On the Yard (30 page)

He began to think his way into the past. Some day the scraps of accidents, the pointless incidents, the chance meetings, and forced partings, the idle whims as well as the careful decisions, his fortunes, his Jonahs—some day it would all be arranged so it made sense, even the ten years he had left to pull would be made to seem significant, some day when he found his personal philosopher's stone ... though he doubted he ever would ... to solve the mystery of who Billy Oberholster really was.

Chilly—Billy then—had encountered police for the first time when he was ten. A small boy, he had dared squeeze through the ventilating system into a neighborhood market to empty the till. Then, rather than leave immediately with the money, he began to explore. But he had no sooner stepped into the doorway leading to the back section when an instinct, which was to grow more dependable as he matured, warned him that someone was standing nearby in the darkness. He started to step back, heard a muffled grunt, saw a flash of white fire, and something warped the air above his head. Later he realized the night watchman had shot to kill a grown man, aiming center and three-quarters up in the frame of the darkened doorway.

He fell to his hands and knees and crawled swiftly along the waxed linoleum into the shelter of the produce aisles. The watchman, uncertain of the number or the size of the burglars he had trapped, prudently covered the front door and called the police. Chilly, cut off from his retreat through the ventilators, realized he was boxed in and he hid the money from the till behind some large cartons on a bottom shelf (he discovered later they were twenty-five-pound boxes of dog food) and then moved as far from the hidden money as he safely could, which brought him to the vegetable section. He crawled into a cabinet beneath the fruit counter. The police found him near the end of a systematic search, and at first were smiling because he was so different from any burglar they'd been imagining. He told them he was only playing, and he looked so young and innocent they seemed inclined to believe him until the night watchman discovered the empty till. Then he told them some older boys had forced him to climb through the ventilator and open the front door for them. When the shot had been fired, they had fled, leaving him behind. At this point he was trying to cry, but he couldn't so he made do by hiding his face in his hands.

Who were the older boys?

He didn't know. Just older boys. They had threatened to beat him up if he didn't obey. They said they knew where he lived and they'd catch him coming home from school.

Why hadn't he told this story in the first place?

He didn't want to tell on anyone.

The police made a careful search around the potato bins, but couldn't find the money. He never knew whether they believed him or not, but they didn't pat him on the head or call him son. They took him downtown and lodged him in the juvenile detention home. His mother came and signed him out the next day, and he was able to reach the store before closing time to recover the money from behind the boxes of dog food. Then, after having managed everything so well, he was careless enough to allow his mother to see him with a five-dollar bill. Her eyes had widened with dismay: “Oh, Billy, you
did
take that money!”

The dominant dream of his youth was directed towards the day he would free his mother of all her burdens, replace his missing father. What he didn't realize at the time, and what she never let him guess, was that he was her gravest burden. During his middle teens he started bringing home comparatively large sums of money and handing them to her without explanation. And she didn't ask because she didn't want to hear a lie, and, even more, she didn't want to hear the truth. She never protested unless the nights when she hugged him to her breast, murmuring, “Billy, Billy, Billy, whatever will become of you?” could be counted as a protest. These episodes caused him intense discomfort; still, when he sensed one coming on, he made no effort to avoid it. In his way, he was as permissive with her as she was with him.

As he considered it years later he might have done all right if he had stayed on the single-o, but though he had many of the characteristics of a loner he wasn't a true solitary. He had a strong urge to gather a gang around himself, with results that were unfailingly disastrous. He went to reform school when he was sixteen and his mother began to write the bleeding letter she had been writing, with brief interludes, ever since.

He was out of reform school but a few months before he staged a string of armed robberies with two other boys. They covered three states, and ended in a running gun battle with the local law, state law, and the FBI. They were sent to prison in the state of their arrest, and upon completion of that sentence they were extradited home in chains to be tried for the robberies they had committed before they left. Again they were sentenced to prison.

Finally Chilly found himself free again at twenty-four, a two-time loser with almost seven straight years of reform school, county jail, and prison behind him. He had never held a job. He had never had a girl friend. But he didn't leave broke. During his second jolt he had started to master the prison techniques he would later perfect and he smuggled out over two hundred dollars in the barrel of a fountain pen, converted to a keister stash. In the lavatory of the Greyhound Bus depot in San Francisco, he voided his bowels and removed the stash. He rented a cheap room. The following day he located a drop who had been recommended to him and arranged to buy a piece. He paid sixty-five dollars for a snub-nosed banker's special, Smith and Wesson, .38 caliber, and remade the purchase price twenty times over before he had had it a week. He moved into a medium-sized hotel on Powell Street and started looking for a woman. There were a large number of single women in downtown San Francisco, but he didn't know how to make a beginning, and confiding his need to some third person who might have arranged to have it serviced was too much like admitting a weakness. The need itself was a weakness, the inability to gratify it an aggravation. To go it alone was to risk rejection, or to expose his ignorance, and he was uncertain of his capacity to weather either of these situations calmly. He was aware of the charge he had accumulated, and he was afraid he might blow it.

Finally, after several weeks a woman had picked him up, and inevitably it was an older woman. Chilly guessed her to be in her middle forties and from the beginning she made him inexplicably uneasy.

He encountered her in the corridor of his own hotel when she stepped out of her room to ask him to help her open a window. He noticed her small plump hand, pale against the dark wood of the door, the fingers armored with miniature pink shields, and he saw how the thin strap of her watch cut into the flesh of her wrist.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“Right here,” she said, leading him into the room. The window was stuck, as Chilly discovered by opening the top half of the sash, because a paper match folder was wedged against the frame.

