Текст книги "Epitaph For A Tramp"

Автор книги: David Markson

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David Markson
Epitaph For A Tramp

CHAPTER 1

You know how hot the nights can get in New York in August, when everybody suffers – like the vagrants in the doorways along Third Avenue without any ice for their muscatel? Or all the needy, underprivileged call girls with no fresh-air fund to get them away from the city streets for the summer?

I’d taken a cold shower at one o’clock. Since then I’d recited the line-ups of six out of the eight National League baseball teams from the early thirties, I’d tried twice to make a mental list of every woman I’d ever known carnally, and now I was running through parts and nomenclature of common American hand weapons. I’d even had the light on and read for half an hour, but it was no good. It was still steaming. I was still awake. I was still thinking about her.

Cathy. I did that once in a while. Lying there alone like a chump and remembering. Things like the little cries she’d made, my name the way she’d always said it over and over, and then the way it would come in a gasp and her fingers would tear at my shoulders and—

Me Tarzan, you Jane. It was a recollection you’d cherish, like your first swift hobnail boot in the shins. I wondered how much lower she’d sunk in the year since I’d seen her.

No, I didn’t wonder that. All I wanted was to get some sleep. I started doing the linemen of the 194 °Chicago Bears. Stydahar. Artoe. Fortman. Musso. Plasman. Turner. Bray. Wilson. Fortman. Or had I said Fortman? I was almost glad when the phone rang.

I knocked my book to the floor, reaching for it. One considerably bushed private investigator with a healthy dose of insomnia, at your service. “Hello,” I said.

There was nobody there. Or rather somebody was, but he wasn’t saying anything. Probably just shy. “Take your time,” I told him.

I heard one long exhale. Then the steady dull buzz of a disconnected line.

“At the tone,” I said to no one in particular, “the time will be sort of damned near three-thirty in the morning.”

I put back the receiver, then fumbled for the book and put that back too. Nothing else to do, so I supposed I might as well be neat. Maybe I’d even get up and iron. I took a smoke, rolled over on the damp sheets with my hands behind my head and stared at shadows.

The book was a gay little thing by Thomas Mann called The Magic Mountain,another one of the forty-nine thousand and thirteen items I hadn’t had time for when I was day-laboring my way through the University of Michigan at left halfback. Or before that, in North Africa. Or for that matter later, when I had been night city editor in too many saloons. I had been slogging through it for weeks and was having a rough time. Hardly any shooting at all.

I heard a car screech around a corner and then pull up abruptly near my building, burning rubber extravagantly along a curb. It had to have come in from Lexington Avenue, since I live on 68th just off Third and the traffic runs one-way east. The car door slammed with a squeaky sound, as if a terrier had had its tail in the way. High heels clicked a few irresolute steps on the pavement, paused, clicked indecisively some more, stopped altogether. The car was very likely something small, probably a foreign sports job. The indecisive lady was very likely potted.

I heard another car door closing, a heavier one this time. And this time when the telephone started I did not lift it immediately. I let it tease me until after the sixth ring, just to give my playful chum an idea of how valuable my time could be.

“Hi,” I said then, “this is Judge Crater. Where is everybody?”

“Mr. Fannin? Mr. Harry Fannin?”

“Fannin’s dead. Wasted away from lack of sleep. People kept calling him in the middle of the night.”

“Oh, please, this is urgent. May I have Mr. Fannin?”

She wasn’t one of the names in the little black book. She sounded young and pretty. But then they always sound that way. Also they always think it’s urgent.

“This is Fannin.”

“Mr. Fannin, you don’t know me, but my name is Sally Kline. m—

“You call a few minutes ago?”

“What? No. Please, Mr. Fannin, I started to say, I—”

I lost the rest of it, or at least the next sentence. The doorbell blasted in my ear like time to change to the next classroom. When I caught Sally Kline again she was saying,”—and I think she might be in trouble, Mr. Fannin, in serious trouble.”

“Who?” I said. “Listen, Miss Kline, hang on, will you? All of a sudden we’ve got a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler running up here.”

“A what? But—”

“One minute. I’ve got to get the door.”

I left her angled on top of ponderous friend Mann and went to the buzzer. I’ve got one of those speaker things at the bell, rigged by an electrician who should have been a tuba player, and it sometimes works. “Who is it?” I said brightly.

