The Captive (5 page)

"I've been waiting for you too," she said.

"What about ...?"

"He's not really with us anymore," she said.

Barry watched her closed eyes. They moved lightly, as if she were dreaming a slow dream. As he watched, the lashes slowly grew bright and tears began to form around the closed lids. She squeezed her eyes tighter and rolled harder against him so that he held her closer.

"I'm not a bitch," she said.

"I know you aren't."

"I've never done this." She stopped. "That sounds so common," she said.

"I believe you."

"It's just that," and she opened her eyes and looked at him with the lashes wet, the eyes bright with tears. "You are so much what I had been wanting, so like a dream that I've had since our marriage, since Bill, I mean since I knew it would all go to hell sometime, or already had in spite of everything."

"I think there must be something in each of us that needs the other," he said, and meant it so deeply that there was even an agreeing silence from that power more deeply inside him than he could reach with his conscious volition.

"I know people will say I should have done something more," she said.

He thought at first she was being self-excusing, but then her tone caught him.

"I didn't want to do more." She sounded very solidly determined. "He lost his job and wouldn't look for another one. Finally took this thing he's doing now and hating, and he wanted to hate it. I think he wanted to hate me too, us too."

It did not sound as though she were either blaming Bill or excusing herself, more like a simple recitation of fact than an attempted justification. With some surprise he listened to her quiet comments, realizing she was wholly justified in her own eyes because what she wanted seemed inalterably right. There was none of the faltering of aim or the wasted motion of fantasies and the building up of resentment to feed upon. She was, he thought, feeling the Beast's emotion as his own, that dark past as his own, the most straightforward human he had ever met.

"It's going to take some doing," Barry said, feeling the determination of his own life beginning to reach past the present moment into a future that had to include Renee and Mina.

"Yes, I know it will be terrible for a while," she said. She put her arms around him again. "But I know we will do it, no matter if it takes half the kingdom." She kissed him softly on the lips, and he felt she was right. It would be an awful mess, but it would be done, and they would always be  together. If it meant half the kingdom.

When he walked out the back door later, Barry felt more than the satiety he had felt before from sex. There was a new determination in him now that put purpose and future into each thought, each step, as by each passing minute they built toward a real future. It would be, of course, far more complex than Renee could imagine. But it would be done. He walked on down the street toward the boulevard where he would catch a bus back into town. He turned once and looked back at Renee and Mina standing in the grass of their front yard, holding hands and looking after him. He waved, and Renee waved, and then Mina raised her little hand too.

He had been thinking hard about the multitude of details that would have to be settled, arranged. He stepped off the curb several blocks on and heard the screech of car tires around the corner. He stepped back on the curb, startled, to let the car go by, but it rocked to a stop directly in front of him. It was a long black sedan, several years old and in bad shape by the sound of it. Barry looked at the driver as he reached across and pushed the door open. It was Bill Hegel, of course.

"Well, if it isn't
Mister
Golden, taking a walk in our neighborhood. Isn't that a coincidence." He sat hunched over the wheel, glaring out at the other man through his smile. "How about if we go somewhere and have a drink,
Mister
Golden?"

Barry got into the car. "I don't mind, Bill. I was just at your house making arrangements for going clown to Cassius this weekend." The old car smelled of whiskey and the dusty tan upholstery. Bill wheeled around in a U-turn at the corner and headed back into town. He was already driving too fast, and his head hung forward at an angle. Barry  wondered how far into drunkenness he was.

"Renee said she thought this Saturday would be all right with you," he began, not wanting to ride with the man in silence.

"Oh now it's 'Renee,' not Mrs. Hegel anymore, ha?" And he laughed until he coughed around the cigarette in his mouth.

"There's a good looking spot," Barry said, pointing to a restaurant as it flew by.

"Nah. I know a better place over on Twentieth Street. Good Old Fashioneds."

"I'm not really in the mood for a drink, Bill," he said, not really caring, but trying anyway. "How about a cup of coffee?"

"Can't handle the sauce, hah, Mister Golden?"

"That's, right," he said, beginning to tire of this. "I don't drink very well."

"But you do other things
very
well, don't you
Mister
Golden?"

