"In Cold Blood"

[fiefoe]

Truman Capote wanted to write something with “the depth and freedom of prose and the precision of poetry” and he certainly achieved that. Doesn't mean that I'd ever want to read the book a second time.

• Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West... The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
• in western Kansas its practitioners consider themselves “born gamblers,” for they must contend with an extremely shallow precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and anguishing irrigation problems.
• a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles... those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.
• It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze.
• as did a quality of roguish animation, of uppity Irish egotism, which often activated the Cherokee mask and took control completely when he played the guitar and sang.
• Where she found the time, and still managed to “practically run that big house” and be a straight-A student, the president of her class, a leader in the 4-H program and the Young Methodists League, a skilled rider, an excellent musician (piano, clarinet), an annual winner at the county fair (pastry, preserves, needlework, flower arrangement)—how a girl not yet seventeen could haul such a wagonload, and do so without “brag,” with, rather, merely a radiant jauntiness, was an enigma the community pondered
• “Because he hates me,” said Perry, whose voice was both gentle and prim—a voice that, though soft, manufactured each word exactly, ejected it like a smoke ring issuing from a parson’s mouth.
• As a girl she had won an elocution prize; maturity, it seemed, had reduced her voice to a single tone, that of apology, and her personality to a series of gestures blurred by the fear that she might give offense, in some way displease.
• “One day she told the class, ‘Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that’s one definition of a lady.’ ”
• But wherever he goes, he remembers how I dote on tiny things.” She unfolded a little paper fan. “He brought me this from San Francisco. It only cost a penny. But isn’t it pretty?”
• When she opened it, the heat gathered inside the room was like a sudden, awful hand over her mouth;
• While he had fewer tattoos than his companion, they were more elaborate—not the self-inflicted work of an amateur but epics of the art contrived by Honolulu and Yokohama masters.
• Without exception, Garden Citians deny that the population of the town can be socially graded..., but, of course, class distinctions are as clearly observed, and as clearly observable, as in any other human hive. A hundred miles west and one would be out of the “Bible Belt,” that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces
• a generally recognized quality of Mr. Clutter’s: a fearless self-assurance that set him apart, and while it created respect, also limited the affections of others a little.
• the hymn’s grave language sung in so credulous a spirit moved him, made him wonder a little at the justice of his contempt. Eventually, prodded by a slightly alerted religious curiosity, he approached Willie-Jay, and the chaplain’s clerk, at once responsive, thought he divined in the cripple-legged body builder with the misty gaze and the prim, smoky voice “a poet, something rare and savable.”
• Dick, who took a dim view of Willie-Jay, had called the letter “just more of Billy Grahamcracker’s hooey,”
• But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily—as though she were asking, “Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that? Which is me?”
• the local postmistress. “Only, don’t go thinking that’s how I got this position with the government. Myrt didn’t even want me to have it. But it’s a job you bid for. Goes to whoever puts in the lowest bid. And I always do—so low a caterpillar could peek over it.
• She is a gaunt, trouser-wearing, woolen-shirted, cowboy-booted, ginger-colored, gingery-tempered woman of unrevealed age (“That’s for me to know, and you to guess”) but promptly revealed opinions, most of which are announced in a voice of rooster-crow altitude and penetration.
• “When Homer died, I used up all the fear I had in me, and all the grief, too. If there’s somebody loose around here that wants to cut my throat, I wish him luck. What difference does it make? It’s all the same in eternity. Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. So blow your nose.”
• He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind.
• a day gloriously bright-skied, as glittery as mica.
• (“She woke me up. She had a flashlight, and she hit me with it. Hit me and hit me. And when the flashlight broke, she went on hitting me in the dark”), that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “paradise.”
• “I sympathize with that,” said Perry truthfully. Without being kind, he was sentimental, and Dick’s affection for his parents, his professed concern for them, did indeed touch him.
• Perry had hooked “a big one.” Ten feet of soaring, plunging sailfish, it leaped, arched like a rainbow, dived, sank deep, tugged the line taut, rose, flew, fell, rose. An hour passed, and part of another, before the sweat-soaked sportsman reeled it in.
• unusual souvenirs (suspenders and a belt fabricated from the skins of Nevada rattlers he himself had slain; an erotic netsuke bought in Kyoto; a petrified dwarf tree, also from Japan; the foot of an Alaskan bear).
• Treat him mean & you got a buzz saw to fight.
