Kenner, a forty-five-year-old social worker of mundane background, few friends, and full civil service tenure (but nevertheless in grave trouble with his superiors, who had recently found him to be "insufficiently motivated"), then made all efforts to arrange the scene in what he thought to be a natural manner: adjusting the corpse in a comfortable position, cleaning the unused pellets of cyanide from the table, letting the damned cat out, and so forth. Immediately afterward, he went to a movie theater; that is, he went immediately after shutting off all the lights and locking all the doors. Windows were left open in the kitchen, however, to better disperse what he thought of as "the stench of death."
What Kenner did at the movie theater was to sit through a double feature. The price he paid for admission and what films he saw or did not really see are not known at the time of this writing. Furthermore, what he hoped to gain by leaving the scene of the crime only to reenter at a "safer" time remains in doubt. I must have been crazy. Also, Kenner's usual punctiliousness and sense of order did not control his actions during this tragic series of events. I was too excited.
After emerging from the theater, Kenner purchased an ice cream cone from a nearby stand and ate it slowly while walking back to his apartment. As he turned in a westerly direction, he was accosted by two co-workers at the Welfare Unit where he was employed. They greeted him and asked the whereabouts of his wife. Kenner responded that she had had a severe headache and, since she suffered from a mild heart condition complicated by diabetes, wanted to restrain her activities to the minimum. I suppose Kenner was attempting with this tactic to lay the groundwork for a "death by natural causes" verdict, but I'm not quite sure. I do know that one of the co-workers, commenting on Kenner's appearance, said that he looked "ghastly."
Once parted from his colleagues, Kenner continued west and eventually reentered his apartment at 10:51 P.M. It was frightening in the dark. Turning on the lights, he went into the living room and found his wife waiting there for him—sitting under a small lamp, reading and drinking coffee and smoking five cigarettes in various stages of completion. Much perturbed, he was unable to account for the fact that she was still alive. I felt as if I were dreaming.
There was a brief exchange of dialogue between Kenner and his wife, the substance of which I cannot recall, and then he proceeded to his own room. He wanted to lock the door behind him but could not, owing to the fact that his wife—saying that separate bedrooms or not, she wanted to know what the "little fool" was doing at all times—had forbidden him a bolt. On the way he noticed that the plates had been removed from the kitchen table and heaped as always to fester in the sink, and that there was no sign of the violence he was sure had taken place earlier.
Immediately after closing his door, Kenner seized his journal and began to record the evening's curious events in his usual style. I could have been a published writer if only I had worked at it. He was hopeful that the documentation would help him to understand matters, but I was wrong, this was never the answer.
He was interrupted midway through his writing by his wife's customarily unannounced entrance into his room. She told him that his strange state of excitation this evening had upset even her, and therefore agitated her mild heart condition (she had one, all right, although she did not have diabetes). She said she thought I was "breaking down," and went on to say that she knew the "impulse to murder her" had long been uppermost in Kenner's mind but he "didn't have the guts to do it." She further stated that Kenner was no doubt "dreaming all the time of ways and means and you probably fill that damned journal of yours with all your raving imaginations; I've never cared enough to bother reading it, but it's sure to be full of lunatic fantasies."
Kenner responded that he was a mature person and thus not prey to hostile thoughts. He begged her to leave the room so that he could continue his entries. I told her I was writing a novel, but she didn't believe me. She knows everything.
She laughed at him and dared him to make her leave the room. Kenner stared at her mutely, whereupon she laughed again and said if looks could kill, she'd certainly be dead right now. Then she said, "But if I were dead, you'd be lost; you'd fall apart altogether. You need me and you don't really want me dead, you know, even though as I'm talking to you you're probably filling up pages with more vicious fantasies. I'll bet I even know what you're writing this very minute. You're imagining me dead, aren't you? You're writing down right this minute that I'm dead."
She's dead.
She's dead.
She—is—dead!
