Steel and other stories [SSC] Page 4

  In the ready room he collapsed. Pole tried to get him up on the bench but he couldn’t. Finally, he bunched up his blue coat under Kelly’s head and, kneeling, he started patting with his handkerchief at the trickles of blood.

  “You dumb bastard,” he kept muttering in a thin, shaking voice. “You dumb bastard.”

  Kelly lifted his hand and brushed away Pole’s hand.

  “Go—get the—money,” he gasped hoarsely.

  “What?”

  “The money!” gasped Kelly through his teeth.

  “But—”

  “Now!” Kelly’s voice was barely intelligible.

  Pole straightened up and stood looking down at Kelly a moment. Then he turned and went out.

  Kelly lay there drawing in breath and exhaling it with wheezing sounds. He couldn’t move his right hand and he knew it was broken. He felt the blood trickling from his nose and mouth. His body throbbed with pain.

  After a few moments he struggled up on his left elbow and turned his head, pain crackling along his neck muscles. When he saw that Maxo was all right he put his head down again. A smile twisted up one corner of his lips.

  When Pole came back, Kelly lifted his head painfully. Pole came over and knelt down. He started patting at the blood again.

  “Ya get it?” Kelly asked in a crusty whisper.

  Pole blew out a slow breath.

  “Well?”

  Pole swallowed. “Half of it,” he said.

  Kelly stared up at him blankly, his mouth fallen open. His eyes didn’t believe it.

  “He said he wouldn’t pay five C’s for a one rounder.”

  “What d’ya mean?” Kelly’s voice cracked. He tried to get up and put down his right hand. With a strangled cry he fell back, his face white. His head thrashed on the coat pillow, his eyes shut tightly.

  “No,” he moaned. “No. No. No. No. No.”

  Pole was looking at his hand and wrist. “Jesus God,” he whispered.

  Kelly’s eyes opened and he stared up dizzily at the mechanic.

  “He can’t—he can’t do that,” he gasped.

  Pole licked his dry lips.

  “Steel, there—ain’t a thing we can do. He’s got a bunch o’ toughs in the office with ‘im. I can’t. . .” He lowered his head. “And if—you was t’go there he’d know what ya done. And—he might even take back the two and a half.”

  Kelly lay on his back, staring up at the naked bulb without blinking. His chest labored and shuddered with breath.

  “No,” he murmured. “No.”

  He lay there for a long time without talking. Pole got some water and cleaned off his face and gave him a drink. He opened up his small suitcase and patched up Kelly’s face. He put Kelly’s right arm in a sling.

  Fifteen minutes later Kelly spoke.

  “Well go back by bus,” he said.

  “What?” Pole asked.

  “We’ll go by bus,” Kelly said slowly. “That’ll only cost, oh, fifty-sixty bucks.” He swallowed and shifted on his back. “That’ll leave almost two C’s. We can get ‘im a—a new trigger spring and a—eye lens and—-” He blinked his eyes and held them shut a moment as the room started fading again.

  “And oil paste,” he said then. “Loads of it. He’ll be— good as new again.”

  Kelly looked up at Pole. “Then we’ll be all set up,” he said. “Maxo’ll be in good shape again. And we can get us some decent bouts.” He swallowed and breathed laboriously. “That’s all he needs is a little work. New spring, a new eye lens. That’ll shape ‘im up. We’ll show those bastards what a B-two can do. Old Maxo’ll show ‘em. Right?”

  Pole looked down at the big Irishman and sighed.

  “Right, Steel,” he said.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  TO FIT THE CRIME

  “I’ve been murdered!” cried ancient Iverson Lord, “brutally, foully murdered!”

  “There, there,” said his wife.

  “Now, now,” said his doctor.

  “Garbage,” murmured his son.

  “As soon expect sympathy from mushrooms!” snarled the decaying poet. “From cabbages!”

  “From kings,” said his son.

  The parchment face flinted momentarily, then sagged into meditative creases. “Aye, they will miss me,” he sighed. “The kings of language, the emperors of the tongue.” He closed his eyes. “The lords of splendrous symbol, they shall know when I have passed.”

  The moulding scholar lay propped on a cloudbank of pillows. A peak of silken dressing gown erupted his turkey throat and head. His head was large, an eroded football with lace holes for eyes and a snapping gash of a mouth.

  He looked over them all; his wife, his daughter, his son and his doctor. His beady suspicious eyes played about the room. He glared at the walls. “Assassins,” he grumbled.

  The doctor reached for his wrist.

  “Avaunt!” snapped the hunched-over semanticist, clawing out. “Take off your clumsy fingers!”

  He threw an tired glance at the physician. “White-collar witch doctors,” he accused, “who take the Hypocratic Oath and mash it into common vaudeville.”

  “Iverson, your wrist,” said the doctor.

