The shoe belonged to a foot. The foot, twisted, belonged to an ankle. The ankle led to a leg. And so on up along a body until I saw a face of final hysteria. Clarence, hurled and filed between one hundred thousand calligraphies, drowned in floods of ancient publicity and illustrated passions that might have crushed and drowned him, had he not already been dead.
By his look, he might have died from cardiac arrest, the simplest recognition of death. His eyes were sprung flash-photo wide, his mouth in a frozen gape: What are you doing to my tie, my throat, my heart?! Who are you?
I had read somewhere that, dying, the victim’s retina photographs its killer. If that retina could be stripped and drowned in emulsion, the murderer’s face would rise from darkness.
Clarence’s wild eyes begged to be so stripped. His destroyer’s face was frozen in each.
I stood in the flood of trash, staring. Too much! Every file had been tumbled, hundreds of pictures chewed. Posters torn from walls, bookcases exploded. Clarence’s pockets had been yanked out. No robber had ever brutalized like this.
Clarence, who feared to be killed in traffic, and so waited at street signals until the traffic was absolutely clear so he could run his true pals, his pet albums of faces, safely across.
Clarence.
I turned round-about, wildly hoping to find a single clue to save for Crumley.
The drawers to Clarence’s desk had been jerked free and their contents eviscerated.
A few pictures remained on the walls. My eyes roved and fixed on one.
Jesus Christ on the Calvary backlot.
It was signed,“To Clarence,PEACE from the one and only J. C.”
I knocked it from its frame, stuffed it in my pocket.
I turned to run, my heart pounding, when I saw a last thing. I grabbed it.
A Brown Derby matchbox.
Anything else?
Me, said Clarence, all cold. Help me.
Oh, Clarence, I thought, if only I could!
My heart banged. Afraid someone might hear, I fell out the door.
I ran from the apartment house.
Don’t! I stopped.
If they see you run, you did it! Walk slow, stand still. Be sick. I tried, but only dry heaves and old memory came up.
An explosion. 1929.
Near my house a man hurled from his wrecked car, shrieking: “I don’t want to die!”
And me on the front porch, with my aunt, crushing my head to her bosom so I couldn’t hear.
Or when I was fifteen. A car smashing a telephone pole and people exploding against walls, fire hydrants, a jigsaw of torn bodies and strewn flesh …
Or …
The ruin of a burned car, with a charred figure sitting grotesquely upright behind the wheel, quiet inside his ruined charcoal mask, shriveled-fig hands melted to the steering wheel …
Or …
Suddenly I was smothered with books and photographs and signed cards.