“She's alive, Jack,” Bogart said happily. “No doubt about it.”
I simply nodded, watching in fascination as White awkwardly placed Helen down on the moonlit sand. He stared at her for a moment, as if suddenly struck by the fact of her beauty, then turned and walked back toward the house and out of view.
“The boat,” I said. “He's getting the boat.”
A minute later, White reappeared on the sand. He walked heavily and a rope was draped tautly over his shoulder. At the end of the rope was a small motorized boat, gliding smoothly over the sand.
“We have to act now, Jack,” Bogart said, rising.
I held him down by the shoulder and got up myself, moving around to the door of the Nash and peering in through the window. The God in whom I believe at such moments had left the keys in the ignition. I scurried back to Bogart.
“We're in luck,” I told him. “He left the keys in the buggy. If you get in and drive away, we might pull him off the beach. At the very least, it'll distract him.”
“He'll shoot,” the actor said. “Don't you think I need a gun?”
“No. Other people live on this beach. If White starts shooting, they'd come running out to see what's going on. That's the last thing he wants. He'd rather lose the car.”
“Mebbe, mebbe not,” said Bogart. “I'll give it a try.”
The actor got up and slipped into the driver's seat of the Nash, bending down low over the wheel. I heard him feeling around. Suddenly he stuck his head out the window, delighted. He was holding a gun.
“Jack, look!” he whispered. “In the glove compartment.”
“Take off!” I told him.
Bogart started the engine and turned on the headlights. He backed out of the driveway, honked, and started tearing down Pacific Way.
Clarence White, at that very moment lowering Helen's boneless form into the motorboat, looked up and gaped at the departing car. As he did so, I began running toward the right side of the house, stooped way down and heading away from his line of vision.
Things fell neatly into place, way too neatly. The FBI man, startled, dropped Helen into the boat and hurriedly left the beach. Bogart suddenly stopped the car. It was a shrewd move, serving to draw White on; he began racing toward Pacific Way. The actor fired a shot into the air, causing White to fling himself upon the ground. I saw him reach into his jacket pocket, at which point he realized that his gun was in the car.
While Bogart was toying with the undercover man, I made my way down to the beach, alternately watching White and the gentlemen on the cruiser. They were on the deck; one of them, I believe, was holding binoculars to his eyes.
Crab-like, I crawled along the sand and approached the boat, pulling myself over its side. I fell immediately to the wooden floor, belly down, and faced the beach with my gun drawn. Helen was curled on the floor against the stern of the boat, facing me, breathing with the measured heaviness of someone under ether. I made my way over to where she lay and examined her arm: there was a small puncture mark near the left elbow. I rolled her eyelids up; it was not pleasant to see those green and luminous eyes as dull and expressionless as those of a Boston scrod.
The taillights of the Nash shrank to red pinpoints down the road. White was running back from the road, looking concerned but unshaken. He entered the rear apartment of the saltbox house, turned on a light and walked around the kitchen. He moved out of range, into range, then out again. When he reappeared, he was holding a rifle. He pulled a short metal chain and extinguished the bare bulb. I ducked my head and listened as the door shut.
Helen groaned softly, her mind a drug-lit pinball machine. She had the sweats now; the lovely face and smoothly muscled arms were slick and wet, the red hair was turning to damp ringlets. It was chilly by the water and the lady could get a bad cold, but I resisted the impulse to drape my jacket across her body. Resisted it because White was walking quickly through the high grass around the house and was just now stepping onto the beach.
He was fifty yards from the boat.
I attempted to cover the situation. He had a rifle. That was to my advantage. While the rifle could easily blow the Holland Tunnel through my
kishkas
, it was clumsy to operate in a quick-draw, Wild-West situation. And this was the Wild West. You couldn't go farther west without getting wet.
Thirty-five yards.
I wanted to look up and get an exact reading on my angle to White, but couldn't do it, not even for a blurred instant, without revealing myself. If we started opening up at this distance, he had the goods on me. So I remained flat on my belly and waited.
