‘I waited for you two hours,’ he said. ‘You didn’t come.’
‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘Roxbury ain’t big.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I know Mr. Jardine. He said you was in number five.’
‘All right, now the big question: why?’
‘Huh?’
‘Why did you jump me?’
‘You upset Mrs. Emery today.’
‘Oh, that’s some fine reason.’
‘You’re a friend of his, that other one.’
‘What other one? You mean Sands?’
‘Yeah, him.’
‘I’m not a friend of his, I’m just trying to find him.’
‘That ain’t what you told Mrs. Emery.’
‘Did she send you after me?’
‘She don’t know nothing about it.’
‘It was all your idea, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just because of Sands.’
‘He killed Miss Diane. And you’re his friend.’
‘Christ!’
‘You deserved same as he got,’ Holly said.
I stared at him. A vague chill touched my back, staying on there in the saddle of it. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What did you say?’
He pressed his thick bluish lips together.
‘Did you jump Sands the same way you did me, Holly?’
Silence.
‘Goddamn it, Holly, did you?’
‘Yeah,’ he muttered.
‘Why?’
‘I told you. He caused Miss Diane to die. I heard him tell Mr. and Mrs. Emery what he done, and Mrs. Emery she started screaming for him to leave and Mr. Emery was all excited and took to drinking like he does, and when that guy left I just went after him. I had to do something. The Emerys, they’re just like my folks, they been real good to me. Miss Diane was real good to me, too, before she went away. I couldn’t just let that guy walk away without doing nothing.’
‘Where did you jump him? Here at the motel?’
‘No.’
‘Well, where?’
‘I followed him in the truck. I offered him a ride.’
‘You took him somewhere?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where?’
‘To Hammock Grove.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A picnic place out at the end of Coachman Road.’
‘And then what?’
‘I hit him a few times.’
‘You beat him up.’
‘Yeah. He wasn’t tough at all.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I left him there. I drove away.’
‘Was he alive?’
He stared up at me. ‘I never killed nobody.’
‘You’re sure he was alive?’
‘I told you, didn’t I?’
‘Was he unconscious?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Where did you leave him?’
‘In Hammock Grove.’
‘Where in Hammock Grove?’
‘By the bridge.’
‘What bridge?’
‘There’s this bridge goes across a little creek,’ Holly said. ‘When you first come in to the picnic area.’
‘All right. What time of day did all this happen?’
‘In the afternoon.’
‘What time?’
‘I dunno. It was still light out.’
‘And afterward you went home, back to the Emery farm?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do the Emerys know what you did?’
‘No, I never told nobody.’
‘And you never saw Sands again?’
‘No,’ Holly said. ‘Can I get up now? My head hurts.’
I kept my hands on the chair back. ‘Get up, then.’
It took him several seconds. He stood, finally, swaying a little, as if he were very dizzy. He said, ‘You hurt me plenty.’
I did not answer.
He moved then, away from me, into the bathroom. I watched him running water into the basin, as I had done, washing the blood from his face. He did not look into the mirror. He picked up the same towel I had used and buried his face in it, and then threw it down again and came out into the main room, blinking at me.
‘What you going to do?’ he said. ‘You going to take me to the police?’
I just stared at him.
‘I don’t like to be locked up. I can’t stand that.’
‘You can’t go around jumping people like you’ve been doing.’
‘I won’t do it no more.’
‘How do I know you won’t?’
‘Well, I won’t.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘get out of here.’ I was near exhaustion now, and even if I wanted to take him in I did not think I was capable of it. I would pass out before we got halfway to the City Hall, with him docile or not. ‘Go on, Holly, go home.’
‘You won’t come bothering Mrs. Emery no more, will you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t come around there any more.’
‘I got nothing against you now,’ Holly said. ‘You beat me, and nobody ever done that before. You’re a tough guy.’
He staggered over to the door and got it open and looked at me with that pathetic, battered rubber mask; then he went out into the night, pulling the door shut behind him.
I moved directly to the light switch and put the room in darkness. I sat on the bed and took the rest of my clothes off and lay back with the blanket over me, trying to think; but it was no good, it was just no good.
I let sleep wash over me, wrapping the throbbing pain in it. Tomorrow I could think, tomorrow…
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I awoke to a consummate aching stiffness of every muscle in my body.
It was after nine and there was sunlight in the room, shining dustily in long, pale shafts on the bare redwood floor. I lay for a time with my eyes closed against the light, very still, listening to the hammering of surf within the confines of my skull. It began to ebb, finally, and I allowed the blankness upon which I had been concentrating to be filled by returning thoughts of last night.
It seemed like a particularly vivid dream instead of a fragment of reality, the way the events surrounding the knife episode a few months ago had later seemed. I tried to hate Holly again, but that was as useless as it had been last night; he lived in a kind of primitive, simplistic world where everything was black or white, without shading, and if the sanctity of the cave and its dwellers was threatened in any way, you fought as savagely as you knew how to protect those who protected you. There was no way to hate someone like that. Maybe, in some ways, his world was just a little better than ours; it was certainly less grim.
I went over the conversation I had had with Holly, examining again what he had told me. It was the truth, of that I was fairly certain. I did not think he would have known how to lie about something like that. He had then, as he’d said, picked up Roy Sands following the visit to the Emery farm on the twentieth of last month; then he had driven him out to this Hammock Grove and leaned on him and left him there unconscious. I was willing to accept that without disputation.
But then what?
Holly had sworn that Sands was alive when he’d left, and I believed that, too. Sands had come back here to the Redwood Lodge later to pick up his belongings, hadn’t he? And yet, if he was hurt, why hadn’t he gone to the police to press charges against Holly? Or to a doctor-who in turn would have notified the authorities because of the nature of those injuries? If he had done either, the cops would have had his name on record. So what had Sands done after coming out of it? Well-had he come out of it at all? Holly had just left him there, unconscious, and maybe he had been hurt worse than Holly thought, had had a concussion or some such, remained comatose, perhaps died of exposure…? No, if that were the case, the body would have been found by this time-unless Hammock Grove was the kind of summer picnic area no one ever went to in the winter, and it had been less than a month since December 20-oh Christ, if he had died out there, how could he have picked up his stuff and gone up to Eugene? I was thinking in pointless circles.