The Good Old Stuff (12 page)

“You like doing that?”

“You kill the rotten ones and keep the good ones. Like sorting things. Like being neat about yourself.”

“I’m one of the good ones?”

She shook her head, as though puzzled. “No, and yet I kept you. I keep wondering why.”

My glass was empty. She sprang toward me, and had I not learned about her I would have flinched away. But she stopped in time and the new drink was made.

I caught her wrist and pulled her onto my lap. Oddly, she seemed lighter than Connie, though she was much heavier, I knew. The calm lips folded against mine. But there was nothing there. It was holding a senseless pose, like a charade that no one can guess. She went back to her chair.

“I expected anything but that,” I said.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait until afterwards. There isn’t enough togetherness yet. Afterwards the thing shared will make it right.”

“Maybe I died,” I said. “Maybe this is a fancy-type hell, like the mythological one where the sinner is chained for eternity just out of reach of food and drink.”

“Am I food and drink?” She showed, for the first time, a trace of coyness. Like a child’s rattle placed atop a small white coffin.

“Maybe not that. But necessary. In an odd way. Essential.”

“That’s because I know more about these things. I’m like a guide. You’re just learning.”

“Is it a taste you can acquire?”

“That you can’t help acquiring.”

“But when there’s no one left to kill?”

“Then we’ll help each other find someone else. And do it in a better way than words.”

I stood up. “I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

On the way home I could feel the clear imprint of the plate inlaid in my skull, the perfect outline of it, as though gentle fingers were pressing it against the jelly of my brain.

I went into the cellar and fitted a length of soft white pine into the lathe. I let my hands work the way they wanted to work, without direction. The cutting tool ate away the wood, turning angles into curves. I took it off the lathe and turned on the sander. I held it one way, then another way, rounding it the way my hands said. It turned into the crude elongated torso of a woman, a woman as thin as Miranda. Then I put it back into the lathe and cut it down to a round rod, shaving away the woman form.

The pressure against the plate had turned into an ache, the beginning of green behind my eyes. I broke the rod over my knee.

I went up to Connie and said, “Rub the back of my neck.”

I stretched out on the couch. She was awkward about it, lacking the skill of Miranda. I turned and held her close, telling myself she was precious. I kissed her. I saw surprise in her eyes and then a most patient resignation. I sat beside her on the couch and took the patch off the empty socket. She shut
her eyes hard. Her small fists were clenched. I tiptoed away from her and up the stairs and shut myself in my room. I heard her go out. I lay in the livid green and the world was green neon and the outline of the plate changed slowly, forming letters, pressing the word U
NICORN
deep into the gray-green brain, deep into the softnesses in which forever a car rolled and leaped and bounded like a child’s toy thrown aside in petty rage.

“
You won’t
be needing the car, will you?” I asked Connie.

She gave me her prettiest frown. “Gosh, I don’t think so. How long will you have it?”

“Overnight.”

“Where on earth are you going?”

“I went in and talked to Mallory yesterday. We decided I’d start to take on a few odd jobs, just to get my hand in. That splendid creative artist up in Crane is yammering at his agent to arrange a switch of publishers again.”

“But that is where you were going when—”

“Correct. Sort of like a movie. This is when I came in.”

“When are you leaving?”

“He keeps crazy hours. Starts writing after a midnight breakfast. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I’ll leave tonight after dark, and after I see him I’ll hole up somewhere and come back down tomorrow. No point in getting too tired at this stage of the game.”

The upper surfaces of her rounded arms had the faint tan that she never seems to lose, even in the dead of winter. I held her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. She was facing the light. I saw then, and for the first time, the slight yellowness of the whites of her eyes. Once they had been that bluey white that only children seem to have. The pores of her snub nose and on her rounded cheeks were faintly enlarged, and everywhere, eye corners, around her mouth, across her forehead, I could see the spreading inevitable network of wrinkles, cobwebby against the skin. Enlarge those wrinkles to the maximum, and she would have the face of a withered monkey, out of which the gray eyes would still stare, acquiring through that
contrast the knowledge of evil which had always been there but which I had never been able to see or understand.

