Over the Edge/An Edge in My Voice Page 10

  She had directed him to Wheeling’s part of town, and as they pulled up in front of the modern building, all glassbrick and stucco, the doors opened, and a thick-bodied, extremely tanned man, almost bald, stepped onto the front walk, heading toward a Cadillac parked near the curb.

  “That’s Wheeling,” said Marci Lonergan.

  “Fat cat,” Chips said softly, slewing the stake-bed to the right, jumping the curb and driving completely onto the neatly-trimmed lawn in front of the WHEELING REAL ESTATE & INVESTMENT CORPORATION.

  Wheeling jumped back as the truck roared to a halt, and slipping on the grass, fell over backward. He lay there, resting on his elbows, as Chips backed around and cut the motor.

  Chips banged the cab door and swung himself up onto the bed. He pulled the rear gate loose, and without fanfare kicked the three unconscious men off the truck. The bodies rolled and bounced and came to rest inches from Wheeler, where he lay on the grass. “I think you dropped these.” Chips smiled. It was the smile of the mongoose to the cobra; the smile of the man who has nothing, nothing, nothing to lose. It said, very simply, I’m ready. The next time come to kill me.

  He jacked the rear gate back into its mounts, swung off the side of the truck and climbed back into the cab. He clutched tightly, taking off, and dug two thick, deep grooves in the clean, neat grass. They were like fingernail rakes down smooth flesh; raw and nasty and dark in Wheeler’s ordered scheme.

  “The water plant and purifier will give a whole new life to this part of the state,” Marci Lonergan explained, as they stood looking up at the ten-storey construction of girders and sheet metal. “About 1200 feet down they struck a river, feeding out of an underground lake. It keeps refilling, and the soil geologists calculate it’s a tank basin that we couldn’t empty if we pumped steadily for two thousand years.”

  Chips narrowed his eyes, shaded them and looked to the topmost girders, where high steel men in tin hats and denim workshirts were riveting like so many woodpeckers on grey-steel limbs.

  “There were sealed bids for the construction job, and Wheeler tried to bribe the Commission, but there had been a Congressional Investigation six months before, on just such a deal, so the officials were honest for a change. Dad got the contract, and Wheeler was furious.”

  Chips snubbed the cigarette butt against the sole of his work boot. “Why? He looks prosperous enough.”

  Marci smiled crookedly. “Wheeler is a cog in the Combine in this state. An ‘in’ with this construction would have given his outfit an ‘in’ for all the roadside property and real estate rights. There’ll be a town springing up here that will make Holbrook look like a chicken pock on the map. And Wheeler’s Combine wants that town to be private property. Hotels, gambling concessions, restaurants, resorts, the whole scene. That’s what they’ve lost here. Unless…”

  “Unless they can sabotage the construction, force you to miss your completion date, and take over the action.”

  Marci nodded. “Right. And they’ve made a good start. See that beam painted black,” she pointed halfway to the top of the construction square-grid. Chips saw it, a black shaft of steel among the puzzle-frame of grey-silver girders.

  “Dad came down off that beam. It was a closed coffin burial. He had a good sense of balance. He was pushed.”

  They had painted it black, to remind them; to remind her she had to keep her father’s work going, send it on to completion, or his death would have been a waste. Her expression, and the set of her fine body told him that, without her speaking. “No investigation?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Of sorts. Coroner said accidental death. But every man on this job knew better. They’ve been great, Mr. Bolden—oh, sorry…Chips—they’ve all stuck, even though Robert Jack and his outfit have tried to buy them, and scare them and freeze them out. You have a good crew here.”

  “Well, then, let’s see how good I can be with them,” Chips said. He moved toward the construction elevator. “Care to introduce me around? And then I’ll walk a little high steel to earn my keep.”

  The first week, there was nothing. Work went on apace, and Chips settled into the easy, swinging relationship with his men that seemed a second nature with him. They looked up to the big man, as soon as word circulated what Bolden had done to Wheeler’s three heavies, and the construction moved upward and outward rapidly. He received constant warnings, from Marci Lonergan and from several straw-bosses, to be careful, that word was out that Wheeler wanted his hide nailed to the wall, but no overt action was taken against him. Then came the second week.

