The Good Old Stuff

by John D. MacDonald

  At midnight he put his solution into the envelope and addressed it. Myra awakened by herself, yawned, and smiled sleepily at him. Trusting Myra! For a moment his resolve was weakened by pity. He thought of the envelope in his hand. The first prize was fifty thousand dollars. With fifty thousand dollars, life could be made bearable, even with Myra. Money would buy a certain amount of liberty from the married state.

  But, as a winner of many very small prizes, he knew how remote his chances were.

  He smiled back at her and they went to bed.

  On Saturday afternoon he had, as he expected, an hour alone in the apartment. It was a ground-floor apartment in the back of the building, the windows half shadowed by cedars. That was a necessary part of the plan. He took the fishline from the closet shelf, cut off a ten-foot length and tied a loop in the end, made a slipknot. The windows were of the sort with a permanent screen, and they could be opened or closed by inside cranks. Each movement had been planned. The handles on the small gas stove pointed straight down. They turned in the right direction for his purposes. He slipped the noose over one handle, pulled it tight, ran the other end of the string to the window, and poked it through one of the meshes of the screen. The window was open a few inches. Then, carrying a screwdriver for the sake of appearances, he went outside and around the building to the window. He found the end of the string, pulled it slowly and firmly. It gave slightly and then came free. He pulled it all the way out through the mesh, forcing the knot through, then pushed firmly against the window. As he had expected, the crank made a half turn and closed.

  He hurried back into the apartment and found that the kitchenette was filled with the stink of gas. The burner, unlighted, was on full. He turned it off, opened the window to air the place.

  The stove had four burners. He made three more lengths of string with slipknots at the end, knots that would slip off when the handles pointed directly at the window. He put the four lengths of string on the closet shelf.

  When Myra returned from the store, he was working on a new puzzle which had just come out.

  That was on Saturday. He gave himself Sunday as a breathing space and began the second part of the campaign. Myra was a person who needed a great deal of sleep. Peter decided to see that she would become starved for sleep.

  Monday night he talked her into a late movie. After they got back to the apartment he talked long and animatedly about the picture they had seen, ignoring her yawns and sighs. They were in bed by two thirty. He set the alarm for seven and saw that she got up when he did. On Tuesday he phoned four times during the day, knowing from the drugged sound of her voice that he was awakening her each time. Tuesday night he took her out to dinner and then to another movie. He watched her in the movie and awakened her the two times she fell asleep. He insisted on seeing part of the picture over and afterward invented an excuse to call on friends.

  They were in bed by midnight, but Peter lay in the darkness for a time and then awakened her to tell her that he was ill. Her concern for him kept her from getting very much sleep that night. And on Wednesday morning Peter phoned the office and said that he was not well. He demanded copious attention all through the day. Myra cared for him and dragged about with the drugged look of a sleepwalker.

  It was hard for him to conceal his excitement and anticipation. At five o’clock he got up and dressed, declaring that he felt much better. In fact, he said, he was famished.

  At seven o’clock, with the dishes washed, Myra sat across the room from him and fell asleep, making no attempt to read.

  “Myra!” he said, quite loudly. “Myra!”

  She didn’t stir. Everything up to this point had been preparation. And now he realized that the actual commission of the deed required no particular call on his strength and determination. Actually it was as though she were already dead. He opened the kitchenette window several inches, took the four strings, fastened them to the handles, careful not to touch the handles with his fingers. Myra was snoring throatily.

  He poked the strings through the screen knowing that she had no more reason to use the stove, knowing that in the semi-darkened kitchenette the dark strings would be invisible. He took his keys out of his pocket and put them on the desk. He took the note from among his business papers, folded it once and placed it on the desk, an ashtray on top of it, in a conspicuous spot. It was important that he be without keys and that the note be out in the open for anyone to find. It would be best if someone else should find it. Then he could snatch it away and handle it.

  Everything was ready. He spoke to her sharply, went over and shook her.

  “Myra!”

  She smiled blearily up at him. “Gee, I’m so tired I could die!”

  That startled him for a moment, and then he felt a deep ironic amusement at her choice of words.

  “Honey, I feel guilty not working today. I’m going down to Benninger’s drugstore. They’re a client, and I can do a little checking. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  “Maybe I’ll go to bed.”

  “No. Don’t do that. It’s only a little after seven. You go to bed now and you’ll wake up before dawn.”

  “Okay,” she said dreamily. “I’ll wait until you come back.”

  He opened the door, looked back at her, and said, “Goodbye, honey.”

  She yawned. “ ’Bye, Peter.”

  He shut the door, heard the latch click. Now came the period of most danger. The night was very dark. The apartment house was on a quiet street. When he was certain that he was unobserved, he went quickly along the dark line of cedars. He looked cautiously through the windows of the living room. He could see the back of the wing chair in which she sat, her hand slack on the arm of the chair, the edge of one shoe. She did not move. Every object in the room stood out with a strange clarity, as though he were seeing the room for the first time, and had been asked to memorize the contents and the position of each item.

