“Hell, no. Can’t you see he’s out of it?” A whine; Peter Lorre with no accent.
“I think we should off him.” This was a new voice, no more pleasant than the other two. Chalk on a blackboard.
“What do you mean, off him?”
“Look over there and you’ll know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Damn. Maybe you’re right. Damn. I see what you mean. Jesus.”
“I say let’s get the hell out of here. We ain’t no godddamn killers.”
“Is that right? Look over there and see if we ain’t. There’s an expert sitting over there who you could ask an opinion on that subject.”
The voices were getting all jumbled up now. I couldn’t tell who was who. I wondered, idly, which grating whisper belonged to license plate three; I wondered which was the big guy in the van. If he could talk at all. Maybe he was good at sign language.
“I say off the sucker-grease him and get out.”
There was silence for a long, and I mean long, couple of minutes.
And then somebody came over and kicked me in the head.
The next time I came to, they were gone.
And I was alive.
I said it aloud: “I’m alive.” I swallowed. I sat up. I groaned. I was alive, all right-messed up, but alive.
The argument about offing me must’ve come out in my favor, because I was breathing.
But somebody else in the room wasn’t. I found a lamp and switched it on.
Somebody across the room from me, tied to a chair, was dead.
And suddenly there was dampness all over my face, and I felt the dampness with my fingertips to see if it was blood, and it wasn’t. It was tears. I was bawling like a baby and didn’t know it. Then I stopped, and I crawled over to the phone to get help.
2
It didn’t start with people hurting other people, stealing from them, killing them. That came later. It started with kindness, the kindness of four old women.
But I suppose it started even before that.
With Sally.
Sally wasn’t an old woman, and she wasn’t much on kindness, either. What Sally was was young and slender and pretty, her hair natural blonde (that one I can swear to under oath) and her legs-to whom cellulite was a stranger-long and slender. Overall, there wasn’t a thing wrong with Sally that a new personality wouldn’t have cured.
She was the sort of woman who uses her good looks as a form of blackmail when she’s in a good mood, and for revenge when she’s in a bad one. Which didn’t stop me from gratefully shacking up with her early that summer. Even if she did make me “share” the housework and cooking (meaning I did most of it). Sally was a liberated woman who did whatever Ms. magazine told her to, and I put up with all the emasculation quite cheerfully. We all have our masochistic moments, and in my case, remember, those moments were a prelude to long legs and natural blonde hair.
Sally isn’t going to be in this story much longer, so I’ll get to the point, which is that she worked at the local hospital as a dietician. She insisted the job at the hospital was “temporary,” as she wasn’t long for a little hick town of twenty thousand like Port City (she hailed from Burlington, after all)-and in fact wasn’t going to be long at all for a little state like Iowa if she could help it. Mid-summer a job application came through for her, and she kept her word and is now in New Jersey somewhere, at another, bigger hospital, putting together menus for sick people.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, Sally was a dietician (pardon, the dietician; Sally would insist I make the distinction) at Port City General and was in the habit of frequently professing a belief in “getting involved.” She only became a dietician, she said, because it enabled her to “help people, in my small way,” though I didn’t ever see her donating her sizable paycheck to cancer research or anything.
“Mallory,” she said to me once, during foreplay, “do you have any idea why I decided to get involved with you?”
(See what I mean about Sally and “getting involved”? Shacked up is what we were.)
“Yes,” I said, wilting. “I’ve often wondered why you chose to give yourself to an undeserving wretch like me. Just this second I was wondering that.”
Sally didn’t much care for sarcastic remarks, unless she was the one making them, so she pushed me away and said, with no sense of irony whatsoever, “Screw you, Mallory.”
(Most persons of the female persuasion I’ve known-and I use “known” in several senses of the word, including biblical-have called me by the not unaffectionate diminutive “Mal.” They will say, “Screw you, Mal.” Not “Screw you, Mallory.” I tend to take the latter as an insult, though I may be playing at semantics.)
“Are you ready to listen?” she said.
That meant, was I ready to shut up. I nodded.
“I chose you,” she said, “because I thought you were an activist, like I am.”
She voted straight Democratic.
“I chose you,” she continued, “because you wear your hair rather long, by local standards, and of the men I’ve met in this lousy little town, you were the only one with long hair who wasn’t a high school kid.”
Ridiculous. First, my hair barely covered my ears, like an early Beatle. Second, even considering hair an issue, at this late date, branded Sally as the aging former hippie she was.
“Also,” she continued, “the doctors at the hospital are too old for me and, frankly, much too conservative for my tastes.”
The doctors were married.
“You, Mallory, are young.”
Thirty. So was she. Which is why she liked to think of it as young, of course.
“And you have money in the bank and aren’t just some grubby little leech wanting to suck up my paycheck.”
Power to the people.
“Also, these conservative upright Port City types just aren’t my cup of tea.”
Her cup of tea was another kind of tea altogether.
“But you,” she said, “you I thought were different. But no, you aren’t, not at all. You’re as conservative as the oldest old turd sitting on that bench in front of City Hall.”
She liked to say words like “turd” to shock me. Shall we all blush together?
“You don’t think you’re conservative, Mallory? Oh, but you are. If you weren’t conservative, Mallory, you’d get involved.”
“How?”
There was my mistake. Right there. Opening my mouth. Asking a question. Mistake.
So she told me how to get involved, and I did.
I sure did.
But I must admit that the eventual depth of my involvement didn’t have much to do with Sally. She’s just the person who bumped into me, knocking me off a cliff; I mean, she didn’t put the damn cliff there or anything-she just bumped into me.
You see, Sally is one of those persons for whom the term “lip service” was coined. (In more ways than one, but that’s another story.) Sally got involved in politics, for example, by saying “Right on!” while watching her candidate speak on TV. Sally got involved in ecology by putting a litter bag in the front seat of her oil-burning Pontiac. Sally got involved in bettering race relations by calling blacks “black” instead of “Negro” and by making sure to invite one to every party she threw. You’ve met her.
So Sally’s getting me involved was, initially, no great burden for me. And it was more worthwhile an involvement than the usual run of Sally’s lip-service mill.
What Sally wanted of me was a vested interest of hers, meaning it related to her job as dietician at the hospital more than her sense of humanitarian purpose. I was to take hot meals around to four old people during the supper hour, one evening a week. The service was provided at a nominal fee by the hospital so that old folks in the community who were living alone would be sure to get at least one hot meal a day. When Sally explained that this was what she wanted me to do, because one of the volunteers in the service had had to drop out for the summer months, I was relieved and glad to do it.