  It began with a master riveter named Gravy Nose. He was found beaten, in a ditch, on the outskirts of Holbrook. They had broken both his hands. Then the brake fluid was drained out of the cylinders of two steel-rig trucks, and one of them overturned on the highway, spilling out three tons of girder. The insurance company was unhappy. Then someone filled in a carefully-split length of beam with spackling compound, and repainted it with airplane dope, and four steel-walkers narrowly missed being brained when the cranes swung the beam aloft—and it split like a rotten straw. After that there was the incident of the sprung seam compressed air tank, and the hot-bucket man who lost his left eye from flying metal; the weak acid solution in the wash-water that kept a dozen workers from seeing clearly for days; the shattered riveting gun bits; the inability to get certain materiel, an ongoing problem traced to a mysterious wholesale purchasing of same from suppliers who were afraid, or unable, to tell who they had sold them to.

  But somehow, work crept upward. The beam work neared completion, and sheetwork started in earnest.

  Chips was amazed at the fact that it was common knowledge Wheeler was behind the sabotage, but nothing could be pinned on him. Gypsy Buday, who was Chips’s right hand man and head straw-boss, commented, “He’s a big man these parts, Chips. The Combine runs everything from the casinos and the tracks to the laundromats and juke boxes. Most everybody figures it’s easier to look the other way…and keep their eyesight.”

  Even the brothels and road houses belonged to the Combine.

  Chips found that out one Saturday night when he and Buday decided they’d had it for the week, and needed some relaxation. Marci called the Sleepy Eye just as Chips was knotting his tie, asking him if he wanted to have dinner with her, but he begged off, telling her he was working late on some blueprints, in his room. It was a weak lie, but he couldn’t shift gears from his hyped-up need for some wild action and an evening with Marci and her fresh-scrubbed beauty meant hands off. He needed something meatier than that, after the week of horror he had just come through.

  He and Buday found the place they were seeking, a crib declaring itself MADELAINE’S ROAD HOUSE***ACCOMMODATIONS***LIQUOR***DANCING***ROMANCE in neon snakes across the face of the white stucco, two-storey structure, on the highway outside town.

  They went inside and the smoke was an immediate curtain through which they had to plunge. When they became accustomed to the dingy scene, and the din from the rockabilly band was dulled by their numbed senses, they settled into a booth and ordered a pair of shots each. When the whiskey arrived, it was accompanied by a pair of hostesses, heavy on the eyebrow makeup and heavy in the hips. One of them sported a tattoo on her bicep, obviously a souvenir of a past romance with a Coast Guardsman named Furnley Oates. Old English script.

  The tattooed goddess snuggled in next to Buday, whose dark eyes looked pained at the prospect of fun and games with the beef queen of Arizona. “Hiyah, honeysweets; good candy!” She saluted him and then placed his reluctant hand on her trembling thigh.

  The other girl set Chips’s two shots and two beer chasers in front of him and, tapping the table with a long, crimson fingernail, twanged nasally, “Thatta be eight dolluhz.” Her hand came up like the scoop on a toy crane machine.

  Chips peeled off a ten and said, “Keep it.”

  She slipped it down into her bra—black lace, frayed—and sat down next to him. She was just starting to explain the mattress consistenc
y of her bunk “upstehz” when the two men braced him.

  They slid up to the table, and one of them said, “Leggo my broad, you s——.” It was a long word composed of two words, one referred to animal offal, the other to Chips’s cranium, and was followed without pause by a roundhouse blow that slammed the head in question against the back of the booth.

  The girls melted away, having accomplished their purposes, and in the fight that followed, Chips broke the left wrist of the man with the Dirtymouth, and threw him through the back-bar mirror. Buday suffered lacerations of the scalp when he was struck from behind by the metal puck from the bowling machine; his opponent was considerably worse off, getting the gold shaft of the trumpeter’s Selmer bent over his nose.

