Killer Diller

by Edgerton, Clyde

  “Excuse me. Do you mind if I listen to a little of this?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’ll just sit here.”

  But it didn’t work that way. Noah didn’t get in any trouble for laying around drunk, so one of the problems to figure out is why getting drunk is such a big deal today. Well, it can probably be figured out. It’s all in here somewhere. Then the story settles in on the names of countries as the same as the names of kids, and Ham’s kids, the Canaanites, spread around and included places like Sodom and Gomorrah, which I have heard about.

  Wesley turns off the recorder. The young woman sitting across from him is distracting him somehow. She’s sitting at perfect attention, not moving, but she’s too something—paying too much attention—and he needs to preach this out alone. “That’s all,” he says to her.

  “What denomination are you?”

  “Baptist. I guess.”

  “I am too, but that sounded different from what I usually hear. It was sure interesting.” She leaves, carrying Wesley’s breakfast tray.

  Wesley wonders whether or not he should keep preaching what’s on his mind. Here was Noah—after the rainbow— laying around drunk and naked. Seems like the whole problem was due to Noah, not Ham, for heaven’s sake. What’s going on here? It’s got to have something to do with how whoever was writing this down was seeing things, thinks Wesley. For sure me and him have the same God.

  He goes back to Genesis 6:4, reads again. Angels making love with giant women. For sure they won’t married when they did that. How’d they get by with all that?

  His phone rings. It’s Mrs. Rigsbee. “I got a room—7221. Can you come up?” she asks.

  “Yeah. They said I could get up and go to the bathroom. Maybe I can find a wheelchair.”

  “I got a little something for you.”

  “I’ll be right up. I been preaching.”

  “Preaching? Who to?”

  “Myself.”

  “Oh, well. Come on up for a little visit.”

  Wesley rolls into Mattie’s room in a wheelchair.

  “You can’t walk?” she asks him.

  “Oh, yeah. I can walk. I’m just doing this for something different. It was sitting in the hall.” Wesley speaks like an old woman: “Did I tell you? I used to have everything I wanted.”

  “Lord have mercy. That’s not funny. I wonder how she’s doing. But listen. Guess what I got for you.”

  “Pound cake?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Over there in that bag. Don’t eat it all at once. There’s enough there for two times. They don’t have you on no diet or anything, do they?”

  “Oh no. I think I’ll eat a little bit right now.”

  “Well, get something to put it on—a paper towel from over there. Does it hurt to stand up?”

  “Yes, it does.” Wesley stands up from his wheelchair, gets a paper towel from over the sink, comes back, sits down in the wheelchair, breaks off a piece of cake and starts eating it. The cake is wider than the mouth passage. Crumbs are falling.

  “Good health is just about everything, ain’t it?” says Mattie.

  “You can damn sure say that again. How’d you get this cake up here?”

  “Elaine brought it.”

  “She cooked this?”

  “Oh, no. I had it at home. What were you preaching about down there?”

  “Noah.”

  “And the flood?”

  “Yes ma’am. And getting drunk. And did you know about these angels making love with giant women?”

  “Lord no. What in the world are you talking about? You find some of the oddest things.”

  “They ain’t written up like they were odd. They’re written up like they were normal. This is good cake.”

  “I thought it was pretty good myself.”

  Wesley finishes the cake, balls up the paper towel and tosses it into the trash can. “Did Dr. Sears come by to see you?” he asks.

  “Oh, yes, he did. He asked me to join the Ballard family.”

  “Did he say what it would cost you?”

  “Why no. He didn’t mention that.”

  “Mrs. White, at BOTA House, joined. When she kicks the bucket Ballard gets her car and whatever else. They’ll do all the maintenance on her car if she leaves it to the school. They cut the grass at her sister’s house and keep it up till she dies and then that’s theirs.”

  “They couldn’t have my house but it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, leaving a little something to the college.”

  “What about Elaine and Robert?”

  “Oh, they’ll be fine. I said a little something. If everybody left a little something to the Christian colleges, then maybe there wouldn’t be so much lying on television. And maybe I could get my TV fixed without taking out a loan. I’ll swanee. Will they keep your TV fixed if you will that to them?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “The way people overcharge and lie and misrepresent is a crime and if Christian education can’t do something about it, I don’t know what can.”

  Chapter 18

  A uniformed guard, in a little hut, leans through a window and asks for a pass. A long yellow wooden arm with black stripes blocks the road in front of the BOTA House van. Ben is driving. Wesley hands Ben a pass he received in the mail from Ms. Clark, the woman they’re supposed to meet here at Eastern LinkComm. Ben hands the pass to the guard.

  The guard takes the pass, leans back into his booth, slides his window into place and makes a call on his phone.

  “What’s he doing?” says Ben. “What do they make in this place, anyway—atom bombs?”

  “Telephones, I think.” The skin beneath Wesley’s eyes is light yellow, and the cuts have almost healed.

  The guard opens the window. “You both with the band?”

  “That’s right.”

  He hands the pass back. “First door up there. Under that green panel.”

  They park the van and go in.

