as his own. Consciously at that moment he caught himself thinking about a French kiss, and as the coffee and apple pie were set in front of him, Billy Spangler had to cross his legs. But the girl did not stop smiling and she did not shut her mouth till Billy asked her what size shoes and uniform she took. Then she shut her mouth for a moment in order to speak.

  Oh, she said, then I have got the job?

  Yes indeed, she had it….

  All at once, in early February, there was an outbreak of crime in the town of Gewinner, interrupting a long period of such extreme orderliness that during the preceding year no misdemeanor has been committed of a nature more serious than the theft of an artichoke from a chain grocery. The first evidence of the crime wave was the discovery of a billfold that had been ripped apart and dropped at the entrance of an alley. This was like the first eruption of some epidemic pox, for within a few nights the ripped-up billfolds had increased to a score. Then to a hundred. The crimes were flawlessly executed. At least half of the victims were solitary patrolmen, assaulted upon their midnight rounds of the deserted downtown streets, and none of them could give a really satisfactory account of what had happened. They had seen or heard nothing to arouse suspicion or even particular attention prior to the knockout blow, delivered invariably to the back of the head, in some cases with such violence that the skull was fractured. It was like a big black cat had jumped on me, one of them asserted, and from this statement was derived the name “Black Cat Gang” that was fastened on the criminals. The victims who were not patrolmen were workers returning home from the nocturnal shifts at The Project. At first, workers in vehicles enjoyed immunity from the attacks and consequently an order was issued that no pedestrians would be permitted on the streets of Gewinner after 8 P.M. But almost immediately after this edict, a number of workers were found unconscious at the wheels of their cars, everything of value stripped from them, along the curbs of the residential sections. It was then ordered that no private vehicle should be operated at night containing less than two passengers; the police force was multiplied by ten and the streets were illuminated by giant lamps that gave a ghastly greenish hue to everything that they shone upon. Crime experts flooded into the city. Great banners were hung in the streets listing the precautions that were to be taken by the night workers of The Project; Drive well to the center of the street…slow down but do not stop at street intersections…maintain a uniform speed of twenty-five miles an hour in the business section and forty miles an hour in the residential sections…keep to the main thoroughfares wherever it is possible…do not pick up strangers under any circumstances, etc. Then during the last week of February a council meeting was held at which the investigating committee disclosed that the leader of the Black Cat Gang was none other than the Chief of Police. This encouraging bit of information was not released to the press but rumors of it leaked out and the effect on the civil population was rather demoralizing. Nocturnal life in the town got to be like one big continual wild West movie until the whole police force was sent to Camp Tranquillity and was replaced by government agents in armored cars. Then, at least on the surface, the town and The Project fell back into the former well-ordered pattern of existence. A record number of religious converts were made by all the churches and optimists in the pulpits referred to the crime wave, now under control, as “the Devil’s Last Stand.”

  Gewinner Pearce loved most the hours between midnight and dawn, when only the graveyard shift at The Project was still awake. From his tower windows, with lights extinguished, he would watch until he saw the drive-in closed and Billy Spangler driving home in his neat little green coupe. Then Gewinner would prepare to go out. He did not dress warmly. He liked a feeling of chill which made him more conscious of the self-contained life in his body. Chill air about his limbs made them move more lightly, more buoyantly, and so he went out thinly clad. He wore no undergarments. All that he wore on his nocturnal prowlings was a midnight-blue tuxedo made of silk gabardine. Before getting into this garment Gewinner would bathe and anoint himself like a bride, standing among a maze of indirectly lighted mirrors in his shower room. His whole body would be sprayed with pine-scented eau de Cologne and lightly dusted with powder. Gossamer silk were his socks, nylons of the sheerest ply, and his shoes weighed hardly more than a pair of gloves. Crystalline drops cleared his eyes of fatigue, brushes polished the impeccable enamel of his teeth and an astringent solution assured his mouth and throat of an odorless freshness. Often this ritual of preparation would include internal bathing with a syringe, a warm enema followed by a cold one, for Gewinner detested the idea of harboring fecal matter in his lower intestines. He wore a single metal ornament which was a Persian coin, very ancient, that hung on a fine silver chain. He enjoyed the cold feeling of it as it swung pendulumlike across his ribs and bare nipples. It was carrying a secret, and that was something that Gewinner liked better than almost anything in the world, to have and to keep a secret. He also had the romantic idea that someday, some galactic night, he would find the right person to whom to make a gift of the coin. That person had not been found, never quite, and there was the sad but endurable possibility that the discovery would be postponed forever, but in the meantime the Persian coin was a delicately exciting reminder of the fact that night is a quest.

