Perhaps, I thought, there was someone in there waiting for me, or someone had been here and left and the place was looted, although there was, God knows, little enough to loot. It could be kids, I thought—some of these mixed-up kids would do anything for kicks.
I went through the door fast and then came to a sudden halt in the middle of the kitchen. There was someone there, all right; there was someone waiting.
Stiffy Grant sat in a kitchen chair and he was doubled over, with his arms wrapped about his middle, and rocking slowly, from side to side, as if he were in pain.
“Stiffy!” I shouted, and Stiffy moaned at me.
Drunk again, I thought. Stiffer than a goat and sick, although how in the world he could have gotten drunk on the dollar I had given him was more than I could figure. Maybe, I thought, he had made another touch or two, waiting to start drinking until he had cash enough to really hang one on.
“Stiffy,” I said, sharply, “what the hell’s the matter?”
I was plenty sore at him. He could get plastered as often as he liked and it was all right with me, but he had no right to come busting in on me.
Stiffy moaned again, then he fell out of the chair and sprawled untidily on the floor. Something that clattered and jangled flew out of the pocket of his ragged jacket and skidded across the worn-out linoleum.
I got down on my knees and tugged and hauled at him and got him straightened out. I turned him over on his back. His face was splotched and puffy and his breath was jerky, but there was no smell of liquor. I bent close over him in an effort to make certain, and there was no smell of booze.
“Brad?” he mumbled. “Is that you, Brad?”
“Yes,” I told him. “You can take it easy now. I’ll take care of you.”
“It’s getting close,” he whispered. “The time is coming close.”
“What is getting close?”
But he couldn’t answer. He had a wheezing fit. He worked his jaws, but no words came out. They tried to come, but he choked and strangled on them.
I left him and ran into the living room and turned on the light beside the telephone. I pawed, all fumble-fingered, through the directory, to find Doc Fabian’s number. I found it and dialed and waited while the phone rang on and on. I hoped to God that Doc was home and not out on a call somewhere. For when Doc was gone, you couldn’t count on Mrs. Fabian answering. She was all crippled up with arthritis and half the time couldn’t get around. Doc always tried to have someone there to watch after her and to take the calls when he went out, but there were times when he couldn’t get anyone to stay. Old Mrs. Fabian was hard to get along with and no one liked to stay.
When Doc answered, I felt a great surge of relief.
“Doc,” I said, “Stiffy Grant is here at my place and there’s something wrong with him.”
“Drunk, perhaps,” said Doc.
“No, he isn’t drunk. I came home and found him sitting in the kitchen. He’s all twisted up and babbling.”
“Babbling about what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just babbling—when he can talk, that is.”
“All right,” said Doc. “I’ll be right over.”
That’s one thing about Doc. You can count on him. At any time of day or night, in any kind of weather.
I went back to the kitchen. Stiffy had rolled over on his side and was clutching at his belly and breathing hard. I left him where he was. Doc would be here soon and there wasn’t much that I could do for Stiffy except to try to make him comfortable, and maybe, I told myself, he might be more comfortable lying on his side than turned over on his back.
I picked up the object that had fallen out of Stiffy’s coat. It was a key ring, with a half dozen keys. I couldn’t imagine what need Stiffy might have for half a dozen keys. More than likely he just carried them around for some smug feeling of importance they might give to him.
I put them on the counter top and went back and squatted down alongside Stiffy. “I called Doc,” I told him. “He’ll be here right away.”
He seemed to hear me. He wheezed and sputtered for a while, then he said in a broken whisper: “I can’t help no more. You are all alone.” It didn’t go as smooth as that. His words were broken up.
“What are you talking about?” I asked him, as gently as I could. “Tell me what it is.”
“The bomb,” he said. “The bomb. They’ll want to use the bomb. You must stop them, boy.”
I had told Doc that he was babbling and now I knew I had been right.
I headed for the front door to see if Doc might be in sight and when I got there he was coming up the walk.
Doc went ahead of me into the kitchen and stood for a moment, looking down at Stiffy. Then he set down his bag and hunkered down and rolled Stiffy on his back.
“How are you, Stiffy?” he demanded.
Stiffy didn’t answer.
“He’s out cold,” said Doc.
“He talked to me just before you came in.”
“Say anything?”
I shook my head. “Just nonsense.”
Doc hauled a stethoscope out of his pocket and listened to Stiffy’s chest. He rolled Stiffy’s eyelids back and beamed a light into his eyes. Then he got slowly to his feet.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
“He’s in shock,” said Doc. “I don’t know what’s the matter. We’d better get him into the hospital over at Elmore and have a decent look at him.”
He turned wearily and headed for the living room.
“You got a phone in here?” he asked.
“Over in the corner. Right beside the light.”
“I’ll call Hiram,” he said. “He’ll drive us into Elmore. We’ll put Stiffy in the back seat and I’ll ride along and keep an eye on him.”
He turned in the doorway. “You got a couple of blankets you could let us have?”
“I think I can find some.”
He nodded at Stiffy. “We ought to keep him warm.”
