I kept watching the clock, watching every minute that ticked by, and thinking of Tommy up there in San Quentin in the death cell pacing back and forth. I guess maybe he was watching the minutes too. I wondered if it was raining up there and if rain made any difference in a hanging.
We wandered back into the living room and sat down at opposite ends of the divan. Marie looking at nothing, her eyes glassy, and me watching and hating the rain, and hearing the clock.
Then suddenly Marie got up and went to the piano. She didn’t ask me if she could or anything about it. She just went to the piano and sat down. I stared after her, even opened my mouth to speak. But I didn’t say anything. After all, it was her brother who was going to die, wasn’t it? I guess for one night at least she could do anything she wanted to do.
But then she began playing. First, right off, “Lead Kindly Light,” and then “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and then “Little Church in the Wildwood.” I sat there wringing my hands with that agony beating in my ears. Then I leapt to my feet and began to shout at her.
“Stop that! Stop it! Do you want to drive me crazy?”
But her face was frozen now. It was as though she was in a trance. I ran to her and shook her shoulder, but she pulled away from me and played on.
I backed away from her and my face felt as though it was contorted. I backed away and stared at her, her slim, arched back. I began biting my fingernails, and then my fingers. That music was killing me. Those hymns …those silly, inane hymns. Why didn’t she stop it? The piano and the rain were seeping into my bloodstream.
I walked up and down the room. I walked up and down the room faster and faster. I stopped and picked up a flower vase and dropped it, yelling: “Stop it! For the love of heaven, stop!”
But she kept right on. Again I began staring at her, at her back, and her throat, and the profile of her face. I felt blood surging in me. I felt those hammers in my temples …
I tried to fight it off this time. I tried to go toward her to pull her away from that damn piano but I didn’t have the strength to move in her direction. I stood there feeling the breath go out of me, feeling my skin tingle. And I didn’t want to be like that. I looked at my hands, and one minute they were tight fists and the next my fingers were working in and out like mad.
I looked toward the kitchen, and then I moved quietly into it. She was still slamming at the piano when I opened the drawer and pulled out the knife I had used to kill her father.
At least it was a knife like it. I put it behind me and tiptoed back into the room. She wasn’t aware that I had moved. I crept up on her, waited.
Her hands were flying over the piano keys. Once more I shouted, and my voice was getting hoarse: “Stop it!”
But of course she didn’t. She didn’t and I swore. I swore at her. She didn’t hear this either. But I’d show the little slut a thing or two.
I was breathing hard, looking around the room to make sure no one was here. Then I lifted the knife and plunged down with it.
I swear I never knew where Duff Ryan came from. It must have been from behind the divan. A simple place like that and I hadn’t seen him, merely because I had been convinced that he went away in the car. But he’d been in the room all the time waiting for me to do what I almost did.
It had been a trick, of course, and this time I’d been sap enough to fall into his trap. He had heard me denounce hymns, he knew I’d be nervous tonight, highly excitable, so he had set the stage and remained hidden, and Marie had done the rest.
He had told Marie then, after all.
Duff Ryan grabbed my wrist just at the right moment, as he had planned on doing, and of course being fourteen I didn’t have much chance against him. He wrested away the knife, then he grabbed me and shouted:
“Why did you murder Maries father?”
“Because the old boy hated me! Because he thought Marie was too young to know boys! Because he kicked me out and hit me with his cane!” I said all this, trying to jerk away from him, but I couldn’t so I went on:
“That’s why I did it. Because I had a lot of fun doing it! So what? What are you going to do about it? I’m a kid, you can’t hang me! There’s a law against hanging kids. I murdered Pushton too. I shoved him out the window! How do you like that? All you can do is put me in reform school!”
As my voice faded, and it faded because I had begun to choke, I heard Ruth at the telephone. She had come back in too. She was calling long distance. San Quentin.
Marie was sitting on the divan, her face in her hands. You would have thought she was sorry for me. When I got my breath I went on:
“I came back afterward, while Tommy was in the other room. I got in the kitchen door. The old man was standing there and I just picked up the knife and let him have it. I ran before I could see much. But Pushton. Let me tell you about Pushton —”
Duff Ryan shoved me back against the piano. “Shut up,” he said. “You didn’t kill Pushton. You’re just bragging now. But you did kill the old man and that’s what we wanted to know!”
Bragging? I was enraged. But Duff Ryan clipped me and I went out cold.
So I’m in reform school now and — will you believe it? —I can’t convince anyone that I murdered Pushton. Is it that grownups are so unbelieving because I’m pretty young? Are they so stupid that they still look upon fourteen-year-old boys as little innocents who have no minds of their own? That is the bitterness of youth. And I am sure that I won’t change or see things any differently. I told the dopes that too, but everyone assures me I will.
But the only thing I’m really worried about is that no one will believe about Pushton, not even the kids here at the reform school, and that hurts. It does something to my pride.
I’m not in the least worried about anything else. Things here aren’t so bad, nor so different from Clark’s. Doctors come and see me now and then but they don’t think anything is wrong with my mind.
They think I knifed old man Smith because I was in a blind rage when I did it, and looking at it that way, it would only be second-degree murder even if I were older. I’m not considered serious. There are lots worse cases here than mine. Legally, a kid isn’t responsible for what he does, so I’ll be out when I’m twenty-one. Maybe before, because my old man’s got money…
You’ll always remember me, won’t you? Because I’ll be out when I’m older and you might be the one I’ll be seeing.
1940
MACKINLAY KANTOR
GUN CRAZY
MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977) was born in Webster City, Iowa, becoming a journalist at seventeen, and soon after began selling hard-boiled mystery stories to various pulp magazines. He wrote numerous crime stories, as well as several novels in the genre, such as Diversey (1928), about Chicago gangsters, and Signal Thirty-Two (1950), an excellent police procedural, given verisimilitude by virtue of Kantors receiving permission from the acting police commissioner of New York to accompany the police on their activities to gather background information. His most famous crime novel is Midnight Lace (1948), the suspenseful tale of a young woman terrorized by an anonymous telephone caller; it was filmed twelve years later, starring Doris Day and Rex Harrison.
Kantor is far better known for his mainstream novels, such as the sentimental dog story The Voice of Bugle Ann (1936), filmed the same year; the long narrative poem Glory for Me (1945), filmed as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; and the outstanding Civil War novel Andersonville (1955), about the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.