So Pretty and So Green

He stepped through shadows under the Sabal palms about ten o clock at night and he found Auntie Gopher's grim little cottage.

The house stood well back from the street beyond a billboard, the way Bruce had heard men in the Gator Bar describe it. He was not too familiar with this section of Coquina Beach. He hated prowling around in strange darknesses, because some enemy might shoot him in the back.

"And that's cockeyed, too," he told himself. "Purely cockeyed. Because I got me no enemies here in town--only out there in the glades where I been aworking."

He knocked at Auntie Gopher's door with his enormous fist, and it made the whole house tremble. Auntie Gopher got up out of bed and put on a soiled pink-and-orange flowered housecoat, and came shuffling to the door. (continued on page 288)So Pretty and So Green(continued from page 141)

"Who there?"

"Is this the old nigger woman who tells things?"

"Yes," said Auntie Gopher, "but you got to have five dollars, Man."

"Open the damn door," said Stogey. "I'll give you five dollars. I want you should tell me things."

So she turned on the lurid lamps in her cluttered living room and she accepted money after examining the bill suspiciously. She made big Bruce Stogey sit beyond a card table across from her.

Auntie Gopher sighed and moaned; she gabbled unintelligibly; she pressed Stogey's soiled wide white palm between her own trembling fat black ones; she sighed and mumbled little yeas and nays. She said, "Yes, Lord...no, Lord...Ain't that the truth! ... No, no!" She mouthed interjections and interdictions until Bruce Stogey wanted to throttle her.

He told her that he would slap her face unless she got busy.

"I got to have time, Mister Man."

"You had plenty of time, old woman! You go ahead and tell me my five-dollar fortune, or I'll break your neck."

Already he was sorry that he had heeded casual conversation in the Gator Bar...people who had spoken in wondering accents about Auntie Gopher and the necromancies she practiced.

"How you think you're going to do it? No cards, no dice. You hain't got you no glass ball, like a gypsy at the carnival. How you aim to tell me anything?"

She told Bruce, "I just knows. I just knows by the feel of people. I gets their condition."

"I been wasting my time for fifteen minutes. You been wasting it. You better up and get my condition."

And so at last she got it, and she told him.

He arose, he kicked the card table halfway to the ceiling and it came down with a splintering crash.

Auntie Gopher sat back and glared at Bruce Stogey with hate in her small bright eyes. She breathed heavily and rubbed a knee that had been bruised by the card-table leg as it hurtled up and away.

"You old devil! What you mean, telling me a thing like that?"

"It's true," she gasped. "I got to tell you what I sees. You come here--you ask me--"

"I hain't never going to get killed by no falling tree!" cried Bruce Stogey.

The old woman said nothing--she sat watching him with awful eyes.

"You hear me? You hear--?" For a moment he felt impelled to knock her evil head off her shoulders. And certainly he was going to take his five dollars back. This was a bad section--the only bad section in Coquina Beach--but there weren't many po-lice around this town. He didn't care what kind of outcry the old Negress made. He would be gone by the time any help could arrive.

Bruce reached over, he seized the weak arm inside the gaudy sleeve. He twisted her arm until she mourned like a dog that has been hit by a car. He took his five dollars and went out, slamming Auntie Gopher's front door so hard that glass smashed and fell tinkling.

Her terror and pain found voice behind him, but he paid no attention. He strode in his might, across a vacant lot behind the signboard and over to the Seaboard railroad tracks. He walked along the tracks for a way.

• • •

Killed by a falling tree...those were words he did not appreciate. No matter how he fought the whole wide world, that nasty woman had put a fear within his soul.

Only one fear had he admitted before this. Friends or relatives of a man he mutilated on Friday night--someone might shoot him in the back.

You couldn't guard against a thing like that. You might be walking alone, striding some twisty road amid palmetto scrub, and then a shot would ring out. You might hear it before you died, but you would be dead before you hit the ground. Bruce Stogey had known of men being killed in that fashion. He didn't fancy such a thing for himself.

Killed by a falling tree...

That had happened to his very own father, Kermit Stogey. It was back in the time of World War Two, when men were clearing land for a big new training base. Folks had yelled...there came a wind ...a big pine trembled and tilted, but it tilted in the wrong direction. Lumbermen scattered and fled, and Kermit Stogey slipped on wet clay.

It had been something to haunt his son's recollection, for Bruce had seen it happen as he crouched, torturing a frog in front of a tent door, at no great distance from the scene.