  Once or twice when he had only recently resumed his residence in the town, Gewinner was accosted by patrolmen and asked for identification. Now the patrolmen knew him, they knew Gewinner and they knew Violet’s Caddy. They might theorize about the mystery of his prowlings but no interference was offered, such was the power of the name that he bore and the curiously intimidating aura of his person.

  Gewinner’s night prowling followed a certain pattern. At a leisurely pace, always five miles less than the official speed limit for the confines of the municipality, he would pass down the main thoroughfare of the town, appearing, whenever he paused at a crossing, to look around for somebody. All the windows and doorways were locked and lightless. Every three or four blocks he would pass a patrolman who gave him a single, quick glance, full of alarm and discretion, which Gewinner boldly returned with a very slight nod, as though he were an inspector signifying a routine approval of their presence upon the sidewalks. When he arrived at the end of the main avenue, he would turn Violet’s Caddy (now always at his disposal) to the right and proceed along a street of new and completely uniform cottages which had been put up by The Project. This street terminated at the athletic stadium of the high school, and there Gewinner would always stop for a while. Sometimes he would remain in the parked car, close to the main gate of the open stadium, and take a few puffs of a ciagarette which he would extinguish as soon as the car started off once more. But sometimes he would get out of the car and stroll to the water fountain inside the stadium. He would appear to drink though he never allowed the water to touch his lips. Then he would stand beside the fountain a minute or two, looking about the dark stands which were seldom quit
e empty. His eyes would sweep along the whole oblong of the open-air structure until the glow of a cigarette at some point would betray another visitor’s presence. Gewinner would then remove from the pocket of the topcoat, never worn but carried across his arm, a white silk scarf which he would unfold and spread over a concrete bench that was close to the water fountain. Then he would sit down and wait. This was not in keeping with the convention of the place—for all such places have their peculiar conventions—and more often than not Gewinner would wait in vain. If he grew impatient but was still hopeful, he would take out a silver lighter and a cigarette. He would hold the flame of the lighter before his face for a count of ten, not lighting the cigarette, just holding the flame a little away from the tip. Then he would wait a while longer, and sometimes, reluctantly, fearfully, the one who had made the firefly glow in the distance would emerge from the stands and approach the fountain. When this stranger had arrived within a few feet of the fountain and Gewinner had obtained some impression of his general aspect, Gewinner would either rise abruptly and make a rapid exit from the stadium or else he would cross to the fountain just as the stranger arrived there and murmur a word or two as the stranger bent to drink. When this was the procedure, the following step was invariable. Side by side and moving rapidly, Gewinner and the stranger, now his companion, would cross wordlessly out of the stadium and to the parked car. The car would then abandon its former pretense of languor and would shoot rapidly through the sleeping community, out to a certain road that Gewinner had known in his boyhood, a road that terminated for his purposes in the Negro cemetery about two miles out of town, and there among the humble mossy tablets and weather-paled crosses of wood, in a certain covert among them, surrounded by winter rosebushes, Gewinner would unfold the silk scarf again to its full length and width which gave it the dimensions of a bed sheet. Silently, never speaking, he would unclothe himself, standing immediately before the trembling stranger and staring directly and fiercely into the stranger’s eyes, breathing upon his face his fragrant breath and dropping his clothes at his feet till he was quite naked; then, finally, not quite smiling, but lowering his eyes and turning half in profile as though he, too, were suddenly abashed by the strange occurrence, then he would murmur. Well? Am I too ugly?