Kenner murdered his wife for the eleventh time on July 29 or July 30, in her bedroom in their New York apartment. He did it for the usual reasons, and he did not attempt to be elaborately clever as to method and execution. In fact, he chose to repeat the procedure of the previous evening. While she lounged in bed as was her custom on weekends (this was either Saturday or Sunday), I made her breakfast and poisoned her coffee with eleven capsules of nitrous oxide.
When Kenner took the tray into her bedroom, she was sitting up in bed and there were three cigarettes burning on the nightstand. She smiled at him maliciously as she lifted her cup, and asked if he had "put in a few drops of arsenic or something to sweeten the taste." After which she laughed in her diabolical way and drank some of the coffee.
With clinical curiosity, Kenner watched the cup slip from her fingers and spill the rest of the liquid over the bedclothes; watched her expression alter and her face and body once more assume the characteristic attitude of oxide poisoning as she fell back against the headboard. The faint green color looked quite well on her, he concluded.
This time Kenner did not arrange the scene in what he thought to be a natural manner. He also did not open the windows. He simply left the apartment and took a subway to Times Square, where he consumed a breakfast of indeterminate nature in a restaurant or perhaps a cafeteria. Once finished he browsed through a bookstore, purchased a candy bar, and finally took the subway home again. Upon entering his apartment, I think the time was 10:51 A.M., he proceeded directly to his wife's bedroom.
She was still lying in bed, and she was still quite surprisingly dead. The scene, however, had, after all, been changed in certain ways. The coffee that he was sure had been spilled across the bedclothes had not been spilled at all; the cup, in point of fact, rested empty on the breakfast tray. Her color was not greenish, but rather a violent purple. The three cigarettes had become four, and each had burned down to skeletal fingers of gray ash. Her hands were clutched somewhat pathetically at her breast.
Kenner stared at her for a long time, after which scrutiny he went to his room and attempted to write in his journal. I could not seem to think, I knew I would have to wait until later. Returning to his wife's bedroom once more, he paused to study the empty coffee cup and the remains of the cigarettes. It was then that he understood the truth.
The cigarettes and the coffee, not Kenner, had done her in.
What he did next is not clear. Very little is clear even now, many hours later. He does seem to have telephoned his wife's doctor, since the physician arrived eventually and pronounced her dead of a heart attack. Two or three interns also came with a stretcher and took her away. As I write this I can still smell the aftershave lotion one of them was wearing.
One thing, therefore, is quite clear: she's dead.
Damn her, she really is dead and gone forever. What am I going to do now?
Kenner murdered his dead wife for the first time on August 1, or possibly August 6, in the bathroom of their New York apartment.
SWEET FEVER
Quarter before midnight, like on every evening except the Sabbath or when it's storming or when my rheumatism gets to paining too bad, me and Billy Bob went down to the Chigger Mountain railroad tunnel to wait for the night freight from St. Louis. This here was a fine summer evening, with a big old fat yellow moon hung above the pines on Hankers Ridge and mockingbirds and cicadas and toads making a soft ruckus. Nights like this, I have me a good feeling, hopeful, an
d I know Billy Bob does too.
They's a bog hollow on the near side of the tunnel opening, and beside it a woody slope, not too steep. Halfway down the slope is a big catalpa tree, and that was where we always set, side by side with our backs up against the trunk.
So we come on down to there, me hobbling some with my cane and Billy Bob holding onto my arm. That moon was so bright you could see the melons lying in Ferdie Johnson's patch over on the left, and the rail tracks had a sleek oiled look coming out of the tunnel mouth and leading off toward the Sabreville yards a mile up the line. On the far side of the tracks, the woods and the rundown shacks that used to be a hobo jungle before the county sheriff closed it off thirty years back had them a silvery cast, like they was all coated in winter frost.
We set down under the catalpa tree and I leaned my head back to catch my wind. Billy Bob said, "Granpa, you feeling right?"
"Fine, boy."
"Rheumatism ain't started paining you?"
"Not a bit."
He give me a grin. "Got a little surprise for you."
"The hell you do."
"Fresh plug of blackstrap," he said. He come out of his pocket with it. "Mr. Cotter got him in a shipment just today down at his store."