Another female, but that was all I got out of it. My name and a lot of static. This one seemed to know me, however. She called me something that sounded intimate, like hlmphlmphor phrugg,instead of formal old Fannin.

I pressed the button and unlatched the door, but I didn’t bother to look out. I’m on the second floor in front, and with the stairs moving toward the rear you couldn’t see a pole vaulter carrying his gear home from practice until he was almost to the top. I started over to Miss Kline again, and then I remembered that it might be appropriate to greet my guest in something more dignified than common perspiration.

I pulled on G.I. suntans, then leaned down to the phone and said, “Can you hang on there for one more minute?” I went to the door again without listening for an answer. “Who is it?” I called down.

There was no reply but I knew it would be the gal from the sports job, the one I’d decided was drunk. I could hear her using both dainty left feet on each of the steps, taking them slowly enough so that for all I could tell she might have been lugging that little car on her shoulder. I wasn’t going to help her with it. “If you’ve got any friends or pets maybe, bring them along too,” I told her. I went back to the phone.

Miss Kline had found some other form of amusement. I put the receiver on the cradle, crossed the living room once more and went into the kitchen, took ice out of the bucket and poured two Jack Daniels on the rocks. There were a couple of steaks in the Frigidaire, but they were frozen solid and I wasn’t quite sure they’d be fully thawed before my guest got there.

I decided I wasn’t feeling too hospitable anyhow. Snow White was in the outside corridor now, but she was so tight that even on a level keel she was bumping into dwarfs all over the forest. A professional call, no doubt about it.

I could see it all. One of my legion of admirers, alone and bewildered in the night, come to seek succor at Harry’s hearth. Eight to five I’d have to listen to some incoherent sob story until she passed out, all the while doing valiant combat with my conscience to keep from taking advantage of her condition – which would be precisely what she would have come up to have taken advantage of. I dropped myself into my one good chair and took a short snort of the sour mash as the door opened.

No one came in. The door had swung inward toward me, so that I could see her shadow where the light behind her threw it on the rug, but nothing else.

The shadow swayed. Whoever it was, she giggled.

I’d expected a belch. So now we were playing guessing games. “Garbo,” I said. “Anna Magnani.” I couldn’t think of any woman with a foreign car, but I decided I ought to be sporting about it. I supposed I’d given out the license when I’d pressed the buzzer to let her in. “Dietrich. Wendy Hiller. Maria Meneghini Calks.”

Still nothing. I had a paperback Book of Quotationson the stand next to the chair and I tried that, stabbing a page at random. “The life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.Thomas Hobbes. And don’t ask me who Thomas Hobbes is, because governess hasn’t come to that part yet.”

“Old Harry,” she said then.

I closed the book. I put down the glass. I put down my cigarette also, so there were only my hands left, and since there wasn’t anymore room on the table I picked those up and stared at them.

“The same… same old Harry.”

It was a year. I supposed it was a year, but when I looked up at her everything was the way it had always been. There was the face, there were the eyes. It was all there and it still did it to me, and even if I’d had a last name like Onassis or Getty or Zeckendorf this was still the only counter in the world I could buy it at.

She had one hand on the doorknob. She was wearing one of those white linen summer coats which weigh about as much as an overseas airmail stamp and her other hand was inside of it, holding herself below the left breast so that she looked as if she had knocked aside six or eight old ladies in her breathless sprint to get here. But she generally looked like that. That was just another one of the little things that made her so easy to forget.

She had moved toward me half a step, unsteady on her feet, and then had thought better of it. She stood there, clinging to the knob, and all I could do was flip some more pages in the book.

A mighty fortress is our God,said Martin Luther. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,said Emiliano Zapata. Work out your salvation with diligence,said Gautama Buddha. Everyone had something right on the tip of his tongue except Fannin.

“You’re stoned,” I said then. “You’re stoned and you ought to be in bed. Go the hell home, won’t you? Or wherever it is you’re shacked up now.”

I didn’t want to say it like that, God knows I didn’t. But there wasn’t any other way. I’d found that out a year ago and I wasn’t going to leave myself open for it again.

