The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (98 page)

The second week that I stationed myself on the hillside something did happen. My wife’s affair with Jack Hogan was confirmed beyond even the slightest doubt.

It was about midnight when I saw the headlights turn from the road into Hogan’s driveway. As I pressed the binoculars to my eyes and adjusted the focus dial, I saw that it was Adelaide’s car that had pulled into Hogan’s big double garage to park alongside his convertible. He stepped out onto the porch and met her, and they kissed for an embarrassingly long time before going inside. A few hours later I saw them emerge from the house and go for a late night swim. I didn’t want to watch that, so I lowered the binoculars and sat feeling the numbness in me give way to a smoldering rage.

The next night nothing happened. Hogan spent the entire night alone, going to bed about ten o’clock. I suppose he was tired.

That afternoon Lieutenant Faber called me at the motel. A residence in the west end had been burglarized the night before, smoothly and professionally. There were no clues of any kind.

I told him that Hogan had spent the night home alone. The burglary had to have taken place during the early morning hours, so we agreed that I would say I saw Hogan leave in his convertible at two thirty a.m. and return at five. Tomorrow morning, when Lieutenant Faber returned to question the victim and re-examine the scene of the crime, he would “find” the gold lighter, and the frame around Jack Hogan would be complete.

There was really no reason to go back that third night, but the silent rage had grown in me along with my curiosity. And I suppose it gave me some small sense of power, to be able to watch them without them knowing. It kept me from being a complete fool, and while Hogan didn’t know it, he had only one more night of freedom.

All that dark, hot night Adelaide didn’t arrive at Hogan’s home. The windows of the big ranch house were dark, the grounds silent. Around me the crickets chirped madly as if protesting the heat as I sat staring intently through the binoculars.

Then a light came on in one of the windows, the window I knew to be Jack Hogan’s bedroom. After a while a downstairs light came on too, and both lights stayed on. I looked at my watch. Four-thirty.

He must have telephoned her. At twenty to five Adelaide turned her car into Hogan’s driveway. This time after she pulled her car into the garage Hogan came out and lowered the door, for the sun would soon rise. I watched as he put his arm around her and they went into the house.

The sun came up amid orange streaks on the horizon, turning the heat of night into an even more intense heat.

Then I heard a door slam off in the distance, and I scanned, then focused the binoculars on Adelaide in her skimpy black bikini. Hogan was beside her with a towel draped over his shoulder. He flicked her playfully with the towel and she laughed and dived into the pool, and he laughed and jumped in after her.

I watched them for about twenty minutes before I came to my decision.

Jack Hogan had always freely admitted being a burglar. Now I intended to play his game, to tell him openly what was going to happen to him, so that he’d know he’d been outsmarted. Let the knowledge that he couldn’t prove his innocence torment him. Let him suffer as he’d made Lieutenant Faber suffer, as he’d made his burglary victims suffer. As he’d made me suffer. I placed the binoculars in their case, stood and clambered down the hillside to where the car was parked.

Then it occurred to me that Hogan might give me a rough time once he realized he was cornered, so I drove by my house first and got my forty-five caliber revolver from my dresser drawer.

They were sitting in lounge chairs alongside the pool when I approached, Adelaide leaning forward and Hogan rubbing suntan lotion onto her back.

“How’s the water?” I asked calmly.

They whirled, surprised, then Hogan smiled. “It’s great,” he said jauntily. “I’ve invited Adelaide over here before for an early morning swim, but this is the first time she’s come.”

“I know better,” I said, watching Adelaide trying to control the fear and guilt that marked her features. At last she managed a facsimile of a poker face.

“Know better?” Hogan was still playing innocent.

“Yes, and now there are a few things I want you to know. There was a burglary committed night before last in the west end. No clues yet.”

Hogan appeared puzzled. “So what? I was home in bed all that night.”

“For the last several weekends I’ve been spying on you from that hillside,” I said. “Lieutenant Faber gave me infrared binoculars to use at night. I’m going to swear that I saw you leave and return at the time that burglary took place.”

“You can’t!” Adelaide said in a high voice.