I went to get the blankets. When I came back with them, Doc was in the kitchen. Between the two of us, we got Stiffy all wrapped up. He was limp as a kitten and his face was streaked with perspiration.
“Damn wonder,” said Doc, “how he keeps alive, living the way he does, in that shack stuck out beside the swamp. He drinks anything and everything he can get his hands on and he pays no attention to his food. Eats any kind of slop he can throw together easy. And I doubt he’s had an honest bath in the last ten years. It does beat hell,” he said with sudden anger, “how little care some people ever think to give their bodies.”
“Where did he come from?” I asked. “I always figured he wasn’t a native of this place. But he’s been here as long as I remember.”
“Drifted in,” said Doc, “some thirty years ago, maybe more than that. A fairly young man then. Did some odd jobs here and there and just sort of settled down. No one paid attention to him. They figured, I guess, that he had drifted in and would drift out again. But then, all at once, he seemed to have become a fixture in the village. I would imagine that he just liked the place and decided to stay on. Or maybe lacked the gumption to move on.”
We sat in silence for a while.
“Why do you suppose he came barging in on you?” asked Doc.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “We always got along. We’d go fishing now and then. Maybe he was just walking past when he started to get sick.”
“Maybe so,” said Doc.
The doorbell rang and I went and let Hiram Martin in. Hiram was a big man. His face was mean and he kept the constable’s badge pinned to his coat lapel so polished that it shone.
“Where is he?” he asked.
“Out in the kitchen,” I said. “Doc is sitting with him.”
It was very plain that Hiram did not take to being drafted into the job of driving Stiffy in to Elmore.
He strode into the kitchen and stood looking down at the swathed figure on the floor.
“Drunk?” he asked.
?
??No,” said Doc. “He’s sick.”
“Well, O.K.,” said Hiram, “the car is out in front and I left the engine running. Let’s heave him in and be on our way.”
The three of us carried Stiffy out to the car and propped him in the back seat.
I stood on the walk and watched the car go down the street and I wondered how Stiffy would feel about it when he woke up and found that he was in a hospital. I rather imagined that he might not care for it.
I felt bad about Doc. He wasn’t a young man any longer and more than likely he’d had a busy day, and yet he took it for granted that he should ride with Stiffy.
Once in the house again, I went into the kitchen and got out the coffee and went to the sink to fill the coffee pot, and there, lying on the counter top, was the bunch of keys I had picked up off the floor. I picked them up again and had a closer look at them. There were two of them that looked like padlock keys and there was a car key and what looked like a key to a safety deposit box and two others that might have been any kind of keys. I shuffled them around, scarcely seeing them, wondering about that car key and that other one which might have been for a safety box. Stiffy didn’t have a car and it was a good, safe bet that he had nothing for which he’d ever need a safety deposit box.
The time is getting close, he’d told me, and they’ll want to use the bomb. I had told Doc that it was babbling, but now, remembering back, I was not so sure it was. He had wheezed out the words and he’d worked to get them out. They had been conscious words, words he had managed with some difficulty. They were words that he had meant to say and had labored to get said. They had not been the easy flow of words that one mouths when babbling. But they had not been enough. He had not had the strength or time. The few words that he’d managed made no particular sense.
There was a place where I might be able to get some further information that might piece out the words, but I shrank from going there. Stiffy Grant had been a friend of mine for many years, ever since that day he’d gone fishing with a boy of ten and had sat beside him on the river bank all the afternoon, spinning wondrous tales. As I recalled it, standing in the kitchen, we had caught some fish, but the fish were not important. What had been important then, what was still important, was that a grown man had the sort of understanding to treat a ten-year-old as an equal human being. On that day, in those few hours of an afternoon, I had grown a lot. While we sat on that river bank I had been as big as he was, and that was the first time such a thing had ever happened to me.
There was something that I had to do and yet I shrank from doing it—and still, I told myself, Stiffy might not mind. He had tried to tell me something and he had failed because he didn’t have the strength. Certainly he would understand that if I used these keys to get into his shack, that I had not done it in a spirit of maliciousness, or of idle curiosity, but to try to attain that knowledge he had tried to share with me.
No one had ever been in Stiffy’s shack. He had built it through the years, out at the edge of town, beside a swamp in the comer of Jack Dickson’s pasture, and he had built it out of lumber he had picked up and out of flattened tin cans and all manner of odd junk he had run across. At first it had been little more than a lean-to, a shelter from the wind and rain. But bit by bit, year by year, he had added to it until it was a structure of wondrous shape and angles, but it was a home.
I made up my mind and gave the keys a final toss and caught them and put them in my pocket. Then I went out of the house and got into the car.
6
A thin fog of ghostly white lay just above the surface of the swamp and curled about the foot of the tiny knoll on which Stiffy’s shack was set. Across the stretch of whiteness loomed a shadowed mass, the dark shape of a wooded island that rose out of the marsh.
I stopped the car and got out of it and as I did, my nostrils caught the rank odor of the swamp, the scent of old and musty things, the smell of rotting vegetation, and ochre-colored water. It was not particularly offensive and yet there was about it an uncleanliness that set one’s skin to crawling. Perhaps, I told myself, a man got used to it. More than likely Stiffy had lived with it so long that he never noticed it.
