Jordan County (23 page)

A red gig belonging to the fire department was drawn up at the curb. Hector observed that the horse, head down, knees locked in sleep, wore an almost new straw kady, its ears standing stiff and hairy through the holes cut into the brim. Otherwise the street was deserted, stretching long and empty under the drench of moonlight. While the constable waited
at the hotel entrance Hector stood in front of the sleeping horse. (“He looked like he was studying it,” the constable said when he told about it later. “Like he was thinking about buying it, maybe, that old swayback nag that ought to been out to pasture years ago. Thats the trouble with having money; you think about buying almost anything you see. Imagine — at a time like that. And mind you I’d already told him his wife was most likely still dead in there.”) After waiting a full minute, which seemed considerably longer, the constable cleared his throat, first tentatively, then louder. When that did no good he said cautiously, “Mr Sturgis—”

Hector looked up, startled. He had been sketching the horse in his mind, planning to put it on the map, asleep with its ears thrust upward through the holes in the brim of the kady. “What?”

“This way,” the constable said.

The lobby was empty when they first came in, as deserted as the street, but the tinkle of the bell on a curved spring above the door brought the night clerk out of a rear passage. Short, narrow shouldered, his flaxen hair so heavily plastered with brilliantine that he seemed to have just emerged from swimming or a heavy shower of rain, he had the bright, darting eyes of the habitually curious and the limber upper lip of the talkative man. Entering, he wore the solicitous mask of the professional greeter, showing the edges of his teeth. When he recognized Hector Sturgis, however, he stopped and sipped his breath; he performed a shallow bow, shaping the words Good Evening with his mouth but making no sound, as if he had considered and decided that it would be indelicate to speak aloud at such a time. Hector returned the bow with a nod, looking doubtful. There was something too decorous about all this, something too like Frenchmen in cartoons.

He followed the constable, the night clerk bringing up the rear, and as they entered the passageway the latter had emerged from, he began to hear a steady, ghostly sighing. It came from the end of the corridor, a series of low moans, suspirant
and profound — human yet not-human too, somehow too big for human, as if an elephant lay dying of pneumonia in one of the far rooms. The last door on the left was all the way open, but the others along the passageway were only slightly ajar: held so, Hector saw as he came abreast, by hotel guests wearing nightshirts and standing with the doorknobs in their fists. They all faced the same direction, like alerted sentinels, and their eyes caught the flicker of the gasjets.

“It’s the husband,” they said as he came past. He could hear them murmuring from door to door and from opposite sides of the hallway, their voices touched off in a chain reaction, the whispers reaching him louder than shouts; “It’s the husband.”

Just short of the open door, the last on the left, the constable stopped and turned around, intending to prepare Hector for what he was going to see. All the way out to the Sturgis house in the buggy, then all the way back to the hotel, he had thought about what he would say. Up to now, however, he had not been able to bring himself to say anything, and this was his last chance, just short of the door. He raised one hand, palm forward, facing Hector with the great sad bloodhound eyes and the mustache like a big straw-colored U suspended upside-down beneath his nose. His mouth was set for speech, the words of condolence he had rehearsed to himself in the buggy, but Hector brushed past him; he even jerked his arm away when the constable touched his sleeve. It was as well, for when he reached the doorway and halted at last, looking into the room, he knew that beyond what he had already gathered from hearing the hotel guests whisper down the corridor — “It’s the husband!” — nothing the constable might have said, either in the buggy or in the hall, could have prepared him for what he saw.

Two firemen were in the room, both still wearing gum boots though they had removed their slickers and souwesters and thrown them in a corner. One stood over some kind of machine, turning the crank of what resembled a coffee grinder
mounted on a metal cylinder; the other, kneeling on a wide double bed that had been pulled into the center of the room, held the ends of two hoses that ran from the machine. Soft rubber masks were attached to the hoses and the fireman was holding them, one in each hand, over the faces of two people lying crossways on the bed.

