"How long?"
She raised his hand, which was badly scraped, and kissed it. "They don't know."
Tom Saubers closed his eyes and began to cry. Linda listened to that awhile, and when she couldn't stand it anymore, she leaned forward and began to punch the button on the morphine pump. She kept doing it until the machine stopped giving. By then he was asleep.
1978
Morris grabbed a blanket from the top shelf of the bedroom closet and used it to cover Rothstein, who now sprawled askew in the easy chair with the top of his head gone. The brains that had conceived Jimmy Gold, Jimmy's sister Emma, and Jimmy's self-involved, semi-alcoholic parents--so much like Morris's own--were now drying on the wallpaper. Morris wasn't shocked, exactly, but he was certainly amazed. He had expected some blood, and a hole between the eyes, but not this gaudy expectoration of gristle and bone. It was a failure of imagination, he supposed, the reason why he could read the giants of modern American literature--read them and appreciate them--but never be one.
Freddy Dow came out of the study with a loaded duffel bag over each shoulder. Curtis followed, head down and carrying nothing at all. All at once he sped up, hooked around Freddy, and bolted into the kitchen. The door to the backyard banged against the side of the house as the wind took it. Then came the sound of retching.
"He's feelin kinda sick," Freddy said. He had a talent for stating the obvious.
"You all right?" Morris asked.
"Yuh." Freddy went out through the front door without looking back, pausing to pick up the crowbar leaning against the porch glider. They had come prepared to break in, but the front door had been unlocked. The kitchen door, as well. Rothstein had put all his confidence in the Gardall safe, it seemed. Talk about failures of the imagination.
Morris went into the study, looked at Rothstein's neat desk and covered typewriter. Looked at the pictures on the wall. Both ex-wives hung there, laughing and young and beautiful in their fifties clothes and hairdos. It was sort of interesting that Rothstein would keep those discarded women where they could look at him while he was writing, but Morris had no time to consider this, or to investigate the contents of the writer's desk, which he would dearly have loved to do. But was such investigation even necessary? He had the notebooks, after all. He had the contents of the writer's mind. Everything he'd written since he stopped publishing eighteen years ago.
Freddy had taken the stacks of cash envelopes in the first load (of course; cash was what Freddy and Curtis understood), but there were still plenty of notebooks on the shelves of the safe. They were Moleskines, the kind Hemingway had used, the kind Morris had dreamed of while in the reformatory, where he had also dreamed of becoming a writer himself. But in Riverview Youth Detention he had been rationed to five sheets of pulpy Blue Horse paper each week, hardly enough to begin writing the Great American Novel. Begging for more did no good. The one time he'd offered Elkins, the commissary trustee, a blowjob for a dozen extra sheets, Elkins had punched him in the face. Sort of funny, when you considered all the non-consensual sex he had been forced to participate in during his nine-month stretch, usually on his knees and on more than one occasion with his own dirty undershorts stuffed in his mouth.
He didn't hold his mother entirely responsible for those rapes, but she deserved her share of the blame. Anita Bellamy, the famous history professor whose book on Henry Clay Frick had been nominated for a Pulitzer. So famous that she presumed to know all about modern American literature, as well. It was an argument about the Gold trilogy that had sent him out one night, furious and determined to get drunk. Which he did, although he was underage and looked it.
Drinking did not agree with Morris. He did things when he was drinking that he couldn't remember later, and they were never good things. That night it had been breaking and entering, vandalism, and fighting with a neighborhood rent-a-cop who tried to hold him until the regular cops got there.
That was almost six years ago, but the memory was still fresh. It had all been so stupid. Stealing a car, joyriding across town, then abandoning it (perhaps after pissing all over the dashboard) was one thing. Not smart, but with a little luck, you could walk away from that sort of deal. But breaking into a place in Sugar Heights? Double stupid. He had wanted nothing in that house (at least nothing he could remember later). And when he did want something? When he offered up his mouth for a few lousy sheets of Blue Horse paper? Punched in the face. So he'd laughed, because that was what Jimmy Gold would have done (at least before Jimmy grew up and sold out for what he called the Golden Buck), and what happened next? Punched in the face again, even harder. It was the muffled crack of his nose breaking that had started him crying.
