Dick ordered another hamburger. During the past few days he’d known a hunger that nothing—three successive steaks, a dozen Hershey bars, a pound of gumdrops—seemed to interrupt. Perry, on the other hand, was without appetite; he subsisted on root beer, aspirin, and cigarettes. “No wonder you got leaps,” Dick told him. “Aw, come on, baby. Get the bubbles out of your blood. We scored. It was perfect.”
“I’m surprised to hear that, all things considered,” Perry said. The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply. But Dick took it, even smiled—and his smile was a skillful proposition. Here, it said, wearing a kid grin, was a very personable character, clean-cut, affable, a fellow any man might trust to shave him.
“O.K.,” Dick said. “Maybe I had some wrong information.”
“Hallelujah.”
“But on the whole it was perfect. We hit the ball right out of the park. It’s lost. And it’s gonna stay lost. There isn’t a single connection.”
“I can think of one.”
Perry had gone too far. He went further: “Floyd—is that the name?” A bit below the belt, but then Dick deserved it, his confidence was like a kite that needed reeling in. Nevertheless, Perry observed with some misgiving the symptoms of fury rearranging Dick’s expression: jaw, lips, the whole face slackened; saliva bubbles appeared at the corners of his mouth. Well, if it came to a fight, Perry could defend himself. He was short, several inches shorter than Dick, and his runty, damaged legs were unreliable, but he outweighed his friend, was thicker, had arms that could squeeze the breath out of a bear. To prove it, however—have a fight, a real falling-out—was far from desirable. Like Dick or not (and he didn’t dislike Dick, though once he’d liked him better, respected him more), it was obvious they could not now safely separate. On that point they were in accord, for Dick had said, “If we get caught, let’s get caught together. Then we can back each other up. When they start pulling the confession crap, saying you said and I said.” Moreover, if he broke with Dick, it meant the end of plans still attractive to Perry, and still, despite recent reverses, deemed possible by both—a skin-diving, treasure-hunting life lived together among islands or along coasts south of the border.
Dick said, “Mr. Wells!” He picked up a fork. “It’d be worth it. Like if I was nabbed on a check charge, it’d be worth it. Just to get back in there.” The fork came down and stabbed the table. “Right through the heart, honey.”
“I’m not saying he would,” said Perry, willing to make a concession now that Dick’s anger had soared past him and struck elsewhere. “He’d be too scared.”
“Sure,” said Dick. “Sure. He’d be too scared.” A marvel, really, the ease with which Dick negotiated changes of mood; in a trice, all trace of meanness, of sullen bravura, had evaporated. He said, “About that premonition stuff. Tell me this: If you were so damn sure you were gonna crack up, why didn’t you call it quits? It wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed off your bike—right?”
That was a riddle that Perry had pondered. He felt he’d solved it, but the solution, while simple, was also somewhat hazy: “No. Because once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will—depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. Like my dream. Since I was a kid, I’ve had this same dream. Where I’m in Africa. A jungle. I’m moving through the trees toward a tree standing all alone. Jesus, it smells bad, that tree; it kind of makes me sick, the way it stinks. Only, it’s beautiful to look at—it has blue leaves and diamonds hanging everywhere. Diamonds like oranges. That’s why I’m there—to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me. A snake that guards the tree. This fat son of a bitch living in the branches. I know this beforehand, see? And Jesus, I don’t know how to fight a snake. But I figure, Well, I’ll take my chances. What it comes down to is I want the diamonds more than I’m afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand, I’m pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me. We wrestle around, but he’s a slippery sonofabitch and I can’t get a hold, he’s crushing me, you can hear my legs cracking. Now comes the part it makes me sweat even to think about. See, he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quicksand.” Perry hesitated. He could not help noticing that Dick, busy gouging under his fingernails with a fork prong, was uninterested in his dream.
Dick said, “So? The snake swallows you? Or what?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.” (But it was! The finale was of great importance, a source of private joy. He’d once told it to his friend Willie-Jay; he had described to him the towering bird, the yellow “sort of parrot.” Of course, Willie-Jay was different—delicate-minded, “a saint.” He’d understood. But Dick? Dick might laugh. And that Perry could not abide: anyone’s ridiculing the parrot, which had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in a California orphanage run by nuns—shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed. It was after one of these beatings, one he could never forget (“She woke me up. She had a flashlight, and she hit me with it. Hit me and hit me. And when the flashlight broke, she went on hitting me in the dark”), that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “paradise.”
