Fletch Won

by Gregory Mcdonald

  On the television, a woman’s voice said, “If you tell Ed what you know about me, Mary, I’ll see you rot in hell.”

  Inside the house, a woman’s voice shouted, “Keep up that bawlin’, Ronnie, and I’ll slap you silly!”

  A man’s voice said, “Now, now. Let’s get this eating process completed. The kiddies must eat, Nancy. Keep up their strength!”

  Associate Professor Thomas Farliegh’s bungalow was eight blocks from the edge of the university campus. Other humble houses surrounding it had vestiges of paint on them and at least undisturbed stands of weeds in their front gardens. Farliegh’s house was yellow and gray with rot, a front window was smashed in its center, and the front yard was packed dirt, holding, among other things, a wheelless, collapsed, rusted yellow Volkswagen.

  Driving to Farliegh’s house, Fletch had heard a repeat of the radio news report Barbara had mentioned. Stuart Childers had confessed to murdering Donald Habeck. He had confessed—and been released.

  Fletch stood as close to the screen door as he could and shouted as loudly as he could, “Hey! Hello!”

  Noise within the house dimmed fractionally.

  A shadow the other side of the screen door grew into a woman who said, “Who are you?”

  “Fletcher.”

  “Who? I don’t know you. Better come in.”

  Inside it was discovered it was not the screen door which had made him less audible.

  “Are you a student?” the woman asked.

  “I’m from the News-Tribune! The paper!”

  “Tom’s back here,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s corrected your paper yet.” She led him into the kitchen at the back of the house. “You said your name is Terhune?”

  The house smelled of diapers, burned food, spilled milk, and ordinary household dirt.

  “I’m from the newspaper,” Fletch said.

  In the kitchen, beside the blaring television set, a battery-operated toy tank treading noisily along the floor, up and down piles of laundry, garbage, and books, were five children, all of whom seemed to be under the age of seven. Two were in diapers, three in underpants. Each seemed to have been freshly bathed that morning in used dishwater.

  A short, bald, chubby man was at the chipped kitchen table spooning mushed prunes into an infant in a high chair. The man’s eyes, visible as he glanced up at Fletch for a brief instant, were a startlingly pale blue. Four of the children also had light blue eyes, but none as light as his.

  The woman said something.

  “What?” Fletch asked.

  The television said, “… transporting a cargo of dumdum bullets…”

  The woman turned it down, which left just the noises of the tank overcoming all obstacles on the floor, two children shouting and kicking each other, and one small child sitting on a torn cushion against the wall bawling lustily.

  “Ronnie,” the woman said to the bawling child, “stop crying, or I’ll kick you in the mouth.” Her threat went unheeded. Her feet were bare.

  “Do you have a car?” the woman asked Fletch.

  “Yes. Are you Nancy Farliegh?”

  “He wants to see you,” the man at the table said.

  “I’m sure he wants to see you, Tom. Something about a paper.”

  “I want to see you, Nancy. I’m from a newspaper.”

  “Oh,” she said. “About my father’s death.” She was wearing a loose, bleach-stained skirt and a green, food-stained blouse. Her arms and legs were thin and white, her stomach distended. Her hair hung in greasy strands. “I don’t care to say anything about that, but I do need a ride.”

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “Our car is broken,” the man at the table said. “Smashed. Kaput. Ruined.”

  “I should have gone yesterday,” Nancy said.

  “Yes, yes,” the man said. “Bobby likum prunes.”

  “Sit down.” Nancy picked up a pile of newspapers and a telephone book from another chair at the table, and dropped them on the floor. “I’ll just change.” She looked down at her clothes. “Tom, should I change?”

  The child on the cushion stopped bawling. Determination entered his face.

  “Never change, darlin’.”

  The determined-looking child got up from his cushion. He crossed the floor. He caught the tank and picked it up. He hurled it through the window.

  Now three children were in the middle of the floor shouting and flailing each other. Hair-pulling seemed their best strategic device. It caused the best shrieks.

  “I’ll just change,” Nancy said.

  Fletch looked through the kitchen window. In the yard, the toy tank was assaulting a collapsed baby carriage.

  He sat down.

