The Best American Noir of the Century

Cottonwoods and thin saplings made a wall along either side, where the road twisted out of the gully. A driver couldn’t tell that the road was blocked until he had climbed the last curve in low gear.

Clyde wrapped the log chain around two cottonwoods. It sagged, stiff and heavy, across the path.

I said, “He’ll kill you, Clyde. Don’t expect me to help you try to grab him and get killed at the same time.”

“There won’t be any killing.” Clyde settled himself in the darkness. “I’m going to take Nelly Tare back to Elm City. Alive.”

* * *

Old logs and gullies are thick in the Rivermouth country; hazel brush fairly blocks the forgotten road in a hundred places. It was long before Nelly’s headlights came sneaking through the trees. The katydids spoke a welcome; the dull parking lights went in and out, twisting, exploring, poking through the brush; they came on, with the motor growling in low.

Nelly made quite a spurt and went into second for a moment as the car swung up out of the gorge; sleek leaves flew from under his rear wheels; little rocks pattered back into the shrubbery.

Then Nelly saw the log chain. He jammed his brakes and the car slewed around until it was broadside. Nelly turned off the motor and lights in half a second; the car door swung; he was out on the log-chain side, and he had a gun in his hand.

“Don’t shoot, Nelly,” said Clyde Boston, stepping in front of the trees and turning on his flashlight.

I didn’t want to be killed, so I stood behind a tree and watched them. The flashlight thrust out a long, strong beam; Clyde stood fifteen feet away from the car’s radiator, but the shaft of his lamp was like whitewash on Nelly Tare.

“It’s Clyde,” the sheriff said. “Clyde Boston. You remember me? I was up at your sister’s place today.”

Nelly cried, “Turn off that light!”

“No,” Clyde said. “And I’m warning you not to shoot the light out, because I’m holding it right in front of my stomach. My stomach’s a big target. You wouldn’t want to shoot my stomach, would you, Nelly?”

Nelson Tare’s hair was too long, and he needed a shave. He looked like some wild thing that had been dug out of the woods. “Clyde! I’m telling you for the last time! Turn it off!”

Clyde’s voice was a smooth rumble. “Remember one time when we went hunting rabbits?” He edged forward a little. “You and Dave and me. Remember? A big jack sat down, waiting for you to kill him. And you couldn’t pull the trigger. You couldn’t kill him.”

Nelly had his face screwed into a wad, and his teeth showed between his lips.

“Never shot anything or anybody, did you, Nelly?” There was a snapping sound, and I jumped. It was only a stick breaking under Clyde’s foot as he moved nearer to the car. “You never shot a soul. Not a jack-rabbit or anything. You couldn’t.”

He was only ten feet away from Nelly and Nelly’s gun.

“You just pretended you could. But the guards in Oklahoma and Missouri didn’t know you the way I do. They hadn’t ever gone hunting with you, had they?”

He took another step forward. Another. Nelly was something out of a waxworks in a sideshow, watching him come. Then a vague suffusion of light began to show around them; a carload of deputies had spotted my car at the head of the lane; their headlamps came hurtling toward us.

“You shot telephones off of desks,” Clyde purred to Nelly, “and tires off of cars. You’ve been around and you’ve done a lot of shooting. But you never shot things that the blood ran out of…Now, you drop your gun, Nelly. Drop it on the ground. Gosh, I was crazy this afternoon. I shouldn’t have laid down when you told me to. I should have just stood there.”

Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, I don’t know. The car stopped and I heard men yell, “Look out, Sheriff!” They were ready with their machine guns, trying to hustle themselves into some position where they could spatter the daylights out of Nelly Tare without shooting Clyde Boston too. Clyde didn’t give them a chance to do it. He dove forward; he flung his arms around Nelly and crushed him to the ground.

Nelly cried, and I don’t like to think about it; sometimes I wake up in the night and think I hear him crying. My memory goes back to our haymow days and to the rats in the chicken pen — the rats that Nelly couldn’t shoot — and I remember the bloody cottontails dangling from Clyde’s belt.

Nelly cried, but not solely because he was captured and would never be free again. He wept because the world realized something he had tried to keep hidden, even from himself. When he was taken back into prison, he wore an expression of tragic perplexity. It must have been hideous for him to know that he, who had loved guns his whole life long, should at last be betrayed by them.

1945 DAY KEENE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT