by Ed Gorman
She walked briskly to the cabin where Ames lived and knocked. He came to the door disheveled and sad-looking. “I have one more question for you, Mr. Ames.”
“I’m sick of seein’ your face.”
“This won’t take long.”
He sighed. “Go ahead. You will anyway.”
“Do you know what I mean when I say a ‘convulsion’?”
“Like epilepsy?”
“Yes. Like that.”
“What about it?”
“When you were walking with Rachael Muldaur yesterday, did she go into convulsions?”
“I—yes, I think she did. Right after she vomited the second time, her whole body started shaking. I had to set the snake sack down and hold her tight.”
“That’s all I wanted to know, Mr. Ames. I won’t bother you any more.”
Ten minutes later, as she drew near the Muldaur shack, Anna could hear the soft lapping of the river. In the summer months, she wished to have a suitor who wore a straw boater and played a banjo as they drifted downriver in a canoe past the glowing Chinese lanterns of the Ellis Pavilion. She’d seen this in a vaudeville skit last winter and hoped it would happen to her.
Just as she was about to knock, she heard an unwelcome sound. A rattlesnake, angry at something. At first she assumed the rattle was coming from the snakepit out back. But then she realized that the sound was coming from inside the shack.
She knocked. Stephanie answered the door. She wore the same dress she’d had on at the river the other day. Around her slender left forearm was wound a diamondback rattlesnake. Seeing who it was, Stephanie smiled. “You’re a-scared of him, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“If you was good instead of evil then you wouldn’t have no cause to be a-scared of him.”
“I’d like to come in and talk to you about your father.”
“I won’t put him back in the pit.”
“That’s all right. I’ll come in anyway.”
Stephanie glared at her a long moment and then stepped back and let Anna enter. Anna took the same edge of the same chair she’d sat in earlier. Stephanie went over and sat on the couch. The rattlesnake coiled and uncoiled, hissed and hissed. Anna tried not to notice it.
“Do you know what this is?” Anna held up the small box she’d bought a while ago.
“No.”
“It’s rat poison. Your father bought a box of it the day before yesterday.”
“We got rats, so close to the river and all. When we catch ‘em, we put ‘em in the snakepit. The snakes go crazy.”
“Your mother was killed by rat poison. Somebody put it in something she ate or drank.”
“You mean my father?”
Anna nodded. “Yes. Your father.”
Just then, as if he’d been summoned, John Muldaur came through the door and said, “I told you to leave my little daughter alone.” He turned to Stephanie. “How come you let her in here anyway?”
Stephanie was cowering. Even with the rattlesnake twined around her arm, she was afraid her father would strike her. He stood in the middle of the floor, crazed and frightening as an asylum escapee. Anna stood up and showed him the box of rat poison pellets.
“Where’d you get those?” he said.
“The same place you did. Baxter’s Drug Company. You murdered your wife with them.”
“That’s what you think?”
“That’s what I think.”
“Well, I’d like to see you prove it.” His growing anger made the room seem smaller, escape impossible.
“I think I can. Ames told me how she threw up and had trouble swallowing and how she went into convulsions. You don’t do any of that when you’ve been bit by a snake. But you do that when you’ve been fed strychnine.”
Muldaur looked at his daughter and then he looked back to Anna. “I want you out of here. You defile this room with your presence. Do you understand me?” As if in harmony with the master of the house, the rattlesnake started hissing again.
But Anna had to press, goad him into a confession. “I can prove you bought these, Muldaur, and intentionally gave them to your wife.” She started to say more, but then, without any warning, Muldaur brought his hand around and slapped the box from her fingers to the floor. The small pellets were hurled across the floor, noisy as dice.
“I want you off my property right now!” Muldaur said. He grabbed Anna’s shoulder and started to push her to the door, but just then Anna got her first good look at the pellets in lantern light. She hadn’t examined the pellets before. She hadn’t even thought about what color they might be. They were green. And that was when she remembered Stephanie at the river the other day and the faint green stain on her gingham dress. Some kind of green dye? She stared at Stephanie now. Wearing the same dress. With the same faint green stain.
“I’ve made a mistake, Mr. Muldaur,” Anna said. “A terrible mistake.”
Muldaur saw where she was looking and said quickly, in a voice almost gentle with grief, “I’m the one who made a mistake. I shouldn’t have poisoned my wife.”
For the first time Anna felt some respect for the man. He would take the blame for the murder his daughter had committed.
She spoke softly. “You killed your mother, didn’t you, Stephanie?”
“Say nothing! Say nothing!” her father said, his voice booming again.
But Stephanie waited until it was quiet again and said, “She was a sinner and had to be punished. And I knew my father loved her too much to ever punish her the way he should.” She stroked the snake coiled around her arm. “She asked me to make her some lunch—it was her time of the month and she was feelin’ peaked—and so I didn’t have no trouble puttin’ it in her food—except I spilled a glass of water when I had one of them pellets in my hand and it stained my dress.”
“Child,” John Muldaur said, tears making his eyes shiny and his voice almost terrible to hear. “Child, I would’ve told them that I killed your mother. That’s my duty as your father, to protect you that way.”