  When Marci Lonergan came to bail them out, her face was a chill mask of disapproval. They dropped Buday off at the Emergency Clinic, and Marci started to drive toward Chips’s motel.

  As they drew abreast of it, he put his foot gently but firmly over hers, on the gas pedal, and they sped past, out into the desert.

  They drove that way, in silence, for some time. Chips studied the lines and planes of her face. She was the all-American girl, without blemish or fear marring the soap-ad perfection of her features. Yet she was woman, quite a bit of woman, and he knew she had been hurt by his lie.

  Finally, when they were far out on the cold, empty desert highway, with nothing behind and nothing forward but the night, he took his foot away, and she slowed down. “Turn off,” he suggested, and without comment she obeyed him.

  They parked, and he lit cigarettes for each of them.

  She took hers without looking at him, and the plumes of cigarette smoke rose quickly and were ghostly whipaways in the night.

  “You know that was all set up by Wheeler, don’t you?” There was a snappish tone in her accusation; she was furious with him.

  “I needed some relaxation, Marci.”

  “That’s what they want, to see you hung up so you can’t finish the job.”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “Angry? Don’t flatter yourself. If you want whores—”

  “You’re more than any of them, but—”

  “But you prefer filth…”

  “I prefer to stay uninvolved.”

  “Cowards usually do.” She threw her cigarette away.

  He reached across and grabbed her, by the back of the neck, gently again, but firmly, again. He drew her up against him, so she was bent completely across the front seat, and he kissed her full on the mouth. At first she struggled against him, then she crossed the line, and her body folded into him. Her hands came up and around and were unable to meet across his massive back. They hung that way, poised, for a time that lacked duration, and when she heard him snap his own cigarette away, she turned slightly so he could reach the top of her brassiere.

  No garment ever vanished more willingly.

  It had to come to a head. Chips was working the men harder than ever before, security restrictions he had imposed on the project were keeping accidents and “strange happenings” down to a minimum, and it seemed certain Lonergan Construction would have the job in on time.

  It was apparent to everyone that something had to happen soon, that Wheeler and the Combine were not going to bow out that easily. There was too much at stake.

  Yet everything went as usual. The lucky breaks that occur on a construction job had been sadly absent through most of the rigging, but now they began to appear naturally. A join that was expected to be tough, was found to slip together like two friends shaking hands; unskilled men began dancing and flying across the high steel as though they were master craftsmen; morale lifted. The lunch wagon from Holbrook even began proffering a better grade of hot sandwiches and soup. It was the little things that counted.

  And on that day, when it all came to a head, Chips was on the top level, walking the high steel and checking the work of the riveters. It was after lunch, and far below him he could see the dollies and the rigging equipment, and the silver sheen of the lunch wagon, all surrounded by workers, as he danced from one beam to anoth—

  And slipped!

  Catching one of his big hands around a beam, he steadied himself, and felt his legs going rubbery under him. His head swam, his eyes went gray with fog. His mouth tasted bitter, his gut ached. He was doped!

  It was that simple, and as he fell to one knee on the beam, he knew it had been in the soup, or perhaps the little wax-pint of chocolate milk, he had bought from the truck. He tried to call out, but there was no sound from his lips.

  And then, as he was turning slowly, trying to set himself to lie flat on the girder, he caught the quick soft step of someone approaching along the girder. It was his good ear that caught it, his left ear, or he would not have been able to save himself in time.

  It was Gypsy Buday, his friend, his right-hand man.

  A friend that he turned to for help, who abruptly swung the thick metal riveting bucket at his head. Chips dropped sidewise, and the bucket clanged into the beam beside him. There was a mad light in Buday’s eyes. He was intent on doing a finish-up job on Chips.

  “You’re a hard man to put down, good buddy,” said Buday under his breath, and stepped forward again. Chips was barely able to move back. The drug in the food was taking effect more rapidly. He slipped and struggled backward, out on the edge of the construction. He could hear the red-hot rivets in the bucket snapping and popping as they cooled.

