Complete Short Fiction, page 142
We stood there alone, waiting for the train into New York City. He was grinning at me as if nothing had happened. I looked away and thought of Stone-Face and the driver. Both my friends, by degrees; but they had not stood up for me. They had been silent in the car, and would stay so forever, believing that the lie had been an unmasking of some kind, a king’s-invisible-new-clothes event. A lie well told might never be refuted, an urgent legend—an urban legend, of course—like later sightings of dead peoples’ twins or ghosts. People believe what they want to believe about you, Sinatra had once said. I am not a crook, Nixon had said.
Garfield stepped toward the edge of the platform and looked west. The gloomy evening air was thick with smog. A whistle blew, and we saw the train’s light shining through like a small approaching sun. It brightened into a blinding intensity.
When it passed, and my eyes adjusted, I was alone on the platform.
I had killed him long before my hands reached out and my fear said push.
I have no memory of it. I got on the train and rode into the city, expecting for some weeks after to be questioned, but no one came; the fall had happened so close to the moment that the motorman, if he had been looking, did not have time to see.
I might have had to say that I tried to catch my friend as he stumbled, but no one asked. He was a friend, I would have told them, but not close enough to repeat it, if anyone had asked. I did not push him, I would have said, but no one cared enough to let me deny it.
I cared more when I heard about the mangled body that was found, and no one knew what had happened. Maybe a suicide.
He might have been a great sports announcer, I imagined as I waited, even though he hated Damon Runyon stories. How many people don’t get to be what they wanted to be, or even might have been? Best known for becoming a body on a track, but he might have been better known as a friend of the author who knew him waybackwhen in their wannabe days. What had I stopped with his heart? If he had come to nothing, I might have been there to gloat, up in some future; but if he had become an accomplished sort, I would have been there to congratulate, or ignore him . . .
I had pushed off from everything I had known, and would now live as what I had become . . . wearing the everyday that would never be the same again. Everything was a fraud, I thought, as I saw his broken body and the unremembered impulse that had brought him his sudden stillness and had taken me along with him as if someone had pulled a puppet string hooked deep inside me, releasing all that I had needed to put my hand on his back and push, all too quickly for me to vomit up my heart.
Would I be able to live with it?
A clean hate of cold forgiveness had taken me through it.
Would I live with it?
Two weeks later the publisher cancelled my book contract. My agent told me that they didn’t want the first half of the advance back, but he told me I should pay it back anyway. They fired my editor, who died the following week, and my agent let me go before I could fire him. Garfield grinned at me from the grave.
I found another agent, and another publisher, and lived past the delay . . .
But in the endless police silence I sat in my room, waiting to see something crawl across the carpet, crablike, roachlike, at least the size of a baseball.
Briefly, the truth had become a lie, then struggled and righted itself. Revenge did not sicken me. The death of my enemy left me with only one regret—that now I couldn’t kill him again.
I thought of Stone-Face, who had not defended me in the car. Had he imagined that I had been exposed? He had hoped that it was true.
He would have to pay for that.
Once in a while people need to kill each other.
—Anonymous
2. Kayak
Ethan sat on the porch and watched his wife swimming in the lake. Isabel could keep it up forever, swim, tread, and float all day, as if she had been born in the water and was determined to live there; when she left him, that’s where she would be. There was nothing he could do about it in the summers except wait for her to come out, be ready to throw her a life preserver or maybe even to dive in after her if she needed any help. Drylanders were obligated to the waterfolk . . .
The water shimmered in the late afternoon sun because the diamonds on its surface refused to sink.
A strenuous kayaker came up behind her, oars flying as if he expected to take off and fly, disrupting the glittering carpet of unsinkable gems, and hit her in the head. She sank. The oarsman windmilled away as if nothing had happened.
Ethan was off the porch after what seemed an eternity of effort, down the path to the dock and into the water, splashing more than swimming, looking for her beneath a surface that had become a wall that had fallen over her.
She bobbed up, head down. He grabbed her hair and lifted her head. She coughed, but there was blood in her red hair. He sank for a moment, then came up and pulled her to shore, past the dock, and hauled her out by the shoulders.
She lay breathing on the sandy mud. But what was breathing? What was left inside the bloody head?
He looked away and spotted the blue kayak in the distance. A blond man was flipping the oar, glancing back anxiously as he pulled away.
Ethan looked around for the binoculars that Isabel used for checking out the ducks on the far shore, then saw that her chest had stopped moving.
He was at her side, starting to work on her, when he saw the blood soaking into the sand. She had not drowned; she had been bludgeoned to death.
But he tried for the next quarter hour, breathing into her and fooling himself that he saw her chest move, then sat back on his heels in shock, unable to think, watching her stillness, expecting it to end . . .
At last he got to his feet, and stood shaking, then staggered up to the house, called the ambulance, and went back.
Kneeling, he kissed her cold lips and held her head in his lap as he waited for the helpless help to arrive.
He gave his statement to the lone policeman who showed up a century after the ambulance had left.