• a non-alphabetically listed miscellany of words he believed “beautiful” or “useful,” or at least “worth memorizing.” (Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles;
• “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”—Said by Chief Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian Chief... “A breath of a buffalo in the wintertime”—that exactly evoked his view of life. Why worry? What was there to “sweat about”? Man was nothing, a mist, a shadow absorbed by shadows.
• In step, and side by side, they swung along the highway, singing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” Through the silence of the desert, their hard, young voices rang: “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!”
• Don’t talk to me about Dick Hickock! If ever I met the devil! Steal? Steal the weights off a dead man’s eyes!
• And listening to Dick’s conceited chatter, hearing him start to describe his Mexican “amorous conquests,” he thought how “queer” it was, “egomaniacal.” Imagine going all out to impress a man you were going to kill, a man who wouldn’t be alive ten minutes from now
• The light was dimming, the road was straight, with neither house nor human being in view—nothing but land winter-stripped and as somber as sheet iron.
• she smelled of beer and tobacco and recently applied nail varnish. She was seventy-four years old, but in Nye’s opinion, “looked younger—maybe ten minutes younger.”
• All the same, he was “a real man.” He did things, did them easily. He could make a tree fall precisely where he wished. He could skin a bear, repair a watch, build a house, bake a cake, darn a sock, or catch a trout with a bent pin and a piece of string. Once he had survived a winter alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
• Bobo was three years older than Perry, and she adored him; he was her only toy, a doll she scrubbed and combed and kissed and sometimes spanked. Here was a picture of the two together bathing naked in a diamond-watered Colorado creek, the brother, a pot-bellied, sun-blackened cupid, clutching his sister’s hand and giggling, as though the tumbling stream contained ghostly tickling fingers.
• Slender, a pale young seafarer with an elongated face of slightly dour saintliness,
• But secrets are an unusual commodity in a town the size of Garden City.
• “Folks come in here to buy a nickel’s worth of postage and think they can spend the next three hours and thirty-three minutes turning the Clutters inside out. Pickin’ the wings off other people. Rattlesnakes, that’s all they are.
• All the same, at mealtimes he was told again and again that he must please eat. No one comprehended that really he was ill, that grief had made him so, that grief had drawn a circle around him he could not escape from and others could not enter—except possibly Sue.
• the large cardboard box he had mailed from Mexico, and had insured for a hundred dollars, a sum exceeding to an impertinent extent the value of the contents,
• He was dead against me. Said I was a full-time nobody.
• told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosí, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more... He described persons he and his partner had met: a Mexican widow, rich and sexy; Otto, a German “millionaire”; a “swish” pair of Negro prizefighters driving a “swish” lavender Cadillac; the blind proprietor of a Florida rattlesnake farm; a dying old man and his grandson; and others. And when he had finished he sat with folded arms and a pleased smile, as though waiting to be commended for the humor, the clarity, and the candor of his traveler’s tale.
• Hickock obeyed, with an expression that the detective interpreted as a pleading with him to speak, to accuse, and let the prisoner escape into the sanctuary of steadfast denial.
• I frisked the girl’s room, and I found a little purse-like a doll’s purse. Inside it was a silver dollar. I dropped it somehow, and it rolled across the floor. Rolled under a chair. I had to get down on my knees. And just then it was like I was outside myself. Watching myself in some nutty movie. It made me sick. I was just disgusted. Dick, and all his talk about a rich man’s safe, and here I am crawling on my belly to steal a child’s silver dollar. One dollar. And I’m crawling on my belly to get it.”
• Dewey’s ears ring with it—a ringing that almost deafens him to the whispery rush of Smith’s soft voice. But the voice plunges on, ejecting a fusillade of sounds and images: Hickock hunting the discharged shell; hurrying, hurrying, and Kenyon’s head in a circle of light, the murmur of muffled pleadings, then Hickock again scrambling after a used cartridge;
• The Meiers, who had been married more than twenty years, were very much alike: tall people with weight and strength to spare, with wide hands, square and calm and kindly faces—the last being most true of Mrs. Meier, a direct and practical woman who nevertheless seems illuminated by a mystical serenity.
• It was a male squirrel with auburn fur. He named it Red, and Red soon settled down, apparently content to share his friend’s captivity. Perry taught him several tricks: to play with a paper ball, to beg, to perch on Perry’s shoulder. All this helped to pass time, but still there were many long hours the prisoner had to lose.
• He said he’d lied about it because, in his words, ‘I wanted to fix Dick for being such a coward. Dropping his guts all over the goddam floor.’
