Something in the Shadows

by Packer, Vin

  Later in his cubicle he hears Clarence Somerville behind him, blowing his nose. There is peace in the sound; music nearly. A contentment envelopes him; dust of old books in L-M dance in the dying rays of late afternoon sun. Joseph thinks a poem in his head:

  Let my own music to the clouded mountains lure me,

  Past festered sores that stare in mortal grin …

  He scribbles his poem on a piece of scrap paper, knowing he will never finish it; it is all he cares to say. It is not so much that he was afraid back there at that rally; it is that he could not see himself in anyone there. That was it! That was it! He feels better now and works until the library closes.

  • • •

  “So you just walked out on it,” she says that night. She is carrying her shoes. She has sneaked up the stairs of the boardinghouse for their date. “I know it was awful for you.”

  He does not want to talk it out with her. He reaches for her and brings her to his lap on the bed, kisses her face. Kisses away crumpled papers on the courthouse lawn, crushed paper cups, the crowd exercising its ugly democratic right: kisses away older memories, her brother murdered in Pest by Nazis, barbed wire world of her youth; Jew-girl taunts; forget it, Varda, now let me touch you; he feels a tenderness breaking his heart open, spilling a gentle desire all through him for her — then she holds him back.

  “You went to the library, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re so weak, Joseph.”

  “I hated it there.”

  “That word again. Hate.”

  “Didn’t you hate it there? What they did to that Negro woman! And I saw a girl whose blouse was ripped by — ”

  “Never mind.”

  He watches her undress. She has golden hair and she keeps her eyes open, and once she told him to watch her eyes, that he would see himself in them.

  “Anyway, it was a very successful rally. Very!”

  “Successful?” He lights her cigarette for her. Sometimes she does this, sits on the bed smoking a cigarette, while he undresses.

  “Very!”

  “But they were all booing, singing those disgusting take-offs on songs. She’s too black for me! Successful?” He doesn’t like to sit naked. He keeps his undershorts on.

  “We wrote those take-offs, Joseph. We started everyone singing them.”

  He laughs. It’s a joke.

  “I mean it! Dick Gilman from St. Louis got the idea. Mob psychology did the rest. We just started the ball going, as you say in America.”

  “Why?” Still he grins at her; it’s crazy.

  “To get people sympathetic to Wallace, the Negro woman. You wait. The newspapers will be full of it tomorrow. Free speech was denied. A Negro woman was humiliated. It was disgraceful, happening at a big university! I saw Professor Hutchens in the crowd. He looked as though he was going to be ill, he was so upset. Don’t think he won’t have something to say to all the students in his classes tomorrow! Don’t you see, Joseph? Wallace and the Negro woman were martyrs! We’ll get some votes just because a few people who witnessed this are ashamed!”

  “It makes me sick!” Joseph says finally. Suddenly she is more naked than he has ever seen her; than he ever wanted to see her. A conniver on his bed, legs crossed, smoking. The end justifies the means.

  “Maybe I don’t want to sleep with you tonight,” he says.

  “If you mean that — ”

  “No.” Still it is different now. He looks at her.

  “You’re disappointed in me, Joseph. I wish you weren’t. I wish I could explain it to you so you could understand. I’m so happy with you. So depressed every time I have to leave you. Yet we are worlds apart, in so many ways.” She stubs out the cigarette and takes his hand.

  “The cause is more important than that Negro woman’s feelings?”

  “Yes. We did it for her.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  “Put it in the big bottle again then. But remember, Joseph, there won’t be any more room in there one day. You’ll stuff it until it bursts.”

  “Don’t talk tonight,” he says. “Please.”

  3

  “What do I remember about 1948?” Joseph answered. “It’s of no importance. What does it matter?” He reached down and picked up the paper bag, with the book inside. He remembered how Ishmael always liked to crawl into empty paper bags, roll them over and over from inside. When the newspapers began printing stories about children suffocating inside plastic bags, Joseph had made Maggie promise never to bring one in the house. He was afraid she would forget, get careless one day and bring cleaning home in one, so he reminded her often. Once it angered her into snarling that he had an obsession about something happening to that cat. “You ought to find out the reason for it,” she had told him, not in a nice way, either. It was as though she were keeping something from him, something she knew about him that he did not know about himself. Women were often mean that way.

