Complete Short Fiction, page 84
“. . . then, sauté the shallots in the clarified butter,” the lieutenant murmured into his tape recorder. “Take the shallots out and deglaze the pan with the white wine. Reduce the sauce by a half, and put the shallots back in, along with the mushrooms. Pour the sauce—”
For the first time, he saw the Fury, and clicked off his recorder. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to step back behind the police line.”
The Fury leaned over farther. He blinked, then covered his face in horror, as the pus that came from her eyes dripped down into his face, burning and sending its rank stench into his nostrils.
He crawled to the partial shelter of the overturned armchair and held on to the legs for comfort. “No, no, no . . . it wasn’t my fault, I was loyal, I did my job.” His voice was muffled as he rubbed at the ooze on his face. “But now the Olympians are here, it’s out of my hands, don’t you think I’d do something if I could? Don’t take me, I don’t deserve it.”
The Fury stepped over Aegisthus’s outstretched legs and walked down the hall. The master bathroom was the most dramatic part of the house. It was all dark tile, mirrors, gold-plated taps and nozzles. It was here that Agamemnon was murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, just as he was stepping into the tub for a long-awaited bath. That case had been hushed up by an earlier administration, and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus had been permitted to run Argos for years. That reign was over. The new Olympians clearly had other deputies in mind.
The images of the blood-spattered tile had been widely reproduced, though without comment. No news service had been sure whether Agamemnon’s murder was laudable or vile, and so the images had remained just abstract patterns, like a wallpaper design. Every square inch had been photographed before a quick hosing had returned the bathroom to its pristine state. A major advantage of modern bathrooms was their ease of cleaning.
Two workmen with paint-spattered caps were in the bathroom, spreading clear plastic sheets on the walls.
“Over to the left a little bit . . . no, too far. Now down just a hair . . . what kind of hair? Don’t get me started. Did I tell you what she made me do last week? You wonder why I had to talk like I’d had a root canal all morning? Well—”
He sucked in his breath when the Fury entered, then had to cough.
The plastic sheet bore the pattern of bloodstains from Agamemnon’s murder. Attached to the clean black tile, it brought the room back to that day. The other worker, unconcerned with the Fury’s presence, calmly taped the top of the sheet. It matched exactly, with the straight lines of blood running just down the white grout between the tiles, forming a red-brown grid at the bottom of the wall.
“So that we can remember why,” the gabby one said.
Clytemnestra remembered why. In her head, the Fury bore the entire toxic history of the House of Atreus, a stack of murder and violence so heavy that it would never be moved or sorted out. But the Fury could already see the Olympian solution. They would repaint the structure and turn it into art, a subject to employ television writers, advertisers, and directors. Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, had served up his brother Thyestes’s own children to him at a feast. Aegisthus, another of Thyestes’s sons, had finally killed Atreus, only to be supplanted by Agamemnon. But these were merely the last chapters of an endless bloody tale, stretching back past Pelops to the ancient ancestor Tantalus.
In his last moments, Oedipus had warned her of what would happen. Rather than bloody, still-dripping crimes, these could be turned to stories, with Orestes’s murder of Clytemnestra merely the last. But the Fury could taste Clytemnestra’s death in the back of her throat. And despite all the Olympians, she would soothe that taste with the sweet flow of Orestes’s blood. She had no interest in stories.
She could just see the tips of Aegisthus’s polished boots from where she stood. And, for the first time in her existence, she asked herself a question. Could a man who murdered the driver of another car in a foolish traffic dispute—as Oedipus had murdered, all unknowing, his father Laius—ever be worthy of worship? She still heard his words.
Disturbed by her musings, and dismayed by her own distraction in coming to Agamemnon’s house, she swept back out past the assembled reporters, who were all now clustered around the police lieutenant.
“We have all suffered long enough,” he told them. “It was time for a change.” The shiny lenses of cameras and videocams repeated countless distorted reflections of his face. A hundred whispered duplicates of his voice recorded themselves on the spinning tapes.
