All sound and motion died with the car and I was alone in the night with only my heartbeat in my ears. I turned and went around the side of the house rather than through it. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid of the dark part of it and wanted to go back to where the light was.
As I stepped up on the back porch I could hear someone talking. It was Lee. I couldn’t make out the words, but he was talking quietly and slowly and didn’t sound as if he were drunk. The tightness across my chest relaxed a little. I opened the door and went in.
The lamp that was burning was the one with the dark shade and it made a cone of light across the table with the rest of the room in partial shadow. Lee was on one side of the table with his arms resting on it and Angelina sat across from him, deathly quiet and moving only her eyes.
There was a bottle of whisky in front of him and a glass half empty just beyond his left hand, but he wasn’t very drunk. At least, not as drunk as I have seen him. Except for the eyes as he half turned toward me I would have said he was sober. The eyes were blazing.
“Sit down, Bob,” he said. “There by the door.”
“Thank you,” I said. “If you’re leaving, don’t let me keep you.”
I was still blinking in the light and then suddenly the cold began to run down across my shoulder blades and into the small of my back. His hands were lying flat down before him on the table in the edge of the shadow beneath the lamp and under the right one was the flat ugly slab of a .45 automatic. It was mine, and I knew it was loaded.
I sat down—slowly, the way a man would carrying an armful of eggs. There was a delicate balance about the whole thing there under the yellow cone of light and it gave you the feeling the slightest movement one way or the other might tip into chaos. There was something about it that caught you by the throat, even though he wasn’t wild drunk and cursing or waving the gun. Any of those things would have scared me, because you never know about a drunk with a gun, but they wouldn’t have scared me the way this did.
I kept it out of my voice as well as I could.
“All right,” I said. “This is all very dramatic. But do you suppose I could have some supper now, or do we go on rehearsing the high-school play?”
He ignored me. There wasn’t the slightest indication he had heard me or that he even remembered I had come in. He just went on talking. And he was talking to Angelina, or to himself. It was hard to tell which.
“Your hair is different now that you’ve cut it. But it’s beautiful that way and it still shines the same under lamplight. I wonder why I never did write a popular song about it and call it ‘The Beautiful Bitch with the Lamplight Hair” and maybe be famous all over the country and have a banana split named after me when I’m dead, instead of saving strands of it like a high-school girl or a man that’s sick. Maybe the next thing I’d be saving your discarded clothes, and they have a name for people like that but I can’t think of what it is and I don’t want to think of it and you don’t know and there isn’t any way you can know how much I don’t want to think of it and how much time I spend just not thinking of it.”
Angelina’s eyes were fixed intently on his face except for the once she glanced swiftly sidewise at me, begging me to be careful. I sat perfectly still, hating it, and hating the quiet the same way I had the night Sam had been here in this same room. It’s always easier to take when there’s more noise. A moth fluttered stupidly about the rim of the lamp chimney with frenzied gray wings and when it fell inside and was scorched Lee looked in through the glass at it for a long minute with grave speculation and then laughed as if at some joke that only he knew. The laugh wasn’t something you’d want to hear often. I could feel a drop of sweat run down my temple and into the corner of my eye and blinked at the salty sting of it.
He picked up the glass as if weighing it and took a drink. It wasn’t much of a drink, compared to the way he usually did it.
“Just exactly right,” he said. “I should have been a chemist instead of whatever, it is I am, and if we know any long words that are what I am we won’t say them tonight. I should have been a chemist because I’ve got it mixed just right. Or maybe a carburetor. I’m a carburetor that went funny over a bitch with lamplight hair. . . . It’s mixed just right because if I mixed in three more drinks I’d cry and if I didn’t mix in any more at all for a half hour I’d be sober and that wouldn’t be good because we all know what the big word for me is when I’m sober. You know what I’m like when I’m sober, don’t you, Angelina, darling? I run from Sam and hide under the porch and get my nice new white linen suit all dirty. Not nice dirty. Dirty dirty. And things were simple then because I was just like anybody else who took it where he could find it and some of it was good and some of it was better and there wasn’t anything complicated about it like not being able to go away or stay away or sleeping nights because you could always stay away, at least afterward and for a little while.”
Angelina’s face was quiet but I could see her eyes begin to fill. She tried not to blink them. There had been fear and horrified fascination in them, but now there was pity, and all the time she knew as well as I did what he was going to do.
I tried to shift cautiously a little farther out in my chair to get closer to him. He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.
“Don’t move,” he said. I knew who was first on his list and who would still be first even if I tried to jump him, so I didn’t move.
“Things were simple then but they’re not any more and I can’t go away. I went away this afternoon as far as I could but it was only five miles and then I couldn’t go any farther. Then I saw how easy it would be if you went with me. Just the two of us. And it’ll be easy, just like having your picture taken. Raise your eyes up and look at me and don’t look down there and cry. I’m sorry you don’t like whisky because you should always have one for the road and besides it makes everything easy. Just put your hand out here to me across the table and let me hold it. Here . . .”
She tried to draw back and she wanted to look over at me for help but was afraid to because I might jump for him. He had the gun up in his right hand now and there was no way he could miss if the thing went off, not from that distance. He caught her hand in his left, drew it gently across the table toward him, folded the fingers over into a little fist, and closed his own fingers over it. I could feel a great scream coming up inside me and fought with everything I had to hold it in.
“Lee!” I said, still trying not to scream like a woman. “Put down that gun!” I wondered if I were saying it over and over like a phonograph. Maybe I had been saying it for hours.
He looked at me as if I were a stranger speaking a foreign language. Whatever world he was in, I wasn’t in it and he didn’t know me.
“Lee!” I tried again, still yelling, and it got the same deadpan lack of interest. I fought to get my voice down to the same conversational level as his. “Listen, Lee.”
“Yes?”
I had to get through to him some way. I had to make him listen. He was loaded and ready to go and if there was to be any stopping him it was going to be now. “Listen, Lee.” I leaned forward as far as I could without giving the appearance I was going to jump him.
“Listen and get this.” Afterward I remembered that some part of my mind was off by itself very objectively thinking what a damn fool thing that must sound like, saying, “Listen,” over and over. “I want you to understand. You’re drunk but you can understand me and know what I mean if you try. You can shoot that gun only once before I’ll be on you and I’ll have it. You know that. I’ll break your arm but I’ll have the gun. You’ll have one shot. Just one.” I knew I was saying the thing over and over like a parrot because I could hear my voice somewhere a long way off, coming through the roaring in my ears, and I wondered if I were yelling again or keeping it down so he could understand it or would listen.