Orrie's Story (11 page)

“I'll kill him,”
Ellie said. “I won't say anything at all. I'll just cut his guts out.”

Orrie felt this threat in his own entrails. He spoke slowly. “I'm sorry, I'm taking a while, but my head's still spinning. Nothing like this has ever come up before.”

“I can take care of myself,” said Ellie. “Don't you worry any about me. What are you going to do about Daddy?”

Orrie winced. “That's a completely different matter, as I see it. Whatever Erie might have done with Gena doesn't mean he would be capable of murdering somebody.”

“Remember he had Mother's help.”

There she went again! It got no more acceptable no matter how many times it was repeated. Ellie was crazy. No wonder she kept to herself all the time and had no friends. The sex stuff was unbelievable as Well. If she were interested in boys, it would take her mind off this morbidity. Basically she was a nice-looking girl, with fine features. She might even have a decent if slender figure underneath the ill-fitting clothes which seemed to be hand-me-downs from the more ample Gena, but of course that was not a brother's business, and anyway his soul had not ceased to writhe in shame since hearing her personal charge against Erie. Underneath his superficial references to the knife, Gena, reform school, and even his self-pity, he had been occupied only with Erie's advances to Ellie. What was so awful was that he believed her from the first but believed as well that he had a responsibility to pretend to disbelieve. She was too young to know that terrible things happened in life: they should therefore not be confirmed. He owed that to her! But he failed.

“When he did that to you, or tried to, you must have been only eleven or twelve.”

Ellie's eyes changed. The subject seemed not as repugnant to her as to him, no doubt because she had not been overcome. “Yeah.”-

Orrie now gave way within. It was with a sense of loss, not triumph, that he said, “I'm going to get him.”

Ellie seized his hand. “Not for me, please. I'm not a victim. Do it for Gena. But do it most of all for Daddy. He didn't have that coming.”

“I looked everywhere,” said Esther. “He wasn't wearing any dog tags and he didn't have any in his pockets or suitcase. He didn't carry any kind of identification that gave his Army serial number. All he had in his wallet other than the return bus ticket and twelve dollars was that old expired driver's license from here. I guess he didn't have a car down there.”

E.G. and she were sitting decorously, across from each other, in the living room, keeping their distance. Neither had suggested going to bed together since the murder.

E.G. glanced around the room and moistened his lips with his tongue. He had two fresh shaving-cuts on his face. “They got him in a refrigerator now? I won't get a good night's sleep until he's cremated. I'll tell you that.”

This was not the first time he had made that statement. “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “That he'll wake up and come gunning for us?”

E.G. winced. “How can we be sure the coroner won't find bruises or something that won't fit our story?”

She stared at him. “You said you didn't choke him. I couldn't see.”

“I don't think I did. But it was hot and heavy there for a couple minutes.” He lifted his left hand. “I think I broke a finger. It still hurts.”

“That's the one where you usually wear your signet ring!” she cried. “You didn't scratch him with it, did you?”

“I'm certain I didn't. I looked him over pretty carefully before the lifesaving squad got there.”

Esther returned to the matter of the insurance. “The Veterans Administration say they have to have a serial number before they can process the claim, and a legal death certificate, of course.” E.G. seemed distracted by his own worries, and she reminded him, “This is important. He let his civilian policy lapse, you know. This is all I've got coming, this ten thousand.”

E.G. did not react to the cue. Another thing they had not done since the murder was talk of their plans for the future. He got up now and went to look through the front window. “Orrie's supposed to show up soon, isn't he?”

“He's hitchhiking, I guess. I knew he would refuse the money you sent.”

“Well, I keep trying,” he said sadly. “I wonder if he'll change now?”

“He'll come around eventually.”

He turned to her. “You've been saying that all his life.”

She did not want to get into that subject at the moment. “Maybe I
should
begin to worry about him. I begged him not to hitchhike: you never know who might be on the road nowadays.”

“He's all right,” said E.G. “He's a pretty tough little egg, if you ask me.”

