Everything goes along smoothly enough until, in your middle forties, you get yourself involved with a woman named Erika Coates. For the first time in your life you think that you might be in love, but of all the people in the world you should not fall in love with, it is Erika. She hates your profession, she considers it shabby and pointless—and worst of all, she begins to tell you that you're living and have been living a lie. Your world doesn't exist, she says, and never did; you're a kid who never outgrew an era twenty-five years dead, a kid dreaming about being a hero but without the guts or the flair to actually be one. You're a little boy, she says, and she can't compete with the obsessions of a little boy.
And then, inevitably, she walks out of your life and leaves you alone again.
But her words linger on, preying on your mind. You begin to ask yourself if maybe she was right, if maybe it all was and is a lie, a lifetime of hollow dreams and childish pursuits, a game without meaning, a fiction of your own creation. You refuse to believe it; you push it away from you and you go on believing as you have for all those years, you tell yourself you can go on that way forever.
Only forever turns out to be tomorrow, and tomorrow might literally bring a sentence of death, and you start wondering again if she might have been right and it all really is such a useless, useless He …
Abruptly I got up and went inside and made a thick sandwich I did not want from the last of the salami and rolls. I stood there eating it, washing down the mouthfuls with slugs of beer, listening to the silence.
Thinking of Erika again for the first night in a long while.
Four years since I had seen her. Where was she now? What was she doing? I had thought about calling her dozens of times during the first year, but I could never quite bring myself to it; and of course she had never called me. Once love dies, there is nothing but ghosts—and even ghosts fade away after enough long nights have passed.
What would she say if she knew about the lesion on my lung? I-told-you-so? She had spent half of our time together trying to get me to give up smoking along with my profession; see a doctor about your cough, you're a middle-aged man and you're susceptible to diseases at your age. Yes—and now she would probably pity me. Nothing but pity, and I had enough of that of my own.
Well, I didn't need Erika or anybody else. I had existed alone for one half of a century, fifty years that were
not
a goddamn lie, and I could die alone, too, and when I died—
When I died.
Pulp detectives never die, I thought. They live on in the yellowing pages of
Black Mask
and
Dime Detective
and a hundred others, in anthologies and collections and on microfilm. As long as there are people who read, Spade and Dalmas and the rest of them are immortal. They'll go on for centuries shooting hoods and laying blondes and breaking laws with total impunity—and was that, Jesus, was that what I had been after all along?
To become by emulation that which never dies?
Dangerous thinking; I could not handle it, not now, not on the night before I was to learn the results of the sputum test. Go do something, damn it, I told myself. Patrol the camp, take a long swim to make yourself tired enough so you can sleep. Shut the mind down, let the body take over. Hang in there, you'll be all right.
Just hang in there.
I threw the last of the sandwich and the empty beer can into the sink, went into the bath alcove, put on my trunks and a shirt, and got out of there.
There were lights on in Cabin Four, and the door was open and I could see Talesco moving around inside as I passed. I kept going without pausing. When I came out of the trees near Five, though, I slowed and then stopped because the cabin was dark and the door was closed, and I found myself thinking that I had not seen Bascomb anywhere around the camp since yesterday afternoon, that he had not been here when the deputy came this morning, and yet his Ford had been parked in the same spot through the day. Odd that he wasn't back by now, after dark, if he had gone off somewhere on foot.
But then I shrugged and pushed the thought away. Harry had said Bascomb was something of a loner; maybe he had spent the day painting or sketching, and had decided to stay on to do a moonscape or commune with the stars or whatever. One of the dangers of getting yourself involved in the sordid little dramas of others was a tendency to let your imagination manufacture intrigues where none existed. I had always had too damned much imagination for my own good—and maybe I owed that to the pulps, too.
The porch light was burning on the Jerrolds' cabin, but the interior was dark; the faint whispery strains of radio music drifted out through the screen door. So maybe Jerrold was still sleeping it off, and Mrs. Jerrold with him. And maybe it was going to be a nice peaceful night and everything would work out tomorrow the way Harry and I hoped it would.
I carried that thought with me down to the lake and onto the beach—and lost it when I saw the two people sitting with their heads together like a couple of conspirators, or a couple of lovers, in the shadows up near the trees. There was a flash of white as one of them moved and then a deep lazy rumble of laughter from the other one. Mrs. Jerrold. And Todd Cody.
Well
goddamn
it, I thought, and veered up toward them. They could see me clearly enough, silhouetted against the lake, but neither of them moved as I approached. I told myself to take it easy, keep things light and affable, but there was a knot of anger in my chest; I slid my hands into my pockets to keep them from clenching.
They were sitting on a flat outcropping of rock, bare shoulders touching, and Mrs. Jerrold had her legs stretched out in front of her and her arms folded under her breasts so that they bunched up like a couple of half-peeled melons inside the white halter top of her bikini. Cody was in that skintight bathing suit of his, a towel draped around his neck. His expression was insolent, and the smile on his mouth had a fox-in-the-henhouse leer to it.
Mrs. Jerrold's smile was more tentative. “The water's lovely,” she said. “We've just been in.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. God, it's muggy, isn't it.”
“Too muggy for anything but swimming.”
She nodded, but Cody took it the way I meant it and let me hear his snotty laugh. “That's not necessarily so,” he said. “Look at that moon, that lake—it's a perfect night for making love.”
“You're a romantic, Todd,” she said.
“Sure. One of the last romantics in a world of cynical pragmatists.”
I said nothing; I did not trust myself to say anything just then.
Mrs. Jerrold shifted slightly on the rock. “Todd's invited me to his cabin for gin and tonic,” she said to me. “Why don't you join us after you've had your swim?”
