Toplin

by Michael McDowell

I had placed myself so that I might see the door to the street. I gazed continually at that entrance, at once hoping for and dreading Marta’s appearance. Marta did not come.

  I lingered over the last bit of stew and at last pushed my plate aside.

  I ordered strudel again, and it was brought me.

  I finished that, and still Marta did not come.

  In that time, the two old women had got up and left. The old men had each gotten up twice and entered the lavatory. The old Negress departed with her sandwich board and attaché case. A young man and his girl had come in, ordered, eaten, paid, and left. Other diners had come in and were ordering.

  Coffee was brought me. I let the cup sit in the saucer. I didn’t relish it, had no intention of drinking it, but wanted to wait for Marta.

  Marta did not come.

  It was time for me to leave so that I might reach Howard’s at the appropriate hour. I do not take any form of public transportation and haven’t since my brother’s accident. I walk everywhere.

  The waitress brought my bill. I paid for it, stood up, and placing a generous tip in her hand, asked casually but distinctly, “Where is Marta this evening?”

  The waitress dropped the change into the pocket of her apron.

  She replied with a smile: “Marta is in the kitchen.”

  She took up my untouched coffee. The cup slid awry in the saucer. Underneath, Marta’s blood boiled up with a noisome hiss.

  As I staggered out of the restaurant, I glanced toward the curtain that covered the entrance to the kitchen. It twitched. Marta was behind there.

  I left, not having seen her, but inwardly convinced of the rightness of my vow. All the others—Annie, Howard, the gang, the guardians, the vagrants who accosted me on the street—were cardboard foils. It was Marta alone who mattered. Perhaps Another was indeed trying to persuade me to kill her. That was a possibility, but it did not concern me. It was a superfluous coincidence. I alone was concerned in this. For her sake and mine alone, it had to be done. The pact was between the two of us. No one else entered into it.

  13

  So much was clear: I didn’t trust Howard Dormin. I’d hear what he had to say. I’d attend to his messages. I’d smile as he poured out his calculated confidences. But my mind was made up: Marta would die when and where and how it suited me.

  I would use Howard as Howard was attempting to use me.

  I followed the map that Howard left me. His neighborhood is nearby, contiguous to my own to the northeast. It is made up principally of red brick apartment buildings, constructed at the turn of the last century. I found Howard’s house without difficulty.

  The building was an anomaly: a square frame house, half a century earlier in date than the vast apartment houses that hemmed it in on three sides. Perhaps in that earlier time it had actually been a farm house, but its sloping meadows were now leveled concrete, its barns and sheds were crowded tenements, and its purling streams were black gutters brackish with the city’s tears. The house was of four stories, with a crumbling verandah. Its yellow paint was soot-stained, faded, and peeling. It was a sad frail house in a sturdy anonymous neighborhood. I took an instant and instinctive dislike to it.

  The wooden steps sagged as I mounted them.

  The trousers of Suit S-5 were ripped as I tripped over the barbed wire strung at the top. I had not seen it in the fading afternoon light.

  I twisted the bell and knocked loudly for good measure.

  Howard appeared at the door, holding a bottle of medicine—as if the verandah were my flat, and he had rung to make a delivery. He invited me inside, and I went inside.

  The hallway was wide and long, darkly papered, darkly carpeted, its length and breadth so crammed with furniture that we had to make several small turnings to get to the living room. I didn’t know why Howard took me there as it too was so filled with furniture that it was scarcely maneuverable, and all the chairs and sofas were stacked high with books or cartons or piles of linen. The lights wouldn’t work when Howard politely attempted to turn them on.

  On the far side of the room, on the carved marble mantel of the hearth, was a gilded French clock, resolutely ticking away the final hours of Marta’s unhappy life.

  The ostensible reason of my visit was to meet Howard’s grandfather. I saw no sign of the old man. In fact, I saw no sign of the house’s being anything but a vast lumber room of dereliction.

  Howard said, “Let’s go up to the top.”

