Killdozer! (11 page)

“I guess it does. You do reach in and get the truth at times, old man.”

The letter from Iola was waiting for me when I got back home.

I read it over once and tried to read it again because, somehow, I couldn’t see so well. Then I dove for the phone, and thought about the revolver, and turned my back on it. Oh, she’d do it—I knew her.

Then I went out.

Henry found me. Maybe it was three weeks later, maybe four. I didn’t know because I didn’t give a damn. I was sitting on a bench with a couple of other gentlemen.

“Go away. You’re Henry. I remember you. Go away, Henry.”

“Gus! Get up out of that! You’re drunk! Come home with me, Gus.”

One of the other gentlemen back-slid to the extent of taking some of Henry’s money for helping Henry get me home. Once there, I slept the clock around.

Henry woke me, sponging my face with warm water. “Lost thirty pounds or more,” he was muttering. “Filthy rags—ten-day beard—”

“You know what happened to me,” I said, as if that excused and explained everything.

“Yes, I know what happened to you,” he roared. “You lost your cotton-headed filly. And did you stand up and take it? No! You lay down and let yourself get kicked like the jelly-bellied no-good you are!”

“But she wouldn’t—”

“I know, I know. She refused to see you any more. That’s got nothing to do with it. You’re wound up with her—finished. And you tried to run away. You tried to escape into filth and rotgut liquor. Don’t you realize that you do nothing that way but burn up what’s clean in you and leave all that’s rotten, with the original wound festering in the middle of it?”

I turned my face to the wall, but I couldn’t stop his voice. “Get up and bathe and shave and eat a decent meal! Try to act like a human being until you can give as good an imitation as you used to.”

“No,” I said thickly.

Suddenly he was on his knees by the bed, an arm across my shoulders. “Stop your blubbering,” he said gently. “Gus—you’re a grown
man now.” He sat back on his haunches, frowning and breathing too deeply. Suddenly he rolled me over on my back, began slapping my face with his right hand, back and front, back and front, over and over and over.

And then something snapped inside me and I reared up off the bed and sent a whistling roundhouse at him. He ducked under it and jarred me with a left to the temple. And then we went to work. I was big and emaciated, and he was little and inspired. It was quite a show. It ended with him stretched out on the carpet.

“Thanks, Gus,” he grinned weakly.

“Why’d you get me so riled up? Why’d you make me hit you?”

“Applied psychology,” he said, getting up groggily. I helped him.

I felt my swollen nose. “I thought psychology was brain stuff!”

“Listen, pal. You and I are going to straighten old Gus out for good. You’ve got something deep inside that hurts—right? What did you see in that white-headed babe, anyway?”

“She’s … she’s … I just can’t get along without her.”

“You got slushy. I think your taste is lousy.” Henry’s eyes were narrowed and he teetered on the balls of his feet. He knew when he was treading on thin ice, but he was going through with this. “What do you see in an anemic-looking wretch like that? Give me nice, firm, rosy girls with some blood in their veins.
Heh!
Her, with her white hair and white skin and two great big black holes for eyes. She looks like a ghost! She isn’t worth—”

I roared and charged. He stepped nimbly out of the way. I charged right past him and into the bathroom. “Where’s your razor?” I shouted. “Where’s the soap?” And I dove into the shower.

When I came out of the bathroom and started climbing into some clothes, he demanded an explanation. “What did I say? What did I do?” He was hopping exultantly from one foot to the other.

“You said it a long while back,” I said. “So did Beatrice Dix. Something about, ‘He’ll annoy you just as long as he finds the girl attractive.’ ” I laced the second shoe, demanded some money, and pounded out before I had the sentence well finished.

I rang somebody else’s bell at the apartment house and when the buzzer burped at me I headed for the stairs. I rang Iola’s bell and
waited breathlessly. The knob turned and I crowded right in. She was drawing a negligee about her. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

“Gus!” She drew back, turned and ran to a lamp table. “Oh, you
fool!
Why do you have to make it harder for us?” She moved so fast I couldn’t stop her. She had the gun in her hand.

