Chapter 18

Mrs. Elizabeth McKay was aware of a peculiar sensation, or rather the absence of usual sensations, somewhere in her abdomen. Her heart still beat, her lungs pumped breath, and yet there was a sort of pause, a suspension of some vital inner motion. Had she been forced to find words to describe it, she might have compared it to a drop of water on the end of a faucet, drooping, lengthening, threatening to drop, and still not dropping.

'Yes,' Roderick repeated.'I would appreciate it very much indeed. I was thinking you might drown her in a bath, but do it in whatever manner suits you best. I'll wait here downstairs in the meantime. Naturally, I'll pay you for this—any reasonable price.'

'What do you think, Roderick—that I'm some hired murderer?'

'How about that abortion you were just carrying on about? Don't you call that murder?'

'Maybe it was, maybe it was—the Lord will be my judge. God knows, I've regretted it many a time. But I'm not about to risk my soul—and my life—on any murder charge.'

'Bessy, you already have,' Roderick said, in a tone of wheedling reasonableness. 'As far as the law is concerned—and I should know because I was almost a lawyer once—you're as guilty as I am of Harry Dorman's murder—and of your son's. Once a person has entered a conspiracy, he becomes responsible for whatever anyone else in the conspiracy does. You're as guilty as I am, Bessy—before the law.'

'No!'

The drop of water finally fell, silently into a pool of silence, and silent concentric rings rushed outwards from the point of impact and threatened to engulf the room—and her mind. Her son was dead: it would not be believed, it could not be borne.

'I killed your son, Bessy. That's perfectly true, and nothing can be done about it now. In return, I'm asking you to kill my daughter.'

Had he actually said that, or had she just imagined it? It was hardly credible that any living soul could ever say anything so foolish and terrible, and yet by the way he seemed to be waiting for an answer, he must have said it. The only answer she could make to him were tears. The tears rolled down her cheeks, but inside she felt that same strange cessation. It was not pain. It was something deeper than pain.

My heart, she thought. My heart is breaking.

'Are you all right? You don't look well'

'Fine. I'm just fine, I...' Her vision steadied, and she wiped her eyes dry. You just couldn't afford to let your emotions run away with you when you were dealing with a son of a bitch like this.

'You wouldn't by any chance,' Roderick asked, 'have a firearm around here?'

'Why, as a matter of fact ... yes!' She marvelled at the irony of it—the little pistol in her dresser drawer, with its mother-of-pearl inlaid handle, had been a gift from Jim Bittle's daddy. Was that the answer then? It did seem that the hand of Providence was guiding her. She sent Clara up to the bedroom to fetch it. (She just couldn't go up those stairs again herself.)

'Is it loaded?' Roderick asked.

'Yes, it's loaded,' she said wearily. She considered Roderick, whose outmoded and strained nattiness seemed so much in keeping with everything else at Green Pastures—the Latin moustache, the black pompadour set on his head askew, the beginnings of a second chin. No, she couldn't do it. However much he might deserve it, she couldn't shoot him down in cold blood.

She laid the gun down on the table.

'Well? Are you going to do what I asked or not?'

'I'll do it' She raised herself wearily out of the wooden chair. She'd had too much liquor and not enough sleep. 'I'll take care of Alice, but not with that. That'll make too much noise.'

'Strangle her then, or smother her. Do what you like, but don't ...' Briefly his composure deserted him. He glanced about, as though he might find the wanting words suspended in the air or scrawled on the wall. 'Don't tell me, afterwards, what you had to do. She is my daughter, after all, and I can't help feeling a little ... sentimental. You know how it is.'

'While I'm taking care of her, you'd better get away from here, don't you think? The police must be wondering what's become of you.'

'Fifteen minutes one way or another aren't very important. You won't want to leave her body here. The police have come

around asking after Harry once; they're bound to come again. I've got a car outside, and we can wrap her up in blankets with a cement block and dump her at another point further along the tidewater. So you take care of what you have to do, and I'll just wait downstairs.'

