Jessica Pond’s son, Lonnie Oakwode, could yet prove to be a problem. But then, how could he connect me to her? I did worry about my tattoo and Harpo, but not too much. Having informed on me once, he would not do it again, and the tattoo I would alter as soon as I could.
It was Regency. If our security depended on Alvin Luther, then we had none. He inhabited every crossroads. Nor did I like the way he kept to his bed. It indicated to me no more than that he was waiting until he could find a story for himself. In any event, he did not leave his bed.
Within it, however, he had a fearful mouth. To Madeleine, in our hearing, he said, “I made you come sixteen times in one night.”
“Yes,” she said, “and none were any good.”
“That,” he said hopefully, “is because you got no womb.”
She shot him that afternoon. Any one of us could have done it, but it happened to be Madeleine. My father and I had already discussed it in the hallway. “There’s no way out,” Dougy said. “It has to be done.”
“He’s sick,” I said.
“He may be sick, but he’s no victim.” Dougy looked at me. “I have to do it. I understand him. He’s my kind of guy.”
“If you change your mind,” I said, “I can manage it.” I could. My damnable faculty of being able to visualize what I might soon see was becoming more palpable. In my mind, I discharged Regency’s Magnum into his chest. My arm flew up in the air from the kick of the handgun. His face contorted. I saw the maniac. Regency looked like a wild boar. Then he died, and as he did, his face took on an austere look, and his chin became as wooden and set as the good jaw of George Washington.
Do you know, that was the last expression he offered before he died? I came in after the double blast of Madeleine’s little Derringer, and he was expiring on what had been my marriage bed. It seems the last thing he said before she pulled the trigger was “I liked Patty Lareine. She was big time and I belong there.”
“Good luck,” said Madeleine.
“I thought you were big time when I met you,” he said, “but you were small potatoes.”
“Bet on it,” said Madeleine and pulled the trigger.
It was nothing remarkable to go out on, but she had come to her own conclusion that he must be executed. Crazy people in serious places had to be executed. That much you learned with your Mafia milk.
A year later, when she would talk about it, she told me, “I just waited for him to say the word that would get my blood to rise.” Do not call an Italian queen small potatoes.
His body was taken out to sea by my father that night. Regency was buried with a cement block tied by separate wires to his waist, his armpits and his knees. By now, of course, my father was practiced at such a course. On the first morning after Alvin Luther had his attack and lay unconscious, Dougy insisted on being taken out in my boat to Wardley’s cemetery on Hell-Town beach, and there had me find the graves. I did. That night while I kept guard over our fallen narc, my father put in six hours of the most sordid labor. Near the dawn, on the rising of the tide, he took out all five bodies to the deep water and sank them well. Doubtless I am in danger of writing an Irish comedy, so I will not describe the gusto with which Dougy now made his preparations to take Alvin Luther to the watery rest, except to say his comment when done was “Maybe I been in the wrong occupation all this time.” Maybe he was.
Madeleine and I went out to Colorado for a while, and now we inhabit Key West. I try to write, and we live on the money that comes from her work as a hostess in a local restaurant and mine as a part-time bartender in a hole across the street from her place. Once in a while we wait for a knock on the door, but I am not so sure it will ever come. There was a flurry about the disappearance of Laurel Oakwode and pictures of her son in the papers. He said he would not rest until he found his mother, but his face in the photographs lacked, I thought, the kind of character you need for such a search, and the feature story hinted that the local people in Santa Barbara were ready to assume that Laurel, sharing a financial peccadillo or two with Lonnie Pangborn, might have found a wealthy Singapore businessman or someone of that ilk. Despite the shirred blood in the car trunk, Pangborn’s end was officially called a suicide.
One piece appeared in the Miami Herald about the disappearance of Meeks Wardley Hilby III, and a reporter actually tracked me down to Key West and asked if I thought Patty and Wardley might be together again. I told him they were both out of my life but dwelling in Europe, or Tahiti, or somewhere between. I suppose that story can always flare up again.
No one ever seemed to want to know what happened to Regency. It is hard to believe, but there were almost no official inquiries to Madeleine. A man from the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington telephoned her once and she told him she and Regency had been driving down to Mexico, but Alvin disappeared on her in Laredo, so she never crossed the border. (Earlier, on our way to Colorado, we had even taken the long detour to Laredo to provide her with a motel receipt that she could show official eyes if her story was ever questioned.) I do not think, however, that anyone on the official side of the drug business was wholly unhappy to lose him. There, for now, it rests. I asked Madeleine once about Alvin’s brother, but the occasion on which the photograph of those nephews was taken, happened to be the only time she met his family—one brother.
Since we had little money, we thought of selling our respective houses, but neither was in our name. I guess they will be taken eventually for taxes.
My father is still alive. The other day I received a letter from him. It said: “Keep your fingers nice and crossed, but the chirpy birds, to their big surprise, now say I got remission. It’s as big as absolution to them.”
Well, Douglas Madden’s son, Timothy Madden, has his own theory. I suspect my father’s present state of physiological grace has something to do with all the heads and bodies he plumbed and weighted and carried out to sea.
No wonder that cancer is so expensive to cure.
And I? Well, I am so compromised by so many acts that I must try to write my way out of the internal prison of my nerves, my guilts and my deep-rooted spiritual debts. Yet I would take the chance again. In truth, it is not all bad. Madeleine and I sleep for hours with our arms around each other. I live within the fold of her deed, not uncomfortable and not insecure, deeply attached to her and aware that all my present stability of mind rests on the firm foundation of a mortal crime.
Let no one say, however, that we escape from Hell-Town wholly unscathed. One fine summer sunset in Key West when winds from the equator were blowing across the Caribbean and the air conditioning had given out, I could not sleep for thinking of the photographs of Madeleine and Patty that I beheaded with a pair of scissors. For it came to me then to remember that I had done it after sunset (in some dreadful act of amateur voodoo, I suppose, to keep Patty from leaving me) yes, did it just before we set out for the séance which Harpo conducted. If you remember, Nissen began to scream because he had a vision of Patty in her final state.
What can I tell you? The last news I had from Provincetown was by way of a friendly floater who passed through Key West and told me Harpo went mad. It seems he gave another séance some time ago and claimed to glimpse six bodies at the bottom of the sea. From these depths, two headless women spoke to him. Poor Harpo was committed, and from what I hear, is only to be released a little later this year.
To Scott Meredith
By Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
An American Dream
Cannibals and Christians
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Deer Park—A Play
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Of a Fire on the Moon
The Prisoner of Sex
Maidstone
Existential Errands
St. George and the Godfather
Marilyn
The Faith of Graffiti
The Fight
Genius and Lust
The Executioner’s Song
Of Women and Their Elegance
Pieces and Pontifications
Ancient Evenings
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Harlot’s Ghost
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
The Gospel According to the Son
The Time of Our Time
The Spooky Art
Why Are We at War?
Modest Gifts
The Castle in the Forest
On God (with J. Michael Lennon)
Mind of an Outlaw
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
Norman Mailer, Tough Guys Don't Dance
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