Dropping into a chair, he began to think. Not with any conscious direction. His mind functioned, with everything coming now to a bad end, in a kind of numb and lucid detachment. Suddenly, he was strangely indifferent. Nothing had happened, after all, that couldn’t have been anticipated by a guy with no luck whatever.
It was funny, the way he was no longer very concerned about anything. Sitting there in the drab living room in the dull immunity to shame that comes from the ultimate humiliation, he found his mind working itself back at random to the early days at home with the old man. Back to the days when his mother, a beaten nonentity, had been alive. Not a lovable character, the old man. Not easy on wife or kid. A harsh meter of stern discipline for all delinquencies but his own. A master of the deferred payment technique. In the old days, when Frankie was a kid at home, wrongdoing had never been met with swift and unconsidered punishment that would have been as quickly forgotten. The old man had remarked and remembered. Later, often after Frankie had completely forgotten the adolescent evil he’d committed, there was sure to be something that he wanted very much to do. Then the old man would look at him with skimmed milk eyes and say, “No. Have you forgotten the offense for which you haven’t paid? For that, you cannot do this thing.”
Wait till it really hurts. That had been the old man’s way.
Remembering, Frankie laughed softly, air hissing with no inflection of humor through the hole where his lost tooth had been. No luck. Never any luck. He’d even been a loser in drawing an old man — a bastard with a memory like an elephant and a perverted set of values.
The laughter hurt Frankie’s mangled lips, and he cut it off, sitting slumped in the chair with his eyes in a dead focus on the floor. It was really very strange, the way he felt. Not tired. Not sleepy. Not much of anything. Just sort of released and out of it, like a religious queer staring at his belly button.
He was still sitting there at three o’clock in the morning when the old man came in. He was sloppy drunk, and the lines of his face had blurred, letting his features run together in a kind of soft smear. His eyes were rheumy infections in the smear, and his mouth still wore enough of the cheap lipstick to give him the appearance of wearing a grotesque clown’s mask. He stood, swaying, almost helpless, with his legs spread wide and his hands on his hips in a posture of defiance, and Frankie looked back at him from his chair. It made him sick to see the old man so ugly, satiety in his flaccid face and the nauseous perfume of juniper berries like a fog around him.
The old man spit and laughed hoarsely. The saliva landed on the toe of Frankie’s shoe, a milky blob. Without moving, Frankie watched the old man weave into the bedroom with erratic manipulation of legs and hips.
Frankie kept on sitting in the chair for perhaps five minutes longer, then he sighed and got up and walked into the bedroom after the old man. The old man was standing in the middle of the room in his underwear. His legs were corded with swollen blue veins that bulged the fish-belly skin. On the right thigh there was an angry red spot that would probably blacken. When he saw Frankie watching him, his rheumy eyes went hot with scorn.
“My son,” he said. “My precious son, Frankie.”
Frankie didn’t answer. As he moved toward the old man slowly, smiling faintly, the pain of the smile on his mangled lips was a pale reflection of the dull pain in his heart. He had almost closed the distance between them before the old man’s gin-soaked brain understood that Frankie was going to kill him. And he was too drunk now to defend himself, even against Frankie. The scorn faded from his eyes and terror flooded in, cold and incredulous.
“No, Frankie,” he whispered. “For God’s sake, no.”
Frankie still didn’t say anything, and the old man tried to back away, but by that time it was too late, and Frankie’s thumbs were buried in his throat. His tongue came out, his legs beat in a hellish threshing, and his fists battered wildly at Frankie’s face. But it did no good, for Frankie was feeling very strong. He was feeling stronger than he had ever felt in his life before. And good, too. A powerful, surging sense of well-being. A wild, singing exhilaration that increased in ratio to the pressure of his grip.
The old man had been dead for minutes when Frankie finally let him go. He slipped down to the floor in a limp huddle of old flesh and fabric, and Frankie stood looking down at him, the narcotic-like pleasure draining out of him and leaving him again with that odd, incongruous feeling of detachment.
He realized, of course, that the end was his as much as the old man’s. It was the end for both of them. Recalling the .38 revolver on a shelf in the closet, he considered for a moment the idea of suicide, but not very seriously. Not that he was repelled by the thought of death. It was just that he didn’t quite have the guts.
He supposed that he should call the police, and he went so far as to turn away toward the living room and the telephone. Then he stopped, struck by an idea that captured his fancy. He saw himself walking into the precinct station with the old man’s dead body in his arms. He heard himself saying quietly, “This is my father. I’ve just killed him.” Drab little Frankie, no-luck Frankie, having in the end his moment of dramatic ascendancy. It was a prospect that fed an old and functional hunger of his soul, and he turned back, looking at the body on the floor. Smiling dreamily with his thick lips, he felt within himself a rebirth of that singing exhilaration.
At the last moment, he found in himself a sick horror that made it impossible for him to bear excessive contact with the dead flesh, so he dressed the body, struggling with uncooperative arms and legs. After that, it was so easy. It was so crazy easy. If he’d given a damn, if he’d really been trying to get away with it, he could never have pulled it off in a million years.
With the old man dead in his arms, he walked out of the apartment and down the stairs and across the walk to the Plymouth at the curb. He opened the front door and put him in the seat and closed the door again. Then, standing there beside the car, he looked around and saw that there was no one in sight. So far as he knew, not a soul had seen him.
It was then that the enormity of the thing struck him, and he began to laugh softly, hysteria threading the laughter. No-luck Frankie doing a thing like that. No-luck Frankie himself just walking out of an apartment house with a corpse in his arms and not a damned soul the wiser. You couldn’t get life any crazier than that. He kept on laughing, clutching the handle of the car door with one hand, his body shaking and his lips cracking open again to let a thin red line trace its way down his chin.
After a while, he choked off the laughter on a series of throaty little gasps that tore painfully at his throat. Lighting a cigarette, he went around the car and got in beside the old man on the driver’s side.
He drove at a moderate rate of speed, savoring morbidly the approach to his big scene. Now, in the process of execution, the drama of it gained even more in its appeal to him. It gave him a kind of satisfaction he had never known.
He was driving east on Mason Street. The side streets on the south descended to their intersections on forty-five-degree grades. Possessing the right-of-way, he crossed the intersections without looking, absorbed in his thoughts. For that reason, he neither saw nor heard the transport van until it was too late. At the last instant, he heard the shrill screaming of rubber on concrete and looked up and right to see the tremendous steel monster roaring down upon him.