Got to Kill Them All & Other Stories Read online

  She dropped the butt of her Pall Mall and lit another at once, pulling long, hard drags down into her lungs.

  "Last week the kid took the gun from the closet and walked up to me in the kitchen," she continued, starting to hand-wash a sheet in the sink. "Pointed it right at my head and said, 'Bang, you're dead, Mommy.' 'Well,' I said, 'are you gonna do it or not? Don't ever point one of those things at someone unless you're gonna use it.'

  "So he did. The kid pulled the trigger. I didn't think he had the guts. 'Course it wasn't loaded. That really pissed me off. It was just like Vladimir, not teaching him what it means to be a—but what would his dad know about that? About what it takes to be a man."

  She scrubbed at the soiled sheet, pausing to jerk a wet hand up to move a strand of hair away from her face. I couldn't help taking a better look at her face then. It was like the rest of her, young and yet old, drawn and tight, made up expensively even now, in the middle of the night, though obviously in haste, and tired, and blank. For a second then, overpoweringly, I had the belief that she was the same young/old woman I had seen seated in the window of a beauty salon in Beverly Hills once; and later, in a cocktail lounge with another girl, waiting, with long, sharp fingernails the color of blood, French-inhaling a Marlboro and with a look on her face that told you she had a hundred-dollar bill in her purse. And that she was waiting. Just waiting.

  She picked up her Pall Mall with a wet thumb and first finger, drawing hard.

  I noticed the clock on the wall: three o'clock.

  "That was when I got it. All these years, trying to figure a way to teach him and that God damned kid of his something."

  I fed a couple of nickels into the detergent machine.

  She paused long enough to take a couple more lengthy hits from her Pall Mall. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the smoke blowing out into the white light.

  "So tonight he comes home and makes the pitcher of martinis, as usual, and goes into his room and closes the door. I go to the door and ask him what the hell's wrong this time. He says he doesn't know. He just wants me to leave him alone."

  She laughed startlingly, hoarsely.

  "Okay, hot shot, I'll leave you the hell alone, I think. You wanna come home from your fucking office looking like a corpse again tonight and lay around until you fall asleep for the zillionth time? All right, I'll let you!

  "We'll find out if that's what you really want.

  "Only first you and that little pussy of a son of yours are gonna get a lesson you'll never forget."

  She turned on the water full force. It gushed out, flooding the basin faster than it could empty.

  "Who ever said if you wash it in cold water it'll come out? Damn. Why the hell did I have to give him the striped sheets, anyway?

  "So I wake the kid up. It doesn't matter—he's awake, and the bed's all wet as usual. I ask him if he remembers what I taught him.

  "It takes a minute or two, but he finally catches on, the dumb little bastard.

  "So I go get the bullets down and tell him to go in there and prove to me that he remembers what it was I beat the shit out of him for last week…."

  I started to dump my stuff into a machine at the far end of the room. Then, all of a sudden, the thread of what she had been saying got through to me.

  I turned back to look at her.

  She was grinding a bar of soap into the sheet now. At the edges the spot was a thick brown, almost black, but at the heart I noticed it was still a deep, gummy shade close to the color of her nails as her fingers flashed violently around the material. The steam was rising up from the basin to surround her.

  I closed my eyes fast.

  Outside, a car came suddenly from nowhere and passed hurriedly by, swishing away down the empty boulevard.

  She finished the story. I didn't want to hear it, tried to block it out of my ears but she told it through to the finish. It didn't matter to her. She had never been talking to me anyway.

  My eyes jammed shut, harder and harder, until I saw gray shapes that seemed to move in front of me. Never before in my life up to that moment could I remember feeling so detached, so out of it. I leaned the heels of my hands against the washer. The quarter slipped from my fingers, clanked against the enamel and hit the cold, cracked cement floor.

