“Throw me your wallet, Horace,” Sandy ordered.
“Sure. Sure thing.” He took it out and threw it. It landed near me. I picked it up and flipped it to Sandy.
Sandy counted the money. “Two hundred and eighty-two bucks, Horace. That’s very nice. That’s decent of you, man.”
“I like to carry a pretty good piece of cash on me,” Horace said.
“Mm-m. Credit cards. Membership cards. You’re all carded up, Horace. American Legion too?
“I got in just as the war ended. Had some occupation duty in Japan.
“That’s nice. Belong to a lot of clubs, Horace?”
“Well, the Elks and the Masons and the Civitan.”
“What’s your golf handicap?”
“Bowling’s my game. Class A. One eighty-three average last year.”
“Drink beer when you bowl?”
“Well, that’s part of it, I guess.”
“You’re in lousy condition, Horace, with that big disgusting gut on you. You should cut down on the beer.”
Horace slapped his stomach and laughed. It was a flat and lonely sound under the hot sun, and it didn’t last long.
“Who’s the fat broad in this picture, man?”
“That’s my wife,” Horace said rather stiffly.
“Better take her off the beer too. These your kids?”
“Two of them. That was taken three years ago. I got a boy eighteen months old now. Like I said, you people can take the car and the money, and no hard feelings.”
“If we do, would you call it stealing, Horace?”
The man looked blankly at Sandy. “Wouldn’t it be?”
“That’s a raunchy attitude, man. You’re a big successful clubman. And you get this chance to loan us a car and some money.”
“A loan?”
“We’re your new friends. Treat your friends right, Tex.”
“Sure thing,” he said brightly. “It can be a loan, if that’s the way you want it.”
He had been edging back toward the open door of the car. I had noticed it and I guessed Sandy had. Suddenly he whirled and plunged headlong into the car, yanking the glove compartment open. He scrabbled with both hands, releasing a gay rain of trading stamps, dislodging Kleenex, sun lotion, road maps. His hands moved more slowly and stopped. He lay half across the seat as though in exhaustion, and we heard the rasp of his breathing. He pushed himself slowly back out of the car and stood and smiled in a small sick way.
“Now that wasn’t polite, man,” Sandy said.
A faraway jet made a faint ripping sound. Becher stood in his own small black pool of shadow. He was sweating heavily. The situation was changing. He had triggered it. I could feel a coiling and turning in my stomach.
Shack walked slowly back to the tailgate, opened it, slid a heavy cardboard carton out onto the tailgate.
Horace turned and saw him and said, with automatic authority, “Careful with that! That’s a special order. Imported Italian tile for a bar top.”
Shack picked the box up in his arms. With a great effort so smoothly controlled that it looked effortless, he swung it up over his head and launched it in a high arc. It turned slowly in the hot, white sunlight and landed with a jangling smash on the rocks. The box ruptured. Bright shards of tile clattered on the stones.
That changed it, also. It was a symbol. Becher probably sensed the way things were changing and accelerating, and so he said, “I can write it out for you. The loan of the car and the money. You’ll have something to show.”
Nan yawned like a cat. Sandy picked up a few stones and threw them carefully, one at a time, until the fourth one struck and broke an undamaged tile which had slid out of the broken box.
It was all growing and changing. We were all getting closer to the edge of something. I can remember a time very much like that time with Becher. I was fourteen. There were five of us, all of an age. On a Saturday evening in August we went on our bikes out to the Crozier place and up the long drive to the dark empty house. They had gone to their place in Maine for the summer. Paul Beattie, my best friend at that time, had a hopeless crush on Marianne Crozier. Our idea, riciculous, mischievous and slightly romantic, was to break in and find which room was Marianne’s, and leave there a mysterious message from an anonymous admirer.
We got in through a cellar window. It was scary work. We had come prepared, each of us with a flashlight. The electricity was turned off. We moved slowly in a taut group, whispering. From time to time we would stop and listen to the emptiness. It was a huge old place, full of ghosts and creakings. By the time we had located Marianne’s room, we had become much bolder, and had begun to show off, each in his own way, for the others in the group. Fats Carey bounced up and down on Marianne’s bed, with obscene commentary. Gussy Ellison found out that the water was turned on, and hurried from one bathroom to the next, turning on every faucet, stoppering every sink and tub. The constant roar of water gave us courage instead of alarming us. Kip McAllen began to pile the bed of Paul’s beloved with the contents of bottles he found in medicine cabinets and on dressing tables. For a time Paul bellowed his indignation at this violation of the shrine, and tried to put a halt to all disorder, but soon be caught the spirit of anarchy.
It grew and blossomed with us. We ranged through the house, clumping up and down stairs, trying to outdo each other in acts of outrage, each yelling to the others to come witness this particular violation of decent behavior. When, at least three hours later, we pedaled away, trembling with reaction, laughing and hooting in a coarse way, each one trying to exaggerate his own guilt, we left ruin behind us — precious things ripped, smashed, smeared and degraded, books, mirrors, draperies, lamps, statuary, clothing. It was reported later in the paper that the water overflow had caused structural damage to the extent of fifteen thousand dollars, and the other damage was estimated at twenty-five thousand. There were editorials about vandalism. We lived in terror for a month. We got together and devised an alibi so intricate that it could not have survived ten minutes of intensive questioning. But we were never questioned. We all came from substantial families. A few weeks later three of us went off to private schools. Had we all stayed in Huntstown High, we might have given ourselves away.
I am trying to make this point: we did not go to the Crozier place to do forty thousand dollars’ worth of damage. We went on a romantic errand. We rode our sprocket-wheel steeds up there through the warm evening, noble as knights. When we left it was as though we had been through a brief and shocking illness. The violence was a cumulative thing, building upon itself.
I can remember the dreamlike way I climbed onto a chair and took down the saber hanging on Mr. Crozier’s study wall. I slid it out of the scabbard. It made a hissing sound when I swung it. There was a marble bust on a low table, the head and shoulders of a bearded man. “Off with your head,” I whispered and swung with all my strength. The blade snapped off at the hilt. My hands stung. The bust rocked and fell, and the head split on the hardwood floor. It was all a hot excitement, a roaring release.
Now, not quite a decade later, I sat on my heels in hot country and felt it all building again, toward the crazed release.
Becher could not quite believe what was happening to him. On one level I believe he felt that it would all come to an end, and it would be a story for him to tell in the home office and out on the road. But on a more primitive level there was a knowing dread inside him. His color was bad. His mouth kept working. A man could stand like that in a pit of snakes, wondering how to communicate, how to appease yearning for invisibility.
Shack pulled the salesman’s suitcase out of the station wagon, dropped it on the ground, unzipped it. He pulled the clothing out, then stood up with a fifth of bourbon, half full. He uncapped it, took two long swallows, coughed and offered it to Sandy.