THE BLUE HORSE
The Actor’s car ripped through the silent country until, just as Berndt anticipated, they hit the washout. The car shimmied to a perplexed stall. The Actor pulled Agnes roughly into the back seat and the driver revved twice without result. With a fabulous jolt the powerful engine caught and they lurched free, only then to slip off the other side of the road into a more serious predicament. There was no moving, not at all, no matter how the men pushed, roared, swore, kicked. Turning in a circle of frustrated fury, the Actor spied at some distance the horse, the rider.
“Look sharp,” he spoke. The men and he changed suddenly to meeker, commoner sorts and began to work with assiduous uselessness on the car’s engaged tires. Pulling up beside them, Berndt casually offered his assistance. The words did not strangle his throat. He was calm. He tapped his farmer’s brim as he glanced into the back seat. The Actor had spread a blanket over Miss DeWitt’s legs, and she looked all right, though pale and dazzled.
Berndt did not know that the Actor, with an eye to concealing the stolen money, had taken wads of it from the canvas bag. During the ride he had thrust as many bills as he could into his shirt. He had shoved the bag itself under the blanket, next to Miss DeWitt, whom he instructed to not bother getting out of the car. He smiled a genial greeting to Berndt, who nodded at Miss DeWitt, and set to work.
As did she. Quickly, surreptitiously, with a busy intelligence, Agnes pulled sheaves of bills between her fingers and thrust these bills into the ripped lining of her jacket — and was able to feel, in spite of the swooning pain in her hip, that she was very glad to have been a careless seamstress. As for Berndt, by eagerly hooking the good beast to the car’s bumper and making an ostentatious show of straining its powers, Berndt made every appearance of helping the gang. Yet by degrees, through prods and signs, he actually caused the horse to mire them ever deeper. Soon they were in a more helpless state than before. The Actor didn’t see it at first, but then, trained to supersensory human clues, he caught a glance between the farmer and the hostage that betrayed their connection. Just as he moved to grab the reins and question this, there appeared at last Slow Johnny and the deputy, riding in the dead teller’s car.
The men of the law stopped close upon the robbers and gingerly stepped toward them, guns drawn.
“You’re done for,” shouted Slow Johnny.
“Halt, you jackass!”
Crouching so that his body was shielded by the car door and his gun level with the head of Miss DeWitt, the Actor warned off the sheriff.
“Back! Back!” Berndt signaled to Johnny.
“I’ll shoot her, yes by damn I will,” called the Actor.
At a great distance from herself, Agnes felt her mouth open and words emerge. She spoke to the Actor, who cried out, warningly, again. Slow Johnny, though, was hard of hearing as well as slow and he kept walking forward. Berndt saw the thumb of the Actor lift off the hammer of the gun. He struck him just as the gun went off, so that the last Agnes DeWitt saw of the Actor was his unflinching look at her. The last thought she had about him was amazement that he did not regard her words or her life as important or even useful at all, or have a moment’s hesitation about ending all of the thousands of hours of tedious intensity of musical practice, ending the rippling music that her hands could bring into being, ending the episodes of greed and wonder in the arms of Berndt, and the several acts she’d learned to do that men paid whores great sums to perform and that she enjoyed, and further back, ending her time of devotion in the convent where her sisters had already unsewn, pressed, and restitched her habit for another hopeful. None of which was of any consequence. Not even the mountains of prayers for the souls so like his or the vivid attempts beseeching Mary to intercede. Nothing mattered. None of that. And beyond that, to her childhood and the tar roofs of the homestead and the alien bread of her mother’s cruel visions and her father’s terrifying gestures of love and all the precious jumble of her littleness, her thoughts, her creamy baby skin, her howls and burbles, all of this was as nothing to his casual wish to kill her.
This fact smote her as a marvel and a sorrow, and she knew it was because of what she saw, straight on, in the Actor that she so fervently loved Chopin. And God. Now, she had to give herself entirely to God’s will, whatever that might be. And it was just as she wondered, indeed, if for her to die was that will, that the gun went off at her temple and blackness stormed behind her eyes.
While Berndt jumped to her side, the Actor neatly grabbed the reins and somehow pulled himself onto the table-broad back of the horse. He dug in his heels, gave a desperate kick to the horse’s belly, and they were off, though the horse slowed at once just as soon as they entered the vast horizon-bound treeless wet field of thick gumbo. Berndt, kissing Agnes in a strange roar of grief, then followed the Actor, leaving the other two bank robbers and Slow Johnny and the deputy shouting back and forth and leveling their guns but not knowing whom to shoot. Berndt walked straight on. Just as he had when the car sped past, he understood his advantage lay in the increase of distance. He knew how exhausted his horse was, and he knew, too, that he, Berndt, could bend over from time to time to clean off his feet, but his horse could not. Either the Actor would have to dismount, or the horse would eventually slow to a stop, repossessed by the dirt.
And so it was — a low-speed chase.
There in that empty landscape they were a cipher of strained pursuit — one man plodding forward on the horse, the other plodding after. They seemed on that plain and under that spun sky eternal — bound to trudge on to hell no matter what. The clods on the hooves of the horse were soon great rich cakes. Still, on and on, slower, they pressed. Then slower yet so that the Actor kicked in savage indignation until the horse’s flanks bled. Slower yet. Berndt kept coming. The Actor screamed straight into the ear of the horse. With a frantic ripple of muscles it attempted to undo itself from the earth. Only sank itself farther, deeper. Raging, futile, the Actor saw the horse was stuck, leaped off, and put the pistol to its eye.
The shot echoed out, a crack. Another thinner crack echoed, against the mirage horizon. By the time the echo was lost, the horse was dead. Berndt saw his horse kneel in the wet cement dirt the way the animals worshiped the Christ. Then, to Berndt’s grief and rage, there was added a contemptuous bewilderment, which made him capable of what he did next.
The next bullet that the Actor fired struck Berndt in the chest but went through without touching a vital organ. Berndt merely felt a stunning rip of fire. He staggered one step back and then kept moving. When the bullet after that struck him mortally, he seemed to absorb it and strengthen. Rising to the next steps, he skipped from the mud. The Actor’s face stiffened in green shock and he fired point-blank. The empty chamber clicked over just as Berndt clasped the Actor by the shoulders and spoke into his face.
“If you hadn’t shot my horse, you wouldn’t have to die now,” said Berndt, abstractly stating a fact by which he perhaps meant that he would have preferred to deliver the Actor to the terrors of justice, or perhaps that Berndt would have preferred to die in the place of the horse, or yet, that the last bullet would have been his own coup de grâce. As there was life left in him, Berndt set his hands with a dogged weariness upon the Actor’s face, put his thumbs to the gangster’s eyeballs, and pressed, pressed with an inexorable parental dispassion, pressed until it was clear the gangster’s aim would be forever spoiled. Then Berndt toppled forward onto the ground, into the nearly liquid gumbo, pinning the Actor full length.