by Gil Meynier
When they reached the shed, Joe knew that nothing could make him go inside. He stood at the entrance of the rattling, shaking, howling corrugated-iron shack while Mayhew, pink, his rolling flesh showing through his wet shirt, staggered into the depths of the flimsy shack and started tugging at the end of a long four-by-four that was lying on the ground. He signaled to Joe to take hold of the other end and started dragging it out of the shack. Half-heartedly Joe lent a hand and son of a bitch if Mayhew didn’t yank on the damn thing so hard, shoving it toward the door, that Joe got a handful of slivers. Mayhew cursed when Joe dropped it. Okay, so he got hold of it again. Now, what are you going to do with it? he thought. Mayhew nodded toward the house.
Joe picked up his end of the twenty-foot timber and almost fell to his knees. It was too damn heavy. And the rain was pelting down his back. For all the easy ways he had figured to struggle for an existence this was the goddamnest thing to do he had ever heard of. And Mayhew was so damn efficient, as if he knew what the hell he was doing.
Wobbling like ducks, they crossed the yard again, Joe staggering and whimpering, Mayhew stumbling and pushing and breathing hard.
When they reached the corner of the house Mayhew signaled to Joe to raise his end of the timber toward the overhanging breastbone of roof.
“...guy it up,” he shouted.
Joe did not seem to understand. Mayhew cursed at him, scrambled over to where he was, pushed him aside and started to raise the end of the heavy piece of timber. When he had it up to his shoulders the wind got hold of it and slammed it aside. Mayhew almost went over backward. Joe reached up and steadied the timber against the broken wall and laughed. Mayhew tried again. It was still a long way from reaching the breach. Inch by inch they raised the clumsy four-by-four. At times, when Mayhew was pushing at the low end, Joe thought the wind was going to snatch the timber right out of his grasp. He had to hold on with all his strength. He strained hopelessly; the feeling of being buffeted around made him ache, exposure to gale and lightning made him groan and shiver and tighten up into an aching throb of misery. He wanted to shout that the rain was getting into his eyes, that he was going blind. He wanted to quit. He could feel the strength of the wind, in powerful waves, outmatch his own. Twice he almost let go. Mayhew’s incredible activity made him feel useless and abused. When they had the timber almost upright, it was Mayhew’s doing, mostly. And when it was almost upright it was harder to hold, and the slivers were devilish, and Mayhew didn’t seem to see that Joe was doing all he could. And now Joe was getting mad, and if Mayhew puckered his damn lips once more he was going to let him have it. And Mayhew puckered his lips and winked. Then he stepped back, stumbled over a chunk of wall and fell. Slowly, he got up, shaking his head. As he got up, taking his time as if it was easy for Joe to hold the heavy beam on its end, Joe thought, Now! and let go.
He not only let go, he pushed and directed the fall of the tall, twenty-foot beam, and twelve feet away, as he was stepping across his patch of garden, his back toward Joe, the wind-driven timber crashed on Mayhew’s baldish head, knocking him to the ground, bouncing once as his body crumpled, jerked and lay inert in the mud.
That’s all there was to it.