  “Choo, choo, choo, choo!” said Tom Farliegh. “Now the choo-choo comes to the open tunnel. Open the tunnel!” The baby opened her mouth. Tom stuck the mushed prunes into it. “Now,” he said, scraping the bottle of the jar clean, “chew, chew, chew, chew.”

  “Social Security,” Fletch quoted. “The sidewalks of the city/Offer up without pity/Little old ladies to be mugged.”

  “Ah!” Tom wiped the baby’s mouth gently with a crusted rag. “You’re familiar with my work.”

  “Do you call it the Poetry of Violence?”

  “That’s what it’s called.” Tom lifted the baby from the high chair and placed her carefully on the floor.

  He crossed the kitchen to where an even smaller baby was lying in a plastic basket-chair on the edge of the stove, looking like something to be roasted. The man was shaped like a rutabaga. He brought the baby in the basket-chair to the kitchen table.

  “Your poetry is different,” Fletch said.

  “Different, yes.” Tom was trying to unscrew the cap off a bottle of baby formula. “Why don’t you call it beautiful?”

  He handed the bottle to Fletch, who unscrewed the cap and handed it back.

  “Would beautiful be the right word?” Fletch asked.

  “Why not?” Tom screwed a nipple onto the bottle. “Choo, choo, choo.” The baby opened his mouth. Tom inserted the bottle. “There must be a beauty in violence. People are so attracted to it.”

  Holding the bottle tipped to the infant’s mouth, he looked down at where four children now fought and cried on the floor. One was bleeding from a scratch on an arm. Another had a new welt over an eye.

  “That’s why I have so many children,” Tom Farliegh said. “Look at their fury. Isn’t it wonderful? Unbridled violence. I can hardly wait until this crop get to be teenagers.”

  “May your dreams come true,” Fletch prayed. “How many do you think will make it?”

  “You are attracted to violence,” Tom said.

  “Not really.”

  “Do you watch football?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you watch boxing?”

  “Yes.”

  “They aren’t violent?” Tom’s hands were the softest, pudgiest Fletch had ever seen on a man. “The vast preponderance of human entertainment is violent.” He nodded at the television. “That instrument of popular human communication dispenses more violence in a day than most humans, without television, normally would see in a lifetime. What attracts us to such violence?”

  “Fascination,” said Fletch. “It is the second greatest puzzle, in life, that people are willing to do unto others violence which, apparently, they want done unto themselves.”

  “Beauty,” Tom said. “The fascinating beauty of violence. The ultimate irony. Why has there never been a poet before to admit it?” “Slim, belted hips/ Sprayed across by automatic fire/ each bullet/ ripping through,/ lifting,/ throwing back,/ kicking/ the body at its/ center.// Thus/ The Warrior In Perfection/ bows to his death,/ twists,/ pivots and falls/,” quoted Fletch.

  “Beautiful,” said Tom.

  “I have seen such things,” said Fletch.

  “And it is beautiful. Admit it.” Tom Farliegh tipped the baby bottle higher. “Waisted, he is wasted/ but not wasted.// This death is his life/ And
he is perfect/ In it”

  “What courses do you teach at the university?”

  “The works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Another course comparing the works of John Dryden and Edmund Spenser. Also, my share of freshman English courses.”

  “You teach The Faerie Queene?”

  “Oh, yes.” Tom took the bottle out of the baby’s mouth. There was a small quantity of formula left in it. He put it to his own mouth, and drank it.

  The baby cried.

  Tom took the bottle to the sink and rinsed it.

  Fletch asked, “Did you do violence to your father-in-law?”

  “Yes,” Tom said. “I married his daughter. He never forgave either of us.”

  “He never came to see his grandchildren?”

  “No. I doubt he knew how many he had, or their names. Too bad. He would have appreciated them.”

  Fletch watched one Farliegh child throw a carrot at the head of another. “I think so.”

  “There was no honesty in Donald Habeck.”

  “You’re living in squalor here,” said Fletch. “Your father-in-law was a multimillionaire.”

  “Did I murder my father-in-law?” The short, pudgy man turned around from the kitchen sink and dried his hands on a piece of newspaper. “There would have been no irony in it.”