She was still swaying slightly, the out-of-breath smile still in her eyes, being so lovely you could pawn your poor brains for five minutes of not remembering what had happened. “Old Harry,” she said again. “The same tough, hard… same old… same…”

I was out of my chair when she started to buckle, but it came too fast. She hadn’t given any sign, hadn’t even closed her eyes, just turning a little and then going over as if she’d simply gotten tired of standing there and thought she might like to try the rug for size, and I had to go down on one knee to keep her from hitting. I took her weight with one arm around her shoulders and eased her down, holding her head and shoulders up. And then all of a sudden all of the lovely, lovely toys were smashed and scattered all at once.

“Cathy,” I said. “Oh, good God, Cathy—”

The coat had covered it while she was standing. The stain was as big as a six-dollar sirloin below her breast, dark and seeping, and the inside of her hand was soaked with it from where she had had her palm pressed against herself. I saw the slash in the blouse where the blade had gone in, no wider than a man’s leather watch band, centered and near the top of the seepage.

Her eyes were open, staring at me, but they weren’t smiling now. There wasn’t any expression in them at all. They were as empty as two spoonfuls of weak tea.

“Harry. Know what I did, Harry? Real… cops and robbers. You would have…”

“Easy, baby,” I said. “Tell me later. Let me get a doctor. You just lie here and—”

“No!” She had clutched me by the wrist. A four-year-old at his first Hershey bar would have had a hand about as sticky. Or with as little strength in the grip. “Harry, don’t let me go. Hold me, Harry, I…”

Her hand slipped away. All I could think of were the five minutes I’d spent counting the sterling while she was dragging herself up the stairs.

“Cath, you’ve got to let me—” I was stretching, trying to reach a pillow from the couch without letting her go. I couldn’t make it.

“Cathy, I’m going to make you lie back. Just don’t move and 111—”

“Harry—”

“Yes, baby, yes. Here I am.”

“Harry… just for a minute… both your arms. Hold me, Harry.”

My right arm was still beneath her shoulders. I put my other hand along her cheek and it was tearing me apart then. Because it wasn’t going to make any difference if I called a doctor now or ever. I could save the dime for my estate.

I lowered my hand to below her breast, cupping it tight against the wound. The blade had missed her heart but it had been close enough. It had to have happened just before she rang the bell. It was seconds before I caught the faint small beat, like a whisper behind heavy draperies.

“Harry…”

“Here, baby, here.”

“Nobody else, Harry. Rotten… so rotten for you. The only one… only one it was ever right with. You, Harry…”

“I know, baby, I know.”

“Harry…”

And then there was nothing else. “Cath,” I said. “Cath. Baby, I—” Or maybe I didn’t say it out loud, I’m not sure. It didn’t matter. I knelt there holding her for another minute, feeling her hair against my neck, and then I put her down.

The phone was ringing. I had no idea how long it had been doing that again. I got up and walked toward the bedroom extension to answer it. I had a dead one on the living-room carpet and all my instincts told me there were a dozen things I’d better start doing, but I couldn’t think of any of them. Because this one wasn’t just silver dollars for Harry Fannin, private cop. This one was about Cathy.

The phone was in my hand. “Yes?” I said stupidly.

“Mr. Fannin, please, this is Sally Kline again. I tried to tell you before, I live with Cathy. I’m worried, Mr. Fannin, and I didn’t know who else to call. I think Cathy’s in trouble. I think something might happen to her.”

I was staring into the other room. The irony of it registered very remotely. “What?” I said.

“Oh, heavens, what’s the matter? Are you asleep, Mr. Fannin? I said it’s about Cathy, about your wife…”

CHAPTER 2

I met her in the summer of ‘56. It had been one of those weeks when all the business is the kind the competition deserves. On Monday a pleasant Mrs. Dijulio told me that her sweet, innocent, sixteen-year-old Maria was being kept out all night by a nota so nice’a crowd, and could I perhaps tella the boys to leave her alone? Sure. I told’a the boys, although I had to confiscate a few switchblades to do it, and that left me with Maria. Alone in Central Park with charming, innocent Maria. First she ripped off her blouse and screamed rape. No patrolman was close enough to be impressed so she ripped off her skirt too. That impressed me,enough to spank her. So then she threw her arms around my neck and wailed that this was what she had wanted all along, a man, a real man. She had lovely arms, only thirty or forty needle punctures above the elbows. I went over there again the next morning and dialed the number myself to make certain that Mrs. Dijulio got through to the juvenile bureau.