One was covered past the shoulders with a sheet. The other, a man sprawled on his back, was uncovered. He wore only a pair of knee-length drawers, candy-striped and wrong-side-out. They had been improperly buttoned, apparently by other hands and obviously in a hurry. Air from the machine — Hector recognized it as a pulmotor now, though he had never seen one before — was being forced into, then drawn out of the man’s lungs. It went in with a thin, reedy sigh and came out with a quavery moan choked off at the end by a sob of final exertion, as if he were lifting weights beyond his strength. Each breath made the man’s chest expand almost to bursting, and with each expansion and contraction the blond hairs at the top of his chest glinted like scraps of copper wire under the glare of the chandelier directly above the bed. Presently the fireman moved aside for a moment and Hector saw what he had known he would see.

The face beneath the other mask was Ella’s. They had spread her hair fanwise over her head; it was dark and there was even more of it than he remembered. Her breaths were drawn almost an octave higher than the man’s, so that the two of them, lying side by side on the rumpled bed, their four legs dangling in that profound and ultimate relaxation of death, were chanting the not-human duet which Hector had heard from the lobby.

This continued for two more hours, the firemen alternating at the crank. But it did no good. Whenever the masks were removed the breathing stopped; their hearts never beat.

Hector and the constable waited, sometimes in the hall and sometimes in the room itself, though there it was difficult to keep out of the way of the firemen who clumped about in
their gum boots and shirt-sleeves and suspenders. The guests had deserted their vigil by now. From time to time, however, one of them would return to his door, peep out, and then go back to bed. During this period of waiting the constable told Hector what had happened. Speaking with the tuneless Liebestod for background music, he told it in a halting, embarrassed manner. It was true that he had killed five men, four of them more or less in the line of duty, but nothing in his life had prepared him for imparting this kind of news; he kept imagining himself in the listener’s place, with his wife where the listener’s wife was, and that made it difficult. Besides, the version he gave Hector was considerably reduced from the one the night clerk had given, earlier in the evening.

According to the night clerk — in the unabridged version, that is — the dead man (he came through Bristol twice a year, representing a Massachusetts shoe firm) had called for ice water and towels at ten oclock. The Negro bellboy who took them to him was the last person to see him alive, and he saw only a naked arm extended around the partly opened door, a muscular arm with a fell of reddish blond hair glinting coppery in the dim light of the corridor. No one had known the lady was with him until the bellboy saw the way he took the ice water and towels, and even then the bellboy did not mention it to the night clerk.

“She must have snuck in the back way,” the night clerk said. “She sure didnt come past the desk; I’d have seen her. This may not be exactly the cushiest house in the country, no Waldorf-Astoria by a long shot, but at least it’s respectable. Or anyhow it tries to be till something like this hooraw comes along.”

“I hear you,” the constable said. They were in the lobby. He had just gotten there; he had taken one look into the room and now he was waiting to learn the particulars before driving out to the Sturgis house for Hector. “Get on with it,” he said.

A little after midnight the bellboy reported a smell of gas.
When the night clerk went down the hall to investigate, there was a reek of it coming around the door. He knocked but no one answered. Then he used his pass key, and there they were. He had one quick look at them before the gas blinded him with tears.

“That room was full of gas as a balloon. The two of them were on the bed, mother nekkid, huddled up together like a pair of drownded people that got run over by a steamboat. It was something to see, all right.”

“Never mind the trimmings,” the constable said. “Just get on with it. What then?”

The night clerk stumbled around the room, his eyes streaming tears. Blinded, he had to feel his way, and this was particularly harrowing because he had a dread of touching the people on the bed. “Dont anybody strike a match!” he kept shouting, though there was no one to hear him; maybe he was shouting to himself. The window was stuck. He had a hard time raising it, getting angrier and more frightened every second. Finally, though, he got it up. It yielded all of a sudden, as if some force outside himself had jerked it, and he fell forward against the rotted screen, breathing night air through the dust and the rust. When the window and the door had been open long enough to clear the air in the room he found the trouble.