  Cedar brushed his cheek as he moved back to the kitchenette window. He found the four strands, conquering panic as, for a moment, it appeared that one had slipped back through the screen. He pulled slowly and steadily. The four strings pulled free and he yanked them through the screen, balled them in his hand. Then he pressed the window shut, walked out to the edge of the building, looked up and down the deserted sidewalk, then hurried across to the walk and went south with long strides to the Benninger drugstore.

  The younger brother was behind the counter. Peter’s lips felt stiff as he smiled. It seemed to him that in some secret place in his mind he could hear the whisper of escaping gas. A good thing the stove was a cheap one without a pilot light.

  “Thought I’d stop by and see how the new register tape is working.”

  “It seems to be going okay, Mr. Kallon. It slowed us up the first week getting used to it, but now it’s second nature. I like the way it keeps all the sales separated by department.”

  “Sure,” Peter said. “It gives you a check on how you’re doing.”

  “There’s a couple of new books of crosswords in since you were here a couple days ago.”

  “Are there? Good.” He went casually over to the rack, picked out the new ones, put them on the counter, and slid up onto a stool. “I’d like a root beer, please.”

  “Sure thing,” Benninger said. Charged water hissed into the glass. It also sounded like gas escaping. “How’s the missus?”

  “What? Oh, she’s fine. Say, you don’t mind if I sit here and work one of these puzzles, do you?”

  “Goodness, no! You go right ahead, Mr. Kallon.”

  The puzzle he picked was based on names of cities and states. He glanced at the clock as he took his pencil out of his pocket. Ten of eight. He started the puzzle, lettering neatly and quickly. The Christmas city. Ah, that would be Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Number ten down bothered him. Six letters. The only all-rock town in the U.S. He worked on the surrounding words and finally the stubborn one turned out to be Ingram. He felt a glow of satisfaction as he filled it i
n.

  But he couldn’t quite forget the hollow feeling in his middle, the flutter that was partly excitement, partly worry. What was going on at the apartment? Had she been awakened by the smell?

  He finished the puzzle and looked at the clock. Nine fifteen. Later than he had dared believe.

  “Finished it off?” Benninger asked.

  “I got it.”

  Benninger laughed. “You sure are one for the puzzles and contests. Remember that contest blank I give you and you won a fifty-dollar government bond with it?”

  “Of course I remember it. Well, time to get home. I’ve been a little worried about Mrs. Kallon lately. She acts depressed.”

  “It’s this changeable weather. Gets all of us down.”

  “Well, be sure you get those tapes and your check stubs down to the office on Friday, Harry. ’Night.”

  “Good night, Mr. Kallon. We’ll have ’em there on time.”

  Peter let the door swing shut behind him. He felt that he had handled it exactly as planned. Nothing crude like calling attention to the time. His hand hadn’t shaken as he’d picked up the change from his dollar. No, it had gone quite well. That’s what came of understanding details and knowing how to handle them from a purely objective viewpoint.

  He found himself walking too fast and forced himself to slow down. The night air was cool on his face. Breathable air. Fresh, life-giving air. His heels struck firmly and crisply and tidily against the sidewalk. He passed a neighborhood couple by a streetlight. He knew them by sight. That was lucky.

  “Good evening,” he said cheerfully.

  “Hello, Kallon,” the man said. Better and better. He hadn’t realized that the neighbor knew his name.

  He pushed the front door open and walked down the long corridor, past the elevators, down to the corner and then turned left and went to his own door. He took a deep breath, knocked, and called gaily, “Myra! Myra! Open up. I forgot to take my keys with me.”

  He could smell it then, the faint odor of gas. He waited to make certain that he actually smelled it before simulating panic. “Myra!” he yelled, hammering on the door. In a few moments now, other doors would open. “Myra!”

  He was rattling the doorknob helplessly, kicking at the bottom of the door, calling to his dead wife when it happened. In the last fractional second of life that was left to him it was as though the door had curiously pulled loose in his hand. It smashed against him with a white-hot blasting flare, the heavy panel smashing him against the opposite wall of the corridor.…

  Because the girl was very upset and because she looked a little like his daughter, the police lieutenant was very gentle.

  “You had no way of knowing,” he said.

  “I still don’t understand how it happened.”

  He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “There was a heavy concentration of gas in the apartment. When a phone rings it makes a little spark inside it between the magnet and the arm on the clapper. So of course, after you dialed and got the connection, the line went dead at the first ring. You had no way of knowing.”

  There was a stricken look in her eyes. “I … I was so anxious to make that call. One of the other girls wanted to, but it had to be me. I thought it would be exciting telling somebody that they’d won a fifty-thousand-dollar prize.”

  The lieutenant reached over and clumsily patted the girl’s shoulder as she buried her face in her hands. “You had no way of knowing,” he said again. A nearby machine began to clack out a telegram, imprinting the words on the long paper tape. The lieutenant turned and walked stolidly out of the Western Union office.

  Miranda

  They put a plate in the back of my head and silver pins in the right thighbone. The arms were in traction longer than the legs. The eye, of course, was something they couldn’t fix.