“Hold on, you little dope!” I roared. “That may be a way out, but you’re not going out alone. We’re going together!”

“Gus—”

“And doing it together we’re not doing it that way! Give me that thing!” I strode across the room, lifted it out of her hand. I opened the magazine, took the barrel in one hand and the butt in the other and twisted them apart, throwing the pieces at her feet. “Now get in there and get dressed. We’ve got things to do!” She hesitated, and I pushed her roughly toward the bedroom. “One of us is going to dress you,” I said somberly.

She squeaked and moved. I tramped up and down the living room, gleefully kicking the broken gun on every trip. She was ready in about four minutes; she came out frightened and puzzled and radiant. I took her wrist and dragged her out of the apartment. As soon as we passed under the garlic on the door, my skin began to tingle, then to itch, and suddenly I felt that I was a mass of open, festering sores. And on top of this came the slime again. I gritted my teeth and sluiced down my pain with sheer exultation.

We piled into a taxi and I gave an address. When Iola asked questions I laughed happily. We pulled up at a curb and I paid off the driver. “Go in there,” I said.

“A beauty parlor! But what—”

I pushed her in. A white-uniformed beautician came forward timidly. I took a strand of Iola’s white hair and tossed it. “Dye this,” I said. “Dye it black!”

“Gus!” gasped Iola. “You’re mad! I don’t
want
to be a brunette! I haven’t the coloring for—”

“Coloring? You know what kind of coloring you have, with those big black holes of eyes and that white skin and hair?
You look like a ghost!
Don’t you see? That’s why he hounded you! That’s why he loved you and was jealous of you!”

Her eyes got very bright. She looked in a mirror and said, “Gus—you remember that summer I told you about, when he first spoke to me? I was wearing a long white dress—white shoes—”

“Get in there and be a brunette,” I growled. The operator took her.

I settled down into a big chair to wait. I was suffering a thousand different agonies, a hundred different kinds of torments. Pains and horrid creeping sensations flickered over my body the way colors shift on a color-organ. I sat there taking it, and taking it, and then I heard the operator’s voice from the back of the studio. “There you are, ma’am. All done. Look in there—how do you like it?”

And deep within me I almost heard a sound like a snort of disgust, and then there was a feeling like an infinite lightening of pressure. And then my body was fresh and whole again, and the ghostly pains were gone.

Iola came out and flung her arms around my neck. As a brunette she was stunning.

Henry Gade was our best man.

D
ONZEY CAME TO
the door with a pair of side-cutting pliers in his hand and soldering flux smeared on the side of his jaw. “Oh—Farrel. Come in.”

“Hi, Donzey.” The town’s police force ducked his head under the doorway and followed the mechanic through a littered living room into what had once been a pantry. It was set up as a workshop, complete with vises, a power lathe, a small drill press and row upon row of tools. It was a great deal neater than the living room. By the window was a small table on which was built an extraordinarily complicated radio set which featured a spherical antenna and more tubes and transformers and condensers than a small-town bicycle repairman can be expected to buy and still eat. Farrel added a stick of gum to his already oversize wad and stared at it.

“That it?” he asked.

“That’s it,” said Donzey proudly. He sat down beside the table and picked up an electric soldering iron. “She ought to work this time,” he said, holding the iron close to his cheek to see if it were hot enough.

“And I used to think FM was the initials of a college,” said Farrel.

“Not in radio,” said Donzey. The lump of solder in his hand slumped into glittering fluidity, sealed a joint. “And this is a different kind of frequency modulation, too. This is the set that’s going to make us some real money, Farrel.”

