Call If You Need Me Page 17

  Rudy began making violent slashes and sword thrusts in the air, grunting as he gouged and chopped. He seemed to have forgotten about the old couple cowering in the passageway.

  “Now, dear, don’t you worry,” Mother Hutchins said faintly to Old Hutchins. “Dr. Porter’ll put you right. Why, a prostrate operation is, is an everyday occurrence. Look at Prime Minister MacMillian. Remember Prime Minister MacMillian, Daddy? When he was prime minister and had his prostrate operation he was up and around in no time. No time. Now you just cheer up. Why—”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Rudy made a frightening lunge toward them, but they drew back farther into the narrow passageway. Fortunately, Mother Hutchins had enough strength left to whistle up Yeller, a shaggy giant of a dog, who immediately ran into the room from the back porch and put his paws up on Rudy’s narrow chest, pushing him back a step or two.

  Rudy retreated slowly, appalled at the dog’s rank breath. On his way through the living room he picked up Old Hutchins’s prized possession, an ashtray made from the hoof and foreleg of an elk, and hurled the smelly thing out into the garden.

  Old Hutchins began to cry again. His nerves were gone. Ever since Rudy’s vicious attack upon his life a month ago, his nerves, which weren’t good to begin with, had gone.

  What had happened was this: Old Hutchins was taking a bath when Rudy sneaked up and threw the RCA Victrola into the bathtub. It could have been serious, fatal even, if in his haste Rudy hadn’t forgot to plug it in. As it was, Old Hutchins had received a bad bruise on his right thigh when the Victrola had made its flying entry through the open door. That was just after Rudy had seen a movie in town called Goldfinger. Now they were more or less on guard at all moments, but especially whenever Rudy ventured into town. Who could tell what ideas he might pick up at the movies? He was very impressionable. “He’s at a very impressionable age,” Mother Hutchins said to Old Hutchins. Ben never said anything, one way or the other. Nobody could figure Ben, not even his mother, Mother Hutchins.

  Rudy stayed in the barn just long enough to devour half the pie, then put a halter on Em, his favorite camel. He led her out the back door and safely through the elaborate network of snares, covered pits and traps, laid for the careless and the unwary. Once clear, he pulled Em’s ear and commanded her to kneel, mounted, and was off.

  He clop-clopped out across the back forty, up into the dry, sage-covered foothills. He stopped once on a little rise to look back at the old homestead. He wished he had some dynamite and a plunger to blow it right off the landscape—like Lawrence of Arabia had done with those trains. He hated the sight of it, the old homestead. They were all crazy down there anyway. They wouldn’t be missed. Would he miss them? No, he wouldn’t miss them. Besides, there would still be the land, the apples. Damn the land and the apples anyway! He wished he had some dynamite.

  He turned Em into a dry arroyo. With the sun bearing down fiercely on his back, he cantered to the end of the box canyon. He stopped and dismounted and, behind a rock, uncovered the canvas that held the big Smith & Wesson service revolver, the burnoose and the headgear. He dressed and then stuck the revolver in his sash. It fell out. He stuck it in again and it fell out again. Then he just decided to carry it in his hand, though it was heavy and it would be hard to guide Em. It would call for a skillful bit of maneuvering on his part, but he thought he could do it. He thought he was up to it.

  Back at the farm, he left Em in the barn and made his way to the house. He saw the elk-leg ashtray still in the garden, a few flies working away on it, and he sneered; the old man had been afraid to come out and retrieve it. But it gave him an idea.

  He burst in on them in the kitchen. Old Hutchins, sitting rather comfortably at the kitchen table and stirring his coffee and cream, looked completely stunned. Mother Hutchins was at the stove, putting in another pie.

  “Apples, apples, apples!” Rudy shrieked. He followed this outburst with a wild laugh, waving his Colt .45 around in the air, then herded them into the living room. Ben looked up with a slight show of interest, and then went back to his book. It was Luke Short’s Rawhide Trail.

