“She doesn’t seem to want to wake up.”
“Get her up, man!” I looked at him in astonishment. He had snapped the order, but with an obvious uncertainty. He was a little man, posturing, posing, trying to regain lost authority. Last night he had been relieved of command. No matter how hard he strained, he couldn’t get it back. And I suspected that the same thing had happened in all the other groups he had joined during his lifetime. With all his brisk energies Sandy would run things for a little while. Until finally he was pushed and he backed down. And then he would become the group clown. Good old Sandy. He’s a gasser.
I shrugged and went over and shook Helen. She simulated a return of semi-consciousness. I got her up into a sitting position and slipped her shoes onto her slack feet. She mumbled incoherencies. I pulled her up onto her feet and, half supporting her, walked her out into the sitting room.
“Bad shape?” Sandy asked.
“She doesn’t seem any better to me.”
Nan took her and guided her into the bathroom. As they passed Shack he reached out and gave Helen a massive, full-handed pinch on the buttock and winked at me with relaxed, expansive good cheer. “You make it good, doc?” he asked me. He had never been as friendly.
Nan, supporting Helen, looked back over her shoulder at him and pulled her lip up away from her teeth. “Good like you made it, you ox bastard?”
But there was no real rancor in her voice, and Sandy should have sensed that. He said, “I’ll keep the monster tied up so he can’t get to you again, darlin’ Nano.”
“Go chew a pill, you sick spook!” she snapped.
Shack gave a roar of laughter and clapped Sandy on the back. Sandy’s glasses jumped off his nose and swung by one earpiece.
“She found herself a man,” Shack said proudly. “She made a switch. You and Stassen split the blonde, Sandy.”
“Don’t bang my back, you goddam oaf!” Sandy yelled.
Shack banged him again and laughed. Sandy went over and sat down, brooding.
When Nan came out with Helen, the blond girl’s eyes were almost closed, and her head lolled loosely. She was doing well, but she was almost overdoing it. We put the meager luggage in the trunk and got into the car, Nan in front between Sandy and Shack, with Sandy at the wheel.
Within a half hour the big jolt of dexedrine and the other wild range of happy pills had built Sandy back up to his usual level of joyous optimism. He wanted a new car, and he wanted to prove a theory of his. So we cruised a big residential area of Pittsburgh which seemed like damn foolishness to me. When he found what he wanted, he parked a block beyond and went back alone. He said he didn’t need help. Within a shockingly short time he was back with a new Mercury. He said with roosterish pride that he had proved his theory that the last one to get to a private party doesn’t want to block the cars in the drive, so he leaves his keys in the ignition like a good fellow. Hurray for the good fellow.
We brought both cars along. Sandy had another sparkling idea. We found a big auto dump, ran the Buick far back into the clatter, stripped off the plates and threw them into the night.
“Let them figure that the hell out. It’s like confusion, man,” he said. “How’s baby doing, Kirboo?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not so good.”
We had another hot, fast car. We moved east, digging deeper into the night, never missing the little roads that Sandy had looked up and remembered. He had a complete map inside his head, and we were a little light moving along it.
I had to have a thoroughly empty road. If we were rushed by an oncoming car, it could go sour. And finally we were on a road that suited me. I took her hand and squeezed it hard. She squeezed back. And suddenly she began to breathe in a deep, rasping way, articulating each exhalation.
“What the hell?” Nan said, looking around.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she could be dying.”
The great raw breathing went on, very audible over the sound of the motor and the tires and the night wind. It stopped abruptly.
“Is she dead?” Sandy asked.
Before I could answer, the breathing began again, slowly at first and then picking up the previous tempo.
“The next time,” I said angrily, nervously, “it may stop for good, and the last thing I want back here with me is a dead blonde. Let’s leave her the hell off, Sandy. This looks like a good place.”
He slowed the car, then suddenly swung off into a wide and level dirt road. He deftly worked it around until we were heading out, and turned off the lights and the motor. The breathing seemed three times as loud.
“Jesus, that’s a terrible noise,” Shack said. I got out quickly and went around the car and opened the door on her side and got her out. She was completely limp. I got her under the armpits and dragged her. Her shoes came off. I could see them, and the tracks her heels made by the light of a high half moon.
Sandy was beside me. “Where you taking her?”
“Off in the bushes.”
We were talking in whispers. I heard Nan say, back in the car, “Hones’ ta God, Shack, with you it’s a disease.”
And that cut the problem way down. I had been most nervous about Nan and her little knife, and her high delight in using the little knife.
I heard the sound of a brook as I pulled her into the bushes. And suddenly the ground dropped away and the girl and I went crashing and rolling down a short, steep bank into an icy stream. I cursed and hugged my elbow and got up onto my knees, in about five inches of water.
I suddenly realized that the harsh fake breathing had stopped. I got hold of the girl and wrestled her clumsily over to the muddy bank. There was an entirely new quality to her inertness, and I realized that this time it was genuine. She had gone headlong onto the rocks.
“You okay?” Sandy called in a hushed voice. He came cautiously down through the brush.
“Got wet and hit my elbow. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold it,” he said. He bent over the girl and put his ear on her back. “Heart’s still thumping, man.”
“So what?”
He found a rock the size of a softball and forced it into my hand. “Finish it up, man. Take it all the way.”
I balanced the heavy stone in my hand. I touched the roundness of the back of her head with my other hand, under the softness of her hair.
Sandy made a noise like a chicken.
I turned in a way that partially blocked his vision, and I struck down hard with the rock. I hit the hard mud close to her head. It made a convincing noise that would turn stomachs.
I stood up so abruptly I knocked him back against the slope. “Let get the hell out of here.”
“Is she...”
“Get moving!” I yelled at him. We scrambled up the bank. Sandy kicked her shoes into the brush. Shack and Nan had moved onto the back seat. They didn’t know or care whether the car was moving or standing still. We got back on the highway, and soon we were keening down around the curves of a long and dangerous hill.
A long time later Nan asked, leaning over between us, “Is she dead?”
“Like stone cold,” Sandy said.
“And I’m living,” Nan said.
“She had better legs, man,” Sandy said.
“So where is she? Walking, running?” Nan asked.
She leaned back. We rushed through the small hills, drifted through the silent, ugly, sleeping towns. Our headlights unraveled the patched roads.
“Fee fie fiddly-I-oh. Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh.”
We were with it. We rode right out there on the forward edge of it, like a dog with his nose in the wind. The square world was noplace. We were a fly, and a blind man sought to catch us in his fist.