Meeting Evil: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Could he prove it now, though he had not touched the man even in the struggle, nor pointed the gun at him? He had been scrupulous in that regard. But the man had demonstrated the characteristics of a bully and a coward, and might find it necessary to misrepresent the situation in the interests of pride.

  John felt so alone, so defenseless, that he would have welcomed the company of Richie at the moment, even though Richie was the source of all his troubles—but being so, was uniquely capable of clearing his name, at least in everything up to the moment they had parted ways. John would still be on his own as to the matter of the country gentleman, but he would be much more believable if it could be established that he bore no personal responsibility for being in this area in the first place.

  He knew a sudden access of hope, as if lifted on a rising wave: it was by no means too late to set everything right, if he could only manage to get someone in authority not to jump to conclusions but rather listen to his voice of reason. He realized this might be unlikely were he to appear before such an authority looking as he did now. He must get home somehow. He had no money or credit cards, and given his appearance would certainly not have done well at hitchhiking—even if he had not been a wanted man for whom the police would be looking on every highway. He did have the gun.

  That he could ever consider pointing a firearm at a human being, for any purpose whatever, would have been impossible throughout his life up to this moment. Of course he had played with toy weapons as a kid, shooting rubber-tipped darts at brothers and friends, but had had no difficulty, however young, in distinguishing a game from reality, even though that reality had been purely theoretical: he had never seen a real gun being fired, for in movies and TV though the firearms were genuine, the bullets were not, as everyone, even small children, had always recognized. He had not grown up to be one of those adults who suppose killers get their start by training on water pistols in childhood, or believe that owning a popgun at the age of six created a warmonger who in later life would be eager to nuke the world. Take him: he disliked guns, yet here he was, holding one that he had taken with force from its owner so as to save his own life. So far so good, but he had not discarded it. It was the one thing of value at hand. It looked expensive, like the rest of the gentleman farmer’s possessions. Perhaps he could sell the weapon or use it as security for enough money to get home. No, that was wrongheaded: his only hope now was to get back in contact with Joanie and have her come to pick him up. Even if he found the fare, he could not risk using any form of public transportation.

  He felt worse the longer he rested. Not only did certain delayed reactions to the struggle for the gun now make themselves known, but his sore knee had returned. The back of his left hand was deeply scratched: had adrenaline served to numb him to damages received in the struggle to control the gun? Or were the scratches due to the thicket through which he had lately plowed? He pulled himself to his feet.

  Walking was painful, but he had been strengthened by a resolve to take no more abuse. Although he might have something to explain, he had nothing for which to apologize, and he was determined neither to forget the distinction nor to permit anyone else to do so. In future encounters he must deal with the probability that strangers would think the worst of him because of his appearance alone. If in addition they had heard the same broadcast as the gentleman farmer and would take him for the wanted man, no argument of his was likely to be listened to. And in a rural area like this, he had to face the possibility that other locals would routinely keep guns at hand.

  He could not have said how far he walked, having anesthetized himself against time and distance, but eventually he cleared the woods, and there, at the edge of a meadow, on the far side of which some black-and-white cattle were grazing, was a plain clapboard structure that needed a new roof, and beyond it what would seem to be, from the rusty equipment nearby and the dusty, strawy dim reaches of the interior visible through the open and sagging doors, a working barn.

  John liked a real barn. As a child he had once visited an upstate farm owned by a man who had been a pal of his father’s in the army, and got to sit on the back of a real horse and in a barn had watched a cow being milked. The fresh milk, however, tasted from a dipper plunged into the pail, was disgustingly warm. But it gave him an affectionate feeling to remember that visit.

  It was precisely such pretexts for softening that he must guard against now, when he had decided he had no choice, if he expected ever to get out of this morass: he must use not violence—he was no criminal—but force, by which he meant the threat or potential thereof.

  When he knocked at the door, prepared to point the gun at whoever responded, his plan was ruined by the appearance of a bright-eyed young boy.

  “Season’s not open yet,” said the boy, speaking through the screen door. He was full of energy and looked about twelve. “If you want to shoot clay pigeons, use the west field.” He pointed. “Animals get spooked. Hope you look and see you haven’t loaded any deer slugs by mistake. One guy did, last year. They carry further than you think. Came down and hit somebody’s pickup driving by. Cracked the windshield.”

  “I just want to use your phone,” John said.

  The boy was suddenly more guarded. “Just give me the number. I’ll call it for you and give them your message.”

  “It’s not that kind of call.”

  “Afraid it’ll have to be,” the boy said levelly.

  It occurred to John that the lad was exercising the caution urged by public authorities, TV advisers, et al., on persons who opened the door to strangers. He himself had certainly been unwise, as it turned out, to respond to Richie’s knock that morning, though even in retrospect he could not think of an alternative.

  “This is some business between me and my wife.”

  “Sorry,” said the lad, starting to close the main door. “That’s not good enough.”

  “Please wait,” John cried to the diminishing sliver of boy. “All right, you call her.”

  The door stopped closing. Through the narrow gap that was left, he was asked for the number.

