explanation. So I let it go; there was nothing to be gained in making waves.
When we got into the village and onto the side street I made a U-turn so I could park directly behind the Rambler. Talesco and I stepped out and walked over to look inside. Knox showed no signs of having come around, except for a crust of vomit on his chin and a puddle of it on the floorboards. He was lying on his back, curled up with his knees against his chest.
“Jesus,” Talesco said. He unlocked the driver's door and rolled down the windows to let some of the smell dissipate.
I said, “If you want to follow me back, I'll give you a hand with him at the camp.”
“No. You go ahead, I can handle him.”
“You sure?”
“I can handle him,” he said again.
He seemed a little embarrassed now, as if seeing Knox had made the whole thing too painfully personal to share with an outsider; he dismissed me with a glance, went to the rear and opened the door there and fished out a blanket. I slid back into my car. When I swung out past the Rambler he was leaning inside, doing something with the blanket, and he did not look up.
At Eden Lake, the sun was just settling down behind the trees on the western ridge and the sky in that direction had a smoky brick-colored flush. There was still no sign of a freshening breeze. A jay screamed monotonously somewhere within the camp, and you could hear the sporadic singing of crickets; nothing else disturbed the evening hush.
Harry was no longer working inside the shed; there were lights on inside his cabin, but I did not feel much like company. I took a beer out of the cooler and up to my cabin, and it was stifling inside. Even the mosquitoes and the gnats were better than breathing that thick, stale air; I shed my shirt, turned on the porch light, and sat out there with my beer and one of the pulp magazines I'd brought.
Night shadows had begun to deepen now, and the sky slowly lost its color. Moths fluttered in the orange porch light; a mosquito raised a welt on my left forearm and got itself crushed for the effort. The stillness was so intense that I found myself listening to it-and the more I listened and the darker it got, the more I felt a return of the edginess I had had last night. Unwarranted feeling maybe, but it would not go away.
To occupy my mind, I opened the pulp to the lead novelette and made myself concentrate on the words. The story dealt with a fast-talking, bourbon-guzzling private cop hired by a sexy blonde to get back half a million dollars' worth of stolen jewels, and in the space of five thousand words the Eye committed an act of felonious breaking- and-entering, got slugged, threatened a janitor he believed to be concealing information, withheld evidence in a murder case, insulted two cops, and killed a hired gunman in a shoot-out. I began to get irritated with all of this nonsense, and when the hero left the dead gunman on a city street and went off without reporting the incident, I closed the magazine and put it aside.
I had always gotten a laugh from the antics of pulp detectives, but lately they seemed more silly than engaging. Sexy blondes, withholding evidence, committing felonies, shooting hoods-what did any of that have to do with the verities of a private investigator's life? Verity, for Christ's sake, was a man with his head horribly crushed, and a puddle of vomit on the floorboards of a Rambler wagon, and a thing that might be malignant growing on one of your lungs.
Funny. You grow up reading the pulps, and they fascinate you, you can't get enough of them; the heroes are all larger than life, all champions of the purest form of justice, all invincible. You'd like to emulate them in spirit, you think, and as a result it's only natural that you go into police work and stay with it diligently for twenty years, and then one day you realize for a number of reasons that you can't take it any more and you decide to open up a private practice. So you become, in the end, an Eye just like the fictional Eyes of your youth-a real-life Carmady/Dalmas/Marlowe, a living Spade, a breathing Race Williams, a walking Max Latin and Jim Bennett. You don't have any illusions about living their kind of fantasy lives, of course; you don't expect excitement and thrills and women throwing themselves helter-skelter into your bed. You're aloof from all that. You sit back and smile knowingly. You're superior, because you're dealing with reality, and for the most part reality is pretty dull. The only thing you have in common with your fictional counterparts is a profession and an outlook on life that has turned a little jaded by the things you've been forced to deal with.
Everything goes along smoothly enough until, in your middle forties, you get yourself involved with a woman named Erika Coates. For the first time in your life you think that you might be in love, but of all the people in the world you should not fall in love with, it is Erika. She hates your profession, she considers it shabby and pointless- and worst of all, she begins to tell you that you're living and have been living a lie. Your world doesn't exist, she says, and never did; you're a kid who never outgrew an era twenty-five years dead, a kid dreaming about being a hero but without the guts or the flair to actually be one. You're a little boy, she says, and she can't compete with the obsessions of a little boy.
And then, inevitably, she walks out of your life and leaves you alone again.
But her words linger on, preying on your mind. You begin to ask yourself if maybe she was right, if maybe it all was and is a lie, a lifetime of hollow dreams and childish pursuits, a game without meaning, a fiction of your own creation. You refuse to believe it; you push it away from you and you go on believing as you have for all those years, you tell yourself you can go on that way forever.
Only forever turns out to be tomorrow, and tomorrow might literally bring a sentence of death, and you start wondering again if she might have been right and it all really is such a useless, useless He…
Abruptly I got up and went inside and made a thick sandwich I did not want from the last of the salami and rolls. I stood there eating it, washing down the mouthfuls with slugs of beer, listening to the silence.
Thinking of Erika again for the first night in a long while.
Four years since I had seen her. Where was she now? What was she doing? I had thought about calling her dozens of times during the first year, but I could never quite bring myself to it; and of course she had never called me. Once love dies, there is nothing but ghosts-and even ghosts fade away after enough long nights have passed.
What would she say if she knew about the lesion on my lung? I-told-you-so? She had spent half of our time together trying to get me to give up smoking along with my profession; see a doctor about your cough, you're a middle-aged man and you're susceptible to diseases at your age. Yes-and now she would probably pity me. Nothing but pity, and I had enough of that of my own.
Well, I didn't need Erika or anybody else. I had existed alone for one half of a century, fifty years that were not a goddamn lie, and I could die alone, too, and when I died When I died.
Pulp detectives never die, I thought. They live on in the yellowing pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective and a hundred others, in anthologies and collections and on microfilm. As long as there are people who read, Spade and Dalmas and the rest of them are immortal. They'll go on for centuries shooting hoods and laying blondes and breaking laws with total impunity-and was that, Jesus, was that what I had been after all along?
To become by emulation that which never dies?
Dangerous thinking; I could not handle it, not now, not on the night before I was to learn the results of the sputum test. Go do something, damn it, I told myself. Patrol the camp, take a long swim to make yourself tired enough so you can sleep. Shut the mind down, let the body take over. Hang in there, you'll be all right.
Just hang in there.
I threw the last of the sandwich and the empty beer can into the sink, went into the bath alcove, put on my trunks and a shirt, and got out of there.
Twelve
There were lights on in Cabin Four, and the door was open and I could see Talesco moving around inside as I passed. I kept going without pausing. When I came out of the trees near Five, though, I slowed and then stopped because the cabin was dark and the door was closed, and I found myself thinking that I had not seen Bascomb anywhere around the camp since yesterday afternoon, that he had not been here when the deputy came this morning, and yet his Ford had been parked in the same spot through the day. Odd that he wasn't back by now, after dark, if he had gone off somewhere on foot.
