The other me gives him a haughty look. “It is a trifling sum. I will pay you someday.”
“Now! I want it now!” Alfred does a dance.
Papa laughs. “How much does he owe you?”
“Three thousand American dollars... trifling sum, ha! It will take him all his life to earn that in the hoosegoo. How am I to collect?”
Papa shows him how in a swipe of his pen on a blank check. “It’s worth it,” he says.
Just then Mama comes to and faints all over again. Pam decides to stay out of it with a little faint of her own. Punchy fans her with his hat, but he keeps glowering at the Duke. By this time I am leaning against my door jamb, out of breath from laughing. Honest, this was the best vacation I ever had in my life!
Vi and the old bear put their heads together, then Papa steps forward. Right away I see he is a big man in these parts. His whisper is loud enough for me to hear.
“Chief, do you think we can straighten this thing out of court? I’ll be glad to pay any fines or damages, and if you jug this jerk, there really is liable to be some kind of international complications. What do you think?”
I know that Pop is more concerned with the publicity angle than any across-the-ocean mix-up, but the chief saw the wisdom in the words. The matter is straightened out then and there.
While the Duke is putting his ruffled feathers back together, Vi walks up to him. “You know, for a while there I was beginning to like you. Yet you almost have me fooled. I couldn’t see how anybody could pick up a Brooklyn accent so fast. You almost, but not quite, sold me a bill of goods.”
My heart does a flip. Then it flops when the Duke looks at her as though she were crazy.
“Silly girl,” he sneers, and much to Punchy’s disgust, stalks out.
I wait until they all stood outside on the sidewalk. Papa loads the mama bear and Pam into one car, while Punchy holds the door of the limousine open for Vi. The Duke is nowhere around. After Papa drives off, I came down the steps fast.
“Hey, chick, how about that beer we missed having?”
“You!” she gasps.
Punchy said something like, “Agrrr!” He came boiling around the car and sneered, then let loose with that roundhouse. I bend a little at the knees again and it breezes by, then I plant one on him, and this time he does the buck and wing on the other foot.
“That guy will never learn,” I say to Vi. She is standing there with her mouth wide open, staring at me with those big blue eyes. When I take her arm and took off down the street, she is as limp as wet spaghetti.
I laugh because I get her point. She never saw the Duke dash in the station house ahead of Punchy. Sure — she thought Punchy happened to see me and came charging up to get his licks in while he could. Oh, great!
It takes a while, but we reach the spot where I almost ordered the beer. We sit at the table a minute, then the waiter comes up with a half empty bottle in his hand.
“Can’t you stay put, Mac?”
“Who, me?”
“Yeah, you.”
Then I see what he meant. The “Pointers” door opens and the Duke comes out. He is a sorry sight. Vi shrieks and stares at him, then at me, then back to him again. Right then her mind is in an awful stew. I pat her on the head and stand up. After all, I do owe the Duke something.
I went over and held out my hand. “Look, pal, how about you and me let bygones be bygones. I’ll...”
“Eek! It is my doubles again! You have ruined everything. Ah ha! Ah ha! Now you come to me on bend knee for forgiving. No is the answer. Nothing I forgive, not one little thing! You have made me look like a fool, and for that I am objectionable!”
His arms go wide and he shouts to the public, “This... this man, he has stole my train, my woman, my honor...” His eyes found the half empty bottle on my table. “...now he’s even drinking the beer I ordered yet!”
“Now look, it was all a mis—”
“Do not ‘now look’ me. It was the insult supreme and I am challenge you. To the death we fight.”
Up comes his hand and patty-cakes me across the cheek. All is quiet. I see the bartender reaching for the phone.
Right then I look over my shoulder at Vi. “Now do you believe I’m just Joe Moran with a garage in Holly Corners?”
Vi nods.
“Did you really mean that about sorta liking me?”
Vi nods.
“Enough to marry me quick so we can get out of this madhouse and up where all the nuts are on the trees?”
Vi nods.
My face is still stinging from that slap. I grab hold of the Duke’s coat. “Okay, Buster, you asked for this, but remember something, from now on there ain’t gonna be nobody what’ll mistake me for you again!”
It only takes one solid punch to change the Duke’s whole personality. His looks, too. The bartender is busy on the phone. I hear the siren wailing. I yank Vi to her feet and we beat it out to a taxi.
“Union Station,” I order.
“Where are we going?” Vi asks. “Dad won’t like this.”
I grin at her, “I don’t know about that, chick. He said he wanted a man in the family. Now he’s got one. There’s a train going north in five minutes and you better hope we make it. I don’t think we can get your Pop to talk us out of anything ever again.”
The taxi is in time. I pay the driver as we unpile, but I am slightly disturbed. Vi hasn’t said a word during the entire ride to speak of. As we run for the train I give her one last chance. “Want to back out, honey?”
She shakes her head.
“Then why so quiet?”
“I was just thinking...”
“Yeah?”
The train jerks, starts to pull out, and I shove her aboard.
“When you socked the Duke back there, so there wouldn’t be any more mix-ups... Now he doesn’t look like anybody... but you still look like the Duke!”
A white-sleeved arm shoots out, pulls Vi up, then grabs me. I look up into the grinning face of my pal, the same porter that came down with me.
“Glad to see you back, Duke, sar,” he says.
I let out a long groan. “Oh no, not again!”
Vi says, “See what I mean?”
I saw.
The Too-Careful Killer
There’s a penalty for murder. Sometimes the payoff isn’t too quick, but it comes. Time can be a torturer and some place there’s always a killer dying piece by piece, a little more each day, cursing himself when he’s asleep and feeling his mind loosening when he’s awake until he has to fight to hold on.
Then maybe he starts wishing he were dead, too. Or anything but alive and not knowing when his kill is going to come back and haunt him and hound him — and betray him.
Some place, on July 6, 1940, there was a killer and a dead body, known only to time. Then a killer’s mistake came home to roost.
The man in the rowboat fishing Washington State’s Olympic Mountains Crescent Lake probably knew the legend. The lake never gave up its dead, tradition held. The dead stayed dead, the dead stayed put in this icy lake fed by the near freezing mountain streams that bordered it.
So there was only curiosity in the fisherman’s mind when he saw the tapering fingers of a hand break the surface of the lake.
But curiosity can even overcome horror. He rowed closer, perhaps even felt relief when he noticed the waxy sheen of the hand, thinking it was only that of a window-display dummy. Then came sickish horror when he realized the hand was real and so was the body that hung there beneath it.
Tradition had been broken. The lake had given up its dead.