by Lewis Nordan
Would You Shut Up, Please
An Algonquin Short
by Lewis Nordan
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
CONTENTS
Would You Shut Up, Please
About the Author
Also by Lewis Nordan
About Algonquin Books
Would You Shut Up, Please
ONE MORNING, AFTER Annie had left for work, I heard a rifle shot just outside the window of the room where I was sitting. That’s what it sounded like to me anyway. I used to be familiar with guns when I was a boy down South. So, yeah, it sounded like a rifle to me. I slipped from my chair immediately, onto the floor, and waited for whatever would happen next. I lay there and listened. The little plum-colored room where I crouched, the library we called it, was comforting and cozy with its book-lined walls and good rugs. There was a cocoon-like quality that held me there most days, even when I probably should have been working at the computer. In fact except for the firestorm of grief and regret that constantly threatened to unhinge me, comfort was mainly what I felt these days. My marriage was back on track; I was able to work again.
I lay there and listened. The book I had been reading was lying on the floor beside me. I heard nothing, no voices, no car speeding away. What I imagined I might hear came mostly from TV shows. I didn’t have any other experience with this sort of thing. The neighborhood where I lived, full of chestnut trees and rose gardens and butterfly bushes, on a private road in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, was the last place you would expect to hear gunfire. It’s solidly middle-class, home to many professors from Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions of higher learning in the neighborhood.
I started to feel a little silly, there on the floor. I got up and went to the front door and looked out through the screen—peeked out, I should say. Nothing seemed different, nothing amiss. It was autumn, so the trees were flamboyant, big red maples and orange oaks. Squirrels were gathering acorns. There was a nice bite in the air. I opened the screen and stepped out onto the slate walkway to get a better look up and down the street. I saw nothing, suspicious or otherwise, no movement at all. Kids were at school; parents were at work. Comfortable homes, leafy shade and low hedges, a few cars in driveways, not much else.
Finally I noticed the woman who lived directly across the street standing out in her driveway. Mrs. Scott. Annie and I didn’t know our neighbors well, mostly only to wave to them. It’s true, I knew the neighborhood children better than I knew their parents. I was the avuncular guy who was always at home, someone everybody trusted. The parents liked to brag that their kids had this semieccentric writer friend who was just like one of the kids. I played stickball, shot hoops in the driveway, helped in the summer with lemonade stands. No one suspected that my heart was broken or that I needed those children’s presence and approval far more than they needed mine. Annie and I had moved to this neighborhood only a few years before in a hopeless attempt to escape the calamitous stress that befell our marriage after my son’s abduction, disappearance, whatever it was.
Mrs. Scott is a sturdy old gal, in her sixties, with iron-gray hair and a perpetual scowl. She wore a flowered silk dress and patent leather pumps and a string of pearls. A little pathetic, I guess you could say.
I looked around on the off chance Mrs. Scott’s husband was outside today and saw that he was not. The old man was a retired military person, almost a hermit, certainly an oddball. Even at his age, probably in his early seventies, he always wore army fatigues, camouflage, and often ammunition belts and a canteen or gas mask case suspended from a utility belt. The neighborhood children called him Combat. Though he could occasionally be spotted in the yard or in the shadows of the large wraparound front porch, he was most often seen at the strange one-woman plays that Mrs. Scott wrote and performed in her home. Combat was always there in attendance, always in uniform, pleasant as he could be, in an out-of-his-fucking-mind sort of way.
On irregular occasions, whenever the spirit moved her I suppose, Mrs. Scott would gather the neighborhood children into her home, out of the park, off the playground, away from the lemonade stands or kick-the-can games, and require them to watch her perform one of a series of original plays called “Would You Shut Up, Please.”
She was the author of many different one-act plays but all with the same title. Because the children knew that I worked at home, they would often stop by my house and invite me to attend the plays with them. The parents felt safe letting their children roam more or less freely, so long as I was there to accompany them. People had not yet noticed that I was on the verge of a breakdown myself, so we all still felt complicit in the belief that the Scotts were the only lunatics in the neighborhood.
