by Wilderness
“I’m not drunk,” Newman said.
“That’s one of the things you always say when you’re drinking.”
“You think I’d be scared to?”
“Kill someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Aaron, it is a little unusual to sit about in a restaurant and discuss killing someone.”
“You think I’d be scared?”
“I don’t know. Would you?”
“You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Be scared to kill someone?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“You feel like killing anyone when they were tying you up and maybe copping a little feel while they were doing it?”
Janet shivered. Hood looked at her and then at Newman. The muscles at his jaw-hinge moved slightly.
“You feel like killing anybody then?” Newman said.
“Yes.” Janet’s voice was very soft and it hissed out between her teeth.
“So why don’t we?”
Janet looked at Hood.
“He’s serious, Janet,” Hood said.
She poked at the slice of lime in her glass of Perrier water. “And you?”
Hood said, “Whenever you need help, I’ll help you. Whatever it is. You know that.”
“You’re willing to kill someone?”
Hood shrugged. “Whatever,” he said.
“I’d do it for him,” Newman said. He finished his beer. “They did cop a little feel, didn’t they?” There was sweat on his forehead. He felt that odd mixture of lust and horror he’d felt before when he’d found her on the bed.
Janet looked at him without speaking. She ran the ball of her index finger around the rim of her glass.
“Didn’t they?”
She shook her head.
“Like hell,” Newman said. “They touched you. Didn’t they?” He felt desperation. He had to know.
Hood said, “Aaron, for crissake.”
Newman said, “Didn’t they?”
Very softly Janet said, “No. They made me touch them.”
Newman slammed his open palm on the bar top. Hood said, as softly as Janet had spoken, “Jesus.”
Newman said, “How …” and stopped. Hood looked at him once and shook his head.
Janet said, very softly and with no apparent emotion, “Yes. I want to kill them. This morning when I woke up I was afraid and didn’t remember why. You know that feeling. You wake up and you think Oh something is awful but I forgot what and then you remember, and I remember how they made me touch them. And I remember how helpless I was first when they made me touch them and then when they tied me up and I couldn’t move and they gagged me and I couldn’t talk or even spit. I remember that feeling of nakedness and helplessness and every morning when I wake up I will be afraid. And all the time I walk around with that feeling in my stomach of sinkingness and afraid. All the time I think What if they come back and I feel helpless. It’s not a good feeling for me. I need to control things. I need to feel that I am in control. You know that, Aaron. I’ve always needed to manage things, otherwise they frighten me. They get out of control. I can’t function like this. I say ‘I’ll not let it happen.’ I say ‘I’ll put it aside and go on and do my business and my work and not think about it,’ but it’s always there and every morning I’ll wake up frightened.”
Hood put his hand lightly on her forearm. Newman was silent. Both men were leaning forward toward her to listen as she spoke very softly.
“I’ve got to get back in control,” she said. “It will destroy me and destroy us. I can’t be anything you’d want to live with unless I have control.”
“We’ll get it back,” Newman said. He spoke very carefully so as not to slur his words.
“I want to shoot him,” Janet said. “I want to shoot him and the two men who came and tied me up. I want them to die. I want to be free of this.”
“Could it be done, Chris?” Newman said.
“Sure. Sure it could.”
“Would you do it with me?”
“Sure,” Hood said. “Sure I would.”
6
They had moved to a booth and a waitress had brought them a platter of sandwiches.
“If we shot him,” Hood said, “it would solve a lot of problems. You’d bring him, in a sense, to justice.”
Newman had been drinking beer for two hours and it had begun to show in his speech. “And we’d see to it that he hurt no one else.” He had trouble separating the to and the it. “That would make me feel better. It bothers me, he walks around loose.”
“And we’d be out from under,” Janet said. “The son of a bitch.”
“Is it just revenge?” Newman said. He ate a triangular sandwich and gestured with his empty beer bottle toward the waitress. She brought him another.
Janet said, “I want revenge and I want to be sure that what happened to me never happens again. I don’t mind killing somebody. I don’t give a damn about that.”
“Course you never have,” Hood said softly.
“Killed somebody? No. But the thought doesn’t bother me.”
Newman said, “For crissake, Janet, keep it down.”
She cocked her head at him and the flint edge came into her voice. It always scared him when the edge came. “Oh, you find me loud? Am I embarrassing you?”
“No, it’s just that if we do it, we wouldn’t want people to say they heard us talking about it.” He felt as if he’d been bad. His stomach ached slightly with apprehension. Her disapproval is devastating. She just looks hard at me and I get scared. Talk about pussy-whipped. “We are talking about murder.”
Hood said, “He’s right, Janet.”
She smiled at Hood and nodded. “I know, Chris, it’s one of the problems of the whole problem, isn’t it? We have to kill this man Karl so that neither the police nor the gangsters know we did it, or even suspect us. I assume his friends or whatever would want to revenge him even if they only suspected.”
“And they’re not concerned with rules of evidence, Janet,” Hood said.
“So we can’t even be spotted,” Janet said. “If they recognize us, we’re dead.”
Hood smiled. “That sounds about right,” he said.
“We’re still talking about murder here,” Newman said.
