Something in the Shadows

by Packer, Vin

“Just Tony. He’s on an art scholarship in Paris. He has the same sense of humour we have!”

  “You got a grown son? I don’t believe it!”

  Joseph Meaker sighed, and Lou saw his wife give him a dirty look. He said to Joe, “Why don’t we do the male thing, and leave the ladies with the dishes?”

  “Fine!” said Joseph Meaker.

  The pair got up from the long oak table, before the fireplace in the dining section of the kitchen, and walked into the living room. Lou Hart was high enough not to care whether or not it was proper to bring along the bottle of brandy with his glass.

  Janice hissed at him, “Just go easy on that stuff!”

  3

  Upstairs Maggie was taking Janice Hart on a tour of the house. Joseph hoped they would take a long time; he had been waiting for this moment all evening. Across from him, Louis Hart sat glassy-eyed and confidential, spilling a little of the brandy’s ember juice on the marble-top coffee table as he poured more into his glass.

  “… don’t know what you’re getting at,” he was saying. “Sure, a doctor’s life is different from other people’s; so’s a plumber’s.”

  Joseph said, “I mean, a doctor gets a different viewpoint, doesn’t he? People are so much flesh and bones.”

  “So much piles and prolapses!” Lou Hart snickered. “Hell, Joe, these people I treat — these farm people — everything wrong with them’s wrong below the belt. I’ve become a goddam ass doctor’s all.”

  “That’s what I mean, Louis. You get a different outlook as a doctor. Life is cheap, hmmm?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  Joseph Meaker watched him brush the pool of spilled brandy with his fingers, wipe them across his pants, sloppy, careless. He thought of Ishmael, how he used to wash his face by licking his paws and brushing one paw up past his ears and around his whiskers, meticulous about keeping clean. Grief tugged at Joseph; he remembered what it was like to leave Maggie and her guests downstairs and go up into his study, Ishmael tagging along at his heels. He felt a crazy urge to blurt out, “You killed my cat and I’m going to get even with you,” but he simply smiled at Hart across the table, as though there were nothing in the world wrong. He would get to know Louis Hart and find his own way of retaliating, custom-made for Dr. Louis Hart. He decided it was either going to be a very simple accomplishment, or one almost too complicated to fathom. He liked to imagine that he was enjoying the suspense in the situation, that he was effecting a slow and somehow graceful manoeuvering; but he was well aware of the fact that his emotions were too often taut in the confrontation with Louis Hart, and under the façade of calm there was turmoil. Earlier at dinner, Joseph had looked across at Hart’s plate and seen there a piece of bloody-looking animal, done as the doctor had prescribed, and the steak in Joseph’s mouth, cooked well-done, with not even a pink shade to it, had tasted sanguineous suddenly; horrible! He had wanted to shout, “Get your blood-lust out of my sight; you, go!” But instead, he covered his own steak with a leaf from the salad, unable to eat any more.

  “I still don’t get what you mean?” Hart said to him now.

  “What I mean, is that seeing death is sort of a part of your business. The body is dead; long live the body. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes. Death doesn’t mean much.”

  “Did you ever think that a doctor makes a perfectly understandable murderer.”

  He saw Hart hesitate, saw Hart’s face blanch. “No.”

  “Well, think a moment, Louis. Look at the big murder cases. Dr. Sam Sheppard. Dr. Adams. Dr. Finch. Always doctors. Why? Because they see death all around them: they know better than anyone that life amounts to a bag of bones. It’s easy for them to murder.”

  “Just the opposite, I’d say. It’s hard for anyone to imagine someone who saves lives, taking lives. So it makes better newspaper copy!”

  “Still where are the famous murder cases involving lawyers, or clergymen, or professors, or bankers, writers, artists?”

  “I don’t follow murder cases. I don’t know. Why do you know so much about it all, Joe? Whatsa folklorist doing reading murder cases?”

  “The newspapers are full of them!”

  “Who played the world series this year, Joe?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Newspapers are full of sports, too.”

  “Look,” Joseph Meaker said, “I haven’t got anything to keep me awake nights.”

  “Ha! I wish I didn’t.”

  “Ah, so you do, hmm?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Let me put it another way,” said Joseph. “What do you think of hunters?”

