Knight's Gambit (22 page)

Yet he had made a little something resembling an attempt (and he thought a little better of it for the very fact that remembering he had done so gave him no comfort). There was Captain Warren, a farmer a few miles from town, who had been a flight commander in the old Royal Flying Corps before it became the RAF; he had gone to see him that day going on two years ago now when he was only just past sixteen.

‘If I could get to England some way, they would take me, wouldn’t they?’ he said.

‘Sixteen’s a little young. And getting to England’s a little hard to do too now.’

‘But they would take me if I could get there, wouldn’t they?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Captain Warren said. Then Captain Warren said, ‘Look. There’s plenty of time. There’ll be plenty and more for all of us before it’s over. Why not wait?’

So he did. He waited too long. He could tell himself that he had done that at the advice of a hero, which at least did this much for the heart’s thirst: having accepted and followed it from a hero would forever prevent his forgetting that, no matter how deficient he might be in courage, at least he wasn’t in shame.

Because it was too late now. In fact, as far as the United States was concerned, it had never begun at all and so all it would cost the United States was just money: which, his uncle said, was the cheapest thing you could spend or lose: which was why civilization invented it: to be the one substance man could shop with and have a bargain in whatever he bought.

So apparently the whole purpose of the draft had been merely to establish a means for his uncle to identify Max Harriss, and since the identification of Max Harriss had accomplished no more than the interruption of a chess-game and a sixty-cent telephone toll to Memphis, even that was not worth its cost.

So he went to bed and to sleep; tomorrow was Friday so he would not have to put on the pseudo khaki in order to shed the brown and, for another week, the heart’s thirst, if that’s what it was. And he ate breakfast; his uncle had already eaten and gone, and he stopped at his uncle’s office on the way to school to pick up the notebook he had left yesterday, and Max Harriss wasn’t in Memphis; the wire came from Mr Markey while he was still in the office:

and he was still there while his uncle told the boy to wait and wrote the answer:

and so that was that too; he thought that was all; when he came back at noon to where his uncle waited on the corner to walk home to dinner, he didn’t even think to ask; it was his uncle who voluntarily told him how Mr Markey had even telephoned and said how Harriss seemed to be well known not only to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters in the Greenbury, but to all the liquor stores and taxi-drivers in that part of town too, and that he, Mr Markey, had even tried the other hotels just on the impossible supposition that there was one Mississippian who had heard there were others in Memphis.

So he said, like Mr Markey: ‘Now what?’

‘I dont know,’ his uncle said. ‘I would like to believe that he had dusted the whole lot of them from his feet and was a good five hundred miles away by now, and still travelling, except that I wouldn’t asperse him either behind his back with an accusation of judgment.’

‘Maybe he has,’ he said.

His uncle stopped walking.

‘What?’ his uncle said.

‘You just said last night that people nineteen years old are capable of anything.’

‘Oh,’ his uncle said. ‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘Of course,’ his uncle said, walking on again. ‘Maybe he has.’

And that was all: eating his dinner: walking back with his uncle as far as the office corner: in school that afternoon, through the history class which Miss Melissa Hogganbeck now called World Affairs with capitals on both, which, coming twice a week, should have been worse for the heart’s thirst than the inevitable next Thursdays when he would have to tote the brown again—the sabre and the pastless shoulder-pips—and posture through the spurious the straight-faced the make-believe of command, but which was not at all: the tireless cultured educated ‘lady’s’ voice talking with a kind of frantic fanaticism of peace and security: of how we were safe because the old worn-out nations of Europe had learned their lesson too well in 1918; they not only did not dare outrage us, they couldn’t even afford to, until the world’s whole staggering and savage mass was reduced to that weightless interminable murmuring not even echoed within the isolate insulate dusty walls of a prep-school classroom and having a hundred times less connection with any reality than even the sword and the pips. Because at least the sabre and pips were a make-believe of what they parodied, while to Miss Hogganbeck the whole establishment of national R.O.T.C. was an inescapable inexplicable phenomenon of the edifice of education, like the necessity for having children in the junior courses.

