The Fiend

by Margaret Millar

  “—four o’clock in the morning, man, she’ll have a fit,” Jes­sie’s brother said. “She’s always grouching about me waking everybody up too early when I go fishing.”

  “We could all stay at my house overnight. My folks sleep like they’re in a coma.”

  “Good thinking, man. I’ll just check in at the house and check right out again.”

  “Maybe we should leave even earlier than four. We’ll catch the fish before they’ve got their eyes open—”

  The boys passed out of earshot. Cautiously, Charlie raised his head. The snatch of conversation he’d overheard worried him. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that Jessie had told her brother about him and the brother had told his two friends and the three of them were taunting him: he was the fish who would be caught before he opened his eyes. They had found out from some secret source that he always woke up at four o’clock in the morning. Or was it five? Or six?

  The ordinary facts of his existence were all crowding together in one part of his mind and trampling each other like frightened horses in the corner of a corral. Some died, some were mutilated beyond recognition, some emerged as strange, unidentifiable hy­brids. Four and five and six were all squashed together; he didn’t know what time it was now or what time he woke in the morn­ing. The setting sun could have been a rising moon or the re­flected glow of a fire or a lighted spaceship about to land. Jessie and her brother merged into a single figure, a half-grown boy-girl. Louise and Ben had faces but they wouldn’t let him see; they kept their backs to him because he’d done something they didn’t like. He couldn’t remember what it was he’d done but it must have been terrible, their backs were rigid with disapproval and Louise had deliberately let her hair grow long and braided it around her head the way his mother used to. He hated it. He wanted to take a pair of scissors and cut it off. But the scissors wasn’t in the kitchen drawer where it was always kept, and the drawer had lost its handle. It didn’t even open like a drawer. It sprung out when he pushed a little silver button, like the glove compartment in a car.

  Glove compartment. Car. He blinked his eyes painfully, as though he were emerging from a long and dreadful sleep. The sun was beginning to set. It was a quarter to seven by his watch. Three boys were walking up the street. He followed them.

  Ralph MacPherson worked at the office until nearly seven o’clock. He felt too weary to contact Kate again but he could picture her waiting at the telephone for his call, getting herself more and more worked up, and he knew he couldn’t postpone it any longer.

  She answered before the second ring, in the guarded half-disguised voice she always used before he identified himself.

  “Hello.”

  “Kate, this is Mac.”

  “Have you found anything out about Gowen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well? Was I right? He’s some bum Sheridan picked up in a bar and hired to do his dirty work for him.”

  “I hardly think so,” Mac said as patiently as he could. “I went over to Miria Street this afternoon and dropped in at a drugstore around the corner from Gowen’s house. I pretended I’d lost the address. Not very subtle, perhaps, but it worked. The druggist knows the Gowen family, they’ve been his customers for years. It didn’t take much to start him talking. Business was slow.”

  She made an impatient sound. “Well, what did he say?”

  “Charles Gowen lives with his brother Ben. Ben manages a downtown cafeteria, Charles has a job with a paper company. They’re both hard-working and clean-living. They don’t smoke or drink, they pay their bills on time, they mind their own busi­ness. There’s a neighborhood rumor that Charles is going to marry one of the local librarians, a very nice woman who is also hard-working and clean-living, etcetera, etcetera. In brief, Gowen’s not our man.”

  “But he must be,” she said incredulously. “He ran away from me. He acted guilty.”

  “It’s possible that you scared the daylights out of him. He may not be used to strange women chasing him around town. Not many of us are. Make me a promise, will you, Kate?”

  “What is it?”

  “That you’ll stop thinking about Sheridan’s machinations just for tonight and get yourself a decent rest.”

  She didn’t argue with him but she didn’t promise either. She simply said she was sorry to have bothered him and hung up.

  Parked half a block away, Charlie watched the three boys turn in the driveway of a house on Cielito Lane. Only a differ­ence in planting and a ribbon of smoke rising from a backyard barbecue pit distinguished it from its neighbors, but to Charlie it was a very special house.

  He drove past slowly. The mailbox had a name on it: David E. Brant.

  (16)

  It was Howard Arlington’s last night in the city for two weeks and he and Virginia had been invited to a farewell barbecue in the Brants’ patio. They didn’t want to go but neither of them indicated this in any way. Ever since their unpleasant scene the previous night, they’d been excessively polite to each other, to Dave and Ellen and Jessie, even to the gardener and the clean­ing woman. It was as if they were trying to convince everyone, including themselves, that they were not the kind of people who staged domestic brawls—not they.

  This new formal politeness affected not only their speech and actions but their style of dress. They both knew that Ellen and Dave would be in jeans and sneakers, but Howard had put on a dark business suit, white shirt and a tie, and Virginia wore a pink-flowered silk dress with a stole and matching high-heeled sandals. They looked as though they were going out to dinner and a symphony instead of to the neighbors’ backyard for ham­burgers and hi-fi, both of which would be overdone.