“He doesn't look like the gin-and-tonic type,” Cody said, and he was mocking me. He was young enough to be my son, and he was sitting there mocking me with another man's wife.
I said tightly, holding onto my temper, “No, I'm not the gin-and-tonic type. I'm the beer-and-pretzels type. And I'm not a romantic, I'm a cynical pragmatist. Thanks anyway, Mrs. Jerrold.”
“Angela—please?”
“Thanks anyway, Mrs. Jerrold,” I said. Then, pointedly, “How's your husband doing tonight?”
“Oh, well, he's … sleeping.”
“That's probably a good idea, don't you think? I understand you're leaving tomorrow; you've got a long drive ahead of you.”
“That's true. But it's so
hot
…”
“Gin only makes you hotter,” I said.
Cody had stopped smiling; he got up on his feet and narrowed his eyes at me. “If Angela wants a gin and tonic to cool off, man, that's
her
business.”
“It might be her husband's too,” I said. “He's the jealous type, or haven't you noticed?”
“What the hell are you, her father?”
“Stop it, Todd.” She sighed softly and stood up. “Ray
can
be awfully jealous, you know, and it is getting late. I'd better get back.”
“Hell, Angela—”
She patted his arm. “It was a nice swim, wasn't it?” she said. “Good night.” Then she gave me a thin, pouty look, but not the good night, and left the two of us alone.
Cody took a step closer to me and shoved his jaw out belligerently. “I don't like people sticking their noses in my life, man,” he said.
“That's too bad,
man
.”
“Maybe you're jealous yourself, huh? You'd like to make it with her but you haven't got the tools, so you screw it up for somebody who has.”
I brought my hands out of my pockets. “Listen, I've had about all of your mouth I can stand. Suppose you button it the hell up.”
“I don't have to take crap like that from you.”
“All right,” I said, “don't take it.”
But he was not going to get into anything with me, any more than he had wanted to get into anything with Jerrold yesterday. He was all mouth, the kind of guy who goes through life blowing in the wind and then backing away when the blowing threatens to push somebody over on him.
He pulled his lip into a sneer and said, “Another big macho,” and then pivoted away from me. After half a dozen steps I heard him mutter, “Fat old bastard.” He said it louder than he'd intended and he threw a quick, half-furtive look over his shoulder to see if I had heard. I stayed where I was, silent. He lifted the towel from around his neck, walking in a slow swagger, and flicked it back toward me in what was probably supposed to be a gesture of contempt.
I stood there seething. Fat old bastard, I thought. Fat. Old. Bastard. I looked down at myself, at the way my stomach bulged over the waistband of my trunks, at the gray snarls of hair that grew on the bulge. Fat old bastard.
Well all right, I thought then, savagely. I threw my own towel down and took off my shirt and went to the lake and waded out a few steps and dove in. It was plenty cold, cold enough to leave me gasping when I surfaced, but I was not going to let that affect me; I splashed around until I got used to it and finally began swimming in a hard steady crawl—fifty yards out and back, sixty yards and eighty and a hundred. When the complaint in my lungs became too severe, and my legs and arms started to stiffen up, I rolled over and floated on my back and stared up at the curved slice of the moon, resting.
I was still angry.
But not so much at Cody, now, as at Angela Jerrold. What made a woman like that tick? The feeling of power? The need for constant attention? Sex itself? Or was it simply that she was a man-hater—string them along and then sit back and watch them emasculate themselves over her? Whatever it was, she seemed to be the kind who can keep on getting away with it, who foment disaster wittingly or unwittingly and walk away from it untouched.
Well, there was nothing I could do about it. You can't change human nature and you can't live other people's lives; all you can do is turn your back on it at a distance, worry about your own problems. Clichés, every one—but a cliché is really nothing more than a statement of well-known fact. Right? Right, you fat old bastard?
I rolled over again and swam a while longer, but the anger still would not go away, nor the feeling of uneasiness; the only thing that went away was the last of my strength. I paddled in and rubbed myself down with the towel, and wondered if I was tired enough to sleep now, and knew that I wasn't. I sat down on the outcropping of rock and listened to the crickets and swatted mosquitoes.
And wanted a cigarette for the first time since last night. Badly.
Just hang in there
…
Despite the heat, I began to feel a little chilled from the iciness of the lake water. Maybe Harry wants to play a few hands of gin rummy, I thought, and got up again and went up the path through the trees. The porch light on the Jerrolds' cabin was out now and the radio was silent. Small favors. I padded on among the dapples of moonlight and shadow.
Fifty yards from Cabin Five, I heard the sharp slap of a screen door closing. It came from Bascomb's cabin, and I thought: So he finally got back—and did not think anything else about it until I came out in front of the place. Then I saw that it was still dark, although the door behind the screen was now standing partially open; the area was wrapped in stillness. I stopped as I had on the way down, frowning, and stood looking over there.
When a man comes back to his cabin, I thought, he turns on a light somewhere, he doesn't just rattle around in the dark or jump straight into bed. So why didn't Bascomb put a light on?
Maybe he hadn't come back at all, maybe he had been inside there all along and decided to go out. But then, why hadn't I seen him or at least heard him on the path? Because he went the other way, deeper into the woods? There was no path back there and the growth was pretty thick for late-night strolling.
I waited another thirty seconds. Silence, darkness. Come on, I told myself, what the hell difference does it make where Bascomb is and what he's doing? He's not with Mrs. Jerrold, that's all that concerns you.
But the edginess had sharpened now inside me, and the stillness seemed unnaturally acute—and I stopped fighting my impulses and walked slowly across the open ground between the path and the cabin. I climbed up onto the porch, not trying to be quiet about it, and put my face close to the screen. Blackness, the vague shapes of furniture; there was nothing else to see.