  I followed him up. The staircase was thickly carpeted so that our steps were muffled. Balusters were loose or broken or missing altogether. As we passed the second floor, I glanced down the hallway. The window at the end was shuttered and curtained. I detected a slight scrabbling, very likely a rat frightened by our presence. I had no conviction that Howard lived in this place.

  We passed the third floor. That hallway was the same except that the window at the end of it was unshuttered and uncurtained. The panes were so grimy with dirt, however, that very little of the twilight penetrated.

  We climbed to the top. Here were but two rooms, dormered, connected by a wide double door. They were, in sharp contrast to the rest of the house, very brightly lighted and empty.

  In the first room were six full-sized cardboard cutouts of women, ectomorphs and endo­morphs only. Their faces bore no features but for wide leering mouths painted in red lipstick, so thickly and recently applied I could smell it from across the room. Also, along one wall were stacked cages containing small live animals: rabbits in all the cages at the bottom of the wired pyramid, squirrels in the second tier, and rats crowded into the few cages along the top. All the animals, it seemed to me, were frightened. They scrabbled and chattered, thumped and mewed, twisted and hissed.

  In the other room were two wooden crates and a handsomely carved glass-fronted cabinet. In the crates was ammunition, and guns filled the cabinet.

  “My shooting gallery,” said Howard with pride.

  I looked about idly for a moment, and then Howard began to show me his weapons, one by one, and talked of them in detail. He took from the cabinet revolvers and explained to me how they were loaded. He demonstrated how to hold a rifle so as not to be overturned by the recoil. He dropped boxes of ammunition into my hands to establish their surprising weight. We went into the other room and Howard exhibited his animals. He teased them with straws. He told me their names.

  “What do you do with them?” I asked.

  Howard grinned. He lifted one of the cages with the rats—there were five inside—and set it on the floor.

  I retreated through the double doors into the other room. Howard raised the door of the cage. When he backed away, one by one the rats sniffed the air, ventured out, and then fled for cover.

  In the empty room, however, there was no cover.

  The rats cowered in the darkest corners, and they sidled along the cages of the rabbits. Howard stood laughing in the doorway. He took a pistol from his pocket and fired it five times. The shots were loud and echoing. I placed my hands over my ears. One by one, in astonishingly quick succession, the rats jumped up into the air, quivering and cartwheeling. Then, pausing in midair to exhale their depraved rodent souls in minute puffs of oily smoke, they dropped dead onto the floorboards.

  The squirrels raced madly in their cages, the rabbits stood stock still and wept. Blood seeped out of the dead rats’ bodies. There were other stains on the floor, I noted.

  “You’re lucky to have a girl,” said Howard. He placed the barrel of the pistol to my nose and let me smell the burnt powder. I smiled faintly. The odor pleased me.

  It took me a moment to realize he spoke of Annie and not of Marta.

  “Annie thinks you’re good-looking,” I said in reply, making certain that the distinction was clear in his mind as well.

  “What does she know?” said Howard contemptuously. “She’s just a girl.”

  He turned smoothly and fired off the sixth bullet in the pistol. He caught one of the cardboard targets between
its painted lips. Its shape was Marta’s.

  “You’re lucky,” he said, “because you don’t have to pull your thing on the bathroom floor like a faggot.”

  He handed me the pistol.

  “Which sort of bullets does this one use?” I asked curiously.

  He went to the larger wooden crate, extracted a box of bullets, and showed me how it was loaded.

  “See?” he said.

  I nodded.

  He took up one of several brown paper bags stored along the side of the crate of ammunition and went into the other room. He lifted the dead rats by their tails and dropped them inside.

  He took his handkerchief out of his pocket and dropped it on the floor. Still carrying the brown paper bag in his crossed arms, he wiped up the blood using the toe of his boot as a propellant.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and disappeared down the stairs with the dead rats.

  I was meant to take the pistol. That much was clear.

