The handwriting was vile (though not in the least feeble) and took me all day to decipher; the redaction published here can be described as only probable. The letter was written on a sheet bearing the rubric of the Marville Center for Senior Citizens, which as we have seen had been my first port of call and yielded negative results. The request for fifty thousand dollars suggested the work of a potential confidence man.
Yet the next day found me, at the end of a hundred-mile drive through scattered cloudbursts, maneuvering my Pontiac into one of the spaces marked “Visitors” in the asphalt parking lot at Marville. It was early afternoon. The administrative director looked slightly vexed to see me again, and downright contemptuous when I showed him the letter. He put me in the hands of the chief of the psychiatric section, forthwith: a whey-faced person named Teague, who impassively studied the gnarled calligraphy on my document, sighed, and said: “Yes, I’m afraid that’s one of ours. They occasionally get a letter past us. I am sorry that you were inconvenienced, but be assured this patient is altogether harmless. His suggestion of violence in the last paragraph is fantasy. Besides, he is physically debilitated to the degree that he cannot leave his chair without an attendant’s help, and his apperceptive faculties have degenerated. So have no fear that he can make his way to the city and do you hurt.”
I pointed out to the doctor that Mr. Crabb’s threat, if so it could be called, was directed at the staff of the Marville Center and hardly towards me, but of course he merely smiled compassionately. I am not without experience of these gentry, having done my stint at fifty dollars an hour, twice a week, for several years when I was a decade younger, without the least diminution of my nightmares and migraine headaches.
“Nevertheless,” I added, “I must insist on seeing Mr. Crabb. I have just driven a hundred miles and given up a morning that had more profitably been spent with my tax accountant.”
He instantly acquiesced. Members of his profession are very easy to impose one’s will upon, so long as one does so in economic rather than emotional terms.
We went up one flight and walked a good half mile, corridor upon corridor; the psychiatric section was the newest part of Marville, all tile and glass and philodendrons: indeed, it resembled a greenhouse, with here and there a clump of old bald heads like mushrooms among the foliage. We reached a glassed-in balcony full of geraniums. Early December had established itself outside, but by means of the thermostat Marville maintained an internal summer all year round. I was suddenly shocked by a dreadful illusion: in a wheelchair, with its back to us, stood an abominable black bird-the largest turkey buzzard I had ever seen. Through the window it directed a raptorial surveillance on the grounds below, as if in search of lunch, its naked, wrinkled little head trembling ever so slightly.
“Mr. Crabb,” said Dr. Teague to the bird, “you have a visitor. Whatever your feeling towards me, I’m sure that you will be very polite to him.”
The buzzard turned slowly and looked over its sloping shoulder. My horror decreased at the sight of a human face rather than a beak-withered, to be sure, and covered in Mrs. Burr’s wornout oilcloth with many seams, but a face, indeed a furious little face, with eyes as hot and blue as the sky above a mesa.
“Boy,” said the old man to Dr. Teague, “I took a slug in the ham once near Rocky Ford and cut it out myself with a bowie and a mirror, and the sight of my hairy behind was a real pleasure alongside of looking at what you carry on top of your neck.”
He spun the chair around. If as a bird he had been large, as a man he was distinctly undersized. His feet were positively minuscule and shod in saddle oxfords, I suppose for the horsy connotation. What I had taken for swarthy plumage was in reality an old swallow-tailed coat, gone black-green with age. The temperature in the solarium was high enough to force a geranium’s bud, yet under his coat the old man wore a stout woolen sweater over a pajama coat of flannel. His trousers were pajama bottoms, and where they rode up his skinny shanks one could see gray long johns making a junction with black stockings.
His voice I have saved till last. Imagine, if you can, the plucking of a guitar the belly of which is filled with cinders: a twangy note that quickly loses its resonance amid harsh siftings.
Dr. Teague smiled with all the compassion of his repressed malice, and introduced us.
Crabb suddenly slipped between his brown gums a set of false teeth that he had been concealing in his hand and bared them at the doctor, snarling: “Git on out of here, you lanky son of a bitch.”
Teague let his eyelids descend in amused tolerance, retracted them, and said: “If it is satisfactory to Mr. Crabb, I see no reason why you cannot talk quietly here with him for half an hour. You might drop by the office on your way out, Mr. Snell.”
Jack Crabb squinted at me briefly, spat out his teeth, and put them away in an inner pocket of the swallowtail. I felt uneasy, knowing that everything depended on my ability to create a rapport between us. As soon as I had distinguished man from buzzard, I believed absolutely that he was everything he claimed to be in the letter. Yet I determined to move with caution.
He again put those remarkably blue eyes on me. I waited, and waited, and let him stare me down.
“You’re a sissy, ain’t you, son?” he said at last, not however unkindly. “Yes sir, a big fat sissy. I bet if I squeezed your arm the impression would stay there for a long time like it was made of tallow. I knowed a fellow looked like you come out West and went among the Kiowa and they tied him up and let the squaws beat him sore with willow sticks. You got my money?”
I realized that the old scout was testing me, and therefore I failed to show I had been offended, as indeed I had not been.
“Why did they do that, Mr. Crabb?”
He grimaced, which involved the total disappearance of his eyes and mouth and most of his nose, only the very end of which protruded like one fingertip of a clenched fist wearing a shabby leather glove.
“An Indian,” he said, “is crazy to figure out how a thing works. Of course, not everything interests him. What don’t, he don’t even see. But they was interested in that sissy, all right, and wanted to see whether he’d cry like a woman if he was beat. He never, though the marks showed on his back like they was flogging a cheese. So they give him presents and left him go. He was a brave man, son, and that’s the point: being a sissy don’t make no difference at all. You got my money?”
“Mr. Crabb,” said I, somewhat relieved by the story though it still seemed obscure to me, “we’ll have to get straight on another point: my means are very modest.”
He replied: “If you ain’t got money, then what have you got, son? Them clothes don’t look like much to me.” He took his cane from the back of the wheelchair, where it had been hanging, and poked me in the midsection; fortunately the tip was covered with a rubber crutch-end and did not hurt, though it left smudges on my beige weskit.
“We’ll discuss that later,” I had the shrewdness to say, finding a wicker chair behind a rubber-plant grove, drawing it into the open, and placing myself in it. “First, I hope you won’t be offended if I check your story for authenticity.”
The statement elicited from him a prolonged dry laugh that sounded like the grating of a carrot. His little yellow head, naked as a foetus and translucent as parchment, fell onto his chest, and my heart gave a great jolt of apprehension: I had discovered him too late; he had fallen dead.
I rushed to the wheelchair and put my hand upon his wrenlike chest, then my ear.… Would that my own heart beat so firm and true! He was merely asleep.