  “No?”

  “No. It’s the innocence of victims which makes a poetry of what happens to them. And I’m a poet.”

  “Did you know he intended to give almost his entire fortune to a museum?”

  “No.”

  “If he had died without a will, as I understand lawyers are apt to do, your wife might have inherited enough for you to take up poetry full-time. That is, if his fortune were still intact. Are you saying poets aren’t practical people?”

  “Some are.” Tom Farliegh smiled. “Those who get published in The Atlantic and win the Pulitzer Prize. They might be practical enough to do murder. But, surely, you’re not accusing the most unpopular published poet in the country, of practicality?”

  Nancy Farliegh reentered the room. She was wearing ballet slippers, a hotter-looking full skirt, and a once-white blouse gray from repeated washing. An effort had been made to brush her hair.

  “Are we ready to go?” she asked.

  Not knowing where he was going, Fletch stood up.

  “Morton Rickmers, the book editor of the News-Tribune, might like to do an interview with you, Mr. Farliegh. Would you be available to him?”

  “See?” Tom Farliegh grinned at his wife. “I’m reaping the benefits of my father-in-law’s sensational murder already.” To Fletch, he said: “Sure, I’m available to him. I do anything to deepen my unpopularity.”

  “Is it all right to leave him with the children?” Fletch buckled himself into the driver’s seat.

  “Why do you ask?” Nancy Farliegh found her seat belt.

  “Your husband sees beauty in violence. Those kids are beatin’ up on each other in front of him.”

  “He’s better with the kids than I am. He has much more patience.”

  “Much more tolerance.” He turned the ignition key. “Where are we going?”

  “The Monastery of St. Thomas, in Tomasito.”

  “Tomasito!” Fletch looked at her. “That’s a hundred kilometers from here!”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  “I thought I was just dropping you off downtown.”

  “My brother is in the monastery.” Nancy stared at the unmoving landscape through the windshield. “It is a cloistered monastery. I don’t think he yet knows Father is dead. I feel I must go talk to him. I have no other way to get there.”

  “Your brother is a monk?”

  “A monk, a monk,” she said. “I suppose Tom could make a vicious nursery rhyme from that. A monk, a monk/ hiding in a trunk/ to have nothing to do/ with his father, the punk. Not very good.”

  “Not very.”

  “Guess I’ll leave poetry to my husband. I’ll just keep birthing his little monsters.”

  Fletch put the car in gear. “Sorry,” he said. “There’s a hole in the muffler.”

  “I don’t hear it.”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “Me? God, no. Bob’s going into the monastery was his own thing. It had nothing to do with the family, I mean, our upbringing, at all. I suspect he’s trying to atone for the sins of his father. Aren’t they supposed to be visited on the son? He’s got his job cut out for him.”

  Across from the university, Fletch drove up the ramp to the freeway and accelerated.

  He said, “Someone who talked with your father just last week told me your father said he intended to enter a monastery.”

  Nancy gasped. “My father?” She laughed. “I knew newspapers print nothing but fiction.”

  “It’s true,” Fletch said. “At least it’s true that somebody said it.”

  “Maybe my father would enter a monastery if he heard the Judgment Day Horn. It would be just like him. A clever legal defense.”

  “He was getting older.”

  “Not that old. About sixty.”

  “Perhaps he wasn’t well?”

  “Hope so. If anyone deserved leprosy of the gizzard, he did.”

  “Were you never close?”

  “Emotionally? I don’t know. I never saw him that much, growing up. Black suit and black shoes coming and going in the driveway. Intellectually? After I grew up, I realized how he’d been screwing the system all his life. A real destroyer of values. For profit. He never believed in good, or evil, or justice; any of the things we have to believe in, to center our lives, to focus. He believed in having his own way, despite the social consequences; in lining his own pockets. He was the most completely asocial and amoral man I ever knew. If he weren’t educated as a lawyer, he probably would have been a psychopathic killer himself.” After a moment, she laughed wryly. “My father, a monk!”

  “Your husband,” Fletch said, “extolls violence.”

