The drowning pool

Without getting down on my knees, I reached far under the bed and brought out a cardboard suitcase with scuffed leather corners. It was locked, but the cheap clasp loosened when I gave the lid a sharp upward kick with my heel. I dragged it under the light and wrenched it open. Beneath a mouldy smelling tangle of dirty shirts and socks, the bottom of the suitcase was lined with disordered papers. Most of them were personal letters written in uniformed hands and signed with girls’ names or nicknames; exceedingly personal letters. I sampled one which began: “My Dearest Darling: You drove me just wild the other night,” and ended: “Now that I know what love is all about, my Dearest Darling, you won’t go away and leave me—write and say you won’t.” Another, in a different hand, began: “Dear Mister Reavis,” and ended: “I love you pashunitly with all my haert.”

There were official discharge papers which stated that one Patrick Murphy Ryan, born in Bear Lake County, Kentucky, on February 12, 1921, had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on June 23, 1942, in San Antonio, Texas, and been discharged in San Diego in December of the same year, dishonorably. Ryan’s civilian experience was listed as agriculturalist, garage mechanic, and oil well maintenance apprentice, and his preferred occupation as commercial airplane pilot. There was a copy of an application for National Service Life Insurance in the amount of two thousand dollars, made out by the same Patrick Ryan, and dated July 2, 1942. It requested that the policy be mailed to Elaine Ryan Cassidy, R.R. 2, Bear Lake, Kentucky. She could be his mother, his sister, or his ex-wife.

The name Elaine appeared again, this time with a different surname, on a torn and empty envelope crumpled in a corner of the suitcase. The envelope was addressed to Mr. Patrick Ryan, Graham Court, Los Angeles, and postmarked Las Vegas, July 10, that year. The return address was scribbled across the ripped flap: Mrs. Elaine Schneider, Rush apts., Las Vegas, Nev. If this was the same Elaine who had been sent Pat’s insurance policy, she was one woman he trusted. And Las Vegas wasn’t far, as the buzzard flies. I memorized the address.

I was going through the bundle of letters, looking for the one that matched the empty envelope, when a breeze blew light and cold on the back of my neck. I picked up one of the letters and straightened slowly without turning, as if to have light to read by; then slowly turned with the letter in my hands. The door was ajar a few inches, pure darkness beyond.

I reached for the light-switch. A hand came through the aperture, pushing it wider, and closed on my wrist: fingers like curled white sausages, speckled with short black bristles. It pulled me further off balance and my head slammed against the wall. The wallboard crunched. A second hand closed on my arm and began to bend it around the edge of the door. I set one foot against the door-jamb and brought the hands into the room. The hands, then the arms, then the shoulders. When whole man came, he brought the door along with him. It fell against the green curtain with very little noise.

His nose and brows were brown fungus growing on a thick stump of face. Small eyes like shiny black beetles lived in it. They burrowed out of sight when I struck at them with my free hand, and reappeared again. I hurt my hand on the thick chin. The head rolled away with the punch and came back gri

He turned suddenly, raised his arms and swung me off balance. His fingers ground on my wristbones. His heavy shoulders labored. I would not turn in to his hold. His coat split up the back with a sharp report. I twisted my hand free, joined both hands under his chin, and set my knee in the small of his back. Gradually he straightened, came over backwards and down. The floor cracked against the back of his head, then the ceiling fell on the back of mine.

I came to, lying face down in darkness. The surface under my face seemed to be vibrating, and the same vibration beat savagely at the base of my skull. When I opened my mouth I tasted dusty cloth. Something heavy and hard pressed down on the small of my back. I tried to move and found that my shoulders and hips were tightly enclosed on both sides. My hands were tied together, pressed hard into my stomach. Coffin fear took me by the back of my neck and shook me. When the shaking subsided my head was clearer and more painful. I was on the floor of a moving car, wedged face down between the front and back seats.

The wheels bumped and slid across two sets of car tracks. I raised my head from the floor.

“Take it easy, buster,” a man’s voice said. One heavy object was removed from the small of my back and placed on the nape of my neck.

I said: “Take your feet off me.”

The foot on my neck shifted, pressing my face into the floor. “Or what will you do, buster? Nothing? That’s what I thought.”

I lay still, trying to memorize pitch, tone, inflection, so that I would not mistake them if I ever heard them again. The voice was soft and liquid in the way that molasses is liquid, with a fruity tremor of vanity ru

It said: “That’s right, buster, you can do your talking later. And you will.”

More car tracks. A left turn. Pitted city pavement. Another turn. The blood was roaring angrily in my ears. Then there was no sound but the roaring of my blood. The feet were lifted, a car door opened. I struggled upright to my knees and tore at my bound wrists with my teeth. They were bound with wire.

“Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don’t you feel it?”

I felt it. I took it easy.

“Backwards out of the car, buster. Don’t raise a hullabaloo or you’ll take another ride and never know it. Now you can stand up and let me look at you. Frankly, you look like hell.”

I looked at him, first at the steady black gun. He was slender and tall, pinched at the waist by over-elaborate tailoring, heavily padded at the shoulders. The hair on top of his head was thick and black and glossy, but it didn’t match the gray hair over his ears. I said: “You’re showing a little middle-aged sag yourself.”

He nicked me under the chin with the front sight of his gun. My head snapped back and I fell against the open door of the car, slamming it shut. The sound rang out along the deserted street. I didn’t know where I was, but I had the Glendale feeling: end of the line. No lights went on in any of the dark houses. Nothing happened at all, except that the man pressed his gun to my sternum and made threats like cello music into my face.

The other man leaned out of the front window. A little blood flowed from a cut over his right beetle. “You’re sure you can handle this screw?”

“It will be a pleasure,” the tall man said to both of us.

“Don’t mark him up unless he asks for it. We just want to get his story and put him on ice for a while.”

“How long?”

“You’ll hear in the morning.”

“I’m not a baby-sitter,” the tall man grumbled. “What about your place, Mell?”

“I’m going on a trip. Goodnight sweetheart.” The car went away.

“Quick march,” the tall man said.

“Goosestep, or plain?”

He put one heel on my instep and his weight on the heel. His eyes were dark and small. They picked up the light of a distant streetlamp and reflected it like a cat’s.

I said: “You’re very attractive for an elderly man.”

“Cut the comical chatter,” he said throatily. “I never killed a man, but by Jesus—”

“I have, Amy. He kicked me in the head when I was down.”

“Stop calling me Amy.” He backed away and held the gun higher. Without it he was nothing. But he had it.

I quick-marched up the cracked and slanting concrete to the porch. It was cavernous and sunken, a place of shadows. He kept his eyes and gun on me while he fumbled for his key-ring and snapped back the lock. A woman’s voice spoke from the shadows then: