Case Pending - Dell Shannon (9 page)

He said louder than he meant to, "I-I got to go
home, I better not be late for supper," and walked away fast as
he could. He didn't want to hear any more about it, or he might
remember too much. There wasn't anything to remember, he was just
making up stories in his head to try and scare her, because he—

There were long times when he never thought about it,
but when he did, it was all right there sharp and clear, more like it
pounced at him instead of him remembering. That other night.
The
first time
. Wet red mark on the green shirt
and her scolding—because it was late. The big doll with the pink
dress and goldy hair. And next day people talking about—what had
happened—to that colored girl.

He was almost running now, trying to run away from
the voice in his mind, and he blundered into a man walking the other
way. The man said something and put out a hand to steady him on his
feet, but Marty pulled away and dodged round the corner into Graham
Court. He leaned on the broken-down picket fence of the corner house
and he hit it with his fist, the breath sobbing in his throat, tears
squeezing out from tight-shut eyes.

"I
tole
her," he said low in his throat. "I tried tell her!"
It was all he could do, wasn't it? What else could thirteen years old
do? But there wasn't much to tell, that time or this time—he really
remembered, knew his own self. She said so. He didn't know, he
must've remembered wrong, or he was a wicked boy just trying to scare
her. Making up stories that couldn't be so.

And she washed the green shirt but the mark still
showed after.

After a while Marty straightened and went on, slowly,
down the little cul-de-sac. He didn't want to go home; just two
things pulled him that way, drearily, as they had before. Habit, and
Dad's voice that time a while back, slow and easy like always, Dad
saying, "You want to be nice t' your ma, Marty, an' help her all
you can, an' don't do nothing to worry her. I know it ain't easy,
times, but things ain't easy for her neither. You got to remember she
come of folks had a lot more than the Lindstroms, back home—her pa
Ole Larsen was a rich man, eleven hundert acres he had all good land
too, an' his girls never wanted for nothing. Maybe them Larsens did
give theirselves airs, but maybe they had reason to, an' anyways your
ma never had cause to makeshift an' scrims on nothing, till she
married me—an' it ain't exactly been a easy row to hoe for her, not
noways. I know she gets cross-tongued once in a while, but you got to
remember things is hard for her too."

That had been before—anything happened. If it had.

Marty went up the stairs of the apartment building
slow, hanging onto the shaky railing. He felt another thing he'd got
to feeling almost all the time lately, and that was as if there were
two of him: one was a little kid whose ma was right whatever she said
or did, just naturally because she was Ma—and the other was, well,
nearest he could come was Marty-separate-from-Ma, who knew Ma might
be wrong about some things. He tried to push that Marty away, because
he didn't want to really know that, but seemed like that Marty was
getting stronger and stronger in him. At the same time there were two
other Martys, the one that was just a wicked little boy making up
stories—and the one that knew
different.

That one was scared, deep and cold inside. Because it
was all his fault, must be, even if he'd never meant, never known, if
he'd just sort of forgot for a while.

And the bad feeling had begun maybe when Dad went
away, but what had made it so bad ever since was—that first time,
back there on Tappan Street on a breathless night in late September.

He'd had to tell her. Things happened that were too
big for you, frightening and confusing, that you couldn't do anything
about yourself—you told your ma or dad, and they knew what to do.
Only Dad hadn't been there.

And there was a third place the real bad feeling
started, after she wouldn't believe, wouldn't listen—when she did
something she'd never done before, ever: when she went out and bought
a newspaper, and read about—It. And said like to herself in a funny
kind of whisper, "Only some nigger girl, anyways. Prob'ly
trash—just trash."

And the next day she'd gone and found this place for
them to move, account it was cheaper, she said.

He got to the dark top of the stairs, and he thought
frantically, I got to tell her. I got to try. Because He was sick and
shaking with fear, with guilt, with the weight of a thing thirteen
couldn't bear alone. The door was locked like always and he knocked
and she said sharp, "Who is it?"

"It's me, Ma, let me in." And there wasn't
any other way to say it than he did, then: "Ma, it's happened
again! Ma—please listen—I didn't mean to—I never meant nothing
to happen—but it must've, because—"

She just stood and stared at him.

"—Because it was blood on my coat's morning."
He gulped and went on through the lump in his throat, "And—and
the place they found—it—it was right where I—"

The fear pulled her face all tight and cross looking
for a minute, but then it changed to being mad at him, and she said
quick, "I don't listen to a boy tells lies!"

He looked at her dumbly. He knew what else she'd say,
like she had before; but this time he knew something else—that what
she said wasn't just at him, it was at that place she had way inside
her where she knew it was so—it was to shut the door to that place
and forget it was there at all.  And now she was asking him to
help her, seemed like, not mad any more but asking.

"You get washed an' eat your supper while it's
hot, an' then you set right down to that schoolwork you shoulda done
last night—I'm allus tellin' you, don't want to end up like your
dad, not enough schoolin' for a decent job—you're a real smart boy,
Marty, you take after my folks, an' last thing I do I see you get
educated good, maybe even college. But you got to remember you don't
know ever'thing yet, see, an'—an' kids get mixed up in their minds,
like, that's all—"

He whispered, "I'm not awful hungry, Ma."

And all the while the
secret was there in the room with them, neither of them daring to
look at it open: that she wouldn't see for what it really was, that
he was getting more and more afraid of—that they had to live with
somehow.

* * *

Danny stood there by the drugstore awhile after Marty
left. On top of his mind he thought, That big lummox of a Lindstrom
kid, sure a dumb one. But most of him was occupied with the job he
was on, and he felt kind of tensed-up because it was the first time
his dad had taken much notice of him, acted like he was a person with
any sense, and he wanted to do this right.

