7

I dROVE back to town, went around the square, and saw lights burning in the courthouse. I parked Josh’s coupe and went into the building.

Hearing my footsteps, Josh came to the door of Kirk’s office. Josh stared at me, witless. Then his face darkened. He hitched his pants and swaggered toward me, his chin thrust out.

He might have saved himself the trouble, because he didn’t bluff me. He didn’t work at the job of deputy because he was tough. He worked because the job was easy most of the time, added to his prestige, and enabled him to escape manual labor.

I pitched him the keys of his car. “Your crate’s outside,” I said, “none the worse for wear.”

He looked at the keys and rubbed his cheek where I’d bruised it with the flashlight. Then he looked at the furrow on my scalp and shrugged as if the score were even in his mind.

“You sure gave me a start, Wade. First I’m certain I killed you. Then you go busting off from the doctor’s that way. Now you come ankling back, looking like you got the short end of the deal.”

I would go along with that too. “I guess you’re right,” I admitted.

“I better let the state boys know I got my car back. I picked up your crate—it’s parked behind the courthouse.”

I followed him into the office. He pulled his goose-quill toothpick from his pocket, wiped it between his fingers, and explored a frontal cavity. “Didn’t do you no good, going up there.”

“No,” I said. “You’ve seen Kirk, then?”

“Helped him question the girl when he brought her back. Just this minute finished. He’s taken her upstairs.”

I turned and started from the office. Josh moved around in front of me.

“Now, Wade, you know you can’t go up there. Ain’t visiting hours. Your head looks too bad to be running around any more. Why don’t you take it home and put it to bed?”

“Josh, a lot of starch has been wrung out of me, and I’m not trying to start anything, but I want to go up and let her know I tried.”

He shook his head.

“You can stretch a point that much,” I said.

“Nope. Kirk’s already sore as a hornet-stung bear dog. She didn’t help matters none. Got under Kirk’s skin, the way she sat and stared right through him when he was trying to talk to her. Wouldn’t say nothing. Wouldn’t show nothing. Just sat there and stared, like people was something she wouldn’t even spit on.

“Kirk kept telling her he would help her if he could, if she would tell him how she’d killed Rock Hustin. Hell, if she copped a plea they wouldn’t execute her. Kirk tried to explain that. He tried to show her how she’d spook a jury for certain, acting the way she was, not the least bit sorry or humble.

“Kirk finally got out of patience and took her upstairs. Now if I let you go up there and start a ruckus, Kirk’s going to be bad to work for the next couple of weeks.”

He was telling me how remorseless she was, how big a fool I was for not going on home and going to bed. I knew he was wrong. In my short stretch of Korean service, I’d heard of POW’s who had an affliction similar to hers. They’d called it the five-hundred-mile stare. A man witnessed all the horrors his mind could hold; then he walked over and sat down and stared. At nothing. He simply stared, and grew thinner and weaker. Most of them had died.

I dodged around Josh and reached the gloomy corridor. He cursed and came after me. I reached the staircase ahead of him and started up. The passage was dark, the stairs uneven, each scooped out by the passing of countless feet over many years.

Josh started up behind me with the silence of a freight engine coupling cars. He yelled my name twice; then he saved his breath.

My knees almost buckled on the second floor. A lighter, faster man than Josh could have caught me easily; but from the sounds issuing from the stairwell, I seemed to have gained a little on him.

The entry to the stairway going on up was a dozen feet away. I hesitated only long enough to listen for sounds of the elevator bumping its way down. I didn’t hear it. Kirk must still be up there.

I reached the third floor …

The floor of steel and caged space. A couple of overhead lights, snug against the ceiling in small, steel-mesh cases, never permitted full darkness. I drew up short. The elevator was bumping, taking Kirk down.

I ran down the corridor to the steel-barred door that shut off the women’s section. It was around a short ell and the lighting was very dim.

The individual cells were a dozen or more feet beyond the section door. I saw her. She was in the third cell, the only one occupied. She was a slender shadow, and the dim light etched her as she stood on the hard, low bunk bolted to the far wall.

She had knotted her stockings together to give her the length of rope she needed. She’d fastened one end of the rope with a slipknot to an overhead steampipe. She was ready to knot the other end about her throat. Then she would step from the bunk and it would all seem to be over. She’d be free of the final cage in a caged life. She’d have found one way out.

But that way can never be the right way. It solves nothing. It only removes you from every hope of solving anything, takes you forever from a change of fortune that tomorrow or next week might give your life a completely different color.

I knew.

This way she was trying had been my father’s way—and within a year of his death rich deposits of feldspar had been discovered on lands manipulated for the railroad that never came. He might have had a chance to save at least a remnant of the land, a remnant that would have squared him, but he had thrown the chance away in a terrible, pitiful moment when he denied the future.

My mind was aghast with the futility of such an act. My lips began screaming her name.

I yelled loud enough to wake the whole damn town, and I rattled and beat the bars until it seemed the whole building should be shaking with the vibration.

The commotion shocked her to sudden immobility. She stood looking at me and I kept yelling. I don’t know what I said. Her name. Words. Anything to hold her attention.