I was some pleased. But I said, "Now you hadn't ought to go spending your money on me, Billy Bob."
"Got nobody else I'd rather spend it on."
I took the plug and unwrapped it and had me a chew.
Old man like me ain't got many pleasures left, but fresh blackstrap's one; good corn's another. Billy Bob gets us all the corn we need from Ben Logan's boys. They got a pretty good sized still up on Hankers Ridge, and their corn is the best in this part of the hills. Not that either of us is a drinking man, now. A little touch after supper and on special days is all. I never did hold with drinking too much, or doing anything too much, and I taught Billy Bob the same.
He's a good boy. Man couldn't ask for a better grandson. But I raised him that way—in my own image, you might say—after both my own son Rufus and Billy Bob's ma got taken from us in 1947.I reckon I done a right job of it, and I couldn't be less proud of him than I was of his pa, or love him no less, either.
Well, we set there and I worked on the chew of blackstrap and had a spit every now and then, and neither of us said much. Pretty soon the first whistle come, way off on the other side of Chigger Mountain. Billy Bob cocked his head and said, "She's right on schedule."
"Mostly is," I said, "this time of year."
That sad lonesome hungry ache started up in me again—what my daddy used to call the "sweet fever." He was a railroad man, and I grew up around trains and spent a goodly part of my early years at the roundhouse in the Sabreville yards. Once, when I was ten, he let me take the throttle of the big 2-8-0 Mogul steam locomotive on his highballing run to Eulalia, and I can't recollect no more finer experience in my whole life. Later on I worked as a callboy, and then as a fireman on a 2-10-4, and put in some time as a yard tender engineer, and I expect I'd have gone on in railroading if it hadn't been for the Depression and getting myself married and having Rufus. My daddy's short-line company folded up in 1931, and half a dozen others too, and wasn't no work for either of us in Sabreville or Eulalia or anywheres else on the iron. That squeezed the will right out of him, and he took to ailing, and I had to accept a job on Mr. John Barnett's truck farm to support him and the rest of my family. Was my intention to go back into railroading, but the Depression dragged on, and my daddy died, and a year later my wife Amanda took sick and passed on, and by the time the war come it was just too late.
But Rufus got him the sweet fever too, and took a switchman's job in the Sabrevile yards, and worked there right up until the night he died. Billy Bob was only three then; his own sweet fever comes most purely from me and what I taught him. Ain't no doubt trains been a major part of all our lives, good and bad, and ain't no doubt neither they get into a man's blood and maybe change him, too, in one way and another. I reckon they do.
The whistle come again, closer now, and I judged the St. Louis freight was just about to enter the tunnel on the other side of the mountain. You could hear the big wheels singing on the track, and if you listened close you could just about hear the banging of couplings and the hiss of air brakes as the engineer throttled down for the curve. The tunnel don't run straight through Chigger Mountain; she comes in from the north and angles to the east, so that a big freight like the St. Louis got to cut back to quarter speed coming through.
When she entered the tunnel, the tracks down below seemed to shimmy, and you could feel the vibration clear up where we was sitting under the catalpa tree. Billy Bob stood himself up and peered down toward the black tunnel mouth like a bird dog on a point. The whistle come again, and once more, from inside the tunnel, sounding hollow and miseried now. Every time I heard it like that, I thought of a body trapped and hurting and crying out for help that wouldn't come in the empty hours of the night. I swallowed and shifted the cud of blackstrap and worked up a spit to keep my mouth from drying. The sweet fever feeling was strong in my stomach.
The blackness around the tunnel opening commenced to lighten, and got brighter and brighter until the long white glow from the locomotive's headlamp spilled out onto the tracks beyond. Then she come through into my sight, her light shining like a giant's eye, and the engineer give another tug on the whistle, and the sound of her was a clattering rumble as loud to my ears as a mountain rockslide. But she wasn't moving fast, just kind of easing along, pulling herself out of that tunnel like a night crawler out of a mound of earth.
