By the end of their radiant singing, I was overflowed and joyed and Death had had a new coat of sunlight and time, and the hummingbird came back for nectar, and the dragonfly sank down to scan my face and go away.
“That,” said Crumley, on the way out of the graveyard, with Henry walking between us, “is the way I want to be sung out of the world. God, I’d love to be that whole damn choir. Who needs money when you can sing like that!”
But I was staring at Henry. He felt my stare.
“Thing is,” said Henry, “he keeps coming back. Armpits. You’d think he’d had enough, sure? But he’s hungry-mean, can’t stop. Scaring people is like Cracker Jack to him. Hurt’s his byword. Pain is a living. He figures to get old Henry, like he got the rest. But I won’t fall again.”
Crumley was listening with some seriousness.
“If Armpits comes again…”
“I’ll call you, immediamente. He’s fiddling around the rooms. Caught him fiddling Fannie’s locked door. It’s padlocked and pasted over by the law, right? He was fiddling it and I yelled him off. He’s a coward for sure. Got no weapons, just goes around putting his foot out so blind men take a whole flight of steps in one jump. Armpits! I yelled. Scat!”
“Call us,” said Crumley. “Can we give you a lift?”
“Some of the ugly ladies from the tenement brought me, thanks, and will take me home.”
“Henry,” I said. I put out my hand. He took it swiftly. It was almost as if he had seen it coming.
“How do I smell, Henry?” I said.
Henry sniffed and laughed. “They don’t make heroes like they used to. But you’ll do.”
Driving back toward the beach with Crumley, I saw a big limousine pass us at seventy miles an hour, putting a lot of space between it and the flowered graveyard. I waved and yelled.
Constance Rattigan did not even glance over.
She had been at the graveside somewhere, hidden away to one side, and now she was roaring home angry at Fannie for leaving us all, and maybe angry with me for somehow bringing Death to present a bill.
Her limousine vanished in a great white-gray cloud of exhaust.
“The harpies and the Furies just screamed by,” observed Crumley.
“No,” I said, “only a lost lady, running to hide.”
I tried calling Constance Rattigan during the next three days, but she wouldn’t answer. She was brooding and mad. Somehow, in some dumb way, I was in cahoots with the man who stood in halls and did terrible things to people.
I tried calling Mexico City, but Peg was off lost forever, I was sure.
I prowled around Venice, staring and listening and sniffing, hoping for that dreadful voice, searching for the terrible smell of something dying or long dead.
Even Crumley was gone. I stared, but he was nowhere up ahead, following.
At the end of three days of failed phone calls, unmet killers, furious with fate, and confounded by funerals, I did what I had never done before.
Around ten o’clock at night I strode down the empty pier not knowing where I was going until I got there.
“Hey,” someone said.
I yanked a rifle up off the shelf and, without checking to see if it was loaded or if anyone was in the way, I fired it, fired it, fired it, sixteen times!
Wham, wham. And wham wham. And wham wham, and someone was yelling.
I didn’t hit any of the targets. I had never handled a rifle in my life. I don’t know what I was shooting at, but yes I did.
“Take that, you son-of-a-bitch, take that, you bastard!”
Wham, wham, and wham wham.
The rifle was empty but I kept yanking the trigger. I suddenly knew it was impotent. Someone took the rifle away from me. Annie Oakley, staring at me as if she had never seen me before.
“You know what you’re doing?” she asked.
“No, and I don’t give a damn!” I glanced around. “How come you’re open so late?”
“Nothing else to do. I can’t sleep. What’s wrong with you, mister?”
“Everybody in the whole damn world is going to be dead by this time next week.”
“You don’t believe that?”
“No, but it feels like it. Give me another rifle.”
“You don’t want to shoot any more.”
“Yes, I do. And I haven’t money to pay, you’ll have to trust me!” I cried.
She stared at me for a long time. Then she handed me a rifle. “Sock ’em, cowboy. Kill ’em, Bogie,” she said.
I fired sixteen times. This time I hit two targets by mistake, even though I couldn’t see them, my glasses were that fogged.
“Had enough?” asked Annie Oakley, quietly, behind me.
“No!” I shouted. Then I said, lower, “Yes. What are you doing outside the gallery on the boardwalk?”
“I was afraid I’d get shot in there. Some maniac just unloaded two rifles without aiming.”
