by Edwin West
Paul still didn’t move, still didn’t speak.
With a sudden angry movement, Bob stepped into the room and to the left, switching on the nearest floor lamp. In the sudden light, he squinted at Paul. “You knew I was coming, huh? Is that it? You knew I was coming?”
Paul raised his head a bit, just enough so he could look up at Bob’s angry face. A shade of puzzlement crossed Paul’s face and he shook his head slowly from side to side.
“You didn’t, huh?” Bob was dressed in his Army uniform, the sleeves still bare. He had just completed basic training. He reached into his Ike jacket, on the right side, and took out an envelope which he dropped in Paul’s lap. “Take a look at that,” he ordered. “Then you’ll know why I’m here.”
Paul’s movements were in slow motion, as though he were bemused by an ever-renewing wonder at the complexity of the world. Slowly he lowered his head to look at the envelope in his lap. Slowly his hands reached down to it and picked it up and plucked the letter from within; unfolding it, holding it up for his eyes to read.
It was Angie’s letter. Until this moment, he hadn’t even known of its existence.
He read it through, word for careful word, then read it through all over again. Bob reached out to pick it out of his hands just an instant before he would have crushed it and torn it to shreds. His hands closed on one another as though they still held the letter. They trembled convulsively, taut with muscular strain.
Then the hands fell away to his sides and he exhaled, reaching out again for the glass. It was halfway to his lips when Bob slapped it out of his hand, sending it spinning halfway across the room, sloshing liquor on the rug. On his rug.
“Look at me,” snapped Bob. “Look up at me, you son-of-a-bitch.”
Paul raised his eyes. Bob was standing spraddle-legged in front of him, his right hand clenching a small .25 calibre pocket pistol. It looked like a toy in his hand, a little metal toy containing caps, but Paul knew it wasn’t a toy. And he knew it didn’t contain caps.
Bob said: “I’m going to kill you, Paul. I’m not going to try to get away. I’m going to give myself up for it. But I don’t care. Because you’re going to be dead. You killed Angie. And I’m going to kill you for it.”
Paul wrenched his glance away from the gun and raised it higher, until he was looking into Bob’s hot, bitter eyes. His face didn’t change expression, didn’t take on expression, and his eyes were blank and empty. He sat there like that, waiting .
And Bob waited, too. They waited for one another, and slowly the hate in Bob’s eyes changed to bewilderment, then to contempt and finally to understanding. He shook his head.
Unintentionally, not knowing he’d done it, Paul aped the movement, shook own head.
“No,” said Bob decisively. “I’m not going to do it.” His right hand, carrying the gun, lifted up and tucked inside the Ike jacket and returned empty, to hang at his side. “I’m not going to do it,” he repeated. “Do you know why?”
Paul spoke then for the first time. “Bob,” he said, as though he had just identified him.
“I’ll tell you why,” Bob told him. “Because I don’t have to. Because. you’re doing it yourself, with that stuff.” He motioned at the bottle on the floor beside the chair. “So I don’t have to do a thing to you. You’re doing worse to yourself, inside your own head, than I or anybody else could ever think of doing to you. You’re punishing yourself, and you’re a hell of a lot better at the job than I could be.”
“Bob?” asked Paul.
“Good-bye, Paul,” said Bob. He turned away, headed for the front door and outside.
“No!”
Paul moved suddenly, in a frenzied flurry of motion, arcing up out of the chair and leaping to the middle of the room. “No!” he shouted again. “You can’t do it, you bastard, you can’t do that!”
Bob looked back at him. “I can’t do what?”
On Paul’s face there came now such a childish look of craftiness that it seemed as though it could only be a mockery of slyness. “You’re yellow,” he whispered. “You came here to avenge Angie, did you? The great lover, is that it, coming to avenge his sweetheart? And now you’re yellow. Now you suddenly find out you didn’t really love her that much, after all. You can’t go through with it! Is that it?”
Bob stared at him. “Do you want me to kill you?”
“You came in here so tough,” Paul taunted him. He was crouched forward now, hands clawlike at his sides, face jutted forward, leering at the other boy. “You came in here so big and tough, carrying a gun. You were going to be such a brave man. And you’re just a yellowbellied bastard. Aren’t you?”
Bob shook his head slowly in wonderment. “You want me to,” he whispered, still not really believing it. “You actually want me to kill you.”
“It isn’t what I want,” Paul snarled. “It’s what you want. You, talking so big.”
“You’ve been sitting there all this time,” Bob said, awed, “trying to work up enough courage to kill yourself. All this time, you’ve just been sitting there, and you’ve never had the guts.”
“Go on!” screamed Paul. “Go on, you bastard, kill me if you’re going to! What the hell are you waiting for? Are you going to let me get away with it?”
