Expensive People (33 page)

When her golden head appeared once more the fire was extinguished and only a few people applauded. I felt as if I had gazed upon something forbidden.

But it was not these people I seemed to want. I went quietly by them in the dark, jostled by friendly giggling girls who never noticed me; the rifle I carried was nothing alarming (it could have been a walking stick or something to pry a sunken bathing cap out of a drain). I made my way up the hill to the big house itself. Windows there glowed with light. The kitchen was filled with young people in bathing suits. Past the kitchen was a series of bathrooms evidently—the windows were glass bricks. Then a hallway with a great potted plant, then a darkened living room, then—and here my heart began at once to throb—then a kind of Family Room, and there sat Mr. Body himself. I understood that it was this man I'd been seeking.

Seeing him, I began at once to back up. With the rifle to my shoulder I was able to see Mr. Body clearly; he was reading a newspaper. My body tingled. This was real! This was reality! I could not have said why I was here, what Mr. Body meant to me, any more than I could have explained why, a moment later, my finger squeezed the trigger.

But I did squeeze it, and the gun went off. In the same instant, the windowpane that had protected Mr. Body from the night air smashed and I saw Mr. Body, that man in my telescope lens, dive to the floor. He was fast! He dived with as much skill as the man on the diving board. Again I squeezed the trigger, aiming not at Mr. Body but at the wall behind him. Another shot. Mr. Body's newspaper was scattered about
him, and his big fragile head was bent to the floor as if he were about to burrow into it. I pulled the trigger again and yet again. Mr. Body lay very still, playing dead. No need for him to play dead, I knew better! But he waited, and I waited. A few seconds passed, and he made a tentative movement with one hand, perhaps symbolic, in the direction of the telephone, and again I squeezed the trigger and shot the wall.

Now I turned and started running down the Bodys' front driveway, past all the cars. You are surprised that no one heard me? But yes, of course they probably heard me; their ear devices registered the sound of the shots, but they didn't listen because why should they have listened? Rifle shots were not rifle shots to them but, at the most, firecrackers or a motorbike backfiring (if motorbikes backfire).

I ran and ran along Melon Lane. Lovely road! You must drive out to Pools Moran someday, twenty minutes from the heart of downtown but twenty light-years from its stench and poverty, and there stroll along Melon Lane some pleasant July evening. Feel the pebbles underfoot, smell the faint acrid odor of dust (the lane is unpaved). If you want to guess at my feelings, run along and pretend that all of Cedar Grove and Pools Moran are pursuing you. Though you know no one is there (as I knew), run faster all the same, delirious with joy until your legs are carrying you faster than any skeptical gym teacher of your youth would have believed—and you will have some idea of what you are! Why hadn't I guessed at myself before this? What had I done to Mr. Body, what had I committed? I ran, and through my mind thoughts ran also, new, alarming, refreshing thoughts. But my legs carried me on without error, without any lapse in rhythm, carrying me forward, onward, back to Broad Road and across into the darkness of Cedar Grove, and in five minutes I was back home again at 4500 Labyrinth Drive, my home.

I slept well that night; it seemed to me that at last I had discovered myself.

The next morning, Nada knew long before the paper came what had happened over in Pools Moran. I heard her talking on the telephone
and saying vaguely “Yes, it's shocking, it's really shocking …” When the paper arrived Nada and I read it eagerly. I was a little startled at the publicity the event had been given. To me it hadn't seemed much, a rather private ceremony, but there was the big black headline on the front page:
SNIPER MISSES BANKER.
It was a while before I understood that the word “sniper” referred to me.

When Father came home he too discussed it with Nada. He seemed excited and alarmed, gesturing so that his ice cubes clicked. “See what it's coming to, finally! The way the country's going!” he said.

“Yes,” said Nada.

“Honey, you'd better be careful while I'm gone. Keep the shades pulled and everything. Okay?”

“Do we have shades in this house?”

“I don't know, I think so.”

“Not downstairs.”

“Upstairs then. Stay upstairs.”