Clytemnestra had been murdered on the largest of Argos’s three golf courses. It was the only real public space in Argos: the community centers were unused, and all the stores where the inhabitants shopped were in the strip malls on outside roads. Clytemnestra had just been teeing off. Typically, she had been at the blue tees, the men’s, adding ten yards to her drive.
“It’s not as if nothing grows there.” A groundskeeper was taking his lunch at the spot, in the shade of an intensively watered sycamore. “Nothing would be okay, we’d just put in a sand trap, move the tee over a bit, difficult but no real problem. No, people say that, but they don’t actually come here to look.” He vaguely held out a silver thermos, not really wanting her to accept, then poured himself another cup of lemonade. He swirled it in his hand to hear the cold ice click.
The place where Clytemnestra had died was barren, with a few remnants of dead grass around the edges. Extravagantly spiked cacti sprouted from the dry soil. The gray-brown surface was already covered with miniature black stacks of cryptograms, the dry microscopic plants that held the desert soil together. For all the efforts of the green grass to make it seem dead, the desert was deeply alive. That was what made it so frightening.
“A hazard’s supposed to be clean sand, not this stuff. It’s a reminder they don’t need, and no one wants to rip his Sansabelts on a damn Joshua tree while digging holes with his wedge. And who do they blame? You got it.”
The groundskeeper had not gotten up with the Fury’s arrival. He was an old man, brown and sagging from years of the desert sun, and wore the trim blue uniform of the Argos Golf Course.
“I served with the old man, you know. In the war. Only saw him from a distance. Never up close. I was at Aulis. . . .” He tried to hurry past the thought. “I always did my duty. So did Agamemnon. That’s what got him into all the trouble.” He peered up at the Fury. “That’s what I like about you. You do your damn job, and don’t jaw about it.”
The Fury didn’t move, and he shifted position so that she gave him a little extra shade, as if she was just some sort of topographic feature. Most people feared the Fury, but there was no reason for it. The Fury was not arbitrary. He had done his duty, lived well, and had nothing to fear.
“The boy had to kill her, you know. He really did. Things couldn’t go on the way they were. Not that I don’t understand her. Boy, I know why she had to do what she did. Like I told you, I was there.” He looked past the Fury at the mountains. “I was there, waiting with everybody else. Aulis AFB was never meant to hold so many troops. We were triple-stacked in what barracks there were, camped out in the hangars, piled up all over the place, cooking in the sun. We were getting sick. And mad. We wanted war, not waiting around. Of course, if we’d been given a choice later, we might have changed our minds.”
The golf course was also the town graveyard, the Fury now saw. Tiny stone squares were everywhere, almost invisible in the grass. Each one bore a name, a location, and a bar code for inventory control. She looked over the names while the groundskeeper spoke. Troy was the most frequent place of death.
The groundskeeper was almost crying. “We had to go. We had to. The old man knew his job, his responsibilities. The new administration didn’t want to take over the useless projects from the old, and Artemis demanded . . . Well, you know what it was.” The old man’s voice took on the singsong tones of a long-rehearsed but never-told story. “Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter, Clytemnestra’s daughter, had to be sacrificed. It’s in the regs, how you do it. Eighteen paragraphs of it. They raised her up on the rack in the repair garage, cut her throat. She looked around, meeting each of us in the eyes, and there were hundreds of us there. As her blood fell on the oil-stained concrete, the C-5As were finally able to start their engines. They thundered up into the smoky sky behind us. You shake when those engines go, all the way to your heart. But none of us turned to look. Each of us looked at her, remembering her eyes, the way she’d looked at us. Her hair hung down over the end of the lift, the ends trailed in the oil sump. Then they formed us up, and we went off to the war.” He passed a hand in front of his eyes, clearing the scene. “Clytemnestra never forgave any of us for that. I could feel it when she saw me mowing the grass. I was an Argos employee. She wasn’t going to kill me. But when it came to Agamemnon . . . well, as I said, I know why she did it. Did him.”
The groundskeeper looked off across the course at the distant wall.
“He didn’t go back, you know. After he killed his mother. Orestes didn’t go back into town. . . .”