  I put the gun into my pocket, then thought better of it. I took the gun out of my pocket, laid it on the floor, and then kicked it beneath the cabinet.

  Marta’s death was between Marta and me. I wouldn’t allow Howard Dormin to direct the means.

  He came up to the top floor a little while later, bearing a bowl of greens for the rabbits and a bowl of nuts for the squirrels. He seemed to take considerable delight in feeding these animals and called them all manner of pet names during the process. The rats remaining alive got nothing at all. “Makes them run around faster when you let them out,” he explained. “I always kill the rats first.”

  I wondered aloud if the noise of Howard’s shooting gallery didn’t bother his grand­father downstairs.

  Howard shook his head. “No sir,” he said. “Not one bit.”

  The rats’ blood, still damp on the floors, began to stink, and I had grown weary of examining the bullet holes in the plaster walls and the timbered roof.

  Howard said, “I’ll show you my room.”

  Gratefully, I followed him downstairs to the third floor. It was dark out now. The round window at the end of the hallway might as well have been shuttered and curtained for all the light that came through it.

  “Don’t your neighbors hear?” I asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “The shots upstairs,” I said.

  Howard paused with his hand on the knob of the door of his room. He looked at me and grinned. “Nobody can’t hear nothing,” he said in emphatic triple negative. “Not with that pistol. No sir.”

  He turned the knob and opened the door. He flicked on the switch. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that the only light in the room was fixed on one wall no more than a couple of feet from the floor.

  Howard ducked and proceeded into the room. I then saw why.

  At head-height, all across the room, was strung clothesline, like the web of a deranged spider. And depending from what must have been hundreds of wooden clothespins were plastic bags containing Howard’s belongings: his knives, his underwear, his scissors and picks, his kerchiefs, his socks, and his salves.

  “Over here,” said Howard, calling to me through the hanging forest of plastic-encased belongings.

  I stooped and crept under, following his voice.

  There was his bed: no more than two blankets and a pillow laid directly on the hard wooden floor. Howard sat cross-legged on the blankets and playfully slapped at a couple of the plastic bags that hung directly over his head. He pointed out a chair to me.

  It was a regular carved oak chair, but the legs had been sawed off and now the seat rested directly on the floor. I arranged myself in it as comfortably as circumstance permitted.

  “Did you like that pistol?” he asked with a leer. “Did you get off on it?”

  His phrase repelled me.

  “No,” I replied, not certain why I told the truth.

  Howard’s face fell. “You don’t like to shoot things? You don’t like to make holes where there weren’t holes before and stick pistols in holes that are already there and make them even bigger and blacker than they were formerly?”

  “Sometimes,” I equivocated. “But not today.”

  Howard sighed and looked around. He peered up at the window behind him.

  Just beyond the window was the brick face of an apartment building. It couldn’t have been more than three or four feet distant. A portion of a lighted window was visible.

  Howard yanked the cord of the only lighted lamp in the room from its socket. From that moment on we were lighted only by the illumination from that window in the building behind.

  “Old lady lives there,” said Howard, with disgust. “Red lips, red red lips and white powder on her cheeks. I show her my thing. I press it against the window. See?”

  He slid his finger down a trail of white slime on the grimy glass of the single window of his room.

  “She sees me,” said Howard. “Opens her mouth and I want to stick something in it.” From the pocket of his trousers he took a piece of metal. He pressed a kind of button on it, and a long thin sharp blade slid rapidly out of the end of it. He waved it in the air before me. “I want to nail her tongue to the table,” he went on dreamily, raising his hand and lowering it, as if he held a hammer. “And mince it. Mince it,” he repeated happily, energetically performing that action with his very real knife against the floor. The attack left a precise cross-hatching. He slipped the blade back into its sheath and tossed it to me. It dropped with a clatter on the floor between us. I did not pick it up.

  I watched the window for sign of the old woman and her red mouth, but that evening, perhaps, she had chosen not to appear.