  The last thing I heard her saying was:

  "…So afterward I tell the kid to go back to bed, to go to sleep, just to go the hell to sleep, but he can't. Or won't. He just sits there on the floor in the corner, the gun still in his lap, whimpering quietly. That was how I left him, the little sissy…."

  Disgusted—tired and sick and disgusted out of all memory and beyond all hope—I forced my things back into the bag and stumbled out of the laundromat. She said something after me but I didn't want to hear what it was.

  I pulled my coat up around my ears. I was starting to shiver. I snorted, at no one in particular, at the night and all the people in it, everywhere, the stupid, unthinking people who don't know enough to leave a man alone, just to leave you the hell alone the times when you need it most. There was no place left for me to go, no place at all anywhere in the city. And so, breathing steam, I made it away from there as fast as I could, heading off down the street in the same direction as the car and blinking fast, being careful not to step on any cracks, all the way back to my room. My quiet room.

  The Walking Man

  It was one of those long, blue evenings that come to the Malibu late in the year, the water undulating up to the beach like some smooth, sleepy girl moving slowly under a satin sheet. I must have been staring, because the bartender leaned over and pushed the empty glass against the back of my hand.

  "Another?"

  "Vodka," I reminded him. The sky, out by the point that shelters the Colony, was turning a soft, tropical orange of the kind one expects to see only on foreign postage stamps. The edge of the water lapped the pilings below the restaurant. An easy, regular rhythm, like the footsteps outside on the pier.

  He reached for a dry napkin. "Live around here?"

  "A few months," I told him. It was still true, for the moment, at least. I hoped he would let it pass. I didn't want to go into the alimony and the rest of it, not now.

  He had the Rose's Lime Juice in his hand. The way he handled it, I could see he hadn't been at this too long. He was young, still in his twenties; I wondered how he had got the job with all that sun-bleached hair. "Should've seen it back about May, June," he said. He picked up a cherry, one of the green ones, but I held up my hand and he put it back. "All that sand out there?"

  I turned back to the window and looked with him.

  "Rocks," he said. I heard the rough ice cubes drop into the glass.

  "Right."

  "Out there, I mean. Boulders like you never seen. Like the moon or something. Five, six feet of sand must've washed in over the summer."

  He was right. I remembered the beach below the sun deck of our newly leased house: the sand slick as a wet peach as far as we could walk at low tide, and piled in solid around the posts; and I remembered waking one morning to find it gone, washed out from under us during the night, everything but the rocky underpinnings, all the way out to the tide pools where mussels held to the sharp erosions, crusted hard against the beaks of the circling gulls. Now, the season and the waterline changing, it was all coming back. I remembered, and he was right.

  The drink was up. I started on it. The kitchen wouldn't be serving for another hour and the room was still empty, even here at the bar. There were a couple of too-young waitresses making like they were busy, wiping off the plastic menus and refilling the little bowls with sugar packets. I sat watching them in the light of the sunset, their figures silhouetted against the empty panes, but I knew all about the game and I didn't feel up to it. They looked like nervous laughs and weekends at Mammoth and a taste for Cold Duck, and when they joked at each other under their breaths the sound came to me above the piped-in music: telephone voices just out of the shower, brittle as window
glass, unexpectedly cold, and transparent.

  There wasn't much left of the drink so I turned on the stool for one last view. I knew I couldn't see my place from here, buried past a stretch of big rich ones, but I tried just the same.

  "Which one?"

  The voice was so flat, so toneless the thought occurred that it might have been my own. I drained the glass against my teeth and put it down. The bartender was twisting some bottles of Bud in shaved ice. He flicked his eyes in what I took to be the direction of the color TV, but it wasn't on. It never was. I leaned in, trying to see past the end of the bar.

  She was back there at the small table, the one you never notice against the wood. I wouldn't have spotted her at all except for her eyes, the way the whites reflected the dim light coming through the stained glass porthole on the side door. They were huge, very wide-set, as if drawn by a Forties comic strip artist; I couldn't place the style. They were not looking at me. I squinted anyway, trying to see into the shadows. But she was not looking at me.