“Yeah,” said the sheriff without enthusiasm. He was thinking of the irrepressible Donzey’s flotation motor, that was supposed to use the power developed by a chain of hollow balls floating to the top of a tank; of his ingenious plan for zoning highways by disappearing concrete walls between the lanes—a swell idea only somebody else had patented it. Also there was a little matter of a gun which
could be set to fire thirty bullets at any interval between a fifth of a second to thirty minutes. Only nobody wanted it. Donzey was as unsuccessful as he was enthusiastic. He kept body and soul indifferently together only because he had infinite powers of persuasion. He could sell one of his ideas to the proverbial brass monkey—more; he could get a man like Farrel to invest capital in an idea like his directional FM transmitter. His basic principle was a signal beamed straight up, which would strike the Heaviside layer and bounce
almost
straight down, thus being receivable only in the receiver at which it was aimed. Donzey had got the idea over at the pool parlor. If you could aim an eight-ball at a six-ball, off the cushion, you ought to be able to aim a signal from the transmitter to the receiver, off the Heaviside layer. The thing would be handy as a wireless field telephone for military liaison.

Of course, Donzey knew little about radio. But he always worked on the theory that logic was as good or better than book-learning. His mind was as incredibly facile as his stubby fingers. What it lacked in exactitude it made up for in brilliance. Seeing the wiring on the set, an electrical engineer would have sighed and asked Donzey if he was going to put tomato sauce on all that spaghetti. Donzey would have called the engineer a hidebound conservative. Because of Donzey’s pragmatic way of working, the world will never know the wiring diagram of that set. Donzey figured that if it worked he could build more like it. If it didn’t, who cared how it was made?

Donzey laid the soldering iron on the bed it had charred out for itself on the workbench, brushed back his wiry black hair without effect, and announced that he was ready. “She may not work just yet,” he said, plugging the set in and holding his breath for a moment in silent prayer until he was sure that the fuse was not going to blow. “But then again she might.” When the tubes began to glow, he cut in the loudspeaker. It uttered a horrifying roar; he tuned it down to a hypnotic hum.

Farrel folded himself into a chair and stared glumly at the proceedings, wondering whether or not he would ever get his twenty-eight dollars and sixty cents out of this contraption. Donzey switched off the speaker and handed him a headset. “Put these on and see what you get.”

Farrel clamped the phones over his ears and tried to look bored. Donzey went back to his knobs and dials.

“Anything yet?”

“Yeah.” Farrel shifted his cud. “It howls like a houn’ dawg.”

Donzey grunted and put a finger on one phone connection and a thumb on the other. Farrel swore and snatched off the headset. “What you tryin’ to do,” he growled, rubbing a large, transparent ear, “make me deef?”

“Easy with the phones, son.” Donzey was fifteen years younger than the sheriff, but he could say “son” and make it stick. “Phone condenser’s shot. And that’s the last .00035 I have. Got to rig up something. Wait a minute.” He flew out of the room.

Farrel sighed and walked over to the window. Donzey was locally famous for the way he “rigged things up.” He rigged up a supercharger for the municipal bandit-chaser which really worked, once you got used to its going backward in second gear. Farrel was not at all surprised to see Donzey out in the yard, busily rummaging through the garbage can.

He entered the room a moment later, unabashedly blowing the marrow out of a section of mutton bone. “Got a cigarette?” he said, wiping his mouth. Farrel dourly handed over a pack. Donzey ripped it open, spilling the smokes over the workbench. He stripped off the tinfoil, tore it in half, and after cleaning up the bone inside and out with Farrel’s handkerchief, poked some of the foil into the bone and wrapped it carefully in the other piece. “Presto,” he said. “A condenser.”

“My handkerchief—” began Farrel.

“You’ll be able to buy yourself a trainload of ’em when we put this on the market,” said Donzey with superb confidence. He busily connected the outside layer of tinfoil to one phone plug and the inside wad to the other. “Now,” he said, handing the earphones to the sheriff, “that ought to do it. I’m sending from this key. There’s no connection between transmitter and receiver. The signal’s going straight up—I hope. It should come straight down.”

“But I don’t know that dit-dot stuff,” said Farrel, putting on the headset nevertheless.

“Don’t have to,” said Donzey. “I’ll play “Turkey in the Straw.” You ought to recognize that.”