Barry said nothing and gave it up until they had skidded to a stop in the parking lot of a bar called the Rustic Inn. Inside it was gloomy, with only the bartender behind the bar clearly in the light. As they stumbled to a booth, he began to see a few other people. It was probably no more than four-thirty in the afternoon, and they were the only people in a booth.

When Bill had downed half of the drink the bartender had brought, he seemed ready. His square face with the straight black brows across the sunken eyes looked at Barry steadily for a moment, and then he smiled slyly.

"I bet you specialize in marks like my wife."

"I don't know what you mean."

"You're a con man, Mister Golden. I'm not your  innocent hayseed that can't see a swindle under his own nose. You know what I do for a living now?"

"I can't imagine," Barry said, not really meaning to sound insulting.

"I chase deadbeats." And when the other looked  obviously blank, "I collect bad debts from skippers, bums." He paused and smiled his sly smile again. "And drunks."

"And what is my racket? How am I going to get money out of you?"

"Not me," he said, finishing the drink in one long gulp. "My wife."

"Are you always so suspicious of strangers?"

"I don't like people that come into my house and start makin' googoo eyes at my wife. Yeah." He banged his hand on the table, waved two fingers at the bartender.

"This is ridiculous, Mr. Hegel," Barry said. "I'm here trying to find out about my poor brother's little boy - who was here, even though it was a year ago - and it looks like I've stepped into the middle of your marital problems." He studied the husband, wondering if he would break, if he would throw a punch, or perhaps pull a knife when they went out the door. He did not seem dangerous to anyone but himself, his eyes sunken in dimness, his mouth with a small quiver at the left corner. And it was not time yet to talk seriously, even if Bill had been able to. The bartender brought a double shot and set it carefully on the table,  standing at Barry's elbow as if waiting for some sign from Bill Hegel.

"Hey, Vernon," Bill said, pulling the glass over squarely in front of him and turning it slowly with two fingers. "Do you think this guy looks a little like John Dillinger?"

The bartender stepped back a pace to look at Barry, smiled and shook his head. "Hair's the wrong color, and he ain't got the upper lip for it."

"Well, he's a crook anyway," Bill said. "Same as Baby Face Nelson, or Machine Gun Kelly or Dillinger."

"Dillinger never killed nobody," the bartender said. "He wasn't no hood like those other guys. You ought to know that, Mr. Hegel." He looked at Bill with a patronizing air, perhaps recognizing a degree of drunkenness that Barry as a stranger could not see. Bill might have been drinking all afternoon, Barry thought, looking more closely at the set of his head and the unsteady hand that raised the double shot and poured it in one great gulp down his throat. Barry  shuddered at the spasm in the other man's face as the whiskey went down.

"Mr. Hegel," the bartender said softly. "You always want me to let you know when it's gettin' late. Well, it's about five." He stood for a minute watching the man whose head was down now, his whole body shaking as with a chill. Then he saw another customer motioning to him, and he shrugged and walked back over behind the bar.

"Misfits in the new order will be eliminated," Bill said. His face seemed to be sagging away from his eyes as he glared across at his enemy. Barry said nothing, wondering what he was quoting. It sounded like a quote.

His big, trembling hand reached across the table and  fastened on Barry's. It was a cold, sweaty hand, and it tried clumsily to squeeze the other man's fingers together.

"I'd like to take," he said in a grating whisper, "and tie you on the nearest railroad track." He grinned, and Barry saw froth in the corners of his mouth. "And listen to you spout that innocent shit while the Chicago Limited is coming down the track." He reared back, letting go of the hand, his face disappearing as he leaned away from the light.

"Whoooooooeee!" he roared. "Right down the track!"

Barry thought about walking out and looked around the bar, but no one was taking any notice. What could he say to this maniac? Did he have to feel sorry for the husband to complete the act of adultery? The square white face  descended again into the light, this legal husband. Barry watched the husband's drunken rage creating itself, each muscle pulling into place to make a scowl of hate. In a  second or two he will try to attack, probably fall on his face, Barry thought, and I will drive him home. Or was he less drunk than he seemed?

