Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  “But you never met her.”

  “I'm not sure he ever did. Nobody could have been that beautiful. This one wasn't even white.”

  The worm started to work its way up my back again. “You got sick of her name,” I said. “What was her name?”

  “Eleanor,” Alice Lewis said. “Eleanor Chan. Chinese, can you imagine?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can.” My face was flaming. Whatever it had been, for Wilton it had been a grand passion, and I'd made it cheap with one thoughtless, unretractable remark. Even though I loved her.

  “What happened to your first husband?” I asked, just to give myself some room. “Did he keep bothering you? Or Wilton?”

  “He tried at first, but Eddie talked to some friends of his, and then he had an accident. He was—” She stopped. It was as though someone had pulled the plug from the wall.

  “He was?” I prompted.

  “He was laid up at home with two broken legs,” she said in a monotone. “From the accident.” Then she sat straight up and shook her head. “No way,” she said.

  “The house burned down,” I said.

  She turned back to the mirror, looking not at herself but over her shoulder at me. She breathed through her mouth once, then twice. “It wasn't Wilton,” she said. A small galaxy of dimples appeared on her chin.

  Despite the air-conditioning, my shirt was sticking to my chest, and I tugged it free. “Of course it wasn't,” I said.

  The dimples disappeared. “Go away,” she said. She straightened imperiously. “Finished?” she asked, ready to get up and resume her real life, whatever she thought it was. “Things burn,” she said.

  “People, too.” I wanted to see her chin dimple again. It didn't. “Do you know where he's living now?”

  “I didn't know where he was living before. Now are you finished?” She swiveled to regard me directly. Annabelle Winston could have pulled it off, but Alice Hoxley Lewis wasn't big enough for it.

  “No,” I said. “You have to do one more thing for me.”

  She chewed on it for a second. “What is it?”

  “Wilton's going to call and ask you if I've been here.”

  “He won't.”

  “I think he will.”

  “So don't worry. I won't tell him anything.”

  “You'll tell him I was here.” Her jaw dropped in a reaction spontaneous enough to make her son snub her. “And you'll tell him,” I said, fighting back a yawn, “that I'll be at home.”

  17

  The Rabbi

  Home was the only place to be, if he was supposed to find me.

  It took hours to strip the sheets and scrub the mattress until the smell of gasoline had been banished into some parallel universe where Wilton Hoxley might conceivably get caught before he lit me up. When, at 1:00 A.M., I was finished, I went into the living room and pretended to sleep on the couch.

  By the time the sun came up, I had dozed for perhaps forty minutes, the temperature was already in the 90s, and my arms felt heavier than my legs.

  The clock said 7:00 A.M. The couch was sticky with sweat. I sponged myself off with a cold, wet towel, poured Bravo some water, and called Schultz.

  He answered on the first ring despite the hour, sounding as though he'd been waiting all night. “Got her,” I said. I barely recognized my own voice.

  “Where are you? What's she like?”

  “Like a freon cocktail. You were right, one hundred percent. She kicked him out. He burned his father. Her first husband.”

  “I knew I should have said it out loud,” he said. “When I write it up, people will say it was second-guessing.”

  “If that's your biggest problem, relax. I'll tell everyone you told me days ago.”

  “That would be fudging,” Dr. Norbert Schultz said fretfully.

  “And we wouldn't want you to fudge. Not on something as important, something as indispensable, as writing this up. Think of the fame. You'll be a standard footnote.”

  “I'm an asshole,” Schultz said promptly. I heard a match flare, not the most comforting sound at that moment. “Why are you at home?”

  “How's he supposed to come for me,” I asked Schultz, “if he doesn't know where I am?”

  “Sheeez,” Schultz blew smoke into the mouthpiece. “That's pushing it a little, don't you think?”

  “I think nobody's been burned for three days.” I swallowed. “Am I still right? Nobody last night?”

  “Clean as a whistle. Except for a couple of houses.” He listened to himself. “Was the father in a house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, since then, houses haven't been his game, and we're in the goddamn fire season. We lose houses every night.”