Twenty-five yards.
I pulled my knees up a bit, gaining leverage and support. My nervous system, ganglia, pulse, and brain cells began to concentrate on that single connection between mind and right index finger. The waves pounded close behind and a spray of salty drops pelted my neck. Helen opened her eyes and although they appeared blank and uncomprehending, they saw something that made her scream.
It was a deafening, air-raid siren of a scream, a horrific noise at the worst possible moment. I heard White stop dead in his tracks and cock his rifle.
Helen screamed again, then abruptly closed her eyes and sailed back to her silent nightmare. Mine was just beginning. Between the Nash vanishing and the lady's howl, White had figured things out to the dime and demonstrated so by taking aim into the boat and missing my head by approximately one-quarter of an inch.
I stood up and fired at his approaching form, missing terribly. White quickly ripped off another salvo. It bit into ray left shoulder and I tumbled over into the sand as two more shots, aimed from the cruiser, blew a hole into the motorboat.
I completed a somersault and came up to see White advancing on me, setting up a guaranteed jackpot at my skull. He was smiling. I took another tumble, straightening up and firing as I reached my feet. My potshot caught White in the wrist, opening a red geyser out of an artery and forcing his volley to fly in the general direction of the moon.
“Communist bastard!” White yelled at me. The arterial flow on his wrist continued unabated, but he quickly loosed a waist-high blast, Pretty Boy Floyd-style, that blew past my ear and out to sea. He was about to fire again when I killed him.
I don't enjoy killing people, but this was not a situation in which ethics were up for debate. It was caveman time and I got Clarence White with what was actually a bad shot. I wanted the heart, but the stinging pain in my shoulder was throwing off my balance, so the shot flew upwards and caught White below the Adam's apple, cutting his windpipe. He tossed his gun away and clutched at his throat, as if to repair the damage with his hands. Death broadcast a hoarse and ruined melody. It was no fun to hear.
I watched him die and almost got killed in the process. White's comrades on the boat started opening up and yet another bullet entered my left shoulder. Furiously, I grabbed at it, as if going after a wasp, and stumbled over to where White lay dead.
I took his rifle, then ran to the motorboat and pulled Helen out. She was unconscious but untouched by the gunfire. I turned the boat over and lay down on the sand beside it. My shoulder was bleeding badly and I could feel my head grow light. Four more shots flew past us. I set the rifle on the upturned bottom of the boat and fired out to sea, once, then again, but at best I might have wounded a careless squid.
A honking commenced to the rear. Bogart had returned in the Cadillac.
“Can you drive down here?” I shouted.
“Not in that sand,” he hollered back. “We'll never get back out.”
Another barrage from the cruiser drove me down. Bogart stepped from the car.
“Stay inside!” I yelled.
He pretended not to hear me and went running down the road, taking a position behind a rock. The men on the cruiser fired at his fleeting form, but missed. Bogart fired back, but the boat was well out of pistol range. It was a gallant gesture, but all it did was mark his position on the shore.
I peered through the rifle sight and held the stock as well as I could. Christ, how my shoulder hurt. I aimed at the gasoline barrels, invoked the spirits of Jehovah, Zeus, and DiMaggio, then pulled the trigger.
The back of the cruiser exploded in flames as instantaneously and violently as if I had bombed it from the air. The barrels were bunched closely together and the chain reaction of heat and combustible fuel literally blew the cruiser apart. Sections of wood and glass, and of arm and leg, were thrown over a thousand yards of ocean.
I stood up. Bogart stood up. The explosions continued; a fireball floated on the water like some biblical warning of doom.
People down the beach were crowding their decks and porches, watching the grotesque spectacle offshore.
“My shoulder,” I called to Bogart. “Help me with Helen.”
He came running down to the beach and I sat back down on the sand. Helen lay beside me, wet and motionless; I did not regret that she had missed the events of the past minutes.
Bogart knelt down and examined my shoulder.
“That's a beaut,” he said. “Hurt like hell?”
“Yeah.”