The graying cop looked at him in the fading daylight of the kitchen, then stepped back and asked, “You sure she was hit by a kayak oar and didn’t just drown?”
“What?” Ethan said and stepped toward him. “Why, just go and look at the body!”
“Oh, yeah, sorry I missed the wagon. Have to ask. People tell me all sorts of things, you know.”
“Go look!”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”
Ethan tried to calm himself, outraged by the effort.
“They told you she was dead?” the cop asked, moving his jaw as if he were chewing gum.
“Well no . . . but.”
“I’ll double check.”
“She wasn’t breathing!”
“Okay, but how close did you look? Okay, okay. I’ll get on it.”
“Hurrying won’t help,” Ethan said, and the cop grimaced at him, then let the door slam as he left.
Ethan sat down and wondered how he could ever be calm again as he began to hear a rushing in his ears.
After what seemed like hours he put on his jeans, shirt, and boots, found his phone and hung the binoculars around his neck, and went out to his pickup.
He drove south slowly along the shore, looking for blue and blond among the vacationers, wishing that he had caught the man’s face in the binoculars and imprisoned it in the lenses for all time.
He searched the shores as if somehow he might find her instead of her killer, remembering how it had been whenever they were apart: a kind of relief, for a day or two; but on the third or fourth day it would begin to suck, and now it would suck forever—whether he found her killer or not.
Isabel was away. His feelings insisted that she would be back; it could not mean anything else, because that was the way it had always been between them. She had never been away like this, or in any other way . . . so it would never be different.
Toward evening, when he had nearly driven the entire irregular lakeshore, he slowed down.
Blue and blond.
A blue kayak was beached on the sand. A blond man stood nearby with a beer in his hand.
Ethan stopped and cut his engine.
The man heard him and turned around.
Ethan sat watching him. The blond man stared back.
Finally, the man started to walk toward his bungalow.
Ethan got out of the truck and slammed the door, and the man began to run, dropping his beer.
Ethan called out, “Gotta talk to you!”
The man tripped halfway to the door and Ethan caught up with him. As Ethan looked down at him, the man’s legs twisted and tried to get him up. He was breathing hard, avoiding Ethan’s gaze, looking around at the red sand as if trying to find his dropped beer. Ethan remembered when the community had met to decide on the purchase of the sand for the beaches, but he did not recall this man showing up for the vote.
Ethan took a deep breath and asked, “Why?”
The man stayed down, rose up on one elbow, then went down on his back, as if trying to look helpless. He was young, Ethan saw, maybe not even twenty.
“Well?” Ethan asked, giving him a small kick in the shin.
The man started to weep. “I don’t know, man! It just came over me.”
Ethan squatted and stared at the blubbering face.
“You don’t know?” he asked. “How can you not know!”
“Yeah, I don’t know. You tell me!”
“How would I know?” Ethan asked, feeling the acid inside him along with the terror in the young man’s face.
“Somebody’s gotta know,” said the young man.
Ethan looked at the man and knew that the boy was not a killer—who had killed.
Ethan took his cell phone from his belt, dialed the hospital and asked about his wife. Yes, Isabel was dead, double checked by the cop’s doubts.
The young man on the sand had closed his eyes, but opened them when Ethan finished his call.
“She’s dead,” Ethan said.
“Go ahead, kill me,” said the young man. “No one will ever convict you.”
“You studying law?”
“No—plumbing. My father wants me to go in with him.”
“And?”
“I hate him, and all pipes.”
Ethan looked at him, unable to speak because there was nothing waiting to be said; both their lives had run out of words to say to each other.
“I can’t . . .” said the young man, “ever live with . . . this.”
Ethan knew that only forgetfulness would be of use, but only one kind was truly available to the young man—and none for himself. There was nothing left, and nothing after . . .
Ethan was glad that he was wearing boots as he stepped up to the man’s head and kicked.
3. Unsafe
Sprawled on the sofa, one intruder held a gun on the old couple in their comfy chairs while his partner searched the house.
The searcher came back after a noisy half hour, looking disappointed.
“Nothing,” he said to his gunpointing partner. “All they have is books, in every room, DVDs, CDs, crap like that.”
“What’s with you?” asked the lounger. “Don’t you people have anything?”
The couple was silent.
“Well?”
“We sold all our good stuff a long time ago,” said the handsome old woman, “so this is all we have. Take the television and stereo.”
“This stuff’s all . . . so old. Where’s your flat screen, or your Bose sound system?”
“We never earned much,” said the woman.
“What did you do?”
“We write for a living,” she said.
“Really? Writers, huh? Damn little money in that.”
“For most,” said the husband.
“One thing,” said the tired searcher as he sat down in a worn upholstered chair. “There’s a rusty old safe under the basement stairs. Disgusting with dust.”
“Oh?” said the gunman, sitting forward. “What’s in it?”
“Nothing,” said the woman.
He pointed the gun at the old man. “Whaddya say I shoot him in the shoulder?”
