Authors: Gil Brewer
“I was right,” Angers said.
Up at the head of the pier, a police car turned off the intersecting street and started down toward us, moving slowly. The man was in the street, yelling and pointing at us.
“Step on it,” Angers said. “They’ve seen us.”
I heard a shot and saw it was Angers with the Luger. He was leaning out of the window and he had fired just once at the man back there. I didn’t know whether he’d hit him or not. I couldn’t see back there.
The police car kept coming and I saw fire leap from the window and heard the sound of another shot. Then we were past them and they were turning. Another police car came around the corner up there.
“Turn to the right,” Angers said. “And drive as fast as you can, pal.”
He didn’t have to tell me. I didn’t want to get it, not yet. Not while there was still a chance. I was in the middle and I knew it and I didn’t like it.
“We’ve got to get away from them,” he said. “We’ve got to, Steve. You hear?”
“I’m doing all I can.”
We went around the corner fast and the sirens were beginning now. It was a sound I’d been waiting for a long time. Now that I heard them, really close, I didn’t want to hear them. I knew Lillian was listening back there. I wondered what she thought.
I began to drive, let me tell you.
I
DID NOT WANT IT
to end this way.
It wouldn’t be right if they got me, too. Because they would, I could feel it. But that wasn’t the only reason for the way I felt. It wasn’t sudden, either; it had been coming on me for a while now and I knew it was the right thing. Two of us were against all of them and I knew that’s the way it was going to be. But all the time I knew how wrong that was.
It was wrong for him. He was trying to accomplish something he believed in. He had an aim, a deep-seated one, and to him it was as right as the sun in the morning. Maybe you can’t grasp that, understand it. But it was how I believed.
He was doing something he thought was right.
And I wanted to see Ruby. God, how I wanted that! Things had changed, blurred. I wanted to see her just once more—alive, happy.
I don’t know. I’d been going along with this guy, wanting to get him if I could, wanting to get away from him, and I hadn’t been understanding it right, either. Sure. But he hadn’t killed me. Had he? Well, I’d be happy if he could get away from them. I knew that now. Maybe he’d taught me something I couldn’t put into words; I don’t know.
I settled down to driving as I’d never driven before. It wasn’t wild; it was determined effort to get away. I’d flash a glance at him and he’d be sitting there, watching me, kind of nodding, with the gun on his knee.
He half believed in me, as I say, and it was hell knowing that. Maybe he believed in me all the way. I was his pal. And you could never explain it to him now. There was no straightening this out.
They were after both of us.
“You’re doing fine, Steve,” he said between the wails of the sirens not far behind us. “Just don’t get rattled. You got nerve, pal.”
“Thanks. We’re going to need it.”
We came down past the Vinoy Yacht Basin and I wheeled her left around in front of the Vinoy Hotel sitting up against the paler night sky like a huge black monster without eyes, wearing a top hat. We headed straight for town.
They came along back there, three of them, three cars, all with their sirens moaning and wailing, and it was fine.
Nobody but Lillian and I would ever really know how it was. We were the only ones, and how could you explain it? It came on you slowly.
If you can’t feel it, you can’t, but there was a sadness there. It kept coming up on me, getting into my mouth, like the taste of bright metal, dry and cold….
Stop lights didn’t mean anything, and probably the whole town knew about it by now. We came whispering up the street from the bay side, passing through a residential section, and you could see the people on the lawns, flashing by like white-faced posts with stiff arms.
I took another left, then the first right into an alley beyond a store front. We went through that alley bouncing on the bricks and sliding a little in wet places and ‘way ahead you could see it was a dead end, but a driveway turned right, so I took that and boomed along rutted shell and out into a street again.
We were on one of the main streets, heading west, and I opened her up, right down the middle of the street, with cars peeling off to the right and left as we came along.
“You’re never going to be able to build the hospital in this town,” I said, not looking at him. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes. I know that now.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, Steve, but I’m going to build the hospital.”