That was Monday. Wednesday it was a pharmacist named Heppenstall whose wife had wandered. I found her easily enough, holed up with a Matterhorn-size lesbian and the dregs of a case of rum in a dollar-a-night Third Avenue hotel.

Agnes Heppenstall threw a sheet-shredding tantrum while I booted out her playmate, then turned whisky coy the minute we were alone. She was such a dreadful mess, she said. And it was all psychological. Heppenstall hadn’t excited her in seventeen years and so she had been experimenting. And I was such a pretty man, couldn’t I help her experiment some more? She was sick four times in the cab on the way home, and not psychologically.

Nice week, nice profession. Friday it was a tavern keeper named O’Rourke from Eighth Avenue whose night-shift barmaid was clipping the payments on a Mercedes-Benz out of the till, but would I go a little easy because the dame was his deceased brother’s only child? No thanks, Mr. O’Rourke. Even if the doll didn’t have nineteen sailor pals guzzling for free along the rail, there would probably be a light machine gun behind the blackberry brandy. Or a folding bed under the rear booth. No, O’Rourke, sorry, but I was just leaving. I had a date to wrestle a python. Something undemanding, you know?

I locked the office and got out of there fast. Three newspaper guys I knew had rented a shack on the Long Island shore. Ants, roaches, linen that had been dirty when the last of the Mohicans abandoned it and hadn’t been washed since, dishes in the sink from one leap year to the next. And no Maria Dijulio, no Agnes Freud, no worldly little barmaid. Just a couple of fifths of Jack Daniels, a little sun, and I was my clean, wholesome old self again.

The newspaper guys drove back into the city late Sunday evening, but I decided to give it another night. I sat around for a couple of hours, disciplining myself by not opening the next bottle until I could manage it without defacing the tax stamp, and trying to make sense out of something called The Waste Landby T. S. Eliot which was the only book in the joint. About midnight I decided I’d take a stroll on the beach.

I did not have anything in mind. The tide was out and I went along the edge of the wet sand. I walked for twenty minutes and used up a couple of cigarettes and then I decided it might fill my later years with fond memories if I left my clothes on some rocks and went in.

The water was fine. I took my bearings on a tank tower behind some dunes and swam easily for about ten minutes, going straight out from the shore. When I checked the tower I had not veered off much. I lay there and rode the swells for a while, thinking about original sin and the fallibility of the human intellect and what the Red Sox would do for base hits when Ted Williams finally quit, and then just to impress myself I sprinted back.

I touched bottom with the water up to my chest and stood there waiting for my lungs to straggle on home. That was when it came to me that I was never really going to amount to anything in life. Here I was with an audience, and I hadn’t even had the foresight to print up tickets.

She was at the edge of the water. I could not see her face but in the dim light her hair looked the color of Palmolive soap. She was wearing a light-colored blouse and a dark skirt and no shoes, and she was standing with her feet wide apart. The wash went in and churned around her ankles and buried them as it slipped back. She had a cigarette in her hand.

I was still twenty yards out and she spoke quietly but I had no trouble hearing her over the surf. She had a deep, throaty voice and she seemed amused. “The cigarette’s yours,” she said. “I didn’t go through your pockets. I just sort of felt around the outside for the pack.”

“I’m glad,” I told her. “None of the rest of that stuff is supposed to be opened before Christmas.”

“I guess I can wait. But we can have a tree, can’t we?”

“I’ll tell you what. You turn your back for half a minute and I could maybe get started trimming it right now.”

“Don’t tell me!”

She was laughing. She walked forward a few short steps, so that the water swirled around her calves. Her hair was tinted more yellow than green now, but her face still might have been Jolson’s just after they’d painted him up to do Mammy.

She had edged forward even more. When it swelled inward now the water was almost to the level of her skirt.

“Suppose I don’t turn?” she said. “Suppose I just camp right here?”

“You’ll get a little damp when the tide comes in,” I told her. “Me, I’ll be home by the fire. I’m coming out just about now.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t come out.”