Just as he was starting toward his daughter, it happened. Stephanie took the rattlesnake in both hands and turned its head toward her face. Then she squeezed it very hard, so that it became enraged. Its rattling sounds filled the room. The snake’s head lashed out at her, its fangs sinking deep into her neck. Even before it was through imparting its poison, John Muldaur had the snake in his hand and was killing it by smashing it against the doorframe.
As for Stephanie Muldaur, she had leaned her head against the back of the shabby sofa and was crying softly. “She was a sinner and I had to kill her; I had to.” Her father sank to one knee and put his head in her lap, where he, too, began to cry.
That was how Anna left them, sorrowful and crazed in their dark religion, as she set off to get Doc McWilliams to purge the poison from Stephanie before it killed her.
RENDER UNTO CAESAR
I never paid much attention to their arguments until the night he hit her.
The summer I was twenty-one I worked construction upstate. This was 1963. The money was good enough to float my final year-and-a-half at college. If I didn’t blow it the way some of the other kids working construction did, that is, on too many nights at the tavern, and too many weekends trying to impress city girls.
The crew was three weeks in Cedar Rapids and so I looked for an inexpensive sleeping room. The one I found was in a neighborhood my middle-class parents wouldn’t have approved of but I wasn’t going to be here long enough for them to know exactly where I was living.
The house was a faded frail Victorian. Upstairs lived an old man named Murchison. He’d worked forty years on the Crandic as a brake-man and was retired now to sunny days out at Ellis park watching the softball games, and nights on the front porch with his quarts of cheap Canadian Ace beer and the high sweet smell of his Prince Albert pipe tobacco and his memories of WWII. Oh, yes, and his cat Caesar. You never saw Murch without that hefty gray cat of his, usually sleeping in his lap when Murch sat in
his front porch rocking chair.
And Murch’s fondness for cats didn’t stop there. But I’ll tell you about that later.
Downstairs lived the Brineys. Peter Briney was in his early twenties, handsome in a roughneck kind of way. He sold new Mercurys for a living. He came home in a different car nearly every night, just at dusk, just at the time you could smell the dinner his wife Kelly had set out for him.
According to Murch, who seemed to know everything about them, Kelly had just turned nineteen and had already suffered two miscarriages. She was pretty in a sweet, already tired way. She seemed to spend most of her time cleaning the apartment and taking out the garbage and walking up to Dlask’s grocery, two blocks away. One day a plump young woman came over to visit but this led to an argument later that night. Peter Briney did not want his wife to have friends. He seemed to feel that if Kelly had concentrated on her pregnancy, she would not have miscarried.
Briney did not look happy about me staying in the back room on the second floor. The usual tenants were retired men like Murch. I had a tan and was in good shape and while I wasn’t handsome girls didn’t find me repulsive, either. Murch laughed one day and said that Briney had come up and said, “How long is that guy going to be staying here, anyway?” Murch, who felt sorry for Kelly and liked Briney not at all, lied and said I’d probably be here a couple of years.
A few nights later Murch and I were on the front porch. All we had upstairs were two window fans that churned the ninety-three degree air without cooling it at all. So, after walking up to Dlask’s for a couple of quarts of Canadian Ace and two packs of Pall Malls, I sat down on the front porch and prepared myself to be dazzled by Murch’s tales of WWII in the Pacific Theater. (And Murch knew lots of good ones, at least a few of which I strongly suspected were true.)
Between stories we watched the street. Around nine, dusk dying, mothers called their children in. There’s something about the sound of working class mothers gathering their children—their voices weary, almost melancholy, at the end of another grinding day, the girls they used to be still alive somewhere in their voices, all that early hope and vitality vanishing like the faint echoes of tender music.
And there were the punks in their hot rods picking up the meaty young teenage girls who lived on the block. And the sad factory drunks weaving their way home late from the taverns to cold meals and broken-hearted children. And the furtive lonely single men getting off the huge glowing insect of the city bus, and going upstairs to sleeping rooms and hot plates and lonesome letters from girlfriends in far and distant cities.
And in the midst of all this came a brand new red Mercury convertible, one far too resplendent for the neighborhood. And it was pulling up to the curb and—
The radio was booming “Surf City” with Jan and Dean—and—
Before the car even stopped, Kelly jerked open her door and jumped out, nearly stumbling in the process.
Briney slammed on the brakes, killed the headlights and then bolted from the car.
Before he reached the curb, he was running.
“You whore!” he screamed.
He was too fast for her. He tackled her even before she reached the sidewalk.
Tackled her and turned her over. And started smashing his fists into her face, holding her down on the ground with his knees on her slender arms, and smashing and smashing and smashing her face—
By then I was off the porch. I was next to him in moments. Given that his victim was a woman, I wasted no time on fair play. I kicked him hard twice in the ribs and then I slammed two punches into the side of his head. She screamed and cried and tried rolling left to escape his punches, and then tried rolling right. I didn’t seem to have fazed him. I slammed two more punches into the side of his head. I could feel these punches working. He pitched sideways, momentarily unconscious, off his wife.
