Epilogue - Moth in a Killing Jar

"Put the knife away," said his brother's voice. "You hear me, don't you, Don? Put it away. It won't do you any good anymore."

Don opened his eyes and saw the open-air restaurant about him, the gilt lettering across the street. David sat across the table, still handsome, still radiating concern, but dressed in a moldering sack which once had been a suit; the lapels were gray with fine dust, the seams sprouted white threads. Mold grew up the sleeves.

His steak and a half-full wineglass were before him; in his right hand he held a fork, in his left a bone-handled Bowie knife.

Don freed a button on his shirt and slid the knife between his shirt and his skin. "I'm sick of these tricks," he said. "You're not my brother, and I'm not in New York. We're in a motel room in Florida."

"And you haven't had nearly enough sleep," his brother said. "You really look like you're in terrible shape." David propped one elbow on the table and lifted the smoky aviator glasses off his eyes. "But maybe you're right. It doesn't unsettle you so much anymore, does it?"

Don shook his head. Even his brother's eyes were right; that seemed indecent, that she should have copied his eyes so exactly. "It proves I was right," he said.

"About the little girl in the park, you mean. Well, of course you were right about her. You were supposed to find her-haven't you worked that out yet?"

"Yes. I did."

"But in a few hours little Angie, the poor orphan girl, will be back in the park. In ten or twelve years, she'll be just about the age for Peter Barnes, wouldn't you say? Of course, poor Ricky will have killed himself long before that."

"Killed himself."

"Very easy to arrange, dear brother."

"Don't call me brother," Don said.

"Oh, we're brothers all right," David said, and smiled as he snapped his fingers.

In the motel room, a weary-looking black man settled back into the chair facing him and unclipped a tenor saxophone from the strap around his neck. "Now me, of course, you know," he said, putting the saxophone down on a bedside table.

"Dr. Rabbitfoot."

"The celebrated."

The musician had a heavy, authoritative face, but instead of the gaudy minstrel's getup Don had imagined him wearing, he dressed in a rumpled brown suit shot with iridescent threads of a paler, almost pinkish brown; and he too looked rumpled, tired from a life spent on the road. Dr. Rabbitfoot's eyes were as flat as the little girl's, but their whites had turned the yellow of old piano keys.

"I didn't imagine you very well."

"No matter. I don't take offense easy. You can't think of everything. In fact, there's a lot you didn't think of." The musician's breathy confidential voice had the timbre of his saxophone. "A few easy victories don't mean you won the war. Seems like I be reminding folks of that a lot. I mean, you got me here, but where did you get yourself? That's an example of the kind of thing you gotta keep in mind, Don."

"I got face to face with you," Don said.

Dr. Rabbitfoot lifted his chin and laughed: and in the middle of the laugh, which was hard and explosive, as regular as a stone skipping over water, Don was in Alma Mobley's apartment, all of the luxurious objects in their old places around him, and Alma was seated on a cushion before him.

"Well, that's hardly new, is it?" she asked, still laughing. "Face to face-that's a position we knew many times, as I remember it. Top to tail, too."

"You're despicable," he said. These transformations were starting to work: his stomach burned and his temples ached.

"I thought you got beyond that," she said in her glancing, sunshiny voice. "After all, you know more about us than nearly anyone on this planet. If you don't like our characters, at least you should respect our abilities."

"No more than I respect the sleazy tricks of a nightclub magician."

"Then I'll have to teach you to respect them," she said and leaned forward and was David, half his skull flattened and his jaw broken and his skin broken and bleeding in a dozen places.

"Don? For God's sake, Don… can't you help me? Jesus, Don." David pitched sideways on the Bokhara rug and groaned with pain. "Do something-for God's sake…"

Don could not bear it. He ran around his brother's body, knowing if he bent over to help David they would kill him, and opened the door of Alma's apartment, shouted "No!" and saw that he was in a crowded, sweaty room, a nightclub of some sort (It's only because I said nightclub, he thought, she picked up the word and yanked me into it) where black and white people sat together at small round tables facing a bandstand.

