I moved around toward the carport side, crouched and ran to the side of the convertible, waited there, resting on one knee, listening. I came up cautiously and looked into the empty car, then leaned and felt cautiously. The keys weren’t in it. I went to the rear, crouched and felt the nearest tail pipe. There was just a slight residual heat. Recalling how he drove it, I could guess it had been there some time. I moved close to the house and around the corner and along the front of it, ready to flatten myself among the unkempt plantings should a car come down the street. The awning windows across the front of the living room were almost wide open. I crouched below them, raised cautiously. I saw Crane Watts from another angle. All I could see of him was the sprawl of legs on the hassock, one hand dangling. The chair faced the television set. It accounted for the flickering light. The sound was completely off. A handsome Negro girl was singing. The camera had moved in for a closeup, the white teeth, tremolo of tongue, effortful throat, vast enunciations of the lips. All in a total silence, total until I heard a faint buzzing snore from the man in the green chair, and another.
I ducked down and continued across the front to the far corner. As I went around the corner I saw the long shadow I cast, and knew that I was outlined against the single streetlight on the other side of Clematis Drive, and knew it would be a Very Good Thing to get back where I had been. Out of darkness ahead came a sound. THOP. And with it a whisper of air movement touching the right side of my throat, and immediately thereafter the workmanlike chud of lead into a palm trunk a hundred yards behind me.
They would say, when Whitey ford made that incredible motion to nip the base runner off first, that the man was caught leaning. The man was leaning one way, and realized what was happening, and yearned to go the other way, but he had to overcome the inertia of himself before he could move back. I was off balance. I yearned for the safety I had left. Either it was a cheap silencer he was using, or a homemade one, or a good one used too many times. Good ones go THUFF. Not THOP I did not review all my past life in a microsecond. I was too busy changing balance and direction, and thinking, How stupid, how idiotic, how… Arthur-like. I did not hear the next THOP I heard only the monstrous tearing blast as the slug tore the whole top left side of my head off with such finality, the world ended in whiteness without even any residual sense of falling.
… my head was in a fish bag, in a fetid closure of stink, laced with engine oil. My hand was way off, around a corner, down another street, utterly indifferent to the master’s demands. So if you won’t come, I told it, wiggle a finger. It wiggled a finger. No problem, boss. Try the other hand. The right hand. The good one. But that is impossible, entirely. Cleaved I am, from crown to crotch, the right half discarded, wound fitted with plexiglass so they can see all the moving parts in there, all the little visceral pumps and pulses.
The rebel hand floated up and came drifting, unseen, all the way back, caught upon something, pushed, and the fish bag was gone and I lay in a black fresh wash of air, made one little hitch, another, looked at two moons riding, two half moons absolutely identical. Well now. That is unusual. Each star had a twin, both in the same relationship as were the twin moons. I struggled with some massive concept of duality, something which, could I but grasp it and put it into coherency would alter the whole future of mankind. But some nagging little temporal worry kept trying to intrude. A graveyard slab was over me, tilting. Actually two of them, one merging into the other. I stared and the slab became two white leathery backs of a front seat, merged in the same way, and by painful deduction I established that I was on the rear floor of a car. And suddenly it was Boone Waxwell’s car, and I was dead. Caught leaning. I got my hand up there to find out how I died. It felt very bad up there, and very tall. All caked and torn meat. Stickiness and miscellany which could not be me. I tried to find the other half of myself. The hand, more docile and obedient, went a searching. It found a dull dead meat, and I thought someone was tucked in there with me. But when I prodded it and squeezed it, there was some deep and muffled tenderness announcing itself as my right arm. My efforts brought the edge of the stinking tarp flapping down over my face once more, and I pushed it down and away. Dead was one thing. Becoming crab food was a further unpleasantness. The fellow was certainly casual about it. Kill me, dump me in his car, throw a tarp over me, take care of the body when he found the time. But if the body happened to be gone… Reaching up, I found the release on the rear door. It clicked and I shoved with my good leg. I slid over the sill a little, forcing the door open. I pushed again and again until my shoulders were over the sill, but my head hung down. I got the good hand under the back of my head, pulled it up, shoved again, and I slid out until my shoulders were on turf, hips still up on the sill. Two more shoves and my hips fell onto the ground. Then I could push against the outside of the car with the good leg. The dead leg followed me out. Rolling over was a major feat, requiring careful planning, proper shifting of dead parts into positions where leverage would work. Twice I got up to the balance point and the third time I flapped over.
Rested, then with the help of my hand, got my head up to take a look. Two of everything. Far things were doubled. Close things were two things merged, blurred into each other. Blinking did no good. It was between his convertible and the side of the carport. I had begun to wonder if I might not be entirely dead. The raw scrubby land out back would be that way. Worry about the fence when I got to it. If I got to it. Go that way. Get to back corner of carport, turn left. Go along back wall of carport and house. Come to cage. Turn right. Go along edge of cage and then straight out across yard.
In a little while I found the only possible method of locomotion. Roll onto the dead side, stay propped up by pressure of left hand against ground. Bring left knee up as far as I could get it. Use leg as brace and reach as far ahead as possible with left hand. Dig fingers into soil. Then pull with hand, and push with edge of left shoe, and slide on the dead side. Not quite as dead. It had begun to tingle in a very unpleasant way. Pins and needles. But it wouldn’t respond to command. I estimated that five or six good efforts took me my own length. I awarded myself a brief rest at the end of each McGee-length. Four rests brought me to the carport corner. Four more rests and I seemed to be halfway to the cage. It seemed to me that a long time had passed since he had shot me in the head. There seemed to be only one light in the house. I felt I was rustling the half-dead leaves of the plantings too loudly. At least I was in moonshade on the back side of the house.
I stopped for an earned rest, face down in moist grass. I was ordering a dead-hand finger to wiggle when, directly over me, in a voice that was half a hard resonance and half a husky whisper, with a dreadful, intimate jocularity Boone Waxwell said, “Gone play dead now, hey?”
I waited to feel the cool fat end of that silencer against the nape of my neck.
“You answer ol‘ Boo now, hear?” he said in that same wheedling, jolly imitation of affection. “Gone play dead? Little ol’ country club pussycat gone try that little game that didn‘ work the other times neither?”