As the years went by, the particular torments from which the bird delivered him altered; others—older children, his father, a faithless girl, a sergeant he’d known in the Army—replaced the nuns, but the parrot remained, a hovering avenger. Thus, the snake, that custodian of the diamond-bearing tree, never finished devouring him but was itself always devoured. And afterward the blessed ascent! Ascension to a paradise that in one version was merely “a feeling,” a sense of power, of unassailable superiority—sensations that in another version were transposed into “A real place. Like out of a movie. Maybe that’s where I did see it—remembered it from a movie. Because where else would I have seen a garden like that? With white marble steps? Fountains? And away down below, if you go to the edge of the garden, you can see the ocean. Terrific! Like around Carmel, California. The best thing, though—well, it’s a long, long table. You never imagined so much food. Oysters. Turkeys. Hot dogs. Fruit you could make into a million fruit cups. And, listen—it’s every bit free. I mean, I don’t have to be afraid to touch it. I can eat as much as I want, and it won’t cost a cent. That’s how I know where I am.”)
Dick said, “I’m a normal. I only dream about blond chicken. Speaking of which, you hear about the nanny goat’s nightmare?” That was Dick—always ready with a dirty joke on any subject. But he told the joke well, and Perry, though he was in some measure a prude, could not help laughing, as always.
Speaking of her friendship with Nancy Clutter, Susan Kidwell said: “We were like sisters. At least, that’s how I felt about her—as though she were my sister. I couldn’t go to school—not those first few days. I stayed out of school until after the funeral. So did Bobby Rupp. For a while Bobby and I were always together. He’s a nice boy—he has a good heart—but nothing very terrible had ever happened to him before. Like losing anyone he’d loved. And then, on top of it, having to take a lie-detector test. I don’t mean he was bitter about that; he realized the police were doing what they had to do. Some hard things, two or three, had already happened to me, but not to him, so it was a shock when he found out maybe life isn’t one long basketball game. Mostly, we just drove around in his old Ford. Up and down the highway. Out to the airport and back. Or we’d go to the Cree-Mee—that’s a drive-in—and sit in the car, order a Coke, listen to the radio. The radio was always playing; we didn’t have anything to say ourselves. Except once in a while Bobby said how much he’d loved Nancy
, and how he could never care about another girl. Well, I was sure Nancy wouldn’t have wanted that, and I told him so. I remember—I think it was Monday—we drove down to the river. We parked on the bridge. You can see the house from there—the Clutter house. And part of the land—Mr. Clutter’s fruit orchard, and the wheat fields going away. Way off in one of the fields a bonfire was burning; they were burning stuff from the house. Everywhere you looked, there was something to remind you. Men with nets and poles were fishing along the banks of the river, but not fishing for fish. Bobby said they were looking for the weapons. The knife. The gun.
“Nancy loved the river. Summer nights we used to ride double on Nancy’s horse, Babe—that old fat gray? Ride straight to the river and right into the water. Then Babe would wade along in the shallow part while we played our flutes and sang. Got cool. I keep wondering, Gosh, what will become of her? Babe. A lady from Garden City took Kenyon’s dog. Took Teddy. He ran away—found his way back to Holcomb. But she came and got him again. And I have Nancy’s cat—Evinrude. But Babe. I suppose they’ll sell her. Wouldn’t Nancy hate that? Wouldn’t she be furious? Another day, the day before the funeral, Bobby and I were sitting by the railroad tracks. Watching the trains go by. Real stupid. Like sheep in a blizzard. When suddenly Bobby woke up and said, ‘We ought to go see Nancy. We ought to be with her.’ So we drove to Garden City—went to the Phillips’ Funeral Home, there on Main Street. I think Bobby’s kid brother was with us. Yes, I’m sure he was. Because I remember we picked him up after school. And I remember he said how there wasn’t going to be any school the next day, so all the Holcomb kids could go to the funeral. And he kept telling us what the kids thought. He said the kids were convinced it was the work of ‘a hired killer.’ I didn’t want to hear about it. Just gossip and talk—everything Nancy despised. Anyway, I don’t much care who did it. Somehow it seems beside the point. My friend is gone. Knowing who killed her isn’t going to bring her back. What else matters? They wouldn’t let us. At the funeral parlor, I mean. They said no one could ‘view the family.’ Except the relatives. But Bobby insisted, and finally the undertaker—he knew Bobby, and, I guess, felt sorry for him—he said all right, be quiet about it, but come on in. Now I wish we hadn’t.”
The four coffins, which quite filled the small, flower-crowded parlor, were to be sealed at the funeral services—very understandably, for despite the care taken with the appearance of the victims, the effect achieved was disquieting. Nancy wore her dress of cherry-red velvet, her brother a bright plaid shirt; the parents were more sedately attired, Mr. Clutter in navy-blue flannel, his wife in navy-blue crepe; and—and it was this, especially, that lent the scene an awful aura—the head of each was completely encased in cotton, a swollen cocoon twice the size of an ordinary blown-up balloon, and the cotton, because it had been sprayed with a glossy substance, twinkled like Christmas-tree snow.