“That fellow must have accidentally kicked the lever on the heater alongside the bed. Youd think they would have heard the hissing, though; when I come in it sounded like a whole pit full of snakes. It’s a good thing nobody struck a match. Lord God. Theyd have heard the boom in Bannard; we’d have all been blown to glory.” He grinned. “What do you reckon that fellow was doing, to kick that heater on like that and never know he’d done it?” This was rhetorical; he broadened his grin, then continued. “They didnt hear it or smell it either, except maybe after it was too late, and maybe not even then. They sure must have been keeping occupied; you have to hand him that. Yair. I heard once of a fellow
took a girl off into a canebrake. It was over in Arkansas, the way I heard it. He took her out for a buggy ride, and while they were back in the canebrake on the laprobe, along came a moccasin and bit her in the act. They—”

“In the what?”

“The act,” the night clerk said. “It’s a manner of speaking. And they come back out and got in the buggy and started back for town. They were about halfway home before she begun to feeling peaky. That was the first she knew of being bit. Fact is, she didnt even know it then. She like to died, and they still didnt know what it was until the doctor got to looking round (all in the line of duty, you understand) and found the tooth marks, the punctures where the cottonmouth had struck her. Yair; I always had a respect for that fellow … But this one tonight has got him beat a mile.” He sighed. “You saw her, Pete. Tchk! All he had to do was measure up to what luck brought his way; thats all. Even dead she looked plenty good to me.”

He paused. His face was suddenly serious. He was quiet for a time, brooding upon mortality, and a little V appeared between his eyebrows.

“I heard she was running round, though I never got in on it myself; she favored out-of-towners, traveling men. It was a kind of quirk with her. Everybody was talking about her, saying she was hell-born, things like that. Well,
I
never blamed her, considering what she married. Ive known him all his life — him and his highflown ways. Bristol schools werent good enough. He never even dressed like us, the others with him in school I mean. You could tell just by the look on his face how much better he thought he was than anyone else. Let me tell you, Pete, if thats blue-blood I’m glad I didnt have any to pass on to my kids. Come to think of it, maybe thats why that baby swole up and turned purple and finally died. Too much blue-blood. If it was his to begin with, I mean.”

He leaned forward and tapped the constable on the forearm, nodding earnestly as he spoke.

“I remember he went to public school for a while at the beginning. You should have seen him, the way he dressed, like every day was Sunday and school was an ice cream party. He thought all us others ought to kowtow to him. Once he tried to give something out of his lunch box to my kid brother, the way youd feed a monkey at the zoo. He came to me about it, crying; my brother I mean; his feelings were hurt. So I went up to the little overdressed dude — he was sitting on the side steps with that fancy lunch box on his knees. So I went up to him, as I said, there on the steps, and told him to keep his elegant grub to himself or I’d bounce one off his nose. ‘Get up from there and I’ll bounce one off your nose.’ Thats what I told him, the identical words, and he just sat there and took it; he didnt budge. (He remembers it still — I can tell. He cant look me in the eyes to this good day, not even in passing.) And from then on, all the boys were onto him. We guyed and ragged him till his mama came and yanked him out of school.”

He took out a pocket comb and ran it through his hair. It made a whispering sound, like a spoon stirring butter. The constable watched him without really listening; he was trying to decide how to go about breaking the news when he reached the Sturgis house. Down the corridor the firemen had gone to work with the pulmotor. The night clerk returned the comb to his breast pocket, and now he rubbed his palms together to wear off the brilliantine.

“I’ll tell you, Pete,” he said. “When a man’s wife gets to running round, it stands to reason she’s out after something she’s not getting at home. Right?” The constable just looked at him, so the night clerk answered himself: “Right. And what would you expect? He grew up in satins and laces, cultivating the graces, the way the song says, and come back from college with a Yankeefied accent, wearing Yankeefied clothes. Then he up and married
her
and everybody says ‘Oh-oh, now we’ll see some fun’; they had known her of old, back before she married him. And sure enough he got more and more peculiar, keeping more and more to himself, till it wasnt long before
she was back to her old practices. I’m telling you. Many’s the time I stood behind this desk right here in the lobby and heard the drummers pass the word, telling each other about her, talking like she was a train youd ride, calling her the best jump between Memphis and New Orleans and counting up how many times and all her little tricks. Yair. But like I say, I never blamed her. What the hell. If a man wants his wife to stay home, cleaving her only unto him the way she swore at the wedding, he by God ought to nail her down. Give her what she’s wanting, is what I say, and she wont want to roam.”