She moved uncomfortably in my grasp. “What are you staring at?”

“My fine true wife, my loyal little Connie. Darling, what did I do to deserve you?”

She had the grace to blush. “Oh, come now.”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it? Why, any other woman would be scheming and planning how to get rid of me. But not you, Connie. Not you. Love is bigger than expediency, isn’t it?”

“If you say so, George.”

“Read any good books lately?”

“George, right now you seem … more like yourself. You’ve been so odd, you know.”

“I’ll be my very own true self very soon now.”

“Are we going to move away from here?”

“I think so.”

Her voice became wheedling. “Darling, before you make up your mind for sure, let’s go up to the cabin for a long week. Just the two of us. There won’t be anybody around at this time of year. We can walk in the woods. Oh, we’ll have a wonderful time.”

“Just the two of us?”

Her eyes grew as opaque as gray glass. “Call it a second honeymoon,” she breathed.

That would be ideal for them. Not difficult to arrange at all. So many ways to do it up there. I could almost see Louie Palmer pushing me off the high front porch onto the lake-front rocks and then lighting a cigarette in his Bogart way, saying, “I’ll run along. You drive out and make the phone call. Remember, he complained about feeling dizzy and you told him not to go near the steps.”

There would be a deep satisfaction in that for them. An end of tension. It had failed the first time. Their frozen world would begin to revolve again.

“A second honeymoon,” I said.…

In the late afternoon I took the car down to the station. Conner, the owner, was there as well as Louie Palmer. Louie was in his coveralls, his sleeves rolled up over muscular fore-arms,
a smear of grease on his chin near the corner of his mouth, a lank end of black hair curling down across his forehead to the black eyebrow. He avoided meeting my eye.

“Taking a little trip,” I said heartily to Conner. “First one since my accident. Have Louie check the tires, steering arms, kingpin, front wheel bushings, please.”

“Put it on the rack, kid,” Conner said in his husky, domineering voice. I wondered how much Conner’s constant scorn was a factor in Louie’s bold play for big money. I watched the coveralls tighten across Louie’s broad shoulders as he ducked under the car. How had it started? A few sidelong glances? The realization that the Corliss woman was coming around oftener than strictly necessary? Then, probably, “I guess we better road-test it, Mrs. Corliss. Just move over and I’ll take the wheel.”

How does it start?

“Change the oil, sir?” Louie asked.

“No thanks, kid,” I said. I rasped that “kid” across him, saw the color creep up the back of his neck.

I waited, and when he was through I tipped him a quarter. He looked as if he might throw it in my face. “Buy yourself a beer,” I said. “Try the Unicorn. I hear that’s a good bar.”

His mouth sagged a little, and the color left him. I grinned into his face and turned away. Louie was jumpy.

“Take it easy, Mr. Corliss,” Conner advised.

“I’ll do that,” I said. “Made myself a promise that I’ll never drive over forty-five again, and I’m sticking to it.”

Beyond Conner I saw a puzzled look on Louie’s lean white face.

I went over right after dinner. Miranda was waiting for me. Her eyes seemed deeper in her head, their glow strong and steady. The wide lips were parted a faint fraction of an inch. It added to the breathlessness of her words. The spring within her was wound as tightly as the key could be turned. A deb waiting for the grand march. A horse player waiting for the sixth race. An animal watching, from a limb, the trail beneath.

She shut the door and leaned against it. “Tonight?”

“Yes, tonight.”

She shut her eyes for a moment. With her eyes shut she had a corpse face.

“How? Tell me how. Quickly!”

“They think I’ll be gone. They think I’ll be gone overnight. We’ll come back.”

“They’ll be together?”

“Why not? They have planning to do.”

“But how?”

“Electricity.”

She looked disappointed. “Is—is that a good way?”

“The best. Clean and quick and final.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, I can see a lot of ways how it could be. But I won’t just watch, will I? I’ll be part of it.” You there, little girl! Get into that game of musical chairs with the other children.

“You’ll be part of it. I promised.”

“Do they have a good chance of catching us, blaming us?”