“Quiet, dear.” I looked again at Hogan. He was grinning.

“Your word against mine, old pal. I’ve beat that one before.”

“I believe you lost your initialed gold cigarette lighter,” I said. “It has your fingerprints on it and it’s going to be found at the scene of the crime.”

Now anger showed on Hogan’s handsome face. “By Lieutenant Faber, would be my guess.”

“Your guess is correct. We’re framing you and sending you to prison, to put it plainly.”

“As I’ve always put it, huh?”

I nodded and couldn’t help a faint, gloating smile. Hogan’s game and he was getting beat at it. “Lieutenant Faber told me you were one of the world’s takers,” I said. “Well, I’m one of the world’s keepers. I don’t give up what I have easily.”

“Faber was right about that,” Hogan said frankly. “I’m a taker. I can’t see something of value without taking it.”

“Something like Adelaide?”

“Exactly.”

“Your mistake,” I said tauntingly, “was in trying to take something from me. I’ll think of you from time to time when you’re in prison.” I turned to go home, leaving Adelaide to return when she felt like it.

“It won’t work,” her voice said behind me.

I turned around and saw that the fear and surprise had left Adelaide’s face completely to be replaced by a look of determination.

“And why won’t it work?” I asked.

“Because I’ll swear in court that I spent that entire night with Jack.”

I started to laugh incredulously at her, but the laugh wouldn’t come out. “But you were at home.”

“Alone,” Adelaide said. “You could never prove it. I’ll swear I was here instead.”

“You’d swear to that in a courtroom, under oath?” I stared at her, feeling the sun on the back of my moist shirt. “But why?”

“I don’t think you’d understand.”

“Now listen!”

“Nothing more to listen to, or say,” Adelaide said, and as a pretense for getting away from me she turned and walked toward the diving board.

Hogan lowered himself into the shallow water with an infuriating smile. “Nothing more to say, old pal. Sorry.” And he actually looked as if he might be sorry, the gracious winner.

The sun seemed to grow hotter, unbearably hot, sending beads of sweat darting down my flesh inside my shirt. I looked up and saw Adelaide poised gracefully on the end of the diving board, tanned and beautiful in her tiny swimming suit as she carefully avoided a glance in my direction.

How the revolver got from my pocket into my hand I honestly don’t know. I have no recollection of it, a magician’s trick. And I don’t remember pulling the trigger.

Adelaide was raising her arms, preparing to dive, when the gun roared in my hand as if of its own will. I saw Adelaide’s body jerk, saw the spray of blood, heard the scream as she half fell, half jumped awkwardly from the diving board, arms and legs thrashing as she struck the water. Then there was a choking sound and she stopped thrashing and floated motionless face up.

Hogan stroked toward the ladder, a look not of shock or horror on his face, but an expression that suggested he might be very sick. “Oh, God, Smathers!” he said as he started to climb the chrome ladder. I let him get to the second step before blasting him back into the pool.

I stood there then, pulling the trigger automatically, emptying the revolver into their bodies.

Considering how large the pool was, it was amazing how quickly all the water turned red.

So now I’m sitting here awaiting trial, writing this to kill time, though I’m sure the hour will come when I’ll pray I had this time back. There isn’t any doubt in my mind that I’ll be convicted. They have my full confession, and now they’ll have this.

What concerns me is that all my life I’ve tried to be a decent sort of man, hard-working, industrious. I’m not very religious, but I have tried to live by the ten commandments, breaking them every now and then, of course, like everybody else. And yet if you went back and read over this again you could put your finger on spot after spot until you’d realize that between the four of us, me, Adelaide, Jack Hogan and Lieutenant Faber, in one way or another we’ve broken every single commandment.

Evil spreads, I suppose, like the red through the water in Hogan’s swimming pool.

One afternoon, on coming home from the cotton field where I had worked all day long, I noted, outside the barbed-wire fence of the bungalow I was living in, a Mexican peasant squatting on the bare ground. I did not know him because, as I learned later in the evening, he was from another village six or seven miles away. He was very poor and all in rags.