  The hi-fi was already going and so was the fire. Smoke and violins drifted into the Arlingtons’ kitchen window. Normally, Howard would have slammed the window shut and made some caustic remark about tract houses. Tonight he merely said, “Dave’s sending out signals. What time does Ellen want us over there?”

  Virginia wasn’t sure Ellen wanted them over there at all but the invitation had been extended and accepted, there was noth­ing to be done about it. “Seven o’clock.”

  “It’s nearly that now. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps we’d better leave Chap in the house.”

  “Yes, perhaps we’d better.” Her voice gave no hint of the amused contempt she felt. The big retriever was already asleep on the davenport and it would have taken Howard a long time to wake him up, coax, bribe, push and pull him outside. Chap would not be mean about it, simply inert, immovable. Sometimes she wondered whether the dog had learned this passive resist­ance from her or whether she’d learned it from him. In any case the dog seemed just as aware as Virginia that the technique was successful. Inaction made opposing action futile; Howard was given no leverage to work with.

  They went out the rear door, leaving a lamp in the living room turned on for Chap, and the kitchen light for themselves. At the bottom of the stairs, Howard suddenly stopped.

  “I forgot a handkerchief. You go on without me, I’ll join you in a minute.”

  “I’d rather wait, thank you. We were invited as a couple, let’s go as a couple.”

  “A couple of what?” he said and went back in the house.

  Virginia’s face was flushed with anger, and the rush of blood made her sunburn, now in the peeling stage, begin to itch pain­fully. She no longer blamed the sun as the real culprit, she blamed Howard. It was a Howardburn and it itched just as pain­fully inside as it did outside. There was a difference, though: inside, it couldn’t be scratched, no relief was possible.

  When Howard returned, he was holding the handkerchief to his mouth as if to prove to her that he really needed it. His voice was muffled. “Virginia, listen.”

  “What is it?”

  “You don’t suppose the kid told her
parents about that twenty dollars I gave her?”

  “I talked to Ellen today, nothing was mentioned about it. By the way, Jessie has a name. I wish you’d stop referring to her as ‘the kid.’“

  “There’s only one kid in our lives. It hardly seems necessary to name her.”

  “I thought we’d agreed to be civil to each other for the rest of your time at home. Why do you want to start something now? We’ve had a pleasant day, don’t ruin it.”

  “You think it’s been a pleasant day, do you?”

  “As pleasant as possible,” Virginia said.

  “As pleasant as possible while I’m around, is that what you mean? In other words, you don’t expect much in my company.”

  “Perhaps I can’t afford to.”

  “Well, tomorrow I’ll be back on the road. You and the kid can have a real ball.”

  “Let’s stop this right now, Howard, before it goes too far. We’re not saying anything new anyway. It’s all been said.”

  “And done,” Howard added. “It’s all said and done. Amen.” He looked down at her with a smile that was half-pained, half- mocking. “The problem is, what do people do and say after everything’s said and done? Where do we go from here?”

  “To the Brants’ for a barbecue.”

  “And then?”

  “I can’t think any further than that now, Howard. I can’t think.”

  She leaned against the side of the house, hugging her stole around her and staring out at the horizon. Where the sea and sky should have met, there was a gray impenetrable mass of fog between them. She dreaded the time when this mass would begin to move because nothing, no one, could stop it. The sea would disappear, then the beaches, the foothills, the mountains. Streets would be separated from streets, houses from houses, people from people. Everyone would be alone except the women with a baby growing inside them. She saw them nearly every day in stores, on corners, getting into cars. She hated and envied the soft, confident glow in their eyes as if they knew no fog could ever be thick enough to make them feel alone.

  Howard was watching her. “Let me get you a sweater, Vir­ginia.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You look cold.”

  “It’s just nerves.”

  They crossed the lawn and the concrete driveway and Ellen’s experimental patch of dichondra with a Keep Off sign in the middle. From the beginning, neither the dichondra nor the sign had stood much of a chance. The sign had been bumped or kicked or blown to a 45° angle, and between the dichondra plants were the marks of bicycle tires and children’s sneakers. The sneaker marks were about the size that Jessie would make, and Virginia had an impulse to lean down and push some dirt over them with her hand so that Jessie wouldn’t be blamed. But she realized she couldn’t do such a thing in front of Howard; it would only aggravate his jealousy of the child. So, instead, she stepped off the flagstone path into the dichondra patch, putting her feet deliberately over the imprints of Jessie’s.

  Howard opened his mouth to say something but he didn’t have time. Mike was coming out of the gate of the patio fence, carrying some fishing tackle, a windbreaker, and three ham­burgers still steaming from the grill.

  Mike grinned at Howard and Virginia but there was impa­tience behind the grin, as though he suspected they would try to keep him there talking when he had other and more interesting things to do.

  Howard said formally, “Good evening, Michael.”

  “Oh hi, Mr. Arlington, Mrs. Arlington. If you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got some of the gang waiting for me. We’re going fish­ing at two o’clock in the morning.”

  “That’s pretty early even for fish, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure whether fish sleep or not.”

  “I’m not, either. Well, good luck anyway.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Arlington. So long.”