That was as much as he was going to give her, and it was enough. She walked off across the grass. Behind the clubhouse, an arroyo dug down under the wall, passing through a high concrete culvert. Teenagers had cut through the grating with torches and bent the corrugated iron bars back. The culvert itself was filled with broken bottles and old cans, blackened in ritual fires. Beyond was the eternal desert, sere and serene in the light of late afternoon.
The soft sand left from the last cloudburst was marked by a single line of footprints.
The mobile homes in the park had been there so long that they were almost invisible under spreading vines, untrimmed shrubs, abandoned leaning bathtubs. Strings of Chinese lanterns hung above picnic tables. The street sides of yards were marked by truck tires painted white, filled with flowers. And everywhere were the mystic silver globes on their stands, sign of the cryptic Orphism of country folk. In each of the trailers a TV glowed, many tuned to the same channel. Some joke on an old sitcom caused a thunder of canned laughter through the trailer park, like a coming storm.
A burly man with a yellow beard sat at a picnic table in work-stained coveralls, several drain pans in front of him on the green-checked plastic tablecloth. He scrubbed carburetor parts with an old toothbrush dipped in solvent, shifting them from one pan into another as he decided they were clean enough.
“If I had known, I never would have let them into the house,” he said. He held a needle valve up to the light, shook his head, and discarded it and its housing into a drain pan with a flick of his thumb.
“Oh, your fine house.” A woman in a dragon-embroidered house robe appeared in the trailer door. She was beautiful, with bitter lines to her face. Her dark hair was long and wild, and her lipstick was smeared on her lips, probably deliberately, with a thumb. “Orestes and Pylades. Their hands were so . . . clean. So soft. I noticed it as soon as they arrived. Do you really think they wanted to come in here?”
She leaned against the jamb and crossed her arms under her breasts. She irritably examined the kitchen witch that spun slowly under the lintel. One elegant leg stretched out of her robe. She wore velvet high-heeled house pumps. This was Electra, Orestes’s sister, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s daughter. She had been compelled to marry the auto mechanic while Aegisthus and Clytemnestra ruled Argos. His name was Waldemar, and it was clear from the way he looked at her that he loved Electra desperately.
“His hands aren’t clean anymore, that’s for damn sure.” Waldemar took a certain gloomy satisfaction in that. He looked up from his work and saw the Fury where she stood, silent in the road. Her presence didn’t seem to surprise him. Silently, he gestured her to sit on the bench opposite him. She did not move.
“He’s not here, damn you!” Electra teetered in the trailer door on her high heels, but did not quite dare to fly at the Fury.
“True enough,” Waldemar said. “Didn’t come by this way, far as I know. Only on the way in, on the way to Argos.” He shook his head. “If I’d known what those two butt-heads were up to . . . Well, Pylades is in jail now, though he’s got a fancy lawyer and will be out pretty soon, smart word says. He was just helping out a friend, after all. What could anyone do? Want some chili? It’s what we’re having for dinner. Out of a can, though, I should warn you. Electra’s a sweet thing but she’s never been much of a cook. . . .”
“Stop chattering with her,” Electra said. “You know you’re just doing it to bug me.”
“Well, you got your chance to talk with those TV guys.” For the first time, the Fury noticed the tracks of the media vehicles all over the grass. A shrub had been broken next door by a van backing up, several of the trees had clamp marks on their bark where cameras had been attached, and the flowers were turning back to the glow of the setting sun, having been temporarily seduced by the brighter sun of the TV lights.
“I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.” Waldemar had finished his carburetor and set the drain pans in a neat row against the side of the trailer.
“Oh!” Electra bit back the retort that he wasn’t important enough to be listened to, though it hung, almost visible, in the air.
The TV was on inside. War scenes flickered on the screen: explosions, miles-long lines of refugees, burning cities, tanks roaring across fields and smashing through the corners of farmhouses already tilting with age. Agamemnon was alive again, sitting behind a table and stabbing a pointer at a chart covered with symbols. He was a bland functionary of death, not a warrior, and this made him sad. Somewhere, hidden deep, never reflecting the light of day, was a bronze helmet with a bobbing plume, a helmet he had never been permitted to wear. On the TV he was suddenly a tragic figure, unfairly removed from a life in which he had never really participated. His beseeching eyes looked out toward Electra, Waldemar, and the Fury. In the corner of the screen was the tiny outline of a running figure: the logo of Orestes In Flight, symbol of this news coverage.
