themselves had rusted off their hinges and leaned crazily.
“Turn in here. This is it, James. The ancestral acres.” There was a weird, sardonic sorrow in his voice.
The driveway was half overgrown with weeds which brushed against the underside of the car. On either side, eucalyptus trees hung in the moony air like shapes of mist congealing into cloud. The house loomed dark at the end of the avenue.
It was a two-storied house with walls of stone and a round stone tower at each end. It had been built to resist time, but time and weather were winning out against it. Mountain winds had torn off shingles and left ragged holes in the roof. The windows on the upper floor were smashed; the windows on the lower floor were boarded up. There was a light behind one of the boarded front windows.
“My mother used to live here in the summers when she was a girl.” As if it were the conclusion of the same line of thought, Gaines added: “G-get out now, I’ll be right behind you. One false move and I fire, see?”
His voice was small in the silence. Drifts of leaves and fallen branches and twisted strips of bark littered the ground. They crackled under our feet. The moon peered down through flimsy cloud like an acned blonde roused behind her curtains by our noise. Our shadows fell jerkily across the veranda and lengthened up the door into the darkness under the veranda roof.
Gaines thrust his leg out past me and kicked the ancestral door. A woman’s voice answered, its brassiness hushed by alarm. “Who is it?”
“Larry. Open up. I brought a friend with me.”
A bolt squealed. The door opened an inch, and then a foot. The woman who called herself Holly May looked out.
“What friend? You got no friends.”
She slouched in the doorway, narrow-eyed. A dead cigarette hung down from the corner of her mouth. Her body gave off a sense of sleeping danger, immediate as an odor.
“It isn’t exactly a friend,” Gaines said. “It’s the lawyer Ferguson hired.”
“Why did you have to cart him up here?”
“I p-picked him up in Mountain Grove. I couldn’t let him run loose.”
“Well, don’t just stand there, bring him in.”
Gaines ushered me in with the gun. The woman bolted the door behind us. We went down a vast dark hallway into a vaster room.
One end of the room was lit by a gasoline lantern which stood in the nearest corner. Its hissing circle of brightness fell with shuddering violence on the very light housekeeping arrangements which Gaines and the woman had set up: a canvas sleeping bag on the bare floor, a rustic bench blanched by rain and sun, a few glowing coals in the great stone fireplace, bread and cheese and an open can of beans laid out on a page of newspaper which carried the picture of Donato, under his sheet.
I wondered when they planned to start spending Ferguson’s money. Or had they involved themselves in crime merely to reduce themselves to this? To make a brief impossible marriage in a corner of the wrecked past.
“Stand b-back against the wall alongside the fireplace,” Gaines said to me. “On the far side away from the lantern. And stand still, you hear me?”
I stood against the wall in silence.
“You hear me?” Gaines said. “Let me know you hear me.”
I could see him clearly for the first time. He was a good-looking man, if you didn’t look too closely. But his eyes were small and brilliant with trouble. They moved like ball bearings magnetized by the woman. Her presence seemed to focus his personality, and also to diminish it.
He stood with one hand on his hip, the other holding the gun. He might have been posing for a photograph: rebel without a cause years later and still without a cause; or actor in search of a role, looking for the crime that would complete his nothingness. I guessed that his life was a series of such stills, forced into the semblance of action by fits and starts of rage.
“Let me know you hear me, G-gunnarson.”
I stood silent. He glanced down anxiously at his gun, as if it might suggest an action to him, turn in his hand like a handle and open the door on manhood. The gun jerked. A bullet tore the floor in front of me and sprinkled my legs with slivers.
Among the dying echoes of the shot, the woman said: “Don’t get gun-happy, Larry. We’re not the only people in these hills.”
“You can’t hear it outside, the walls are too thick. I used to come up here when I was a kid and shoot at targets.”
“Human targets?” I said. “Was that your boyhood hobby?”
The woman tittered like a broken xylophone. Unkempt as she was, her bleached hair stringy as hemp, her hips bulging in a pair of men’s jeans, she dragged at the attention. Her eyes were blowtorch blue in a white, frozen face.
“Have yourself a good look, lawyer. It’s going to have to last you a long time.”
“Are you going someplace, Hilda?”
“Hey,” she said to Gaines, “he knows my real name. Did you have to tell him my real name, stupid?”
“D-don’t you call me stupid. I can think rings around you any day of the week.”
She moved toward him. “If you have such a brilliant brain, what did you bring him here for? He knows me. He knows my name. It’s a hell of a note.”
“Your mother and D-dotery told him. I don’t know how he got to them, but I caught him outside their store in the G-grove.”
“What in merry hell are we going to do with him now? We’re supposed to be hitting the road tonight.”
“We’ll knock him off. What else can we do?” His voice was shallow, almost devoid of expression. He glanced down at the gun and said more forcefully: “Knock him off and burn the frigging place down. We can d-dress him in some of my clothes, see, we’re about the same size. Once he’s cremated, nobody will know the d-difference. Even the Rover boys won’t know the d-difference.”
“You’re going to cut them out, then?”
“I always did intend to cut them out. It isn’t a big enough melon to slice so many ways. It’s why I wanted Broadman out, why I tipped off the cops on D-donato.” He strutted at the edge of the light. “I’m not so stupid, bag. Anyway, what contribution did the Rover boys make? I’m the brains, they’re nothing better than errand boys.”
“They did your dirty work for you.”
“That’s what I mean, I’m the brains. They’d crucify their g-grandmothers for a stick of H. Let the k-kill-crazy bastards stay here and take the rap. I’ll send them a postcard from South America.”
Her blue gaze jumped like a gas flame at his face. “You mean we will, don’t you?”
“We will what?”
“Send them a postcard from South America, stupid. We’re going there together, aren’t we?”
“Not if you g-go on calling me stupid.”
“What in hell is this, Larry?”
“You keep a civil tongue, talking to me.”
“Oh, sure. The mastermind. The big brain.” She snarled at him: “Let me see those tickets.”
“They’re not here. I don’t have them.”
“You went down to the Grove to pick them up. Didn’t Adelaide buy them?”
“Of course she did. They’re in my car. Everything’s in my car.”
“How do I know there are two tickets?”
“I’m telling you. Do you think I’d stand you up at this late date?”
“If you thought you could get away with it. Only you can’t.”
It resembled a conversation on a lower floor of merry hell, where two dead souls re-enacted a meaningless scene forever. It was the meaninglessness that made it hell. I dug deep for the most meaningful words I could find. “Listen to me. Hilda. Ferguson’s very fond of you, he’s ready to forgive you. Why throw yourself away on thieves and psychos? You still have some kind of future if you’ll take it.”
Gaines moved on me jerkily. His boot soles thumped the floor as if he had poor contact with reality.
“I’m no psycho, d-dad.” He offered the gun in evidence, leveling it at my middle. “Take it back or I k-kill you now. I’m going to k-kill you anyway. I’d just as soon k-kill you now.”
