He leaned against the stair rail, staring at the key in the lock and wondering what to do.
The blonde woman was coming up the stairs.
Stanley smiled and said, “Good evening.”
“Hello, there. What happened? Forget your key?”
“No, I—The lock’s a little stiff,” he said.
“Oh. Always something wrong in this house, ain’t there?” she said, moving on down the hall. “Did you ever see anything like it?”
“No,” he agreed, smiling. But he looked after her anxiously. Usually, she stopped and chatted a little longer. Had she heard something about his dropping the rock? And she hadn’t mentioned his broken windows, though she was home all day and had probably heard the noise.
Stanley turned and attacked the lock, turning the key with all his strength. The lock suddenly yielded. The door was open.
It took him until after midnight to get the panes in. And all the time he worked, he was conscious of the fact that the windows might be broken again when he got home tomorrow.
The following evening the same two men, the paunchy one and the dark-haired one who was in blue jeans and a shirt now, were standing across the street, and to Stanley’s horror they crossed the street so as to meet him in front of his door. The paunchy one reached out and took a handful of Stanley’s jacket and shirtfront.
“Listen, Mac,” he said in Stanley’s face, “you can go to jail for what you did Sunday. You know that, doncha?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Stanley said quickly.
“Oh, you don’t?”
“No!” Stanley yelled.
The man let him go with a shove. Stanley straightened his jacket, and went on into his house. The lock was again difficult, but he flung himself against it with the energy of desperation. It yielded slowly, and when Stanley removed his key, a rubbery string came with it: they had stuffed his lock with chewing gum. Stanley wiped his key, with disgust, on the floor. He did not begin to shake until he had closed the door of his apartment. Then even as he shook, he thought: I’ve beaten them. They weren’t coming after him. Broken windows, chewing gum? So what? They hadn’t sought out the police. He had lied, of course, in saying he didn’t know what they were talking about, but that had been the right reply, after all. He wouldn’t have lied to a policeman, naturally, but they hadn’t brought the police in yet.
Stanley began to feel better. Moreover, his windows were intact, he saw. He decided that the redheaded man was probably going through a prolonged crisis. There was something subdued about the men’s behavior, he thought. Or were they planning some worse attack? He wished he knew if the redheaded man were in a hospital or walking around. It was just possible, too, that the man had died, Stanley thought. Maybe the men weren’t quite sure that it was he who had dropped the rock—Mr. Collins lived above Stanley and might have dropped it, for instance—and perhaps an investigation by the police was yet to come.
On Thursday evening, he passed Mr. Collins on the stairs as he was coming home. Mr. Collins was on his way to work. It struck Stanley that Mr. Collins’ “Good evening” was cool. He wondered if Mr. Collins had heard about the rock and considered him a murderer, or at least some kind of psychopath, to have dropped a ten-pound rock on somebody’s head?
Saturday came, and Stanley worked all day in his father’s hardware store, went to a movie, and came home at about eleven. Two of the small panes in the upper part of one window were broken. Stanley thought them not important enough to fix until the weather grew cooler. He wouldn’t have noticed it, if he hadn’t deliberately checked the state of the windows.
He slept late Sunday morning, for he had been extremely tired the night before. It was nearly one o’clock when he set up his easel to paint. He had in mind to paint the aperture between two buildings, which contained a tree, that he could see straight out his window above the lot. He thought this Sunday might be a good Sunday to paint, because the ballplayers probably wouldn’t come. Stanley pictured them dampened this Sunday, at least to the extent that they would find another vacant lot to play in.
He had not quite finished his sketch of the scene in charcoal on his canvas, when he heard them. For a moment, he thought he was imagining it, that he was having an auditory hallucination. But no. He heard them ever more clearly in the alley—their particular sullen bravado coming through the murmuring, a collective murmur as recognizable to Stanley as a single familiar voice. Stanley waited, a little way back from his window.
“Okay, boys, let’s go-o-o!”