I had grown up in the South, where eccentricity was a virtual art form, and as I encountered little enough of it here in the bucolic northern neighborhood of my middle years, I welcomed each opportunity to visit in the Scott’s home, if for no other reason than to revisit, nostalgically anyway, the memories of my youth. I hadn’t considered that I might simply be seeking out people of my own kind.
What these parents did not know, and what I see now I should have taken more seriously, was that Mr. Scott, Combat, had a vast collection of military weaponry in his house. The walls were lined with glass cabinets filled with guns—heavy old World War I Springfield rifles, bolt-action 30:06s, Korean vintage M-1s, Browning Automatic rifles, British Enfield 303s, some rifles of Russian and Chinese make as well. Live ammunition was laid everywhere about, boxes of steel-jacketed machine gun rounds, candy dishes filled with brass-cased bullets of many calibers. Here and there lay rocket launchers, hand grenades, German Lugers, and God knows what else. It was like going into a war museum, except that presumably some of these weapons could actually still be fired.
In any case, Mrs. Scott’s plays each had the same name and the same approximate dialogue, though each play was different, with different characters and setting and situation. Mrs. Scott played all the parts of these dramas, male and female, adult and child—in good weather out on her screened porch, in inclement weather upstairs in a room she called the Theater—while the children and I sat in folding chairs and watched. Only a week earlier, the previous Saturday, the children and I were invited in for the “premiere” of a new play—this is the way Mrs. Scott described it. As always, the play contained a line of dialogue that was repeated many times—“Would you shut up, please”—spoken in many voices and accents and with varieties of tone and modulation. There was other dialogue, and always a bare-bones plot of sorts, but this single repeated line was spoken at intervals throughout each play.
All of this was nutty enough, but the gunshot was another matter, if a gunshot was indeed what I had heard. Eccentrics are not so well tolerated in Pittsburgh as in the South—or so I had believed until this day—and momentarily I wondered whether someone had shot at Mrs. Scott, or at least shot to frighten her. I feared that someone had decided this oddball needed to be taught a lesson. I can’t say I knew Mrs. Scott well, but I never would have wanted her to be hurt or to be the victim of violent harassment.
I looked hard at the woman standing in her driveway across the street. In one hand she held a broom, and in the other a large plastic trash bag. She was working clumsily at some task, I couldn’t tell exactly what. She seemed to be trying to shove something with the broom into the trash bag.
I called across the road to her, “Mrs. Scott, are you all right?” That’s a silly question, I know, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
My voice seemed to startle her, and when she heard me she looked quickly back over her shoulder in my direction. I repeated my question: “Are you all right?”
She said, �
��This cat. This big orange cat—it just fell off my wall.”
She meant the low wall that separated her yard from the driveway. I looked at a large orange shape at her feet on the pavement and saw that it was indeed a cat, a huge dead cat, from all appearances.
This little cul-de-sac of a neighborhood was locally famous for its population of feral cats. Some people fed them; I myself once fixed up a box in the garage where one might sleep on a winter night. There is nothing so sad as a stray cat during a Pittsburgh winter. I had called animal control countless times, but nothing ever really got done. The driveway wall was no more than four feet high, so I knew that the cat had not slipped and fallen to its death from this low perch. The sound of the rifle shot was still in my head of course. Could there be any question? The cat had been shot; of this I was certain.
I said, “Wait a minute. I’ll be over.”
I went around back to the tool shed and pulled a shovel down from a hook on the wall and walked across the road to help Mrs. Scott. I kept looking up and down the road for whatever clues might be there, or at least some idea of where the shooter might have stood or behind what bush he might have hidden to make this shot. I saw nothing.
