I didn’t mind the walk. I didn’t mind the time it took. I wanted it to be late when I got there. Good and late. That’s why I didn’t try to hitch my way out, as I easily could have done. I wasn’t in any hurry. I was sure of getting there. Nothing could have stopped me.
I plodded along under the stars, unhurried, even-paced, steady, and sometimes a breeze from the sea would cut across me and play around with me a little and then go on its way again. Then the night would be calm and still again, like it had been before. Once in a while a car would streak by, making a comet path out of its heads that slowly dissolved again after it was well gone.
It’s a funny feeling, to keep going and know that ahead of you, when you get where you’re going, two men are going to die. Or at least you’d think it would be, but it wasn’t. I didn’t feel anything at all about it. I didn’t even hate much any more. I was like all frozen up about it. I suppose that’s a bad way to feel, but it makes it awfully easy to do a thing like that. You’re just a machine, and the switch handle has been thrown away; you can’t be turned off any more.
Those stars looked funny, winking to each other, giving each other the eye, all over the vault above me, as if they knew what was up and had seen so much of this, it was an old story to them. As if they were saying, “There is goes again.”
It must have been about three, I guess, when I got out to Hermosa Drive; I don’t know for sure. I turned off the main highway and walked down to the place. They had the gate locked now, cutting across the right of way, but that didn’t stop me. I knew by heart the places where the wall was easiest to get over. I walked along it till I found one of them, all the way down toward the shore, where it ran down into the sand. When the tide was low, like it was now, all you had to do was reach and pull yourself up over it from standing level. But even if the tide had been high, I think I would have swum out and around the end of it and come floating back on the inside. He even had the ocean staked off in front of his place; it was his own private property.
That’s one thing those who live in fear should learn: you can keep a man out, but you can’t keep death out.
I was squirming up the beach now, coming at the place from the front. It was built to face the ocean, as I’ve told you. That door at which I’d always picked them up with the car was in reality the rear door, though it was the only one they ever used.
I was on the inside now. They’d already stopped living, but they didn’t know about it yet.
The little private cabanas that they’d used for sun-bathing stood up there over to one side, black against the white gleam of the sand. They looked like sentry boxes. There was a low, rumbling sound, and something came rushing at me from around in back of them, too quick to be focused.
They had a dog on the inside, Job’s dog. They thought that was protection enough; that and the gate and the wall. It would have been ordinarily. He would have torn to pieces anything on two legs he found on the wrong side of the fence.
I stopped short and held it, to see if I was going to take or not. He curbed his onslaught only at the last minute and sent up a spray of sand all over my legs, trying to dig in. When you’ve once made friends with a dog it doesn’t wear off again. That’s the difference between a dog and men.
“Hello, Wolf,” I said, “I’m back,” and groped for his skull a couple of times.
He was more of a nuisance trying to love me up than he had been trying to chew me up. He kept getting in my way.
“All right, go back to sleep,” I said; “this has nothing to do with you.”
The lights were all out in the house. I’d never had a key to the house, so I’d have to go in there and get them the best I could. I didn’t want to ring and mix Job up in it. Job was all right; I had nothing against him. I’d sat and eaten my meals at the same table with him the whole time I was there.
I walked around to the side and followed that back, to where Roman’s windows were. That terrace he had outside his room helped a lot; that made a break, a notch in the straight up and down of the walls. I used the window indentations below for footrests — they had these Spanish-type iron grilles over them — and managed to get a grip on them, then hoisted myself up and over.
Then I stood a minute and looked down. Wolf was sitting there on his haunches and watching, head cocked to one side in curiosity. I thumbed him back toward the beach, but he didn’t move.
I turned to face the way I was going. He had the windows all open; you just stepped in, without even lifting your feet. The room was dark and quiet, but I knew he was in it. I could hear him breathing and I could smell the alcohol he’d brought back on his breath from wherever it was he’d been earlier tonight.
I felt my way in and around and over the way in which I remembered the bed to have been, that one and only time I was ever up here before, that first day.
I traced the bottom of it with my hand and felt along the side of it, and when I’d gone far enough up toward the head, I sat down on the edge of it, close beside him. The mattress sank a little under my weight, but he didn’t seem to feel it.
I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to know whom he was getting it from when he got it. I reached out for a little lamp he had there close beside the bed and clicked it on. Twin halos of light sprang out, one at each end of the shade, and showed up our faces and a little of the margin around them. The shade itself was opaque, to rest the eyes.
Then I just sat back and waited for the shine to percolate through to him, sitting on the bias to him. It took some time. He was sleeping like a log. He didn’t miss her. Murder agreed with him. He must have been brought up on it. He must have been weaned on it. Good; I was going to see that he got some more.
I let him take his own time about waking up. I sat and waited quietly on the edge of the bed, right next to him, looking at him, watching his face. I thought of all the ugly people I’d run into in Havana the night before, and there’d been some beauts. Quon the dope fiend, and that Danish sea captain. But he was the ugliest of the lot, this man here. To me he was, anyway. Because he’d killed the thing I loved.
The light started to filter through to his brain. He got restless. He tried to turn over away from it and get it off his face. I took him by the shoulder and eased him back again the way he’d been the first time. But not violently, just by a sort of indirect pressure.
The lids of his eyes flickered, made a couple of false starts to go up. Then suddenly they made it all the way, stayed that way, and the thing was under way at last.
First there was just disbelief in them; he thought he was having a bad dream or the light was playing tricks on him. He shuttered them rapidly two or three times in succession, to get me out of them. I stayed in, and he had to believe it.
I watched the fear come into them slowly, changing them, making them glassy and swelling them.
“Hello, Roman,” I said. “Nice night for dying, isn’t it?”
His voice was still asleep. He had to shake it to wake it up. “Jordan,” he whispered hoarsely. “Jordan.”
I put my open hand to the base of his throat and just left it there, resting lightly, relaxedly. “Don’t try to call for him in full voice,” I said. “Because I can stop it, down here, quicker than you can get it all the way up and out. You’ll only bring the thing on all the quicker. While you’re quiet, you’re alive.”
The collar of his pajamas was in the way a little, so I took my other hand and spread the wings farther out, first one and then the other, where they wouldn’t interfere. He still went in for those candy-striped satins, I saw; this time black and gold.