Everything goes along smoothly enough until, in your middle forties, you get yourself involved with a woman named Erika Coates. For the first time in your life you think that you might be in love, but of all the people in the world you should not fall in love with, it is Erika. She hates your profession, she considers it shabby and pointless-and worst of all, she begins to tell you that you're living and have been living a lie. Your world doesn't exist, she says, and never did; you're a kid who never outgrew an era twenty-five years dead, a kid dreaming about being a hero but without the guts or the flair to actually be one. You're a little boy, she says, and she can't compete with the obsessions of a little boy.
And then, inevitably, she walks out of your life and leaves you alone again.
But her words linger on, preying on your mind. You begin to ask yourself if maybe she was right, if maybe it all was and is a lie, a lifetime of hollow dreams and childish pursuits, a game without meaning, a fiction of your own creation. You refuse to believe it; you push it away from you and you go on believing as you have for all those years, you tell yourself you can go on that way forever.
Only forever turns out to be tomorrow, and tomorrow might literally bring a sentence of death, and you start wondering again if she might have been right and it all really is such a useless, useless He…
Abruptly I got up and went inside and made a thick sandwich I did not want from the last of the salami and rolls. I stood there eating it, washing down the mouthfuls with slugs of beer, listening to the silence.
Thinking of Erika again for the first night in a long while.
Four years since I had seen her. Where was she now? What was she doing? I had thought about calling her dozens of times during the first year, but I could never quite bring myself to it; and of course she had never called me. Once love dies, there is nothing but ghosts-and even ghosts fade away after enough long nights have passed.
What would she say if she knew about the lesion on my lung? I-told-you-so? She had spent half of our time together trying to get me to give up smoking along with my profession; see a doctor about your cough, you're a middle-aged man and you're susceptible to diseases at your age. Yes-and now she would probably pity me. Nothing but pity, and I had enough of that of my own.
Well, I didn't need Erika or anybody else. I had existed alone for one half of a century, fifty years that were not a goddamn lie, and I could die alone, too, and when I died When I died.
Pulp detectives never die, I thought. They live on in the yellowing pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective and a hundred others, in anthologies and collections and on microfilm. As long as there are people who read, Spade and Dalmas and the rest of them are immortal. They'll go on for centuries shooting hoods and laying blondes and breaking laws with total impunity-and was that, Jesus, was that what I had been after all along?
To become by emulation that which never dies?
Dangerous thinking; I could not handle it, not now, not on the night before I was to learn the results of the sputum test. Go do something, damn it, I told myself. Patrol the camp, take a long swim to make yourself tired enough so you can sleep. Shut the mind down, let the body take over. Hang in there, you'll be all right.
Just hang in there.
I threw the last of the sandwich and the empty beer can into the sink, went into the bath alcove, put on my trunks and a shirt, and got out of there.
Twelve
There were lights on in Cabin Four, and the door was open and I could see Talesco moving around inside as I passed. I kept going without pausing. When I came out of the trees near Five, though, I slowed and then stopped because the cabin was dark and the door was closed, and I found myself thinking that I had not seen Bascomb anywhere around the camp since yesterday afternoon, that he had not been here when the deputy came this morning, and yet his Ford had been parked in the same spot through the day. Odd that he wasn't back by now, after dark, if he had gone off somewhere on foot.
But then I shrugged and pushed the thought away. Harry had said Bascomb was something of a loner; maybe he had spent the day painting or sketching, and had decided to stay on to do a moonscape or commune with the stars or whatever. One of the dangers of getting yourself involved in the sordid little dramas of others was a tendency to let your imagination manufacture intrigues where none existed. I had always had too damned much imagination for my own good-and maybe I owed that to the pulps, too.
The porch light was burning on the Jerrolds' cabin, but the interior was dark; the faint whispery strains of radio music drifted out through the screen door. So maybe Jerrold was still sleeping it off, and Mrs. Jerrold with him. And maybe it was going to be a nice peaceful night and everything would work out tomorrow the way Harry and I hoped it would.