  “Maybe houses are his new mission,” I said.

  “No,” he said with certainty, sounding like the Schultz of old. “If he's got a new mission, it's something bigger than houses.”

  “I just thought I'd bring it up,” I said, “because I'm in a house.”

  “You could be the exception,” he admitted. “Do you want protection?”

  “Oh, sure. Protect me from the west wind. This is a guy who could smell junk when he was twelve. He can smell cops the way you can smell an anxiety neurosis.”

  “Junk? Are we talking about dope?”

  “No,” I said, “we're talking about inferior interior decor. We're talking about glass grapes. I'll explain it all in time for your article. Unless, of course, you think it would be better for posterity if I were to explain it right now.”

  “Don't you know anybody,” Schultz asked, sounding anxious, “who isn't a cop? Somebody who could keep an eye out?”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking. “I do. When do you want me to call you next?”

  “When something happens.”

  “After something happens, I may not be able to call.”

  “You'll be fine,” Schultz said. Doctors are among the world's champion liars. “Call your friend, then call me every three hours. Here are the numbers for today.”

  “What is this, a one-time code?”

  “I have office hours,” he said, clearly affronted. “I have business at Parker Center today—nothing about you, don't worry. Do you want the numbers or don't you?”

  I took them down and then called Billy Pinnace.

  “Consciousness control,” Billy said, answering the line his customers used. His parents, although they spent Billy's money, didn't want to talk to his clientele.

  “How they growing, Billy?”

  “High as an elephant's eye,” he said. “No mail.”

  “I know. I'm home. Have you still got your rabbi?”

  “My piece?” Billy said proudly. The rabbi was a semiautomatic from Israel. “I sleep with it under the mattress.”

  “Must make a lump.”

  “Other side of the bed, doofus.”

  “Lend it to me,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said, sounding a lot less eager. “A guy and his piece, you know?”

  “A man is only as tall,” I said, “as he is in his stocking feet.” Billy, who was financing a future at Harvard that would lead to a career either as a corporate lawyer or an international terrorist, was a fool for quotes.

  “Where'd you read that?” Billy demanded.

  “I'll tell you when you bring me the gun.”

  “Is it Zen?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It's from Now and Zen by the French multiple murderer Maurice Chevalier. Every aspiring terrorist should read it, even though it's written in phonetics.”

  “You got a copy?”

  “I sleep with it under the mattress. Trade you for the gun, one lump for another, and when you're finished with it, I'll give the gun back. What do you say?”

  “A book for a gun?” Billy was a capitalist to his toenails.

  “Ah, Billy,” I said. “The revolution will be won with books, not bullets.”

  “Chairman Mao?” he guessed.

  I was suddenly dizzy with fatigue, and my mouth re
fused to do anything more complicated than breathe. I could hear the sigh whistling in the earpiece of the phone.

  “You in big trouble?” Billy asked.

  “Billy,” I said, “bring every bullet you own.”

  I was making coffee when the phone rang for the first time. I let it ring, concentrating on pouring. It didn't stop. On ring twelve or thirteen, I picked it up.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Someone exhaled.

  “I already said hello,” I said, sipping. “Your move.”

  Nothing. But no hang-up either.

  “Hey, Wilton,” I said. My pulse was trying to beat its way through the skin on my wrists. “How you doing?”

  He might have cleared his throat. The sound in the earpiece was raspy enough.

  “Mommy says hi,” I said, watching my heart bump in the thin blue line leading down to the hand with the cup in it.

  He hung up. The dial tone snored in my ear.

  I was still sitting there, staring at the phone, twenty minutes later, when I heard someone climb the driveway. I was caught flat-footed; all I could do was pick up the heaviest thing in sight, my copy of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, hoist it two-handed over one shoulder, National League style, and stand behind the door opening into the kitchen. I'd already popped the door to make turning the knob unnecessary.