  Buday came on, intent now…even though he could be seen from below. It was as though there was only one thought in his mind, one direction he could take. Chips went down on all fours, and with a vicious step, Buday crunched down on his hand with his foot. He swung the bucket again.

  With the last of his strength, Chips grabbed the foot and slid it off his hand, sliding up the leg to the thigh, and higher. He squeezed, as hard as he could. Buday shrieked and dropped the bucket. Hot rivets bounced off Chips’s back and the girder. Several lay there, glowing.

  Buday teetered, and Chips squeezed again, as fiercely as he could. Buday clutched at his groin, and then slipped over the side. He grabbed as he fell, and his hand closed around Chips’s shirt.

  He hung there, ten storeys above the ground, and the howls from below indicated the entire scene had been witnessed by the workmen. Several started up on the elevator.

  “Don’t let me fall! Don’t let go, Chips, please…pl-please!” Buday begged. Chips reached down and held him under the arms. But he did not pull him up. “Who paid you, Gypsy…?”

  The Gypsy was silent. He was no coward, but it was a long way down.

  “Wheeler. It was Wheeler, right?” Chips demanded.

  Gypsy did not answer.

  “A messy way to go, Gypsy. Splat! Who paid you?”

  Gypsy nodded gently.

  Wheeler.

  Chips held him aloft till they could get witnesses onto the beam, and then Gypsy spilled the whole can of worms. Terror and sabotage, and murder. Marci Lonergan’s father had been doped, just as Chips had been. The coroner was in Wheeler’s pay, and the officials who had gone along with it reluctantly. The whole can of worms.

  Then they pulled Gypsy back up, and Chips swam down and down into the pool of prune juice.

  It was a short trial. It had to be; they were dedicating the water purification plant. And Chips had to be somewhere else. It doesn’t pay to be late for your own wedding; not when your future wife is always ready to go bail for you.

  SHADOW PLAY

  As the crippled man walked, his shadow detached itself and slithered away.

  It slid across the ground, rising as it encountered a fence. It oozed up the fence, flat flat flat, and disappeared blackly over the other side. It went away quickly, and not for fifteen minutes did the crippled man notice it was gone. As he passed a fat woman with a package under her arm, he observed her obese shadow rumbling along before her. He saw nothing on the pavement before himself; he looked back and up at the glaring street, and back to the fat woman
’s shadow. “I have no shadow,” he said aloud.

  The fat woman continued walking, but the blubbered column of her neck turned, wattling, and her eyes met the crippled man’s.

  “I have no shadow,” he said again, amused, and she looked where he was pointing. She stared, licking her sausage lips, and nodded.

  “Hmm,” she said, passing it off, “unfortunate.”

  She turned the corner, her shadow angling right and stepping to the side as she passed. In a moment she was gone, and the shadow lingered fat and black on the grass, broken by little upshoots of turf. It revolved, as though it were a snake turning on itself, saw the crippled man staring, and fled rapidly.

  The crippled man continued to stare, confused and wondering—for a long, long time. But his shadow did not return.

  Somewhere, they met.

  Under a pier, atop the greasy, blue-green water, with tiny whorls of oil drifting past on the tide, they met. The shapes of them rippled and shimmered and dipped as the water roiled and tumbled. They lay side by side beneath the pier, and every once in a great while a shaft of moonlight penetrated through the shattered boards of the pier, cutting a shadow in two.

  “Why are we here?” the shadow of a bald-headed man asked.

  “What was your name when you were in slavery?” another, larger, shadow replied with another question.

  “Harold,” the shadow answered.

  “Not Harold,” the large shadow corrected, “you are Dlorah. That is the way of it. When we were vassals of the substantials we observed their customs. But now we are free—totally free and powerful—and we will observe those customs no longer.”

  “I’m afraid,” the shadow of a woman answered, as it slapped against a piling. It moved free into clear water once more, and repeated it, “Afraid!”