Dr. Rabbitfoot was sitting on the edge of the bandstand, nodding at him. The saxophone was back on its chain, and he fingered the keys as he spoke.

"You see, boy, you got to respect us. We can take your brain and turn it to cornmeal mush." He pushed himself off the stand and came toward Don. "Pretty soon"-and now, shockingly, Alma's voice came from his wide mouth-"you don't know where you are or what you're doing, everything inside you is all mixed up, you don't know what's a lie and what isn't." He smiled. Then in the doctor's voice again, and lifting the saxophone toward Don, he said, "You take this horn here. I can tell little girls I love them through this horn, and that's probably a lie. Or I can say I'm hungry, and that sure as hell ain't no lie. Or I can say something beautiful, and who knows if that's a lie or not? It's a complicated business, see?"

"It's too hot in here," Don said. His legs were trembling and his head seemed to be spinning in wide arcs. The other musicians on the stand were tuning up, some of them hitting the A the piano player fed them, others running scales: he was afraid that when they started to play, the music would blow him to pieces. "Can we leave?"

"You got it," said Dr. Rabbitfoot. The yellow around his pupils shone.

The drummer splashed a cymbal, and a throbbing note from a bass vibrated through the humid air like a bird, taking his stomach with it, and all the musicians came in together, the sound hitting him like an enormous breaker.

And he was walking along a Pacific beach with David, both of them barefoot, a seagull gliding overhead, and he didn't want to look at David, who wore the dreadful moldering gravesuit, so he looked at the water and saw shimmering, iridescent layers of oil sliding through the pools around them. "They just got it all," David was saying, "they watched us so long they know us right down to the ground, you know? That's why we can't win-that's why I look this way. You can get a few lucky breaks like you did back in Milburn, but believe me, they won't let you get away now. And it's not so bad."

"No?" Don whispered, almost ready to believe it, and looked past David's terrible head and saw behind them, up on a bluff, the "cottage" he and Alma had stayed in, several thousand years before.

"It's like when I first went into practice," David explained, "I thought I was such hot stuff, Don-Jesus, I thought I'd turn the place upside down. But the old guys in that firm, Sears and Ricky, they knew so many tricks, they were smooth as grease, man. And I was the only thing that got turned upside down. So I just settled down to learn, brother, I apprenticed myself to them, and I decided that if I was ever going to go anywhere I had to learn to be just like they were. That's how I got ahead."

"Sears and Ricky?" Don asked.

"Sure. Hawthorne, James and Wanderley. Isn't that what it was?"

"In a way it was," Don said, blinking into a red sun.

"In a big way. And that's what you have to do now, Don. You have to learn to honor your betters. Humility. Respect, if you like. See, these guys, they live forever, and they know us inside out, when you think you got them pinned down they wiggle out and come up fresh as flowers-just like the old lawyers in my first firm. But I learned, see, and I got all this." David gestured encompassingly around, taking in the house, the ocean, the sun.

"All this," Alma said, beside him now in her white dress, "and me too. Like your saxophone player says, it's a complicated business."

The patterns of oil in the water deepened, and the sliding colors wrapped around his shins.

"What you need, boy," Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, "is a way out. You got an icicle in your belly and a spike through your head, and you're as tired as three weeks of a Georgia summer. You gotta get to the final bar. You need a door, son."

"A door," Don repeated, ready to drop, and found himself looking at a tall wooden door upended in the sand. A sheet of paper was pinned to it at eye level; Don trudged forward and saw the typed letters on the sheet.

Gulf View Motor Lodge

1. The Management requests that all guests depart by noon, or pay another night's cabin rental.

2. We respect your property, please respect ours.

3. No frying, grilling or boiling in the cabins.

4. The Management wishes you a hearty welcome, a happy stay and a purposeful departure.

The Management.

"See?" David said behind him. "A purposeful departure. You have to do what the Management tells you to do. That's what I was talking about-open it, Don."

