“I guess you’re right. We’re no longer invisible. That’s another thing Larry hadn’t counted on.” She sounded like she was spiralling down into depression.
“Mrs. Geller, this may sound peculiar, but have you been talking with a man named Wally Moore, a panhandler you may have seen on St. Andrew Street? He and his partner are part of the scenery. Has he phoned or come to the door?”
“There have been dozens of calls. People threatening. I hate answering the phone. But I don’t remember him. I hope it’s not important. I’ve got to go. Debbie’s just come back. I’ll pass you to her and talk to you later, okay?”
“Never mind Debbie. Just one thing. Did Larry call you for any reason that last day?”
“The day he …? No, I don’t think so. No, I’m sure he didn’t. Why?”
“Just wondered.”
“I’ve really got to go, Mr. Cooperman.” I said “Sure” and she was gone.
So Larry burned his papers and telephoned home before he skipped out. And Ruth doesn’t want me to know about the call. It wasn’t much, but it was something I didn’t know ten minutes earlier. In this business you have to be thankful for mouldy crumbs sometimes.
I sat in Larry Geller’s chair for a minute trying to see things his way, from his point of view. Inspiration didn’t rain down on me from the ceiling, so I got ready to leave.
Making a mental note to get the keys to Larry’s door and the building duplicated at Coy’s, I went out into the unlighted corridor. The door closed with a punctuating click behind me. My memory is vague on the subject of what I was thinking about next. In fact, apart from the ghost of an idea that I might have been thinking of my supper, things aren’t very clear at all about the next part. When I turned around from the door, thinking whatever I was thinking, I was staring into three badly lit mean faces and the open end of a.32 calibre revolver.
ELEVEN
“We don’t want no trouble,” said a voice somewhere above the gun. I wasn’t too particular which of the heavies facing me was the spokesperson. The two on the outside moved around both my flanks while my mouth tried to find something to do besides hang on its hinges. I started to turn to the right, the direction of the stairs, when a big sunflower bloomed suddenly behind my left ear. It developed magenta petals and enlarged to fill the whole screen. You read in mysteries that getting hit on the head is like diving into a pool of darkness. Tonight it was like diving into a three-hundred-watt bulb. I didn’t even feel myself hit the ground.
Two or three hundred years slipped by without my noticing. I think there were dreams at one point. I remember Ruth Geller was trying to tell me something. Pia Morley was glowering at me over my mud-stained desk. Somehow her car got into the office. I was walking down a line of parked cars and the doors kept opening to block the way. I leapt over one car, then a door opened and Joyce See fell out. She didn’t move. Nathan Geller was there fixing the windshield, and he was joined by the rest of the family pointing at the heap on the ground and then at me. They were leering at the gun that was smoking in my hand. I tried to explain; I tried to back up and get away, but true to the nature of dreams, the way was blocked by a pile of Nathan’s life-sized statues. A newspaper vendor in plaster of Paris, a balloon salesman in bronze, a traffic cop with his fat hand raised against me. Then it was a dinner-table with Friday night candles burned low and Ma and Pa frozen in an attitude of patient waiting, while the gravy congealed around a cooling brisket roast. Nathan’s skilled hands had put worry into both of their faces.
When my senses started coming back, it was the sense of motion that hit me first, I think. I felt short bristles under my cheek, a rug, maybe, and a bouncing movement. I couldn’t see anything. I moved and it hurt. My wrist banged against something cool. It was even cooler than I was. Fingers traced the outline of a metal object in the shape of a cross. It felt heavy without my trying to move it. The arms were about ten inches to a foot across. I felt the end of one arm and knew what it was. That was a low moment. Carefully I reached above my head. I was right. There were only a few inches above. The metal cross was a tire iron, and I was in the trunk of a moving car.
I’m not generally prone to feelings of claustrophobia. As a matter of fact I’m not generally prone, period. I could see panic beginning somewhere around my solar plexus and I knew that if I didn’t put a sock in it, it was going to come out a scream. I knew that wasn’t going to yield much of a harvest except maybe another bump on the head, so I tried to chill the urge. If they wanted me dead, I thought, I’d be dead. I tried to squeeze some pleasure from that. I tried to move around. Each movement was like having your ear-drums tickled with a chisel and mallet. At least there was a lot of room in the trunk. I wasn’t being taken for a ride in a cheap imported compact. I could move across to the fender covers, or down into a valley where I found a spare tire that felt new. I could feel little nipples of rubber on the treads that would have been normally worn away within a few miles of driving.
We were on a smooth highway, judging by the even flow of the ride. There were no sudden turns or stops. Another passenger in the trunk with me was a coat, a light raincoat by the feel. I went through the pockets and moved everything I could find to my pockets. I’d like to think it was training that made me do that. It was more likely that I did it just to stop myself from starting to holler. At the very least I would separate one of the hoodlums from his laundry for a while.
Gradually my eyes began to send weak messages to my brain. At first they were false notions of light in that dark place. I seemed to be able to see a faint glow in one part of the trunk and then in another. Maybe that’s what happens when the dark is that thick. I tried moving again and a bright light exploded in my face, forcing me to blink. It was the illuminated dial of my wristwatch. The glow seemed to light up the whole space under my nose and plunge the far corners into even deeper black. “Seven twenty-three” the little figures read. I hadn’t been out for very long, then. I kept looking at the little red lines that made up the numbers. Useless information was presented by a damaged mind: I’d get the maximum of illumination at ten-O-eight and the least at one-eleven.
These speculations were interrupted by the smell of exhaust working its way steadily into my moving coffin. Carbon monoxide! I’d be found cherry red in a ditch without a scratch on me. I tried to sniff my way to the place where the smell was strongest, and stuffed the raincoat into the gap of rusted-away wheel cover. Canadian winters are great eaters of innocent metal. The smell began to settle down. I remembered that carbon monoxide is heavy, so I propped my head as high as I could. That meant that I took an occasional thump on the forehead from every pot-hole or dead skunk the car ran over.
I needed to take my mind, or what was left of it, off the panic that had found nesting ground in every joint of my body. I did a survey of my pockets and came up with a ball-point pen, cigarettes and my penknife. I could see myself chipping away at the trunk lid with it until it broke, like Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer, with his cheek against the massive door of the closed cave. Then I thought of that new tire without even a mile on its factory-new treads. I took the knife firmly and with what little leverage I could find worked the blade back and forth along the smooth wall of the tire. I was getting a little light-headed. Would it be better to relax and keep still or should I go down with harness on my back? That was Macbeth, I think. I think I felt the presence of an old English teacher. We were talking about an essay I’d got a C-plus on. “It’s not good enough, Benny. It’s just not good enough. I know you can do better. Where’s your stick-to-it-iveness? You’ve got to work like a Trojan if you intend to graduate.” I kept moving the knife against the rubber, the nylon cords and then the backing. It was something to do, something to demonstrate to Mr. McDonald that I was trying to improve. When the tire blew, I thought my ear-drums would roll out of my head and spiral about like two nickels on a table-top. The air that came out was stale, smelling of dust and rubber. But there must have been a little stale oxygen in it somewhere. It made a nice change from the carbon monoxide I’d been breathing. I was glad to see that the English teacher had vanished. My head even felt clearer, until the car lurched sharply and I was thrown against the left-hand side of the trunk. We’d gone off the smooth highway and were now on a bumpy road. My back took a pounding. Every new bump hit where a sore place was hiding. All body secrets were out in the open. I had to clench my teeth or lose them. Rough road, journey’s end. That made sense. Life’s happy journey. Dead and red in a ditch.