The Houseguest

by Thomas Berger

  “Well, didn’t you hear Chuck say he has decided to stay here forever? And we couldn’t even get rid of him before we knew he was related to the police chief.”

  “If they are all in it together,” said his mother, who was essentially talking to herself, “then tomorrow will get worse. Mrs. Finch plus the cleaning crew.”

  Lydia spoke sternly. “Then we have to handle it as soon as possible. How much more that fat cop can drink without falling in his face is in doubt. I think we could take them in the kitchen. Chuck’s the more dangerous. Luckily he’s seated with his back to the outside door. I’m willing to go out and around the house to that door, and on a prearranged signal I’ll burst in and slug him with something, a good solid hit this time, while you, Doug, and Bobby come in through the butler’s pantry and take the chief from behind.”

  Bobby’s father asked irritably, “And then what do we do with them?” She made a fist, “We have to get everything settled before we start anything, including every eventuality that could possibly occur, such as what happens if Lyman’s not as drunk as we think or even, if so, can still handle himself effectively. He’s awfully fat, remember, and that means he can hold more alcohol than most.” He made his voice gentle and said to Lydia, “With all respect, do you really have the nerve to hit Chuck hard enough to knock him out?”

  For an instant she looked as though she might flare up in anger, but she said slowly, “You’re right. Look what happened last time.”

  The idea came to Bobby from nowhere. “The drapes and blinds and all,” said he. “All those cords.” He pointed at the window that now was a framed view of the black of night woods. Its Venetian blind was in a tight furl, and therefore most of the cord hung free.

  “All right,” said his father. “We take them by surprise and we tie them up. So far so good. Then what?”

  Lydia groaned. “It keeps coming back to the same question, which nobody can answer. And now you can’t haul Chuck somewhere out on the highway and abandon him, because what can be done with Lyman?”

  “Actually, that idea came from what the rangers do with troublesome bears in the national parks,” said Bobby’s father. “It probably wouldn’t work with human beings, anyway.” His eyes widened. “The state police! There’s a barracks on the mainland, about a mile from the ferry pier. They’d be free of the Finch connection.”

  Lydia’s face was showing the effects of her ordeal. Bobby’s wife had been in the forefront of all the action of the day. She was that kind of person. He was pleased with himself for having found her, though it had actually been the other way around: she had first spoken to him, in the university library, offering her help when he displayed his understandable confusion in filling out the call slip for a certain reference book. He had all too seldom done that sort of thing in three years of college. He was no scholar and never pretended to be. What he was, was a good fellow. He had no malice in him, which meant he was at a terrible disadvantage when dealing with a man like Chuck. His mind simply didn’t work that way.

  Therefore when he spoke now, it was in the spirit of make-believe. “I just can’t see any way to deal with Chuck except to do him in. It keeps coming back to that. Because even if we were able to reach the state police, what could we get them to do? What would we charge Chuck with? We know he’s a criminal, but it would be hard to explain to anyone else.”

  “Carrying a concealed lethal weapon,” said his father. “At least. And that’s a felony… . Of course, if he’s Lyman’s cousin he probably already has a license to carry a gun on the island, or if he hasn’t now, Lyman could easily fix him up with one, make him a deputy. Maybe he’s already been deputized. That would account for his arrogance.” He stared at his wife. “Do you realize what this is beginning to sound like? That the Finches are making their big move. After all these years! For example, Lyman said the phone service is off all over the island, not just here. Maybe there’s a Chuck in everybody’s house: we all use the Finches for everything.”

  Lydia protested to Bobby. “You just can’t speak of Chuck now as if dealing with him alone will solve anything. Whether or not your father’s right in seeing this as some sort of peasant uprising—”

  His father snorted. “Some peasants! They own a lot more than I do. They might be clods, but old Ronnie Finch, Lyman’s uncle, who must be eighty but still does all the local landscaping, pays cash for the heavy machinery he buys. They could buy and sell me, that’s certain.”

  “All right,” said Lydia, “but my point remains: with Lyman’s appearance Chuck has got at least a temporary reprieve from anything really extreme, though I’ll admit that anything less probably wouldn’t be effective.”