“Yeeeeee-hoooooo!” Sheer defiance, a challenge to any who might contest their right to play there.
Stanley went closer to the window, looking, wide-eyed, for the redheaded man. And there he was! A patch of bandage on the top of his head, but otherwise as brutishly energetic as ever. As Stanley watched, he hurled a catcher’s mitt at a companion who was then bending over, hitting him in the buttocks.
Raucous, hooting laughter.
Then from above: “F’gosh sakes, why don’t you guys grow up? Why don’t you beat it? We’ve had enough of you around here!” It was the blonde woman, and Stanley knew that Mr. Collins would not be far behind.
“Ah, save yer throat!”
“C’mon down ’n get in the game, sister!”
There was a new defiance in their voices today. They were louder. They were determined to win. They had won. They were back.
Stanley sat down on his bed, dazed, frustrated, and suddenly tired. He was glad the redheaded fellow wasn’t dead. He really was glad. And yet with his relief something fighting and bitter rose up in him, something borne on a wave of unshed tears.
“Let’s have it, Joey, let’s have it!”
Thud!
“Hey, Franky! Franky, look! Ah-hah-haaaaaa!”
Stanley put his hands over his ears, lifted his feet onto the bed, and shut his eyes. He lay in a Z position, his legs drawn up, and tried to be perfectly calm and quiet. No use fighting, he thought. No use fighting, no use crying.
Then he thought of something and sat up abruptly. He wished he had put the hedge bushes back. Now it was too late, he supposed, because they had been lying out on the ground for a week. But how he wished he had! Just that gesture of defiance, just that bit of beauty launched again in their faces.
THE EMPTY BIRDHOUSE
The first time Edith saw it she laughed, not believing her eyes.
She stepped to one side and looked again; it was still there, but a bit dimmer. A squirrel-like face—but demonic in its intensity—looked out at her from the round hole in the birdhouse. An illusion, of course, something to do with shadows, or a knot in the wood of the back wall of the birdhouse. The sunlight fell plain on the six-by-nine-inch birdhouse in the corner made by the toolshed and the brick wall of the garden. Edith went closer, until she was only ten feet away. The face disappeared.
That was funny, she thought, as she went back into the cottage. She would have to tell Charles tonight.
But she forgot to tell Charles.
Three days later she saw the face again. This time she was straightening up after having set two empty milk bottles on the back doorstep. A pair of beady black eyes looked out at her, straight and level, from the birdhouse, and they appeared to be surrounded by brownish fur. Edith flinched, then stood rigid. She thought she saw two rounded ears, a mouth that was neither animal nor bird, simply grim and cruel.
But she knew that the birdhouse was empty. The bluetit family had flown away weeks ago, and it had been a narrow squeak for the baby bluetits as the Masons’ cat next door had been interested; the cat could reach the hole from the toolshed roof with a paw, and Charles had made the hole a trifle too big for bluetits. But Edith and Charles had staved Jonathan off until the birds were well away. Afterward, days later, Charles had taken the birdhouse down—it hung like a picture on a wire from a nail—and shaken it to make sure no debris was inside. Bluetits might nest a second time, he said. But they hadn’t as yet—Edith was sure
because she had kept watching.
And squirrels never nested in birdhouses. Or did they? At any rate, there were no squirrels around. Rats? They would never choose a birdhouse for a home. How could they get in, anyway, without flying?
While these thoughts went through Edith’s mind, she stared at the intense brown face, and the piercing black eyes stared back at her.
“I’ll simply go and see what it is,” Edith thought, and stepped onto the path that led to the toolshed. But she went only three paces and stopped. She didn’t want to touch the birdhouse and get bitten—maybe by a dirty rodent’s tooth. She’d tell Charles tonight. But now that she was closer, the thing was still there, clearer than ever. It wasn’t an optical illusion.
Her husband Charles Beaufort, a computing engineer, worked at a plant eight miles from where they lived. He frowned slightly and smiled when Edith told him what she had seen. “Really?” he said.
