At the last moment he found in himself a sick horror that made it impossible for him to bear excessive contact with the dead flesh, so he dressed the body, struggling with uncooperative arms and legs. After that it was so easy. It was so crazy easy. If he’d given a damn, if he’d really been trying to get away with it, he could never have pulled it off in a million years.
With the old man dead in his arms, he walked out of the apartment and down the stairs and across the walk to the Plymouth at the curb. He opened the front door and put him in the seat and closed the door again. Then, standing there beside the car, he looked around and saw that there was no one in sight. So far as he knew, not a soul had seen him.
It was then that the enormity of the thing struck him, and he began to laugh softly, hysteria threading the laughter. No-luck Frankie doing a thing like that. No-luck Frankie himself just walking out of an apartment house with a corpse in his arms and not a damned soul the wiser. You couldn’t get life any crazier than that. He kept on laughing, clutching the handle of the car door with one hand, his body shaking and his lips cracking open again to let a thin red line trace its way down his chin.
After a while he choked off the laughter on a series of throaty little gasps that tore painfully at his throat. Lighting a cigarette, he went around the car and got in beside the old man on the driver’s side.
He drove at a moderate rate of speed, savoring morbidly the approach to his big scene. Now, in the process of execution, the drama of it gained even more in its appeal to him. It gave him a kind of satisfaction he had never known.
He was driving east on Mason Street. The side streets on the south descended to their intersections by steep grades. Possessing the right-of-way, he crossed the intersections without looking, absorbed in his thoughts. For that reason he neither saw nor heard the transport van until it was too late. At the last instant he heard the shrill screaming of rubber on concrete and looked up and right to see the tremendous steel monster roaring down upon him.
His own scream cut across the complaint of giant tires, and he hurled himself away reflexively, striking the door with a shoulder and clawing at the handle. The door burst open at the precise instant of impact, and he was catapulted through the air like a flapping doll. Striking the pavement, he rolled over and over, protecting his head with his arms instinctively. The overwhelming crash of the Plymouth crumpling under the van was modified in his ears by the fading of consciousness.
On his back, he lay quietly and was aware of smaller sounds—distant screams, pounding feet, horrified voices, and after a bit, the faraway whine of sirens growing steadily nearer and louder.
Someone knelt beside him, felt his pulse, said in manifest incredulity, “This guy’s hardly scratched. It’s a goddamned miracle.”
A voice, more distant, rising on the threat of hysteria, “Christ! This one’s hamburger. Nothing but hamburger.”
And he continued to lie there in the screaming night with the laughter coming back and the wild wonder growing. What was it? What in God’s name was it? A guy who’d started and ended with a sour bastard of an old man and never any luck between. A guy who’d had it all, and most of it bad. A guy like that getting, all of a sudden, two fantastic breaks you wouldn’t have believed could happen. Walking out of a house with a body in his arms, scot-free and away. Surviving with no more than a few bruises a smashup that should have smeared him for keeps. Maybe it was because he’d quit caring. Maybe the tide turns when you no longer give a damn.
Then, in a sudden comprehensive flash, the full significance of the situation struck him. Hamburger, someone had said. Nothing but hamburger. Thanks to the cockeyed collaboration of the gods and a truck driver, he had disposed of the old man in a manner above suspicion. He lay on the pavement with the wonder of it still growing and growing, and his insides shook with delirious internal laughter.
CHAPTER 4.
In time he rode a litter to an ambulance, and the ambulance to a hospital. He slept like a child in antiseptic cleanliness between cool sheets, and in the morning he had pictures taken of his head. Twenty-four hours later he was told that there was no concussion, and released. With the most sympathetic cooperation of officials, he collected the old man at the morgue and transferred him to a crematory.
When he left the crematory, he took the old man with him in an um. In the apartment he set the urn on a table in the living room and stood looking at it. He had developed for the old man, since the smash-up, a feeling of warm affection. In his heart there was no hard feeling, no lingering animosity. He found his parent in his present state, a handful of ashes, considerably more lovable than he had ever found him before. Besides, he had brought Frankie luck. In the end, in shame and violence and blood, he had brought him the luck he had never had.
Putting the old