  Louis Hart said, “You have to forgive me, Joe. I live in the past.”

  “I do, too,” Joseph said. “The near past.” He held out the paper bag. “This is for you.”

  “What is it, Joe?”

  “No, don’t open it now. When I go, open it.”

  He saw the look of puzzlement on Louis Hart’s face. He remembered the last shuddering of the cat’s broken and bloody body; the blue eyes asking why before the blank stare of death impaled them; and he did not feel sorry for this man. He could not say anything more to him except good-bye. Yet as he walked out of the doctor’s office after saying that, he felt the moment was very much like a book he had read once, where the author had begun with the words “The End”, and finished with “The Beginning”.

  Chapter Nine

  He took the long way home because he had to think. Maggie was arriving from New York that night with Amos Fenton, one of A.& F.'s account executives. Although it was not yet five o’clock, Maggie often left after lunch on Fridays, and she had said something that morning about wanting Amos to see the countryside on the way up. He did not want to chance finding them at the house before he had thought everything out. He had felt tense and strange at Louis Hart’s office, but that sensation was being replaced gradually by a feeling of light-heartedness nearly euphoric now. Wasn’t that because he had finally managed to get the whole thing off his chest? Maggie liked to talk about getting something off your chest. It was Maggie’s theory that Joseph’s chest was hopelessly weighed down, “like a camel carrying Rockefeller Centre around,” she sometimes put it. “Get it off your chest, Joseph.” That expression always reminded Joseph of the legendary incubus, the nightmare who rode his victims in the dark, or sat straddling them until they were breathless from the weight. But by now Louis Hart had opened Joseph’s gift; he knew, by now. He was probably sitting in his messy office going back over the whole course of events in his mind, from the moment he had first seen Ishmael in his headlights, to the moment Joseph had approached him in the Doylestown Shopping Centre, to the present: this afternoon, near dusk, on the second of December.

  Joseph was approaching the beginning of Tidd’s Woods. He was not far from home now, and he was not yet ready to face the noise and Amos Fenton and the nervous aura of New York Maggie always brought with her.

  Joseph turned on to Old Ferry Road, having gone two miles in a circle from Louis', approaching his home the other way now, still not ready to arrive there. He pulled over to the side of Tidd’s Woods, cut the motor, and sat looking out at the huge red eye of sun sinking off in the west between the trees. He should simply forgive Louis Hart, as soon as Hart called and apologized. Wasn’t that all Joseph really wanted, to hear the apology, to believe it was sincere? Joseph had always been disturbed by the stories in folklore of revenge. The avenger was often more cruel than the offender by his way of retaliation.

  Would Hart call that evening? “God, Joe, I’m sorry about your cat. I never realized — ” Say something like that?

  Joseph might
say, “I’m not going to forget it, Hart. Don’t think I am!”

  Let him stew then; let him wonder what Joseph meant, worry about how Joseph might repay him in kind. Was that enough? Joseph might say, “Thanks for calling, Hart. Now all that’s left is for me to think of a way to even up the score.”

  A green station wagon pulled up in front of Joseph’s car. The man who got out was carrying a gun; pinned to his back was the Celluloid shield containing the regulation hunting licence. He nodded at Joseph as though Joseph were a colleague of some kind, then he trekked off into the forest. Joseph could see the bright colours of a dead pheasant piled on boxes in the rear of the station wagon. When the man was out of sight, Joseph opened his door and got out. He wanted to see the poor dead bird, to despise the hunter all the more by witnessing the bullets’ ravishment of the animal’s body; but when he looked in the station wagon’s window, he saw no blood on the bird, nor any wound, merely its lifelessness and its eyes squeezed shut in its last pain.

  Joseph stared at the magnificent colours of the bird, the intricate blending of them, the fabulous beauty there. He remembered the ugly pock marks on the hunter’s face and his big, clumsy and pot-bellied body. He thought of the hunter’s death some far-off day when loving hands would prepare him for display in some satin-lined coffin, lay out his last crisp white handkerchief for the pocket of his suit, select a proper tie, and shine the shoes for his feet, lay him softly down and surround him with lilies and low lights of flickering candles, and weep for him. How much more beautiful this bird would look in the hunter’s casket; how much more fitting that the hunter’s bulk be thrown atop a pile of boxes in the back of a station wagon.