“You can say it,” she said, “but the safe will still be empty.”
“How’s about we see for ourselves?”
The searcher had closed his eyes and was leaning back in his chair. “There’s nothing here, Henry,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
“Why don’t you give them my address,” Henry said.
“Hey,” shouted the husband, “James Cagney said that in White Heat!”
“No, dear,” said the woman, “that was Cagney in Shake Hands With The Devil, just before he shot the captive Black and Tan policeman.”
“It’s a common enough name, Henry,” the searcher said as he opened his eyes. “What’s a black and tan?”
“So give them your name, too,” Henry said. “The cops will show them pictures, you know.”
“My name’s Bob,” the searcher said, “so I guess we’ll have to kill them.”
“Okay,” Henry said, “you’re nice old folks, and goddamned writers, too, so just give me the combination.”
“Give us, the combination,” Bob said. “There are two of us here.”
“A comedy act,” said the writer to his wife.
“There is no combination,” said the woman. “The safe was from long before our twenty years here.”
“I told you,” said her husband, “to have it opened professionally and leave it open, so this wouldn’t have a chance of happening.”
“No tricks,” said the gunman as he shifted the weapon to his left hand. “What’s the combo!”
“Don’t have it,” said the woman.
“How’s we don’t believe you,” said Bob.
“Did you ever open it?” asked Henry.
“Nope,” said her husband. “By the way, I’m Crawford, and this is my wife Prunella.”
“I get the Prunella,” said Henry, “but is Crawfish your first or last name?”
“First,” Crawford said.
Bob guffawed and sat back. “I gotta hear their last name.”
The couple were silent.
“Well?” asked Henry.
“Tell them,” Prunella said, “so they can die laughing.”
“The combination, wise-ass,” Henry said, extending his gun toward her.
“Now, young man,” Prunella said in a motherly way, “you know that you are not going to shoot me.”
“Oh, yeah? You really know that?”
“He doesn’t know himself,” Bob added.
“If I die, you won’t get the combination.”
“Oh, so there is one,” Henry said.
“Maybe, and my husband doesn’t know it.”
“His shoulder, lady, will never be the same.”
Prunella said, “But, really, sonny, there is no combination.”
“So you say.”
“He’ll shoot,” Bob said and Henry grinned at her.
“Whatever made you boys so nasty?” Prunella asked. “I don’t believe you can do it. You don’t have it in you.”
“Hey,” cried the husband, “that was Zero Mostel, the crooked shyster in The Hot Rock!”
“Quite right this time, dear,” she said, “but he wasn’t all that crooked.”
“Crooked enough,” her husband said, “to know better about everything in the movie.”
“Who do you think you people are?” Henry cried. “You talk as if you owned the friggin’ world. Enough with the product placement.”
“Crawford Kane and Prunella Angleton,” her husband said, “if you read books. Writers are like that.”
“You have separate names?” Bob asked. “Damn.”
“Sure,” Crawford said, “we treasure our bylines.”
“Bylines?” Henry asked.
“You know, the name that goes in front of whatever you write,” Crawford said.
“Oh, yeah, sure. But Prunella? Who’d want to read a Prunella?”
“You can do other things with a Prunella,” Bob said, eyeing her knees.
“But people do remember the name,” she said.
“The combination, lady,” Bob said, “or . . . Crawford will need a new shoulder—if he lives to get one.”
“Let’s take this down to the basement,” Henry said, standing up. “It’ll inspire them.”
The two young men went down to the basement, and stood watching as the old couple crept down the old wooden stairs and sat down in the small laundry room sofa.
The big old metal box waited smug and safe under the stairs.
The two intruders stood looking at the big door.
“Okay, lady,” said the gunman, “open it.”
She went over to the safe and stood with her back to the two men. Slowly, she grasped the handle, and opened the door.
“Hey!” Bob shouted.
“Sure,” she said as she looked inside, “but we never tried it, so how could we know it was open?”
“Clean forgot,” said her husband.
Henry tucked his gun into his belt.
Prunella waited a moment, then turned around with a German Lugar in her right hand.
“Look what I found inside, dear,” she said to her husband, who blinked and sat back, creaking the cheap old sofa’s springs as he adjusted his baggy pants.
Henry drew his gun and she fired. He dropped the gun and collapsed with a small hole in his chest. Bob screamed and backed away, bumping into the washing machine.
She waited until he was quiet. They all looked down at the man on the green floor.
“He’s not breathing,” Crawford said.
“Now, Bob, listen carefully,” Prunella said.
“What?” Bob asked, horrified by her calm.
“You’re going to run away,” she said.
“You’ll shoot me!” he cried, looking around for his gun. Crawford put out his foot and kicked the gun away into the corner by the washing machine.
“I won’t have to,” Prunella said.
“You will!” he cried.
“No, I won’t,” she said. “Your friend is dead, and it’s his own fault. You’ll get to live, and you’ll never say a word about what happened here. You won’t want to confess how you broke in to rob us at gunpoint.”
