Bruno shrugged. “I told them what I knew.”
Captain Buck scratched the back of his head. “Are you sure?” He smiled. “People do remember things later.”
“Yes,” Bruno said. “I mean I told everything I knew, and I haven’t recalled anything since.”
The captain looked at him and knew a wall when he saw one, if not a dead end. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Thanks for your time. Sorry to wake you up.” He gave the living room a good look, then went to the door.
“By the way,” he continued, turning back to Bruno, “the super said there was some shouting here last night. A woman. Did you have a visitor?”
Bruno shrugged. “Not that I know of.”
“You were asleep?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t hear a thing?”
“I sleep deep,” Bruno said, “but maybe I cried out.”
He would not have to pocket the captain; that would only bring around another busybody. Best to let it go.
“Thanks,” said the captain.
Worthier enemies awaited, Bruno thought as he closed the door. He didn’t need any new foes. He remembered when as a small boy he had killed wasps above his grandmother’s patio, where they had been building nests in the overhang. He had swatted them one by one as they came and went for weeks on end, killing some, chasing others away; and one day there were no more; the swarm had gotten the message and had left the danger zone—and all without his using any chemicals. He had been proud of not using harmful poisons. After all, he was not a killer. Killing had to have reasons behind it to make it more than official murder, whether of insects or human beings, or even cats and dogs. He felt good about sparing the three policemen. Power required prudent use.
Bruno kept expecting new communications from Felix, even though Cecil Banes was no longer around to send them. It just seemed to Bruno that Felix was not quite done with him. Their collaboration, though it had been just about perfect in every expected way, still seemed insufficient because it had so imperfectly convinced him to give up the revenge he had so wanted to have on his old rival. But wishes traditionally came wrapped with conditions, so he had increasingly accepted the fact that the skill had been given to him with a price, and a reasonable one at that, soberly considered; merely an annoying one.
Other enemies waited, tyrannizing whole continents of his mind, requiring regime changes as soon as possible. Yet Bruno feared to come to the end of his enemies, because that would force him to face the unfinished business of the now forever unreachable Felix, irritatingly safe on the far side of death. Even though he was rotting in his grave, Felix held Bruno close with the squirrel cage of temptations that he had bequeathed to the victim of his youth.
Bruno sometimes doubted that Felix was dead, despite all official notices. Would digging up a body quiet that doubt? Felix had been officially cremated, and Bruno had not been asked to the funeral service.
Maybe it was time to see June, Bruno thought. He had avoided thinking about his lost wife after Felix’s death, consoling himself with how much she had probably suffered over Felix’s infidelities and divorces these last three decades. That and the lost vanities of age would have tormented her more than enough. In fact, one might say that Felix had left both of them well fixed. One might even say that it had been a kind of reparation, if one added in his dying. As Bruno thought about June now, he compared past and present states, his own and hers, his past feelings with what should have been their continuing, unstifled pain, and was startled suddenly; his feelings seemed to belong to someone else.
Curiosity rather than immediate revenge now led Bruno to the decision to go see June. He went for a long walk in the park, trying to bring back his feelings about her. She had been disloyal to him right from the start of their marriage. Felix and he had long since parted company, but it was clear from later events that she had started seeing him soon after reading about him in the paper.
Quite simply, she had gone to Felix, told him that she was friends with his old college buddy Bruno, and soon after had served her husband of six weeks with annulment papers from Felix’s powerhouse attorneys. Bruno Willey had been only a steppingstone to Felix Lytton. Bruno had not contested his abandonment. There was nothing to divide except his tears, which he should have had bottled and sent to her. There had been so little time, so little between them to remember...
Bruno remembered her picture in the paper, announcing their marriage. Other marriage notices ran pictures of the man and the woman; but June had gone for the traditional woman alone. This had always struck Bruno as silly, suggesting parthenogenetic reproduction without need of a male.
A wall had always stood between him and his past feelings about Felix and June, built, he realized, by his pride.
“What’s the sexually most important part of a woman?” Felix had said just before June had gone to him.
“I’m sure you’ll tell me,” Bruno recalled saying, foolishly happy with his bride.
“The face,” Felix had said.
“The face?”
“The look in her face when she tells you she wants you, that she’s accepted that it’s going to happen.”
“No matter how she looks?” Bruno had asked with a laugh.
“Doesn’t matter, my friend. If she wants you, you’re a goner. It’s the enthusiasm in their faces that gets you, when that previous dubious look turns into acceptance. Even the great beauties can’t match that if they’re cold inside.”
Had June given Felix that look as he swam inside her? Bruno had no memory of it for himself from their private moments. Her cold beauty had been enough for him.
Bruno stopped, looked around the darkened park and took a deep breath of the fresh night air. There was no way to change the past; even doing something in the hope of redress would not change it; it would only add more past to the fleeing present. He hung there, in a moment that seemed to have stopped, thinking that he was about to learn something new, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“Use it or lose it,” Felix had told him about the skill. “That’s all there is to it. It will die if you neglect it. Believe me, I was close to losing it. Be afraid of losing it.”
