Skeleton Crew

"His foot must have been pressed down on the clutch, perhaps for support, when he pushed the starter button. The engine was hot; it caught fire immediately. The boy, in his extreme terror, would have reacted by removing his foot from the clutch immediately, preparatory to jumping out. Had the car been older or in poorer condition, it would have stalled.

But Brower cared for it scrupulously, and it leaped forward in a series of bucking, roaring jerks.

Brower was just in time to see this as he rushed from the jute manufacturer's house.

"The boy's fatal mistake must have been little more than an accident.' Perhaps, in his flailings to get out, an elbow accidentally struck the throttle. Perhaps he pulled it with the panicky hope that this was how the white man choked the dragon back into sleep. However it happened... it happened. The auto gained suicidal speed and charged down the crowded, roiling street, bumping over bundles and bales, crushing the wicker cages of the animal vendor, smashing a flower cart to splinters. It roared straight downhill toward the street's turning, leaped over the curb, crashed into a stone wall and exploded in a ball of flame." George switched his briar from one side of his mouth to the other.

"This was all Greer could tell me, because it was all Brower had told him that made any sense. The rest was a kind of deranged harangue on the folly of two such disparate cultures ever mixing. The dead boy's father evidently confronted Brower before he was recalled and flung a slaughtered chicken at him. There was a curse. At this point, Greer gave me a smile which said that we were both men of the world, lit a cigarette, and remarked, 'There's always a curse when a thing of this sort happens. The miserable heathens must keep up appearances at all costs. It's their bread and butter.' 'What was the curse?' I wondered.

" T should have thought you would have guessed,' said Greer. 'The wallah told him that a man who would practice sorcery on a small child should become a pariah, an outcast. Then he told Brower that any living thing he touched with his hands would die. Forever and forever, amen.' Greer chuckled.

" 'Brower believed it?'

"Greer believed he did. 'You must remember that the man had suffered a dreadful shock.

And now, from what you tell me, his obsession is worsening rather than curing itself.'

" 'Can you tell me his address?'

"Greer hunted through his files, and finally came up with a listing. 'I don't guarantee that you'll find him there,' he said. 'People have been naturally reluctant to hire him, and I understand he hasn't a great deal of money.'

"I felt a pang of guilt at this, but said nothing. Greer struck me as a little too pompous, a little too smug, to deserve what little information I had on Henry Brower. But as I rose, something prompted me to say, 'I saw Brower shake hands with a mangy street cur last night.

Fifteen minutes later the dog was dead.'

" 'Really? How interesting.' He raised his eyebrows as if the remark had no bearing on anything we had been discussing.

"I rose to take my leave and was about to shake Greer's hand when the secretary opened his office door. 'Pardon me, but you are Mr. Gregson?'

"I told her I was.

" 'A man named Baker has just called. He's asked you to come to twenty-three Nineteenth Street immediately.'

"It gave me quite a nasty start, because I had already been there once that day—it was Jason Davidson's address. When I left Greer's office, he was just settling back with his pipe and The Wall Street Journal. I never saw him again, and don't count it any great loss. I was filled with a very specific dread—the kind that will nevertheless not quite crystallize into an actual fear with a fixed object, because it is too awful, too unbelievable to actually be considered." Here I interrupted his narrative. "Good God, George! You're not going to tell us he was dead?"

"Quite dead," George agreed. "I arrived almost simultaneously with the coroner. His death was listed as a coronary thrombosis. He was short of his twenty-third birthday by sixteen days.

"In the days that followed, I tried to tell myself that it was all a nasty coincidence, best forgotten. I did not sleep well, even with the help of my good friend Mr. Cutty Sark. I told myself that the thing to do was divide that night's last pot between the three of us and forget that Henry Brower had ever stepped into our lives. But I could not. I drew a cashier's check for the sum instead, and went to the address that Greer had given me, which was in Harlem.

"He was not there. His forwarding address was a place on the East Side, a slightly lesswell- off neighborhood of nonetheless respectable brownstones. He had left those lodgings a full month before the poker game, and the new address was in the East Village, an area of ramshackle tenements.