The locomotive clacked on past, and me and Billy Bob watched her string slide along in front of us. Flats, boxcars, three tankers in a row, more flats loaded down with pine logs big around as a privy, a refrigerator car, five coal gondolas, another link of box cars. Fifty in the string already, I thought. She won't be dragging more than sixty, sixty-five. . . .
Billy Bob said suddenly, "Granpa, look yonder!"
He had his arm up, pointing. My eyes ain't so good no more, and it took me a couple of seconds to follow his point, over on our left and down at the door of the third boxcar in the last link. It was sliding open, and clear in the moonlight I saw a man's head come out, then his shoulders.
"It's a floater, Granpa," Billy Bob said, excited. "He's gonna jump. Look at him holding there—he's gonna jump."
I spit into the grass. "Help me up, boy."
He got a hand under my arm and lifted me up and held me until I was steady on my cane. Down there at the door of the boxcar, the floater was looking both ways along the string of cars and down at the ground beside the tracks. That ground was soft loam, and the train was going slow enough that there wasn't much chance he would hurt himself jumping off. He come to that same idea, and as soon as he did he flung himself off the car with his arms spread out and his hair and coattails flying in the slipstream. I saw him land solid and go down and roll over once. Then he knelt there, shaking his head a little, looking around.
Well, he was the first floater we'd seen in seven months. The yard crews seal up the cars nowadays, and they ain't many ride the rails anyhow, even down in our part of the country. But every now and then a floater wants to ride bad enough to break a seal, or hides himself in a gondola or on a loaded flat. Kids, old-time hoboes, wanted men. They's still a few.
And some of 'em get off right down where this one had, because they know the St. Louis freight stops in Sabreville and they's yardmen there that check the string, or because they see the rundown shacks of the old hobo jungle or Ferdie Johnson's melon patch. Man rides a freight long enough, no provisions, he gets mighty hungry; the sight of a melon patch like Ferdie's is plenty enough to make him jump off.
"Billy Bob," I said.
"Yes, Granpa. You wait easy now."
He went off along the slope, running. I watched the floater, and he come up on his feet and got himself into a clump of bushes alongside the tracks to wait for the caboose to pass so's he wouldn't be seen. Prett
y soon the last of the cars left the tunnel, and then the caboose with a signalman holding a red-eye lantern out on the platform. When she was down the tracks and just about beyond my sight, the floater showed himself again and had him another look around. Then, sure enough, he made straight for the melon patch.
Once he got into it I couldn't see him, because he was in close to the woods at the edge of the slope. I couldn't see Billy Bob neither. The whistle sounded one final time, mournful, as the lights of the caboose disappeared, and a chill come to my neck and set there like a cold, dead hand. I closed my eyes and listened to the last singing of the wheels fade away.
It weren't long before I heard footfalls on the slope coming near, then the angry sound of a stranger's voice, but I kept my eyes shut until they walked up close and Billy Bob said, "Granpa." When I opened 'em the floater was standing three feet in front of me, white face shining in the moonlight—scared face, angry face, evil face.
"What the hell is this?" he said. "What you want with me?"
"Give me your gun, Billy Bob," I said.
He did it, and I held her tight and lifted the barrel. The ache in my stomach was so strong my knees felt weak and I could scarcely breathe. But my hand was steady.
The floater's eyes come wide open and he backed off a step. "Hey," he said, "hey, you can't—"
I shot him twice.
He fell over and rolled some and come up on his back. They wasn't no doubt he was dead, so I give the gun back to Billy Bob and he put it away in his belt. "All right, boy," I said.
Billy Bob nodded and went over and hoisted the dead floater onto his shoulder. I watched him trudge off toward the bog hollow, and in my mind I could hear the train whistle as she'd sounded from inside the tunnel. I thought again, as I had so many times, that it was the way my boy Rufus and Billy Bob's ma must have sounded that night in 1947, when the two floaters from the hobo jungle broke into their home and raped her and shot Rufus to death. She lived just long enough to tell us about the floaters, but they was never caught. So it was up to me, and then up to me and Billy Bob when he come of age.
Graveyard Plots Page 7
