“I? I could never be! I should be asking you that question myself.”
“Sorry that I’m not a Quavely any longer?” Her laugh was shaky, causing me to look at her quickly.
She must have had a pretty rugged time of it at home. They’d had months and months to take her away from me. They had failed. But I suspected how hard they must have tried. I had met her mother and sister on one furlough, not long before that last furlough before I shipped out. They’d known they were losing her. Lucy, the sister, in particular was infused with the importance of family prestige. One thing could be said for Lucy. She hadn’t kept her cards up her sleeve. She had drawn the line; she had spoken her on guard; then she had done battle.
But all of them had failed. I never could blame them too much. I had lost Bryanne finally through failure of my own.
I set the Old Seaman back on the bureau. If Lucy were on my team, if she were here now, what would she say? Something like, “Ever since Papa Joe’s flare-up late this afternoon you’ve been thinking, haven’t you? He bashed your eyes open, didn’t he? Just as soon as you can do so without any unpleasantness, making a scene, you’re leaving here. Then why not keep right on fighting? You won once. Then at the first failure you felt that Bryanna was lost to you forever. Forever is a long time, my friend. In this life you’re not privileged to back up and start over, to erase past mistakes, but you’re never denied a new beginning from the moment you decide to begin again.”
I knew then that I’d been toying with the idea for weeks. I hadn’t liked the taste of defeat from the beginning. Stuff like the Old Seaman hadn’t been able to wash it out-of my mouth.
I walked over to the window. I forgot Harold’s troubles, Papa Joe’s raw bitterness because he was forced to grub for a living in the construction business of grandeur — this in a land where his forbears had ruled.
I felt exhilarated. There would have to be a job, of course, a good one. A little egg in the bank. But it could be done.
From the window, I looked down on the front lawn. My thoughts broke off as I saw the shadowy figure of a man go down the walk, turn north on the sidewalk. He was about the size and build of Harold.
A knock sounded on my door. Still watching the quickly moving man, outside, I said, “Come in.”
The door opened, and I turned to find Vera moving across the room toward me. Her eyes were agitated. “I thought Harold might be in here.”
“No, I haven’t seen him since he came up after talking to McGinty.”
She sat weakly on the edge of the bed. “I’m scared,” she said frankly. “Harold said he wanted a big slug of straight whisky to settle his nerves. He said there was a bottle in the buffet. I went to the dining room and got the bottle and glasses. When I came back up just now he was gone.”
I turned back to the window. It was dark out there now, as dark as if a thunder squall were in the making. Then in the glow of the street light at the intersection of Hickory street and Northland avenue, I saw my man. He was turning west on Hickory.
“I’ll look around outside,” I said. “Likely he decided a short walk would relax him more than a drink.”
She looked up at me. “I hope you’re right,” she said in a low voice. “But Harold is armed.”
Papa Joe and I entered the hall at the same moment.
“What’s up?” he demanded. “Where are you going?”
I didn’t have time to answer his questions. I took the stairs down two at a time.
By the time I reached the intersection of Hickory and Northland, Harold had vanished. I stood in indecision. He hadn’t been heading uptown toward the business district. His turn west on Hickory, the last move I had seen him make, removed the possibility of that. Northland ran straight into the business section. He wasn’t going far, either, or he would have taken his car.
I started west on Hickory, walking rapidly under the dark canopy of the maples that lined the sidewalk. The terrain changed in a few blocks. Houses became fewer, weed-grown fields more prominent. And a few more blocks further on the street would begin twisting downhill toward a settlement of large old houses that had been converted into tenement dwellings for Negroes.
I could surmise only one destination for Harold. About midway between Northland and the Negro district stood an empty cottage on Hickory that Papa Joe owned. If I did not find Harold there, I had lost him completely.
The bungalow stood forbidding and dismal, its windows like black mirrors. I passed the weathered, lopsided “For Sale” sign at the corner of the yard. The unkempt grass chopped at my ankles.
Just as I was deciding that my hunch had been wrong, I saw a flash of light in the bungalow. I moved to the window that had reflected it.
Harold and McGinty were inside the bungalow, McGinty crouched in the beam of the flashlight in Harold’s hand. McGinty’s eyes were distended, his face mottled with fear. He was holding one hand out before him, saying hoarsely, “No!”
Then Harold began shooting. McGinty whirled, knowing in that final instant that death was coming. He plunged through a doorway behind him, into the yawning black emptiness of the room beyond. Harold fired five times, as rapidly as he could pull the trigger. At the distance, I knew it was impossible to miss. I knew the slugs were hammering squarely in the Irishman’s broad back between the shoulder-blades.
The impetus of his motion kept McGinty moving for a second or two. He crashed into something — a door or piece of discarded furniture — in the dark room beyond. And then stillness. Just as suddenly as the whole thing had started, it was over.
Still holding the light and gun, Harold raised his hands to his face. His features were contorted, white, ghastly. He pressed the backs of his hands against the sides of his face.
“McGinty?” he queried. And when no sound came from the adjoining room, a sob broke in his throat. He let the flashlight fall from his nerveless fingers, and bolted.
He chose the back way out of the cottage, a short-cut across weed-grown fields back to the house on Northland. He plunged into the brush and by the time I reached the edge of the yard he had crashed his way out of sight.
I returned to the cottage. A moment’s pause there. Then I went back out on Hickory street.
The nearest house was about a block’s distance away. It was dark, and remained so. Then I saw a lone man hurrying down the street. The shots, then, had been heard. For a moment I had entertained the hope that they had gone unnoticed. The gun was small; the shots had been muffled by the empty cottage.
I faded into the shadows of a tree; heard the quick snapping of the approaching man’s heels against the sidewalk. He paused at the edge of the walk leading to the cottage porch. The man was Papa Joe.
The scuff of my foot startled him, swung him about, swinging up his cane for a quick blow. He lowered the cane slowly.
“What are you doing here?” he asked shortly. “When you ran out of the house, I followed you. Was that shooting I heard?”
“I’m afraid it was.”
“Inside the cottage?”
“Yes.”
“Who was in there?”
“Harold and a man called McGinty. They were apparently keeping an appointment made earlier this evening.”
Papa Joe’s mouth was a tight, thin line, yet his voice quaked, “He — shot Harold?”
“No, it was the other way around.”
Some of the sudden, tortured agony was dissipated from Papa Joe’s bleak features. “He hurt McGinty badly?”
I hesitated. Yet to evade the question and have him learn the truth later would be more cruel than giving it to him now.
I said, “He shot McGinty until the gun was empty. He was hysterical. I don’t think he knew fully what he was doing. But it’s certain he killed a man in there.”