  Joseph opened the station wagon’s back door and took out the pheasant. He carried it gently to his own car, and placed it with a certain tenderness beside him on the front seat. When he reached the house, he would bury the bird, put him to rest quietly in the ground, beside Ishmael. He would forgive Louis too when Louis called to apologize. There was too much violence; too many people all out of control everywhere. A slight shiver went through Joseph as he started his car. He was thinking of where his own anger could have led him, if he had not right at that moment near Tidd’s Woods, decided to forgive Louis Hart. He felt control come back to him. It was all right now. He felt nearly gay and certainly calm. Only when he passed the spot where the Benz had struck down Ishmael did he hear the faint thundering of his own heartbeat. But what could you expect?

  2

  “Imagine this,” said Amos Fenton. “You are going through a room filled with people you respect. Now I mean, you really care what these people think of you! Okay? And you happen to overhear them saying something about you. Got it? All right. What I want to know is, what most would you like to hear said about you?”

  Maggie said, “Amos, what a wonderful question! God, give me time to think.”

  Naturally, Joseph Meaker said nothing. Good God, but Maggie had picked herself a lemon! Fenton poured himself and Maggie another brandy. Meaker was sipping ginger ale in an orange-juice glass. Behind Maggie the fire danced over the logs in the fireplace; there were long white candles flickering on the table between Fenton and Maggie, and Amos Fenton had a sudden sorry wish that Joseph Meaker would simply disappear from his place at the head of the table.

  “You think, too, Joseph,” said Maggie.

  “I don’t have to,” Joseph Meaker answered. Fenton thought of how he would like to pick up Meaker’s glass of ginger ale, and spill it over Meaker’s head. Maggie deserved better, for damn sure!

  Still, he kept his composure and said to Joseph, “In our business we have to wonder about people’s self-images. But this is a good question anyway, for anyone to answer! It shows you a hell of a lot about someone.”

  Maggie said, “Do the people in the room know I heard what they said?”

  “No, Mag, that’s the point. It’s not the point, but what you hear is an absolute frank statement about you. Now what would you like to hear? It can be anything! You pick it.”

  “Amos, I love it! It’s a great question!”

  Amos Fenton beamed. He looked straight into Maggie’s eyes, way in, hoping she would know by that look how goddam much he really thought about her. Fenton was a widower of two years, a man in his late forties with two boys, the oldest fourteen. He had transferred from Barton Beam Agency to A. & F. a year ago, and on sight, he had liked Maggie. This was the first time he had ever been in her home. On the drive up, Maggie had said, “You know my husband might scare you a bit at first. He’s sort of solemn and introverted, but you’ll get used to him.” Joseph Meaker did not scare Amos Fenton; he made him want to puke. As far as getting used to him — Fenton would sooner warm up to one of the kooks from A. & F.'s mailroom.

  “I think I know the answer,” said Maggie. “What I’d like to hear said about me is that I had heart! It’s as simple as that, Amos!”

  “Honey, that’s easy for you. And it’s a hell of a good answer!” Amos Fenton held her glance some fraction of a minute, smiling at her — God love her — wishing he could reach across and put his large hand over her hand.

  “And how’d you answer it, Amos?”

  “Me? Well, Mag. I’d like to hear something like this. ‘There goes Amos Fenton. That’s a fellow with real character!’ “ Fenton sat back and laughed, “Hell, I mean, why not? I’d like to hear that.” He acted embarrassed, but he was actually quite pleased. He felt a warmth with Maggie; he felt as though Maggie thought he had character, the same way he knew Maggie had heart. Joseph Meaker could go jump, for all he figured in that moment, just go jump.

  Instead, Joseph Meaker said, “You forgot the salad again, Maggie.”

  “Oh, who the hell cares?” Maggie took a sip of her brandy. “I always forget the salad.”