  “Okay,” said John. “We’ll be glad to pay you when she gets here. Tell her I’m stranded—where are we, incidentally? Near Meredith? Wherever that is.”

  “Meredith?” the boy asked derisively. “This is Beckworth.”

  “Just tell her how to get here.”

  “By car? I’m not old enough to have my license yet. I don’t know much about roads except just between here and the village.”

  “That’s okay,” John said, trying to keep the boy calm. “Fine. Just tell her how to get here from the village—that’s Beckworth?”

  “Naw, the village that’s closest is Bolton.”

  “Bolton?” John asked. “Okay, just tell her that, and then what road to take to get here.”

  “Does she know where Bolton is? Where’s she coming from, anyway?”

  “She can find Bolton on a map.” Desperation was gaining on him again. Joanie was an excellent driver, better than he in precision techniques such as parking parallel to a curb, but she was hopeless with a map and, uncharacteristically for her sex, had the aversion to asking directions from strangers for which males are traditionally noted. Her explanation was that men might get the wrong idea if so accosted by her.

  “Where’d you leave your car?” the boy asked through the slit between door and jamb, which he prudently had not widened. “Want me to call the Triple-A?”

  “I didn’t come by car.”

  “No car and yet you’ve got a twelve-gauge pump gun?”

  The non sequitur made John sigh. “Would you mind first making that call to my wife? I’ll explain while I’m waiting for her. The gun doesn’t belong to me. I don’t even know how to unload it.”

  The boy spoke in a sneering tone. “Then what are you doing with it?”

  “I really think I ought to talk to her,” John said, turning the weapon to offer it butt-first. “I’ll bet living out here you know how to use th
is. Take it and cover me, if you want, while I make the call. In fact, you keep the gun as a present from me. I’ll repay the guy I borrowed it from.”

  “Know what one of these costs?” the boy asked skeptically. “You don’t have that kind of money. You look like some kind of a bum.”

  It was amazing to John how much the comment hurt him, though it would seem to be the least of his complaints on this day. No doubt it was worse because a minor had made it. “I’m no bum,” he said reproachfully. “I’m a respectable man with a wife and children and job, a good position with a fine firm. I have an excellent reputation in my town, which has many well-to-do residents, including some television personages who paid a million or more for their homes: that red-headed woman on the morning news, I don’t know if you’ve seen her? And others. I’ve just had some bad breaks today, that’s all. I’m a good person.”

  “You don’t exactly look it.”

  John lost his temper. “God damn it, you let me use that telephone!”

  The boy slammed the door and loudly latched it.

  John tried unsuccessfully to open the screen door, but the hook was fastened. He pounded on its frame. There was no response. He had been stupid to boil over like that. The boy was probably home alone for some reason, maybe recuperating from an illness that kept him from school. So the sick child is threatened by an infamous-looking tramp with a stolen gun. There could now be a list of charges against John for a multitude of crimes he had not committed, some of which had never even occurred. The matter of the truckdriver, however, was serious: that could not be forgotten. But not only had he not run the man down, he had called an ambulance on the nearest phone he could reach. He was still utterly clean, if he could just find somebody who would listen to and believe him.

  On an impulse, he ran down from the porch and located where the telephone line came in from the roadside pole. Using the gunbarrel as a lever, he forced the wires to rip away from the porcelain connector. If he was not permitted to phone his wife, he would not suffer the boy to make an unwarranted call to the police. This unfairness simply had to stop. He did not deserve it.

  He returned to the porch and propped the weapon against the wall of the house. Face against the door, he cried, “I’m leaving the gun out here. That should show you how you misjudged me. When I get to town, I’ll call the phone company. Sorry I had to put yours out of commission. But you should have believed me!”

  There was no answer, and John had no means of telling whether the boy had heard him. He could have tried to peer in through one of the windows that gave onto the porch, but refrained from doing so lest he frighten the lad even more. He was considerate even under conditions of extremity.

  He had come out of the woods on the left side of the house. He began to leave now on the dirt driveway to its right, and had almost reached the road when an automobile turned in and stopped abruptly before him. For the briefest of instants he took it for some sort of official vehicle, and believed he had the choice of surrender or flight.

  But it was Sharon’s car, and Richie was behind its wheel. Sharon sat next to him. She looked more alert than when last seen.

  Richie pointed at the house and asked, out of the window, “Who’s in there?”

  John had hoped never to see him again, but the events that had occurred since so changed his feelings that he could put up with the man if it meant getting home.

  “Nobody.”

  Richie emerged from the car. He stretched in a self-indulgent way and smiled at John. “What are you doing here?”

  “I might ask you the same, but the hell with it. Let’s get out of here.”

  “We can’t go anyplace right now by car. The cops have set up roadblocks down there.”

  John could not believe it. “Roadblocks? It’s some kind of manhunt?” He sighed. “Then we’ve got no choice. Maybe they’re looking for someone else, someone dangerous, and it’s not for us at all. But even if it is us they’re looking for, we have to turn ourselves in. That burglary, so called, was hardly major, and it must be on record that I phoned for an ambulance, which should help with the truckdriver thing. I’ll support your claim that you were saving my life; the tire iron was right there beside him, after all. We can expect trouble, but I don’t see why we can’t beat the worst of it.” To be speaking in this fashion was outlandish for him, and if someone from his old life, preeminently Joanie, had appeared at this moment and said, “You got to be kidding,” he might have smirked and so conquered the nightmare, gone back inside his house, and, after cleaning up the breakfast dishes, put in the rest of a normal day off.