  “I don’t think about them.” “Do you post your land?”

  “Sure. Little enough business without them knocking off a good case of gastrogenous diarrhoea on me!” Lou Hart chuckled and reached again for the brandy.

  “What’s your philosophy about hunting?”

  “Well, I only know about the deer. This is a surplus area. I’ve seen them come into my place starved. A bullet in the fall is kinder than slow starvation in the winter.”

  “Do you think the hunters are hunting out of kindness, Louis?”

  “Naturally not. But the result’s the same.”

  Joseph had felt so near a short time ago; now it was slipping, the moment was passing, like dreams, when the thing you are trying to catch hold of escapes through your fingers, swift slippery.

  Louis put the cap back on the bottle of Remy Martin. “We’re all of us hunters in a way?”

  “How do you mean that? I’m certainly not. I’ve never hunted anything.”

  “You never squashed a mosquito with your hand in the summer? G’wan!”

  “All right! If it attacked me, I defended myself. But Louis, I have never in my life bought a special instrument with which to kill a living thing! Never! Not even a mousetrap!”

  Louis was laughing at him suddenly. Joseph resented it, interrupted it with a protest, unexpectedly loud in its tone, “I haven’t! I never have!”

  “Aw, Joe! You’re going to lose this argument, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, no. No, Louis. I’m speaking the truth.”

  “Joe, there’s a fly-swatter hanging out there in the kitchen. Did you ever use it?”

  Joseph Meaker’s face was as warm and stung as though he had been slapped hard by this man; he could feel himself blush, feel the shortness of breath in him while he searched for an answer. Louis was laughing again. “Life is life, Joe boy. You’re not a God. You hunt flies with special equipment; the hunter goes after a deer with a gun. Did the fly have any more chance than the deer? Or is our argument really about what life is valuable and what life isn’t? That’s a moral question, a philosophical question. No, Joe, I have you!”

  Joseph Meaker was on his feet now, shouting out his retort, pointing his finger at Louis Hart, “And a cat’s life, Louis? A cat’s life?”

  “A cat’s life, a dog’s life, a deer’s life, an ant’s life, or the life of a bacterium — any life! Is it up to you to say which is more valuable, Joe?”

  “I’m talking about the pleasure in killing!” Joseph shouted. “I’m talking about the deliberation, the certain feeling or sensation of power! You know what I’m talking about!”

  Louis looked up at him with a smile, a playful one which Joseph wanted to wipe from his mouth with the palm of his hand. Louis said, “Are you talking about the satisfaction you get when you’ve nailed one of those goddam pesty flies with your swatter?”

  But Joseph stood there looking at Hart suddenly without seeing him, his eyes given to the stare of a trance which involved him in time past, and not this moment; and Joseph found himself remembering an afternoon months ago, during the first days in the house. He and Maggie had hung up flypaper. There were countless flies all through the house, for Joseph left the screen door open in the beginning, to encourage Ishmael to come and go freely. That afternoon Joseph had gone into the kitchen for a glass of water, when he saw one of the fli
es wiggling, stuck hard to the paper, his four legs kicking to be loose. Joseph had gone across to get him loose, but when he tried, he had succeeded only in tearing the wing from the creature, and the moment he did it, Maggie had come up behind him, and she had said, “Oh, pulling wings off flies, hah?” and laughed. Something had exploded inside Joseph then, blown his control to bits, and like someone insane, he had yanked the pieces of flypaper from the ceiling, his hands tangling in their sticky glue, until it was almost as though he were handcuffed by them, and a panic started in him which made him run first to the sink to try and wet his hands free, then the stove, as though he would burn the gummy shackles off. Finally, he headed out the door to the lawn, where he buried his hands in the grass, but only more dirt and some bugs from the earth stuck to the paper, and in that brief instant of frustration, he had felt mad, trapped, the same as any madman in a strait jacket. When Maggie came out after him, she was nearly hilarious; it had become, since then, one of her favourite stories, to tell of the time she had cut Joseph free of flypaper with scissors and a hot dishrag. “… and to see the expression on his face!” was the way the story always ended. Whenever she told the story, Joseph’s hands would itch; he would begin to feel all through him the horrible sensation of sticky death on his flesh, sticky death hanging on to him, making him its prisoner; flies he had trapped, trapping him.