“Oh, now look, I know it was probably a dumb stunt, but I just drained out all my anti-freeze last month. If you don’t turn your back I’m going to—”

“Turn yours.” She was laughing again. And then her hands were at her blouse.

“For crying out loud—”

I decided my only hope was to start swimming around to my clothes the back way, via the Oriental trade routes. I went perhaps a dozen lazy overhand strokes, hearing nothing, and then she came up ahead of me. She took a deep breath and grinned after it and her face caught the light now. I saw the way her hair was flat along her skull and the way her eyes sparkled. I saw how beautiful she was.

“Hello, Harry Fannin,” she told me.

We were treading water. “I know you. You’re the trustworthy girl who didn’t go through my pockets.”

“Wouldn’t you? If you found someone’s clothes on the sand?”

“No doubt about it.”

“I thought all sorts of things. Foul play, mayhem, drunk and disorderly conduct—”

“Death by water. The fire sermon—”

“I know that poem. Eliot. And I thought all detectives were illiterate. Anyhow I was all set to rush off screaming. You ruined it all.”

“I’m sorry. I would have squandered my savings on a heavy meal first if I’d known.”

She laughed again, a rich, husky laugh that had nothing false about it. It was as real as the way she’d let her hair get wet like that. Hell, it was as real as her being there. She splashed water at me and then slipped away, going under so that I saw the flash of her back arching just beneath the surface and then the gleam of her long legs, and then coming up ten yards off and swimming out. She did a crawl well, moving with sharp clean strokes and heading off” at an angle against the current. I’d decided she wasn’t tight after all. I watched her for a minute and then I went in and walked back up the beach to where my clothes were.

I was smoking when she came out. Her own things were scattered along the sand and she stood there at the edge of the water for a long minute before she started to put them on, brushing water from her body and bending over to wring out her hair. Her hair was chopped fairly short. She did not look at me but she did not turn away either. She had a lovely body, with the long legs that I had seen and good hips and breasts that were high and round when she turned into profile against the water.

I think that was when it happened. She was standing there with her legs wide apart and her back half toward me, and she was wearing nothing but her panties. The line of her thighs was turned beautifully and I watched it as she moved. She wrung out her hair again but did it by leaning backward this time, arching her body the way a diver might at the height of a back dive and holding it that way with her arms lifted back and all of her being fluid and lovely in the moonlight, and I felt the tightening along my jaw. Because she was not doing it for my benefit. She had decided she could be just as batty as the next guy, and now she was getting dressed the best way she could without a towel and it was as simple as that.

Sure, simple. So why not run and fetch your zither, Fannin, strum us a little mood music? Come off it, huh? Probably she’d turn out to be an untouched little Bryn Mawr sorority president who’d never had a night in bed worth remembering since the time she’d snuggled up with a hot copy of Studs Lonigan.I chucked my smoke into the sand and started walking down the beach away from her.

And then I decided I was nuts altogether. A screwball dame comes prancing into the locker room and offers it to me all wrapped up with a red ribbon and I start acting like some bashful adolescent too mixed up by puberty to kiss his own mother good night. For crying out loud, Fannin.

I stopped when she caught up with me. She’d had to run and she was out of breath. Her breasts were rising and her blouse was tight across them where it had gotten wet. I reached out and touched the wet ends of her hair.

“I tell you you’re the prettiest nitwit I’ve met in months?”

She laughed. “And I haven’t had a drink since the V-8 juice at breakfast, that’s the silly part of it. I think you’re probably pretty nice, Harry Fannin.”

We were near the dunes. She was lovely, all right. So make up your mind, I told myself.

“You’re staring at me.”

“The way you stare at four aces,” I told her.

“Because you always think you’ve misread the hand?”

“Partly. Mainly because you’re sure somebody’s going to call a misdeal before you get a chance to bet.”

She was smiling. Her eyes were dark and bright under her wet lashes. There was something so alive about her it made my throat ache.

“Bet,” she said then. “Bet the hand, Harry Fannin.”

But I was still looking at her. “The limit,” I said. “With four it can’t be anything under the limit.”

“Suppose I raise? Suppose I’ve got a straight flush. That would win, wouldn’t it? You and your measly four aces.”