Hood sipped at his Perrier water. Even in the booth with the Newmans he seemed remote, partly in the shadow. They each leaned forward, arms on the table. He leaned back in the corner of the booth.
“What difference does it make what you call it,” Janet Newman said. “Don’t play word games. We have a problem here and we’re thinking about a solution. You had the original idea.”
Newman looked at his beer glass. “This isn’t a goddamned curriculum question. We’re talking about a human life.”
Janet made a hissing sound. “I know what we’re talking about,” she said. “I had a lot of chance to think about it last night while I was lying on the bed tied up. It’s not going to happen to me again. That’s a goal. I’m looking for a process by which we can achieve that goal.”
“Process-oriented,” Newman said. “Really sharpened the old management skills being chairman of that curriculum committee. ‘Scuse me, chairperson.”
Janet Newman said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Aaron.”
Chris Hood said, “Excuse me a moment.” He slid out of the booth and walked halfway down the bar. A heavy man in a white three-piece suit and a black shirt with no tie was leaning over the left shoulder of a woman at the bar. She was wearing an ankle-length flowered dress and sandals. As Hood approached, the woman said something to the man and shook her head hard.
Hood put his left hand gently on the man’s shoulder and smiled and murmured something.
The man said, “Who the fuck are you?”
Hood murmured again to the woman. She nodded.
The man said, “Get your hands off my shoulder, Jack, or there’s gonna be trouble.”
Hood’s hand tightened slightly on the man’s shoulde
r, and he murmured again and nodded toward the door.
The man said, “Fuck you, buddy,” and Hood hit him in the kidneys with his right fist. The punch traveled six inches. The man yelped. Hood’s left hand slid down the man’s arm, got the wrist, and levered it up behind the man’s back. His right hand took hold of the man’s collar, and Hood and the man in the white suit walked very fast toward the front door and outside.
The bartender put another drink in front of the woman in the long flowered dress, and Hood came back in the bar, walked down to the Newmans’ booth, and sat down. He sipped at his Perrier.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I was about to rush out and join you,” Newman said. “What happened out there?”
Hood smiled and shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Man just decided to move to another bar.”
“What if the man is too hard to handle?” Janet said.
“They usually aren’t,” Hood said. “And besides”—he took a two dollar roll of nickels out of his coat pocket—“I have a helper.”
Newman laughed. “All right, Chris,” he said. “Want me to work here on busy nights? We could really do a tune on some guy.”
“How about Adolph Karl,” Janet said. “Can you do a tune on him?”
Newman finished his beer and belched. “I bet we could,” he said. “Chris and I? Huh? What you say, Chris. Can we take him?”
“What’s that the man said once,” Hood answered. “To kill a man you need three things: the gun and the balls?”
“We can get the gun okay,” Newman said. He ran get and the together. “And we got the rest.” Newman’s color was high and he drummed on the table edge with both hands.
Janet Newman said, “I’ll be interested to see how you feel about it tomorrow.”
“Why,” Newman said, “cause I been drinking? I’m not drunk.”
“Why not sleep on it. And you might want to think what you’re trying to involve Chris in.”
“For crissake, don’t you want me to do it? A minute ago you were talking like you wanted me to do it. You want me to do it, I’ll do it.”
The waitress appeared, looked at Newman’s empty glass. Hood shook his head very slightly and the waitress went away.
“Because I want you to?” Janet said.
“Yeah. You want it. I’ll get it for you.”
“Not because you want it?”
“It don’t matter what I want. I do whatever you want, babe. You want something done, I’m your man.”
“So it’s all up to me,” Janet said.
“Some of it is up to me, Janet,” Hood said. He was sitting back in his corner, and the shadow of the booth hid his eyes. “It’s up to me how far I get involved in this.”
“Of course, Chris. If you don’t involve yourself, I very much doubt if Aaron will. Even if he thinks so now.”
“Bullshit,” Newman said. “I’ll do it with him or without. I got you, babe, I don’t need anything else.”
Hood smiled and was silent.
“Always self-sacrifice, always the martyr to love,” Janet Newman said. “If you do this it will be because you want to. I’m not going to be the one.”
“Fuck this,” Newman said and stood up. “I’m going home. You coming?”
“I have my car,” Janet said, “remember?”
Newman said, “Yes, so you do,” and turned and walked out of the bar.
In the booth Janet and Hood were silent. Then Janet said, “Chris. He’s going to do it, the son of a bitch. Or I’ll do it myself. Those bastards. They will not do that to me again.”
“You’re thinking about revenge, Janet, and safety.”
“So what.”
“He’s thinking about honor and courage, maybe justice.”
“Shit.”
“Not to him it isn’t. They’re hard things to think about. Being the kind of man he thinks he ought to be is hard. It’s a burden.”
“Being the kind of woman he thinks I ought to be isn’t very easy either,” she said. “I just think that killing Adolph Karl is the only intelligent solution to the problem we’ve got. It will serve as justice for the young woman he killed, it will prevent him from doing it again, it will take our own lives out of jeopardy, it will, I admit this, ease my own sense of violation. And it will solve Aaron’s problems of honor and manhood or whatever you think is bothering him.”