Esther was annoyed. “He's not some roughneck!” She returned to practical problems. “How are we going to find out where this fiancée of Augie's can be located? I hate to have it hanging over our head: eventually the girl is going to come looking for him. She might make trouble. Whereas if we could get it out of the way as soon as he's cremated, we'll have nothing to fear from her tracking him down later and catching us by surprise.”

“You can come up with the damnedest worries,” said E.G. “Who cares about this girl? She can't do anything. You're still his legal wife, aren't you? She hasn't got any rights! I'm concerned about the postmortem. I don't
think
there's anything to find, but you can't really tell about doctors. If you'd just done it right in the beginning, he'd have been electrocuted once and for all, nice and clean.”

She freely admitted not having checked the length of the cord on the fan, but it was also a fact that while planning the murder it had never occurred to
him
that the body would entirely occupy that end of the tub so that anything falling from above would necessarily be diverted from the water by Augie's upper parts. Things of that sort were.male matters: as a woman she could not be expected to deal with them.

“It doesn't do any good to whine now. I want that insurance money!”

After a pause he said, “Get them to look him up by his name. There can't have been many August E. Menckens in the Army. It's not like Smith or Jones.”

“Meanwhile,” Esther said, “I'm in no position to pay for any of this.”

“Any of what?”

“Cremation, to start with! What do you think I meant?”

“Don't raise your voice to me.”

She was not ready to get into a real quarrel. “I assumed you would know what we've been talking about.”

“You were talking about this girl of his.” Then in effect it was he who capitulated. “Come on, let's not bicker.” He turned back to the window. “When are you going to tell him?”

“This is hardly the opportune time,” said Esther. She assumed a different voice, a witchlike falsetto. “‘Don't be too upset, Orrie. He wasn't really your father. It's more complicated: it was your real dad who killed him!'”

E.G. spun around. “‘And your mother,'” said he, in an ugly voice of his own, “‘she cheated on him for twenty years and then she killed the poor son of a bitch in the bathtub…when he had just come back from fighting for his country. That's the kind of mother you got!'”

In her fury Esther seized the nearest object that could serve as a makeshift weapon, the green glass vase from the drum table. It was almost always empty except on Mother's Day, when in recent years, after Orrie was old enough to celebrate the occasion, he bought such flowers as he could afford, with the money he made cutting lawns and caddying.

E.G. dodged the missile, which shattered against the sill of the bay window. Then he strode to her and struck her in the jaw. She fell to one knee. He seized the front of her dress, bunching it up above the bosom. She tried to get her legs under her.

“You do anything like that again, and I swear I'll kill you.” He slapped her face with his free hand, going and coming. As it happened, this hurt more than did the punch, which seemed to carry its own anesthetic with it. “Don't you
ever
think you can do to me what you did to Augie.” He was not speaking narrowly of the murder. “You try to cut my balls off, I'll cut your rotten throat.”

Being in an impossible situation at the moment, she submitted, sagging in his grasp. He let her go without warning. Her head might have struck the floor had she not caught herself on her hands.

His rage having been expended, E.G. was suddenly less severe, though scarcely tender. “Go put some ice on your face. You ran into a door while carrying that vase. That's the kind of thing happens when a person's got a lot of grief.”

Orrie was not old enough to be served alcohol in a public place, nor did he look anywhere near twenty-one. Paul could get away with it, given his size and authoritative manner. He could also buy a bottle of whiskey, which is what he had done now at Orrie's request. They sat on their respective beds in the little tourist cabin, a mean place for such an exorbitant fee: two bucks. The bathroom was furnished with a stall shower and a toilet without a lid, and its door was not a door but rather a heavy curtain. Paul had suggested they stay instead at a decent hotel in the city, twenty miles away, but Orrie would not hear of spending even more on this mission, and when Paul amiably pointed out that he himself was uncomfortable and should be allowed to spend his own money, Orrie chided him for being there at all.

“It's not your affair. Go back to school.”

Paul shook his head. “We're friends.” He tilted the bottle and drank from its neck, then wiped the top with his palm and passed it across to Orrie.

