The Best American Noir of the Century Page 7

  Then suddenly I lunged over, I shoved against him. He looked back once, and that was what I wanted. He looked back for an instant, his fat face green with the most unholy fear I have ever seen. Then I gave him another shove and he was gone. Before he could call out, before he could say a word, he was gone, falling through the air!

  I risked jumping up on the bed so I could see him hit, and I did see him hit. Then I got down and straightened the bed and beat it out.

  I ran down the stairs as fast as I could. I didn't see anybody. More important, no one saw me. But when I was on the second floor I ran down the hall to the end and lifted the window. I jumped out here, landing squarely on my feet.

  I waited for a minute, then I circled the building from an opposite direction. My heart was pounding inside me. It was difficult for me to breathe. I managed to get back to the play field through an indirect route.

  Funny thing, Pushton wasn't seen right away. No one but myself had seen him fall. I was on the play field at least ten minutes, plenty long enough to establish myself as being there, before the cry went up. The kids went wild. We ran in packs to the scene.

  I stood there with the rest of them looking at what was left of Pushton. He wouldn't blow any more bugles. His flesh was like a sack of water that had fallen and burst full of holes. The blood was splattered out in jagged streaks all around him.

  We stood around about five minutes, the rest of the kids and I, nobody saying anything. Then a faculty officer chased us away, and that was the last I saw of Pushton.

  Supper was served as usual but there wasn't much talk. What there was of it seemed to establish the fact that Pushton had been a thick-witted sort and had undoubtedly leaned out too far trying to fix the aerial wire and had fallen.

  I thought that that could have easily been the case, all right, and since I had hated the little punk I had no conscience about it. It didn't bother me nearly so much as the fact that Tommy Smith was going to die. I had liked Tommy. And I was nuts about his sister, wasn't I?

  That night study hall was converted into a little inquest meeting. We were all herded into one big room and Major Clark talked to us as though we were a bunch of Boy Scouts. After ascertaining that no one knew any more about Pushton's death than what they had seen on the cement, he assured us that the whole thing had been unavoidable and even went so far as to suggest that we might spare our parents the worry of telling them of so unfortunate an incident. All the bloated donkey was worrying about was losing a few tuitions.

  Toward the end of the session Duff Ryan came in and nodded at me, and then sat down. He looked around at the kids, watched Major Clark a while, and then glanced back at me. He kept doing that until we were dismissed. He made me nervous.

  Friday morning I woke up and listened for reveille but it didn't come. I lay there, feeling comfortable in the bedclothes and half lazy, but feeling every minute that reveille would blast me out of my place. Then I suddenly realized why the bugle hadn't blown. I heard the splash of rain across the window and knew that we wouldn't have to raise the flag or take our exercises this morning. On rainy days we got to sleep an extra half-hour.

  I felt pretty good about this and put my hands behind my head there on the pillow and began thinking. They were pleasant, what you might call mellow, thoughts. A little thing like an extra half-hour in bed will do that.

  Things were working out fine and after tonight I wouldn't have anything to worry about. For Duff Ryan to prove Tommy was innocent after the hanging would only make him out a damn fool. I was glad it was raining. It would make it easier for me to lay low, to stay away from Marie until the final word came...

  That was what I thought in the morning, lying there in bed. But no. Seven-thirty that night Duff came over to the school in a slicker. He came into the study hall and got me. His eyes were wild. His face was strained.

  "Ruth and I are going to see the lawyer again," he said. "You've got to stay with Marie."

  "Nuts," I said.

  He jerked me out of the seat, then he took his hands off me as though he were ashamed. "Come on," he said. "This is no time for smart talk."

  So I went.

  Ruth had on a slicker too and was waiting there on the front porch. I could see her pretty face. It was pinched, sort of terrible. Her eyes were wild too. She patted my hand, half crying, and said, "You be good to Marie, honey. She likes you, and you're the only one in the world now that can console her."