Susan at once retreated. “I went outside and waited in the car,” she recalled. “Across the street a man was raking leaves. I kept looking at him. Because I didn’t want to close my eyes. I thought, If I do I’ll faint. So I watched him rake leaves and burn them. Watched, without really seeing him. Because all I could see was the dress. I knew it so well. I helped her pick the material. It was her own design, and she sewed it herself. I remember how excited she was the first time she wore it. At a party. All I could see was Nancy’s red velvet. And Nancy in it. Dancing.”
The Kansas City Star printed a lengthy account of the Clutter funeral, but the edition containing the article was two days old before Perry, lying abed in a hotel room, got around to reading it. Even so, he merely skimmed through, skipped about among the paragraphs: “A thousand persons, the largest crowd in the five-year history of the First Methodist Church, attended services for the four victims today. . . . Several classmates of Nancy’s from Holcomb High School wept as the Reverend Leonard Cowan said: ‘God offers us courage, love and hope even though we walk through the shadows of the valley of death. I’m sure he was with them in their last hours. Jesus has never promised us we would not suffer pain or sorrow but He has always said He would be there to help us bear the sorrow and the pain. . . .’ On the unseasonably warm day, about six hundred persons went to the Valley View Cemetery on the north edge of this city. There, at graveside services, they recited the Lord’s Prayer. Their voices, massed together in a low whisper, could be heard throughout the cemetery.”
A thousand people! Perry was impressed. He wondered how much the funeral had cost. Money was greatly on his mind, though not as relentlessly as it had been earlier in the day—a day he’d begun “without the price of a cat’s miaow.” The situation had improved since then; thanks to Dick, he and Dick now possessed “a pretty fair stake”—enough to get them to Mexico.
Dick! Smooth. Smart. Yes, you had to hand it to him. Christ, it was incredible how he could “con a guy.” Like the clerk in the Kansas City, Missouri, clothing store, the first of the places Dick had decided to “hit.” As for Perry, he’d never tried to “pass a check.” He was nervous, but Dick told him, “All I want you to do is stand there. Don’t laugh, and don’t be surprised at anything I say. You got to play these things by ear.” For the task proposed, it seemed, Dick had perfect pitch. He breezed in, breezily introduced Perry to the clerk as “a friend of mine about to get married,” and went on, “I’m his best man. Helping him kind of shop around for the clothes he’ll want. Haha, what you might say his—ha-ha—trousseau.” The salesman “ate it up,” and soon Perry, stripped of his denim trousers, was trying on a gloomy suit that the clerk considered “ideal for an informal ceremony.” After commenting on the customer’s oddly proportioned figure—the oversized torso supported by the undersized legs—he added, “I’m afraid we haven’t anything that would fit without alteration.” Oh, said Dick, that was O.K., there was plenty of time—the wedding was “a week tomorrow.” That settled, they then selected a gaudy array of jackets and slacks regarded as appropriate for what was to be, according to Dick, a Florida honeymoon. “You know the Eden Roc?” Dick said to the salesman. “In Miami Beach? They got reservations. A present from her folks—two weeks at forty bucks a day. How about that? An ugly runt like him, he’s making it with a honey she’s not only built but loaded. While guys like you and me, good-lookin’ guys . . .” The clerk presented the bill. Dick reached in his hip pocket, frowned, snapped his fingers, and said, “Hot damn! I forgot my wallet.” Which to his partner seemed a ploy so feeble that it couldn’t possibly “fool a day-old nigger.” The clerk, apparently, was not of that opinion, for he produced a blank check, and when Dick made it out for eighty dollars more than the bill totaled, instantly paid over the difference in cash.
Outside, Dick said, “So you’re going to get married next week? Well, you’ll need a ring.” Moments later, riding in Dick’s aged Chevrolet, they arrived at a store named Best Jewelry. From there, after purchasing by check a diamond engagement ring and a diamond wedding band, they drove to a pawnshop to dispose of these items. Perry was sorry to see them go. He’d begun to half credit the make-believe bride, though in his conception of her, as opposed to Dick’s, she was not rich, not beautiful; rather, she was nicely groomed, gently spoken, was conceivably “a college graduate,” in any event “a very intellectual type”—a sort of girl he’d always wanted to meet but in fact never had.
Unless you counted Cookie, the nurse he’d known when he was hospitalized as a result of his motorcycle accident. A swell kid, Cookie, and she had liked him, pitied him, babied him, inspired him to read “serious literature”—Gone with the Wind, This Is My Beloved. Sexual episodes of a strange and stealthy nature had occurred, and love had been mentioned, and marriage, too, but eventually, when his injuries had mended, he’d told her goodbye and given her, by way of explanation, a poem he pretended to have written:
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin;
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
He had not seen her again, or ever heard from or of her, yet several years later he’d had her name tattooed on his arm, and once, when Dick asked who “Cookie” was, he’d said, “Nobody. A girl I almost married.” (That Dick had been married—married twice—and had fathered three sons was something he envied. A wife, children—those were experiences “a man ought to have,” even if, as with Dick, they didn’t “make him happy or do him any good.”)