Later on Bruce heard about his grandfather, Old Grover. Same thing: It happened purely like that. Except in the case of Old Grover it was a cypress and was said to have occurred over around Wauchula somewhere. Old Grover had tried to get out of the way; but he stubbed his toe against a root, and the hard lovely trunk of the cypress plastered him amid the ooze.

• • •

Bruce left the railway tracks and went over to Route 41.

...Sweat was larding him. He cursed both his father and his grandfather. Heaven knew--maybe there was a great-grandfather, too, whom he had not known about--also killed by a falling tree.

Once upon a time, within the fastnesses of this young man's primitive soul, there dwelt a tiny awareness of beauty. He had realized, any moment when he cared to consider it, that wonder and compulsion ruled the lonely subtropical forests. Trees...they were so pretty and so green...yet they could kill you.

Until this hour he had felt impervious to such a prevailing fright. Falling trees might smash the Stogeys of earlier generations; they could not touch Bruce.

He had begun working in a camp when he was only 13. He worked with turpentine crews and road crews as well; but any honest love he gave--and that was precious little--he gave to the timberland. Now he recognized that he must fear trees and hate them.

He had beaten men often before this. He was a bad actor, especially when drunk. He had been sentenced to stockades and road gangs in various counties, had served time, had worked along highways with tough guards watching him speculatively as they balanced their shotguns. His soldiering experience was only a distasteful few months' incident, terminated by a dishonorable discharge. The United States Government spatted Bruce Stogey off its hands and let him return to the swamps and somber woodlands.

Glad I got my five dollars back. He smiled, recollecting how Auntie Gopher had wailed as he squeezed her arm. He owned other money in his pockets also...liquor still buzzed in his brain...

There was a street lamp at a crossroad. Bruce stopped under the lamp. He stood there, a towering grim figure in soiled T-shirt and spotted khaki pants. He drew scraps of bills out of his pockets and counted them. Only $26: That wasn't much, he couldn't go far on that.

But go he must. He was afraid to return to his job with a crew cutting pine southeast of the Myakka State Park. No longer was he restrained by a secret dread that someone might plant a bullet between his shoulder blades--some friend or brother-in-law, perhaps, of the man whose nose he had torn, whose jaw and ribs he had fractured. He was fearful now of the trees themselves. He must go from them--far, far away, where there were no pines or cypresses or even gnarly live oaks to swat him down.

He had little to leave behind: some clothes, an old foot locker full of odds and ends in the shack where, until Friday night, he had bunked with other men.

Probably he was lucky to miss another stockade sentence this time. And lucky that he only had to pay a fine. That hundred dollars and costs--he hated to think of it. But it was only money, after all: He could get more. He had always been able to get money whenever he wanted to. He was powerful enough for that.

(Trees were more powerful. They waited on either side of the Tamiami Trail...pines and cabbage palms...he passed them warily, admitting their menace when shadows swooped and the cars went by.)

Bruce Stogey turned every now and then and flapped his hand, trying to hitchhike as the lights tore past him. Nobody stopped. He cursed the drivers and shambled on until he found a lighted filling station. He stood in nearby gloom and waited. He didn't have to wait long.

A car stopped for gas. It was a shining convertible and there were two tourists, both men, in the front seat. They ordered their gas; the attendant started to put it in. Stogey could see that the men had a bottle of whiskey and were drinking from it.

So he approached the men, moving slowly, trying to put all threat out of his manner and all supplication into his voice.

"Please, Captain--"

The driver broke off his conversation about their bad luck at gambling in Miami and asked Bruce Stogey what he wanted.

"Please, Captain. Just a ride up to my place."

"Where is that?"

"Just about nine miles up the road. My wife's mighty sick..."

The tourists looked at each other...the driver shrugged. What was the difference? It was nearly midnight, but they were two against one, they had nothing to fear.

"OK, Mac." The driver nodded toward the rear seat and Bruce climbed in.

...They were passing through the countryside some miles farther on. Bruce arose in the rear. He leaned his weight against the front seat and, reaching past the astonished driver, turned the keys in the ignition, withdrew them and put the keys in his pocket.

Dumbfounded and terrified, the driver guided the coasting car to a halt beside the ditch, while his partner twisted and tussled with Bruce Stogey. It was an easy thing...laughable, it was accomplished so readily. Bruce rapped his elbow against the passenger's head and then turned his brief attention to the driver...Then he went through their pockets. Later investigation would reveal that he made a haul of only $365 in currency. He flung the two unconscious men into a shallow ditch and heard water squash amid weeds when they struck. He got them out of the way before the lights of cars ahead or behind could come upon him. He climbed over into the front, started the engine and drove on.