  "What time does Tommy go?" I asked.

  "Ten-thirty," said Duff.

  I nodded. "OK." I stood there as they crossed the sidewalk and got into Duff Ryan's car and drove away. Then I went in to see Marie. The kid looked scared, white as a ghost.

  "Oh, Thorpe," she said, "they're going to kill him tonight!"

  "Well, I guess there's nothing we can do," I said.

  She put her arms around me and cried on my shoulder. I could feel her against me, and believe me, she was nice. She had figure, all right. I put my arms around her waist and then I kissed her neck and her ears. She looked at me, tears on her cheeks, and shook her head. "Don't."

  She said that because I had never kissed her before, but now I saw her lips and I kissed her. She didn't do anything about it, but kept crying.

  Finally I said, "Well, let's make fudge. Let's play a game. Let's play the radio. Let's do something. This thing's beginning to get me."

  We went to the kitchen and made fudge for a while.

  But I was restless. The rain had increased. There was thunder and lightning in the sky now. Again I had that strange feeling of being cold, although the room was warm. I looked at the clock and it said ten minutes after eight. Only ten minutes after eight! And Tommy wasn't going to hang until ten-thirty!

  "You'll always stay with me, won't you, Thorpe?" said Marie.

  "Sure," I told her, but right then I felt like I wanted to push her face in. I had never felt that way before. I couldn't understand what was the matter with me. Everything that had been me was gone. My wit and good humor.

  I kept watching the clock, watching every minute that ticked by, and thinking of Tommy up there in San Quentin in the death cell pacing back and forth. I guess maybe he was watching the minutes too. I wondered if it was raining up there and if rain made any difference in a hanging.

  We wandered back into the living room and sat down at opposite ends of the divan. Marie looking at nothing, her eyes glassy, and me watching and hating the rain, and hearing the clock.

  Then suddenly Marie got up and went to the piano. She didn't ask me if she could or anything about it. She just went to the piano and sat down. I stared after her, even opened my mouth to speak. But I didn't say anything. After all, it was her brother who was going to die, wasn't it? I guess for one night at least she could do anything she wanted to do.

  But then she began playing. First, right off, "Lead Kindly Light," and then "Onward Christian Soldiers," and then "Little Church in the Wildwood"' I sat there wringing my hands with that agony beating in my ears. Then I leapt to my feet and began to shout at her.

  "Stop that! Stop it! Do you want to drive me crazy?"

  But her face was frozen now. It was as though she was in a trance. I ran to her and shook her shoulder, but she pulled away from me and played on.

  I backed away from her and my face felt as though it was contorted. I backed away and stared at her, her slim, arched back. I began biting my fingernails, and then my fingers. That music was killing me. Those hymns ... those silly, inane hymns. Why didn't she stop it? The piano and the rain were seeping into my bloodstream.

  I walked up and down the room. I walked up and down the room faster and faster. I stopped and picked up a flower vase and dropped it, yelling: "Stop it! For the love of heaven, stop!"

  But she kept right on. Again I began staring at her, at her back, and her throat, and the profile of her face. I felt blood surging in me. I felt those hammers in my temples...

  I tried to fight it off this time. I tried to go toward her to pul
l her away from that damn piano but I didn't have the strength to move in her direction. I stood there feeling the breath go out of me, feeling my skin tingle. And I didn't want to be like that. I looked at my hands, and one minute they were tight fists and the next my fingers were working in and out like mad.

  I looked toward the kitchen, and then I moved quietly into it. She was still slamming at the piano when I opened the drawer and pulled out the knife I had used to kill her father.

  At least it was a knife like it. I put it behind me and tiptoed back into the room. She wasn't aware that I had moved. I crept up on her, waited.

  Her hands were flying over the piano keys. Once more I shouted, and my voice was getting hoarse: "Stop it!"

  But of course she didn't. She didn't and I swore. I swore at her. She didn't hear this either. But I'd show the little slut a thing or two.