As far as Joe was concerned the storm ended right there. He stared, pressing himself against the rough wall so that the wind would not blow him toward Mayhew. That’s all there had been to it. Alive one moment, dead the next. Surely, when your body falls like that and jerks just once and lies still, you are dead. But Joe hadn’t done it. Surely nobody would think that Joe had done it. He wanted to run away and hide, to abolish all connection with the monstrous, wet thing that lay face down in six inches of water in the furrows of the garden, a dripping timber across its back, its lips probably puckered...No, they couldn’t be. He started to crawl against the wind toward the corner of the house, away from the body. Then a clear thought emerged from the turmoil of his brain: he must go to the kitchen door, past the body. That’s all there was to it; if he went the other way, around the house to the front door, it would look as if he had run away from something he had done. He had to go to the kitchen door. And he had to do it now, before he melted into weakness, while he could see, as if on a distant screen, a disheveled Joe running around the house, away from a sprawled, still body, accused, pursued, trapped. His knees buckled as he started toward the kitchen door but he managed to scramble to his feet. At the thought of falling and lying in the same mud with the dead thing his head swirled and a sob tore a pain through his chest. It was amazing how clearly he could see the minute details of chunks of mud, of the grain and the slivers of the timber. He looked frantically around to see if there was any escape nearer than the kitchen door. He took a deep breath and advanced another step along the wall, fighting the wind that was pushing him along. The dead thing was only four feet away from him. He couldn’t help seeing the gash in the hair and the bone. Was it brain matter that shimmered wetly in the rain? His thoughts bogged down on the word “brain” and, in a tremendous upheaval, he sank into a faint. He felt himself go but he never felt himself hit the wet, muddy ground.
12
HIS next perception was a simple awakening. A painless, comfortable awakening. He had no desire to move. He just wanted to open his eyes. But there were voices and footsteps around him and he was sure that people would talk to him the moment he opened his eyes. He kept them shut. After a while he would open them just a fraction and take a look. In the meantime he was feeling comfortable. He curled his toes, just a little bit, and felt the smoothness of a rather hot hot-water bottle. He moved his fingers, just a little bit. His hands were along his sides. His right hand felt the roughness of blankets. His left hand, closer to his body, felt something soft, and, at the same moment, through his side he felt the touch of his hand. His mind, which had been wandering slowly, suddenly focused on the fact that his hand had touched his bare body. Somebody had taken off his clothes. Whoever it was had no right to do that. There was something monstrous about the idea of people seeing him nude, looking at him, naked, while he was unconscious. He should jump up and put on his clothes.
There was a lull in the voices and the footsteps. He had a feeling that he was alone. Slowly, he tried to separate his eyelids, to make a thin crack through which to look. It is harder than you think. His eyelids seemed glued together. Now, he could see. He was in his own room, in his own bed, naked, under blankets. His wet clothes made a muddy heap at the foot of the dresser. His shirt had caught on one of the knobs of the drawers and hung there. It was still raining outside.
He closed his eyes again and let his head roll to one side, as if he were stirring in his sleep. Then he looked again. There was a man standing in the doorway of his room. Joe could see the man’s feet and the bottom part of his blue uniform trousers. He saw heels. The man was looking into the hall.
Now was the time to sneak out of the blankets, get into his clothes and leave through the window as in all the escapes he had rehearsed in his problems. But it was raining and he was trapped. It had never rained in his problems. Why is it that in imagination you can move so smoothly through all sorts of situations but that in real life you never can? In imagination, the man at the door, the guard, seems much farther away, beds don’t creak, things run the way you want them to. In real life, every time you behave the way you imagined you should, something happens. Something...
Joe stopped thinking and wished his left ear were not buried in the pillow. A voice at the door was saying something. He wanted to hear. Something was being said and he must listen so that he would not be unprepared. The voice said: “Okay, you can come in. He’s awake now.”
Joe was startled at the unfairness of it. The man at the door had been spying on him. They had no right to say, “He’s awake now”—not until he had his clothes on and could defend himself. What was the defense against people who ask questions? What was the defense against questions behind which people watched and squinted, distorting everything?
The man who dragg
ed a chair to the side of the bed said he was from the police department. His clothes needed pressing, they needed drying as well as pressing, they showed he had been out in the rain. His face was reddish, smooth-shaven; his nose had been broken. He looked like a policeman in spite of his civilian clothes. Joe waited.
The man nodded in the general direction of the kitchen and said:
“What about that?”
What about it? thought Joe. Is this where I have to tell what happened?
“I .. .” Joe began. “Gosh...it was awful.”
“What happened?”