  “This is it,” Rudy said, his voice rising. “This is it, this is it, this is it!”

  Mother Hutchins kept puckering her lips—almost as if expecting a kiss—trying to whistle up Yeller, but Rudy only laughed and hooted. He pointed at the window with the barrel of his Winchester. “There’s Yeller,” he said. Mother Hutchins and Old Hutchins both looked to see Yeller trotting into the orchard with the ashtray in his mouth. “There’s your old Yeller,” Rudy said.

  Old Hutchins groaned and fell with a painful clump to his knees. Mother Hutchins got down beside him but cast an imploring look in Rudy’s direction. Rudy was about four feet away from her, just to the right of the red Naugahyde footstool.

  “Rudy, now you wouldn’t do anything now, dear, you’d be sorry for later. You wouldn’t hurt me or your pa, would you, Rudy?”

  “He ain’t a pa to me—ain’t, ain’t, ain’t,” said Rudy, dancing around the living room with an occasional glance at Ben, who, since his initial momentary flicker of interest in the proceedings, hadn’t stirred himself again.

  “Shouldn’t say ain’t, Rudy,” Mother Hutchins gently reproved.

  “Son,” Old Hutchins stopped sniffling for a minute, “you wouldn’t hurt a poor old helpless broken-down old man with a prostrate condition, would you? Huh?”

  “Stick it out here, stick it out here and I’ll blow it off for you,” Rudy said, waving the ugly snub-nosed barrel of his .38 right under Old Hutchins’s rather large nose. “I’ll show you what I’ll do for you!” He waved it there from side to side a minute longer, then danced off again. “No, no, I wouldn’t shoot you. Shooting’s too good for you.” But he fired a burst from the BAR into the kitchen wall just to show them he meant business.

  Ben raised his eyes. He had a soft, indolent look to his face. He stared at Rudy a minute without recognition, then went back to his book. He was in a fine room in a Virginia City hotel called The Palace. Downstairs there were three or four angry men waiting for him at the bar, but right now he was going to enjoy the first bath he’d had in three months.

  Rudy faltered a minute, then looked around wildly. His eyes fell on the grandfather railroad ticktock clock that had been in the family seven years. “You see that clock there, Ma? When the b-big hand gets on the little hand there’s going to be an explosion. Wham! Foom! Up she goes, everything! Ballou!” With this he bounded out the front door and jumped off the porch.

  He sat down behind an apple tree a hundred yards from the house. He intended to wait until they were all assembled on the front porch: Mother Hutchins, Old Hutchins, even Ben; all assembled there with the few pitiful accumulations they hoped to preserve, and then he would pick them off quickly, one by one. He swept the porch with his scope, putting the cross hairs on the window, a wicker chair, a cracked flowerpot drying in the sun on one of the porch steps. Then he took a long breath and settled down to wait.

  He waited and waited, but they didn’t come. A small band of California mountain quail began to work their way down through the orchard, stopping every now and then to pick at a fallen apple, or to look around the base of a tree for a nice juicy grub. He kept watching them and pretty soon was no longer watching the porch. He sat very still behind the tree, almost without breathing, and they didn’t see him and came closer and closer, talking soft quail talk between themselves as they picked at the apples and sharply scrutinized the ground. He leaned forward slightly and strained his ears to overhear what they were saying. The quail were talking about Vietnam.

  It was too much for Rudy. He could’ve cried. He flapped his arms at the quail, said “Who!” Ben, Vietnam, apples, prostrate: what did it all mean? Was there a connection between Marshal Dillon and James Bond? Oddjob and Captain Easy? If so, where did Luke Short fit it? And Ted Trueblood? His mind reeled.

  With a last, forlorn glance at the empty porch, he placed the shiny, recently blued barrels
of the 12-gauge double into his mouth.

  FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL

  from The Augustine Notebooks

  OCTOBER 11

  “No way, sugar,” she said, looking at him steadily. “No way at all. Not on your life.”

  He shrugged. He sipped from the glass of lemon fix without looking at her.