  “There you are,” said Bobby.

  His father was still occupied with the Finches’ holdings. “Do you realize they own miles of undeveloped shoreline property? It’s not for sale either, at least not at the moment. But when the time comes, and the price is right, they’ll sell it to the most vulgar entrepreneur. We’ll have condominiums and marinas and shopping malls full of overweight teenagers and gaudily dressed people wearing eyeglasses. Supermarkets and soft-drink machines and discount drugstores. Not just Chuck—if only we could exterminate the whole tribe!”

  The passion of this speech brought Bobby back to reality for the moment. It was likely that Lydia had relatives, perhaps even immediate, to whom such a commercial vision would have been very attractive. After all, such a complex would produce many tons of rubbish and thus much potential profit for a business like her father’s. And had there not been money in private refuse collection, she could not have afforded to attend the university at which Bobby had met her. He was acquiring a new awareness of the interconnectedness of things, so perhaps not all this ongoing episode was deplorable, and then there was the growing, and unprecedented, solidarity within the family. During the last few hours he had spent more time in his father’s company than he could remember having done previously in all his life. Furthermore, the man had listened with respect to several of his ideas on how to vanquish their common enemy.

  “How about tampering with the brakes or the steering on Lyman’s jeep?” he asked now. “You know that big curve just before you get to the village? If he lost control there, especially drunk as he is, it would be quite a fall, and it’s all granite boulders below.”

  Lydia gave him a searching look. “You’ve got a bloodthirsty side I’ve never seen before.”

  His father asked, “Does any of us have enough technical knowledge to do something like that so it would definitely work—and then not be detected later? I doubt it.” He assumed a judicious expression. “You see, not only do we have to extricate ourselves from this predicament, but we must do it so that it is brought to an absolute end, with no subsequent repercussions. We must not only keep our noses clean legally, but we must be extremely careful not to incur the vengeance of the remaining Finches.”

  “But,” wailed Bobby’s mother, “we seem to be suffering from that as it is.”

  “Exactly, and we must not make it worse—and here our work is cut out for us—we must not only rid ourselves of Chuck but dissipate the existing resentment that can be detected in Lyman, which surely must be shared by the other members of the tribe.”

  Bobby’s mother said, “I still insist that Mrs. Finch and I have never exchanged a harsh word.”

  “That sullen old bitch,” said his father. “She’s cheated on the household accounts for years.”

  This was an old theory of his father’s, and in the past the occasion for many angry words between his parents, but Bobby now was relieved to hear his mother say, “Maybe you’re right. Everything is changing so rapidly.”

  His father returned the favor and replied inoffensively. “Or maybe it’s always been what we only now are recognizing since Chuck has revealed his true colors.”

  A gunshot was heard at that moment, a sound that had to travel around and through many obstructions, and yet it reached them, as a scream or bellow could not
have done if produced in the faraway kitchen.

  Lydia’s brief expression of alarm was replaced by one of hope. “Could that possibly mean that one of them has shot the other?”

  Before she could be answered came the sounds of two volleys of gunfire.

  Bobby’s mother spoke with her eyes closed. “They’re shooting up the house: that’s what they are doing.”

  Bobby could not have anticipated the fear that claimed him at the sound of this distant fire, so different from that heard in movie and TV battles, so flat, literal, undemonstrative. As it continued, it seemed ever so gradually to be coming closer.

  With an effort, he rose above what might otherwise have become stark terror, and said, already in motion, “We’d better fortify this place before they get here.”

  Bobby had taken the initiative. Doug had to grant him that; perhaps he was finally arriving at manhood. Doug followed his son into the bedroom, and together they tore away what was necessary to get to the naked mattress, lifted it off the frame, and carried it to lean vertically against the outer door of the study, where Lydia and Audrey held it in place while the men pushed pieces of heavy furniture against it, the upended sofa and, back of that, Doug’s desk, which remained horizontal, offering a surface onto which the bedclothes and sofa cushions were piled.