  “Who knuckle-tap our chests and sound our hearts yet have no more conception of our ills than plumbers have of stars or pigs of paradise.”

  “Your wrist, Iverson,” the doctor said.

  Iverson Lord was near ninety. His limbs were glasslike and brittle. His blood ran slow. His heartbeat was a largo drum. Only his brain hung clear and unaffected, a last soldier defending the fort against senility.

  “I refuse to die,” he announced as if someone had suggested it. His face darkened. “I will not let bleak nature dim my light nor strip the jewel of being from my fingers!”

  “There, there,” said his wife.

  “There, there! There, there!” rasped the poet, false teeth clicking in an outrage. “What betrayal is this! That I, who shape my words and breathe into their forms the breath of might, should be a-fettered to this cliche-ridden imbecile!”

  Mrs. Lord submitted her delicate presence to the abuse of her husband. She strained out a peace-making smile which played upon her features of faded rose. She plucked feebly at mouse-gray curls.

  “You’re upset, Ivie dear,” she said.

  “Upset!” he cried. “Who would not be upset when set upon by gloating jackals!”

  “Father,” his daughter implored.

  “Jackals, whose brains like sterile lumps beneath their skulls refuse to emanate the vaguest glow of insight into words.”

  He narrowed his eyes and gave his life-long lecture once again. “Who cannot deal with word cannot deal with thought,” he said. “Who cannot deal with thought should be dealt with—mercilessly!” He pounded a strengthless fist on the counterpane.

  “Words!” he cried. “Our tools, our glory and our welded chains!”

  “You’d better save your strength,” his son suggested.

  The jade eyes stabbed up, demolishing. Iverson Lord curled thin lips in revulsion.

  “Bug,” he said.

  His son looked down on him. “Compose your affairs, Father,” he said. “Accept. You’ll find death not half bad.”

  “I am not dying!” howled the old poet. “You’d murder me, wouldn’t you! Thug! I shall not listen further!”

  He jerked up the covers and buried his white-crowned head beneath them. His scrawny, dry fingers dribbled over the sheet edge.

  “Ivie, dear,” entreated his wife. “You’ll smother yourself.”

  “Better smothered than betrayed!” came the muffled rejoinder.

  The doctor drew back the blankets.

  “Murdered!” croaked Iverson Lord at all of them, “brutally, foully murdered!”

  “Ivie, dear, no one has murdered you,” said his wife. “We’ve tried to be good to you.”

  “Good!” He grew apoplectic. “Mute good. Groveling good. Insignificant good. Ah! That I should have
created the barren flesh about this bed of pain.”

  “Father, don’t,” begged his daughter.

  Iverson Lord looked upon her. A look of stage indulgence flickered on his face.

  “So Eunice, my bespectacled owl,” he said, “I suppose you are as eager as the rest to view your sire in the act of perishing.”

  “Father, don’t talk that way,” said myopic Eunice.

  “What way, Eunice, my tooth-ridden gobbler—my erupted Venus? In literate English? Yes, perhaps that does put rather a strain on your embalmed faculties.”

  Eunice blinked. She accepted.

  “What will you do, child,” inquired Iverson Lord, “when I am taken from you? Who will speak to you? Indeed, who will even look?” The old eyes glittered a coup de grâce. “Let there be no equivocation, my dear,” he said gently. “You are ugly in the extreme.”

  “Ivie, dear,” pleaded Mrs. Lord.

  “Leave her alone!” said Alfred Lord. “Must you destroy everything before you leave?”

  Iverson Lord raised a hackle.

  “You,” he intoned, darting a fanged glance. “Mental vandal. Desecrator of the mind. Defacing your birthright in the name of business. Pouring your honored blood into the sewers of commerciality.”

  His stale breath fluttered harshly. “Groveler before check books,” he sneered. “Scraper before bank accounts.”

  His voice strained into grating falsetto. “No, madame. Assuredly, madame. I kiss with reverent lips your fat, unwholesome mind, Madame!”

  Alfred Lord smiled now, content to let the barrages of his father fall upon himself.

  “Let me remind you,” he said, “of the importance of the profit system.”

  “Profit system!” exploded his sire. “Jungle system!”

  “Supply and demand,” said Alfred Lord.

  “Alfred, don’t,” Eunice cautioned.

  Too late to prevent venous eyeballs from threatening to discharge from their sockets. “Judas of the brain!” screamed the poet. “Boy scout of intellect!”

  “I pain to mention it,” Alfred Lord still dropped coals, “but even a businessman may, tentatively, accept Christianity.”

  “Christianity!” snapped the jaded near-corpse, losing aim in his fury. “Outmoded bag of long-suffering beans! Better the lions had eaten all of them and saved the world from a bad bargain!”

  “That will do, Iverson,” said the doctor. “Calm yourself.”

  “You’re upset, Ivie,” said his wife. “Alfred, you mustn’t upset your father.”

