Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  As subtly as I can, I try to suggest this to Ethel, and she says, “Well, it’s too early to get someone to baby-sit. Ken will just have to go without me.”

  “No. I want you both there.”

  “Marcus, you’re scaring me, the way you sound. Look, don’t worry about the kids. We’ll be there without them as fast as we can make it.”

  When I put down the phone, David at my shoulder says, “All right?” and I answer, “Yes. So far.”

  So far.

  We go out to the porch, where the gathering seems to have resolved the question before it. McGrath says to us, “Some don’t want any part of it, but they’ll keep buttoned up about it. The rest of us will do what we can to help. Mike Roos there”—he points to a young man, not bearded but with long hair down his back in a pigtail—“doesn’t think he can keep the kids tied down to the house all day, so he’ll take them to the lake for a picnic or something.”

  Mike Roos, I remember, is the one the commune designated as its schoolmaster, the one for whom they had applied for some meeting funds so that he can get in his required college courses. I say to him, “I’m grateful to you for your help. You know, the money that’s needed for you—” and he abruptly, almost angrily, cuts me off by saying, “Fuck the money. You want to pay for this, I’d just as soon not go along with it.”

  “Cool it, man,” McGrath tells him, and then says to me, “We can talk about all that later. Meanwhile, you know what it means once those roadblocks are set up. No more getting from here to the meeting house by Ridge Road. You’ll have to go a long ways roundabout through town and up Quaker Lane. That turns two miles into maybe five or six. So if you want to stay in touch here, make sure you’ve got somebody standing by the phone in the meeting house.”

  “The Marcy house,” I say.

  “Anna and Elizabeth in on this too?” Erlanger asks.

  “They will be. We’re meeting over there right away.”

  Erlanger says doubtfully, “A couple of old people like that, I don’t know. Best thing would be to get them away from here altogether.”

  “You don’t know that couple of old people,” David says.

  “They wouldn’t leave even if we wanted them to,” I tell Erlanger. “As for our keeping in touch with each other, there’s one thing more I’d like you people to do. Try to keep watch on the house from the woods without being seen. And on the trail in back of the house. After David and I get things settled with the meeting, we can take care of that ourselves.”

  “No sweat,” McGrath says. “Some of our women use the woods for mushrooms and salad stuff. They know their way around the whole ridge. They’ll take care of it.”

  “But always out of sight,” David warns. “They have to keep under cover no matter what. We all do.”

  Erlanger says, “Even so, Flood must be smart enough to figure somebody’s most likely keeping an eye on him.”

  “But we don’t give him evidence of it,” David says. “That’s the name of the game. He has to be totally isolated until the structure of the gang breaks down.”

  “And how long will that take?” Mike Roos asks caustically. “Man, you are dealing with hard cases. And they are fixed up with food and probably pot and pills and, for a sure thing, women. And the longer they hold out, the meaner they’ll get.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “I thought you were with us.”

  “Sure. But you have to set some kind of time limit. Daytime might be all right. Nighttime, when I bring the kids back here, that gang could come walking right in on us out of the dark, and then what happens? You talk about them not communicating with the outside. But sooner or later they’ll have to communicate, and we’ve got a phone here, and our cars handy for them, and, man, we are just wide open for disaster. So I say you have to set a time limit when you start communicating with them and leave us out of it.”

  I look at David. “He’s right about that.”

  David shakes his head. “I don’t believe they’ll try walking along the road past any roadblock, and that’s the only way they can get here.”

  “But you can’t be sure,” Roos argues. “And what happens if this thing keeps up tomorrow? You really think you can stand up under that much pressure yourselves? Like wondering just how pissed off Flood is about being all fouled up, and how much he’ll take it out on the women?”

  “Shit, man,” McGrath says. “That kind of talk doesn’t help any.”

  “Because I am telling it like it is. All right, it’s worth a try. But taking a chance our kids wind up hostages too, and doing G.I. reconnaissance with guns aimed at you out of a window—this is heavy involvement, man. I don’t like the fuzz any more than anybody here. Especially I don’t like Mister Tight-ass Police Chief Duffy and the way he runs this tight-ass town. But I say comes the moment of truth, and it’s his business to put down Flood.”

  “There’s time for that,” David says.

  “You’ll be surprised how fast time can go,” Roos says.

  This is what I take away with me when David and I get into the station wagon and head down the road toward town. The echo of those words, and the lip-curling delivery of them.

  When we pull up to the bank Herb Hill, the manager, is at the door, the night watchman opening it for him. Mondays, when the armored trucks make their early deliveries, I am always at the bank eight o’clock on the dot, and Hill is always there ahead of me. Now he raises his eyebrows to indicate surprise that I am fifteen minutes ahead of this rigid schedule, but says nothing as David and I follow him into the building.

  He’s an old-timer, Hill, has worked his way up from teller, a competent and reliable man, but a little too affable for my comfort, a little too much the back-slapper of the favored customer for my taste, though it seems to go down well with the customer. However, we have worked side by side for almost thirty years, so I must brace myself to get it out. “You’ll have to take over for both Janet and me today, Herb. Neither of us will be here.”

  “Just like that? Something wrong at home? You look like it, Marcus.”

  “I suppose I do. Janet’s been hurt. An accident. Very serious.”