  It was a big, busy place they had there. The way I had come in, I guess, was a sort of challenge to the doctors. A post-graduate course. See, gentlemen, this thing is alive—indubitably alive. Watch, now. We will paste it back together the way God made it. Or almost as good.

  My friends came—for a while. For a few months. I wasn’t too cordial. I didn’t need them. It was the same thing every time. How terrible to be all strung with wires and weights! Aren’t you going mad from boredom, George?

  I wasn’t going mad from boredom. I learned how to keep my face from laughing, how to laugh on the inside. As if I was sitting back there in my mind, hugging myself, shrieking with laughter, rocking from side to side, laughing and laughing. But nothing but silence on the outside. The faraway dignity of the very sick.

  They brought me in and I was dead. That is, for all practical purposes. The heart had no right to keep beating.

  But you see, I knew. When you know a thing like that, you can’t die. When you know a thing like that, it is unfinished business.

  Poor George. Poor old George.

  And me all the time laughing away. It was a joke that I could understand, but nobody else would. The joke goes like this. I’ll tell you and you can laugh with me too. We’ll rock and giggle together. Once upon a time there was a good-natured, broad-shouldered slob named George A. Corliss who lived in an eleven-thousand-dollar frame house in an orderly little suburban community called Joanna Center. He lived at 88 April Lane. He made a hundred and thirty-eight fifty each and every week in a New York publishing house, carried a little more insurance than he should have, loved his dainty, fragile-boned, gray-eyed, silver-blond little wife named Connie very much indeed. In fact this slob had his happiest moments when Connie would give him a speculative look and tell him that he really did look a little like Van Johnson. This George Corliss, he made replicas of early American furniture in a basement workshop, bought a new Plymouth every time he had the old one about paid for, conscientiously read “good books” while commuting, and often brooded about the childlessness of the Corliss household, a thorn in his side.

  He drove too fast, smoked too much, knocked off too many cocktails. In all respects a very average guy. But what George didn’t know was that Connie, the little silver-blond wife, feeling the thirties coming on, had acquired an itch for a Latin-type twenty-two-year-old kid, a gas pumper at the local lubritorium, a pinch-waisted kid with melting eyes, muscles, and a fast line of chatter. Since the kid obviously could not support Connie in the style to which George had gradually accustomed her, nothing seemed simpler than to find some nice safe way of knocking George off and glomming onto the fifty-six thousand bucks his demise would bring in.

  So one day when George had told Connie in advance that he had to take a run up to a mountain town called Crane, New York, to dicker with a recalcitrant author, Connie took the Plymouth to the garage and the kid, Louie Palmer by name, did a judicious job of diddling with the tie-rod ends with the idea of their parting when a turn was taken at high speed.

  So I took a turn at high speed. Rather, I tried to take it. The steering wheel went loose and gummy in my hands. They killed me, all right. They killed George, the slob, all right.

  Funny, how it was. Take the moment the car started rolling. I had maybe one second of consciousness left. And in that second a lot of little things added up. I’d had the steering checked in town that week. Connie always buying gas in one-dollar quantities. The funny way she’d said goodbye. At the last minute I wanted her to come along. She was emphatic about saying no. And there was the time I found the initialed cigarette case on the car floor. She took it and I forgot it until I saw that Louie Palmer using it. Then he got all red and bothered and said it had slipped out of his pocket while he was checking the car, maybe when he reached in to yank the gimmick that releases the hood.

  And before things went out for me, in a blinding whiteness that reached across the world, I said to myself, almost calmly, “George, you’re not going to let this kill you.”

  But it did kill the George I was talking to. The man who came out of the coma eight days later wasn’t the old furniture builder, huckster, and loving husband.

  N
o, he was the new George. The boy who could lie there and laugh inside at his joke. They tried to kill him and they did. And now he was going to kill them. Murder by a corpse. There’s something you can get your teeth into and laugh at. But don’t let it move the face muscles. It might pull out some of the deep stitches.

  “You’re the luckiest man in the world,” the young doctor said. Young, with a nose like a bird’s beak and no more hair than a stone.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I would have bet ten thousand to one against you.”

  “Good thing you didn’t.” I wanted him to go away. I wanted to think about Connie and Louie and just how I would do it to them.

  He fingered the wasted arm muscles. “Doing those exercises?”

  “Every day, Doc.” I liked to see him wince when I called him Doc.

  He clucked and muttered and prodded. “I warned you that you might not ever be able to walk again, the way those nerves were pinched. But the nurse told me you took a few steps today. I don’t understand it.”

  I looked him in the eye, with the one I had left. “You see, Doc,” I said, “I’ve got everything to live for.”

  The way I said it made him uneasy.

  “Mr. Corliss, you’re not going to be exactly as good as new. We can improve that face for you by hooking a plastic eye in those muscles so that the eye will turn in its socket, but the two big scars will still show. You’ll limp for a few years and you will have to be very careful for the rest of your life, protecting that plate in your head from any sudden jars. No sports, you understand. Bridge is going to be your speed.”

  “You’ve said this before, Doc.”

  “I want to impress it on you. A man can’t go through what you went through and expect—”