It had been a big surprise to him to feel the way he
did. Asked him last week, he'd have said it wasn't nothing to him,
whatever his dad did or said—been three and a half years since he'd
laid eyes on him, anyways—and that went other way round too, they'd
always just sort of stayed out of each other's way. Same as with his
mother, but she was just a nothing, like a handful of water, and
there was at least something to his dad. And he'd felt a new, funny
feeling when his dad said that:
Kind of a
sharp kid, you can maybe be some use to me
.

Besides, this was different from hooking little stuff
off store counters or stripping cars at night. This was a big job.

When the man came, he spotted him right off from what
his dad had said he looked like; but he waited awhile, just went on
looking in the drugstore window. The guy stopped and stood there too,
waiting, under the store canopy. Nobody came past after him, and when
Danny walked down the block there weren't any cops watching from
alleys, nobody at all. It was all going just like his dad had
planned, but of course you had to play it smart. Danny walked back to
the drugstore; he didn't stop by the guy waiting there, just slowed
down, and he said, "He's changed his mind, mister, he says meet
him at the Paradise Bar on Second, right now."

The man said, "What?" sort of dumb and
surprised, and then he made as if to grab for him, but Danny slid
away in the dark, into the alley round the corner, and waited. After
a minute the man started to walk up toward Second Street, not very
fast; he looked back a couple of times, but once away from the corner
lights it was dark and Danny stayed close up against the buildings.

On Second Street there were more lights, but people
on the sidewalk, too, to hide him; he stayed farther behind, but he
could still see the guy when he turned in under the pink neon sign
that said PARADISE. So that was O.K. And no cops.

Danny turned and sauntered back to the corner;
another man stood there, looking in the window of the liquor store.
"O.K.," said Danny.

"He's in, and no cops."

"You sure?"

"You think I can't smell a cop?"

The man relaxed a little,
grinned. "Maybe you ain't so smart as you think, but I guess
you're not so dumb neither. Chip off the ole block like they say,
huh? O.K., you go along. Now I just let the guy stew awhile an' get
real worried." He went back to looking in the window.

* * *

Inside the bar a jukebox was pounding, and the
blood-hammer in Morgan's head began to keep time with it. He went all
the way in to the last of the little booths opposite the bar, and sat
down; the waiter who came up gave him a sour look for taking a booth
instead of going to the bar, but he didn't say anything and he'd come
over promptly because Morgan was a lot better dressed than the usual
customer in here and might be drinking something besides beer or
wine.

Morgan asked for whiskey, but when it came he just
left it there on the table; he'd never been much of a drinker and not
at all the last eight years, since— Which was a useless gesture,
maybe: morbid.

He sat there and waited. The place wasn't crowded on
a rainy night, only ten or a dozen men at the bar. It was stuffy, too
hot after the street, and he realized he still had his coat on, slid
out of the booth to take it off, fold it beside him. The clock on one
side of the bar said half-past six, but Morgan knew he'd better keep
his eye off the clock—the man wanted him to sweat, and might not
show up for hours. In his mind he knew that, while all the rest of
him was tense and agonizing to get to it, have it done, the ultimate
doom arranged.

He lit a cigarette and set himself to wait, and wait,
and wait some more; and his intellect told him further (methodical,
plodding Morgan) that if he let himself go over and over this thing
emotionally, he'd be in just the softened-up state the bastard
wanted, at the end. So he made himself think about anything,
everything else than Sue and Janny. The first thing he seized on to
think about was that boy. Using a youngster, for this. That was a
conventional thought out of the small neat circle of life he'd always
lived in up to now: correction, up to being on the job he held now,
for that (even before his own private nightmare) should certainly
have taught him about lives lived elsewhere and otherwise, where
children weren't automatically screened from the uglier realities
because they were children.

It didn't occur to him that the boy was just relaying
a message, didn't know what he was mixed into: he'd seen his
expression. And there were two things about that, that turned this
into something like a real nightmare where ordinary sights and sounds
made no sense or a new monstrous kind of sense. That boy hadn't
realized, maybe, that there on the rain-swept empty corner, as he
swaggered past Morgan, the lights from the store fell unshadowed on
him. Oh, yes, the boy had known just what he was doing.

Morgan looked down at his hands on the wet, scarred
table, and as he looked they began to shake violently, so he put them
in his lap. Quite a handsome boy. Even in that deceiving light, he
had seen the regular features, fair skin with the black hair and blue
eyes all the more emphasized for it, the thick brows going up in
little wings at the end.

He knew that curve by heart, the very angle,
Janny's
brows winging up at the corners of Janny's blue eyes—

Not to think about Janny, or Sue. Janny, just about
now, being tucked into bed with that ridiculous stuffed tiger Mrs.
Gunn had got her, that she was so crazy about. Warm and powdery from
her bath, buttoned into the woolly blue pajamas.

That boy had just had on jeans and a leather jacket.
That boy who was, who must be—

For God's sake!
said his
mind to him savagely.

He glanced sideways at the clock. It was twenty-five
minutes to seven. He remembered a while ago, couldn't remember where,
reading an article on juvenile delinquents that had interested him.
It was funny, there was a clear picture in his mind of himself saying
to Sue, "The man's got something there, you know," but he
couldn't recall now who the author was, some official or a senator or
whatever. Anyway. Often the most intelligent children, it said, those
with imagination and ability, the nonconforming minds any society
needs—but for this and that reason turned in the wrong direction.

All right, yes; up to a point; some of them, the
leaders. Most, well Hell, maybe the man was right.