“Not a chance in the world.”

“Oh, good! And later … we’ll go away.”

“Far away.”

“How much time is there?”

“Three hours. Four.”

“Long hours to wait, George.”

“We’ll take a ride. That’ll kill time. Come along.”

She had not sat beside me in a car before. She was unexpectedly feline, a part of her that I had not noticed. She sat with her legs curled up under her, partly facing me, and I knew that she watched, not the road, but my face, the glow of the dash lights against it, the pendulum swing of the streetlamps.

“Scared?” I asked.

“No. Something else. Like when you’re a child. You wake up in the morning. Another day. Then you see the snow on the windowsill and it all comes with a great rush. The day after tomorrow is Christmas, you say. One more day gone. Yesterday it was the day after the day after tomorrow. Now it’s getting so close it closes your throat. That’s how I feel. Getting one at last that isn’t a sick one.”

She inched closer so that the hard ball of her knee dug against my thigh. The musky perfume was thick in the car.

Without turning to see, I knew how her eyes would look. “We’ve never had to say much, have we?” she asked.

“Not very much. We knew without saying. A look can say everything.”

“Later we can talk. We can say all the words that ever were. Good words and bad words. I’ve said bad words when I’m alone. I’ve never said them out loud to anybody. And we can say the other words too, and it won’t be like after reading a story.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, murder. Death. Kill. Blood. Bodies. I kill, you kill, we kill. The way you had to learn the Latin words in school.”

“Conjugations, you mean.”

“That’s what I was trying to think of. Miranda Wysner, conjugate the verb to kill. I kill, I shall kill, I killed, I had killed, I should have killed.”

She laughed. Her fingers shut on my arm above the elbow. “Think about it, George. Like swinging a big shining white sword. You swing it at evil and you tell yourself that’s why you do it, but all the time way down inside your heart you know that it isn’t the reason for it, it’s the act itself.”

I was on the road north out of town. She looked out the windows.

“Where are we going?”

“We’ll just go north out of town up into the hills and then swing around and come back.”

She was silent. I drove ever more rapidly. The road climbed and then began to gather unto itself a series of gentle curves that later would grow hard, the shoulders popping and crackling as the car threw itself at them.

I knew the landmarks. At the crest I slowed down, my arms tired from the strain. I started down the other side. The rising whine of the wind grew louder. The needle climbed. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five.

“We’re killing the two of them, you see,” I yelled above the wind. “We can’t make the curve coming up. You wanted a part of it. You’ve got it, baby. You’ve got it. I left a letter with Mallory to open if I should die. It’s all in there. They’ll
never worm out of this one. Electricity will kill them, all right. Courtesy of the State of New York, baby.”

I saw the white posts of the curve in the farthest reach of the headlights.

Her scream filled the car, filled my ears, drilled into my soul. “Faster, Georgie! Oh, faster!” Wild ecstasy, beyond the peak of human endurance.

I gave her one quick look. The dash lights hit the white-ridged bone structure of her face so that the shape of the skull was apparent. The mouth was wide-screaming, lip-spread. Her voice told me that she had known.

I came down hard on the brake. The car went into a long skid toward those posts. I let up on the brake, accelerated it straight, came down on the brake again. This time the skid was the other way so that the car headed toward the brink, still skidding sideways. I could hear only the scream of tortured rubber, then the jolting metallic scraping as tires were rolled right off the rims. I couldn’t bring it out of the second skid. The front right wheel smacked the posts and the car spun so that I lost all sense of direction. For a moment it looked as though the car were spinning in one spot, like a top, completely ringed about with the white posts. Then it hit again and I was thrown toward Miranda. I tried to find her with my arms but I couldn’t.

The crescendo of sound was fading. The car jolted, lurched, stood absolutely still in a world where there was no sound.

I got out. Other cars stopped. I looked for Miranda. I couldn’t find her. The tow truck had a spotlight on it, and so did the trooper car. I made them shine the lights down and search down the slope. They looked and looked. After I told them a little more about her they stopped looking and they were most polite, and they took me to a doctor who gave me white powders.