“You’ve got a dead chicken tied around his neck and he doesn’t know it yet because it hasn’t started to rot. He still thinks it’s dinner.”
“I understand he punched you up a little before Christmas.”
“I told him the truth and he didn’t like it.”
“Truth’s a slippery word, Bart. I would think you’d understand that better than anyone, after all the lies you told me.
“That still bugs you, doesn’t it?”
“When you discover that a man you thought was a good man is full of shit, it does tend to bug one, yes.”
“Bug one,” he repeated. “Do you know something, Steve? You’re the only person I’ve ever known in my life that would say that. Bug one. It sounds like something that comes in a fucking aerosol can.”
“Was there anything else, Bart?”
“No, not really. I wish you’d stop beating Vinnie, that’s all. He’s a good man. You’re wasting him. And you know goddam well you’re wasting him.”
“I repeat: why would I want to 'beat' Vinnie?”
“Because you can’t get to me.”
“You’re getting paranoid, Bart. I’ve got no desire to do anything to you but forget you.”
“Is that why you were checking to see if I ever had personal laundry done free? Or took kickbacks from the motels? I understand you even took the petty cash vouchers for the last five years or so.”
“Who told you that?” Ordner barked. He sounded startled, off balance.
“Somebody in your organization,” he lied joyfully. “Someone who doesn’t like you much. Someone who thought I might be able to get the ball rolling a little in time for the next director’s meeting.”
“Who?”
“Good-bye, Steve. You think about Vinnie Mason, and I’ll think about who I might or might not talk to.”
“Don’t you hang up on me! Don’t you-”
He hung up, grinning. Even Steve Ordner had the proverbial feet of clay. Who was it Steve reminded him of? Ball bearings. Strawberry ice cream stolen from the food locker. Herman Wouk. Captain Queeg, that was it. Humphrey Bogart had played him in the movie. He laughed aloud and sang:
“We all need someone to Queeg on,
And if you want to, why don’tcha Queeg all over me?”
I’m crazy all right, he thought, still laughing. But it does seem there are certain advantages. It came to him that one of the surest signs of insanity was a man all alone, laughing in the middle of silence, on an empty street filled with empty houses. But the thought could not still his humor and he laughed louder, standing by the telephone and shaking his head and grinning.
January 19, 1974
After dark he went out to the garage and brought in the guns. He loaded the Magnum carefully, according to the directions in the instruction pamphlet, after dryfiring it several times. The Rolling Stones were on the stereo, singing about the Midnight Rambler. He couldn’t get over what a fine album that was. He thought about himself as Barton George Dawes, Midnight Rambler, Visits by Appointment Only.
The.460 Weatherbee took eight shells. They looked big enough to fit a medium howitzer. When the rifle was loaded he looked at it curiously, wondering if it was as powerful as Dirty Harry Swinnerton had claimed. He decided to take it out behind the house and fire it. Who was there on Crestallen Street West to report gunshots?
He put on his jacket and started out the back door through the kitchen, then went back to the living room and got one of the small pillows that lay on the couch. Then he went outside, pausing to flick on the 200-watt yard light that he and Mary had used in the summer for backyard barbecues. Back here, the snow was as he had pictured it in his mind a little more than a week ago-untouched, unmarred, totally virgin. No one had foot-fucked this snow. In past years Don Upslinger’s boy Kenny sometimes used the backyard express to get up to his friend Ronnie’s house. Or Mary used the line he had strung kitty-corner between the house and garage to hang a few things (usually unmentionables) on days when it was too warm for them to freeze. But he himself always went to the garage by the breezeway and now it struck him as sort of marvelous-no one had been in his backyard since snow first fell, in late November. Not even a dog, by the look of it.
He had a sudden crazy urge to stride out into the middle, about where he set the hibachi every summer, and make a snow angel.
Instead he tucked the pillow up against his right shoulder, held it for a moment with his chin, and then pressed the butt plate of the Weatherbee against it. He glared down the sight with his left eye shut, and tried to remember the advice the actors always gave each other just before the gyrenes hit the beaches in the late-night war movies. Usually it was some seasoned veteran like Richard Widmark talking to some green private-Martin Milner, perhaps:
Okay, Fred. Let’s see if I can hit my own garage.
He squeezed the trigger.
The rifle did not make a report. It made an explosion. At first he was afraid it had blown up in his hands. He knew he was alive when the recoil knocked him back against the kitchen storm door. The report traveled off in all directions with a curious rolling sound, like jet exhaust. The pillow fell in the snow. His shoulder throbbed.
“Jesus, Fred!” he gasped.