“Here's your trouble,” he said, holding the folder out. He noticed that it wasn't weather-stained, but the woman looked at it with mild amazement as if he had just performed some modest conjuring trick, producing a chain of bright scarves instead of the crumpled folder. She offered him a drink—as a reward, she said. He sipped a tall watery scotch while she volunteered her name—Margaret. She was in town to attend a series of lectures. She didn't give her last name, or mention where she was from.

She sat tidily on the edge of the bed, leaving the chair for Chilly, and rattled on with an uneasy brightness about the unfriendliness of large cities. She was a short, solid woman with thick white calves and thin ankles. Her black hair was smartly set, waved around the sides of her round pale face. Her mouth was tiny and her eyes an alert blue that because of her coloring seemed more vivid than they actually were. The lines of her body were indistinct, blended with the compression of her foundation garments. Her room smelled of bath powder.

“Do you stay here?” she asked.

“Yes, down the hall. Would you like to go to the lounge for another drink?”

“The lounge? Here at the hotel? Oh, I don't think so.”

“Maybe some place else? A bar?”

She made a small show of hesitation, then accepted. “All right—I shouldn't, but, yes, I would like that.”

In the course of the evening Margaret became sedately but thoroughly drunk, and Chilly, turning most of her questions, managed to learn that she was a high school teacher from Dunsmuir.

“Biology,” she said to the bar mirror, then turned to tell Chilly, “Biology One. The things I teach them, they seem so unimportant sometimes. I wonder if any of them remember, and if they do, does it mean anything to them? Other than the charts of the reproductive systems.” Chilly was surprised to see her blushing. “If I had married, if I could have married—” She looked away again, this time into her glass, and her small lips were quirked in a mirthless smile.

“I might have had a son your age.”

“I'm older than I look.”

“You're not very old even if you're older than you look.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Bother—no, but it puzzles me.”

Chilly smiled faintly, “I've led a sheltered life.”

“I don't mean that. I wonder why a nice-looking young man like you hasn't anything better to do than spend an evening with a middle-aged schoolteacher.”

“Oh, come off it. Isn't this exactly what you hoped would happen?”

“I'm enjoying myself. This is—” She touched her glass lightly with her fingertips as if indicating a classroom exhibit. “This is recess. But you? I was wondering about you?”

“I don't know what to tell you. I don't even know why we're talking about this.” He reached over and took her wrist. “That's a nice-looking watch.”

“It's inexpensive.”

He slid two fingers up the sleeve of her jacket. Her skin there was warm and smooth. She reached over to cover his hand with her own.

“You don't mind?” she asked.

“No, I don't mind.”

When they returned to her room, she went into the bathroom to undress. Chilly stripped swiftly, still taking time to fold his clothes neatly, and got into her bed. The sheets were cool. He stacked the pillows and lay half propped in the center of the bed with his hands clasped behind his head. He felt more curiosity than excitement, and when Margaret came from the bathroom in a robe and crossed quickly but unsteadily to turn out the light, he watched her closely. With her body unbound and without her high heels she seemed almost squat. Her hams pumped solidly and her lowered breasts swayed against the thin material. Chilly swallowed slowly and when the light went out the darkness seemed to slap the air.

Later he was never able to retain any of the smaller details. When they had finished, lying separately again, Chilly was left with the feeling he had been wasting his time. Not only the immediate time just past, but all the time he had spent thinking about this encounter and hoping for it. It wasn't that he hadn't enjoyed it, but he hadn't enjoyed it enough to compensate for the time and money he had spent on this old woman.

He got up after she was asleep and by the light of a match looked through her purse. She had a little money, two fifty-dollar American Express travelers' checks, and a Bank-Americard. Her name was Mildred Allain and she lived at 250 Cochilla Street in Chico, California. She carried a membership card in a teachers' association, and back to back in a plastic envelope were two photos of a younger woman with four children.

Chilly replaced the wallet, and dressed. He turned to take a last look at Margaret-Mildred. She lay solidly where he had left her, and now that the lipstick was worn from her small mouth, her face appeared round and featureless like a white balloon, shadowed only by the foreshortened ellipses of her lashes against her cheeks. He remembered her saying, just as he moved to mount her, “This is awful ... just awful.” Then she had groaned deep in her throat.

He saw her once more, briefly, as he was crossing the lobby the next day. She was looking at the magazines racked on the counter of the cigar stand, and there was something in her posture that suggested to Chilly she had seen him first and turned away to avoid an encounter.

The days that followed never seemed quite real, they had the feel of holiday as if they stood apart in bold red against the working calendar of his life. Everything he attempted with his gun succeeded but the size of the scores he could attempt were sharply limited by the condition that he was working alone. Trying to balance the safety factor between a number of small stings and one large sting was a complex exercise in probability, but he concluded that the greatest danger lay in repeated exposures to the bitch of chance, and he started to look for partners.

Chilly realized that the underworld, as it is imagined by newspapers, didn't exist in San Francisco, but there was a loosely cohesive and always shifting sub-world which included a small manpower pool, fed by a trickle of youngsters outgrowing the teen gangs, and another trickle of older men out on parole. Chilly tended to like and trust men who had solid reputations behind the walls, those who were known as good people, and it was two such men that he approached. They knew Chilly in the same way he knew them and if they had any hesitation it generated from the half formed apprehension that Chilly might find it too easy to kill. Not in heat or panic, but as the most logical way to prevent any future identifications. Robbery, at best, was a desperate measure, attractive only to men who had no significant talent for anything else, whose energies, appetites, and ambition still demanded that life show them some chance, some opening no matter how slender, through which they might enlarge themselves. But murder committed during a robbery was also suicide. They were satisfied Chilly was cool enough; in fact, they were afraid he might be too cool, but he persuaded them that in spite of his youth and lack of major experience he knew what he was doing, that he was capable of leading them, and if he ever played the fool or the nut he did it late at night, locked in his own room under the covers.