Sweat had come out on him while he was talking on the telephone to Vera Sue and since, and he was wet with it. He was in bad shape. Being so helpless brought tears of rage to his eyes. Here he was like a mouse with its tail caught in the trap, he reflected, and all the cats walking around smacking lips. One cat, two cats, three cats. The city policeman, the Kansas City sherlock, and now Vera Sue, trying to cut herself in on a reward at his expense...
He did not remember going to sleep, but he awakened when the doctor came in. He felt very weak and shaky.
“Doc, you sure stayed away long enough.”
“I was invited to leave, remember?”
“Ah, Doc, don’t be an old woman. You know, I don’t feel so hot.”
“What’s the matter? The arm hurt?”
“The arm, the head, all over. I feel like one big sore ball, Doc, you want to know the truth.”
The thermometer went into his mouth again, feeling like an icicle, while the doctor counted his pulse. “You have some temperature. What happened with that telephone call to upset you this way?”
“Nothing, Doc, that I know of.”
They brought in a transparent canopy and set it up on the bed with him inside, then wheeled in a cylinder that had gauges on it and a tube running under the canopy. They hooked up the thing, and stood watching the gauges while the tube hissed close to his nose. “Doc, what is this thing?”
“An oxygen tent.”
“That’s what they put on guys who are dying, ain’t it? Take it away. I’m afraid of the thing.”
“We probably won’t be that lucky with you.”
The morning sun was splintering into his eyes. The way the sunlight was hitting the oxygen tent canopy he could see very little in the room. Finally he realized someone was sitting by the bed. A nurse, he thought, sitting there like an albino crow waiting for him to die. “Nurse, I got to piss.”
There was a giggle. The corner of the oxygen tent was lifted and Vera Sue looked in at him. “Hello, Walter.”
She kissed him. He kissed her back. Her mouth was warm and moist, tasting of spearmint.
“Jesus, honey, what I said there a minute ago. I thought you were the nurse.”
“It was kind of funny, Walter.”
“She’s an old crow, always sticking her cold thermometer in my ass.”
“Walter, I been sitting here a long time. They told me not to wake you—they said I could sit in here, but I should let you sleep. I told them a lie. I said I was your wife.”
“I wondered how you got in.”
“Walter...I couldn’t go to Illinois. I couldn’t make myself do it. You know something, after I talked to you on the telephone, I missed my bus sitting there trying to make myself go to Illinois like you wanted, but I just couldn’t.”
“Baby, I knew you wouldn’t, so you can stop kidding around.”
She kissed him and held him close. Her moist mouth moved all over his. “I’m glad you’re not mad. Walter, I wish I could get in bed with you right now.”
“That would be something. I bet this oxygen stuff would go flying all over, and somebody would come in to see what was wrecking the joint.”
“I wouldn’t give a damn if they did.”
A nurse came in with two glasses of orange juice, one for him and one for Mrs. Harsh, she said. The nurse was a different one, a large plain woman.
“Walter, is she the nurse you were talking about?”
“No, but she gives you an idea.” He lay back holding his orange juice. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. You got no idea what it is to be nailed down like this. Now, what was this about a detective from Kansas City asking about me?”
“Hasn’t he been around to see you yet?”
“I haven’t seen him, but I don’t know if he was here or not. I made the Doc think I was too sick to be bothered.”
“That’s funny. I got the idea he was finding out all about you, getting ready to offer you a proposition. I don’t really understand what he’s up to, Walter. He didn’t say you were accused of anything. He just said there was five thousand in it for him if you turned out to be acceptable and satisfactory, and he would appreciate anything I could tell him about you. He didn’t seem to be after any specific information, just general stuff. Walter, what is he up to?”
“I sure would like to know myself.”
“You sure got to help me figure a way to get my mitts on that five thousand.”
“Our mitts, you mean, don’t you?”
“What? Oh, sure, that’s what I mean.”
“Vera Sue, you be careful. You let me know before you make any moves. You let me supply the brains around here.”
“Well, how about me working some more on Kansas City as our first move?”
“All right with me. But watch out for that local city cop, John Something-or-other. He’s no pushover. How are you going to get in touch with this Kansas City dude?”
“I’m going to call him and invite him to have breakfast with me. He left me his hotel address here.”
“Say, I would like to have a look at that picture the guy is showing around, the one that looks like me except for the scar on the face. Can you swing that?”
“I bet I can, Walter.”
He would bet she would too.
At noon they gave him a lamb chop and some mashed potatoes and peas and a cigarette and a newspaper. The policeman had not come back. The doctor had not come back. And Vera Sue had not come back. He had turned into a forgotten man, he decided, and it was all right with him. He was nervous. His mind was jumpy. He thought of his mind as acting like a bird with its legs chopped off so it couldn’t come to roost on anything.
He lay there with his fists clenched and his eyes closed, and one of the things he could not keep out of his mind was the way D. C. Roebuck’s car had gone over and over in the field, in one of the flips landing (he was now able to remember) on D. C. Roebuck himself.
Suddenly he remembered the newspaper they had brought him with his lunch. What was wrong with him? A thing as important as the newspaper, and he had hardly noticed it. Where was the paper anyway, on the floor, or where? He saw the paper on the floor, and when he leaned off the bed for it, the blood ran to his head and made him dizzy, and he almost fell off the bed before he clutched the newspaper.
The story from Carrollton, Missouri, was a small item on an inside page. It said the body of D. C. Roebuck, Kansas City photographic supply salesman, had been found with his demolished automobile in a field near Carrollton Friday and had been taken to his home in Kansas City for burial. That was all. Nothing there to hook him up with Roebuck’s death, he reflected, though that did not necessarily mean a thing. He imagined the police, and even more so an insurance company, worked undercover until they had all the evidence they wanted, then bang, they let you have it.
The next thing was the jury. The idea of a court trial worried him, but if he had to have one, he hoped the jury would be made up of farmers, so he could have his lawyer bring out that he grew up on a farm. Thinking about his early days on the farm made him feel maudlin. It was a good life, that farm, and he wished he had stuck with it. He would have, too, only a man needed a million dollars and a million acres to make a go on the farm; it was just impossible for a young man to save enough to start farming. It was equally hopeless the way his own parents had tried to make it, which was by share-farming. It was all the same hind tit and impossible to suck more than a bare existence out of it. But one thing he could say for the farm, it was man against nature, and not man against man the way it was in the city. In the city it was every man for himself: talk sweet and polite, act like a shark. He had to laugh at the memory of how he came off the farm a green one, and he had taken it in the neck too, until he got unsquared. Since then, he had handed them back a few licks himself.