He looked at his garage and was hardly able to believe it. There was a splintered hole in the siding big enough to fit a teacup through.
He leaned the gun against the kitchen storm door and walked through the snow, never minding the fact that he had his low shoes on. He examined the hole for a minute, bemusedly prying up loose splinters with his forefinger, and then he went around and inside.
The exit hole was bigger. He looked at his station wagon. There was a bullet hole in the driver’s side door, and the paint had been seared off to show bare metal around the concave hole, which was big enough for him to stick the tips of two fingers in. He opened the door and looked across the seat at the passenger door. Yes, the bullet had gone through there too, just below the door handle.
He walked around to the passenger side and saw where the bullet had exited, leaving another big hole, this time with tines of metal sticking balefully out. He turned and looked at the garage wall opposite where the bullet had entered. It had gone through that too. For all he knew, it was still going.
He heard Harry the gun shop proprietor saying: So
He walked back to the kitchen door, stooped to pick up his pillow, and went back into the house, pausing automatically to stamp his feet so he wouldn’t track across Mary’s kitchen. In the living room he took off his shirt. There was a red welt in the shape of the rifle’s butt plate on his shoulder in spite of the pillow.
He went into the kitchen with his shirt still off and fixed a pot of coffee and a TV dinner. When he finished his meal he went into the living room and laid down on the couch and began to cry, and the crying rose to a jagged, breaking hysteria which he heard and feared but could not control. At last it began to trail off and he fell heavily asleep, breathing harshly. In his sleep he looked old and some of the stubble on his cheeks was white.
January 20, 1974
He woke with a guilty start, afraid it was morning and too late. His sleep had been as sodden and dark as old coffee, the kind of sleep he always woke from feeling stupid and cottonheaded. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past two.
The rifle was where he had left it, leaning nonchalantly in the easy chair. The Magnum was on the end table.
He got up, went into the kitchen, and splashed cold water on his face. He went upstairs and put on a fresh shirt. He went back downstairs tucking it in. He locked all the downstairs doors, and for reasons he did not wish to examine too closely, his heart felt a tiny bit lighter as each tumbler clicked. He began to feel like himself again for the first time since that damnable woman had collapsed in front of him in the supermarket. He put the Weatherbee on the floor by the living room picture window and stacked the shells beside it, opening each box as he set it down. He dragged the easy chair over and set it on its side.
He went into the kitchen and locked the windows. He took one of the dining room chairs and propped it under the kitchen doorknob. He poured himself a cup of cold coffee, sipped it absently, grimaced, and dashed it into the sink. He made himself a drink.
He went back into the living room and brought out the automobile storage battery. He put it behind the overturned easy chair, then got the jumper cables and coiled them beside the battery.
He carried the case of explosive upstairs, grunting and puffing. When he got to the landing he set it down with a thump and blew out his breath. He was getting too old for this sort of bullshit, even though a lot of the laundry muscle from the days when he and his partner had lifted four-hundred-pound lots of ironed sheets onto the delivery trucks, was still there. But muscle or no muscle, when a man got to be forty, some things were tempting fate. By forty it was attack time.
He went from room to room upstairs, turning on all the lights: The guest bedroom, the guest bathroom, master bedroom, the study that had once been Charlie’s room. He put a chair under the attic trapdoor and went up there, turning on the dusty bulb. Then he went down to the kitchen and got a roll of electrician’s tape, a pair of scissors, and a sharp steak knife.
He took two sticks of explosive from the crate (it was soft, and if you pressed it, you left fingerprints) and took them up to the attic. He cut two lengthy of fuse and peeled the white insulation back from the copper core with the steak knife. Then he pressed each bare wire into one of the candles. In the closet, standing below the trapdoor now, he peeled the insulation from the other ends of the fuses and carefully attached two more sticks, taping the fuse firmly to each so that the peeled wire wouldn’t pull free.
Humming now, he strung more fuse from the attic into the master bedroom and left a stick on each of the twin beds. He strung more fuse from there down the hall and left a stick in the guest bathroom, two more in the guest bedroom. He turned off the lights as he left. In Charlie’s old room he left four sticks, taped together in a cluster. He trailed fuse out the door and dropped a coil of it over the stairway railing. Then he went downstairs.
Four sticks on the kitchen counter, beside his bottle of Southern Comfort. Four sticks in the living room. Four in the dining room. Four in the hall.
He trailed fuse back into the living room, a little out of breath from going up and down stairs. But there was one more trip to make. He went back up and got the crate, which was considerably lighter now. There were only eleven sticks of explosive left inside it. The crate, he saw, had once contained oranges. Written on the side, in faded letters, was this