  Howard, after inveighing at considerable length against this neighbor, seemed to recover his purposeful conviviality. He no longer spoke of the pistol with which he had put paid to the five rats and the cardboard cutout. He ignored the knife that still lay on the floor between us.

  He talked of his past.

  He had been thrown out of high school for some misdemeanor. He wasn’t specific as to its nature. I imagined it to be quite small, in fact, and it was the lightness of his crime that prompted his silence, not its magnitude or perversity. It pleased Howard to appear in the most lurid light possible, I felt.

  He said, for instance, “This building, you know, around the corner, full of cows. Cows with these red mouths and long black throats, bleating at me out their window, calling, Howard, Howard, come up and kiss me!” He imitated the song of the old women in a high, wheedling, nasal voice. He seemed pleased with the effect and repeated it. He grinned: “Man gave me ten and said, Do it. So I did it.”

  “Did what?” I asked.

  “Lit it. Torched it. Boiled it. Broiled it. Burned it down.”

  “For just ten?” I asked incredulously.

  “It was what I wanted,” he said quietly. His voice, his manner of speech, his very diction altered as he recalled: “I stood there. I watched. I said hello to the firemen. I heard the old cows’ bleating. Save me Howard save me Howard bring me medicine for my burns. I saw them standing in their windows. Save me Howard save me Howard. I saw their hair catch fire and burn like matchstick flame.”

  He explained to me the best manner for torching a piece of residential property. He took from his pocket a key and held it up over his head so that it shone in the light from the next apartment. That key, he claimed, would open the basement door of any apartment building in the city. He pointed into a dim corner of his room, and I barely discerned there a large can with a metal pouring spout. It was filled with kerosene, Howard said, and poured over any pile of trash—as might be found in the basement of any apartment building in the city—would serve as ignition for a powerful conflagration.

  He got up and left the room, carefully setting the skeleton key on the floor halfway between my chair and the canister of kerosene.

  In Howard’s absence I remained seated in the amputated chair. I left the key where it lay. I did not go near the can of kerosene.

&n
bsp; When Howard returned, he saw the key still upon the floor, and in a moment of uncontrollable anger, he kicked it into the corner.

  He had brought with him into the room a small alarm clock. He sat back down on his blankets and furiously wound the clock.

  “Ten thousand doors into Hell,” he murmured. “And they all swing both ways.”

  He set the clock on the floor between us. Its luminous face glowed faintly. It ticked away the seconds of our lives.

  I had not yet been convinced, in my hour or so in Howard’s company in this appointed place, that this was indeed Howard’s house. It might merely have been a location, searched out, secured, and prepared for our meeting by Another who controlled Howard’s actions and sought to control mine. Howard was a good shot, so much was undeniably true—rats cannot be taught to play dead and bleed on cue. But he might have trained elsewhere than on the shooting range at the top of the house. These plastic bags hanging from wooden clothespins on strung line in his room might contain his underwear and his small weapons, but they need not necessarily have hung there for long. I kept my eyes open for some incontestable sign that this was genuinely Howard’s place of residence. In the room ostensibly his, I could find none.

  I asked the location of the bathroom. Perhaps I would find something there, I con­jectured, or on the way there or on the way back from there.

  Howard described the path I should take.

  I went out of Howard’s room and down to the end of the hall. I quietly opened a couple of doors on the way, feigning confusion. Each of the rooms was a large square airy chamber, empty and dusty, eerily lighted by the proximity of fixtures in the apart­ments of the next building.

  I went into the bathroom. I needn’t turn on the light. Not more than a meter or so outside the bathroom was a red brick wall and the lower portion of someone’s kitchen window. Even through the glass I could smell pungent Indian spices. On a counter I counted three pale melons. That kitchen lighted Howard’s bathroom.

  I did not relieve myself. I’ve total control over my bladder and my guts. Instead, I immediately opened the medicine cabinet. That, I told myself, would give some sort of evidence, though indicative of what I hadn’t any idea.