Kirk heard and returned to the third floor. Josh arrived also. They rushed up behind me, Kirk with my name angrily on his lips. He was ready to give me a hiding down, but he saw what I had seen, and he jerked out his keys.

He opened the first door. He seemed to me to be moving much too slowly. But I didn’t crowd him or get in his way. With a squeal of steel hinges that needed oiling, the second door swung.

Vicky didn’t move until we were in her cell. Then she stepped down from the bunk, her face like a beautiful painting done by an artist who has failed to breathe life into his creation.

She looked at us as if she couldn’t believe we were there. She moved her head slowly to give the dangling stocking a long look. Then something snapped inside of her. She covered her face with her hands. A tremor shook her body. A low, hoarse cry came from her lips.

She was unresisting as I pushed her onto the bunk and covered her with a blanket. She was sobbing as no human being should.

I glanced over my shoulder at Kirk.

His face was gray. “Josh is gone to bring the doc over.” He touched his lips with his tongue. “Wade, I’m sorry.”

An apology from Kirk was unusual. I knew what it cost. I sensed his meaning, too. He was a hunter, but he despised those who hunted and needlessly tortured their prey.

“Wade,” he said, “watch after her until the doc arrives.”

He left the cell quickly, leaving me alone with her.

When I turned back to Vicky, she was looking at me, her eyes dilated until they were like drops of ink in her pale face. Her sobs had subsided until they were only an occasional convulsive shuddering of her body.

I wiped the fine, cold sweat from her forehead. She said weakly, “Don’t worry, Wade. I won’t try it again. I must have been crazy.”

“Don’t talk about it, Vicky.”

She closed her eyes and lay silent for a few seconds. The overhead light glinted on the tear streaks on her cheeks. “Why’d you do it, Wade?” “Do what?” “Tell her.” “I don’t get it.”

“You told your mother where I was to meet you. She told Kirk.”

The hairs at the back of my neck began to feel like needles pricking the skin. A rigidity settled in my arms and legs. For a second, I had the feeling that I couldn’t move if I tried.

Vicky looked at my face; then she sat up on the bunk quickly. She caught my hand and pressed it tightly against her cheek.

“Wade, you mustn’t blame her!”

“She tricked me.”

“She was fighting to keep her world intact, Wade.”

“She hit low, even if she is my mother.”

“I’d have done the same—for our son. Would you want him to try and understand?”

“She’s the cause of your being caught, brought to this place. Yet you still speak this way of her.”

Vicky glanced away. “It’s not because I’m good, Wade. I don’t want you messing up your life completely. I told you after you stopped Oldham’s car. It’s no good. You’ll destroy yourself.”

I reached out, took her chin in my hand, and forced her face in the direction of mine, until our eyes met.

“No,” I said, speaking with slow care, “this is the one chance I’ve got to find myself. I don’t know exactly what’s happened to me, but I’m not the same Wade Calhoun I was last week or even two days ago. Success or failure never meant much to me in the past. I was supposed to be the end product of a family sunken in decay. The past was so big and tangled up that it obscured the future.

“Now I’ve learned something. The past is big only when you put small meaning in your life. Now success means everything—it’s the future.”

“Crazy Wade,” she said, a fresh warmth in her voice. “You choose a time like this to discover a future?”

“It happens that way sometimes.”

“I could listen to you long enough and almost think there might be a future.”

“There will be! No one can stop me now, Vicky. No one except you.”

Again she glanced at the dangling stockings.

“Don’t hate yourself for it,” I said. “Be as kind to yourself as you would to another person in your place. Forgive yourself—and try to believe, Vicky!”

She laid her cheek against mine and she was crying again. But it was different this time. She said softly, “I’ll believe, Wade.”

I knew she would, and the sense of failure was no longer so acute.

Footsteps approached the cell. Kirk and Doctor Braddock carne in. Braddock checked her pulse and heart. He took a needle from his bag. She didn’t flinch when he swabbed a spot on her arm and jabbed her. She was looking at me when the hypo took effect. Her eyes glazed and then closed and she was asleep.

Kirk stirred heavily; Braddock snapped his bag closed and stood up.

“Shock,” Braddock said. “She’ll probably be okay when she wakes. Better have the night deputy look in on her now and then.”

We went downstairs. Braddock, when we were in Kirk’s office, pointed to a chair. “Sit down, Wade.”

I sat. Braddock opened his bag again. He swabbed the gash on my temple, bandaged it, and left.

Kirk sat on the edge of his desk, facing me. “You’ve tried to hamstring the law and run off with a deputy’s car, Wade. Both jailable offenses. But you brought the car back, and I got her. That’s the important thing. So I’m going to let you go with a final warning. Stay out of it! Leave my case against her alone or I’ll make you curse the day you ever set eyes on her.”

I didn’t feel like arguing. “You certainly seem to have drawn to a flush and filled it,” I said.

I left the courthouse, crossed the square, and entered the Old Homestead Hotel. The elderly night clerk showed me to a room on the second floor. I got my shoes off, shucked my pants and shirt and draped them on the back of a chair.

I made it to the bed. Then I collapsed.