The Night Listener and Others (30 page)

When I entered my bedchamber, the first thing that greeted me was my reflection in the full-length mirror upon the closet door, and I confess it gave me quite a start. I scarcely recognized the bird therein as the reflection of your kindly narrator, B. W. For some unfathomable reason I was wearing a top hat (which I hardly ever do these days), had grown a good twelve inches, and had turned into what, on first glance, resembled Al Jolson all dolled up with burnt cork for a minstrel show. As I looked closer, I realized that it would have been well nigh impossible to sing “Mammy” with the mouth now residing beneath the Worster schnozola. It seemed to be filled with those big hatpins I’d seen that image of Sambo wearing, and I thought of myself, as though in the third p.,
Now there’s a lad who’ll be a hit with the ladies should a strong March wind blow up.

Or perhaps not. To be honest, I looked a fright, and should the Bucket or the Crayne have been able to see me now, they would have canceled the nuptials in an instant. The rest of my garb seemed to have been tailored from what appeared to be some sort of skin, and Hortense might possibly have been able to derive some frothy romanticism from the material of my right sleeve, which had a tattoo of a heart and an arrow through it, with the legend, “MUM,” just beneath.

I must admit, however, that the
ensemble
fit rather well, though the lines of the jacket pockets were rather compromised by the bulging batches of chopped-off human fingers that protruded from them. Jeaves, I thought, would much have preferred his master in even the abhorred yellow weskit as opposed to this decidedly non-Saville Row wardrobe. Or so at least I fancied.

Then my thoughts turned to something else entirely. Being that there was no one left on whom to use my exceedingly well-tempered razor, I thought very seriously about cutting the Worster throat itself. I suppose I’d become so used to the practice that I was finding it nigh impossible to stop, like one of those Chinks who smoke opium in Limehouse, admittedly bad for the health, but quite difficult to put down the pipe and sign the pledge. I looked avidly at my shiny black neck in the mirror and considered precisely where to make the first and probably last incision. Since I was to go, I determined to go out in high style, a Worster to the end.

Then a polite clearing of the throat turned me about so that I saw my man Jeaves, impeccably togged as always, standing in the doorway to my room, his face imperturbable as additionally always. “You seem, sir,” said Jeaves in his calm, gentleman’s gentlemanly voice, “to be in a bit of a predicament.”

“Right ho. You’ve touched the nerve there, Jeaves,” said I, pleased at least to hear my voice coming from that pin-cushion of a mouth as clearly as ever. “And I’m wondering if you might just be able to help me put things in perspective. A whiskey and soda might be a fruitful start.”

“I shall endeavor to give satisfaction, sir,” he replied. Then, of all the odd things that had happened that day, the oddest thing of all occurred.
Good heavens, what next, do tell!
I hear you chorus, and tell you I shall, after leaving a sufficient amount of excess verbiage for the suspense to build to epic props.

What it was, was this: Jeaves laughed. His features creased up like cuffs in a hot pants-press, and he guffawed a guffaw the likes of which I’d never heard before and could not have expected, particularly after having witnessed his greatest display of mirth being a soft smile.

“Satisfaction indeed! Worster, you toffee-nosed
prat
,” he said, grinning with all his teeth that I had never before noticed. I suppose I’d always thought of Jeaves as a gums-only type. “What goes around has finally, thanks to my patience
and
that razor, come around. You’ve done it all, just as I’d hoped you would, you worthless snob, you smarmy, ignorant poseur, you bigoted, racist, selfish, elitist, inbred leech on the body politic!”

Well, honestly, I mean to say, I was stunned.
Toffee-nosed?
The Worster beak has been called many things over the years, but toffee-esque has not been one of them. “Now look here, Jeaves,” said I, anxious for such verbal abuse to cease and desist.

“No,
you
look here, Worster, you swine,” he said, his unexpected and alarming smile quite gone now. “I’ve put up with your shite for long enough, watching you evade the Army in two wars, while my brothers gave their lives in the Great War and my nephews gave theirs in the present struggle, and you and yours completely ignored anything beyond the bounds of your goddamned clubs and cricket matches and country houses. And all the time I got you out of your stupid, minor scrapes and made your cheap, illicit assignations, always waiting, waiting for the time when my chance for revenge on you and your entire parasitical way of life would come, as I knew it eventually should, you being a boob of very little brain.”