He slumped over on the sidewalk next to Kelly. I got her up right away and held her and let her sob and twist and moan and jerk in my arms. All I could think of were those times when I’d seen my otherwise respectable accountant father beat up my mother, and how I’d cry and run between them terrified and try to stop him with my own small and useless fists…
Murch saw to Briney. “Sonofabitch’s alive, anyways,” he said looking up at me from the sidewalk. “More than he deserves.”
By that time, a small crowd stood on the sidewalk, gawkers in equal parts thrilled and sickened by what they’d just seen Briney do to Kelly…
I got her upstairs to Murch’s apartment and started taking care of her cuts and bruises…
I mentioned that Murch’s affection for cats wasn’t limited to Caesar. I also mentioned that Murch was retired, which meant that he had plenty of time for his chosen calling.
The first Saturday I had off, a week before the incident with Peter and Kelly Briney, I sat on the front porch reading a John D. MacDonald paperback and drinking a Pepsi and smoking Pall Malls. I was glad for a respite from the baking, bone-cracking work of summer road construction.
Around three that afternoon, I saw Murch coming down the side-walk carrying a shoebox. He walked toward the porch, nodded hello, then walked to the backyard. I wondered if something was wrong. He was a talker, Murch was, and to see him so quiet bothered me.
I put down my Pepsi and put down my book and followed him, a seventy-one year old man with a stooped back and liver-spotted hands and white hair that almost glowed in the sunlight and that ineluctable dignity that comes to people who’ve spent a life at hard honorable work others consider menial.
He went into the age-worn garage and came out with a garden spade. The wide backyard was burned stubby grass and a line of rusted silver garbage cans. The picket fence sagged with age and the walk was all busted and jagged. To the right of white flapping sheets drying on the clothesline was a small plot of earth that looked like a garden.
He set the shoebox down on the ground and went to work with the shovel. He was finished in three or four minutes. A nice fresh hole had been dug in the dark rich earth.
He bent down and took the lid from the shoebox. From inside he lifted something with great and reverent care. At first I couldn’t see what it was. I moved closer. Lying across his palms was the dead body of a small calico cat. The blood on the scruffy white fur indicated that death had been violent, probably by car.
He knelt down and lowered the cat into the freshly dug earth. He remained kneeling and then closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross.
And then he scooped the earth in his hands and filled in the grave.
I walked over to him just as he was standing up.
“You’re some guy, Murch,” I said.
He looked startled. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“I was watching.” I nodded to the ground. “The cat, I mean.”
“They been damn good friends to me—cats have—figure it’s the least I can do for them.”
I felt I’d intruded; embarrassed him. He picked up the spade and started over to the garage.
“Nobody gives a damn about cats,” he said. “A lot of people even hate ‘em. That’s why I walk around every few days with my shoebox and if I see a dead one, I pick it up and bring it back here and bury it. They’re nice little animals.” He grinned. “Especially Caesar. He’s the only good friend I’ve made since my wife died ten years ago.”
Murch put the shovel in the garage. When he came back out, he said, “You in any kind of mood for a game of checkers?”
I grinned. “I hate to pick on old farts like you.”
He grinned back. “We’ll see who’s the old fart here.”
When I got home the night following the incident with Kelly and Briney, several people along the block stopped to ask me about the beating. They’d heard this and they’d heard that but since I lived in the house, they figured I could set them right. I couldn’t, or at least I said I couldn’t, because I didn’t like the quiet glee in their eyes, and the subtle thrill in their voices.
Mur
ch was on the porch. I went up and sat down and he put Caesar in my lap the way he usually did. I petted the big fellow till he purred so hard he sounded like a plane about to take off. Too bad most humans weren’t as appreciative of kindness as good old Caesar.
When I spoke, I sort of whispered. I didn’t want the Brineys to hear.
“You don’t have to whisper, Todd,” Murch said, sucking on his pipe. “They’re both gone. Don’t know where he is, and don’t care. She left about three this afternoon. Carrying a suitcase.”
“You really think she’s leaving him?”
“Way he treats her, I hope so. Nobody should be treated like that, especially a nice young woman like her.” He reached over and petted Caesar who was sleeping in my lap. Then he sat back and drew on his pipe again and said, “I told her to go. Told her what happens to women who let their men beat them. It keeps on getting worse and worse until—” He shook his head. “The missus and I knew a woman whose husband beat her to death one night. Right in front of her two little girls.”
“Briney isn’t going to like it, you telling her to leave him.”
“To hell with Briney. I’m not afraid of him.” He smiled. “I’ve got Caesar here to protect me.”
Briney didn’t get home till late. By that time we were up off the porch and in our respective beds. Around nine a cool rain had started falling. I was getting some good sleep when I heard him down there.
The way he yelled and the way he smashed things, I knew he was drunk. He’d obviously discovered that his compliant little wife had left him. Then there was an abrupt and anxious silence. And then there was his crying. He wasn’t any better at it than I was, didn’t really know how, and so his tears came out in violent bursts that resembled throwing up. But even though I was tempted to feel sorry for him, he soon enough made me hate him again. Between bursts of tears he’d start calling his wife names, terrible names that should never have been put to a woman like Kelly.