I drove a while, getting through some thick traffic that was trying just as hard to keep out of the way. Behind us the wail of sirens began getting loud again. That alley had flipped them for a moment and I knew I could lose them. If I drove her right and used my head and didn’t lose my nerve and didn’t get rattled. Then I could lose them.
We weren’t going awfully fast.
“They’d get us outside town,” I said.
“I know it.”
“You don’t want them to get us, do you, Ralph?”
“No. I’m just thinking about Lillian.”
You can say what you want about cases like this. They’ve got feelings. It’s just they’re cockeyed on one thing and killing is a blind means. Or maybe like when you brush that fly off your arm next time. Remember it.
Well, it’s perspective. It’s seeing things one way or seeing them another. I knew. It’s believing. It’s believing so hard in one thing that you become blind except in one direction. And it doesn’t matter whether the direction is good or bad, because it’s what you’re blind to that really matters.
It’s a funny thing, but that’s the way it works. Try it and see.
Only he was affected by criticism, too.
Only what would have happened if Ralph Angers had been allowed from the very beginning to build his hospital and attempt to satisfy himself about transplanting the human eye?
We came onto Ninth Street and I turned left into traffic and went along the middle of the street. It was a good bet, because of the traffic. It would slow us, maybe, but it would slow them still more.
“Steve,” Angers said, “I’m counting on you. I can’t drive, you know. Never learned. I was always too busy. Even during the war.”
“We can’t head into the country,” I said. “They’d get us sure, so we’ve got to lose them here in town.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I know the town pretty good,” I told him.
“I can’t help thinking about Lillian,” he said.
“She’ll be all right.”
“I know it.”
“Then don’t worry.”
We both saw the police car on the corner up ahead. It was nosing out into the street from a cross street, only some cars were in the way because of a stop signal. I went right on by and you could see them looking at us. They couldn’t shoot, either, because of the other cars and the people on the street.
“I’m not worrying,” he said. “I’m thinking about your eye, too, Steve.”
“Never mind that.”
I was driving carefully and easily. If you get in a sweat, things don’t go so well. Bourney’s car was swell and for an instant I saw him back there, in my mind, lying on the grass with his cigar.
“I want you to know something,” Angers said.
I wheeled right, off Ninth, and the sirens got faint because of the buildings. I knew they were back there and that they’d seen where we turned. I took it sharp into an alley, then right into another alley, then left again, and we were on a dirt road right in the middle of town, bouncing all over the place, downhill. I opened her up and we stuck in the ruts fine going down through there and the sirens were very faint now and I heard them going on up the street. They had missed the alley.
We came out of the dirt road going uphill, and over a bridge by some big trees, and the car lights swirled on the trees among the leaves and it looked peaceful, like driving on a summer’s night in the country.
Then we came out onto a main street again, bounding up off the dirt onto the pavement. A police car went by, going like hell, and they saw us.
I slammed the car out of there with the sound of the police car’s screaming tires, and as we went off away, I saw them coming around in a wild U turn that took them over the curb and across a funeral parlor’s front lawn and under a canopy by the sidewalk. Their siren started.
I went left off the street and we were in a residential section again. I really rode it now, hanging on, and letting Bourney’s car do whatever it could.
“Steve?”
“Sure, sure.”
“Tell you something.”
I shot a glance at him and he hadn’t moved. He was still sitting like that, with the gun on his knee, as if he were dreaming. Sure, I was afraid of him. Right now he might shoot me, just like that.
“What?”
“That eye of yours.”
“Forget the eye!”
“No, Steve. If something isn’t done about that eye of yours, you know what’s going to happen?”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy with the wheel on this brick street. The street had been laid perhaps twenty-five years before and the bricks were loose and it was pocked with potholes and it was bad. The car drummed like a machine gun, the wheel going in a tight mad staccato.
“You’ll go blind in one eye,” Angers said. “I’m not kidding you, pal. That’s the way it is. I know. Maybe both eyes. Sympathetic reaction.”
I heard him but it didn’t touch me. Not then, anyway. I didn’t feel sympathetic, so I kept quiet, and he didn’t say any more, either. Not about that.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said.