“Ah, yes,
Pooh!
“ said I, finally grasping one of Jeaves’s literary allusions.

“Very good, sir,” said Jeaves with a trace of irony, as I understand the word.

“Then the razor came into my possession from my cousin, pitiful and foolish man that he was. He didn’t believe the tales, and when
he
had received the razor, he used it to shave with—”

“A thoroughly understandable position to take,” I observed.

“Not when you know its history,” Jeaves said in a voice that made me go creepy-crawly all over. “Not when you know that it takes blood wherever it can, blood for the spirit that dwells within it, and enters the bodies and souls of those whose blood it sheds.”

“
Ergo
,” I said, “this spirit egg you mention is within young B. Worster e’en as we speak?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Jeaves exploded, “you’re not
young!
You’re
fifty-three
, you daft barrel of dog droppings! Now shut your yap and let me tell this!”

“Proceed, Jeaves. I’m all ears.”

“The razor cut him, and with it he killed his wife, his three children, and, when there was no one left, himself. Thus it always was, and will ever be.” That smile was back and I stared at it entranced. It was such a
novelty
to see Jeaves’s teeth. “And thus it was with you, Worster,” he said. “Your aristocratic aunt and uncle, your indolent and slothful friends are dead, and though I grieve for the servants whose lives you ended, it was a sacrifice worth making. Bernard Worster is a mass murderer…
and
a suicide.”

“Yes, Jeaves. I was contemplating with extreme solemnity that very route when you walked in. But one thing rankles, Jeaves. A fellow as clever and far-sighted as you have proven to be in the past must surely have realized that I would not do away with myself, while there was still another living, breathing, skin-wrapped bag of blood and meat in the immediate vicinity, i.e., you. So why then do you show up here practically begging for it? Oh, I’ve read enough shilling shockers to grasp the revenge
motif
, if that’s the word—”

“It is, sir,” said Jeaves, skillfully falling back into our old repartee.

“Thank you, Jeaves,” I replied, also revisiting our old Smith and Dale routines. “I can understand the melodramatic joy of saying the equivalent of nyah hah hah, I’ve got you at last and all that, but is having your throat cut to the point of beheadedness really worth the candle?”

“A cut throat is a far quicker and easier way to die than cancer.”

“Cancer, you say, Jeaves?”

“Cancer, sir.”

“Very sorry to hear it, Jeaves.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I couldn’t tell if Jeaves was doing the Mr Interlocutor/Mr Bones gag with me a.) for old time’s sake, b.) as an subconscious throwback, or c.) for the purposes of that irony stuff I was talking about, but it seemed rather comforting to both of us. Motive and means both having been explained, I felt that no further clarification on Jeaves’s part was necessary, so I cut his throat with the razor, a bit more forcefully than before, I confess. Truth to tell, I was rather peeved with Jeaves.

Perhaps I jammed my foot into the top of his head more roughly than I might have as well, but Jeaves’s roomy brainpan allowed much more foot room than had Hortense’s, and it was with a great deal of comfort that I walked to the writing room to relate the events of the past two days before doing what Jeaves had hoped I would do.

No regrets, as the code of the Worsters really doesn’t allow it.
Que sarah sarah
, whoever she was. This massive missive will serve as my admission of guilt, so that no wandering knight of the road should be blamed for these mishaps. No doubt all this spirit-in-the-razor mumbo jumbo will be written off as the nutty-as-a-fruitcakiness of your humble narrator, and perhaps it’s best so.

There remains only my last will and testament, so tally-ho and on with it then:

Being of sound mind (under the circumstances), parents being deceased, and being siblingless, I leave everything I possess to my biological son, whom I now for the first time admit to fathering by my Aunt Amanda’s chambermaid, who was let go a year and a half ago for being in the family way
sans
required family. Her name escapes me—Rosie or Rosalyn, something along those lines—but I trust the authorities will find out. The last name might have been Lichter or Lechter or something sim. Might as well give the little chap the razor too, if it doesn’t get put on display in S. Yard’s Black Museum. Who knows, he might find it useful someday.