He drove to a point north of Parrish and then turned off on a side road, where he examined his spoils...suitcases. He tore them open...yes, he had been right in judging that one of the men was nearly as tall as he, although much fatter. There were slacks: fine powder-blue slacks, never worn before, probably purchased at some expensive shop in Miami Beach.

Stogey took off his own soiled clothes and dressed himself more or less properly in new attire. A sport shirt too tight across the chest, too loose around the middle, but it would do. He turned down the cuffs on the trousers...everything was all right, but he didn't want to keep this car too long.

He progressed to Tampa and abandoned the convertible on a nearly empty parking lot in the heart of town. He walked to the bus terminal with a stolen topcoat over his arm. He carried one of the suitcases; he had managed to force the fastenings back together again.

A bus left for New York at 1:45 A.M., and Bruce was on it. He arrived in New York at 4:40 the second morning.

At last there were no trees.

• • •

Oh, yes, piddling little planes and others could be observed, leading their well-kept lives along the avenues. But men were not apt to go acutting those.

Bruce hung around the West 42nd Street area for a while. Later, his money drained away through grotesque debaucheries in off-color hotels, he decided to move to another section of town. Enroute, he observed Central Park for the first time and saw trees clogging the entire landscape. He measured their height and girth with respect and with fear. Central Park was a good place to stay away from.

That night, in a Bronx barroom he observed a well-dressed young man plying himself with liquor because, as the young man announced to the listening world, a blonde named Peggy had gone away with her husband to California.

(California? Bruce Stogey didn't want to go there: He had heard about the redwoods. Once he worked alongside a man who had served his lumbering apprenticeship in a redwood forest. Sequoias, the man called them, and his description of their vast trunks was enough to make a gibbering idiot out of anyone who carried such fear locked inside his thick skull and his thicker chest.)

Bruce would never go to California where the redwoods grew. But he did follow the tipsy young man down an ill-lighted street, and he did slap his huge hand across the young man's sputtering face, and he did strike this resisting doll until it resisted no longer.

Seventy-three dollars from that one; $16 on Friday night; $222 on Sunday night (that was the old foreign gentleman who was a friend of the bartender's, and he was generous to casual strangers like Bruce Stogey--he even bought Stogey a beer ten minutes before the giant attacked him).

Thus Bruce found a career, and so he pursued it throughout the Bronx, then into the West Side precincts of Manhattan again and over into midnight caverns on Second and Third Avenues--practically untenanted in the late hours--and always, of course, devoid of any trees except small ones.

He acquired a comfortable wardrobe; he enjoyed buying bright neckties and plaid jackets. He kept himself reasonably well groomed: No one would take him for a mugger. He was wise enough to vary the neighborhoods where he operated from week to week, and he developed a technique all his own. He would not permit his victims to see him. This required more imagination than Stogey might have displayed in earlier years. It was a strain, but it paid off.

He waited in darkest doorways and areaways. Sometimes the intended victim turned in the wrong direction after leaving the bar where Bruce had spotted him; but there were always another bar and another victim; he could try again. Eventually the result would be the same: the lightning forward step, the big hand flattened over the face, stifling all outcry and eyesight. A punch at the base of the brain...he tried to be careful, he tried not to punch too hard. The times when he killed men--he was honestly sorry to read about it in the papers the next day.

The Big Mugger: That was what they called him. For of those many who recovered, all could sing their dread chorus about the colossal energies of the bandit who came upon them so slyly and from behind. They could recollect the pressure of his herculean hand, the steady silence in which he operated. That was all they knew about him.

Bruce Stogey carried a fine wallet of alligator hide. In this receptacle were his Social Security card and the driver's license that he had taken out the previous August, when he had to drive a log truck at Kissimmee. These scraps of identification and probity served him well. Several times he was questioned by the po-lice, who throughout these nervous weeks were apt to question any man of sizable proportions whom they saw strolling the streets at night.

Who? ...Me, Captain? ...Sure enough, I'm from Florida. Just up here on a little vacation.

Thus, each time his wallet and money were returned to him politely by the cops, and he was cautioned about wandering in bad neighborhoods at a late hour. No telling what might happen to an out-of-towner bent on visiting the dank fleshpots of the metropolis for the first time!