  Pale pink tiles reflect bright lights. A uniformed woman wearing a badge stands behind a dark pink chest-high counter to their right. “Pass?” she says, glancing up, then looking back down to a list of numbers which she’s checking against another list.

  Wesley hands her the pass.

  “Pass?” she asks Ben, glancing up. She goes back to the lists.

  “He just gave it to you.”

  She looks up. “Where is your pass?” she asks Ben.

  “That’s mine too.”

  “Both of you have to have a pass. Two people—two passes. You can’t get in without a pass.”

  “We both just got in the gate,” says Ben.

  “That’s the gate. You might get in the gate, but you don’t get in the building without a pass. I’m the building guard.”

  “What the hell are y’all guarding?” asks Ben.

  The woman looks at him. “Information.”

  “You think I’m going to steal information?”

  “You might. Listen. I don’t make the rules. I just work here.”

  The woman pulls out a different list of numbers and checks it against the number on the pass. “Sign in. Right over there. What’s the name of the person this pass was sent to?”

  “Me—Wesley Benfield.”

  “No, you don’t sign in,” she says to Wesley, “just him. Once we get him assigned a pass he’ll need to sign in again since he didn’t have a pass to start with. Your pass signs you in. Do you know who sent this pass?”

  “Miss Clark. In public something.”

  “Public Relations?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t have this pass number on my master sheet.”

  A man comes in from the outside and hands the guard a large white envelope. “Personnel,” he says.

  The guard makes a call on the phone. “Package, gate two ... Darnell.” She presses and releases the receiver button, presses two numbers, looks at Wesley’s pass as sh
e waits for an answer. She hangs up. “I’m going to have to call back. Y’all can wait in there.” She nods to a small waiting room across the hall.

  Three people have come in and are waiting their turns.

  Ben sits in a chair in the waiting room. Wesley sits at the end of a couch. He looks at his watch. “We’re already ten minutes late.”

  “I got to take a leak,” says Ben. He gets up, goes out to the desk, comes back.

  “You don’t mean you got to have a pass to go to the bathroom?” says Wesley.

  “You got it. I’ll tell you one thing. If we have this much trouble getting back out of here, we’re gon’ dry up and die.”

  They wait five minutes.

  The guard comes to the door. “Did you say Miss Clark? We got two Miss Clarks. We got Miss Deborah Clark and Miss Georgia Clark.”

  “I don’t know. It was in Public Relations or whatever that was you said. We play in a band. We’re supposed to be meeting about setting up a gig for week after next.”

  The guard turns back to her little room. There are now six people waiting for her.

  Wesley looks at his watch. “This is crazy.”

  Ben picks up the receiver to the phone on the table beside his chair, pushes the zero. “Yes, this is Security. I need Public Relations. We got a little problem down here. . . . Thanks.” Ben hands the phone to Wesley.

  In three minutes Georgia Clark stands in the doorway. “Well, hello,” she says. “You had a problem getting in?”

  “Yeah, we did,” says Ben.

  As they walk to the elevator, Ben says, “You think you could show me were the bathroom is?”

  Ms. Clark’s office is one of twenty-eight honeycomb cubicles set off by lightweight, head-high dividers. Ben and Wesley listen as she describes plans for the Christmas luncheon that LinkComm and Ballard are giving for the clients at Shady Grove Nursing Home.

  “My grandma’s out there now,” says Wesley. “She had something like a heart attack, and they got her resting.”

  “Wonderful. She’ll get to see you perform then. How nice. When we have an opportunity to do something for the community, we do something for the community. Mr. Snaps, the president, is really behind it. And the president at Ballard is also very interested this year—Dr. Sears. The media will be here and all. Let’s go over to the dining room and I’ll show you the setup.”

  As they leave her office, Ms. Clark says to Wesley, “You know, I always wanted to be in a band.”

  Ben rolls his eyes.

  On the way home, Ben and Wesley stop at McDonald’s for supper. They each get a Big Mac, large fries, and large Coke. “Let’s go outside and eat,” says Wesley. “It’s got to be seventy degrees—and it’s near about Christmas.” He carries a salt shaker out with him.

  They sit outside at a small table. Several children are playing on the kiddie playground.

  Ben watches the children playing. A little boy picks up a piece of the bark beneath a swing and throws it at another little boy. “You marry Phoebe,” he says to Wesley, “you’ll have a little redhead.”

  “Yeah, probably. My problem with Phoebe is her old man don’t like me.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “He’s her old man.”

  “She don’t have to do what he say.”

  Wesley chews, watches the children. “I want you to go out to that nursing home with me sometime.”

  “Why?”

  “I figure maybe we could figure out a way to get Mrs. Rigsbee out of there. Spring her. I bet she would do it.”

  “Ain’t she sick?”

  “Naw. She can take care of herself. She ain’t that bad off. She don’t want to be out there. Like we don’t want to be in the BOTA House.”

  “I been thinking about that.” Ben sips Coke through his straw.

  “What?”

  “Running.”

  “You ain’t got that much longer, man.”

  “I got three months. And that’s a long-ass time you be wanting to go somewhere.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “What about the band?”