Reluctantly Bessy followed Roderick into the living-room. She shooed Fay and Clara up to their bedroom. Roderick lay back on the sofa, yawning loudly. Bessy felt heartburn rising up in her throat.

'Well, you just have yourself a good nap, hon,' she said. 'I'll be as quick as I can.'

Roderick nodded, smiling abstractedly.

There was no question of killing anybody, least of all the child, but Lord, what was she doing to do? Lord, she thought, Lord, deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man. A spasm of giddiness overtook her then, and she rested her head on the hand that gripped the banister. She felt as if she had been left all alone, as if the Lord had hidden himself from her. But be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord. It was a comfort to know that.

As soon as Roderick heard Bessy locking her bedroom door, he went back into the kitchen. After putting one of the gloves back on, he pocketed the pearl-handed revolver. He had a presentiment that he would have occasion to use it.

'I don't like it, I don't like, it a damned bit,' Clara whispered fiercely. 'If it don't work just exactly so, what you think is going to happen? He ain't playing games down there, you know.'

'Then what you got to suggest better, Clara?' Bessy asked. 'That we go ahead and do what he wants? You think he don't mean to do the same with you and me and Fay as he did with Harry and Jim Bittle? Like hell he don't!'

Alice's fingers shook as she buttoned up the back of Fay's pink organdie party dress. Though Bessy had been careful that she should not overhear her and Clara discussing their plight, she could not help but have suspicions concerning her father's intentions.

'We're going to look like a goddamned circus parade,' Clara complained.

'We'd look less like one, if you'd change out of those denim overalls,' Bessy suggested. Clara made a suggestion of her own in reply.

'Are we going to the circus?' Fay asked eagerly, all buttoned at last.

'You remember everything I told you to do?' Bessy asked of Alice. She nodded. 'And you're not afraid?' 

'Only a little.'

'I'm not at all afraid,' Fay assured Bessy. The animals will all be inside cages, so there isn't anything to be afraid of.' But no one seemed to pay any attention to her today. She began to chew on her hair fretfully.

Bessy began to tie Alice up in one of the sheets from the bed, while Clara began knotting another sheet to this one, then to the second sheet a third.

'What if she runs off and leaves us stuck up here?' Clara asked. Then what will we do? Jesus Christ, who would have thought yesterday that I'd be helping the kid escape today!'

'You won't do that, will you, Dinah? Promise me.'

Alice criss-crossed her heart and pointed to God. Bessy helped her sit on the window sill. The ground was a fearful distance down, but this time she wouldn't have to jump.

'Don't be afraid,' Bessy said. 'We'll be holding on tight.'

'Are we going to the circus?' Fay asked loudly.

'Sssh, child. Clara, can't you keep Fay quiet? Clara, where'd you go?'

Clara came out of the bath that adjoined her own bedroom. She was holding a boot. 'I got this for her to knock on the door with. If she only uses her hand, it won't sound like no F.B.I, man.'

'What a clever idea,' Alice said, smiling uncertainly at Clara, who frowned back at her fiercely. 'Ready?' Bessy asked.

Alice nodded her head. Clara caught her up under her armpits and lowered her outside the window until the sheet pulled taut. Then she and Bessy together began lowering Alice by the rope of sheets to the marshy ground fifteen feet below.

Roderick walked to the foot of the stairs. 'What are you doing up there?' he called out. 'You've been half an hour!'

'We won't be long now,' Bessy answered.

He returned to the sofa, but the minute he sat down he found himself dropping off to sleep again. That would be a hell of a note: to let the police come by and find him asleep on the sofa—with his daughter's dead body upstairs! He went into the kitchen and threw some cold water on his face.

There was knocking at the front door, a sound portentous and heavy with authority. He was about to call and ask Bessy if it had been her making the noise, then checked himself. If it weren't she, if it were someone at the front door ...

Clara came charging down the steps, wearing her denim pants and jacket and a single boot. 'Stay away from that window,' she hissed at Roderick, who had been about to peek through the Venetian blinds to see who was at the door. 'You want people to see you here?" She pushed him away from the window and lifted a single slat of the blinds. 'Jesus Christ,' she whispered.