Bruno remembered how Felix had allowed him to hang around with him in college. Felix knew things and people, and Bruno had told himself that he might benefit from being around with him. Felix might hand him something one day. But Felix had always taken away, humiliating him. “Bruno—what are you doing here?” he had demanded of him one day. “Did I send you an invite to this party?” Felix had laughed at him. “Can’t you see there’s no girl here that would want you?” he had shouted at him, even though he had been invited—to be humiliated, of course.
Well, Felix had finally given him something.
“Your money, man,” a voice said from behind him. “Don’t look around, just drop the fuckin’ wallet and keep on going.”
Confidence rushed up out of Bruno, cold and pure and controlled. He reached with a steady hand into his back pocket, took out his wallet and whirled around to face the mugger.
A young man stood before him, empty handed.
Bruno put away his wallet and opened a pocket between them, two feet high; then, as the man tried to make sense of what he was seeing, Bruno came around quickly and grabbed him by his neck.
“Shit!” cried the young man.
With strength that surprised him, Bruno shoved him down into the darkness like a bag of leaves into an incinerator.
“I can’t see!” came a cry from the fading pit.
“Teach you to bluff!” Bruno shouted, happy with the ease of his own action.
“Hey there—stop!” a male voice called to him as the pocket faded away.
He turned his head and saw a dark figure pass under one of the park lights. A policeman hurried toward him.
Bruno took a deep breath.
“I heard shouts,” said the cop.
Bruno said, “So did I. Somewhere up ahead there.”
The cop looked at
him with suspicion. “Show me some ID.”
Bruno reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and opened it to his driver’s license. The cop took the wallet, squinted at the document, handed it back, then said, “I could swear you weren’t alone as I came up. There was something at your feet there.” He looked down, then tried to peer around Bruno.
“I’m quite alone,” Bruno said, stepping to one side.
The cop tensed, then looked directly at him. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking a walk,” Bruno said.
“At two in the morning?”
“That late? I’d better get home.”
“I dunno,” the cop said suddenly. “Maybe I’d better take you in and check you out.”
On what charge, Bruno wanted to say. But it wouldn’t amount to much, Bruno’s rational self told him, since they had nothing on him, not even a traffic ticket.
“Come on, buddy,” the cop said.
“You’re wasting my time and yours,” Bruno said softly.
“Better safe than sorry,” said the cop, turning away. “Come along, now.”
Bruno followed him. As the cop glanced back, Bruno opened a pocket ahead of him, and the cop walked into it.
“Ahh!” cried the officer and tumbled over. Bruno grabbed his legs and finished the job. There was just no way the cop could have expected anything to appear in front of him. Felix had taught him well in the ways of misdirection.
“Remember,” Felix had said several times, “that all you really have is a way to dispose of bodies. You must never be seen doing it. Distraction must become your art. Practice it well.”
As Bruno walked home, he imagined the officer feeling his way around in the pocket, uncomprehending of what had happened to him.
Bruno slept well that day, and was ready to face June that evening.
“Bruno!” June cried out in her usual musical way, unchanged by the decades. “How nice of you to come by.” He almost expected Felix to come up grinning behind her, as if all their lives had been a practical joke and it was now time to have a good laugh about it.
He had driven to the estate without calling first, expecting to perhaps be turned away by the servants; but the main gate had been open, so he had gone in and parked by the front entrance to the great house left to her by Felix after their divorce.
She had come to the door alone, dressed in elegant black pants and a white blouse that went well with her graying shoulder-length hair. Her curves, padded or not, seemed intact and attractive; her throat was pale and vulnerable, young from the work done on it.
“Come in, come in,” she sang with the same voice that had once beguiled him. There was no fear or suspicion in her face. Had she somehow expected him—or just didn’t remember?
Bruno stepped inside, wondering how long his hatred, which still seemed to belong to someone else, would obey him.
A man came up behind her, and Bruno tensed at the impossible sight of Felix’s face.
He closed his eyes and felt dizzy. Felix had set a trap for him.
Bruno opened his eyes—
—and a closer look revealed someone else.
“Are you unwell?” the man asked.
“Yes—yes, I’m fine,” Bruno said, annoyed by his mistake.
“This is Henry,” June said, seemingly oblivious to his distress. “Felix’s first cousin.”
“We’ve never met, have we?” Henry asked as he stepped forward and offered his hand.
“Henry and I are engaged,” June sang.
She had never been a woman to remain alone, Bruno’s distant self thought bitterly as he shook hands with the man.
The whole evening was sickly sweet. June served tea and pie, and lamented Felix’s departure from the good life they had enjoyed together. She made no mention of his other wives. Henry grinned, oddly caricaturing Felix’s face, and Bruno imagined that his old enemy was mocking him from the grave.
But he is gone, Bruno told himself. At least I know that for a fact now.
As they sat in the over-decorated, over-upholstered living room of bright, flowery patterns and light blue walls that seemed like vertical skies, June smiled at Bruno as if she thought him a hapless idiot for having let her go to Felix, and he felt contempt for the effectiveness of the come hither look that she now bestowed on Henry. Bruno gazed directly at her once or twice, and saw a stranger. There was no spark in her eyes, no warmth at all, only the discipline of correct behavior gazing back at him—the punishment meted out to the loser. How easily he could reach out, Bruno thought, and change it all.