  “Ah, Joe,” Louis Hart was saying now, “don’t you see? We’re never so guilty as when we’re innocent.”

  Then there was the sound of Maggie’s and Janice’s high heels on the wooden stairs leading from the upstairs — and Maggie’s voice, “Do you know we’re a lot alike?” Janice Hart answered, “We could be sisters!”

  Louis Hart grinned at Joseph. “They are alike too,” he said. “I suppose we must be; after all, we picked ‘em.”

  Chapter Seven

  In the two weeks that followed that Friday evening, Lou Hart began to think Janice was right. Joseph Meaker probably had heard about him; probably that was the whole point of that dinner: Joseph Meaker wanted a good look at a doctor who was the next thing to a murderer. That kind of gossip could come from anyone in the county, not even a particularly malicious source, either. It was a natural enough thing, wasn’t it, to discuss doctors with newcomers; tell them where the nearest one lived, what he was like, fill them in on the matter for their own safety? Could have been a milkman who told him, or Teller, the local fuel-oil supplier; Overholt, who ran the grocery in Point Pleasant, or Harry, the Sunny Beverage Company driver. Anyone, who did it matter? Anyone could have said, “Well, now, you do have a doctor close by, but around here we don’t take much stock in him.”

  Then it would come out — all about old Mrs. Tondley calling Lou up seven-thirty at night. Her nephew home on leave from the Marines had been helping out on the farm; his arm got caught in the blade of an electric saw; bleeding badly, and Mrs. Tondley did not drive a car. Dr. Hart said he would be there immediately.

  Six hours later Freddy Tondley, who had faced the last-ditch fighting for the city of Taejon in Korea, and the Iwo Jima invasion in the war before that, was dead from blood loss; and seven hours later his old aunt had heart failure because of the shock, but it was a good three hours after all of that when the State Police woke Dr. Hart up on the Mechanicsville road. His car was pointed in the direction of the Tondley farm, but he could not even remember taking the call. Red-eyed, still reeking of rum, he was taken to the Doylestown Police Station. Only luck, translated as lack of sufficient evidence, and love folks in Bucks County felt for Doc Hart, Sr., let him off with a fine, a judge’s lecture, and suspended disciplinary action from the State Medical Licensing Society. But no amount of luck or reverence for his father’s memory could win back what little confidence there had ever been in Dr. Louis Hart, Jr.

  He was always a drinker, and no one ever said any differently, but after the Tondley incident, folks no longer overlooked it; in fact, they rarely saw anything else when they saw Lou Hart passing. Was he walking straight? Circles under his eyes? Did anyone get a whiff of his breath; smell anything? Five years and it was still going on. So was the doctor still going on drinking, wasn’t he?

  Except for those mavericks who never would go along with the consensus, and making allowances for new folks who didn’t know any better, and folks who knew he was cheaper than his colleagues (had to be if he wanted business), he was not a very busy man any more. The New Hope Hospital wasn’t proud; they let him take charity cases during the week, looking him over good to insure his sobriety when he arrived mornings. He did have a steady trickle of patients, but no where near enough to warrant buying a Benz. That took gall, too; flashing around that way; not many were able to resist a certain sarcasm when they saw him. “Well, there’s the doctor, if you please, some nerve, I’d say!” And some, “I hope he’s happy with his fancy car! I just hope he’s happy!”

  Lou knew how people talked. Still, it had never occurred to him that that might have prompted Joseph Meaker’s invitation, not until Janice and he were driving home afterwards. There was that awkward moment near the end of the evening when Lou had made the pointless remark about being like Joe, because their wives were alike. Suddenly Joe had grabbed Lou’s lapels, leaned towards him with his face only inches away, and then nearly hissed his words, “You think that do you? You think so, do you?”

  And even Maggie had exclaimed, “Jo-seph! What on earth — ” and had come across and pulled him away from Lou. Somebody — Lou couldn’t remember who — made a joke somehow; a take-off on some commercial about tension pounding away, and everyone had laughed, Joseph Meaker joining in. But there was a certain paleness to his face, a certain lack of conviction in his eyes, his stance, in the way he held one hand tightly with the other. Spooky, Janice had called the moment; plain spooky.

