The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski

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СКАЧАТЬ was introduced to the killer:

      “Ronnie, Hank. Hank, Ronnie.”

      He sat there in a dirty undershirt. And he didn’t have a face. Just runs of skin. Veins. Little fart eyes. We shook hands and started in on the wine. I don’t know how long we drank. One hour or 2, but he seemed to get angrier and angrier, which is rather commonplace with commonplace drinkers, especially on the wine. Yet we kept talking, talking, I don’t know about what.

      Then, suddenly, he reached over and grabbed his black and white wife and picked her out of bed and began using her like a willow rod. He just kept banging her head against the headboard:

      bang bang

      bang bang bang

      bang bang bang bang

      bang

      Then I said, “HOLD IT!”

      He looked over at me. “Wuzzat?”

      “You hit her head one more time on the headboard and I am going to kill you.”

      She was whiter than ever. He placed her back in bed, straightened the strands of her hair. She seemed almost happy. We all began drinking again. We drank until the crazy traffic began running up and down the streets far below. Then the sun was really up. Bright, and I got up and shook his hand. I said, “I have to go; I hate to go; you are a good kid; I gotta go anyhow.”

      Then there was Mick. The place was on Mariposa Ave. Mick didn’t work. His wife worked. Mick and I drank a lot together. I gave him 5 dollars once to wax my car. I didn’t have a bad car at the time, but Mick never waxed it. I’d find him sitting on the steps. “It looks like rain. No use waxing if it looks like rain. I’m gonna do a good job. Don’t want it spoiled.” He’d be sitting on those steps drunk. “O.K., Mick.” Next time he’d be sitting there drunk and see me. “I’m just sittin’ here lookin’, deciding what I’m gonna do. You see, you got those scratches on there. First thing I’m gonna do, I’m gonna paint in those scratches. I’m gonna get me some paint . . . ”

      “Jesus Christ, Mick. Forget it!”

      He did, but a fine fellow he was. One night he insisted that I was drunk although he was the one who was drunk. And he insisted that he help me up the 3 flights of stairs. Actually, I helped him up. But it was a lumbersome, cumbang bang bang bang bersome journey and I think we awakened everybody in the apartment building with our cussing and falling against walls and doors and stair-rails. Anyhow, I got the door opened, and then I tripped over one of his big feet. Down I went, straight and flat upon a coffeetable with a one-quarter-inch glass covering. The whole table smashed straight to the floor—I weigh around 218—and all 4 legs crushed under, the top of the table cracked in 4 places, but the slab of glass itself remained perfect, unmarred. I got up. “Thanks, old buddy,” I told him. “Nothin’ to it,” he said. And then I sat there and listened to him crashing into doorways and falling down the steps. It was like the whole building was under bombardment. He made it on down, gravity was on his side.

      He had a good wife. I remember one time they cleaned up my face with cotton and some kind of sterilizer when it was all smashed-in from a bad night out. They seemed very tender and concerned and serious about my smashedin face, and it was a very odd feeling to me, that care.

      Anyhow, the drinking got to Mick, and it gets to each of us differently. With him, the body swelled up, doubled, tripled in size in various places. He couldn’t zip his pants and had to cut slits in the pant legs. His story was that they didn’t have a bed for him in the vet’s hospital. My feeling was that he didn’t want to go there. Anyhow, one day he made a foolish move and tried the General Hospital.

      After a couple of days he phoned me. “Jesus Christ, they’re killing me! I’ve never seen a place like this. No doctors anywhere and nurses don’t give a damn and just these fruit orderlies running around like snobs and happy that everybody’s sick and dying. What the fuck is this place? They’re carrying the dead out by the dozens! They mix up the food trays! They won’t let you sleep! They keep you awake all night fucking around with nothing and then when the sun comes up, they wake you up again. They throw you a wet rag and tell you to get ready for breakfast and then breakfast, if you want to call it that, arrives around noontime. I never knew that people could be so cruel to the sick and dying! Get me outa here, Hank! I beg you, pal, I beg you, let me out of this pit of hell! Let me die in my apartment, let me die with a chance!”

      “Whatcha want me to do?”

      “Well, I asked to get out and they won’t give me my release. They’ve got my clothes. So you just come on down here with your car. You come up to my bed and we’ll bust out!”

      “Don’t you think we better ask Mona?”

      “Mona don’t know shit. Since I can’t fuck her anymore she don’t care. Everything about me swelled up but my dick.”

      “Mother nature is sometimes cruel.”

      “Yeah, yeah. Now listen, you comin’ on down?”

      “See you in about 25 minutes.”

      “O.K.,” he said.

      I knew the place, having been there 2 or 3 times myself. I found a parking spot near the entrance building and walked on in. I had the ward number. It was the stink of hell all over again. I had the strange feeling that I would die in that building some day. Maybe not. I hoped not.

      I found Mick. The oppressive helplessness hung over everything.

      “Mick?”

      “Help me up,” he said.

      I got him to his feet. He looked about the same.

      “Let’s go.”

      We went padding down the hall. He had on one of those chickenshit gowns, untied in back because the nurses wouldn’t tie them for you, because the nurses didn’t care about anything except catching themselves some fat young subnormal doctor. And although the patients seldom saw the doctors, the nurses did—in the elevators, pinchy pinchy! oh hee hee hee!—with the smell of death everywhere.

      The elevator door pulled open. There sat a fat young boy with pimples sucking at a popsicle. He looked at Mick in his gown.

      “Do you have a release, sir? You have to have a release to get out of here. My instructions are . . . ”

      “I’m on my own release, punk! Now you move this thing down to the street floor before I jam that popsicle up your ass!”

      “You heard the man, son,” I told him.

      We moved on down, smartly, and straight through the exit building where nobody said a word. I helped him into the car. In 30 minutes he was back at his place.

      “Oh fuck!” said Mona. “What have you done, Hank?”

      “He wanted it. I believe a man should have his own wishes as much as possible.”

      “But there isn’t any help for him here either.”

      I went out, bought him a quart of beer and left them in there together to fight it out.

      A couple СКАЧАТЬ