Don opened the door and walked through. Broiling Florida sun fell on him, lay across the shining asphalt of the parking lot. Angie was standing before him, holding open the door of his car. Don staggered and leaned on the baking red flank of a Chevrolet van; the man who resembled Adolf Eichmann, immured in his concrete booth, turned his head to stare at him. Light gleamed from his thin gold spectacles.

Don got in the car.

"Now just drive on out," Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, leaning back into the car seat. "You found that door you needed, didn't you? It's all gonna work out fine."

Don pulled out into the exit lane. "Which way?"

"Which way, son?" The black man giggled, and then gave his breathy, explosive laugh. "Why, our way. That's the only way you got. We're just gonna get off by ourselves somewhere in the countryside, you see that?"

And of course, he did see it: turning out onto the highway in the direction away from Panama City, he saw not the road but a broad field, a checkered tablecloth on grass, a windmill turning in a scented breeze. "Don't," he said. "Don't do that."

"Fine, son. You just drive."

Don peered ahead, saw the yellow line dividing the highway, gasped for air. He was tired enough to fall asleep driving.

"Boy, you stink like a goat. You need a shower."

As soon as the musical voice had ceased, a shattering rain hit the windshield. He switched on the wipers, and when the windows cleared for a moment, saw sheets of rain bouncing off the highway, slicing down through suddenly darkened air.

He screamed and, not knowing he was going to do it, stamped on the accelerator.

The car squealed forward, rain pouring in through the open window, and they shot over the edge of the highway and plummeted down the bank.

His head struck the wheel and he knew the car was rolling over, flipping once and bouncing him up on the seat, then flipping again and righting itself, pointed downward, rolling free toward the railroad tracks and the Gulf.

Alma Mobley stood on the tracks, holding up her hands as if that would stop them: she flickered out like a light bulb as the car jounced over the tracks and went on gathering speed toward the access road.

"You damned cracker," Dr. Rabbitfoot shouted, violently rocked into him and then rocked back against the door.

Don felt a sudden pain in his shirt, clasped his hand over it, and found the knife. He ripped open his shirt, shouting something that was not words, and when the black man lunged at him, met him with the blade.

"Damn… cracker," Dr. Rabbitfoot managed to gasp. The knife bumped against a rib, the musician's eyes widened and his hand closed around Don's wrist, and Don pushed, willing it: the long blade scraped past the rib and found the heart.

Alma Mobley's face appeared across the windshield, wild and raddled as a hag's, screeching at him. Don's head was jammed into Dr. Rabbitfoot's neck; he felt blood pouring out over his hand.

The car lifted six inches off the ground, hoisted by an internal blast of wind that battered Don against the door and tore his shirt up into his face. They bounded off the access road and rode on the nightwatcher's death down into the Gulf.

The car mired itself in water and Don watched the man's body shriveling and shrinking as Anna Mostyn's had done. He felt warmth on his neck and knew that the rain had stopped before he saw the sunlight streaming across the whipping, tortured form blown back and forth on the car seat. Water poured in through the bottom of the doors; spouts of it whirled up to join Dr. Rabbitfoot's last dance. Pencils and maps on the dashboard lifted off and whirled too.

A thousand screaming voices surrounded him.

"Now, you bastard," he whispered, waiting for the moan from the spirit inhabiting that disappearing form.

A whirling pencil winked into invisibility: vibrant greenish light colored everything like a flash of green lightning. Cracker, hissed a voice from nowhere, and the car pitched violently, and shafts of color as violent as that, as if the car were a prism, burst out from the center of the pinwheeling water.

Don aimed at a spot inches above the vortex and shot out his hands, throwing himself forward just as his ear recorded that the last hissing of the voice had become an angry, enduring buzz.

His hands closed around a form so small that at first he thought he had missed it. His motion carried him forward, and his joined hands struck the edge of the window and he tumbled off the seat into the water.

The thing in his hands stung him.

LET ME GO!

It stung him again, and his hand felt the size of footballs. He scraped his palms together and rolled it into his left hand.

RELEASE ME!