The cat was no great loss to the world, for all the cruelty of the person who might do such a thing. At least it wouldn’t freeze or starve this winter. But the sight of the cat, when I finally reached the other side of the road, was far more shocking than I had expected. I had not expected so much blood. There was a gallon of blood, it seemed to me, my God, really more blood than you could possibly imagine coming from a twenty-pound animal. It was awful, really, dark and thick and gory. I can hardly express how awful it was, how real and personal death seemed to me in that moment, not just a lifeless animal looking like it might be asleep but an animal split wide open by a bullet and hideously, shockingly dead. I won’t even try to describe the open mouth, the teeth and tongue. My God, what a scene, there in the driveway. Mrs. Scott had blood on her good shoes, and on her stockings, and there was blood on the tips of the broom’s straw head. I saw for the first time how frail and vulnerable she was, indeed how vulnerable we all are.
I thought of my missing son. Had someone tracked through his blood in their shoes? Had someone noticed his teeth and tongue, the teeth he had braces put on while I waited in the orthodontist’s waiting room. I saw how desperately Mrs. Scott held on to, well, to something, I’m not sure what, sanity maybe, a reason to go on living. I felt myself lose a grip on something too, I could not know or admit what, just then. I regretted having thought of her as a mere eccentric, put on earth for my amusement—for this was the way I had viewed both Mrs. Scott and her husband, poor mad old Combat.
I said again, “Are you all right? Would you like to go inside?”
She didn’t answer at first. She seemed stunned, a little pale, but when I started to try to scoop the big cat into the shovel blade, she did manage to say, “I’m all right.” She picked up the big garbage bag again and opened the top for me to put the cat inside. She seemed all the more vulnerable and sad, wearing those bloody pumps and her pearls. Up close, I could see that she wore an excess of face powder, and that it showed on the collar of her dress.
I rammed the shovel blade up under the heavy cat a couple of times before I finally got it secure enough on the shovel to pick it up. It was even heavier than I had thought it would be, and it was half falling out of the shovel as I lifted it. I was relieved and maybe even a little faint when I finally got the dead animal into the plastic trash bag that Mrs. Scott held open for me. I looked at her and could tell nothing from her expression except that she was no closer to fainting than I was. She was holding up remarkably well, in fact, better than me. The blood on the driveway seemed even more obvious and horrible and voluminous once the cat had been removed.
I said, “What on earth happened, Mrs. Scott?”
The thought was inescapable, that Mrs. Scott’s poor old demented husband Combat had done this. I had known, as I said, that he collected guns, but it had never occurred to me that he might turn violent, that Mrs. Scott or any of us neighbors might be in danger. What if one of the neighborhood children had been standing out here? And might not the weapon have easily been turned on Mrs. Scott herself, either accidentally or on purpose?
Mrs. Scott surprised me by saying, “There are so many of these stray cats.”
I said, “Well, yes, but—”
It was clear to me that the conversation was over. It was also pretty clear that Mrs. Scott was protecting Combat, her husband, and that the strange plays and children’s visits would have to come to an end.
I did manage to say, “Where were you when you saw the cat fall off the wall?”
Mrs. Scott tied the top of the plastic bag in a double knot. She said, “I was watching from my bedroom window.”
She indicated an open window on the second floor of her home. I imagined Combat standing there at the window like a sniper and drawing a bead on the cat. “I had just finished a read-through of a new play. My husband was helping with some revisions.”
I said, “Mrs. Scott, what has happened is very dangerous. Very serious.”
She said, “Thank you. You were most helpful, and I want you to know I appreciate your concern.” She hefted the bag over her shoulder and headed up the driveway to her back gate. She said, “Don’t you worry, I’ll hose down this driveway and dispose of the cat.”
WHEN I GOT back inside my house I couldn’t rest. I paced the floor. I looked out the front screen door and watched Mrs. Scott hose the blood off her driveway. I felt as though I was watching someone dispose of evidence. I called Annie’s office, though I knew I wouldn’t reach her; she was in session with clients all afternoon. When the voice mail answered, I hung up. Combat had finally lost it, that’s what I kept telling myself. He was already out of his mind, and had been since Korea, but now he was dangerous. He had shot a rifle in the neighborhood and put all our lives at risk. Something had to be done. I mean, didn’t it? Shouldn’t I do something?
