In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [53]
"Deep down," Perry continued, "way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that."
"How about the nigger?" Dick said. Silence. Dick realized that Perry was staring at him. A week ago, in Kansas City, Perry had bought a pair of dark glasses - fancy ones with silver-lacquered rims and mirrored lenses. Dick disliked them; he'd told Perry he was ashamed to be seen with "anyone who'd wear that kind of flit stuff." Actually, what irked him was the mirrored lenses; it was unpleasant having Perry's eyes hidden behind the privacy of those tinted, reflecting surfaces.
"But a nigger," said Perry. "That's different." The comment, the reluctance with which it was pronounced, made Dick ask, "Or did you? Kill him like you said?" It was a significant question, for his original interest in Perry, his assessment of Perry's character and potentialities, was founded on the story Perry had once told him of how he had beaten a colored man to death.
"Sure I did. Only - a nigger. It's not the same." Then Perry said, "Know what it is that really bugs me? About the other thing? It's just I don't believe it - that anyone can get away with a thing like that. Because I don't see how it's possible. To do what we did. And just one hundred percent get away with it. I mean, that's what bugs me - I can't get it out of my head that something's got to happen." Though as a child he had attended church, Dick had never "come near" a belief in God; nor was he troubled by superstitions. Unlike Perry, he was not convinced that a broken mirror meant seven years' misfortune, or that a young moon if glimpsed through glass portended evil. But Perry, with his sharp and scratchy intuitions, had hit upon Dick's one abiding doubt. Dick, too, suffered moments when that question circled inside his head: Was it possible - were the two of them "honest to God going to get away with doing a thing like that"? Suddenly, he said to Perry, "Now, just shut up!" Then he gunned the motor and backed the car off the promontory. Ahead of him, on the dusty road, he saw a dog trotting along in the warm sunshine.
M ountains. Hawks. Wheeling in a white sky. When Perry asked Dick, "Know what I think?" he knew he was beginning a conversation that would displease Dick, and one that, for that matter, he himself would just as soon avoid. He agreed with Dick: Why go on talking about it? But he could not always stop himself. Spells of helplessness occurred, moments when he "remembered things" - blue light exploding in a black room, the glass eyes of a big toy bear - and when voices, a particular few words, started nagging his mind: "Oh, no! Oh, please! No! No! No! No! Don't! Oh, please don't, please!" And certain sounds returned - a silver dollar rolling across a floor, boot steps on hardwood stairs, and the sounds of breathing, the gasps, the hysterical inhalations of a man with a severed windpipe. When Perry said, "I think there must be something wrong with us," he was making an admission he "hated to make." After all, it was "painful" to imagine that one might be "not just right" - particularly if whatever was wrong was not your own fault but "maybe a thing you were born with." Look at his family! Look at what had happened there! His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children, two sons and two daughters, only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry had ever since "tried to believe she slipped," for he'd loved Fern. She was "such a sweet person," so "artistic," a "terrific" dancer, and she could sing, too. "If she'd ever had any luck at all, with her looks and all, she could have got somewhere, been somebody" It was sad to think of her climbing over a window sill and falling fifteen floors.) And there was Jimmy, the older boy - Jimmy, who had one day driven his