“I may be wrong. I wish you’d shake the thing again and see if there’s anything in it,” Edith said, smiling herself now, though her tone was earnest.
“All right, I will,” Charles said quickly, then began to talk of something else. They were then in the middle of dinner.
Edith had to remind him when they were putting the dishes into the dish-washing machine. She wanted him to look before it became dark. So Charles went out, and Edith stood on the doorstep, watching. Charles tapped on the birdhouse, listened with one ear cocked. He took the birdhouse down from the nail, shook it, then slowly tipped it so the hole was on the bottom. He shook it again.
“Absolutely nothing,” he called to Edith, “Not even a piece of straw.” He smiled broadly at his wife and hung the birdhouse back on the nail. “I wonder what you could’ve seen? You hadn’t had a couple of Scotches, had you?”
“No. I described it to you.” Edith felt suddenly blank, deprived of something. “It had a head a little larger than a squirrel’s, beady black eyes, and a sort of serious mouth.”
“Serious mouth!” Charles put his head back and laughed as he came back into the house.
“A tense mouth. It had a grim look,” Edith said positively.
But she said nothing else about it. They sat in the living-room, Charles looking over the newspaper, then opening his folder of reports from the office. Edith had a catalogue and was trying to choose a tile pattern for the kitchen wall. Blue and white, or pink and white and blue? She was not in a mood to decide, and Charles was never a help, always saying agreeably, “Whatever you like is all right with me.”
Edith was thirty-four. She and Charles had been married seven years. In the second year of their marriage Edith had lost the child she was carrying. She had lost it rather deliberately, being in a panic about giving birth. That was to say, her fall down the stairs had been rather on purpose, if she were willing to admit it, but the miscarriage had been put down as the result of an accident. She had never tried to have another child, and she and Charles had never even discussed it.
She considered herself and Charles a happy couple. Charles was doing well with Pan-Com Instruments, and they had more money and more freedom than several of their neighbors who were tied down with two or more children. They both liked entertaining, Edith in their house especially, and Charles on their boat, a thirty-foot motor launch which slept four. They plied the local river and inland canals on most weekends when the weather was good. Edith could cook almost as well afloat as on shore, and Charles obliged with drinks, fishing equipment, and the record player. He would also dance a hornpipe on request.
During the weekend that followed—not a boating weekend because Charles had extra work—Edith glanced several times at the empty birdhouse, reassured now because she knew there was nothing in it. When the sunlight shone on it she saw nothing but a paler brown in the round hole, the back of the birdhouse; and when in shadow the hole looked black.
On Monday afternoon, as she was changing the bedsheets in time for the laundryman who came at three, she saw something slip from under a blanket that she picked up from the floor. Something ran across the floor and out the door—something brown and larger than a squirrel. Edith gasped and dropped the blanket. She tiptoed to the bedroom door, looked into the hall and on the stairs, the first five steps of which she could see.
What kind of animal made no noise at all, even on bare wooden stairs? Or had she really seen anything? But she was sure she had. She’d even had a glimpse of the small black eyes. It was the same animal she had seen looking out of the birdhouse.
The only thing to do was to find it, she told herself. She thought at once of the hammer as a weapon in case of need, but the hammer was downstairs. She took a heavy book instead and went cautiously down the stairs, alert and looking everywhere as her vision widened at the foot of the stairs.
There was nothing in sight in the living-room. But it could be under the sofa or the armchair. She went into the kitchen and got the hammer from a drawer. Then she returned to the living-room and shoved the armchair quickly some three feet. Nothing. She found she was afraid to bend down to look under the sofa, whose cover came almost to the floor, but she pushed it a few inches and listened. Nothing.
It might have been a trick of her eyes, she supposed. Something like a spot floating before the eyes, after bending over the bed. She decided not to say anything to Charles about it. Yet in a way, what she had seen in the bedroom had been more definite than what she had seen in the birdhouse.