  Something small and white lifted to her lips. No, I thought, or maybe I muttered it. Not this time, and I did not reach for the matches on the bar.

  Then she did something I wasn't ready for, something that had a little class, just a little, at least. She went ahead and lit the cigarette, without the look, the wait. And suddenly I felt bitter in the throat at myself as well as the game, at the whole thing, just the whole damn thing.

  "The lady," said the bartender. "I think she's talking to you."

  She still wasn't looking at me. "What did she say?"

  "Don't ask me, man," he said, and he winked. That settled it for me. No way.

  "No way," I said.

  He shrugged. I climbed off the stool. He was watching but I wasn't going to give him the next act. "Set up one more," I told him. "I'm going to the head."

  "Sure," he said. You know how he said it.

  I took a couple of steps. Then I remembered about the head. (A varnished plaque on the door: BUCKS.) It was back there, down a hall between the cigarette machine and the pay phone. The hall next to the small table.

  Well, the hell with her.

  I passed the table. I was about to turn into the hall, but I couldn't resist checking her out, just once. Call it a flaw in my character, an itch in the place you know you can't scratch but can't stop yourself from trying, every time.

  There was something I recognized. Maybe she reminded me of the types in the class Beverly Hills saloons with the Boston ferns hanging from the ceiling, the ones I've seen as I passed by outside the glass: twenty-nine going on forty, skin diet-taut, a streak bleached into the hair; a look that says that she's got a C-note folded in her bag and that she's waiting, just waiting. This one had the expression, I guess, but that was all. Her hair was black, no streak. Not shiny black, but dull, more like what's left in the grate a minute before the fire goes out. Drawn back along the sides of her head, but not tight, not a cheap face-lift, not like she cared. Her skin was white, but not kept from the sun like some courtesan; it was the kind of pale you get when you don't care enough to go outside.

  And there were the eyes. They set me on edge. They were too extreme, like something you learn never to expect in this life: gilt on the lily, egg in the beer, too much, much too much for the way they tell you things are supposed to be.

  "Which one," she said, again. She said it that way, not a question, not anything.

  "Don't worry. You couldn't see my house if you tried." Don't worry. You couldn't see my house if you tried. I said it, I thought it, I don't know which.

  "Will you help me?"

  She did not bother to raise her head.

  "Which one? Which one of those people?" she continued.

  Now I knew we weren't on the same wavelength. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Her eyes were fixed somewhere close to the line of houses. The pier, I gathered. A few tourists were out on the boards, strolling up and back, back and up. They reminded me of shooting gallery targets, rolling along on tracks and wobbling a little in the breeze. Except that I could hear footsteps, even here.

  "What about them?" I asked.

  "They remind me of mannequins." She stubbed out her cigarette, almost new. "Do mannequins have wheels, do you know?"

  I was standing there looking down at her, studying her face. It was an exaggerated triangle, inverted—like the Sub-Mariner, I think, if you remember. Then again, maybe it was only the perspective. "That's a funny thing to say," I said.

  "Which one would you kill," she said. Another non-question. "Say you could name your price. Any one you choose."

  I thought about it, I don't know why. She was making some kind of point, I guess. I wanted to hear what it was. "You talk like they're not even human," I said.

  She raised her face a few degrees. Her chin was really tiny, almost lost below her enormous lower lip, which was puffed out in a perpetual pout. More than anything else, I saw her wide, pallid forehead. She had not arranged her hair to hide it.

  "And we are?" she said. "Is that what you mean?"

  I leaned on the rail and watched the water bringing sand up to the shoreline. Bringing it up or taking it away.

  "Say you had to choose."

  I pivoted, startled but not surprised. She had come up like a ghost, one of those with sheet trailing and no feet below to sound the boards. I turned back to the rail. The gulls were swooping on the pearled waters, trying to pick up fish that had come too close to shore, into the tide pools between the green rocks where they didn't belong.

