“I thank you,” Wilbourne said. “I do thank you. It wouldn’t stay down, you see.”
“Nonsense. Drink it.”
“I do thank you.” The ambulance was wailing louder, it was coming fast, it was close now, the wail sinking into a grumble as it slowed, then rising into the wail again. It seemed to be just outside the house, loud and peremptory and with an illusion of speed and haste even though Wilbourne knew it was now merely crawling up the rutted weed-choked lane which led from the highway to the house; this time when it sank to the groan it was just outside the house, the sound now possessing a baffled grunting tone almost like the voice of an animal, a large one, bewildered, maybe even injured. “I do thank you. I realise there is always a certain amount of inevitable cleaning up in vacating a house. It would be foolish to add to it this late.”
Now he heard the feet on the porch, hearing them above his heart, the profound strong ceaseless shallow dredging at air, breath on the point of escaping his lungs altogether; now (there was no knock) they were in the hall, the trampling; three men entered, in civilian clothes—a youth with a close cap of curly hair, in a polo shirt and no socks, a neat wiry man of no age and fully dressed even to a pair of horn glasses, pushing a wheeled stretcher, and behind them a third man with the indelible mark of ten thousand Southern deputy sheriffs, urban and suburban—the snapped hat-brim, the sadist’s eyes, the slightly and unmistakably bulged coat, the air not swaggering exactly but of a formally pre-absolved brutality. The two men with the stretcher wheeled it up to the bed in a businesslike manner; it was the officer whom the doctor addressed, indicating Wilbourne with his hand, and now Wilbourne knew the other had really forgot that the hand still held the pistol.
“This is your prisoner,” the doctor said. “I will prefer formal charges against him as soon as we get to town. As soon as I can.”
“Look out, Doc— Evening, Miss Martha,” the officer said. “Put that thing down. It might go off at any time. That fellow you got it from might of pulled the trigger before he turned it over to you.” The doctor looked at the pistol, then Wilbourne seemed to remember him stowing it methodically into the scuffed bag along with the stethoscope; he just seemed to remember this because he had followed the stretcher to the bed.
“Easy now,” he said. “Dont rouse her up. She wont—”
“I’ll take charge of this,” the doctor said, in that weary voice which had become peaceful at last after a fashion, as if it had worn itself out yet which would have, could have risen again at need quick and easy, as if it had renewed itself, renewed the outragement. “This case has been turned over to me, remember that. I didn’t ask for it.” He approached the bed (it was now that Wilbourne seemed to remember him putting the pistol into the bag) and lifted Charlotte’s wrist. “Go as easy with her as you can. But hurry. Doctor Richardson will be there and I will follow in my car.” The two men lifted Charlotte onto the stretcher.
It was on rubber-tired wheels; with the hatless youth pushing it seemed to cross the room and vanish into the hall with incredible rapidity, as though sucked there and not pushed (the very wheels making a sucking sound on the floor), by no human agency but by time perhaps, by some vent-pipe through which the irrevocable seconds were fleeing, crowding; even the night itself.
“All right,” the officer said. “What’s your name? Wilson?”
“Yes,” Wilbourne said. It went through the hall too that way, sucked through, where the wiry man now had a flashlight; the risible dark wind chuckled and murmured into the open door, leaning its weight against him like a black palpy hand, he leaning into it, onto it. There would be the porch, the steps beyond. “She’s light,” Wilbourne said in a thin anxious voice. “She’s lost a lot of weight lately. I could carry her if they would—”
“They can too,” the officer said. “Besides, they are being paid for it. Take it easy.”
“I know. But that short one, that small one with the light—”
“He saves his strength for this. He likes it. You dont want to hurt his feelings. Take it easy.”
“Look,” Wilbourne said thinly, murmuring, “why dont you put the handcuffs on me? Why dont you?”