Having greeted me he waited patiently until I had dismounted from the burro I had been riding home on. When I had taken off the saddle and the burro had gone its way looking for cornstalks in the yard, the Mexican entered the front yard, came close and began talking.

He talked rapidly and in a confused manner. For a moment I thought him to be on the high – that is to say, that he might have smoked more marijuana than he could digest. However, though he was now telling the end of his story, now the beginning, now the middle, all in confusion, I soon noticed that he was neither drunk nor doped, only very ignorant and evidently suffering from a nervous breakdown – as far as this can happen to a Mexican of his kind.

It was difficult for me to make sense of his story and for a long while I was unable to see which part of his story was the end and which the beginning or the middle. The farther he came in his story the more was he swept away by his emotion until he only blubbered or shouted absolutely incoherent phrases. Never once did he fully end his tale. Whenever I thought him close to the end and I was trying to catch up with the full meaning, I realized that he was already telling his story from the middle backwards to the start again. In this confused way he told me his story more than a dozen times and always with the same words, out of a vocabulary which barely consisted of more than three hundred different words. His mood changed constantly. Each time he started as if he were telling the story of somebody else, yet invariably he ended up crying almost hysterically.

“Look here, señor doctor, that old hussy and tramp that she is and always was, she is gone. She is gone with that ugly cabron and dirty son of a heathenish dog, that thief Pánfilo, you know him, señor, the one I mean, that would steal the horns of the devil if they were not grown on, you know that housebreaker, and if you don’t know him, so much the better for you because he steals barbed wire and cuts telegraph poles and the telegraph wire also and no hog is safe if he is around. I wish him the smallpox all over his face and the most terrible disease extra to make it worse for him. I come home. I come home from my work in the bush. In the bush I had to cut down hard trees for making charcoal; you see. I sell the wood and the charcoal if I have any to the agents – who are thieves, too. I come home tired and hungry. Home in my
jacalito
. I’m hungry more than a dog, that’s what I am, from hard work in the bush. No tortillas ready. No frijoles in the pot. Nothing. I tell you the truth, señor doctor, nothing. I call my woman, that old hussy. My
mujer
I mean. No answer. I look around. She isn’t at home, my woman isn’t. Her sack with her dress in it, and her shirt and her torn stockings, which are in that same sack also, are all gone. The sack used to hang on a peg. My
mujer
has ran away. She doesn’t ever return. Never, such what I say. And she is so full of lice too, my woman is. I’ve no tortillas for me to eat. Nor black beans for my empty belly. Off she went like the stinking hussy that she is. If I only knew who she ran off with, that useless old nag. I’ll get
him
. And I’ll learn him how to steal decent and honest women that belong to other men. He is a
mil
times worse than any dirty cabron.” (
Mil
means thousand; to his kind, though,
mil
means anything between one hundred and one thousand billions.) “Now, I ask you, mister doctor señor, who will make tortillas for me? That’s what I want you to tell me right now.”

So he asked, but he did not wait for my answer and he went on with his story, hardly stopping to catch a full breath.

“Nobody is going to make me tortillas now. That’s what it is, I tell you. She has ran away. I’ll catch
him
and he won’t live to tell who done it. I come home in my
choza
. I come home from the hot bush. Hungry and dying of thirst. I don’t mind the thirst. I come home and no tortillas. No frijoles. She is gone. She has taken her sack with her dress and her stockings along with her.”

At this point of his sad story he cried so bitterly that for the next three minutes it was difficult to understand what he was saying now because it was all blubbering. Slowly he calmed down once more. Yet, crying or not crying, he talked on and on like a cracked phonograph record.

“I come home. From the bush I come home and I’ve worked all day long under that blistering sun and no—”

“Now wait a minute,
manito
,” I interrupted him before he went into his speech again and made it impossible for me to stop him before he reached that part of his story where he would have to cry for a few minutes. “Let’s talk this over quietly. You’ve told me your heartbreaking experience fifteen times by now. I admit it is heartbreaking. But I can’t listen to it a
mil
times because I’ve got other things to attend to. All I can say is that your
mujer
is not here in my
jacal
. Step in and look around and make sure.”