A few people dropped in for cocktails and they all discussed the sniper, who was eavesdropping on them from the stairs. I looked down to see Nada greeting new guests, arching her elegant backbone as she kissed the cheek of some female acquaintance, and I could see the tops of their silky hairdos and the lids of their eyes, which told me nothing. My backbone did not seem strong enough today to keep my body erect, so I sat on the stairs and lay back. I listened to their opinions shot back and forth. Father's loud voice triumphed finally. “It's the judges and the sleazy liberal sentiments that are ruining this country, and just as Tashya here says, it's a wonder things like that don't happen every day with things like they are!”

“Oh, how can you say that?” a woman said.

“I did not say that,” said Nada.

“Well, it's a hell of a thing,” said a man. “There's no protection, it's like a jungle—”

“Why shouldn't it be a jungle?” Nada asked.

Only her voice excited me! She seemed to be talking right to me, to my soul, as if she knew the sniper himself was eavesdropping on her.

“All the world and all of history is a jungle, when it hasn't been a garbage heap or a graveyard, which comes to the same thing,” Nada said. “Why not? What right do we have to complain? Are we better? What my people did to the Jews, what they did to one another, and
what they're still doing—it's all a mess.” Her “accent” was getting stronger and more vicious; her guests must have been astonished. “We think we are in a holy city here—what is it? Cedar Grove—and yes, yes that's true, this world we have is holy but let us understand that it will not last. It won't stop us from getting shot or dying in some other way. Of all people, we have no right to complain.”

A few seconds of silence. Then a man said, clearing his throat, “Of course, with Anthony Body, there's that peculiar business of Armada's sister's estate, dragging on now for five years. And I think, I just think that
maybe that
might have some bearing on the—”

“Oh, how can you say things like that?” a woman interrupted shrilly.

Safe in my room, I read through all the papers that Father had brought home. My room was safe because Libby didn't come in it: I had explained to her that, as a punishment, I was to clean my own room from now on. So I was safe. I slept well again that night. I was buoyed about for a while on the surface of an immense dark ocean, then I sank very slowly to the bottom, where I drifted gently back and forth with the warm currents all night long. When morning came the sunlight shone murkily through the water but did not dispel it. What was wrong? I sat up in bed and was still sunk in water, but I was able to breathe and I felt a surprised smile spread across my face very slowly, the way smiles always move in water.

When Nada came in she declared me “sick” and said she would nurse me. I lay soothed by the warm currents of the ocean bed and by my mother's kindness. It seemed to me that both Nada and myself were being buffeted about by the waves, but Nada did not know what was happening and I did know. I said, “Don't be afraid of the sniper, you're safe here.”

Nada laughed, and I said again, not knowing what her laughter meant, “Like Father says, if you stay upstairs—”

“Like Daddy says,” she corrected. Then she said, “As Daddy says.”

I didn't need to wait for the paper to know that no further sniping had been done, but I was interested to see what progress the police had
made. The county sheriff had nothing to say to reporters; he was cagey. Neighbors of the Bodys were interviewed. College friends of the Bodys' children gave their opinions. A few photographs. In short, nothing.

Without me they couldn't get along!

I waited cunningly for a day or two before I went out again, and this time I stayed close to home. I sprinted down our back lane only a few houses! I was pleased to see that many windows were shaded, that lights were burning around houses, set up in trees and above garages, to dispel the forces of darkness. But the darkness, which frightened others and had always frightened me, was now something into which I ran with great joy and longing, my face still smarting from the soap I'd used on it, and my eyes keen as they had never been in the daytime. Oh, what a failure I was as a daytime creature! How feeble, how despicable! Nada was a nighttime creature and never until now had I understood that. Night people don't stir to life until the sun sets or, at least, until shades are mysteriously drawn; in the daytime they pretend. My daytime self was a failure, no doubt of it, but my nighttime self was strong. If only Nada could see me now and realize what I was—not that feeble, sickish daytime child of hers, but a darker, more secret child of hers, a boy who belonged only to her and dedicated everything to her.

This time I paused, panting, by a wire fence. A few dogs barked— dogs always bark in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Dogs own those neighborhoods. I saw a car coming down the street out front and waited, and, sure enough, it turned in to the driveway of the house I was watching. I hid behind the garbage cans. The car's headlights flicked near me, sailing through the little curtained windows at the back of the garage, then there was the sound of one car door being slammed shut, then another. A woman's voice … a man's voice … a jangle of keys …

My heart was pounding once again, and when the people appeared inside the lighted alcove that led to the side door I was prepared. My rifle rested on top of the fence, aimed, and through the telescope I could see two ordinary, attractive, anonymous people who looked as if they were arguing. I aimed at an expanse of white wall near them and pulled the trigger.