I decided to call the cops. The 911 operator said, “State your emergency, please.” I explained as best I could, completely and succinctly, that my neighbor had shot a stray cat in our neighborhood. I said it was a small quiet neighborhood, with children. I was concerned, I said. Somebody could have been injured. I went through the chronology of the events. I said that Mr. Scott suffered from some kind of shell shock or combat fatigue or whatever it was called, post-traumatic stress maybe. I said he owned guns. I said I thought he had killed the cat and that she was protecting him.
The 911 operator said, “So somebody shot your cat?”
I said, “Well, not my cat. A cat. A stray cat.”
“The cat didn’t belong to you?”
“No.”
“Whose cat was it?”
“The cat was a stray cat. Forget the cat. The cat is not—”
“So you’re just reporting somebody shot a stray cat.”
I said, “The point is, somebody shot a rifle in this neighborhood. Somebody could have been killed.”
“Whoa! Somebody was killed?”
“Nobody was killed, for heaven’s sake. A cat was killed.”
“And this cat—”
“Forget the fucking cat. I don’t give a fuck about the fucking cat.”
“Are you canceling your emergency, sir?”
“How can you cancel an emergency? An emergency is an emergency. You can’t just cancel it. No, of course not. I’m saying the emergency is not the death of a cat. The emergency is that somebody shot a rifle in this neighborhood and—” I started to say, “And could have killed somebody,” but I didn’t want to get back into that discussion. I said, “Could you send an officer out right away, please.”
She said, “To check on this stray cat.”
I said, “Yes.”
EVENTUALLY, A CRUISER showed up in front of my house and the officer came to the door and said, “You the bloke with the dead cat?” He was a tiny, beady-eyed
little guy in what might have been a child’s policeman costume. He spoke in what might have been a British accent of some kind.
I said, “I called in a report, yes.”
He was looking at a note pad. He said, “Somebody shot your bleeding cat, is that the story you’re telling?”
I said, “It wasn’t my cat. Can you forget the fucking cat, for God’s sake? I’d shoot the fucking cat myself if it wasn’t against the fucking law.”
The little officer took a couple of steps back. He said, “Calm down, mate, calm down. There’s no need to go shooting anybody.”
I took a couple of deep breaths and went through the whole story again.
When I finished with my story the officer said, “The husband didn’t shoot the cat.” He seemed very pleased with himself. “Not a bit of it. The old lady—she’s the one what done it. She’s the bird what shot your cat.”
I said, “Were you listening to me? The husband is a crackpot. He wears camouflage and keeps guns. He’s obsessed with military equipment. The neighborhood kids call him Combat. Mrs. Scott wouldn’t shoot a cat; she’s a nice old lady. She hears voices maybe, I don’t know, but she would never do a thing like that. She gives plays for the neighborhood children.”
There was a pause. “Does she now?” he finally said. “Are any of the plays about your cat?”
I said, “No, of course not. Nothing like that.”
It is hard to explain with what suddenness I felt overwhelmed by emotions of many kinds. I remembered going rabbit hunting with a friend when I was a boy in Mississippi; maybe I was fourteen years old. The same age as my son when he went missing. My own son never went hunting. I was through with guns by then, though I had held on to a small .22 pistol of my father’s for sentimental reasons. I hadn’t seen it in years. Anyway, on that rabbit hunt, a flash of fur appeared suddenly out of a brush pile in a field that was being cleared and I raised the little single-shot Winchester .410 and cut the animal in half, I was so close. It was not a rabbit at all, it turned out, but a big cat. I had forgotten about that cat until this minute. I had felt responsible then and suddenly I felt responsible now—for that poor beast all those years ago and for the cat in Mrs. Scott’s driveway. I thought of my son who had vanished years before. I had imagined many deaths for him, and worse. I was reeling with strong feelings and dizzy with the voices of blame inside my head. I felt completely incapable of predicting even minutes into the future. I might do anything. In this moment my whole inner life was chaos.