• Among the elements contributing to Dewey’s confidence was the recovery of the radio and pair of binoculars the murderers had stolen from the Clutter house and subsequently disposed of in Mexico City (where, having flown there for the purpose, K.B.I. Agent Harold Nye traced them to a pawnshop).
• As for the empty cartridge shells, the cord and tape, these were retrieved with the aid of Virgil Pietz, a county-highway employee, who, working with a road grader in the area pinpointed by Perry Smith, shaved away the earth inch by inch until the buried articles were uncovered.
• Dick was not the “hardrock” he’d once thought him: “pragmatic,” “virile,” “a real brass boy”; he’d proven himself to be “pretty weak and shallow,” “a coward.” Still, of everyone in all the world, this was the person to whom he was closest at that moment, for they at least were of the same species, brothers in the breed of Cain;
• Actually, it was a beautiful day. Spring. Though mud abounded underfoot, the sun, so long shrouded by snow and cloud, seemed an object freshly made, and the trees—Mr. Clutter’s orchard of pear and apple trees, the elms shading the lane—were lightly veiled in a haze of virginal green.
• Only Perry Smith, who owned neither jacket nor tie, seemed sartorially misplaced. Wearing an open-necked shirt (borrowed from Mr. Meier) and blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs, he looked as lonely and inappropriate as a seagull in a wheat field.
• I loved my father but there were times when this love and affection I had for him drained from my heart like wasted water.
• Mr. Clutter’s younger brother, Arthur, who had driven a hundred miles to be there... He took a seat directly behind the defendants, and fixed them with a gaze of unique persistence, as though he planned to paint their portraits from memory.
• Dancing, I was always crazy about it, it was my whole life when I was a girl; and there was a boy, gosh, he could dance like Christmas—we won a silver cup waltzing together... Nobody ever danced with me again until I learned Dick, and he didn’t take to it exactly, but he was sweet, Dick was the best-natured little kid.”
• But Dick didn’t shoot them, he never could’ve—though he’s damn quick when it comes to running down an old dog. I wonder why I did it.” He scowled, as though the problem was new to him, a newly unearthed stone of surprising, unclassified color.
• I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. Half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we’re not human. I’m human enough to feel sorry for myself. Sorry I can’t walk out of here when you walk out. But that’s all.”.. Perry said, “Why? Soldiers don’t lose much sleep. They murder, and get medals for doing it.
• Not everyone was attentive; one juror, as though poisoned by the numerous spring-fever yawns weighting the air, sat with drugged eyes and jaws so utterly ajar bees could have buzzed in and out.
• “The bad part was saying goodbye. When you knew where he was going, and what would happen to him. That squirrel of his, he sure misses Perry. Keeps coming to the cell looking for him. I’ve tried to feed him, but he won’t have anything to do with me. It was just Perry he liked.”
• Kansas abolished capital punishment in 1907; in 1935, due to a sudden prevalence in the Midwest of rampaging professional criminals (Alvin “Old Creepy” Karpis, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Clyde Barrow and his homicidal sweetheart, Bonnie Parker), the state legislators voted to restore it.
• But inside the quiet young scholar there existed a second, unsuspected personality, one with stunted emotions and a distorted mind through which cold thoughts flowed in cruel directions.
• the move did not lessen Perry’s resolve; when attempts were made to force-feed him he fought back, tossed his head and clenched his jaws until they were rigid as horseshoes.
• Curse and scream the whole time. It’s intolerable, so everybody starts yelling shut up. I wish you’d send me earplugs. Only they wouldn’t allow me to have them. No rest for the wicked, I guess.”
• Dick was rather a bookworm, too; but his interest was restricted to two themes—sex, as represented in the novels of Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace (Perry, after being lent one of these by Dick, returned it with an indignant note: “Degenerate filth for filthy degenerate minds!”),
• Tate’s lips curved downward, his eyes blazed. “Mr. Shultz,” he said, as though the name was a prolonged hiss,
• I’m an ignoramus except when it comes to what I know about life. I’ve walked along a lot of mean streets. I’ve seen a white man flogged. I’ve watched babies born. I’ve seen a girl, and her no more than fourteen, take on three guys at the same time and give them all their money’s worth. Fell off a ship once five miles out to sea. Swam five miles with my life passing before me with every stroke. Once I shook hands with President Truman in the lobby of the Hotel Muehlebach. Harry S Truman.