  It flew open and hit me in the forehead, and I retaliated by bashing it with the book. “Rat-a-tat-a-tat,” Billy Pinnace said, throwing the barrel of the semi right and left in the approved Rambo manner. Then he looked at me and lowered it.

  “You're reading Dreiser?” he asked, looking at the book. “You know, you're bleeding.”

  “You don't know,” I said, wadding up a paper towel and pressing it to my eyebrow, “how grateful I am for that information. Your disquisition has enabled me to pursue that Hippocratic succor without which this injury might have dimmed, even truncated, my life. Is that thing loaded?”

  “Are you?” Billy asked. As always, he looked like the kid you hope will ask your daughter to the prom.

  “No. That's the way you talk when you're reading Dreiser.”

  “Lemme borrow it.”

  I checked the cut in the mirror over the sink. Still bleeding. “I pause,” I said, “because there is in it such matter that, I fear, would not nourish the vigorous development of the young mind but might, rather, turn it in strange and dark directions.”

  “Hot shit,” Billy said. “It's a swap.” He handed me the gun, and I gave him Sister Carrie. Pound for pound, he got the better deal.

  “How do you work it?” I asked.

  “What do you mean? You point it and pull the trigger.”

  “Have you ever fired it?”

  “At beer cans,” Billy said grudgingly. Billy's father drank a lot of beer.

  “How do you load it?”

  “You should take care of that cut,” Billy said, and the phone rang.

  I took care of the cut by ignoring it. I swallowed some coffee and wiped the blood and perspiration from my face before I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Simeon,” said a male voice.

  “You got it right out of the box,” I said. “What's happening, Wilton?”

  “You're there,” Wilton Hoxley said. Then he hung up.

  “Billy,” I said, the telephone still in my hand, “tell me how to work this thing and then get out of here.”

  The phone rang on the hour, every hour, thereafter. I answered it with the semi cradled between my knees, but it might as well have been a papoose for all the use I got out of it. Every time I picked up the phone, Wilton Hoxley hung up. Between the fourth and the fifth calls, I took a shower, the semi leaning against the shower stall, and when I was finished I made a butterfly bandage on the cut over my eye. Then I cleaned the house. Doing the everyday drudgery seemed to lessen the menace, but I cleaned with one hand, the other arm locked over the semi. Cleaning took a long time. Cleaning had always seemed to take a long time, which was perhaps one reason why I did it so seldom, but on this occasion it was like running through cooling lava. Still, by four o'clock I had finished the kitchen and was almost through with the living room, despite the periodic interruptions to phone Schultz and answer Wilton's mute queries. I'd thought a hundred times about kicking Alice into gear and drifting down the hill to the restful anonymity of some Holiday Inn, but I hadn't done it. For one thing, I had Billy' s semi to shoot him with. For another, as long as Wilton was phoning regularly, I was in the classic double bind; he knew that I was there, and I knew that he wasn't. Wherever he was, even if it was at a phone booth just down the hill, I wanted to keep him there.

  At four o'clock, the phone rang. The boy was punctual.

  I was on my sixth pot of coffee by then, and my synapses had permanent caffeine bridges between them. “Woo-woo, Wilton,” I said, “let me hear you respirate again.”

  “Respiration,” he said calmly, “is a form of combustion.”

  I hoisted the coffee cup and said, “Interesting.”

  “It oxidizes the iron in your bloodstream,” he said. “Rusts it, so to speak. Rusting is also a form of combustion, as I'm sure you know.”

  “I thought fire was supposed to be lethal,” I said. Through the window, I heard a premature cricket chirp by way of announcing its presence to a hungry starling.

  “Then you haven't understood me at all,” Wilton Hoxley said. “You disappoint me. Well, life is just a succession of disappointments. What we mean, conventionally speaking, by growing up is just the process of adjusting to disappointment.”

  “I'm not all that disappointed,” I said.

  He laughed, a sound like a gate slipping its latch. “Is that so? Are you happy about where you are in your life?”