Now that Joe had had time to look at the man he was less afraid. He thought he could tell a good story. And if he kept his head on the pillow he wouldn’t have to look at the man’s eyes, and it would make him look sick, and if he acted sick he could stop talking now and then and keep track of things.
“We were in the kitchen,” said Joe.
“Who was?”
“Me and Mr. Mayhew.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he hadly hurt?” said Joe.
He thought he should ask that.
“Kind of bad,” said the man from the police.
“Gee,” said Joe, “I thought we were both going to get killed out there. I guess I was lucky.”
“Yeah,” said the policeman. “What happened?”
“Well, we were in the kitchen. And the storm was blowing.”
“Then the crack in the wall opened up. And we thought the whole damn house was going.”
The man waited.
“Well,” said Joe, “we couldn’t just stand there and Mr. Mayhew said something about the roof falling in. So...”
He paused, wondering whether it would be smart to say that he, Joe, alert and wise, had suggested guying up the roof. To hell with it, he thought, let Mayhew be the hero.
“Well, Mr. Mayhew he thought of getting that long, heavy piece of timber in the shed and propping up the roof with it. So we went out in all that storm and got it from the shed. It was tough going. It was heavy and the wind was blowing us all over the place. I hurt my hand.”
He stopped again and watched the man who was nodding his head.
“Well, we got it up finally. I strained so hard I almost passed out. When we had it up...I stepped back a few steps. The wind nearly blew me over. I had to step back to look at the thing—well, you know, to see if it would hold. Mr. Mayhew he stepped the other way to take a look, too. And that’s when the wind knocked the thing over and it fell, and I saw it hit him.” ‘
The man was nodding his head and chewing his lip.
“I ran over to him, to help him up. Then I saw the back of his head and—well...it upset me, and I guess I passed out. Always had a weak heart. Some people can look at things like that...I can’t.”
“Yeah, I know,” said the man. “You say he stepped back to take a look. Which way was he looking?”
“Well, he started walking backwards and looking up. But he tripped on something, so he turned around and he had his back turned when the pole hit him. Is that what you mean?” “Yeah,” said the man from the police. “That’s what the lady across the street says happened. Says she was watching the old gent because she was afraid something like that was going to happen. Says she could see which way the wind was blowing. She wasn’t watching you after Mayhew tripped. The coroner may want to see you downtown.”
“The coroner?”
The policeman nodded.
“They took your friend down to the mortuary. They say he was a pretty nice old guy.”
The policeman got up.
“Yes,” said Joe, “he sure was.” Then he thought he had better look shocked and grieved. “You mean he’s...dead?”
“Yes, poor fellow,” said the policeman from the doorway. “By the way, the Doc took a look at you. Says there wasn’t a thing wrong with you except fainting and getting wet. Take care of yourself.”
“I’m doing all right,” Joe wanted to say. It was smart the way he had said he had taken a few steps back to see how it looked. That, alone, placed him away from the pole when it fell.
The policeman hadn’t said much. Except that deal about the woman across the street. “She wasn’t watching you ..Joe wriggled uncomfortably under the blankets. There was danger in that woman. Suppose she remembered that he had been at the foot of the pole when it fell, that he had pushed it. Damn it, if she had been looking, there was a chance that she would remember...an old man, an empty space, the pole. Joe at the foot of the pole.
Joe could imagine the woman across the street, talking, talking, telling the neighbors how she saw the accident, how she went to the telephone and called the police, or the ambulance or the fire department, or whatever she called, then frowning hard, searching her mind for a detail, trying to remember...
Funny, thought Joe, how he could always build up a picture of other people and how they never seemed to figure him right. Funny how he could fool people but they didn’t fool him. He knew damn well they were all out to get him, every last one of them. Look how he’d fooled Mac. If Mac only knew how much had been held out on him in the crap deal! But Mac hadn’t fooled Joe. Joe had known all along that Mac wasn’t to be trusted, that Mac would turn on him some day. Well, take Dorry. He’d fooled her. She thought he was a big shot, that’s why she had kissed him like that. And hadn’t he fooled Stringer into believing that he had a house for sale! And May-hew. Mayhew had been fooled all right. Never thought that little Joe was a dangerous guy to play with, did he! Well, see what happened. And Joe wasn’t even anywhere near the pole when it fell. That was the important point.