And it was still all even when he had seen the horse. It was in a muddy horse-van standing in an alley behind the square when he passed after school, with a half dozen men standing around looking at the van from a definitely respectful distance, and only afterward did he actually see the horse shackled into the van not with ropes but with steel chains as if it were a lion or an elephant. Because he hadn’t really looked at the van yet. In fact, he hadn’t even got as far as affirming, accepting that there was a horse in it, because at that moment he saw Mr Rafe McCallum himself coming up the alley and he crossed the street to speak to him because he and his uncle would go out to the McCallum farm fifteen miles from town to shoot quail in season, and, until they enlisted last summer, he used to go out there by himself to spend the night in the woods or the creek bottom running fox or coon with the twin McCallum nephews.

So he recognised the horse, not by seeing it, because he had never seen it, but by seeing Mr McCallum. Because everybody in the county knew the horse or knew about it—a stallion of first blood and pedigree but absolutely worthless; they—the county—said that this was the only time in his life that Mr McCallum had ever been beaten in a horse-trade, even if had bought this one with tobacco- or soap-coupons.

It had been ruined either as a colt or a young horse, probably by some owner who had tried to break its spirit by fear or violence. Only its spirit had refused to break, so that all it had got from whatever the experience had been, was a hatred for anything walking upright on two legs, something like that abhorrence and rage and desire to destroy it which some humans feel for even harmless snakes.

It was unrideable and unmanageable even for breeding. It was said to have killed two men who just happened to get on the same side of a fence with it. Though this was not very probable, or the horse would have been destroyed. But Mr McCallum was supposed to have bought it because its owner wanted to destroy it. Or maybe he believed he could tame it. Anyway, he always denied that it had ever killed anyone, so at least he must have thought he could sell it, since no horse was ever quite as bad as the man who bought it claimed, or as good as the man who sold it contended.

But Mr McCallum knew that it could kill a man, and the county believed that he thought it would. For although he would go into the lot where it was (though never into a stall or pen where it would be cornered), he would never let anyone else do it; and it was said that once a man had offered to buy it from him, but he had refused. Which had an apocryphal sound too, since Mr McCallum said himself that he would sell anything which couldn’t stand up on its hind legs and call his name, because that was his business.

So here was the horse roped and chained and blanketed into a horse-box fifteen miles from its home paddock, and so he said to Mr McCallum:

‘You finally sold it.’

‘I hope so,’ Mr McCallum said. ‘A horse aint ever sold until the new stall door is shut behind it though. Sometimes not even then.’

‘But at least it’s on the way,’ he said.

‘At least it’s on the way,’ Mr McCallum said.

Which didn’t mean much, didn’t mean anything in fact except that Mr McCallum would have to hurry like billy-O just to prove he hadn’t even sold it. Which would be in the dark and a good while into it: four oclock now, and anyone who had engaged to buy that horse would have to have lived a long way off not to have heard about it.

Then he thought how anybody who bought that horse would live too far away to be reached in just one daylight even if it were the twenty-second of June, let alone the fifth of December, so maybe it didn’t matter what time Mr McCallum started, and so he went on to his uncle’s office and that was all except the postscript and even that was not too long away; his uncle had the practice brief all laid out for him on the desk and the list of references beside it and he got to work and it seemed almost at once when the light began to fail and he switched on the desk lamp and then the telephone rang. The girl’s voice was already talking when he lifted the receiver and it never did stop, so that it was a second or two before he could recognise it:

‘Hello! Hello! Mr Stevens! He was here! Nobody even knew it! He just left! They called me from the garage and I ran down and he was already in the car with the engine running and he said if you want to see him, to be on your corner in five minutes; he said he wouldn’t be able to come up to your office, for you to be on the corner in five minutes if you want to see him, otherwise you can call and maybe get an appointment with him at the Greenbury hotel tomorrow—’ and still talking when his uncle came in and took the receiver and listened for a moment, and probably still talking even after his uncle put the receiver back up.

‘Five minutes?’ his uncle said. ‘Six miles?’

‘You never saw him drive,’ he said. ‘He’s probably already crossing the Square.’