“What do you think is bothering him?”
“Oh God, Chris, I don’t know and I’m sick of trying to figure it out. He’s not a man, he’s a big child. Everything has to be romance and chivalry and …” She gestured aimlessly with her hand.
“And a code of behavior,” Hood said. “I read the books. That’s not always a bad thing, Janet.”
“Live with it awhile,” she said.
Hood was silent.
“Would it bother you to do it, Chris? To kill Adolph Karl?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I agree with your summary of the situation. It seems your best move.”
“It’ll bother Aaron, I can assure you.”
“He’s never done it before,” Hood said.
“Kill someone?”
“Yes.”
“Neither have I,” Janet said, “but it doesn’t bother me.”
“I’ve got another edge on Aaron,” Hood said.
“You’re probably in better shape,” Janet said.
“No,” Hood said. “I kind of like it.”
7
Newman woke in the morning uneasy and feeling guilt. As always after he’d been drinking he ran back in his mind to see if he’d done anything bad. He felt hot with embarrassment that he’d tried to swagger with Chris about being a bouncer in his pub.
The air conditioner was humming, Janet was still asleep, her back to him, her hair up, a blue scarf tied around it. There was an old maple tree in the front yard. Its trunk was four feet in diameter. The thick healthy green leaves moved gently against the sky outside the bedroom window. He felt the stab of fear as he thought of Adolph Karl. Two cops had called him a psychopath. He’d talked with such conviction last night about killing him.
He slid under the covers over against Janet. His pelvis pressed against her buttocks. He put his left arm over her and put his hand on her breast. She was wearing a bra. Like armor, he thought. Always a bra, underpants, pj’s, socks, no matter how hot it is. Must be security or something. Sometimes a fucking bathrobe. She rolled over onto her stomach away from his hand.
“I gather,” he said, “you don’t care for a little nooky?”
“Un-unh,” she murmured, still half-asleep.
He rolled back over to his own side of the bed and lay on his back. His throat felt tight and again his eyes stung but no tears came. He thought of her as he had seen her on the bed the night before. Naked and helpless. Couldn’t even spit. Desire buzzed in his stomach. He looked at her beside him. She was on her stomach, her face turned away. Except for the slight rise and fall of her back as she breathed she was inert. One of her hair rollers had come loose and was half hanging out from her blue scarf.
“You want me to kill some guy for you,” he said.
She moved slightly, still asleep, and said, “Ummm.”
He laughed without humor, or sound, and got up. He slept naked. In the bathroom mirror he looked at himself. He had the weight lifter’s mass. Pectoral muscles, deltoids, triceps, all over-developed. But there was fat, too, a roll around his waist that thickened his whole body, flesh that softened and sagged his chest over the big pectoral muscles. His upper eyelids had sagged so that the top round of his eye was covered, and the flesh under his chin was loose so that if he tucked his chin back at all his neck disappeared.
He flexed at the mirror. He looked better when he flexed. What seemed soft was suddenly revealed as hard, what might have been fat was in fact shown to be muscle. Not bad for forty-six. If I could only drop twenty pounds I’d be splendid for forty-six.
In the shower he tho
ught about Adolph Karl. But would it be right, he thought. Do I have the right to take the law into my own hands. Christ, I sound like a comic strip. Who was that masked man anyway? But do I? But if I don’t, how can I stand being dishonored so? “I could not love thee half so much loved I not honor more.” I wonder if Richard Lovelace was married. Was he just worrying about the ethics of it to avoid doing it? Was he simply scared?
He lathered his hair with apple-scented shampoo and let the hot water run over him rinsing the shampoo away. Let’s look at the problem of scared. He tried to examine himself, to study his spiritual condition the way one might examine a painting. But his spiritual condition was evasive. It wouldn’t stay in frame, it shifted. Like looking at an electron, he thought. The act of observation changes its behavior. Yes, I’m scared, but is that why I’m hesitating on this thing? Chris wouldn’t hesitate. Chris would go right to it. Ah, but I’m not Chris, nor was meant to be.
He shut off the water and stepped out of the shower. The world is out of joint. He toweled dry and went back upstairs to the bedroom to dress. He never used the upstairs bathroom. She used it to get dressed for work. A steamy shower would ruin her hair.
The bedroom was empty. She was in the bathroom getting ready for work. He dressed and made the bed, tightening the sheets, making careful hospital corners, smoothing the quilt over the pillows. She never made the bed right, she simply rolled the quilt up over sheets and pillows so there was a sense of lumpiness under the quilt, and when you got in at night the sheets were wrinkly.
He had breakfast on the table when she came into the kitchen. As he heard her step on the back stairs he poured the coffee, and everything was ready when she sat down. There were melon slices arranged on a plate, and toasted oatmeal bread, and strawberry jam, and coffee. Almost never did either of them eat the melon, but he liked the look of it on the table.
She’d spent more than an hour making up and getting her hair organized. She wore a white muslin shirt with loose sleeves and a slotted neck, and high-waisted apricot-colored pants with a draw waist and tapered legs over high heels. She smelled of perfume.
“Christ,” he said, “aren’t you beautiful.”