And that, as they say, is that. So let me turn to Shakespeare for my parting words. As I sit here and ponder, however, the only complete line I can come up with (which has always stuck in my head for some reason or other) seems to be: “Exit hurriedly, pursued by a bear,” so that’ll have to do.

Really, it
is
Shakespeare. I’ve won bar bets with it. Look it up if you wish— I believe it’s from a play.

The Smoke in Mooney’s Pub

That night, after we’d finished playing our gig at Mooney’s, I did the same as I’d done the previous two weeks. I had a final Guinness with Hugh and Jack, we split the take, and I went home and took a shower. I had to. Mooney’s reeked of smoke.

Molly murmured something from the bedroom as I passed the door, and I called hello to her, then stripped off my clothes and stuffed them into the hamper. You couldn’t wear Mooney’s Pub clothes again until you washed them. I turned the shower to hot and stepped in.

I could feel phlegm in the back of my throat, draining down from my sinuses, as I had after the other Mooney gigs. I suppose I’m allergic to smoke, though not so bad that I still couldn’t sing for four hours, bellowing out the songs until one in the morning. But now I hawked up the thick stuff and spat it into the water that swirled down the drain. When I saw it land I almost jumped.

What came up from my throat was dark, like the darkness of the smoke-stained crossbeams of Mooney’s ceiling, and when it hit the tub the swirling water made it crawl into the drain as fast as a centipede, and it was gone. It wasn’t bright bloody, so there was no worry there, but the darkness of it was almost more disturbing.

Hell, I thought as I lathered up, miners coughed up black coal, and there had been times when I’d worked outside on a dusty day that I’d hacked up gunk the shade of dirt. This was probably similar. Tomorrow, after breathing some smoke-free air, I’d be fine again.

The goddamned smoke got into everything. I swear, after just two Friday nights, both guitars had smelled like lifelong residents of Mooney’s Pub. I’d left them out when I’d gotten home, even set them by an open window so fresh air would blow into and around them, but it didn’t help. My new Taylor had lost its showroom smell for good. Even the case, which had smelled like some woody-sweet candy, smelled like smoke.

It wasn’t just cigarette smoke, either. Mooney’s smoke had a distinctive bite to it. It had been a pub and nothing but for well over a hundred years, from the time the Irish had come into their own ghetto of the city and established their own saloons, and kept out others the way they had been kept out. Pipe smoke was the first, I suppose, then cigars and cigarettes, but through it all there was a tang of peat too. I don’t even know if they used peat for fuel outside the old sod, but I’ve smelled burning peat at festivals and in Ireland itself, and damned if that wasn’t what it smelled like.

After our first gig I asked Kevin O’Toole, the owner, if he ever burned peat in the pub to add atmosphere, but he just laughed. “Hell, no. Irishmen have been smoking in here since 1883. They had peat in their blood. When they breathed out tobacco smoke, the peat came with it.” I laughed too, though I don’t know as I believed him, not then anyway.

After I toweled off and dried my hair, I crawled into bed beside Molly. She turned towards me, then changed her mind and turned her back. “God, you smell like smoke,” she said.

“I took a shower and washed my hair. Don’t know what else I can do.”

“Quit playing there,” she said into her pillow.

It was almost three in the morning, and I didn’t feel like arguing, but Molly’s attitude pissed me off. It was easy for her to be cavalier about jobs, since she didn’t have to worry about one. She had a good, solid position as vice-president of a small but busy ad agency, a salary to match, and great medical benefits which fortunately covered me too, since I had no permanent employment. I was a gigging musician. That said it all.

I’d tried teaching full-time, but I hated the bureaucracy of the city’s high schools, and the bureaucracy didn’t take to me either. So I’d left the jazz bands and orchestra rehearsals behind, and decided to see what I could do on my own. As it turned out, I did a lot. The only problem is that a lot of music doesn’t add up to a lot of money.

I played in three different groups around the city, a jazz trio with a bassist and drummer, a bluegrass quartet in which I doubled on mandolin, and the Phat Rogues, the Celtic band with Hugh and Jack. I did solo guitar gigs too, primarily for brunches in upscale restaurants. They paid the best, since I didn’t have to split with partners. I even had several private students who I taught in our apartment for thirty bucks an hour.