But, fooling aside, thought Joe, why is it that people don’t accept me as a smart guy and respect me? Why is it that I always have to figure all the angles, and all these people, without ever doing any figuring, take advantage of me at every turn! Take the police, they’re dumb, but, if they want to, they can really tie a fellow up.
Suppose, thought Joe, I’d been an ordinary little fellow and had told them that I had been at the foot of the pole when it hit. Why, they’d be on my tail right now, trying to pin something on me. But I fixed it, and they’re gone.
The storm had moved away. It was still raining but there were moments when the rain stopped and the only noise was the dripping from the roof and the splashing of passing cars in the flooded street.
Joe decided to get up. He would have to put on his best clothes. The others were wet. He wanted to get out of the house. He listened for a while. The house was silent and empty of outsiders. Now and then he heard Mrs. Jard’s voice, then Dorry’s voice, down the hall in Dorry’s room. He felt contemptuous of the two silly women because they did not know how smart he was. He got up. He was nude. His door was open. Okay, let them look!
What was the matter with the kitchen? It was dark in there. Joe put on his pants and stepped into the hall. The kitchen was dark because somebody had stretched a tarpaulin around the entire corner of the house. It covered the hole in the wall and all the windows. There was mud a foot deep, it looked like, on the floor. It was a mess. Some house, thought Joe.
When he came out of the bathroom he was all shaved and slicked up. He had figured that the lack of hot water was due to the kitchen being wrecked. He didn’t get mad. He shaved in cold water.
Back in his room, he listened again. The women were still talking in Dorry’s room. He finished dressing and, silently, walked down the hall and sat in the rocker and listened. He missed a few words and wished he had started listening sooner.
“...I couldn’t tell them that.”
Couldn’t tell them what? thought Joe.
“It wasn’t very valuable.”
“Well, I think that we should tell them when they come back.”
“No. Please. I’d rather forget the whole thing. I may have lost the other one along the way somewhere.”
“I still think we should tell them.”
There was a silence. Joe caught himself puckering his lips the way Mayhew used to do.
That nimini pimini business. So it was the rings they were fussing about. Dorry didn’t want to say anything about it. And Jard was egging her on. Well, well, Mrs. Jard, thought Joe, you just wait. He had forgotten what he had thought would happen when the rings were found in Jard’s dresser. It didn’t matter. But he should have guessed, though, that Dorry wouldn’t want to go to the police. It would have been more fun, knowing that, to push Dorry around a bit. Well, other things had turned up.
What were they talking about now? Jard had a sing-song crying voice with a sniff in it.
“He was such a grand person. And Mrs. Fred should never have gone out...”
Joe leaned over the side of the rocker and peered through the opening in the curtains of Mrs. Jard’s alcove. He could see into Mrs. Fred’s room. She wasn’t on the bed. He hadn’t thought about her until now and he had a strange feeling that she wasn’t in the house. What the hell had happened to her?
He got up, walked across the hall and went into Dorry’s room without knocking. The two women looked frightened. Mrs. Jard was sitting in one of the armchairs and Dorry was standing up.
“Where’s Mrs. Fred?” said Joe.
They looked at him with the look people have when they don’t want to talk to you.
“Well, come on, where is she?” he said.
Suddenly his mind jumped to Mayhew. What the hell had become of the moneybelt! And why hadn’t he thought of that before? He hadn’t known what it was that had made him want to get up and get dressed. He knew it was something. It was the moneybelt.
“They took her away,” said Mrs. Jard.
“What?” said Joe. “What was that?”
“Mrs. Fred,” said Dorry. “They took her away.”