Jimmy never would have cried.
***
He was still looking greedily at the Moleskines when Freddy Dow returned with the other two duffel bags. He also had a scuffed leather carryall. "This was in the pantry. Along with like a billion cans of beans and tuna fish. Go figure, huh? Weird guy. Maybe he was waiting for the Acropolipse. Come on, Morrie, put it in gear. Someone might have heard that shot."
"There aren't any neighbors. Nearest farm is two miles away. Relax."
"Jails're full of guys who were relaxed. We need to get out of here."
Morris began gathering up handfuls of notebooks, but couldn't resist looking in one, just to make sure. Rothstein had been a weird guy, and it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that he had stacked his safe with blank books, thinking he might write something in them eventually.
But no.
This one, at least, was loaded with Rothstein's small, neat handwriting, every page filled, top to bottom and side to side, the margins as thin as threads.
--wasn't sure why it mattered to him and why he couldn't sleep as the empty boxcar of this late freight bore him on through rural oblivion toward Kansas City and the sleeping country beyond, the full belly of America resting beneath its customary comforter of night, yet Jimmy's thoughts persisted in turning back to--
Freddy thumped him on the shoulder, and not gently. "Get your nose out of that thing and pack up. We already got one puking his guts out and pretty much useless."
Morris dropped the notebook into one of the duffels and grabbed another double handful without a word, his thoughts brilliant with possibility. He forgot about the mess under the blanket in the living room, forgot about Curtis Rogers puking his guts in the roses or zinnias or petunias or whatever was growing out back. Jimmy Gold! Headed west, in a boxcar! Rothstein hadn't been done with him, after all!
"These're full," he told Freddy. "Take them out. I'll put the rest in the valise."
"That what you call that kind of bag?"
"I think so, yeah." He knew so. "Go on. Almost done here."
Freddy shouldered the duffels by their straps, but lingered a moment longer. "Are you sure about these things? Because Rothstein said--"
"He was a hoarder trying to save his hoard. He would have said anything. Go on."
Freddy went. Morris loaded the last batch of Moleskines into the valise and backed out of the closet. Curtis was standing by Rothstein's desk. He had taken off his balaclava; they all had. His face was paper-pale and there were dark shock circles around his eyes.
"You didn't have to kill him. You weren't supposed to. It wasn't in the plan. Why'd you do that?"
Because he made me feel stupid. Because he cursed my mother and that's my job. Because he called me a kid. Because he needed to be punished for turning Jimmy Gold into one of them. Mostly because nobody with his kind of talent has a right to hide it from the world. Only Curtis wouldn't understand that.
"Because it'll make the notebooks worth more when we sell them." Which wouldn't be until he'd read every word in them, but Curtis wouldn't understand the need to do that, and didn't need to know. Nor did Freddy. He tried to sound patient and reasonable. "We now have all the John Rothstein output there's ever going to be. That makes the unpublished stuff even more valuable. You see that, don't you?"
&nbs
p; Curtis scratched one pale cheek. "Well . . . I guess . . . yeah."
"Also, he can never claim they're forgeries when they turn up. Which he would have done, just out of spite. I've read a lot about him, Curtis, just about everything, and he was one spiteful motherfucker."
"Well . . ."
Morrie restrained himself from saying That's an extremely deep subject for a mind as shallow as yours. He held out the valise instead. "Take it. And keep your gloves on until we're in the car."
"You should have talked it over with us, Morrie. We're your partners."
Curtis started out, then turned back. "I got a question."
"What is it?"
"Do you know if New Hampshire has the death penalty?"