  “Not bad,” Doug said when the barrier had been completed, standing back like a general, hands on hips, a posture for which his only training had been in military school so many years before. Of that time his principal memory was of the tormenting of an effeminate boy till he fled the Regiment (calling it “school” could get you ostracized interminably) and went home to Mother. Doug might well have been obliged to be of the company that, carrying out a traditional ritual by which a weakling was shamed, sodomized the lad had not the screaming response to the first attacker alerted the Officer of the Day.

  In short, he had had no serious preparation for war, which was clearly what he was faced with now. With an effort of will he avoided dwelling on the fact that the battle had hardly been recognized as such when it was already at the stage of a Thermopylae.

  But leave it to Audrey to make the point aloud. “Now our backs are really to the wall,” said she, staring disconsolately at the barrier. “But what could we do once the guns started?”

  Even Lydia had lost some of her earlier spunk. “Do we just cower in here till they eventually run out of ammunition?”

  “I’ll be happy to hear suggestions,” Doug said reprovingly.

  Bobby had a hand to his ear. “They’ve stopped, haven’t they?”

  While everybody strained to listen, a voice came from outside the door. Owing to the intervening padding, it was somewhat muffled. “Let me in!” Though slightly distorted, it sounded as though produced by Chuck, but Doug certainly made no answer.

  Unnecessarily, Bobby whispered, “It’s a trick.”

  “Doug? It’s Chuck. Lyman’s out of control. He’s gunning for me now!” Chuck was a good actor. His terror would have seemed real enough to someone without experience of him. Doug knew that any response whatever would undoubtedly evoke an impassioned bogus argument and therefore stayed silent.

  “It’s the alcohol sets him off,” Chuck cried. “A chemical reaction. I forgot about that. Maybe I never quite believed it. But now he’s turned homicidal. For the love of God, let me in before he finds his way back here!”

  Lydia came close to Doug and spoke in an undertone. “Could he just be telling the truth?”

  “No,” Doug whispered with intensity.

  She repeated, “Could he?”

  It annoyed him to have to explain. “I’ve known Lyman for years. Drunk or sober, he’s not dangerous on his own. If he is now, it’s because Chuck is manipulating him. Didn’t you notice how he pulled in his horns as soon as Audrey denounced him? And he was then already full of alcohol. He’s a moron and a coward.”

  Chuck now shouted, “No, Lyman, don’t do it!” A loud shot was heard, followed by more anguished pleading from the houseguest. “Now, that came close enough! Put that pistol down before you do something you’ll regret to the end of your life.”

  Another shot was heard. The gunfire was no longer without reverberation, at such close range and contained within the low-ceilinged hallway. Nothing could have been louder. The mattress-and-furniture barrier looked pitiful now.

  There was one last supplication from Chuck, followed by three shots in quick succession. Against his will, Doug listened for the sound of a body striking the uncarpeted floor, but of course heard nothing. Chuck was too arrogant to give the hoax the kind of detail it required.

  Bobby said, in a voice of more than normal volume, pain in his pale eyes, “Maybe he was telling—”

  Doug cut him off. “Can’t you see it’s fake? Don’t go weak on me now. You’ve just been doing such a good job… .”

  Bobby’s eyes changed. “Do you mean it?” He seemed to be genuinely moved.

  “Yes, I do, son. You ought to know that.” Doug suppressed an urge to say, “In case we don’t come out of this.” Sentimentality could serve only the enemy.

  “But what can we do now, Dad?” Bobby asked plaintively.

  “Absolutely nothing. I know that’s hardest to manage, but you see, doing something’s what’s got us in so deep with Chuck.”

  Bobby’s nose was wrinkled. “I thought it was just the reverse: that we didn’t do enough when he was moving into a position of power, that we could have stopped him in his tracks if we had got him when he was first starting out.”

  Doug shook his head. “On the contrary! We paid too much attention to him, flattered him too much. He couldn’t have got anywhere if he had been ignored.”

  Bobby made a stubborn nose. “But what about him installing himself as a proper houseguest without an invitation from anybody? Without even knowing any of us! The fantastic nerve! But it worked.”