  I wasn't. “I can handle it.”

  “Are you happy,” he asked, “about whom Eleanor is sleeping with tonight?”

  I tossed the coffee over my shoulder and onto my clean floor. “Are you happy about whom Mommy is sleeping with tonight?”

  I could hear the friction of lips over gums. “There's no question that you're bright,” he said. “You were always bright. Such a bright boy, such a golden boy.”

  “I had two feet,” I said nastily. “And while we're at it, come and get me.”

  “Now you're trying to insult me,” Wilton Hoxley said. “That makes me suspicious, even though we're old friends. Old friends should be able to talk. You know, it amazes me that you didn't realize that we were friends. After all, we had Eleanor in common.”

  “Eleanor was never common enough for you,” I said, and closed my eyes.

  “A little cheap,” he said. “But then you're a nonentity, a footnote.” Schultz's unwritten paper flashed before my eyes in its full unpublished glory. “You don't understand, do you? They're playing with you, just as I am. I can play with you until the cat comes home, and you won't figure it out, and Eleanor will still land in my lap. If I want her. Of course, I don't want her.”

  “You wanted her before,” I said. “My, my, Wilton, the lies you told.” He didn't say anything. “The lies you told to Mommy.”

  He hung up.

  I was wetter than I'd been after my shower, but I barely felt it. I took my copy of Dreiser's An American Tragedy and put it on the back of the couch, trained Billy's semi at it, and blew it into satisfying smithereens. Feeling marginally more secure, I toted the gun into the kitchen and poured more coffee. Anything that could put commas into Dreiser could put a few well-placed full stops into Wilton Hoxley.

  At five the phone rang again. I decided, for once, not to obey. It rang twenty-seven times before falling silent. I sat on the couch, hoping it wasn't a wrong number. I still wanted him on the other end of the phone. When it stopped, I called Schultz and gave him a progress report.

  “Get out of there,” he said.

  “Skip it. He's getting crazy.”

  “Simeon,” Schultz said. It might have been the first time he ever called me by my first nam
e. “Simeon, speaking from a purely professional standpoint and evaluating him within the peripheries of any generally agreed clinical criteria, he's already crazy. He's been as loose as a bucket of moths for years.”

  “I think you should get off the line,” I said. “He might be calling.”

  “He'll call at six,” Schultz said. “Not before. You're going to stay in touch, right?”

  “As long as the promise holds. I talk to you, and it ends there.”

  “You're the one who's crazy,” Schultz said, hanging up.

  It rang again precisely at six, and this time I picked it up.

  “Why should I want Eleanor?” Wilton Hoxley said as though there'd been no interruption. “Eleanor, as beautiful as she is, is just a woman.”

  “Whoa, Wilton,” I said. “Good for you. How come you never graduated?”

  “And what's a woman?” he continued. “A vertical storage system, and a temporary storage system at that. Their insides gurgle like coal running downhill. Ever put your ear up against Eleanor's stomach? Gurgle, gurgle. Peristalsis at work. Women eat innocence, nice, photosynthetic plants that make sugar out of sunshine, and they eat dumb animals who think that people love them until they get their jugular veins cut as the first long step toward the table. Pigs are treated well, Simeon. You've obviously never spent any time around pigs.”

  “I'm rectifying that now.”

  “You can't insult me. You're not important enough. Pigs, as I was saying, are very intelligent, they learn to love the carnivore who tosses them their slops, they follow him around from place to place. To them, we're gods. To us, they're pork. The most beautiful woman in the world is just a mechanism for turning innocence into shit. The prima ballerina, dancing around on those torturous little shoes the French invented, looking lighter than air, is gurgling inside, turning some light-footed pig—have you ever seen how a pig walks on those tiny little hooves?—into shit. Sleeping Beauty, Odette the swan, they get offstage, the tutu comes down, and some poor dumb animal or some inoffending head of lettuce comes out, headed for the sewer. Women are a self-procreating system for turning the world into shit.”