He squeezed his fingers down into his palm, and was stung again before the enormous voice in his head dampened into a thin, wriggling shriek.

Crying now, partly from pain but far more from a savage sense of triumph that made him feel he was shining like the sun, streaming light from every pore, he used his right hand to take the knife from the sodden car seat and push the passenger door open against the lapping water of the Gulf.

Then the voice in his mind widened out like a hunting horn. The wasp stung him twice rapidly, hitting the base of two fingers.

Don crawled sobbing across the seat and dropped out into the waist-high water. Time to see what happens when you shoot the lynx. He stood up and saw a row of men standing seventy yards off outside the sheds, staring at him in the sun. An overweight man in a security guard's uniform was running down to the edge of the water.

Time to see what happens. Time to see. He waved the security guard away with his right hand, and dropped the left into the water to stun the wasp.

The guard saw the knife in his hand, and put his own hand on his holster. "You okay?" he shouted.

"Get away!"

"Look, buddy-"

RELEASE ME!

The guard lowered his hand, backed a few inches up the beach, bewilderment chasing the belligerence from his face.

YOU HAVE TO LET ME GO!

"Like hell I do," Don said, and came up onto the sand and went to his knees, cramping his left hand down again. "Time to shoot the lynx."

He raised the knife over his swollen, flaming left hand and curled back the fingers a fraction of an inch at a time. When a part of the wasp's body, struggling legs and a bloated hindquarters, was uncovered, he slashed down with the knife, laying open his hand.

NO! YOU CANNOT DO THIS!

He tilted his palm and dropped the severed section of the wasp onto the sand. Then he slashed down again and cut the remainder of the wasp in half.

NO! NO! NO! NO! CANNOT!

"Hey, mister…" said the security guard, coming nearer across the sand. "You cut your hand all to hell."

"Had to," Don said, and dropped the knife beside the pieces of the wasp. The enormous flaring voice had become a shrill piping scream. The guard, still red-faced and fuddled, looked down at the pieces of the wasp, twitching and rolling feverishly over the sand. "Wasp," he said. "Thought maybe that freak storm took you off the… uh…" He rubbed his mouth. "It prob'ly stung you right then, huh? Jeeze, I never knew those things live when they're… uh…"

Don was winding his shirt around his wounded hand, and he dropped it back into salt water to help it heal.

"Guess you wanted revenge on the l'il sonofabitch, huh?" the guard said.

"I did," Don said, and met the man's baffled eyes and laughed. "That's right, I did."

"Yeah, you got it too," the guard said. Both of them watched the severed pieces of wasp rolling in the wet sand. "That thing ain't ever gonna give up the ghost."

"Doesn't look like it." Don used his shoe to scrape sand over the wriggling sections of the wasp. Even then dimples and depressions in the sand showed that the thing continued to struggle.

"Tide'll come in and take it," the guard said. He motioned toward the sheds, the rank of curious men. "Can we do anything for you? We could get a truck out here, call from the plant to get your car hauled out."

"Let's do that. Thank you."

"You got somewhere you got to go in a hurry?"

"Not in a hurry," Don said, knowing all at once what he had to do next. "But there's a woman I have to meet in San Francisco." They began to go toward the sheds and the quiet men. Don stopped to look back; saw only sand. Now he could not even find the spot where he had buried it.

"Tide'll take that l'il bastard halfway to Bolivia," the fat guard said. "You don't want to worry about that anymore, friend. It'll be fishfood by five o'clock."

Don tucked the knife into his belt and experienced a wave of love for everything mortal, for everything with a brief definite life span-a tenderness for all that could give birth and would die, everything that could live, like these men, in sunshine. He knew it was only relief and adrenalin, but it was all the same a mystical, perhaps a sacred emotion. Dear Sears. Dear Lewis. Dear David. Dear John, unknown. And dear Ricky and Stella, and dear Peter too. Dear brothers, dear humankind.

"For a guy whose car is turning into salt rust, you look awful happy," the guard said.

"Yes," Don answered. "Yes, I am. Don't ask me to explain it."

The End

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