Hope is a poor subsitute for woodsmanship. I should have been a Boy Scout. I should have been a pioneer. I should have stood in bed.
I don’t believe in stacking the deck. It gets comical after a while. It gets like a soap opera.
‘When we left Nellie May yesterday, her mother was dying of frostbite and the phone was out of order. Nellie couldn’t send her brother Tom to the village for the doctor because Tom had a broken leg. The lion who’d escaped from the circus was clawing at the kitchen screen door, and the oil burner had just exploded setting the basement on fire. As we all know, Nellie is a drug addict, and her last fix had been three days ago...’
So I don’t believe in stacking the deck. I figured Phil was in enough trouble as it was. I figured DeMorra was sticking his neck out by sending me to help. I figured Ann might be in serious danger, and I figured I was a horse’s ass for traipsing through the woods without a compass.
I needed what happened next. I needed it like Nellie May needed the circus lion at her kitchen door.
I felt myself falling.
The fall came suddenly, the ground abruptly sloping off so that I lost my footing. I stumbled forward, groping for support where there was none. Something cold touched my ankle, and panic roared up into my brain until I realized the something cold was water. I was too far gone by that time. I fell flat on my face, covered with slime, covered with water that surely had come out of an ice-cube tray. I’d clung tightly to the .38, but it was submerged with me, and it probably wouldn’t fire for the next ten years. I sat up. The water was up to my waist. I wanted to laugh. Until I heard — or rather sensed — movement in the water.
I thought it was a trick of my eyes at first, a gag my eyes were playing.
I’d heard about snakes swimming, but I’d never seen one before.
I couldn’t even see this one too clearly, except that he was about three feet away from me in the water and coming on an apparent collision course. If you’re going to be shocked, go ahead. I didn’t ask for the snake. I didn’t even ask for a caterpillar. I’m no different from you, unless you’re a snake trainer. I don’t like them. I pulled the .38 up, and I fired. The gun misfired, and I squeezed the trigger again, and again there was nothing, and then the snake hit.
I screamed.
I don’t give a damn what you think about men screaming. I screamed. I screamed as loud as I know how to scream, and then I felt a needle-like pain in my leg, and I screamed again, and I lashed out at the snake with the butt of the .38, and I kept lashing, striking up the water, hitting at the snake, and yelling and screaming and cursing all the while. He left.
As suddenly as he’d come, he was gone.
I couldn’t move.
I sat with the black waters swirling around my waist. I was trembling, and I suppose my eyes were shut tight, and then the shocking idea came that there might be more snakes in the water, and I leaped to my feet and clawed my way up the bank of the pond, and I fell flat on my face again, but this time I got up and shoved my way through the bushes, feeling the bushes clawing at me like live things, hearing the insects, and hearing the animal noises, but pushing through, and then becoming aware of the awful pain in my leg, and suddenly cognizant of the fact that the snake may have been a poisonous one.
It occurred to me that the most idiotic thing I could do at the moment would be to get lost in the woods and die of snake bite. I could not, right then, think of a more moronic way of dying. I didn’t have a pocket knife, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have known the first thing about lancing a snake bite and drawing off the poison. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know how to find out where I was, and I longed for the feel of asphalt under my feet, longed for the screech of the elevated trains, longed for the blare of a traffic signal.
I came close to panic again.
It’s very easy to panic. Panic is the easiest thing in the world to do. You don’t panic when you’re up against a situation you know you can control. You can face another man with a revolver, and he can be firing at you, and you won’t panic because you’ve faced men with revolvers before. You can face a broken bottle being thrust at your jugular vein and you won’t panic because this is old hat. But it’s easy to panic when you don’t know the score. You can feel the panic bubbling inside your stomach, and it’s so easy to let it go, so easy to let it erupt into your mind and your body, so easy to let it propel your legs, let it control the wild flailing of your arms, let it put fright in your eyes and fear in your heart.
I didn’t.
I wouldn’t.
I kept shoving my way through the woods, dragging my leg behind me, dragging my backside, dragging every ounce of will power I could muster. I kept on what I hoped was a line paralleling the road. And finally I saw a light.
I still had the .38 in my fist. I clung to it, as if it were a howitzer instead of a gun which wouldn’t fire.
I came out of the woods behind the motel, and I staggered down to the gravel court, and I shouted, ‘Help!’
I wasn’t thinking of detective work at the moment. I was thinking I’d been bitten by a poisonous snake, and I needed a doctor. The office door opened. Barter and Hezekiah stepped into the light.
‘Help!’ I said again, and I limped toward them. Hezekiah came out of the doorway. Something big and ugly was in his hands.
‘I’ve been bitten by a snake,’ I said, and Hezekiah, son of a bitch that he was, hit me on the head.
Chapter fifteen
I felt like a private eye.
Only private eyes get hit on the head. They feel ‘blackness closing in’, or ‘consciousness going down the drain’. Or they feel ‘the lights going out’. Private eyes are always getting hit on the head. It’s a wonder their skulls don’t look like sieves.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been hit on the head with a wrench. Hezekiah hit me with a wrench. In books, in the movies, you get hit on the head with a wrench and you go unconscious and when you wake up you feel a little dizzy. Otherwise, you’re fine. You just missed a little bit of the action, but everybody is in a big hurry to fill you in.
I would like to correct this false impression.
The skull, even if it is a hard one like mine, is a pretty vulnerable thing. If you get hit with a wrench, or a bottle, or a hammer, or a chair, or a club, or a shoe, or whatever, you don’t just drift off into a peaceful sleep. Bang your head sometime by accident and see how quickly the bump rises. Then add the force of a man’s arm and shoulder to the blow, add the terrible impact of a piece of forged steel.
Your head cracks.
The hair cushions the blow only slightly, and then the steel splits the skin and opens your skull, and if you’re lucky you don’t suffer a brain concussion. If you’re lucky, you bleed. Your head aches, and you bleed. You bleed down the side of your face, and down the side of your neck, and under your shirt collar. There is a hole in your head, and your blood runs out of it, and when you finally come to, the blood is caked and dried on your temple and your cheek and your neck.
You squint up at the light, and you feel only a terrible pain somewhere at the top of your head. You can’t even localize the pain, because your whole head seems to be in a vice, your whole head is pounding and throbbing. This is the hangover supreme. This is the prince of all hangovers, and you don’t laugh it off and drink a glass of tomato juice. There’s nothing to laugh about. You’ve been hit on the head, and the chair didn’t shatter the way it does in the movies — but your head did.