A baby yuma, she thought an hour later as she was sprinkling flour on a joint in the kitchen. A yuma. Now, where had that come from? Did such an animal exist? Had she seen a photograph of one in a magazine, or read the word somewhere?
Edith made herself finish all she intended to do in the kitchen, then went to the big dictionary and looked up the word yuma. It was not in the dictionary. A trick of her mind, she thought. Just as the animal was probably a trick of her eyes. But it was strange how they went together, as if the name were absolutely correct for the animal.
Two days later, as she and Charles were carrying their coffee cups into the kitchen, Edith saw it dart from under the refrigerator—or from behind the refrigerator—diagonally across the kitchen threshold and into the dining-room. She almost dropped her cup and saucer, but caught them, and they chattered in her hands.
“What’s the matter?” Charles asked.
“I saw it again!” Edith said. “The animal.”
“What?”
“I didn’t tell you,” she began with a suddenly dry throat, as if she were making a painful confession. “I think I saw that thing—the thing that was in the birdhouse—upstairs in the bedroom on Monday. And I think I saw it again. Just now.”
“Edith, my darling, there wasn’t anything in the birdhouse.”
“Not when you looked. But this animal moves quickly. It almost flies.”
Charles’s face grew more concerned. He looked where she was looking, at the kitchen threshold. “You saw it just now? I’ll go look,” he said, and walked into the dining-room.
He gazed around on the floor, glanced at his wife, then rather casually bent and looked under the table, among the chair legs. “Really, Edith—”
“Look in the living-room,” Edith said.
Charles did, for perhaps fifteen seconds, then he came back, smiling a little. “Sorry to say this, old girl, but I think you’re seeing things. Unless, of course, it was a mouse. We might have mice. I hope not.”
“Oh, it’s much bigger. And it’s brown. Mice are grey.”
“Yep,” Charles said vaguely. “Well, don’t worry, dear, it’s not going to attack you. It’s running.” He added in a voice quite devoid of conviction, “If necessary, we’ll get an exterminator.”
“Yes,” she said at once.
“How big is it?”
She held her hands apart at a distance of about sixteen inches. “This big.”
“Sounds like it might be a ferret,” he said.
“It’s even quicker. And it has black eyes. Just now it sto
pped just for an instant and looked straight at me. Honestly, Charles.” Her voice had begun to shake. She pointed to the spot by the refrigerator. “Just there it stopped for a split second and—”
“Edith, get a grip on yourself.” He pressed her arm.
“It looks so evil. I can’t tell you.”
Charles was silent, looking at her.
“Is there any animal called a yuma?” she asked.
“A yuma? I’ve never heard of it. Why?”
“Because the name came to me today out of nowhere. I thought—because I’d thought of it and I’d never seen an animal like this that maybe I’d seen it somewhere.”
“Y-u-m-a?”
Edith nodded.
Charles, smiling again because it was turning into a funny game, went to the dictionary as Edith had done and looked for the word. He closed the dictionary and went to the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bottom shelves of the book case. After a minute’s search he said to Edith, “Not in the dictionary and not in the Britannica either. I think it’s a word you made up.” And he laughed. “Or maybe it’s a word in Alice in Wonderland.”
It’s a real word, Edith thought, but she didn’t have the courage to say so. Charles would deny it.
Edith felt done in and went to bed around ten with her book. But she was still reading when Charles came in just before eleven. At that moment both of them saw it: it flashed from the foot of the bed across the carpet, in plain view of Edith and Charles, went under the chest of drawers and, Edith thought, out the door. Charles must have thought so, too, as he turned quickly to look into the hall.
“You saw it!” Edith said.
Charles’s face was stiff. He turned the light on in the hall, looked, then went down the stairs.
He was gone perhaps three minutes and Edith heard him pushing furniture about. Then he came back.
“Yes, I saw it.” His face looked suddenly pale and tired.
But Edith sighed and almost smiled, glad that he finally believed her. “You see what I mean now. I wasn’t seeing things.”
Eleven Page 16