  “You must be crazy, it’s true.” She looked around at the other tables. It was ten o’clock in the morning and, at this time of year, there were not many tourists left on the island. Most of the tables in the courtyard were empty and on some of the tables waiters had stacked chairs.

  “Are you crazy? Is it really true, then?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “Let it alone.”

  A peacock had wandered in from the marketplace which was next to the nearly empty courtyard where they sat at their table drinking the lemon fixes. The peacock stopped at a spigot near the edge of the courtyard and held its beak under the dripping tap. As it drank, its throat rippled up and down. Then the peacock walked slowly around some empty tables and headed in their direction. Halprin threw a wafer onto the flagstones. The bird picked it to bits there on the flagstones and ate the pieces without once looking up at them.

  “You remind me of that peacock,” he said.

  She stood up and said, “I think you might just as well stay here. I think you’ve had it, anyway. I think you’ve lost your mind. Why don’t you just kill yourself and get it over with?” She waited a minute longer, holding her purse, and then she walked away between the empty tables.

  He signaled the waiter, who had watched everything. In a minute the waiter put another bottle of lemon fix and a clean glass in front of him. After pouring what was left of her drink into his glass, the waiter took away her bottle and glass without saying anything.

  Halprin could see the bay and their ship from where he sat. The harbor was too shallow for a ship of its size to enter, so it had anchored a quarter mile out, behind the breakwater, and they had come ashore that morning on a tender. The entrance to the bay was narrow and had, more than two thousand years ago, given rise to the legend that, in even more ancient days, the Colossus itself had straddled the entrance to the harbor—one mammoth bronze leg on either side of the harbor entrance. Some of the postcards for sale in the marketplace depicted a gigantic cartoon Colossus with boats going and coming between its legs.

  In a little while, she came back to the table and sat down as if nothing had happened. Every day that passed, they hurt each other a little more. Every day now they grew more used to wounding each other. At night, with this knowledge, their love-making had become vicious and unbridled, their bodies coming together like knives clashing in the dark.

  “You weren’t serious, were you?” she said. “You didn’t mean what you said? About staying here, you know, and all the rest?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I said it, didn’t I? I’m serious about it.”

  She continued to look at him.

  “How much money do you have?” he asked.

  “Not a cent. Nothing. You have everything, sugar. You’re carrying it all. I can’t believe this has happened to me, but I don’t even have enough to buy cigarettes.”

  “I’m sorry. Well,” he said after a minute, “if we just wouldn’t look or act or even talk like broken-down Hemingway characters. That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

  She laughed. “Jesus, if that’s all you’re afraid of,” she said.

  “You have your typewriter,” she said.

  “That’s true, and they must sell paper here, and pens or pencils. Here, here’s a pen, for instance. I have a pen right here in my pocket.” He scribbled some sharp vertical lines on the paper coaster. “It works.” He grinned for the first time.

  “How long would it take?” she said and waited.

  “I don’t have any idea. Maybe six months, maybe longer. I’ve known people who … Probably longer. I’ve never done it before, as you know.” He drank from his glass and didn’t look at her. His breathing had slowed.

  “I don’t think we can make it,” she said. “I don’t think you, I don’t think we have it in us.”

  “Frankly, I don’t think we do, either,” he said. “I’m not asking or forcing you to stay. The ship won’t leave for another five or six hours, you can make up your mind before that. You don’t have to stay. I’ll divide up the money, of course. I’m sorry about that. I don’t want you to stay unless you’re sure you want to stay. But I think I will stay. My life is half over, more than half over. The only, the only really extraordinary thing to happen to me in, I don’t know, years, was to fall in love with you. That’s the only really extraordinary thing in years. That other life is over now, and there’s no going back. I don’t believe in gestures, not since I was a kid, before I married Kristina, but this would be a gesture of some sort, I suppose. Call it that, if you want. That is, if I pull it off. But I think I might if I stay. I know it sounds crazy. I don’t know, though, about us. I’d like you to stay. You know what you mean to me. But you must do what’s right for you from now on. In my more lucid moments”—he turned the glass in his hand—“I think it’s true, it’s over for us. Why, just look at me! My hands are shaking, for Christ’s sake.” He put his hands out over the table so she could see. He shook his head. “In any case, there’s somebody out there waiting for you. If you want to go.”