  “You don’t see a difference?” Nancy asked. “My husband is a teacher. A poet. At sacrifice to himself, he’s pointing out the beauty in violence, and there is beauty in violence. We are attracted to it. He’s making us confront the violence in ourselves. He’s teaching us about ourselves. His poetry wouldn’t be so damned effective, if it weren’t true.”

  “What sacrifice to himself?”

  “Come on. People cross the street when they see him coming. They won’t even talk to me. We haven’t been invited to a faculty cocktail party in three years. Most of the faculty want to get rid of him. He could never get another job teaching. We’re going to end up in Starvation Lane. Just so Tom can make this statement, not about the nature of violence, but about the nature of you and me. Don’t you understand?”

  “Anyway.” Fletch stretched in his car seat. “This man, who should know, told me your father intended to give five million dollars to the museum. The money was to be spent on contemporary religious art. He was going to give the rest of his wordly goods to a monastery, which he was going to enter.”

  Nancy shrugged. “He had an angle somewhere. I’d guess someone had the goods on him. The Justice Department. The Internal Revenue Service. The American Bar Association. I expect that after the dust settled, you would have found my father living luxuriously somewhere with his sexy, pea-brained young wife behind the facade, the protection of some religious or cultural foundation, all brilliantly, legally established, and funded, by himself.”

  “Maybe. But did you know your father had stated the intention of disposing of his worldly goods?”

  “I read something of the sort in the newspaper. This morning’s newspaper. After he was murdered.”

  “No one had told you before?”

  “No.”

  Fletch said, “It’s always hard to prove that you don’t know something.”

  They rode without speaking for a while. They listened to The Grateful Dead on the radio.

  Finally, Fletch said, “At your father’s house yesterday, I
met a woman who was about sixty years old, white-haired, or blue-haired, whatever you want to call it, wearing a colorful dress and green sneakers. I asked her if she was Mrs. Habeck, and she said she was. All she’d say about your father was that he wore black shoes and wandered away. She referred to Habeck, Harrison and Haller as Hay, Ha, Haw.”

  “Ummm,” Nancy said.

  “That your mother?”

  “Um.” Nancy shifted in her seat. “What it says on your shorts is correct. You can be a friend, I guess.”

  “That’s not quite what the legend means.” Fletch had changed T-shirts. He had hoped his own, pure T-shirt, left outside his shorts, had covered the advertisements.

  “You put your finger on it,” Nancy said. “Growing up, my father and I ignored each other. He wasn’t interesting. When I got older, I learned contempt for him. ‘Brilliant legal practitioner.’ Bullshit. He was a crook. When he put Mother away, had her legally committed to a home for the mentally unwell, I absolutely despised him. I never spoke to him again, or voluntarily saw him again. Sorry. I didn’t tell the exact truth, before. I hate the son of a bitch.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mother didn’t need to be thrown out of her home. Confined to an institution, however swank and gentle. She’s just pixilated.”

  Fletch remembered Mrs. Habeck looking down at her green sneakers and saying, I don’t have any privacy.

  “Pixilated,” Nancy repeated. “Year after year, Dad left her alone in that house. No one wanted to know her. At first, she tried to get out, go do things, you know, join the Flower Club. The other ladies didn’t want her. Some sensational case of my father’s would be in the newspaper, a small editorial outcry about Donald Habeck getting a not-guilty verdict for some rapist. And Mother’s flower arrangements wouldn’t get into the show. Her phone wouldn’t ring. Once, when I was a teenager and getting independent, Mother marched downtown and got herself a job behind the counter in a florist’s shop. My father put a stop to that, quick enough. Poor, damned soul. She moldered alone in that house. Talked to herself. She began setting the dining-room table for luncheon and dinner parties, for six people, eight people, a dozen. There were no people.” Tears streamed down Nancy’s face. Her voice sounded dry. “What could I do? I went home as much as possible. She used to go to six different hairdressers in one day, just to have people to talk to. Her hair was getting burned out. Then she took to spending all day in the shopping malls, buying everything in the world, lawn mowers, washing machines, towels. There were about twenty washing machines delivered to the house one week. When she was being packed up to go to the Agnes Whitaker Home, it was discovered she had over two thousand pairs of shoes! She liked to talk to the salespeople, you see.”