I glanced back toward the village and through the darkness of the nightmare trees I could catch an occasional glimpse of a swaying street lamp. No one, I was certain, could have seen me come here. I’d switched off the headlights before I turned off the highway and had crawled along the twisting cart track that led in to the shack with no more than a sickly moonlight to help me on my way.
Like a thief in the night, I thought. And that, of course, was what I was—except I had no intent of stealing.
I walked up the path that led to the crazy door fashioned out of uneven slabs of salvaged lumber, closed by a metal hasp guarded by a heavy padlock. I tried one of the padlock keys and it fitted and the lock snicked back. I pushed on the door and it creaked open.
I pulled the flashlight I had taken from the glove compartment of the car out of my pocket and thumbed its switch. The fan of light thrust out, spearing through the doorway. There was a table and three chairs, a stove against one wall, a bed against another.
The room was clean. There was a wooden floor, covered by scraps of linoleum carefully patched together. The linoleum was so thoroughly scrubbed that it fairly shone. The walls had been plastered and then neatly papered with scraps of wallpaper, and with a complete and cynical disregard for any color scheme.
I moved farther into the room, swinging the light slowly back and forth. At first it had been the big things I had seen—the stove, the table and the chairs, the bed. But now I began to become aware of the other things and the little things.
And one of these smaller things, which I should have seen at once, but hadn’t, was the telephone that stood on the table.
I shone the light on it and spent long seconds making sure of what I’d known to start with—for it was apparent at a glance that the phone was without a dial and had no connection cord. And it would have done no good if it had had a cord, for no telephone line had ever been run to this shack beside the swamp.
Three of them, I thought—three of them I knew of. The one that had been in my office and another in Gerald Sherwood’s study and now this one in the shack of the village bum.
Although, I told myself, not quite so much a bum as the village might believe. Not the dirty slob most people thought he was. For the floor was scrubbed and the walls were papered and everything was neat.
Me and Gerald Sherwood and Stiffy Grant—what kind of common bond could there be among us? And how many of these dialless phones could there be in Millville; for how many others of us did that unknown bond exist?
I moved the light and it crept across the bed with its patterned quilt—not rumpled, not messed up, and very neatly made. Across the bed and to another table that stood beyond the bed. Underneath the table were two cartons. One of them was plain, without any lettering, and the other was a whiskey case with the name of an excellent brand of scotch writ large across its face.
I walked over to the table and pulled the whiskey case out from underneath it. And in it was the last thing in the world I had expected. It was not an emptied carton packed with personal belongings, not a box of junk, but a case of whiskey.
Unbelieving, I lifted out a bottle and another and another, all of them still sealed. I put them back in the case again and lowered myself carefully to the floor, squatting on my heels. I felt the laughter deep inside of me, trying to break out—and yet it was, when one came to think of it, not a laughing matter.
This very afternoon Stiffy had touched me for a dollar because, he’d said, he’d not had a drink all day. And all the time there had been this case of whiskey, pushed underneath the table.
Were all the outward aspects of the village bum no more than camouflage? The broken, dirty nails; the rumpled, threadbare clothing; the unshaven face and the unwashed neck; the begging of money for a drink; the seeking of dirty little piddling jobs to earn the price
of food—was this all a sham?
And if it were a masquerade, what purpose could it serve?
I pushed the case back underneath the table and pulled out the other carton. And this one wasn’t whiskey and neither was it junk. It was telephones.
I hunkered, staring at them, and it now was crystal clear how that telephone had gotten on my desk. Stiffy had put it there and then had waited for me, propped against the building. Perhaps he had seen me coming down the street as he came out of the office and had done the one thing that would seem entirely natural to explain his waiting there. Or it might equally well have been just plain bravado. And all the time he has been laughing at me deep inside himself.
But that must be wrong, I told myself. Stiffy never would have laughed at me. We were old and trusted friends and he’d never laugh at me, he would never do anything to fool me. This was a serious business, too serious for any laughing to be done.
If Stiffy had put the phone there, had he also been the one who had come back and taken it? Could that have been the reason he had come to my place—to explain to me why the phone was gone?
Thinking of it, it didn’t seem too likely.
But if it had not been Stiffy, then there was someone else involved.
There was no need to lift out the phones, for I knew exactly what I’d find. But I did lift them out and I wasn’t wrong. They had no dials and no connection cords.
I got to my feet and for a moment stood uncertain, staring at the phone standing on the table, then, making up my mind, strode to the table and lifted the receiver.
“Hello,” said the voice of the businessman. “What have you to report?”
“This isn’t Stiffy,” I said. “Stiffy is in a hospital. He was taken sick.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then the voice said, “Oh, yes, it’s Mr. Bradshaw Carter, isn’t it. So nice that you could call.”
“I found the phones,” I said. “Here in Stiffy’s shack. And the phone in my office has somehow disappeared. And I saw Gerald Sherwood. I think perhaps, my friend, it’s time that you explained.”
“Of course,” the voice said. “You, I suppose, have decided that you will represent us.”