  That night in bed they had gone over it for hours. Lou had remembered the discussion with Joe on doctors who murdered, and that had clinched it for Janice. The whole thing, she said, was obvious; then both had stayed awake smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out why it was so important to Meaker. There were all sorts of theories between them. Had he been an old Marine buddy of Tondley’s, bent on some subtle revenge? Was he really a folklorist studying hexerei, or was he some sort of popular psychologist doing some kind of research, or a novelist, even? What? Was his wife in on the scheme too, whatever it was? Janice could not believe that Maggie would have anything to do with any scheme.

  Still, it was weird, made even more weird when a week later Maggie called Janice for a shopping trip in Frenchtown. The pair spent a very gay four hours with no mention of either Joseph or Lou. The Saturday following — another jaunt together — to an auction up near Carversville. Again, no particular mention of their husbands. Janice steered away from the subject, too delighted with the new friendship to take any chances, and Maggie seemed oblivious to schemes of any kind. Yet Janice reported that once, when she made a casual suggestion that all four have dinner at the Hart’s one night, Maggie answered, “It’s like pulling teeth to get Joseph anywhere, so don’t count on it.”

  • • •

  None of it made any sense to Lou as he mulled it over in his mind. In between a Mercury Sulfide tattooing for pruritus and a check-up for a young granite worker, Lou gave it a lot of thought. He was still so steeped in the mystery, that for the first few minutes of his examination of the granite worker, he did not get what the fellow was trying to tell him. Something about needing the check-up because of a certain worry, something about losing something. Lou realized what the fellow was saying when he finally became more direct.

  “You see,” he told Lou, “I’m Platonic now, and it’s getting my wife down. I been Platonic a month.”

  Lou leaned back in his swivel chair and lit a cigarette. “Where do you fellows get that word? I heard it a lot out here. I’ve lived here all my life, but I don’t remember it being a local expression.”

  “The fellow writes the column for the Intelligencer uses it. You know, the
doctor? Writes on health. Well, I read it there, but I never figured I’d get that way.”

  “I don’t want you to worry about it,” Lou told him. “We’ll give you a good check-over and — ”

  The fellow interrupted him. “I was never once Platonic before this, Doc! There’s got to be something wrong.”

  “Okay, we’ll look you over, but it’s not uncommon, Highsmith. It can happen to the best.”

  “I knew you’d understand, Doc. I’d be embarrassed to tell a regular doctor, but I figured I could tell someone like you.”

  Lou Hart never got used to it; he could feel the warmth of his cheeks, spreading to his neck, ears, and the patient saw his embarrassment, tried to undo it, “You know, Doc, I mean you’ve had your troubles too. That’s all I meant.”

  “I know,” Lou Hart said. He glanced away from the fellow’s apologetic expression, distracting himself by looking out the window, mechanically telling the fellow to strip to his underwear. It was at that instant he saw the Ford Consul come slowly down the drive, saw Joseph Meaker behind the wheel.

  2

  The dreams, of course, were the least of it. Some of them were even rather pleasant, though when Joseph Meaker woke from them, the loss of the cat felt even more terrible to him. But in the dreams there seemed to be neither great sadness nor great exaltation. They were peculiar dreams. In one, Joseph would be opening a can of mackerel, Ishmael rubbing back and forth against his ankles, the way the cat used to do. In another, Joseph would be empying the red plastic pan of kitty litter down the toilet, then lifting the large orange bag over the pan, and pouring in the new litter, turning his head slightly away from the litter’s dust, as he used to. The dreams always seemed to remember the commonplace; unlike some dreams, they had neither beginning nor any conclusion, and no point, really; they were like snapshots of a time past. Still, there they were in Joseph’s head, night after night, and some afternoon, when Joseph would drop off while he was reading, a minute, two or three minutes, it was hard to tell, but each time — the dream of Ishmael. The dreams, he could have stood; that much was predictable about loss, wasn’t it, that dreams would bleed the experience until there was no more life left in the unconscious either; then the loss would be accepted. No, it was not just the dreams upsetting Joseph; it was something else, “getting even,” Maggie said. “You still want to get even with him.”