“Oh, Ricky, Ricky,” she gasped.
He let her go.
He fell back as if she had struck his face.
She put up her hand, as if to catch those words, but she was too late. She couldn’t bring them back.
He just looked at her as if she were invisible and said: “What did you say?”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“You said Ricky! You said it!”
* * *
Weakly, then, dazed, he repeated her words and then said, “You love him. You love a dead man. I should have guessed. You made me try to look like him, you risked your life on it. You made me look, walk, talk like him, so he could hold you again, so he could kiss you again, hurt you again!”
“Please…Johnny!”
His eyes were wide open again. “You don’t love me. You tried to dig up Ricky out of the grave. I should have guessed when the gang acted the way it did at the magazine shop. They wanted Ricky back, too. They took a substitute for want of the real article. And all the other little things—”
He started groping for the door like a blind man. “You didn’t want me to kiss you. You kissed me. That’s the way it was with Ricky. You did things for him. When I did things, you resented it, you slapped me. It was off-key, off-character. It wasn’t Ricky, it wasn’t him at all. The flower I gave you, you didn’t want. Ricky never gave flowers. And if I said nice things, you were angry—”
Julie got in front of the door, her breath hissing. “You can’t go out! Vanning’ll kill you.”
“You afraid I’ll get killed? Afraid Ricky will die again?”
He beat it at her, like fists, while his unfeeling hand sought the gun in its leather vest under his arm. “Afraid Ricky’ll die again! Couldn’t stand that, could you? Couldn’t stand having him killed again!”
“No.” She said the word so simply, so softly. “I couldn’t stand it. I’m sorry, Johnny, but that’s how it is.”
She shook her head, as though trying to fight out of a dream. “Don’t you see, Johnny? We’re both the same. I’m not Julie. You don’t want me. You want—your mother. Somebody you can cling to. Somebody to take care of you. The mother you never had, Johnny. And I—I want Ricky. We met in front of a bank, Johnny, you and I, and we both wanted something and we tried to get it and it fell apart in our faces.” She gripped him, spoke convulsively, “Oh, Ricky, hold onto me tight—”
Ricky! The name was like an iron poked into his brain, stirring all the self-doubts and longings that wracked him. He didn’t say anything, but what he was thinking through the liquor fog was, “I’m Johnny Broghman! I’m myself! Damn them—all of them, I don’t need a woman to lean on. Not my mother, not Julie?
??not anybody. I’m Johnny Broghman—the strongest thing in the world.”
He tried to push her away and she only clung tighter. Like a leech she was, feeding on his strength, trying to make him into somebody who wasn’t Johnny Broghman. As if Johnny Broghman wasn’t good enough.…
What his hands couldn’t do, his gun did for him.
He didn’t will it precisely. But there it was. His eyes were closed almost down, the Ricky way. His gun shot twice and knocked her back. He could feel her hands pull away from him, clinging to the last. She fell, sprawled, and lay unmoving on the floor.
He leaned against the door, swallowing, wiping at his eyes which were blurred. Then he went downstairs, the gun still in his hand. With every step he could feel himself growing stronger. Now he was free. He didn’t need a woman to lean on, and now he had proved it.
He had killed twice and now he would kill again. The old man with the pink face, Vanning. The one who called himself a businessman, and who thought he could make a desk punk out of Johnny Broghman. Vanning, who thought he could boss Johnny Broghman the way he had bossed Ricky Wolfe. Johnny Broghman was a better man than Ricky Wolfe had ever been. Julie had found that out.
Broghman opened the front door.…He got it before he had walked halfway down the drive to his car. Vanning’s men, in the black car parked in the night shade of bulking trees, reached for him with tommy-guns. The line of bullets hit him and he folded over them like a man folds over an invisible wall.
The guns kept spitting long after Johnny Broghman slumped down like a little kid on the lawn to take his evening sleep.…
* * *
So that’s Johnny Broghman’s story, take it or leave it, with or without the benefit of the scalpel. It’s all here on the slab.
Now, I’ll take the heart of Johnny Broghman’s and place it back inside the body where it never had a chance to love, but was only a guy in a cell. I’ll put all of Johnny back inside himself where it belongs, all the agony and hatred and sullen burning flame of Johnny, back in upon himself in the cold cavern of the bullet-torn body, and I’ll perform suture upon it with a needle and thread. Drop one, purl one, sewing Humpty-Dumpty back up again so they can bury him. I’ll go on to other bodies, but I won’t be able to write stories about them like Johnny’s story. I won’t be able to scalpel those brains apart, to know how the heart pulsed or the stomach turned in agony.
Johnny Broghman was my brother.