We looked at each other and I began to laugh.
She listened and said, “Are you laughing or crying?”
“What’s it sound like? I got to do something. Tell me what.”
She studied my face for a long time and then she went around shutting off the running ducks and the bobbing clowns and the lights. A door opened in the back of the gallery. She was silhouetted there. She said:
“If you’ve got to shoot at anything, here’s the target.” And she was gone.
It was a full half minute before I realized she expected me to follow.
“Do you behave this way often?” asked Annie Oakley. “Sorry,” I said.
I was on one far side of her bed, she on the other, listening to me talk about Mexico City and Peg and Peg and Mexico City so far away it was a dreadful ache.
“The story of my life,” said Annie Oakley, “is men in bed with me bored silly or talking about other women, or lighting cigarettes or rushing off in their cars when I go to the bathroom. You know what my real name is?
Lucretia Isabel Clarisse Annabelle Maria Monica Brown. My mom gave me all those, so what do I choose? Annie Oakley. Problem is, I’m dumb. Men can’t stand me after the first ten minutes. Dumb. Read a book, an hour later, it’s gone! Nothing sticks. I talk a lot, don’t I?”
“A bit,” I said, gently.
“You’d think some guy would like someone as truly dumb as me, but I wear them out. Three hundred nights a year it’s some damn different male goof lying where you’re lying. And that damn foghorn blowing out in the bay, does it get to you? Some nights, even with a jerk of a cluck in bed with me, when that foghorn goes off, I feel so alone and there he is, checking his keys, looking at the door…”
Her telephone rang. She grabbed it, listened, said, “I’ll be damned.” She waved it at me. “For you.”
“Impossible,” I said. “No one knows I’m here.”
I took the phone.
“What are you doing at her place?” said Constance Rattigan.
“Nothing. How did you find me?”
“Someone called. Just a voice. Told me to check on you and hung up.”
“Oh, my God.” I was turning cold.
“Get out of there,” said Constance. “I need your help. Your strange friend has come to visit.”
“My friend?”
The ocean roared under the Rifle Gallery, shuddering the room and the bed.
“Down by the shore, two nights in a row. You’ve got to come scare him off… oh, God!”
“Constance!”
There was a long silence in which I could hear the surf outside Constance Rattigan’s windows. Then she said, in a strange numb way, “He’s there now.”
“Don’t let him see you.”
“The bastard is down on the shoreline, just where he was last night. He just stares up at the house, like he’s waiting for me. The bastard’s naked. What does he think, the old lady is so crazy she’ll run out and jump him? Christ.”
“Shut the windows, Constance, turn off the lights!”
“No. He’s backing off. Maybe my voice carries. Maybe he thinks I’m calling the police.”
“Call them!”
“Gone.” Constance took a deep breath. “Get over here, kid. Fast.”
She didn’t hang up. She just let the phone drop and walked off. I could hear her sandals slapping the tiled floor making typewriter sounds.
I didn’t hang up, either. For some reason I just put the phone down as if it were an umbilical cord between me and Constance Rattigan. As long as I didn’t disconnect, she couldn’t die. I could still hear the night tide moving on her end of the line.
“Just like all the other men. There you go,” said a voice.
I turned.
Annie Oakley sat up in bed, huddled in her sheets like an abandoned manatee.
“Don’t hang up that telephone,” I said.
Not until I reach the far end, I thought, and save a life.
“Dumb,” said Annie Oakley, “that’s why you’re going. Dumb.”
It took a lot of guts to run the night shore toward Constance Rattigan’s. I imagined some terrible dead man rushing the other way.
“Jesus!” I gasped. “What happens if I meet him?” “Gah!” I shrieked.
And ran full-tilt into a solid shadow.
“Thank God, it’s you!” someone yelled.
“No, Constance,” I said. “Thank God, it’s you.”
“What’s so damn funny?”
“This.” I slapped the big bright pillows on all sides of me. “This is the second bed I’ve been in tonight.”
“Hilarious,” said Constance. “Mind if I bust your nose?”
“Constance. Peg’s my girl. I was just lonely. You haven’t called in days. Annie asked me for pillow talk, and that’s all it was. I can’t lie. It shows in my face. Look.”
Constance looked and laughed.
“Christ, fresh apple pie. Okay, okay.” She sank back. “I scare the hell out of you just now?”
“You