The scene cut to a vast traffic interchange crammed with cars, all stalled with their windows shattered, bodies hanging out of the doors and dangling over the railings, Agamemnon’s great victory in the war, then to a perfume commercial. Beautiful hands with long fingers delicately opened a crystal bottle.
The Fury kept staring at Electra. It was starting to make her nervous. The Fury stood in her long dark coat like a funeral monument, an old one, something ancient, put up because of the real fear that the body beneath might rise up if not held fast by the weight of the stone. Flies buzzed in the heavy air.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Electra gasped. “I didn’t have anything . . . that is, I didn’t know, I didn’t know what Orestes was going to do!”
Waldemar stood and put himself between the Fury and Electra, though the look on his face revealed that he had no idea of what he could do if the Fury chose to act. The Fury knew that Clytemnestra had never truly loved Electra, who was too much Agamemnon’s daughter, while she dearly loved Orestes, and Electra knew it too.
“If you had any brains, you’d be able to figure it out for yourself,” Electra jeered, as a way of excusing her fear, her betrayal. “And I can tell you because it doesn’t matter. He’s on his way to Delphi. Good luck with getting him once he’s there.”
Delphi. Apollo’s home base. They weren’t making it easy.
“Climb back into your hole!” Electra hooted behind the Fury as she walked off. “You’ve bitten off more than you can chew.”
Orestes stopped in an ice-cream shop for a soda. The place was decorated in a deliberately Olde Tyme style, with ceiling fans over the curlicue tables and chairs, and a picture of a gentleman in a straw boater, wearing what looked suspiciously like a butcher’s apron.
Orestes was just reaching for the large paper cup when the Fury came up behind him. He tried to be cool, to pretend that her presence didn’t matter at all to him, but his hand shook as he tried to pay the bored high-school girl behind the counter, and he dropped the change.
“I . . . I think I’m going to be sick.” He ran for the bathrooms in back. There was a door there, leading to the gravel parking lot. The screen door flopped loudly.
The Fury scooped up the change and handed it to the girl behind the counter. “Thanks.” As she turned indifferently back to the magazine she had been reading, the Fury recognized where she was. A rack of newspapers displayed to one side said Thebes Advertiser.
Thebes was the home of Oedipus, the Fury’s last victim, the one who had come closest to destroying her, and the one whose voice still spoke to her. The counter girl did not recognize the executioner of her great ruler, never having seen her on TV, or in the magazine she had now turned her attention to. Her eyes were as blue and vacant as the sky, and the Fury had the sudden urge to remove her, this innocent and chance-come-upon young woman, as guiltier than Electra, Orestes, Agamemnon, or Clytemnestra, to drag her screaming through the streets and sacrifice her in the main square beneath the monuments to old wars.
The Fury dug her nails into the counter. She had never before thought of killing anyone but the one designated for punishment. Indifference and ignorance were not crimes, not to her. They weren’t. The Formica peeled off its fiberboard backing with a sound like dry leaves. The girl looked up from her magazine, annoyed.
“Hey, is there something else?” As she looked more closely, fear seized her face. Her skin tightened and her thick pancake makeup seemed about to crack and fall to the floor.
It was that fear that saved her, and saved the Fury from an impossible swerving from duty. Some trace of her old power was still left her.
She left the shop and strolled the streets, seeing the scene of Oedipus’s history. Thebes had a pleasant green, and rows of old brick buildings, many of them now gone. The building, she thought, where Jocasta had hanged herself, and Oedipus had put out his eyes with a pin from her dress, was a smooth expanse of improbably white gravel, as was the old hotel at which Tiresias had stayed. Thebes was determined to have no memory of the great. Perhaps the girl was not alone to blame for her ignorance.