'What is it?' Roderick asked.

The F.B.I. The man who was here yesterday asking after you. You'd better hide.'

He looked about the room helplessly. 'Where?'

'You can't go out the back way 'cause you might get caught in the mud. It's happened before. You better get into that closet.' She pointed to a door opening on to the brief foyer.

Reluctantly he went to the closet door and opened it. It was crammed with raincoats and heavier, wintry clothes. 'There's no room,' he protested.

The knocking came again. It seemed incredibly loud—as though, Roderick thought, someone were pounding on the door with Clara's missing boot. But its loudness was probably due entirely to his own fear.

'Of course there's room,' Clara said, pushing him inside. 'Now, don't for Christ's sake move around in there or make the least noise. Get yourself comfortable now.'

'But suppose he looks in here?' Roderick whispered urgently, as she pushed the door closed.

'I'll lock the door and tell him the key is lost.'

'No!'

But Clara paid him no heed, and he did not dare protest any louder. In the stifling, woollen-musty darkness he listened to the key moving the tumblers of the lock. Clara opened the front door then, but he couldn't hear what she said to the man who'd been knocking, because the sound of Bessy coming down the stairs drowned it out. Shadows passed back and forth in front of the key-hole, but putting his eye up to it Roderick could see nothing but the forty-five phonograph laying smashed on the floor on the other side of the living-room. The front door slammed shut, and all was silence. 'Clara,' he whispered. 'Clara, let me out of here. Do you hear?'

But how could he expect her to hear him if he only whispered?

He woke up all in a sweat. Someone was moving around the house. He had not wanted to sleep, but the air in the closet was so close, he was so tired, his bed of overcoats so comfy. Had he slept long? It was too dark in the closet to read the face of his watch. He pressed his eye, gummy with sleep, to the key-hole. The living-room was strident with daylight. He blinked, seeing that phonograph collapsed upon the floor, remembering, and wanting not to remember.

He had been putting the finishing touches to his initials, carved on the kitchen door, when the screams began coming from upstairs. Bessy, who had just then been putting another stack of records on the brand-new, phonograph (Tenderly had just finished playing) stood up suddenly, jarring the end table and sending the record player crashing to the floor. Automatically (record players are expensive) she bent down to recover it, and so it had been Roderick who got up the stairs first. The screams continued to come out of the bedroom, shrill soprano agonisings that must have torn blood from the girl's lungs. The door was unlocked.

It was the Creole girl. She was naked, her ankles tied to the lower bed-posts, while Clara, the black homely girl that no one really cared for, stood at the head of the bed holding her wrists. Clara's face was a mask of indifference. When she saw Roderick come into the room the Creole girl stopped screaming. Her skin was so light, with her hair dyed and straightened, she might have passed for white—north of Norfolk, at least.

Bogan folded up his bloody penknife and pocketed it. Roderick's gaze returned again to the girl's smooth belly, where dark blood welled from the cuts. It was just possible, through the mess of blood, to make out the letters that Bogan had carved there: KKK.

Tt was an accident,' Bogan said. 'Honest. My hand slipped.' He pouted.

'My God!' Roderick said, holding to the door frame for support (and, incidentally, to bar the others who had followed him up the stairs from the room). 'You beast! Bogan, you beast!'

'It was an accident,' Bogan repeated idiotically. 'I'll pay for any damage I done, but it was an accident. You'll back me up on that, won't you, Hot Rod? You'll say it was an accident?'

'You better get out of here before Bessy comes up and sees what you done. Damn it all, Bogan, you must be a raving lunatic to think you can pull off a stunt like this.'

'It was an accident. You'll back me up. You'll stand by your brother.' Bogan prepared to leave the room, but stopped, consideringly, before the dresser. He picked the ashtray from the glass top with drunken over-preciseness. 'We'd better cauterise that wound, or it'll get infected.' He turned the ashtray upside down over her belly. She began to scream again, though not with the same hysterical intensity. Roderick hit Bogan a glancing blow on the back of his head, and then Bogan was out of the door and into the hall, doubled with laughter.