“Do you want them?” the officer said. And now the stretcher without stopping sucked off the porch too, into space, still on the same parallel plane as though it possessed displacement perhaps but no weight; it didn’t even pause, the white shirt and trousers of the youth seemed merely to walk behind it as it moved on behind the flashlight, toward the corner of the house, toward what the man from whom he had rented the house called the drive. Now he could hear the threshing of the invisible palms, the wild dry sound of them.
The hospital was a low building, vaguely Spanish (or Los Angeles), of stucco, almost hidden by a massy lushness of oleander. There were more of the shabby palms too, the ambulance turning in at speed, the siren’s wail dying into the grunting animal-like fall, the tires dry and sibilant in oyster shells; when he emerged from the ambulance he could hear the palms rustling and hissing again as if they were being played upon by a sand-blower and he could smell the sea still, the same black wind, but not so strong since the sea was four miles away, the stretcher coming out fast and smooth again as though sucked out, the feet of the four of them crisp in the dry fragile shells; and now in the corridor he began to blink again at his sanded lids, painfully in the electric light, the stretcher sucking on, the wheels whispering on the linoleum, so that it was between two blinks that he saw that the stretcher was now propelled by two nurses in uniform, a big one and a little one, he thinking how apparently there was no such thing as a matched stretcher team, how apparently all the stretchers in the world must be propelled not by two physical bodies in accord but rather by two matched desires to be present and see what was going on.
Then he saw an open door fierce with light, a surgeon already in operating tunic beside it, the stretcher turning in, sucked through the door, the surgeon looking at him once, not with curiosity but as you memorise a face, then turning and following the stretcher as Wilbourne was about to speak to him, the door (it sounded rubber-tired too) clapping to soundlessly in his face, almost slapping his face, the officer at his elbow saying, “Take it easy.” Then there was another nurse; he had not heard her, she did not look at him at all, speaking briefly to the officer. “Okay,” the officer said. He touched Wilbourne’s elbow. “Straight ahead. Just take it easy.”
“But let me—”
“Sure. Just take it easy.” It was another door, the nurse turning and stepping aside, her skirts crisp and sibilant too like the oyster shells; she did not look at him at all. They entered, an office, a desk, another man in sterilised cap and tunic seated at the desk with a blank form and a fountain pen. He was older than the first one. He did not look at Wilbourne either.
“Name?” he said.
“Charlotte Rittenmeyer.”
“Miss?”
“Mistress.” The man at the desk wrote on the pad.
“Husband?”
“Yes.”
“Name?”
“Francis Rittenmeyer.” Then he told the address too. The pen flowed, smooth and crisp. Now it’s the fountain pen I cant breathe in, Wilbourne thought. “Can I—”
“He will be notified.” Now the man at the desk looked up at him. He wore glasses, the pupils behind them distorted slightly and perfectly impersonal. “How do you account for it? Instruments not clean?”
“They were clean.”
“You think so.”
“I know it.”
“Your first attempt?”
“No. Second.”
“Other one come off? But you wouldn’t know.”
“Yes. I know. It did.”
“Then how do you account for this failure?” He could have answered that: I loved her. He could have said it: A miser would probably bungle the blowing of his own safe too. Should have called in a professional, a cracksman who didn’t care, didn’t love the very iron flanks that held the money. So he said nothing at all, and after a moment the man at the desk looked down and wrote again, the pen travelling smoothly across the card. He said, still writing, without looking up: “Wait outside.”
“I aint to take him in now?” the officer said.
“No.” The man at the desk still did not look up.
“Couldn’t I—” Wilbourne said. “Will you let—” The pen stopped, but for a time longer the man at the desk looked at the card, perhaps reading what he had written. Then he looked up.
“Why? She wouldn’t know you.”
“But she might come back. Rouse one more time. So I could—we could—” The other looked at him. The eyes were cold. They were not impatient, not quite palpably patient. They merely waited until Wilbourne’s voice ceased. Then the man at the desk spoke:
“Do you think she will—Doctor?” For a moment Wilbourne blinked painfully at the neat scrawled card beneath the day-colored desk lamp, the clean surgeon’s hand holding the uncapped pen beside it.
“No,” he said quietly. The man at the desk
