something to escape into: nepenthe, surcease: the project he had decreed for himself while at Harvard of translating the Old Testament back into the classic Greek of its first translating; after which he would teach himself Hebrew and really attain to purity; he had thought last night
So it was not even two-thirty when with no surprise really he found himself getting into his car and still no surprise when, entering the empty Sunday-afternoon Square, he saw Ratliff waiting at the foot of the office stairs, the two of them, in the office now, making no pretence as the clock crawled on to three. “What happened that we set exactly three oclock as the magic deadline in this here business?” Ratliff said.
“Does it matter?” Stevens said.
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “The main thing is not to jar or otherwise startle thatere thread.” Then the courthouse clock struck its three heavy mellow blows into the Sabbath somnolence and for the first time Stevens realised how absolutely he had not just expected, but known, that his telephone would not ring before that hour. Then in that same second, instant, he knew why it had not rung; the fact that it had not rung was more proof of what it would have conveyed than the message itself would have been.
“All right,” he said. “Mink is dead.”
“What?” Ratliff said.
“I dont know where, and it doesn’t matter. Because we should have known from the first that three hours of being free would kill him, let alone thre days of it.” He was talking rapidly, not babbling: “Dont you see? a little kinless tieless frail alien animal that never really belonged to the human race to start with, let alone belonged in it, then locked up in a cage for thirty-eight years and now at sixty-three years old suddenly set free, shoved, flung out of safety and security into freedom like a krait or a fer-de-lance that is quick and deadly dangerous as long as it can stay inside the man-made man-tended tropic immunity of its glass box, but wouldn’t live even through the first hour set free, flung, hoicked on a pitchfork or a pair of long-handled tongs into a city street?”
“Wait,” Ratliff said, “wait.”
But Stevens didn’t even pause. “Of course we haven’t heard yet where he was found or how or by whom identified because nobody cares; maybe nobody has even noticed him yet. Because he’s free. He can even die wherever he wants to now. For thirty-eight years until last Thursday morning he couldn’t have had a pimple or a hangnail without it being in a record five minutes later. But he’s free now. Nobody cares when or where or how he dies provided his carrion doesn’t get under somebody’s feet. So we can go home now, until somebody does telephone and you and Flem can go and identify him.”
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Well—”
“Give it up,” Stevens said. “Come on out home with me and have a drink.”
“We could go by first and kind of bring Flem up to date,” Ratliff said. “Maybe even he might take a dram then.”
“I’m not really an evil man,” Stevens said. “I wouldn’t have loaned Mink a gun to shoot Flem with; I might not even have just turned my head while Mink used his own. But neither am I going to lift my hand to interfere with Flem spending another day or two expecting any moment that Mink will.”
He didn’t even tell the Sheriff his conviction that Mink was dead. The fact was, the Sheriff told him; he found the Sheriff in his courthouse office and told him his and Ratliff’s theory of Mink’s first objective and the reason for it and that the Memphis police would still check daily the places where Mink might try to buy a weapon.
“So evidently he’s not in Memphis,” the Sheriff said. “That’s how many days now?”
“Since Thursday.”
“And he’s not in Frenchman’s Bend.”
“How do you know?”
“I drove out yesterday and looked around a little.”
“So you did believe me, after all,” Stevens said.
“I get per diem on my car,” the Sheriff said. “Yesterday was a nice day for a country drive. So he’s had four days now, to come a hundred miles. And he dont seem to be in Memphis. And I know he aint in Frenchman’s Bend. And according to you, Mr Snopes knows he aint in Jefferson here. Maybe he’s dead.” Whereupon, now that another had stated it, spoke it aloud, Stevens knew that he himself had never believed it, hearing without listening while the Sheriff went on: “A damned little rattlesnake that they say never had any friends to begin with and nobody out at the Bend knows what became of his wife and his two girls or even when they disappeared. To be locked up for thirty-eight years and then suddenly turned out like you do a cat at night, with nowhere to go and nobody really wanting him out. Maybe he couldn’t stand being free. Maybe just freedom killed him. I’ve known it to happen.”
“Yes,” Stevens said, “you’re probably right,” thinking quietly
“I know,” the Sheriff said. “I deputised two men at Varner’s store yesterday that claim they remember him, would know him again. And I can have Mr Snopes followed, watched back and forth to the bank. But dammit, watch for who, what, when, where? I cant put a man inside his house until he asks for it, can I? His daughter. Mrs Kohl. Maybe she could do something. You still dont want her to know?”
“You must give me your word,” Stevens said.
“All right,” the Sheriff said. “I suppose your Jackson buddy will let you know the minute the Memphis police get any sort of a line, wont he?”
“Yes,” Stevens said. Though the call didn’t come until Wednesday. Ratliff had rung him up a little after ten Tuesday night and told him the news, and on his way to the office this morning he passed the bank whose drawn shades would not be raised today, and as he stood at his desk with the telephone in his hand he could see through his front window the somber black-and-white-and-violet convolutions of tulle and ribbon and waxen asphodels fastened to the locked front door.
“He found a ten-dollar pistol,” the classmate’s voice said. “Early Monday morning. It wasn’t really a properly licensed pawnshop, so they almost missed it. But under a little … persuasion the proprietor recalled the sale. But he