“Well!” June exclaimed as he was leaving. “Now we’ve broken the ice.”
Careful you don’t fall through it and drown, Bruno thought as he went out, hating June with his other self, into the night. Halfway to his car, his distant self seemed to be weeping over his losses, baffling him with its uncontrollable weakness.
“Come back soon!” Henry called after him.
At his car he looked back, lost to himself, and saw them standing in the open doorway like two plastic dolls, frozen in their farewell.
During the next week, Bruno imagined that he was running out of enemies, and not getting to the right ones. They were all out of air in the pockets he had filled, unbreathing by now in their claustrophobic bits of infolding darkness, rotting as they drifted somewhere in the cosmic scheme of things that now served him only grudgingly.
One day soon, he told himself, I might get free of the past’s wrongs, and even be able to afford becoming what might be called a good man. It was a state to ponder, as he considered a world where people had no control over themselves as slaves to unchosen impulses. The practice of pocketing had perhaps brought him too much control of himself, making him hold back from what was truly possible. Felix had taught him to fear the loss of the skill, or its exposure, but these cautions always seemed to be hiding something.
Among potential candidates for justice who now came to mind, there was a portly, unwilling candidate for retirement who rarely filled the mailboxes in the apartment building before five, and often long after dark. It was well known that the mail carrier spent much of the day in the doughnut, deli, or fast food shops, neglecting his delivery route until the last hours of the workday. Bruno’s complaints, even with attached schedules of lost, late, rain soaked, or misdelivered mail, failed to move the carrier’s supervisors. Too many appeal procedures were open to a postal employee, and he did deserve his retirement, by the rules, after all. No one wanted to beat up on an old man who lived with his dying mother, even though he probably tore up select pieces of mail belonging to customers who complained, both outgoing and incoming. Sometimes his local bosses even lied for him by telling callers that they’d had no mail that day. The regime of intimidation enforced by the carrier was complete; nothing could be proved easily against him.
He just couldn’t afford to retire, he said. The pension would force him into what he regarded as poverty.
Bruno went down to the lobby and waited just inside the inner door. He peered through the glass and ironworks for fifteen minutes. Finally, as the evening lights went on, the fat postman opened the outer door, entered the marbled foyer, and struggled up the three steps to the shining wall of mailboxes. Bruno waited until he had unlocked the big access panel and deposited all the mail in the brass boxes.
“Good evening,” Bruno said as he opened the inner door and stepped into the foyer. The door clicked shut behind him.
The postman nodded, dropped his heavy bag with a sigh, then slowly closed the heavy brass panel and locked it with his key.
“I’ve got diabetes,” he said softly without looking at Bruno, as if he were continuing a conversation. Even when he was silent he seemed to be complaining.
“Sorry to hear it,” Bruno said, and opened a pocket at the bottom of the three steps.
The outer door rattled.
It had stuck.
The postman turned his head and saw the strangeness below him.
Bruno gave him a quick shove. The postman cried out and plunged head first into the pocket. His feet went up as his weight did most of the work, and he slid away down into the dark. Bruno grabbed the mailbag off the floor and tossed it in after him.
The front door rattled insistently. A pizza delivery boy burst in just as the pocket faded. He stopped. Bruno stared at him, recognizing his freckled face and badly chopped brown hair. The boy stood still, puzzled by what he had glimpsed.
“Is that for me?” Bruno asked to distract him.
“Uh, double pepperoni?” the boy asked.
“Right. How much?”
“Ten ninety-nine,” said the boy, handing the pizza up to him.
Bruno took out his wallet, dropped twelve dollars on top of the box, then took it with both hands as the boy swept up the bills.
“Thanks,” the boy said uneasily. “You’re in 3E, right?” he asked uncertainly, putting away the money.
“Right.” Bruno grimaced with indecision.
The boy looked up at him with suspicion, then smiled with an angelic charm.
“You okay, mister?” he asked.
Bruno nodded.
As the boy went out the door, Bruno put the hot pizza box down on the marble steps and went to his mailbox. He opened it with his key, took out the single envelope, and stared at it for a long time.
It was from June.
He tore it open and read the hand-printed block letters:
Dear Bruno—
You are invited to a pre-wedding ball next Thursday. Black tie. RSVP by phone voice-mail.
Then handwritten: Henry and I were delighted to see you the other evening. As time goes on, we must learn to treasure old friends. June
Bruno laughed, but his laughter was silenced by resentment at how she had probably revised the history of their enmities. Maybe she had completely forgotten.
He savored the aroma as he picked up the pizza box, let himself back in with his key, and took the elevator up to his apartment.
As he ate the pizza at the small table in his kitchen alcove, he realized what was wrong. He had been waiting too long, doing too much of Felix’s business, and had taken out his frustration on the postman. The pizza delivery boy would have been another useless exertion. And there was something suspiciously wrong with the way Felix had prattled about the loss of feeling to an iron self-control. What was the good of that? One might avoid getting caught, but at the cost of all satisfaction.
Black Pockets Page 29