***
They took secondary roads across the narrow chimney of New Hampshire and into Vermont. Freddy drove the Chevy Biscayne, which was old and unremarkable. Morris rode shotgun with a Rand McNally open on his lap, thumbing on the dome light from time to time to make sure they didn't wander off their pre-planned route. He didn't need to remind Freddy to keep to the speed limit. This wasn't Freddy Dow's first rodeo.
Curtis lay in the backseat, and soon they heard the sound of his snores. Morris considered him lucky; he seemed to have puked out his horror. Morris thought it might be awhile before he himself got another good night's sleep. He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?
"So you really think we'll be able to sell those little books of his?" Freddy asked. He was back to that. "For real money, I mean?"
"Yes."
"And get away with it?"
"Yes, Freddy, I'm sure."
Freddy Dow was quiet for so long that Morris thought the issue was settled. Then he spoke to the subject again. Two words. Dry and toneless. "I'm doubtful."
Later on, once more incarcerated--not in Youth Detention this time, either--Morris would think, That's when I decided to kill them.
But sometimes at night, when he couldn't sleep, his asshole slick and burning from one of a dozen soap-assisted shower-room buggeries, he would admit that wasn't the truth. He'd known all along. They were dumb, and career criminals. Sooner or later (probably sooner) one of them would be caught for something else, and there would be the temptation to trade what they knew about this night for a lighter sentence or no sentence at all.
I just knew they had to go, he would think on those cellblock nights when the full belly of America rested beneath its customary comforter of night. It was inevitable.
***
In upstate New York, with dawn not yet come but beginning to show the horizon's dark outline behind them, they turned west on Route 92, a highway that roughly paralleled I-90 as far as Illinois, where it turned south and petered out in the industrial city of Rockford. The road was still mostly deserted at this hour, although they could hear (and sometimes see) heavy truck traffic on the interstate to their left.
They passed a sign reading REST AREA 2 MI., and Morris thought of Macbeth. If it were to be done, then 'twere well it were done quickly. Not an exact quote, maybe, but close enough for government work.
"Pull in there," he told Freddy. "I need to drain the dragon."
"They probably got vending machines, too," said the puker in the backseat. Curtis was sitting up now, his hair crazy around his head. "I could get behind some of those peanut butter crackers."
Morris knew he'd have to let it go if there were other cars in the rest area. I-90 had sucked away most of the through traffic that used to travel on this road, but once daybreak arrived, there would be lots of local traffic, pooting along from one Hicksville to the next.
For now the rest area was deserted, at least in part because of the sign reading OVERNIGHT RVS PROHIBITED. They parked and got out. Birds chirruped in the trees, discussing the night just past and plans for the day. A few leaves--in this part of the world they were just beginning to turn--drifted down and scuttered across the lot.
Curtis went to inspect the vending machines while Morris and Freddy walked side by side to the men's half of the restroom facility. Morris didn't feel particularly nervous. Maybe what they said was true, after the first one it got easier.
He held the door for Freddy with one hand and took the pistol from his jacket pocket with the other. Freddy said thanks without looking around. Morris let the door swing shut before raising the gun. He placed the muzzle less than an inch from the back of Freddy Dow's head and pulled the trigger. The gunshot was a flat loud bang in the tiled room, but anyone who heard it from a distance would think it was a motorcycle backfiring on I-90. What he worried about was Curtis.
He needn't have. Curtis was still standing in the snack alcove, beneath a wooden eave and a rustic sign reading ROADSIDE OASIS. In one hand he had a package of peanut butter crackers.
"Did you hear that?" he asked Morris. Then, seeing the gun, sounding honestly puzzled: "What's that for?"
"You," Morris said, and shot him in the chest.
Curtis went down, but--this was a shock--did not die. He didn't seem even close to dying. He squirmed on the pavement. A fallen leaf cartwheeled in front of his nose. Blood began to seep out from beneath him. He was still clutching his crackers. He looked up, his oily black hair hanging in his eyes. Beyond the screening trees, a truck went past on Route 92, droning east.
Morris didn't want to shoot Curtis again, out here a gunshot didn't have that hollow backfire sound, and besides, someone might pull in at any second. "If it were to be done, then 'twere well it were done quickly," he said, and dropped to one knee.