  Iverson Lord’s dulling eyes flicked up final lashes of scorn at his fifty-year whipping post.

  “My wife’s capacity for intelligible discourse,” he said, “is about that of primordial gelatine.”

  He patted her bowed head with a smile. “My dear,” he said, “you are nothing. You are absolutely nothing.”

  Mrs. Lord pressed white fingers to her cheek. “You’re upset, Ivie,” her frail voice spoke. “You don’t mean it.”

  The old man sagged back, dejected.

  “This is my penitence,” he said, “to live with this woman who knows so little of words she cannot tell insult from praise.”

  The doctor beckoned to the poet’s family. They moved from the bed toward the fireplace.

  “That’s right,” moaned the rotting scholar, “desert me. Leave me to the rats.”

  “No rats,” said the doctor.

  As the three Lords moved across the thick rug they heard the old man’s voice.

  “You’ve been my doctor twenty years,” it said. “Your brain is varicosed.” “I am to perish,” it bemoaned, “sans pity, sans hope, sans all.” “Words,” it mused. “Build me a sepulcher of words and I shall rise again.”

  And domineered: “This is my legacy! To all semantic drudges—irreverence, intolerance and the generation of unbridled dismay!”

  The three survivors stood before the crackling flames.

  “He’s disappointed,” said the son. “He expected to live forever.”

  “He will live forever,” Eunice emoted. “He is a great man.”

  “He’s a little man,” said Alfred Lord, “who is trying to get even with nature for reducing his excellence to usual dust.”

  “Alfred,” said his mother. “Your father is old. And . . . he’s afraid.”

  “Afraid, perhaps. Great? No. Every spoken cruelty, every deception and selfishness has reduced his greatness. Right now he’s just an old, dying crank.”

  Then they heard Iverson Lord. “Sweep her away!” howled the sinking poet. “Whip her away with nine-tails of eternal life!”

  The doctor was trying to capture the flailing wrist. They all moved hastily for the bed.

  “Arrest her!” yelled Iverson Lord. “Let her not embrace me as her lover! Avaunt—black, foul-faced strumpet!” He took a sock at her. “Avaunt, I say!”

  The old man collapsed back on his pillow. His breath escaped like faltering steam. His lips formed soundless, never-to-be-known quatrains. His gaze fused to the ceiling. His hands twitched out a last palsied gesture of defiance. Then he stared at the ceiling until the doctor reached out adjusting fingers.

  “It’s done,” the doctor said.

  Mrs. Lord gasped. “No,” she said. She could not believe.

  Eunice did not weep. “He is with the angels now,” she said.

  “Let justice be done,” said the son of dead Iverson Lord.

  ~ * ~

  It was a gray place.

  No flames. No licking smoke. No pallor of doom obscured his sight. Only gray—mediocre gray—unrelieved gray.

  Iverson Lord strode through the gray place.

  “The absence of retributive heat and leak-eyed wailing souls is pre-eminently encouraging,” he said to himself.

  Striding on. Through a long gray hall.

  “After-life,” he mused. “So all is not symbolic applesauce as once I had suspected.”

  Another hallway angled in. A man came walking out briskly. He joined the scholar. He clapped him smartly on the shoulder.

  “Greetings, mate!” said the man.

  Iverson Lord looked down his mobile, Grecian nose.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, distaste wrinkling his words.

  “What do you know?” said the man. “How’s life treating you? What do you know and what do you say?”

  The semanticist drew back askance. The man forged on, arms and legs pumping mightily.

  “What’s new?” he was saying. “Give me the low-down. Give me the dirt.”

  Two side halls. The man buzzed into one gray length. Another man appeared. He walked beside Iverson Lord. The poet looked at him narrowly. The man smiled broadly.

  “Nice day, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What place is this?” asked Iverson Lord.

  “Nice weather we’ve been having,” said the man.

  “I ask, what place is this?”

  “Looks like it might turn out nice,” said the man.

  “Craven!” snapped Iverson Lord, stopping in his tracks. “Answer me!”

  The man said, “Everybody complains about the weather but nobody . . .”

  “Silence!”

  The semanticist watched the man turn into a side hallway. He shook his head. “Grotesque mummery,” he said.

  Another man appeared.

  “Hi, you!” cried Iverson Lord. He ran. He clutched the man’s gray sleeve. “What place is this?”

  “You don’t say?” said the man.

  “You will answer me, sirrah!”

  “Is that a fact?” said the man.

  The poet sprayed wrath upon the man. His eyes popped. He grabbed at the man’s gray lapels. “You shall give intelligence or I shall throttle you!” he cried.

  “Honest?” said the man.

  Iverson Lord gaped. “What density is this?” he spoke incredulously. “Is this man or vegetable in my hands?”

  “Well, knock me down and pick me up,” said the man.

  Something bar
ren and chilling gripped the poet. He drew back muttering in fear.