  I heard her release a long, shuddering breath. With effort, her voice low, she said, "If you won't say it, I'll say it for you. You can't choose because it wouldn't make any difference. You can't tell them apart."

  I shut my eyes and held them shut for a while before I opened them. Shadows on the sand. People on the beach. Figures chasing a ball, picking driftwood, unleashing dogs, rolling trouser legs, walking hand in hand. I couldn't see their faces from here. Each time my eyes opened the configuration was different, the figures shuffled, interchanged.

  But I was letting myself go. It was easy. Too easy.

  I pressed my eyelids shut again, so tight I saw dull light.

  Thinking: well all right, why not, maybe this one is different, I pulled myself up.

  Finding the strength, blinking, I faced her with eyes open. I reached down, steeling myself and relaxing, setting and going with it. Hands on the rail behind, the nails whitened moons, they must have been, I heard myself saying, "What is it you really want?"

  I left the lights off.

  She wanted me, but not desperately. She gave, but not to lose herself. She took from me—received and did not grasp. The moment did seem to be out of time, but passed to the next moment as easily as the passing of a breath. I began to think of her as beautiful. She might have been anyone. She was familiar somehow; I had never known her like. I passed from her back into myself as easily as a breath is taken and released. I was aware of the wind outside, the lights in the windows of other houses going on and off along the point, the white sound of the waves, the passing and repassing of slapping feet on the beach, drunken laughter beyond the deck. The absence of laughter. The easy silence, and the night.

  "Who's out there?"

  "What? Nobody, probably. It's late."

  "I don't mean the beach. I thought I heard someone walking. Outside, there."

  She meant the front of the house.

  "There's nothing out there but the highway. Not even a sidewalk. You know that."

  I watched her in the moonlight from the window.

  "All right, what is it?"

  She shifted to her side, her hair lifting away from the pillow in long black tendrils. "Sometimes there's a man, walking."

  I reached for my shirt. "Smoke?"

  "Mm."

  But before I could get to my cigarettes, she had one in her mouth. I don't know where she got it. I gave her a light. I saw the twisted end, the way it caught and bur
ned unevenly.

  She filled her lungs without blinking and held out the joint.

  I hesitated, but only for a second. The last couple of times it had made me remember too much, had made the ache come again. I took it. It tasted like sweet garbage, but it went down easy.

  She lay back. Her eyes were staring. I seemed to be seeing her from above: the dark hollows over her collarbone, her breasts, the way they did not flatten when she lay on her back, the way her breath moved below her ribs, the tangle between her thighs, glistening under me….

  "How do you know no one is there?" she said.

  "Because—" I flopped onto my back, took another lungful, executed a quick sit-up. I crossed the living room, drew open the top half of the door to the sun deck and leaned out. The tide was low, a good fifty feet from the supports, and nothing was moving but a line of sandpipers between the naked rocks. "Because there's nobody. On the beach or anywhere else around here." With irritation. "What's the—" matter with you, I started to say.

  "How do you know?" she repeated.

  My mouth opened. It stayed open, my jaw scissoring as I came back to the big pillows. I squatted next to her on the rug, almost over her. "I need some more of that, I guess," I said, reaching for the joint, "before I can pick up what you're trying to say."

  She punched up the pillow.

  "We were talking about something, back on the pier," she said. "Remember?"

  Though she would not meet my eyes, I stared at her. I thought her mouth began to move, but it was only her chin, receding further.

  Get it out, I thought. The rest of it, so that I can know what to think of you, before I let myself think any more of you than I do. "Come on." Or do you want to go back into hiding in that bar, I thought, do you really? Is that all you want? "Damn it," I said, "you're—" spooking me, I thought. Really.

  "I'm what?" She rose up on the pillow.

  "Nothing."

  "That's what I thought," she said, slumping.