He bit his lip and took a handkerchief from his pocket, wrapping it around the shoulder and beneath the left armpit. The handkerchief was too small.
“Goddamn,” Bogart said softly. He tossed off his jacket and undid his shirt.
“That's not necessary,” I told him, my head spinning. “We can get to a doctor.”
“Stop playing the hero,” the actor said. He tied the dress shirt tightly around my shoulder. It rapidly turned red.
“I owe you a shirt,” I said.
“Sure you do.” He put his jacket back on over his tee shirt and looked at Helen.
“How is she?”
“Okay. Just junked up to the gills.”
“The bastards,” he said bitterly. The actor pointed at the dead form of Clarence White. “We leave him here or what?”
“We leave him here and call the cops.”
“What are they going to do?”
“My guess is they'll report him missing.”
“Then maybe we ought to make a stink. Bring him in ourselves.”
I stood up to think it over, but the blood loss had taken its toll and I keeled over.
“The hell with it,” Bogart said. “Let's get to a doctor.”
He bent down and gently lifted Helen onto his back. This was a very splendid man. We started back to the Caddy. The trip took years and I began feeling nauseous. We reached the car and Bogart placed Helen down across the back seat, supporting her head with his jacket. I vomited by the side of the car, then got in.
Bogart was now attired in tee-shirt and slacks. He started down Pacific Way, driving away from the ocean. People were standing in the road, talking in small excited groups. They turned and examined our approaching car; Bogart accelerated and blew right past them.
“Hey, listen,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
“Anytime.” The actor grinned. “Best Thursday night I've spent in weeks.”
My stomach churned again. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back.
“Stop talking and relax, Jack,” he said. “I don't want you puking all over the car.”
We both laughed. I told Bogart he was one hell of a guy and he might have said that I was, too, but I passed out about then, so I'll never really know. I like to think he did.
14
F
our evenings later, Helen and I boarded the Super Chief for the long trip east. We took a Pullman room and pulled down the shades. With the great Southwest a craggy moonscape outside our window, we indulged in long silences and a night of gentle, healing sex. It had been quite a fight and we both had our scars. Two bullets had been taken from my shattered left shoulder; a pin had been inserted, just temporary they told me, and the discomfort was considerable. As for Helen, it had taken her two days to emerge fully from the drugged coffin she had been nailed into. When her senses had cleared, she knew that she'd have to get away from Los Angeles.
We didn't talk about what had happened, at least not for a while. It was in the nature of a tacit agreement. There was a stopover in Albuquerque, a dozen hours out of L.A. It was 8:30 in the morning and we wandered out to have breakfast in the station coffee shop. Over hotcakes and sausage we spoke about little thingsâthe trip so far, the extraordinary blue skyâand spent some warm and peaceful minutes just gazing out the window at the comings and goings on the platform.
Afterwards we strolled through the streets near the terminal. Helen bought an armload of authentic Navajo blankets from a silent, watchful Indian woman who looked to be in her seventies. Helen intended to deliver the blankets to her relatives in Utica.
“And one of them is for you, Jack.”
“That's very kind,” I said.
She shrugged, then smiled, then began to cry. The Indian woman stared straight ahead as the red-haired lady put that beautiful head on my good shoulder and let the tears flow.
“Christ,” said Helen, “when am I going to stop crying?”
“When you don't feel like crying,” I told her.
So she wept and we stood there, me and Helen and the Navajo blanket-seller, under that intensely blue sky in New Mexico, and if I had any brains at all, I would have told Helen to let the train go on without us.
Instead, I told her it was time to get back on. We re-boarded slowly, reluctantly, and marched through the cars back to our room. Helen put the blankets away and blew her nose. She lit a cigarette, crossed her legs and looked out the window as the train started moving with that surprising first tug and we headed out toward the pastels of eastern New Mexico.
“We shouldn't have gotten back on the train,” she said, facing the window.
“I was thinking the same thing. Beautiful out here.”
She turned to me.
“So why didn't we stay?”
“Because I left my Luckies on the train.”