Yet should he admit this and risk forfeiting the one friend who had ever “truly understood” him? (Hod, Joe, Jesse, travelers straying through a world where last names were seldom exchanged, these had been his “buddies” – never anyone like Willie-Jay, who was in Perry’s opinion, “way above average intellectually, perceptive as a well-trained psychologist.” How was it possible that so gifted a man had wound up in Lansing? That was what amazed Perry. The answer, which he knew but rejected as “an evasion of the deeper, the human question,” was plain to simpler minds: the chaplain’s clerk, then thirty-eight, was a thief, a small-scale robber who over a period of twenty years had served sentences in five different states.)
Perry decided to speak out: he was sorry, but it was not for him – heaven, hell, saints, divine mercy – and if Willie-Jay’s affection was founded on the prospect of Perry’s some day joining him at the foot of the Cross, then he was deceived and their friendship false, a counterfeit, like the portrait.
As usual, Willie-Jay understood; disheartened but not disenchanted, he had persisted in courting Perry’s soul until the day of its possessor’s parole and departure, on the eve of which he wrote Perry a farewell letter, whose last paragraph ran: “You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw “will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why?
Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they’re fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself – in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements.”
Perry, flattered to be the subject of this sermon, had let Dick read it, and Dick, who took a dim view of Willie-Jay, had called the letter “just more of Billy Graham cracker’s hooey,” adding, ” ‘Faggots of scorn!’ He’s the faggot.” Of course, Perry had expected this reaction, and secretly he welcomed it, for his friendship with Dick, whom he had scarcely known until his final few months in Lansing, was an outgrowth of, and counterbalance to, the intensity of his admiration for the chaplain’s clerk. Perhaps Dick was “shallow,” or even, as Willie-Jay claimed, “a vicious blusterer.” All the same, Dick was full of fun, and he was shrewd, a realist, he “cut through things,” there were no clouds in his head or straw in his hair. Moreover, unlike Willie-Jay, he was not critical of
Perry’s exotic aspirations; he was willing to listen, catch fire, share with him those visions of “guaranteed treasure” lurking in Mexican seas, Brazilian jungles.
After Perry’s parole, four months elapsed, months of rattling around in a fifth-hand, hundred-dollar Ford, rolling from Reno to Las Vegas, from Bellingham, Washington, to Buhl, Idaho, and it was in Buhl, where he had found temporary work as a truck driver, that Dick’s letter reached him: “Friend P., Came out in August, and after you left I met Someone, you do not know him, but he put me on to something we could bring off beautiful.
A cinch, the Perfect score . . .” Until then Perry had not imagined that he would ever see Dick again. Or Willie-Jay. But they had both been much in his thoughts, and especially the latter, who in memory had grown ten feet tall, a gray-haired wise man haunting the hallways of his mind. “You pursue the negative,” Willie-Jay had informed him once, in one of his lectures. “You want not to give a damn, to exist without responsibility, without faith or friends or warmth.”
In the solitary, comfortless course of his recent driftings, Perry had over and over again reviewed this indictment, and had decided it was unjust. He did give a damn – but who had ever given a damn about him? His father? Yes, up to a point. A girl or two – but that was “a long story.” No one else except Willie-Jay himself. And only Willie-Jay had ever recognized his worth, his potentialities, had acknowledged that he was not just an under-sized, over muscled half-breed, had seen him, for all the moralizing, as he saw himself – “exceptional,” “rare,” “artistic.” In Willie-Jay his vanity had found support, his sensibility shelter, and the four-month exile from this high-carat appreciation had made it more alluring than any dream of buried gold. So when he received Dick’s invitation, and realized that the date Dick proposed for his coming to Kansas more or less coincided with the time of Willie-Jay’s release, he knew what he must do.
He drove to Las Vegas, sold his junk-heap car, packed his collection of maps, old letters, manuscripts, and books, and bought a ticket for a Greyhound bus. The journey’s aftermath was up to fate; if (things didn’t “work out with Willie-Jay,” then he might “consider Dick’s proposition.” As it turned out, the choice was between Dick and nothing, for when Perry’s bus reached Kansas City, on the evening of November 12, Willie-Jay, whom he’d been unable to advise of his coming, had already left town -left, in fact, only five hours earlier, from the same terminal at which Perry arrived. That much he had learned by telephoning the Reverend Mr. Post, who further discouraged him by declining to reveal his former clerk’s exact destination. “He’s headed East,” the chaplain said. “To fine opportunities. A decent job, and a home with some good people who are willing to help him.” And Perry, hanging up, had felt “dizzy with anger and disappointment.”
But what, he wondered when the anguish subsided, had he really expected from a reunion (with Willie-Jay? Freedom had separated them; as free men, they had nothing in common, were opposites, who could never have formed a “team” – certainly not one capable of embarking on the skin-diving south-of-the-border adventures he and Dick had plotted. Nevertheless, if he had not missed Willie-Jay, if they could have been together for even an hour, Perry was quite convinced -just “knew” – that he would not now be loitering outside a hospital waiting for Dick to emerge with a pair of black stockings.
Dick returned empty-handed. “No go,” he announced, with a furtive casualness that made Perry suspicious.
“Are you sure? Sure you even asked?” “Sure I did.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you went in there, hung around a couple of minutes, and came out.” “O.K., sugar – whatever you say.” Dick started the car. After they had traveled in silence awhile, Dick patted Perry on the knee. “Aw, come on,” he said. “It was a puky idea. What the hell would they have thought? Me barging in there like it was a god-dam five-‘n’-dime . . .”
Perry said, “Maybe it’s just as well. Nuns are a bad-luck bunch.”
The Garden City representative of New York Life Insurance smiled as he watched Mr. Clutter uncap a Parker pen and open a checkbook. He was reminded of a local jest: “Know what they say about you, Herb? Say, ‘Since haircuts went to a dollar-fifty, Herb writes the barber a check.'” “That’s correct,” replied Mr. Clutter. Like royalty, he was famous for never carrying cash. “That’s the way I do business. When those tax fellows come poking around, canceled checks are your best friend.”
With the check written but not yet signed, he swiveled back in his desk chair and seemed to
ponder. The agent, a stocky, somewhat bald, rather informal man named Bob Johnson, hoped his client wasn’t having last-minute doubts. Herb was hard-headed, a slow man to make a deal; Johnson had worked over a year to clinch this sale. But, no, his customer was merely experiencing what Johnson called the Solemn Moment – a phenomenon familiar to insurance salesmen. The mood of a man insuring his life is not unlike that of a man signing his will; thoughts of mortality must occur.
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Clutter, as though conversing with himself. “I’ve plenty to be grateful for -wonderful things in my life.” Framed documents commemorating milestones in his career gleamed against the walnut walls of his
