Selected Stories (59 page)

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m sick.”

“Of all the things to steal,” she said from the kitchenette. “Who do you suppose would do such a thing?”

Suddenly I knew who would. I cracked my fist into my palm and laughed.

“What’s the matter, you crazy?”

“Yes,” I said. “You got a phone?”

“No. Where you going?”

“Out. Goodbye, Charity.”

“Hey, now wait, honey. Just when I got coffee for you.” I snatched the door open. She caught my sleeve.

“You can’t go away like this! How’s about a little something for Charity?”

“You’ll get yours when you make the rounds tomorrow, if you don’t have a hangover from those sherry highballs,” I said cheerfully. “And don’t forget the five you swiped from the tip plate. Better watch out for that waiter, by the way. I think he saw you do it.”

“You’re not drunk!” she gasped.

“You’re not a witch,” I grinned. I blew her a kiss and ran out.

I shall always remember her like that, round-eyed, a little more astonished than she was resentful, the beloved dollar signs fading from her hot brown eyes, the pathetic, useless little twitch of her hips she summoned up as a last plea.

Every try to find a phone booth at five
A.M.
? I half-trotted nine blocks before I found a cab, and I was on the Queens side of the Triboro Bridge before I found a gas station open.

I dialed. The phone said, “Hello?”

“Kelley?” I roared happily. “Why didn’t you tell me? You’d ’a saved sixty bucks worth of the most dismal fun I ever—”

“This is Milton,” said the telephone. “Hal just died.”

My mouth was still open and I guess it just stayed that way. Anyway it was cold inside when I closed it. “I’ll be right over.”

“Better not,” said Milton. His voice was shaking with incomplete control. “Unless you really want to … there’s nothing you can do, and I’m going to be … busy.”

“Where’s Kelley?” I whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” I said. “Call me.”

I got back into my taxi and went home. I don’t remember the trip.

Sometimes I think I dreamed I saw Kelley that morning.

A lot of alcohol and enough emotion to kill it, mixed with no sleep for thirty hours, makes for blackout. I came up out of it reluctantly, feeling that this was no kind of world to be aware of. Not today.

I lay looking at the bookcase. It was very quiet. I closed my eyes, turned over, burrowed into the pillow, opened my eyes again and saw Kelley sitting in the easy chair, poured out in his relaxed feline fashion, legs too long, arms too long, eyes too long and only partly open.

I didn’t ask him how he got in because he was already in, and welcome. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to be the one to tell him about Hal. And besides I wasn’t awake yet. I just lay there.

“Milton told me,” he said. “It’s all right.”

I nodded.

Kelley said, “I read your story. I found some more and read them too. You got a lot of imagination.”

He hung a cigarette on his lower lip and lit it. “Milton, he’s got a lot of knowledge. Now, both of you think real good up to a point. Then too much knowledge presses him off to the no’theast. And too much imagination squeezes you off to the no’thwest.”

He smoked a while.

“Me, I think straight through but it takes me a while.”

I palmed my eyeballs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s okay,” he said quietly. “Look, I’m goin’ after what killed Hal.”

I closed my eyes and saw a vicious, pretty, empty little face. I said, “I was most of the night with Charity.”

“Were you now.”

“Kelley,” I said, “if it’s her you’re after, forget it. She’s a sleazy little tramp but she’s also a little kid who never had a chance. She didn’t kill Hal.”

“I know she didn’t. I don’t feel about her one way or the other. I know what killed Hal, though, and I’m goin’ after it the only way I know for sure.”

“All right then,” I said. I let my head dig back into the pillow. “What did kill him?”

“Milton told you about that doll Hal give her.”

“He told me. There’s nothing in that, Kelley. For a man to be a voodoo victim, he’s got to believe that—”

“Yeh, yeh, yeh. Milton told me. For hours he told me.”

“Well all right.”

“You got imagination,” Kelley said sleepily. “Now just imagine along with me a while. Milt tell you how some folks, if you point a gun at ’em and go bang, they drop dead, even if there was only blanks in the gun?”

“He didn’t, but I read it somewhere. Same general idea.”

“Now imagine all the shootings you ever heard of was like that, with blanks.”

“Go ahead.”

“You got a lot of evidence, a lot of experts, to prove about this believing business, ever’ time anyone gets shot.”

“Got it.”

“Now imagine somebody shows up with live ammunition in his gun. Do you think those bullets going to give a damn who believes what?”

I didn’t say anything.

“For a long time people been makin’ dolls and stickin’ pins in ’em. Wherever somebody believes it can happen, they get it. Now suppose somebody shows up with the doll all those dolls was copied from. The real one.”

I lay still.

“You don’t have to know nothin’ about it,” said Kelley lazily. “You don’t have to be anybody special. You don’t have to understand how it works. Nobody has to believe nothing. All you do, you just point it where you want it to work.”

“Point it how?” I whispered.

He shrugged. “Call the doll by a name. Hate it, maybe.”

“For God’s sake, Kelley, you’re crazy! Why, there can’t be anything like that!”

“You eat a steak,” Kelley said. “How’s your gut know what to take and what to pass? Do
you
know?”

“Some people know.”

“You don’t. But your gut does. So there’s lots of natural laws that are goin’ to work whether anyone understands ’em or not. Lots of sailors take a trick at the wheel without knowin’ how a steering engine works. Well, that’s me. I know where I’m goin’ and I know I’ll get there. What do I care how does it work, or who believes what?”

“Fine, so what are you going to do?”