The first couple of swallows had been hard to take, Orrie not having a history of drinking hard liquor. He did not even like beer. But after a few mouthfuls he was getting inured to it. Paul had offered to get something to mix it with and to try to find a place that sold ice, but Orrie's pure and simple purpose being to get drunk as quickly as possible, there was no point in diluting the poison.

He felt the effects soon enough. His eyes were suddenly warm, and he was conscious of his tongue, wondering where he ordinarily kept it.

“Not bad.” He returned the bottle to Paul. “I don't know much about whiskey.”

“This is bourbon,” said Paul. “It's sweeter than Scotch. I figured you wouldn't be a Scotch-drinker.”

“My dad used to hang out at a local bar a lot when I was a kid, but I don't even know what he drank. Maybe I ought to go there and have one with his friends, in his memory. I guess they'd know what he liked. I ought to find out more about what he did in the Army, too. My mother never mentioned it unless we'd ask, and even then she wouldn't say much.”

Paul drank more in each of his turns with the bottle than did Orrie, but as yet showed no sign he was affected by the alcohol. “I guess you're old enough to be drafted, aren't you?”

“Yeah,” Orrie answered. “But I got a perforated eardrum. I didn't even know it till the physical. But now the war's over and there doesn't seem to be much sense in going to the service anyway.”

Paul gave the bottle to him. “I'm Four-F myself,” he said, blinking. “Isn't that rich? I've always been the picture of health, all my life, been good at sports, never sick for a day. But it turns out I've got a heart murmur. Otherwise I would have joined the Marines. I'd a lot rather have done that than go to college.”

“You would?”

“Yeah.” Paul ran a hand through his hair. “Physical stuff. I'm better at that than books. I'm not stupid. I just can't get much interested in reading, and you've got to do so much of it at whatever college you go to. I thought it might be easier when I transferred.”

“Listen,” Orrie said with comradely feeling. “I'll help you out however I can. I really appreciate what you're doing for me here.”

Paul accepted the bottle. “What am I doing? I just came along for the ride.” He was a genuinely modest guy. Orrie thought: God, if I were tall and wealthy, I'd be unbearable.

“It would have been tough to go through it all alone. My sister, she's, well, she's awfully young…” He was still not drunk enough to begin to share what Ellie had told him with regard to their father's death. Paul might already be a good friend but he was still a new one. Being careful is not cowardice. Courage is not an exclusive possession of the rash. In fact, sometimes to move slowly and with care takes more guts than to rush in swinging wildly…or so he kept telling himself. What in hell did Ellie expect of him, to shoot Erie down in cold blood? He could not even bear to think of his mother in this context.

“She looks like she might be very smart in school,” Paul said, generous as always.

“Yeah,” Orrie said, drinking more whiskey. After he swallowed, by now a smooth procedure, he went on. “She could stand to do something about her appearance: she's not bad-looking basically.”

Paul genially chided him. “You don't mean get all painted up, I hope. That's the kind of sister to have. A lot of these young girls nowadays get themselves up like streetwalkers, with flaming lipstick and tight sweaters.”

What he said had certainly been true of Gena—another subject Orrie had not mentioned. He had been quite a little kid when Gena, herself hardly twelve, had suddenly sprouted protuberances on her chest. At first this seemed like some kind of joke, and then when she persisted, it was embarrassing for him to be near her, especially when other people were also present. One day, by accident, passing the girls' room, he saw through the half-open door that she was stuffing a balled bobby sock into one slack cup of a pink brassiere.

“I can't stand girls who throw themselves at you,” Paul added.

So as to seem sophisticated, Orrie pretended to agree, but in reality he would have been ecstatic had an attractive girl made advances to him—he would have been mighty pleased had any of the girls at college so much as glanced at him before turning their heads. As yet he had been invisible, a state of affairs that was no improvement on that in high school, where though he could have dated any number of plain-to-fair-looking females, he could never establish more than a passing acquaintance with any of the series of girls he had adored from a distance.