“And you never will have the guts, will you?” Bob asked him. “You’re the coward, not me.”
“Aren’t you going to do it?” Paul shrieked at him, his face contorted and grimacing.
Bob shook his head. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t do you the favor.” And he turned his back and went on out of the house.
Paul raced after him as far as the front door and stood in the doorway watching Bob proceed down the walk to the street. “Do it!” he screamed. “Do it, you bastard! Kill me, kill me, kill me!”
Bob paused and looked back at him. “Kill yourself,” he said contemptuously and strode away and out of sight.
Paul made as if to follow him even farther, to go down· the street after him, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t cross the threshold. He couldn’t step out of the house. He hung there, in the doorway, stating at the empty street, his one leg raised as though to rake a step, his face ravaged and haunted.
Full night had fallen, the street outside seemed gradually to press in on him, to loom closer and closer to him. He shook his head and stared into the darkness until he couldn’t stand it any more. Then he whirled back into the house, slamming the door after him and racing back into the living room.
He stood poised in the living room, his frozen stare darting this way and that. “Angie!” he called and waited. There was no answer. “Angie! Angie! Angie!”
Still there was no answer.
He shrieked wordlessly, stumbling toward the dining room, kicking a drum table out of his path as he went, so that it careened across the floor and the lamp that had been on it crashed against the wall.
He blundered into the dark dining room, brought up heavily against the dining room table, reached out clawing hands and found one of the chairs. He picked it up and hurled it into the darkness ahead of him, heard it smash into the glass doors of the upper half of the secretary. He shoved at the table, pushing it and pushing it until it tipped over and out of his path.
He stormed through the house, upstairs and downstairs, crying out for his sister, hurling furniture from him whenever he happened to come near it, leaving behind him wreckage and shambles. He searched the house from top to bottom, crying for his sister.
But he didn’t once look in the kitchen.
***
It was Mrs. Fielding who phoned for the police. The racket and screaming from next door was just too much to ignore. Mrs. Fielding had never complained to the police about a neighbor in her life, but after the sounds of breakage and yelling had kept on for nearly half an hour, she had to call. It didn’t seem like a complaint any more. It was more like summoning help for a neighbor in trouble, for the good Lord alone knew what was going on over there.
A prowl car came first
, arriving fifteen minutes after Mrs. Fielding called. Two patrolmen left the car and walked up to the stoop, pausing there to look and listen. There were no lights on in the house, there was no sound at all from the house. They looked at one another and shrugged.
Mrs. Fielding came across the front lawn to them. “I’m the one who called,” she said. “It stopped about five minutes ago.”
“Anybody come out?” one of the patrolmen asked her.
“No. Not out the front door, anyway. I’ve been watching that.”
“Well,” said the other, “let’s take a look.”
He withdrew a flashlight from his hip pocket and went up onto the porch, the other following him. Mrs. Fielding waited on the walk, looking anxious, hoping she hadn’t done the wrong thing.
The patrolmen stood at the door and rang the bell. They could hear it ring inside the house, but there was no other sound.
One of them went back to the head of the stoop and asked Mrs. Fielding, “Who lives here?”
“Just Paul Dane,” she told them. “All by himself. It’s a tragic family. His mother and father were killed in an automobile accident early in the summer, and his sister committed suicide just three weeks ago.”
“The door’s unlocked,” said the other patrolman.
The first one said to Mrs. Fielding, “Thank you.” He went back to the door and switched on his flashlight. Then he pushed the door open and went in.
The foyer was a mess. The rug had been balled-up in a comer, the hat rack was broken, the little table that had stood there was smashed into kindling. His flashlight beam touched all these things, then he moved forward cautiously to the living room doorway and flashed his light in there.
He almost dropped the flashlight. He had been riding in a prowl car for seven years, most of that time on night duty. He had been under the impression for some time that nothing in the world could ever again reduce him to instinctive terror. He knew that conscious, rational fear of actual danger would stay with him, and rightly so, but animal terror, he had believed, was behind him. He had been wrong.
He stared at Paul Dane and felt the tingling up his back, the raising of hairs on the back of his head, the sudden chill around the heart. He almost dropped the flashlight.
Paul Dane sat cross-legged on the living room floor, surrounded by the wreckage he had created. He sat there and gazed into the beam of the flashlight with bright, wide, merry eyes. His lips were drawn back in a wide, taut, terrible smile. He didn’t move.
The patrolman whispered, “Jesus!”
Paul still didn’t move, nor did he change expression.
When, a while later, two hospital attendants lifted him bodily and carried him out to the ambulance which had been quickly summoned by the police, he still hadn’t changed his expression. They carried him out of his front door and out of his house. Paul kept right on smiling. Just as though it didn’t make any difference.
The End