So it went, until a night in early January when Bruce selected as his customer one Whitey Thomas--a colored man of sawed-off dimensions, but a wrestler of note. The assault occurred about two o'clock in the morning. It was in a block on East 110th Street...Whitey Thomas, through the persuasion of his compact frame and his knowledge of wrestling, was able to resist strenuously. Finally, he got Bruce Stogey's finger between his jaws and bit it to the bone.

Undoubtedly, Thomas would have been killed but for a fortuitous alarm of fire. A glistening mass of scarlet and silver came howling east in 110th Street, sound and fury blazing ahead. The lights of the fire truck and the roar of its rocketing approach were enough to send Bruce Stogey fleeing.

Whitey Thomas picked himself up off the sidewalk and staggered to Julio's bar at 110th and Park Avenue, and there he gave his story to two patrolmen of a 23rd Precinct car when next they came creeping past.

...Look--here was even blood on his necktie. He knew well enough that he had bitten the man's finger. He had chewed it severely...

Now, on this Tuesday, the fourth of January, something else was known about the Big Mugger: He had a sore finger or thumb. Patrolmen of the 23rd Precinct, and other precincts as well, were duly apprised. This was information especially applicable to those on the four-to-twelve or the Late Tour; but it was duly noted down by Patrolmen Murray Hershon and Bouncey Carroll as they cruised through the Day Tour along Fifth and Madison Avenues in Car 322.

They first spotted Bruce Stogey when he stood picking his teeth in front of a small restaurant near 98th and Madison.

"Pretty big guy."

"Sure is."

"Notice anything about his hand?"

"No. there were people in the way. Let's go around again."

So they drove around the block, and by the time they came back through heavy truck traffic to Madison Avenue, Bruce Stogey had reached the corner of 96th Street.

He walked proudly and slowly in his new camel's-hair coat--dark-faced, brutal-jawed, but impeccable in attire when judged by the standards of those who find their joy and their culture amid sordid surroundings.

Said Patrolman Carroll, "He's no mugger...I wish I had a coat like that..."

"Wait a minute," said Hershon. "Hasn't he got a bandage on his hand?"

At just that moment, the bandage went out of sight, for Bruce Stogey had pulled on his new brown gloves; and that was a job--forcing the wounded finger, all wadded with its home-constructed wrappings, into the glove.

The green-and-white car stopped quickly outside a row of parked autos. Carroll opened the door on the right.

"Just a minute," he called. "Can we talk to you?" and he slipped between the parked cars.

By this time, Bruce Stogey was remembering well the bandage on his finger. He pretended to take no notice, he walked faster. Perhaps if he ignored the po-lice--

He was walking west toward Central Park, and there were trees...he saw them ahead: gray tufts of wintry fuzz against the sky...and trees had brought a doom to his father and to his grandfather, and--for all he knew--to other Stogeys in the wilderness camps of an earlier century... Perspiration was welling beneath the band of his hat.

"Listen, you!" cried the officer, who did not like to be ignored. Then, in nervousness and quick fright at that glimpse of dangerous trees, Bruce Stogey began to run.

Carroll on foot, Hershon in the car--they chased him west along the block. Patrolman Hershon brought the car to a screeching halt before he reached Fifth Avenue; he leaped out to head off the fugitive.

But Bruce Stogey would not be headed off--not yet--and he swung into a narrow areaway that cuts between the respective buildings of 1150 Fifth Avenue and 7 East 96th Street. He scrambled hugely into this passage and thudded across the cold bare pavement where there were only ash cans to restrain him, and not many of those.

The patrolmen closed in behind.

• • •

"No," said the rear elevator man to the cook who worked for Mr. and Mrs. Neeman in the top floor of the apartment building at 1150 Fifth Avenue. "No, please. It'll make an awful mess in the elevator. Just push it out of the window into the court, and the boys can take care of it downstairs."

So they did, Mr. Neeman and the cook...They had the dining-room window wide open. Old Mr. Neeman put his head out cautiously and saw that the rear courtyard 15 stories below was safely deserted.

"OK, let's give it a shove."

So they gave it a shove, and down it plummeted--once so pretty and so green, but drier now, with needles stiff and prickly, and little scraps of tinsel caught in the branches. Down it sailed, nearly two weeks after Christmas; and they had got rid of it, and the nine-foot Christmas tree drove its three-and-a-half-inch butt against the skull of Bruce Stogey as he came running there.