  “I don’t know. We could all meet somewhere after you get out.”

  One of the children—a little boy—starts crying, sits down on the bark shavings. A man comes out of the door and goes to him, picks him up and talks to him quietly. Wesley wonders how Holister treated Vernon when he was a baby. He thinks about Phoebe and her daddy, what it would be like to have a colonel as a daddy.

  “Ever since the fair they been after my ass,” says Ben, “and Mrs. White been writing all them drug things on the blackboard, and she’s been in the room twice when I come in, snooping. I think she’s after my ass.”

  “You got paramania. That’s all. But, maybe they are after you. You better quit smoking in there.”

  “You wouldn’t run?” asks Ben.

  “Not me. No way. I’m running out of second chances.”

  The Monday morning breakfast meeting has just broken up and Stan, still known as the new assistant treasurer, is seated at Mysteria’s desk talking on the phone to his wife, Darleen, about how to handle the afternoon trip to the pediatrician. Their youngest has an ear infection. He has just seen Ted and Ned go back into the president’s meeting room. Everyone else is gone. Mysteria is away from her desk. Stan notices Ned closing the meeting room door.

  “I’ll come on at three-thirty,” says Stan to Darleen. “If there’s any problem with me getting away I’ll call you. I’ll ask Big Don at lunch—when he’s happiest. Call me if it gets unbearable. Bye.”

  Stan hangs up, looks at the buttons on the phone. He presses intercom, picks up the phone quietly. He can hear every word:

  “But if it is marijuana and we don’t do anything—”

  “It looks like it. Don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure it is. It wouldn’t be in the plastic bag if it was something else.”

  “It was in a pair of balled-up socks. She said there was only one pair of balled-up socks and that’s how she knew to check. The rest were just loose.”

  “The bags?”

  “Socks.”

  “Oh. And we can trust her. Right?”

  “No question.”

  “We can’t do anything now—with the luncheon tomorrow.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “We got big coverage on it. Snaps is going to be there for the announcement and all. This would throw a wrench in everything.”

  “We could always discover this stuff next week, or maybe even a bit later, depending. Wait, I just had an idea. There may be a way to maximize on this thing. Every part of it. In fact, this could be a blessing in disguise. Listen.” A chair scrapes. It sounds like they’re moving to another part of the room. The voices are lowered. Stan strains to hear. “Cla cou dar drug bust and whefen ter ha bun Benfield comes out of it clean ah ah junt de bour the Ashley boy and besides that we oper in aye morn of Benfield’s faith and our influence. Listen iglit ar lee up seqen to the barm then close that place down and if Snaps to leggit of the option—”

  Mysteria opens the office door and backs in with a tray of clean coffee cups. Stan presses the intercom button off. “Okay,” he says into the receiver. “I’ll be there about three-thirty. Goodbye.” He hangs up. “Hi, Mrs. Montgomery. Just borrowing your phone to call Darleen.

  “Oh, that’s fine.”

  “One of our kids has an ear infection.”

  “It’s that time of year, I guess.”

  “Sure is. Here, I’ll let you have your desk back.”

  At the snack shop, Stan orders coffee. He sits at a table, opens his yellow legal pad to a clean page, pulls his Bic ballpoint from his shirt pocket and starts writing:

  Dear Wesley Benfield,

  You don’t know me, but I enjoyed your music on the radio a while back and I think I know something you need to know.

  He puts his hand to his head, flips to a new page.

  Dear Wesley Ben
field,

  I’ve been working at Ballard for some time now, as an administrator. But my time as an administrator here is over. I am familiar with your music and I’ve just come across some information I think you might need to know about.

  “It sounds like to me you’re headed for trouble,” says Mattie Rigsbee to Wesley. She is dressed and sitting up in a chair in her room at Shady Grove Nursing Home. “Just because he’s your friend and got in trouble ain’t no reason for you to go messing up again. What you need to be thinking about is finishing your time over there and getting a job and settling down. Around here, somewhere. You’ve got a good job skill and you’re starting to get some roots around here. I don’t know what you’d get into without any roots.”

  “I got roots.”

  Wesley tries to believe that Mrs. Rigsbee looks better than she did in the hospital.

  “You go running off and you won’t. You need to settle down, have a kitchen and a wife and children. You can’t have roots where you can’t cook. That’s one reason why this place is so horrible. I can’t live nowhere I can’t cook. And they won’t let me go home. It’s the saddest place I’ve ever been in my life and nobody won’t listen to you. They cut you off in the middle of what you’re saying or else they walk out on you. It’s just . . . I don’t know. But, son, you listen here. You put this running-off business right out of your mind. It’s dangerous and plum foolish, you go running off for no good reason. You’re twenty-four years old, son. Your life ain’t even started yet. They’re liable to lock you up sure enough.”

  “Can you escape?”

  “Escape? Me?”

  “Yeah, escape. From here. You can figure out ways to get out of places like this. I’ve gotten out of places a whole lot harder to get out of than here. You could probably just put on a overcoat and hat or something and walk out.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t think it would be so easy.”