“Have you? My bets in.”

“God, we’re talking. Have you got any idea why we’re talking so much?”

There were beer bottles. There were tin cans and chunks of driftwood and seashells. There could have been hot coals.

Her arms were across my shoulders. Her body was warm and damp beneath me and her face was turned against the sand. My face was along her neck where her hair had fallen away and I could feel a pulse, fast at first and then slowing. And after a very long time the sound of the surf came back.

“Who dealt that?” she said then. “Oh, my God, did I deal that?”

I pressed my hand over her lips, turning my head. They were coming toward us along the water’s edge, talking, and she saw them and lay still.

One of them was sketching jerky little abstractions against the darkness with a cigarette. His voice was high-pitched and nasal but it carried across clearly as they passed us. “He’s a beautiful little boy,” he said, “beautiful. But the only person who knows if he’s mine or not is my wife. I love that kid, I do. But I tell you, I just don’t know if he’s mine—”

Surf took the rest of it. I watched them going away, not moving and hearing her breathing softly next to me.

Her voice was distant. “If you go now you won’t have to fumble through the talk,” she said. “It can be messy to fumble through, particularly when you don’t even know the girl’s name.”

“Mrs. Harry Fannin,” I told her.

I could feel her laughing without hearing any sounds or seeing her face. She said, “I did have the straight flush, Harry, and thanks. But it would be kind of silly to think there could be two winners in the same hand, wouldn’t it?”

“Marry me,” I told her. I didn’t know I was going to say that. You’ve got to think the whole thing was something you’d just invented to say that, and it was something I had had before. But I could count the times. I had had it once in the army in Texas but after a while it had come out that the girl had a husband getting shot at somewhere, and so there was nothing to do but go off with my lip quivering and get shot at myself. I’d had it once at college also but the girl was killed in an automobile wreck and what I did after that I didn’t much like to remember. I’d had it those two times and here it was again after six or eight years and how do you know you’ll ever find your way back to the same stretch of sand? So I said it again.

I had lifted myself to my elbows and she turned her head, watching me. “I told you I went through your wallet,” she said. “I saw your investigator’s license and that Sheriff’s Association card and the gun permit and, gosh, all sort of impressive things. But I guess I must have missed the release papers from that mental institution. I never did see them at all.”

I was kneeling. I dug out two cigarettes and lit them and gave her one, grinning back at her. I picked up her wallet where it had slipped out of her skirt and lit another match. Hawes, it said. Catherine.

“Harry?”

“Let’s get out of here, Hawes. Right now.”

She had lifted herself slightly, braced on one arm. She took up a handful of sand and let it run through her fingers. “It would be gone before we got to Pennsylvania Station,” she said remotely. She was looking past me. “Something like this, so damned quick. What was it, maybe twenty minutes? Old first-glance Cathy. You don’t think it’s the first time, do you? Go away, Fannin. Take another swim and wash the hayseed out of your hair. I was reading a Dostoievski novel before I came out for my little walk. I’ll go back and finish it now, so I can see what it’s like when people really suffer things that tear out their guts instead often cents’ worth of romantic twinge just because there’s moonlight and for five minutes you don’t have to feel alone anymore or—”

I had taken her by the shoulders. “Hawes, come on.”

“Oh, damn,” she said. “Oh, goddam.” She was chewing her lip and I was sure of it then if I hadn’t been before. Because you get so many with whom there’s never anything left. But here it was afterward and I was kneeling there and I was still feeling it. It hurt me to look at her. It hurt me the way her voice was, the way the line of her thigh joined her hip.

Which was romantic as all hell, but was still no concern of our two wandering companions. They were coming back up the beach and this time the other one of them was holding forth:

“I’m telling you, Lou, with three kids around you’re paying for fifteen meals a day. Fifteen. That’s one hundred and five meals a week. And when you’re doing it without love, well, brother—”

Her arms slipped around my neck then. “Fannin, Fannin, Fannin, it’s insane. Of all the idiotic, impossible, scatter-brained, impulsive… and I just don’t know whatI’m going to tell Frank Sinatra in the morning!” She was trembling, maybe laughing, maybe crying, I don’t think it mattered which. Because we came together and it was all there again and it had to be right. It was. For maybe ten months.