  “Just like you were waiting.”

  “Yes, just like I was waiting, that’s true.”

  “I want to stay,” she said after a minute. “If it doesn’t work, if it isn’t going to work, we’ll know, we’ll be able to see in a little while, a week or two. I can always go then.”

  “Anytime,” he said. “I won’t try to hold you.”

  “You will,” she said. “If I decide to go, one way or another you’ll try to hold me. You’ll do that.”

  They watched a flock of pigeons turn with a rush of wings overhead and then wheel toward the ship.

  “Let’s go for it, then,” she said and touched the back of his left hand where it held his glass. His right hand was in his lap, clenched.

  “You stay, I’ll stay, we’ll both stay together, okay? Then we’ll see. Sugar?”

  “Okay,” he said. He got up from the table and sat down again. “Okay, then.” His breathing was all right once more. “I’ll speak to someone about getting our stuff off the ship and applying for a refund for the rest of the trip. Then I’ll divide all the money between us. We’ll divide the money today. We’ll both feel better about that. We’ll get a hotel for tonight, divide the money, and then look for a place tomorrow. But you’re probably right, you know: I am crazy. Sick and crazy.” He was serious as he said this.

  She began to cry. He stroked her hand and felt tears come to his own eyes. He took her hands. She nodded slowly as the tears continued to run from her eyes.

  The waiter turned his back on them abruptly. He moved to the sink and after a minute began to wash and dry some glasses and hold them up to the light.

  A thin, moustached man with carefully combed hair—Halprin recognized him from the ship; the man had boarded with them at Piraeus—pulled out a chair and sat down at one of the empty tables. He hung his jacket over the back of one of the chairs, rolled the cuffs of his sleeves back once, and lighted a cigarette. He looked briefly in their direction—Halprin was still holding her hands, she was still crying—and then looked away.

  The waiter arranged a small white towel over his arm and went over to the man. At the edge of the courtyard, the peacock turned its head slowly from side to side and regarded them all with cold, brilliant eyes.

  OCTOBER 18

  He sipped coffee and remembered beginnings. Imagine, he thought, and the next time he looked it was clearly noon. The house was quiet. He got up from the table and went to the door. Women’s voices carried in from the street. Flowers of all kinds grew around the steps—big, puffy flowers, drooping red and yellow flowers mainly, with a few shapely purple ones as well. He shut the door
and headed down the street for cigarettes. He didn’t whistle, but he let his arms swing as he moved down the steep, cobbled street. The sun fell squarely off the sides of the white buildings and made him squint. Augustine. What else? Simple. No diminutive either, ever. He had never called her anything but: Augustine. He kept walking. He nodded at men, women, and horses alike.

  He drew aside the bead curtains over the door and went inside. The young barman, Michael, wearing a black armband, was leaning on his elbows on the bar, a cigarette between his lips, talking to George Varos. Varos was a fisherman who had lost his left hand in an accident. He still went out now and then but since he was unable to handle the nets, he said he no longer felt right going out in the boats. He spent his days selling sesame rolls that looked like doughnuts. Two broomsticks stacked with sesame rolls leaned against the counter next to Varos. The men looked at him and nodded.

  “Cigarettes and a lemon fix, please,” he said to Michael. He took the cigarettes and his drink to a small table near the window where he could see the bay. Two small boats moved up and down with the motion of the waves. The men in the boats sat staring down into the water without moving or talking, while the boats moved up and down on the waves.

  He sipped the drink and smoked and in a little while he took the letter out of his pocket and commenced to read. Now and then he stopped and looked out the window at the boats. The men at the counter went on talking.