But that would be a little too fast even for that one. He and his uncle went down to the street and stood on the corner in the cold dusk for what seemed like ten minutes to him, until at last he began to believe that here was some more of the same hurrah and hokum and uproar they had been in the middle of or at least on the edge of, since last night, in which the last thing they would expect would be not only what they might have expected, but what they had been warned to look for.

But they did see him. They heard the car, the horn: the heel of the Harriss boy’s palm on the button or maybe he had simply reached inside the dash or the hood and jerked the ground connection loose, and probably if the boy was thinking about anything at all then, he was being sorry he didn’t have an old-time muffler cutout. And he, Charles, thought of Hampton Killegrew, the night marshal, running out of the pool room or the Allnite Inn or wherever he would be at this time and already too late too, the car howling and wailing up the street toward the Square with all the lights burning, parking driving and fog, then blatting and crashing between the brick walls and the street narrowed into the Square; and afterward he remembered a cat leaping in silhouette across the rushing lights, looking ten feet long one second then the next one high and narrow as a fleeing fence post.

But luckily there wasn’t anybody else but him and his uncle at the crossing and the boy saw them then, the lights swinging down at them as if he was going to drive right up onto the curb. Then they swung away at the last second and he could have touched the boy—the face, the teeth glinting in it—as the car shot past into the Square and crossed it and slewed skidding, the tires squealing against the pavement, into the Memphis highway, the horn and the tires and the engine growing fainter and fainter, until at last he and his uncle could even hear Hampton Killegrew running toward the corner cursing and yelling.

‘Did you pull the door to?’ his uncle said.

‘Yes sir,’ he said.

‘Then let’s go home to supper,’ his uncle said. ‘You can stop at the telegraph office on the way.’

So he stopped in the telegraph office and sent the wire to Mr Markey exactly as his uncle had worded it:

He is now Greenbury tonight use police per request Jefferson chief if necessary

and came out and overtook his uncle at the next corner.

‘Why the police now?’ he said. ‘I thought you said—’

‘To escort him on through Memphis toward wherever he is going,’ his uncle said. ‘In any direction except back here.’

‘But why is he going anywhere?’ he said. ‘You said last night that the last place he will want to be is out of sight; the last place he will want to be is where nobody can see him, until after his joke—’

‘Then I was wrong,’ his uncle said. ‘I maligned him too. Apparently I attributed to nineteen not only more ingenuity than it is capable of, but even malice too. Come along. You’re late. You’ve not only got to eat supper, you’ve got to get back to town.’

‘To the office?’ he said. ‘The telephone? Cant they call you at home? Besides, if he’s not even going to stop in Memphis, what will they have to telephone you about—’

‘No,’ his uncle said. ‘To the picture show. And before you can ask that, the reason is, that’s the one place where nobody nineteen or twenty-one named Harriss nor going on eighteen named Mallison either, can talk to me. I’m going to work. I shall spend the evening in the company of scoundrels and felons who have not only the courage of their evil, but the competence for it too.’

He knew what that meant: the Translation. So he didn’t even go to his uncle’s sittingroom. And his uncle left the supper table first, so he didn’t see him again.

And if he, Charles, hadn’t gone to the picture show, he wouldn’t have seen his uncle at all that evening: eating his supper without haste since there was plenty of time despite his uncle and only his uncle seemed to want to avoid the human race: walking still without haste, since there was still plenty of time, through the cold vivid dark toward the Square and the picture show, not knowing what he was going to see and not even caring; it might be another war picture he was walking toward and it didn’t even matter, thinking remembering how once a war picture should, ought, to have been the worst thing of all for the heart’s thirst to have to endure, except that it was not, since there lay between the war movie and Miss Hogganbeck’s world events a thousand times even the insuperable distance which lay between Miss Hogganbeck’s world events and the R.O.T.C. pips and the sword: thinking how if the human race could just pass all its time watching moving pictures, there would be no more wars nor any other man-made anguishes, except for the fact that man couldn’t spend that much time watching moving pictures since boredom was the one human passion that movies couldn’t cope with and man would have to spend at least eight hours a day watching them since he would have to sleep for another eight and his uncle said the only other thing man could stand for eight continuous hours was work.