“Get what got Hal.” His tone was just as lazy but his voice was very deep, and I knew when not to ask any more questions. Instead I said, with a certain amount of annoyance, “Why tell me?”

“Want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell no one what I just said for a while. And keep something for me.”

“What? And for how long?”

“You’ll know.”

I’d have risen up and roared at him if he had not chosen just that second to get up and drift out of the bedroom. “What gets me,” he said quietly from the other room, “is I could have figured this out six months ago.”

I fell asleep straining to hear him go out. He moves quieter than any big man I ever saw.

It was afternoon when I awoke. The doll was sitting on the mantelpiece glaring at me. Ugliest thing ever happened.

I saw Kelley at Hal’s funeral. He and Milt and I had a somber drink afterward. We didn’t talk about dolls. Far as I know Kelley shipped out right afterward. You assume that seamen do, when they drop out of sight. Milton was as busy as a doctor, which is very. I left the doll where it was for a week or two, wondering when Kelley was going to get around to his project. He’d probably call for it when he was ready. Meanwhile I respected his request and told no one about it. One day when some people were coming over I shoved it in the top shelf of the closet, and somehow it just got left there.

About a month afterward I began to notice the smell. I couldn’t identify it right away; it was too faint; but whatever it was, I didn’t like it. I traced it to the closet, and then to the doll. I took it down and sniffed it. My breath exploded out. It was that same smell a lot of people wish they could forget—what Milton called necrotic flesh. I came within an inch of pitching the filthy thing down the incinerator, but a promise is a promise. I put it down on the table, where it slumped repulsively. One of the legs was broken above the knee. I mean, it seemed to have two knee joints. And it was somehow puffy, sick-looking.

I had an old bell-jar somewhere, that once had a clock in it. I found it and a piece of inlaid linoleum, and put the doll under the jar at least so I could live with it.

I worked and saw people—dinner with Milton, once—and the days went by the way they do, and then one night it occurred to me to look at the doll again.

It was in pretty sorry shape. I’d tried to keep it fairly cool, but it seemed to be melting and running all over. For a moment I worried about what Kelley might say, and then I heartily damned Kelley and put the whole mess down in the cellar.

And I guess it was altogether two months after Hal’s death that I wondered why I’d assumed Kelley would have to call for the little horror before he did what he had to do. He said he was going to get what got Hal, and he intimated that the doll was that something.

Well, that doll was being got, but good. I brought it up and put it under the light. It was still a figurine, but it was one unholy mess. “Attaboy, Kelley,” I gloated. “Go get ’em, kid.”

Milton called me up and asked me to meet him at Rudy’s. He sounded pretty bad. We had the shortest drink yet.

He was sitting in the back booth chewing on the insides of his cheeks. His lips were gray and he slopped his drink when he lifted it.

“What in time happened to you?” I gasped.

He gave me a ghastly smile. “I’m famous,” he said. I heard his glass chatter against his teeth. He said, “I called in so many consultants on Hal Kelley that I’m supposed to be an expert on that—on that … condition.” He forced his glass back to the table with both hands and held it down. He tried to smile and I wished he wouldn’t. He stopped trying and almost whispered, “I can’t nurse one of ’em like that again. I can’t.”

“You going to tell what happened?” I asked harshly. That works sometimes.

“Oh, oh yes. Well they brought in a … another one. At General. They called me in. Just like Hal. I mean
exactly
like Hal. Only I won’t have to nurse this one, no I won’t, I won’t have to. She died six hours after she arrived.”

“She?”

“You know what you’d have to do to someone to make them look like that?” he said shrilly. “You’d have to tie off parts so they mortified. You’d have to use a wood rasp, maybe; a club; filth to rub into the wounds. You’d have to break bones in a vise.”

“All right, all right, but nobody—”

“And you’d have to do that for about two months, every day, every night.” He rubbed his eyes. He drove his knuckles in so hard that I caught at his wrists. “I
know
nobody did it; did I say anyone did it?” he barked. “Nobody did anything to Hal, did they?”

“Drink up.”

He didn’t. He whispered, “She just said the same thing over and over every time anyone talked to her. They’d say, ‘What happened?’ or ‘Who did this to you?’ or ‘What’s your name?’ and she’d say, ‘He called me Dolly’ That’s all she’d say, just ‘He called me Dolly.’”

I got up. “Bye, Milt.”

He looked stricken. “Don’t go, will you, you just got—”

“I got to go,” I said. I didn’t look back. I had to get out and ask myself some questions. Think.

Who’s guilty of murder, I asked myself, the one who pulls the trigger, or the gun?

I thought of a poor damn pretty, empty little face with greedy hot brown eyes, and what Kelley said, “I don’t care about her one way or the other.”

I thought, when she was twisting and breaking and sticking, how did it look to the doll? Bet she never even wondered about that.

I thought, action: A girl throws a fan at a man. Reaction: The man throws the girl at the fan. Action: A wheel sticks on a shaft. Reaction: Knock the shaft out of the wheel. Situation: We can’t get inside. Resolution: Take the outside off it.

It’s a way of thinking.

How do you kill a person? Use a doll.

How do you kill a doll?

Who’s guilty, the one who pulls the trigger, or the gun?

“He called me Dolly.”

“He called me Dolly.”

“He called me Dolly.”

When I got home the phone was ringing. “Hi,” said Kelley.

I said, “It’s all gone. The doll’s all gone, Kelley.” I said, “stay away from me.”

“All right,” said Kelley.

S
AY YOU’RE A KID,
and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast
witchy-witchy-witchy.
You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination timepiece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even
try
to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.

His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later … forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you
knew
that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did. … Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now.