  Virginia hadn’t spoken. She was still standing in the di­chondra patch looking vague and a little puzzled, as if she was wondering how she got there, and whether fish slept or not. Her high heels were sinking further and further into the ground like the roots of a tree seeking nourishment and moisture. For a mo­ment she imagined that she was a tree, growing deeper, growing taller, putting out new leaves and blossoms, dropping fertile seeds into the earth.

  Then Howard grasped her by the arm and it was an arm, not a branch, and it would never grow anything but old.

  “For heaven’s sake, what are you doing, Virginia?”

  “Would you really like to know?”

  “Yes.”

  She let out a brief, brittle laugh. “I’m pretending to be a tree.”

  “You’re acting very peculiar tonight.”

  “I’m a very peculiar woman. Hadn’t you noticed that before, Howard? Surely those sharp eyes of yours couldn’t miss any­thing so obvious. I’m not like other women, I’m a freak. There’s something missing in me.”

  “Take my hand and I’ll help you out of there.”

  “I don’t want to get out. I like being a tree.”

  “Stop playing games. Are you going to let me help you?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” Without further argument he picked her up and lifted her out of the dichondra patch. He had to exert all his strength to do it because she’d made herself limp—arms, legs, waist, neck. “O.K., tree, you’ve just been uprooted.”

  “Damn you. Damn you.”

  “That’s better. Now suppose we go inside and you can start pretending you’re a person.” He opened the gate for her. “Coming?”

  “I have no choice.”

  “You’d have even less choice if you were a tree.”

  They went into the patio and Howard closed the gate behind them with unnecessary force. The loud bang seemed to Virginia to be a warning, like a shot fired over her head.

  “Come in, come in,” Dave said. “Welcome to Brants’ Beanery.”

  He was standing at the barbecue grill wearing an apron over his Bermuda shorts and T-shirt, and drinking a can of beer. Ellen sat barefoot at the redwood picnic table, slicing an onion. Neither of them looked as though they expected company or particularly wanted any.

  Even though Virginia had known this was how it was going to be, she felt a stab of resentment, aggravated by a feeling, a hangover from her childhood, that she was the one who was wrong, and no matter how hard she tried, she always would be. She had spent an hour dressing and fixing her hair but Dave didn’t even look at her. He had opened a can of beer for How­ard and the two men were already deep in conversation, one on each side of the barbecue pit.

  Virginia sat down beside Ellen. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “It’s all done, thanks. I wouldn’t allow you to touch a thing in that dress, anyway. I’d feel so guilty if you spilled something on it. It’s simply gorgeous.”

  Virginia had to take it as a compliment but she knew it wasn’t. Ellen’s voice was too objective, as though the dress had nothing to do with Virginia personally; a gorgeous dress was a gorgeous dress and it didn’t matter who wore it or who owned it.

  “It’s not new,” Virginia said. “I mean, it’s just been lying around.” For a whole week it had been lying around, waiting for an occasion. Now the occasion had arrived, hamburger and onions and baked beans in the next-door neighbors’ backyard. She thought wildly and irrationally, damn you, Howard. You didn’t have to bring me here.

  “I thought perhaps it was the one you bought last week at Corwin’s,” Ellen said. “You told me about it.”

  “No, no, I took that back. I’ve had this dress since—well, since before you even moved here. That seems ages ago, doesn’t it? I feel so close to you and Dave and Mike and, of course, Jessie.” She glanced hastily in Howard’s direction to make sure he hadn’t overheard the name. He was still engrossed in h
is con­versation with Dave. “Where is Jessie?”

  “In the front room watching television.”

  “I’ll go in and say hello. I have a little something for her.”

  “Virginia, you shouldn’t, you’ll—”

  “It’s nothing at all, really, just a piece of junk jewelry. I saw it in a store window this afternoon and I thought Jessie would like it.”

  “She’s too young to wear jewelry.”

  “It’s only a small ring with an imitation pearl. I had one exactly like it when I was six years old. I remember it so clearly. My hands grew too fast and it had to be filed off.”

  “It won’t have to be filed off Jessie,” Ellen said dryly. “She’ll lose it within a week.”

  “Then you don’t mind if I give it to her?”

  “I suppose not.”

  Virginia rose and crossed the patio, moving with unaccus­tomed agility as though she wanted to get away before she could be called back.

  Jessie was curled up in a corner of the davenport, her chin resting on her knees, her arms hugging her legs. Her eyes wid­ened a little when she saw Virginia in the doorway but it was the only sign of recognition she gave.

  “Hello, Jessie.” Virginia went over to the television set. “May I turn this down a minute?”

  “I—yes, I guess.”

  “I haven’t seen you for two days.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Jessie said, looking down at the floor as if she were talking to it and not Virginia. “My mother took me swimming this afternoon. To see if the salt water would hurt my hands.”

  “And did it?”

  “Not much.”

  Virginia sat down on the davenport beside her. “You know what I did this afternoon? I went downtown shopping.”

  “Did you buy something?”

  “Yes.”