  I was breathing hard, looking around the room to make sure no one was here. Then I lifted the knife and plunged down with it.

  I swear I never knew where Duff Ryan came from. It must have been from behind the divan. A simple place like that and I hadn't seen him, merely because I had been convinced that he went away in the car. But he'd been in the room all the time waiting for me to do what I almost did.

  It had been a trick, of course, and this time I'd been sap enough to fall into his trap. He had heard me denounce hymns, he knew I'd be nervous tonight, highly excitable, so he had set the stage and remained hidden, and Marie had done the rest.

  He had told Marie then, after all.

  Duff Ryan grabbed my wrist just at the right moment, as he had planned on doing, and of course being fourteen I didn't have much chance against him. He wrested away the knife, then he grabbed me and shouted:

  "Why did you murder Marie's father?"

  "Because the old boy hated me! Because he thought Marie was too young to know boys! Because he kicked me out and hit me with his cane!" I said all this, trying to jerk away from him, but I couldn't so I went on:

  "That's why I did it. Because I had a lot of fun doing it! So what? What are you going to do about it? I'm a kid, you can't hang me! There's a law against hanging kids. I murdered Pushton too. I shoved him out the window! How do you like that? All you can do is put me in reform school!"

  As my voice faded, and it faded because I had begun to choke, I heard Ruth at the telephone. She had come back in too. She was calling long distance. San Quentin.

  Marie was sitting on the divan, her face in her hands. You would have thought she was sorry for me. When I got my breath I went on:

  "I came back afterward, while Tommy was in the other room. I got in the kitchen door. The old man was standing there and I just picked up the knife and let him have it. I ran before I could see much. But Pushton. Let me tell you about Pushton—"

  Duff Ryan shoved me back against the piano. "Shut up," he said. "You didn't kill Pushton. You're just bragging now. But you did kill the old man and that's what we wanted to know!"

  Bragging? I was enraged. But Duff Ryan clipped me and I went out cold.

  So I'm in reform school now and— will you believe it? —I can't convince anyone that I murdered Pushton. Is it that grownups are so unbelieving because I'm pretty young? Are they so stupid that they still look upon fourteen-year-old boys as little innocents who have no minds of their own? That is the bitterness of youth. And I am sure that I won't change or see things any differently. I told the dopes that too, but everyone assures me I will.

  But the only thing I'm really worried about is that no one will believe about Pushton, not even the kids here at the reform school, and that hurts. It does something to my pride.

  I'm not in the least worried about anything else. Things here aren't so bad, nor so different from Clark's. Doctors come and see me now and then but they don't think anything is wrong with my mind.

  They think I knifed old man Smith because I was in a blind rage when I did it, and looking at it that way, it would only be second-degree murder even if I were older. I'm not considered serious. There are lots worse cases here than mine. Legally, a kid isn't responsible for what he does, so I'll be out when I'm twenty-one. Maybe before, because my old man's got money...

  You'll always remember me, won't you? Because I'll be out when I'm older and you might be the one I'll be seeing.

  GUN CRAZY

  1940: Mackinlay Kantor

  MACKINLAY KANTOR (1904–1977) was born in Webster City, Iowa, becoming a journalist at seventeen, and soon after began selling hard-boiled mystery stories to various pulp magazines. He wrote numerous crime stories, as well as several novels in the genre, such as Diversey (1928), about Chicago gangsters, and Signal Thirty-Two (1950), an excellent police procedural, given verisimilitude by virtue of Kantor's receiving permission from the acting police commissioner of New York to accompany the police on their activities to gather background information. His most famous crime novel is Midnight Lace (1948), the suspenseful tale of a young woman terrorized by an anonymous telephone caller; it was filmed twelve years later, starring Doris Day and Rex Harrison.