  “The last chapter hasn’t been written yet,” Doug said, with a narrowing of eyes. “Who can say what the end will be? Lots of things give the illusion of success at the outset, but that’s all it is, an illusion. Oh, I’m not saying we’re in what would seem a powerful position, barricaded here and unarmed, with not one but two adversaries frothing at the mouth to get to us, both armed to the teeth. I’m not saying this is the ground on which I’d fight by choice. But they haven’t got us, have they? And aren’t we in a better situation now than if we were still in the kitchen?”

  Bobby nodded but suddenly he seemed to be thinking of something else. In a moment he said, “I’ve got an idea.”

  Doug was not pleased to have his principle defied no sooner than it had been enunciated. “I thought I was just saying that we should sit tight, do nothing at all?”

  Bobby hypocritically nodded agreement, but proceeded to suggest a course of action. “Now here’s how it goes: we pour a puddle of water here, just in front of the door. Then we cut off the cord of the desk lamp, cut if off at the lamp end, leaving the plug end intact. We scrape off the insulation, baring the two wires. We plug one end in the wall socket, and we put the two bare wires into the puddle of water. We take away the barrier and let Chuck in. He steps into the water, and boom, he gets the juice.”

  “If Chuck is wearing rubber-soled shoes,” said Doug, “it wouldn’t work.”

  Bobby stretched his lower lip halfway to his nose. “What do you think, Lyd?”

  They both turned to her, Doug wryly: every time he began to approve of Bobby, he soon had reason to feel otherwise. Even in an extreme situation, the boy could rarely rise above his fundamental tendency towards fecklessness.

  But Lydia was not to be seen. Nor, for that matter, was Audrey. Hearing a sound from the bathroom, Doug and Bobby went together to its open door.

  Facing them, knees inside, Lydia sat on the frame of the high small window in the alcove—that from which Doug had seen her in the afternoon: she was slender enough to do that. Audrey had apparently helped her gain the height and was at the moment holding the litt
le white stool on which she had climbed.

  Audrey spoke to Doug in what he heard as a self-righteous tone. “Lydia’s going to take the attack to them.”

  With a cursory wave, his daughter-in-law lifted her arms over her head, hands out the window, grasped something above, swung her legs up and out, and dropped from sight. This was done as if by a veteran gymnast, so deftly as to convert any negative feelings that Doug might have had to honest admiration.

  He went to the window and looked out, but could not see her. Near the house it was always very dark back there at night, and the segment of the pool area could be distinguished only when the moon was more assertive than it was at the moment.

  “She pushed the screen out,” Audrey said. “She knew how to do that.”

  Lydia moved along the wall by touch. She could see nothing, but had no fear of stepping on a loose rake or kicking a lost football. She was not at home; the Graveses hired people who came regularly to tend the grounds, more Finches presumably. Her father on the other hand hired men pretentiously called gardeners (and they did plant special trees and gaudy bushes, all of which usually soon died), but were easily recognized as being the same guys who did freelance masonry, housepainting, and roofing, and on Friday nights played cards with their employer. They were the Santinis, more or less, comprising relatives and friends: another version of the Finches, except that there was not so much, if any, separation between them and their clients. Her brothers were supposed to help with outdoor work, and their habitual failure to do so was the occasion for much clamor and threats of mayhem by her father, yet she could not remember a time when such vengeance was actually wreaked. Whereas as a young female person she had now and again been denied certain privileges when she failed to discharge her kitchen duties to the letter: table-clearing, dish-scraping, loading the dishwasher in a way that would not result in broken glassware. Had she been the daughter of an earlier era, according to her mother, she would have had to assist in the washing of dishes by hand and perhaps clean bathrooms as well. But she was punished worse for using foul language, and worst of all for getting slightly tipsy on apricot brandy at the age of thirteen: the birthday party was canceled at the last minute, and it was left to her to explain to her favorite boy. But when her brother, under one influence or another, totaled the Continental, so great was her parents’ relief with his escape from personal injury that he was not even grounded for a day.