"You shot me," Curtis said, sounding breathless and amazed. "You fucking shot me, Morrie!"
Thinking how much he hated that nickname--he'd hated it all his life, and even teachers, who should have known better, used it--he reversed the gun and began to hammer Curtis's skull with the butt. Three hard blows accomplished very little. It was only a .38, after all, and not heavy enough to do more than minor damage. Blood began to seep through Curtis's hair and run down his stubbly cheeks. He was groaning, staring up at Morris with desperate blue eyes. He waved one hand weakly.
"Stop it, Morrie! Stop it, that hurts!"
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Morris slid the gun back into his pocket. The butt was now slimy with blood and hair. He went to the Biscayne, wiping his hand on his jacket. He opened the driver's door, saw the empty ignition, and said fuck under his breath. Whispering it like a prayer.
On 92, a couple of cars went by, then a brown UPS truck.
He trotted back to the men's room, opened the door, knelt down, and began to go through Freddy's pockets. He found the car keys in the left front. He got to his feet and hurried back to the snack alcoves, sure a car or truck would have pulled in by now, the traffic was getting heavier all the time, somebody would have to piss out his or her morning coffee, and he would have to kill that one, too, and possibly the one after that. An image of linked paper dolls came to mind.
No one yet, though.
He got into the Biscayne, legally purchased but now bearing stolen Maine license plates. Curtis Rogers was slithering a slow course down the cement walkway toward the toilets, pulling with his hands and pushing feebly with his feet and leaving a snail-trail of blood behind. It was impossible to know for sure, but Morris thought he might be trying to reach the pay telephone on the wall between the mens' and the ladies'.
This wasn't the way it was supposed to go, he thought, starting the car. It was spur-of-the-moment stupid, and he was probably going to be caught. It made him think of what Rothstein had said at the end. What are you, anyway, twenty-two? Twenty-three? What do you know about life, let alone literature?
"I know I'm no sellout," he said. "I know that much."
He put the Biscayne in drive and rolled slowly forward toward the man
eeling his way up the cement walkway. He wanted to get out of here, his brain was yammering at him to get out of here, but this had to be done carefully and with no more mess than was absolutely necessary.
Curtis looked around, his eyes wide and horrified behind the jungle foliage of his dirty hair. He raised one hand in a feeble stop gesture, then Morris couldn't see him anymore because the hood was in the way. He steered carefully and continued creeping forward. The front of the car bumped up over the curbing. The pine tree air freshener on the rearview mirror swung and bobbed.
There was nothing . . . and nothing . . . and then the car bumped up again. There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.
Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis's head was gone.
Well, no. Not exactly. It was there, but all spread out. Mooshed. No loss of talent in that mess, Morrie thought.
He drove toward the exit, and when he was sure the road was empty, he sped up. He would need to stop and examine the front of the car, especially the tire that had run over Curtis's head, but he wanted to get twenty miles farther down the road first. Twenty at least.
"I see a car wash in my future," he said. This struck him funny (inordinately funny, and there was a word neither Freddy nor Curtis would have understood), and he laughed long and loud. He kept exactly to the speed limit. He watched the odometer turn the miles, and even at fifty-five, each revolution seemed to take five minutes. He was sure the tire had left a blood-trail going out of the exit, but that would be gone now. Long gone. Still, it was time to turn off onto the secondary roads again, maybe even the tertiary ones. The smart thing would be to stop and throw all the notebooks--the cash, too--into the woods. But he would not do that. Never would he do that.
Fifty-fifty odds, he told himself. Maybe better. After all, no one saw the car. Not in New Hampshire and not at that rest area.
He came to an abandoned restaurant, pulled into the side lot, and examined the Biscayne's front end and right front tire. He thought things looked pretty good, all in all, but there was some blood on the front bumper. He pulled a handful of weeds and wiped it off. He got back in and drove on west. He was prepared for roadblocks, but there were none.