And then things began to move. Hegel stood up, knocking his head on the hanging light, reached for Barry with both hands, his mouth twisted, teeth bared like a vicious dog. The smaller man knocked aside the drunken grasp and swung a long punch from out in the aisle. It hit Bill Hegel high on the cheek, smacking him into the wall so that his head hit with a solid crack, and he slid down limply into the booth. The light over the table swung back and forth, his white, helpless face moving in and out of the glare. Barry pulled him upright, laid him across the table and looked up to catch the bartender standing tense in the bright lights behind the bar.

"You have to do that?" he said. One hand was beneath the bar holding something.

"We're old buddies," Barry said. "Last time he hauled me home."

"I thought he had too much," the bartender said. He didn't want to be involved. "He usually does," he said grinning.

"I'll take him home to Renee," Barry said, hauling at the big man. He got one arm over his shoulder and got a grip on Bill's belt with his other hand. "She'll know what to do," he said, giving the bartender a wink as he staggered by.

Hegel was a big brute, and Barry wished as he sweated in the late afternoon sun trying to stuff the man into the back seat of the old Chevrolet that he could shift and let the Beast toss him into the car like a sack of feed. And then driving the unfamiliar old car with the big wooden steering wheel he wondered at his care of this fool. It would be easy to park somewhere until nightfall, drive the car onto the  railroad tracks at some lonely crossing, let the train simplify things - Hegel's own idea, after all. And then Barry could step into his place as Renee's husband, live a real life. A shiver of pleasure ran over him as the plan in its practical simplicity began to appeal to that pragmatic power inside him. But there was also the utter wrongness of that act, the human feeling that was at this point stronger than these deeper promptings. How easy it would be, and yet Barry would not consent to such an act. The satisfactions of newly wakened love were too close, too overwhelming as he  remembered them. He felt a new tenderness, a gathering  heroism that was almost like a kid might feel for his first girl, a knighthood sort of feeling. It felt like a weakness. It was too sudden for him to make the decision that would remove this man from his life. The morality of the thing has to be considered, Barry thought, waiting for a traffic light. It was only some minutes later that he realized he had turned left instead of right, that he was heading out of town instead of toward Hegel's house. Perhaps there was time to think about this before he committed himself, and incidentally this unconscious man, to an irrevocable fact. He felt inside  himself the ruminations of that power and its direct course to what it wanted. It wanted what Barry wanted, the love of the woman, for whatever obscure reasons such a creature might have. A widow was much easier to marry than a wife, it seemed to say. We will do this together, it seemed to say, but Barry pushed against it, trying to think for himself.

It is true
, he thought, clear headed for the moment,
that Hegel is a stupid drunk who will simply take years to destroy himself. But it is not that easy, even though
, he thought with a wry smile,
I am driving his car out of town instead of taking him home.
For just an instant he felt guilt, as if  already he had done that act....

Thunder split the world. Lightning blasted sight to an  incandescent brilliance as the bubble of consciousness  shattered. Everything stopped.

***

Roaring sounds. Hammers beating on stones, dull stones, leaden hammers, roaring waterfalls, screaming winds, screechings, whistlings, sounds battering inside and outside his head. Blood on his face, my face? The smell of old  upholstery, whiskey. What happened? The car. Bill Hegel. He sat up and a roaring filled his ears. Darkness. Was he blind? Too dark for night. Night? And then the roaring filled his mind, part of it, the throbbing inside the skull, the other was, what? train whistle. And then he opened his eyes that had been clenched in pain. Looking into the night he saw trees through a windshield. They began to lighten as a beam like that from a lighthouse swept searching into the trees, picking them out from the darkness to his right. Down the track, the gleaming double rails picking up highlights from the beam of light. The car was sitting on a double track at a crossing. He looked up to see the cross bars hanging dimly above in the night like the crossed bones on a bottle of poison.
The sonofabitch has done it to me
, he thought. And then he emptied out like a broken bottle, his mind halting before nothingness.
Or am I Bill Hegel?
The fear turned his stomach inside out.
I am Bill Hegel, and the Beast has put me in the car on the tracks to kill me. The light sweeping along the trees to my right, the train coming around a blind curve. Have to get out. The doors smooth along the whole inside surface. Why can't I open them
, he thought in panic, hearing the whistle again, rising in pitch, closer. His head still dead with pain.
No handles or window rollers. They have been removed. I'm Bill Hegel, and I'm going to die
, he thought.