The lieutenant stepped back smartly from the window, blinked, and puked on the glass. His vomit hung there for an instant like a phosphorus bomb burst in a bunker; then two fuzz were supporting him from the room and we were all jerking back from the mess. All except the politician. He hadn’t even noticed: he was in Henry Millerville, getting his sex kicks the easy way.
I guess the stud in there had never dug that he was supposed to be gone in two seconds without pain, because his body was still arched up in that terrible bow, and his hands were still claws. I could see the muscles standing out along the sides of his jaws like marbles. Finally he flopped back and just hung there in his straps like a machine-gunned paratrooper.
But that wasn’t the end. He took another huge gasp, so I could see his ribs pressing out against his white shirt. After that one, twenty seconds. We decided that he had cut out.
Then another gasp. Then nothing. Half a minute nothing.
Another of those final terrible shuddering racking gasps. At last: all through. All used up. Making it with the angels.
But then he did it again. Every fibre of that dead wasted comic thrown-away body strained for air on this one. No air: only hydrocyanic acid gas. Just nerves, like the fish twitching after you whack it on the skull with the back edge of the skinning knife. Except that it wasn’t a fish we were seeing die.
His head flopped sideways and his tongue came out slyly like the tongue of a dead deer. Then this gunk ran out of his mouth. It was just saliva — they said it couldn’t be anything else — but it reminded me of the residue after light-line resistors have been melted in an electrical fire. That kind of black. That kind of scorched.
Very softly, almost to himself, Victor murmured: “Later, dad.”
That was it. Dig you in the hereafter, dad. Ten little minutes and you’re through the wall. Mistah Kurtz, he dead. Mistah Kurtz, he very very god-damn dead.
I believed it. Looking at what was left of that cat was like looking at a chick who’s gotten herself bombed on the heavy, so when you hold a match in front of her eyes the pupils don’t react and there’s no one home, man. No one. Nowhere. End of the lineville.
We split.
But on the way out I kept thinking of that Army stud, and wondering what had made him sick. Was it because the cat in the chair had been the last to enter, no matter how violently, the body of his beloved, and now even that febrile connection had been severed? Whatever the reason, his body had known what perhaps his mind had refused to accept: this ending was no new beginning, this death would not restore his dead chick to him. This death, no matter how just in his eyes, had generated only nausea.
Victor and I sat in the Mercedes for a long time with the top down, looking out over that bright beautiful empty peninsula, not named, as you might think, after a saint, but after some poor dumb Indian they had hanged there a hundred years or so before. Trees and clouds and blue water, and still no birds making the scene. Even the cats in the black suits had vanished, but now I understood why they’d been there. In their silent censure, they had been sounding the right gong, man. We were the ones from the Middle Ages.
Victor took a deep shuddering breath as if he could never get enough air. Then he said in a barely audible voice: “How did you dig that action, man?”
I gave a little shrug and, being myself, said the only thing I could say. “It was a gas, dad.”
“I dig, man. I’m hip. A gas.”
Something was wrong with the way he said it, but I broke the seal on the tequila and we killed it in fifteen minutes, without even a lime to suck in between. Then he started the car and we cut out, and I realized what was wrong. Watching that cat in the gas chamber, Victor had realized for the very first time that life is far, far more than just kicks. We were both partially responsible for what had happened in there, and we had been ineluctably diminished by it.
On U.S. 101 he coked the Mercedes up to 104 m.p.h. through the traffic, and held it there. It was wild: it was the end: but I didn’t sound. I was alone without my Guide by the boiling river of blood. When the Highway Patrol finally got us stopped, Victor was coming on so strong and I was coming on so mild that they surrounded us with their holsters flaps unbuckled, and checked our veins for needle marks.
I didn’t say a word to them, man, not one. Not even my name. Like they had to look in my wallet to see who I was. And while they were doing that, Victor blew his cool entirely. You know, biting, foaming at the mouth, the whole bit — he gave a very good show until they hit him on the back of the head with a gun butt. I just watched.
They lifted his license for a year, nothing else, because his old man spent a lot of bread on a shrinker who testified that Victor had temporarily wigged out, and who had him put away in the zoo for a time. He’s back now, but he still sees that wig picker, three times a week at forty clams a shot.
He needs it. A few days ago I saw him on Upper Grant, stalking lithely through a grey raw February day with the fog in, wearing just a t-shirt and jeans — and no shoes. He seemed agitated, pressed, confined within his own concerns, but I stopped him for a minute.
“Ah... how you making it, man? Like, ah, what’s the gig?”
He shook his head cautiously. “They will not let us get away with it, you know. Like to them, man, just living is a crime.”
“Why no strollers, dad?”
“I cannot wear shoes.” He moved closer and glanced up and down the street, and said with tragic earnestness: “I can hear only with the soles of my feet, man.”
Then he nodded and padded away through the crowds on silent naked soles like a puzzled panther, drifting through the fruiters and drunken teen-agers and fuzz trying to bust some cat for possession who have inherited North Beach from the true swingers. I guess all Victor wants to listen to now is Mother Earth: all he wants to hear is the comforting sound of the worms, chewing away.
Chewing away, and waiting for Victor; and maybe for the Second Coming.
Knives in the dark
by Don Herron[8]
Nob Hill
I
The hunt began when Blackjack Jerome swaggered into the office, looking for talk. A lusty pirate, 45 tucked into the pants belt under his jacket as usual, the man was slicing out his pieces of the pie on the rougher edges of the San Francisco business scene and signing cheques on a lot of billable hours for the agency. My first assignment when I transferred in from Chi after the war involved a little head-busting he needed done down on the docks, so we had some history. If Blackjack wanted talk, he’d get talk.
I pulled my hat off the rack and caught the eye of the office girl on the way out the door. Five other operatives lounged around reading and playing cards, waiting for assignment, so I could be spared to keep a good customer contented. We took the rear exit and I stepped toward John’s in 57 Ellis, when Blackjack yanked my sleeve.
“Naw. I just ate there last night.”
“Okay by me. I don’t much care where I put the meat on my bones.”
We walked toward Market Street along the row of restaurants and pulled up chairs in Hartman and Maloney’s. While Blackjack unburdened what passed for his soul of his recent doings, I dug into a plate of Hangtown Fry, a meal that keeps you going for a few hours. You couldn’t know when some action was going to pop and hold you away from the table, and I never liked going hungry.