This time I ran at once. There was nothing to wait for. My heart—
listen to it!—it pounded as if it might burst! What abandonment! The silence of the lane through which I ran fell back before me as if it were terrified of my power. I ran and ran, and in a sense I am still running, panting as I type out these words, recalling the night air and the terrible loneliness I had discovered, but a loneliness that made me know who I was. The loneliness everyone feels, suddenly, when he begins to think: and once you discover it you can't push it away. Only Nada and I lived in it, this loneliness, and never until that night had I sucked it happily into my lungs and guts and understood what it was.

But the next day when I woke I was in the daylight again. A daylight Richard. I dressed feebly and picked up my books and went down to breakfast. Nada glanced at me with moony, distracted eyes. Was she thinking about the sniper? Did he seem to her maybe a new lover, one of those men she met somewhere, somehow, and took home with her? But she only said, “You don't look well, Richard. Should I take you to the doctor?”

“No, I'm fine.”

“You look pale.”

“It's just the light.”

She accepted this nonsense and continued her breakfast. I had cereal: it looked and tasted like wood shavings from Father's workbench. I poured milk on it.

“What's this?” Nada said, pulling my math book to her. She leafed through it, nodded, and pushed it back. “Maybe you're working too hard and that's why you look pale.”

“Did that man shoot anybody again?”

“Who, the sniper? I guess not. There's nothing in the paper.”

“Why do you think somebody would do that? Is he crazy?”

Nada shrugged her shoulders.

“Wouldn't he have to be crazy to do that?” I said anxiously.

Nada, licking her lips free of sweet cantaloupe juice, was drawn to say after a reluctant hesitation, “What's crazy is that he shoots to miss.”

And now things began to go fast. All my young life things had gone slowly like leaden beetles, and suddenly at the end of that July they began to go fast. My daylight time was slow as usual, but my night time was picking up faster and faster, like a deranged heart. You see, my readers, I was suddenly joined by another sniper.

Ladies and gentlemen, another sniper stepped out of the light and into the darkness, following my lead!

It was now August 2, and by this date I had gone out a total of three times, very cleverly each time, and each time I had shot to miss and had indeed missed: a bloodless operation. But on August 2 I was joined by another sniper. That bastard hadn't my Cedar Grove touch. He was obviously lower class, a slob who shot an old man out on the sidewalk and hit him in the knee. As if I, Richard Everett, would have shot an old man in the knee! But while my stomach cringed at the thought of such vulgarity, my heart swelled with unreasonable pride to think that I had a follower, an imitator. The only problem was that the police made no distinction between us.

SNIPER STRIKES FOURTH TIME.
“An elderly man, out for an after-dinner walk, was shot today by the mysterious sniper who has …”

I trembled with rage at their stupidity. Three of the stories on the front page dealt with “the sniper,” but which sniper did they mean? The chief of police said that he did not think the sniper really intended to kill or even hurt; he was a sick person looking for help, and he would get help, yes, if he identified himself. A minister complained about the cancerous erosion of morality in public life: how could it
not
affect the unstable in our midst? It was time to “assess ourselves.” The bosomy president of a Mother's Club demanded greater police protection and more convictions.

There were subsidiary stories, about suspects: men with lamentable records, men found loitering near the shooting scenes and unable to justify themselves, all adults, I'm proud to say, and all of them stripped and exposed to public view, so long hidden cleverly behind respectable faces and respectable homes. (It turned out that an advertising executive, evidently a trustworthy man, had been arrested on a morals charge twenty years ago, what do you think of that? His photograph in
the paper showed a most worried man.) And there were many telephone calls. I haven't mentioned my third time out, but it was an excursion to an ordinary Cedar Grove home, nothing sensational, the home of a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Frazer Crane. Now the Cranes were receiving peculiar telephone calls. “Next time I'll get you! I won't miss!” someone promised them. They reported jazzy music in the background.