  Kantor is far better known for his mainstream novels, such as the sentimental dog story The Voice of Bugle Ann (1936), filmed the same year; the long narrative poem Glory for Me (1945), filmed as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; and the outstanding Civil War novel Andersonville (1955), about the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

  "Gun Crazy" was first published in the February 13, 1940, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It has seldom been reprinted, even though it served as the basis for the famous noir cult film of the same title, for which Kantor wrote the screenplay. Released in 1949, it was directed by Joseph H. Lewis. The film, an excellent though more violent expansion of the short story, features a clean-cut gun nut, Bart (Nelly in the story), played by John Dall, who meets a good-looking sharpshooter, Laurie Starr (Antoinette McReady in the story), played by Peggy Cummins, and their subsequent spree of bank robberies and shootings.

  ***

  I FIRST MET Nelson Tare when he was around five or six years old, and I was around the same. I had watched his family moving into the creek house on a cold, snowless morning in early winter.

  Two lumber wagons went by, with iron beds and old kitchen chairs and mattresses tied all over them. They rumbled down the hill past Mr. Boston's barn and stopped in front of the creek house. I could see men and girls working, carrying the stuff inside.

  In midafternoon I was outdoors again, and I coasted to the corner in my little wagon to see whether the moving-in activities were still going on.

  Then Nelson Tare appeared. He had climbed the hill by himself; probably he was looking for guns, although I couldn't know that at the time. He was a gaunt little child with bright blue beads for eyes, and a sharp-pointed nose.

  He said, "Hello, kid. Want to pway?"

  Nelson was only about a month younger than I, it turned out, but he still talked a lot of baby talk. I think kids are apt to do that more when their parents don't talk to them much.

  I told him that I did want to play, and asked him what he wanted to do.

  He asked, "Have you got any guns?" What he actually said was, "Dot any duns?" and for a while I didn't know what he was talking about. Then, when I understood, I coasted back to the house in my wagon, with Nelson walking beside me. We went into the living room.

  I had three guns: a popgun with the pop gone, and a glass pistol that used to have candy inside—but now the candy was all eaten up—and a cap gun and holster.

  The cap gun was the best. It was nickel-plated, and the holster was made of black patent leather. It was the shape and possibly half the size of an ordinary .32-caliber revolver.

  Nelson Tare's eyes pushed out a little when he saw it. He made a grab, and belted it on before I had time to protest and tell him that I wanted to play with the cap gun and he could play with the glass pistol or the broken pop rifle. He went swaggering around with the
gun on, and it kind of scared me the way he did it—all of a sudden he'd snatch the revolver out of its holster and aim it at me.

  I took the glass pistol and tried to imitate him. But the glass pistol couldn't click, and at least the hammer of the cap gun would come down with a resounding click. Nelson, or Nelly, as I came to know him, fairly shot the daylights out of me. I began to protest, and he kept on advancing and kind of wrangling and threatening me, until he had me backed up in a corner.

  He hadn't taken off his little red coat with its yellow horn buttons, and he was perspiring inside it. I still recollect how he smelled when he got close enough to wool me around; I had never smelled a smell like that before. I remember his face, too, when he came close—the tiny, expressionless turquoise eyes, the receding chin and baby mouth still marked with the tag ends of his dinner; and in between them, that inhuman nose whittled out to a point.

  I tried to push him away as he kept battling me and shooting me, and I guess I began to cry.

  Nelson said that it wasn't a real gun.

  "It might go off!"

  He said that it couldn't go off; that it wasn't "weal."

  "'Course it isn't real!" I cried. "I guess there isn't any boy in the world got a real gun!"

  Well, he said that he had one, and when I was still disbelieving he said that he would go home and fetch it. His coat had come unbuttoned in our scufflings, and I remember how he looked as I watched through the window and saw him flapping down the last length of concrete sidewalk past the big maple tree.

  My mother came from upstairs while I waited at the window. She said that she had heard voices. "Did you have company?" she asked.

  "It was a new boy."

  "What new boy?"