  But he really was here, not there, and Richie had broken away from him before he finished, bounded up on the porch, and snatching up the gun, slid forward the wooden handpiece under the barrel. He deftly caught the red shell that flew out. “Hey,” he cried with delight. He proceeded quickly to eject all the shells and then reload them into the weapon.

  John reacted too late. Stepping onto the porch, he said, “That belongs to a guy down the hill. He was pointing it at me, and I had to take it away from him. We’ll leave it here.” He reached for the gun, but Richie swung it away. “Come on, hand it over.”

  “I’m sorry, John, but I got to keep it. I need the protection. Cops don’t fight fair. They’ll be all over the place, with machine guns and tear gas. But maybe they won’t be able to find us. Let’s get that car out of sight.”

  John could no longer regard Richie as being merely an oddball with whom he felt uncomfortable. Even after the running-down of the truckdriver he had tried to maintain that illusion, for what was the alternative? He now said aloud, but mostly to himself, “All this can’t be just because of that hit-and-run.”

  Richie bounced down one step from the porch, shotgun across his left forearm. John looked around for the optimum route of escape. It would probably be that by which he had come, through the woods. But he had momentarily forgotten the boy inside the house, who would be defenseless if he left, he who had put the phone out of commission.

  “Come on, John,” Richie said. He shouted at Sharon to drive the car to the barn. They followed on foot as she drove slowly along the bumpy unpaved lane. “I was going to dump her,” he said, “but she’s got her uses.”

  “You can’t keep this up forever,” John said. “The longer you do, the worse it gets. You can’t really be thinking of a standoff with the police?”

  Sharon stopped at the open barn door. Richie yelled, “Go on in!” To John he said, “Besides, she’s harmless. Her brain’s like a rotten pear.”

  Sharon drove the car inside. When they reached it, Richie told her to put it in neutral and stay at the wheel. “Do you mind, John?” he asked. “You’re stronger than me. Could you roll it over there?” He pointed to a far corner, the only area not obstructed by partitions or farm equipment in disrepair, including what had once probably been a tractor but was now a rusty relic with two wheels of bare iron.

  With an effort, pushing against the frame of the driver’s window, John was able to get the car moving. Its weight made the old floorboards groan, but once started, it was easy to keep moving.

  John felt guilty about having deserted Sharon earlier. He spoke to her in an undertone. “Are you okay?” She showed no physical damage.

  She kept her eyes on where she was steering. “I’m feeling better. He just drove around, looking for you.”

  “He’s no friend of mine!”

  “Tell him that,” she said, tight-lipped. She stopped the car and watched Richie’s approach in the rearview mirror. “We can beat him, but you’re the answer.”

  John was taken aback by her new energy. He was not quite sure what she meant and could not ask for elucidation, for Richie was at hand, carrying an old tarpaulin he had found. He barked at Sharon as she left the car. “Cover up the automobile!”

  John helped her with the heavy oil-soaked canvas. When they were done, it was obvious that a car was concealed underneath it, but Richie said it would be sufficient
to delude the cops, if there was no other evidence that the fugitives had come to this farm.

  “We’ll get inside the house and keep it buttoned up,” he said as they walked back. He brought up the rear with the shotgun. Sharon was in front.

  John remembered he had to protect the boy. “That’s really a dead end. Why not hike out through the woods? They’re going to be looking for the car for a while, not for people on foot.”

  “Much as I like you, John, I realize that what you want to do is get caught. So all your plans are going to have that idea back of them.”

  This was so rational a statement as to give John at least a small hope that Richie could be talked to. “Okay,” he said, “but they’re going to find us sooner or later, you must know that, and the longer it takes, the worse it looks, the tougher it will be to make your case, and—”

  “I don’t have a case, John!” Richie cried, in what sounded like glee. “They have to take me as I come: this is it, like it or not.”

  They arrived at the back door of the house. John prayed that the boy would have escaped from one end or side of the building, by door or window, while they were at the other, but knew it was an unrealistic hope: like any normal human being, the lad would feel most safe in his own home, whatever the menace, with the possible exception of fire or flood. That’s what a home is, beyond its provisions for eating and sleeping: all the fortress most of us will ever require, and John was in trouble only because he had been lured out of his own.

  As ordered by Richie, Sharon mounted the one-step platform that constituted the back porch, swung the unlatched screen door aside, turned the unresistant knob, and opened the unlocked door.

  John caught himself before blaming the kid. How could a boy be expected to have the mentality of a combat soldier? The young fellow was probably crouched in some closet, shaking with terror. Richie would have broken in anyway. Yet John was chagrined to see that Richie had been more successful than he in gaining entrance to the house. Perhaps it was an odd reflection to have at this moment. But had the boy let him use the phone, none of this would be happening.