  “Why do you make it and let it go to waste?” said Joseph Meaker. He took the salad bowl from the table behind him, spooned some on to his plate. “It’ll just go to waste. Doesn’t anyone else want any?”

  “We’re having brandy, Joseph.”

  “All right. All right.”

  Amos Fenton said, “Hell, put it in the refrigerator. I like day-old salad even better. Have it for breakfast with my eggs.” Meaker’s face was sullen, and Fenton could feel Maggie fidgeting across the table. To relieve the moment, Fenton said, “C’mon, Joseph, you haven’t answered the question. What would you like to hear?”

  “I don’t care what people say,” Meaker said.

  “Well, there you have it!” Maggie said. “Old Mr. Personality himself!”

  Amos could not control a sudden guffaw, but he turned to Meaker afterward and said, “Oh, come on now, Joseph. Surely there’s something you’d like to hear.”

  “Why is there?”

  “Well, everybody wants some kind of approval, for the love of Mary!”

  “Don’t be hateful, Joseph,” Maggie said. Maggie looked good in that sweater. Fenton did not care if she saw him look at her there with pleasure. He could no more imagine Maggie in bed with Joseph Meaker than he-could imagine Garbo with Wally Cox.

  “Hateful?” said Joseph Meaker. “Where do you get the idea I’m full of hate?”

  “Why don’t you answer the question then?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Yeah,” Fenton said, “what’s that got to do with it?”

  “People who drink always end up saying personal things. Just because I don’t drink, I don’t have this compulsion to unburden myself!”

  “Well, aren’t we nice!” Maggie snapped. “Mr. Snug and Smug!”

  Again, Fenton guffawed, harder this time. He saw Joseph Meaker flinch as though the noise hurt his ears, but Maggie was laughing too now, so he did not care. Maggie began to sing a song to the tune of the Mr. Clean commercial:

  Mr. Snug hangs on to all his thoughts,

  He never tells a soul them,

  He takes a little shovel out

  And buries in the
hole them!

  Both Maggie and Fenton chorused: “Mr. Snug, Mr. Snug, Mr. Snug!”

  Joseph Meaker got up and walked into the kitchen area. He turned on the small light over the sink. Then he took the ginger ale bottle and carefully poured back into it the amount left in his glass.

  “Come on, Meaker,” said Amos Fenton, “we’re only pulling your leg.”

  “Come on, Joseph, come back and join the party.”

  “It’s late anyway,” said Meaker. “I have some notes to go over.”

  “Joseph, it’s not even eleven o’clock!” Maggie said, but Fenton kept his mouth shut. Why encourage the creep to stay?

  “It’s the noise!” Meaker whined.

  “Oh, the noise, Joseph! There’re only three of us, and we’ve hardly spoken above a whisper!”

  “You’re mistaken, Maggie. I doubt that we could even hear the phone ringing; it’s been that loud!”

  “Who’s going to call us?”

  “Someone might. It’s only an example,” Meaker sighed.

  Maggie snickered. She said to Fenton, “Amos, are you expecting a phone call? Because I don’t know who in the hell would call us up!”

  Amos Fenton sensed the despair of embarrassment in the wisecrack. He was glad that Joseph wished them both good night at that point, and disappeared up the stairs.

  3

  At eleven o’clock, Lou was “in”. He and Janice had once seen a Tennessee Williams play where one of the heroes described Lou’s feeling as “hearing the click in your head,” but for Lou this full transition from sobriety to intoxication was an ingress to a shelter, not easily accessible either. Once “in”, nothing could make a dent; “in” had no memory.

  This particular shelter was housed in the Danboro Bar, and he had found it after four Scotches there, and countless Scotches back at the house. He had poured his first Scotch after opening the “gift” from Joseph Meaker. He had looked at the cover, tossed the book in the wastebasket, and poured number one. He was somewhere around five or six when Janice came back to see why he wouldn’t answer his phone. She had stood there giving him hell, and he had listened to the whole harangue with a certain boredom, until Stilt peed all over his pile of magazines. Everything snapped then. He went for the dog in a rage, kicking him a couple of times, with the dog squealing and Janice screaming; then Janice and the dog left him alone, and all the way up the outside walk he heard Janice telling the dog in babytalk about locking out the old nasty.