“All right.”
“I want you to know, pal,” he said. “I’ll never forget, and when things were a little tight today— Well, you know how it is, pal. Everything depends on what I’m doing. It’s important. Only I want you to know I haven’t forgotten how you saved my life, pal. There wouldn’t have been any hospital if you hadn’t come along.”
Now he had the hospital all built.
“I’d like to make you my first patient,” he said.
I wanted to tell him to shut it off. It was getting to me. Everything was getting to me, from every angle, angles he couldn’t or wouldn’t see.
Ruby, Ruby, I thought. What a Ruby you are!
I was crying, sitting there behind that wheel, crying and driving like hell. Because it was getting to me from every angle about everything and it was all cockeyed and mixed up with wanting to reach Ruby, and this guy believing what he believed….
The police car wasn’t closing in like it should. Then I heard why. Up there ahead of us someplace the sirens were converging and we were cut off. They had a radio and they used it.
“We’re going to stop,” I said.
“We’ll have to, won’t we, pal?”
“Yes. Right up ahead there. We’ll run for it.”
I glanced over at him and he was loading the clip for the Luger, slipping the gleaming brass shells in,
tick, tick, tick
.
I thought of wrecking the car, trusting luck to pull me out of it. But I wanted to live too much. I couldn’t do it, and by the time I had her slowed down, he went
snickety-smack
with the slide and was waiting, with the Luger all ready.
We were in a fine section of town. For maybe a mile square there was nothing but scrap heaps, junk yards, factories old and new, demolished and in process of building, railroad yards stringing through everything.
I drove the car up a long cement ramp into a huge empty barn made of sheet metal. From the ceiling of the barn hung a single electric light bulb. Yellow light from the bulb didn’t reach the distant walls and barely touched the floor.
“Let’s go, pal,” Angers said.
We climbed out of the car and stood there a moment. He had his big roll of blueprints that I’d never seen. They were under his arm again. He looked almost as he’d been this morning except that his beard had grown. That was all.
You could hear the sirens, plain.
We started walking toward the back of the barn, where a pale rectangle of light showed there was a door. We came out onto some railroad tracks and started running across toward what looked like a black tunnel.
T
HERE WAS NO TUNNEL
. It was a board fence and its shadow was deceiving. We came along that to where it ended, and turned behind it into a junk yard. In the moonlight were the bodies of old cars stacked ten and fifteen high, like layers of steel cake. It was a morgue for old cars that were waiting to be buried.
“Let’s go on through,” Angers said.
Back there the sirens came into the barn and you could hear men running. I looked at him and he was watching me. All around us, now, hovered the dark hulks of buildings. Fences and girders and smokestacks spouting sputtering embers into the night.
“We’ve got to hide,” he said. “We’ve got to make it, pal.” His voice was flat and even and all this time there had never been the slightest expression on that face.
A single siren moaned up to the left, then ceased, and two car doors slammed.
“They’re coming after us,” I said.
“Yes.”
“They’ll surround the place. But it’s a big place.”
He didn’t say anything. He touched my arm and we started walking through the yard, down aisles between the stacked cars. It was very quiet, and far off to the left, coming from somewhere you couldn’t see, was the sudden hiss and white glare of a welding torch. It flared and hissed and steel clanged and banged. Shadows stood out in stark black shapes. The white glare shot up fanlike into the darkness, cutting it just like metal. A brilliant shower of bright white sparks arced up and over onto the stacked cars.
We went down along the dirt yard, walking through puddles of water and through a gate in a board fence.
We were in an alley. Over across the way was an immense building, girders sticking up, corrugated iron sides riffling the shadows as the torch flared.
Two men were working in there, making steel ladders. They wore what looked like diving suits and helmets with glass facepieces, not just the helmets themselves. A furnace was roaring in there. A man shoveled coal into the open furnace door from a wheelbarrow. The man was stripped to the waist and he looked red and you could see the sweat from where we stood.