'Get him out of here,' Roderick commanded the other fraternity brothers. 'Take him out to the car. This year's Howl is over, as of now. And keep Bessy calmed down till I can get things straightened with this girl in here.'

He returned to the Creole girl. Clara was still holding her wrists as though she sensed that all was not over.

'Are you conscious? Can you understand me?' he asked the girl. She nodded. Her face was wet with tears and sweat.

Awkwardly he began to wipe away the filth of butts and ashes from the still bleeding wound. He was uncomfortably aware of the warmth growing in his loins. 'Does it still hurt?' he asked.

She nodded and began sobbing with relief.

Roderick looked into Clara's eyes, and there was a spark of mutual understanding before she resumed her customary mask of inexpressivity. He did not even need to tell her to continue holding the girl's wrists.

Roderick was still making love to the unconscious girl when the police arrived. They took her to the coloured hospital, where she was two days coming out of a coma. For those two days Roderick and Bogan were held in prison. When they were released, Roderick learned that he had been expelled from the University. He had been just days short of graduation! Bogan, whose father was in the Virginia State Judiciary, received his degree though he was barred from graduation ceremonies. Roderick knew then that if such things could happen, there was no justice in this world, and thereafter he had planned his life accordingly.

Again there was a knocking at the front door, and thirty heartbeats later it was repeated. Bessy must have left the house, for no one came to answer the door. The question was —had Alice left with her? Or was she up in the bath, or under a bed, dead? Whichever were the case, Roderick could think of no better strategy than silence, and he eased back into his nest of winter coats. He could hear the front door opening, and a man's voice called out: 'Bessy? Bessy McKay, are you here?'

A client perhaps? No, it was too early for that sort of thing. This time it probably was, as Clara had pretended before, the F.B.L agent.

Roderick followed him about the house in his imagination: up the stairs, in and out of each bedroom. Downstairs: in the kitchen; along the corridor out-of-use rooms; then, across to the living-room window. Roderick, kneeling at the keyhole again, saw him stoop to pick up the phonograph from the floor. Across his back, in red script, was scrawled the trademark, SPENGLER'S BEER.

Again! The shock he felt exceeded simple fear and passed almost into the realm of the supernatural, a sort of terrorised reverence or reverential terror. His fists, his guts, his glands, all were suffused by it.

The Spengler's Beer insignia left Roderick's small range of vision. The man wearing the overalls (if only Roderick could have seen his face!) came and stood in front of the closet. He jiggled the door handle. Roderick reached into his pocket and gripped the handle of the revolver.

His faceless antagonist muttered an obscenity and strode out of the front door, slamming it behind him. A moment later Roderick heard him start up his truck and drive off.

He was afraid to shoot through the lock, and he had no idea how to set about picking it. He braced his back against the upper wood panel of the door and pushed with the full force of his arms and legs against the wall of the closet. He ripped the back of his suit and strained a shoulder muscle, but he got out. He lay on the floor of the foyer, crying and drinking in the cool, delicious morning air. It was so good to be alive!

He would have to kill Bessy now, of course. Probably the two whores as well. He could see now that this had always been the most logical plan of action, but he had not had the courage, or the honesty, till now to admit it to himself.

Before he left Green Pastures, he ran upstairs just to make sure that Alice's body wasn't somewhere about. He found her dirty red check dress lying beside the clothes hamper in the

bathroom. She must have been changed into the turquoise-blue dress she'd been kidnapped in.

Somehow the cast-off dress made him feel sad.

He smiled, remembering his Nietzsche: Your killing, O judges, shall be pity and not revenge. And as you kill, be sure that you yourselves justify life! It is not enough to make peace with the man you kill. Your sadness shall be love of the overman: Thus you shall justify your living on.

And Roderick did definitely feel sad.

And justified.