“All right,” Crainpool says kindly, “how do you think you can get away with a thing like this?”
“That’s it, that’s the way. Good,” the Phoenician says, “good.”
And he begins to tell him, feeding him detail, inventing his plausible arrangements as he goes along, reassuring himself as he annihilates loophole, shutting off Crainpool’s harbors and posting guards at his roadblocks, at his gangways and airline check-in counters, watching Crainpool’s trains. And it is all true, even if it is only a sort of foreign language he has learned to speak, the flashy grammar of body contact, a shoptalk of which he is weary because no one has yet bested him at it, least of all this dim Crainpool. And he sees that the man takes it all in, held, not just stalling but actually interested, a disciple to his own destroyer. Puppy! The Phoenician punishes him with strategy, game plan, pressing Crainpool’s nose to the blackboard where the y’s and x’s of opposition spray chalk in Crainpool’s spread, admiring nostrils. It’s what has held him all these years, kept him in town while the Phoenician was off rounding up jumpers; not only what kept him when Main wasn’t looking, but what brought him to the office earlier than usual at such times, and what held him there later, after hours, waiting for a phone call that would check up on him, wanting to hear even if only at long distance what normally he got in person, feeding on comeuppance, humiliation, wisecrack, connoisseur of the Phoenician’s abuse. I am his life’s work, the Phoenician thinks. I have rehabilitated him. He has gone straight man.
So he pours it on, showers Crainpool with spurious inevitability, moves him to object only to shut him off at the pass.
“Such force as may be necessary to effect my return,” Crainpool says triumphantly.
“Asshole. I’ll return you. You’re a fucking deposit bottle.”
“Suppose I shout? Suppose I shout, ‘Don’t shoot, Mr. Main, I surrender’?”
“You fucked up fucking fuck. I shout louder. ‘Call the police,’ I shout, ‘Crainpool’s got my gun.’ ”
“Shmuck. What about the police? Why didn’t you bring them to arrest me?”
“First principles. Shmuck yourself, I’m a bondsman. My reputation depends upon doing my own enforcing.”
“You harbored me. Eleven years you harbored me.”
“I harbored somebody who called himself Crainpool. In the five years it took me to catch up with you, you’d aged beyond recognition. You’d lost hair. You were seventy-five pounds lighter than when you jumped my bond. Your mama wouldn’t have known you.”
“The perfect crime,” Crainpool says appreciatively.
“You’re in season. It isn’t even crime.”
The man nods; he is satisfied that it can be done. Probably he’d never doubted it. But he still doesn’t understand why. “I was your slave,” he says.
“I paid top dollar. You got annual raises, paid vacations, fringe benefits. The first bondsman’s clerk in the State of Ohio with his own retirement plan.”
“I don’t want to die,” Crainpool says. “My God, Mr. Main, why would you do this?”
“Because,” he says quietly, “you’re the only man in the world I’m allowed to kill.” He has drawn his gun.
Crainpool begins to whimper, and the Phoenician is moved. He owes this forlorn man more than the fringe benefit of his theatrics. “How,” he asks, “can there be indifference? How can there be suicides? Why are there old men? Help me, Crainpool. Why is life so lovely? The night sweeter than the day and the day more joyous than the night? Who alive can grieve? How dare there be good weather, seasons when the world is at room temperature? Where are my muscles, my smooth skin? Why doesn’t desire die? Why is it that it’s the one thing which remains intact, that has some fucking strangle hold on immortality? Who sabotaged us and gave our will insomnia? Why am I more interested in others than others are interested in me? What am I to make of their scents, their firm bodies and their healthy hair? Of the snatches of conversation I overhear, the endearments passed like bread? Who wired this tension in me between ego and detachment? Why do I have this curiosity like a game leg? How can I cross-examine the universe when it jumps my bond?”
He begins to feel a little of what he has been saying. Crainpool is alive too, and his determination to kill him momentarily wavers. He sees it as a stunt, one more thing to impress this man who has lived eleven years with and for such impressions and who would, in the instant he squeezed the trigger (first the wild warning shot overhead or out the window to establish alibi — Crainpool would understand, having lived so long in ringside connection to technique, a first-nighter in aisle and orchestra to the Phoenician’s thousand performances, would perhaps even roar “Author, author. Bravo, bravo” to his own death — to make the point that in this small room, in these close quarters, he could not possibly have missed his man and had given him a chance to come quietly), probably smile, appreciation riding his lips like dessert, recognition sparking campfires in his eyes.
“Look at me, Mr. Crainpool. I take all the papers. I. F. Stone wrote me newsletters. I have Scientific American. The Journal of the American Medical Association is on the floor by my bed. National Geographic is in the toilet, American Heritage next to the toaster. Time-Life gives me the prepublication discount. Au courant I am as a deb with my nose for trend and influence and my insider’s thousand knowledges. What does it mean? Everything I don’t know and will never know leans on me like a mountain range. It creams me, Crainpool. It potches my brains and rattles my teeth.”
“You, Mr. Main? You’re a smart man. I wish I had a tenth your brains.”
“Yeah. Same here. I wish I had a tenth yours — anyone’s, everyone’s. I’d fatten on your memory and experience like a starver, suck at your inputs and engrams as at sweet fruit. What’s the future going to be like, Mr. Crainpool? What will people whistle a hundred years from now? What snatch of song will run through the beautician’s head as she leans forward over a customer’s hair? Tell me and I’ll let you go. What will the priorities be? What ruins will yet be uncovered, what treasures from what sunk ships will rise from which seas? What cities will be built and destroyed and uncovered again? Whose teeth will come up in the earthquake and go in the case?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me too. Nothing. Me too. The ocean beds are squeezing together, did you know that? They tow the continents like tugboats. Asia will be a day’s hike from Australia, and a man standing in Italy will cast a shadow in Yugoslavia. Nations shall be resolved like a jigsaw, Mr. Crainpool, and what we call land will one day form a perfect circle, a globe within a globe that sits on the oceans like a skullcap. What a seashore that will be! Like a wet nimbus, Crainpool! Who’ll drive the Golden Spike that first day? What language will he speak?”
He fires the first shot. It goes out Crainpool’s open window and clears the four-story building across the way. “That will merely wake some of them,” he says. “Wait, you’ll hear.” They listen together and can barely make out the sound of one or two doors opening down the corridor. Somewhere a window scrapes open.
“Is everything all right?” someone shouts from the dark street.
The Phoenician levels the gun at Crainpool’s chest in case he calls out. “No,” he whispers. Then to Crainpool in his previous tone, but more excited, “But that’s just the world, the earth. Have you considered astronomy, have you given any thought to physics?”