I could feel myself wanting to start shaking again and tried to suppress it.
“Richard Widmark’s in it,” I said. “It was his first big part, I think. I never went to see it with Jan – we gave the cops and robbers a miss, usually – but I remember reading somewhere that Widmark gave one hell of a performance as the punk. He sure did. He’s pale … doesn’t seem to walk so much as go gliding around … he’s always calling people ‘squirt’ . . . talking about squealers how much he hates the squealers .
. !”
I was starting to shiver again in spite of my best efforts. I just couldn’t help it.
“Blond hair,” I whispered. “Lank blond hair. I watched until the part where he pushed this old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, then I turned it off.”
“He reminded you of Wharton?”
“He was Wharton,” I said. “To the life!”
“Paul—-!’ she began, and stopped. She looked at the blank screen of the TV (the cable box on top of it was still on, the red numerals still showing 10, the number of the AMC channel), then back at me.
“What?” I asked. ‘What, Elaine?” Thinking, She’s going to tell, me I ought to quit writing about it. That I ought to tear up the pages I’ve written so far and just quit on it.
What she said was “Don’t let this stop you!”
I gawped at her.
“Close your mouth, Paul – you’ll catch a fly.”
“Sorry. It’s just that … well . . .”
“You thought I was going to tell you just the opposite, didn’t you?”
“Yes. ”
She took my hands in hers (gently, so gently – her long and beautiful fingers, her bunched and ugly knuckles) and leaned forward, fixing my blue eyes with her hazel ones, the left slightly dimmed by the mist of a coalescing cataract. “I may be too old and brittle to live,” she said, “but I’m not too old to think.
What’s a few sleepless nights at our age? What’s seeing a ghost on the TV, for that matter? Are you going to tell me it’s the only one you’ve ever seen?”
I thought about Warden Moores, and Harry Terwilliger, and Brutus Howell; I thought about MY mother, and about Jan, my wife, who died in Alabama. I knew about ghosts, all right.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t the first ghost I’ve ever seen. But Elaine – it was a shock. Because it was him.”
She kissed me again, then stood up, wincing as she did so and pressing the heels of her hands to the tops of her hips, as if she were afraid they might actually explode out through her skin if she wasn’t very careful.
“I think I’ve changed my mind about the television,” she said. “I’ve got an extra pill that I’ve been keeping for a rainy day … or night. I think I’ll take it and go back to bed. Maybe you should do the same.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose I should!” For one wild moment I thought of suggesting that we go back to bed
together, and then I saw the dull pain in her eyes and thought better of it. Because she might have said yes, and she would only have said that for me. Not so good.
We left the TV room (I won’t dignify it with that other name, not even to be ironic) side by side, me matching my steps to hers, which were slow and painfully careful. The building was quiet except for someone moaning in the grip of a bad dream behind some closed door.
“Will you be able to sleep, do you think?” she asked.
“Yes, I think so,” I said, but of course I wasn’t able to; I lay in my bed until sunup, thinking about Kiss of Death. I’d see Richard Widmark, giggling madly, tying the old lady into her wheelchair and then pushing her down the stairs -“This is what we do to squealers,” he told her-and then his face would merge into the face of William Wharton as he’d looked on the day when he came to E Block and the Green Mile –