  “That’s terrible. In the car?”

  “No, a fall downstairs. We managed to get doctors up from New York in the middle of the night. Possible brain damage, they say, and they can’t even risk moving her.”

  “My God, Marcus, if there’s anything I can do—”

  “What you can do, Herb, is check my desk calendar. Postpone or cancel any of my appointments you can’t handle personally. The same for Janet. Above all, make it clear to everybody that there’s to be no phone calls to the house, nobody visiting.”

  “No phone calls. No visiting.”

  “None,” David says. “Matter of fact, we’re having the phone service to the house discontinued for the time being.”

  “You can have your calls transferred here,” Hill says. “I can take them, at least during bank hours. And stand by here after that if it’s necessary.”

  “No,” I say, “better to just have the service cut off. Will you get the phone company on that right away, Herb?”

  “Can do.” Hill frowns at a bothersome thought. “I suppose Doc Jeffries is up there, isn’t he? How does his office reach him, once the phone service is out?”

  Orin Jeffries. Our family doctor. Who of course would be up there in such a case. It is David who saves the situation while I flounder speechlessly. He quickly says, “We didn’t call in Jeffries, Herb. He’s strictly country style, and this is neurosurgical stuff. Way beyond him, the operation and all.”

  “Oh, sure,” Hill says. “Of course. Well, just leave everything to me. I’ll get hold of the phone company right now.”

  I am sick with tension leaving the building. Outside, I say to David, “If this gets back to Orin Jeffries—”

  “It will. Meanwhile, get it out of your head. One problem at a time is enough.”

  Sometimes too much.

  James Flood

>   No problem about the command post; it is wherever I am. The observation post is something else.

  I issue Lester one of the automatic guns and Coco’s binoculars and lead him up to the attic, where it still looks like no Hayworth ever got rid of a piece of junk from the time the first one grabbed this land and built the house on it. The ladder to the roof is in the middle of the attic. I go up, shove open the hatch, and climb out onto the roof. Nothing has changed. I am on the same old sun deck with the low railing around where I used to hide out when the family got too much on my neck. Lester squeezes through the hatch to join me. From where we stand we have a view all around the building: garage, stables, springhouse, lawns and gardens, and beyond them, the deep Adirondack woods. Ridge Road in front of the house emerges from the woods on one side, disappears into them on the other.

  Lester gauges the distance to the road. “Runs from about two hundred yards in front to maybe eight hundred at the ends,” he says. “Rather have one of the M-fourteens up here for that distance.”

  I say, “Not if they come in bunches like bananas. First job is to pin them down. You can do it a lot better with the spray gun.”

  In the opposite direction is the long slope down to the highway, and from here the trees on it look impenetrable. Lester says, “Not much chance of them coming from that side, I figure.”

  “Not too much. But there’s a trail from Highway Nine up to the back of those gardens. Anybody willing to haul himself up can get you in his sights from right there.”

  “You, too, when it’s your turn up here.”

  “Sure. We’ll all be taking turns up here. Nobody’s trying to dump any extra load on you. All I’m saying is that you have to cover the back of the house as well as the road. You see anybody except Hayworth, just give him a burst at his feet, then get down the hatch.”

  “One hour,” Lester says. “Nobody shows up to take over, I’m still coming down in one hour.”

  “One hour,” I agree. “The ladies’ll have breakfast waiting for you.”

  I take a good look at the trail-head beyond the gardens before I start down the ladder. After that bedtime session with Janet ten years ago, after my sixteen-year-old ineptitude was laid on the line for her the way she wanted it to be, I had to do something about it. No .22 rifle for this, the way it had been for the garbage man. Nothing that obvious. But something that might hurt as bad as a .22 short without anybody even knowing who or why.

  The last time I had been up here was while I was laying shingles to replace the ones wrecked by a heavy winter. I had watched from here as Janet disappeared through the bushes concealing the trail, a beach bag in her hand. Three times within the week. Someone waiting along the way down the slope to service her. Obviously someone considerably better at it than I was.

  One day, when she was away from the house on a shopping trip, I checked out the trail. A rough walk, steeply downhill, over a mat of pulpy, slippery dead leaves which concealed razor-edged rocks and twisting tree roots. A hundred yards down the slope I found what had to be Janet’s lair. Off the trail, water trickled between rocks and curled over a five-and-dime little waterfall. The grass was matted here, some cigarette butts showing in it.

  The next time Janet hit the trail, beach bag in hand, I was ready. I gave her a long head start, and then, camera in hand—it wasn’t much of a camera, but it was a camera—I followed along. Get a few pictures of her having a blanket party with some man, and she would be one sad girl. I moved down the trail as silently as an Indian after wary game, then cut into the woods and worked my way down toward the waterfall between the trees. When I was about twenty feet away from it I saw Janet, not with a man, but almost as good, without any clothes on. She had slipped out of her jeans, shirt, and sandals, and was stretched out on a blanket reading. I sighted the camera on her, squeezed the shutter, then either that click of the shutter or a flash of sunlight on the lens caught her attention. Suddenly she sat up and shouted, “Hey!”

  I was frozen there. I could have run, but even in my panic I realized that unless I just kept running right out of town, there was no sense to that. And Janet herself didn’t show any signs of panic. Taking her time about it, she got into her shirt and jeans and made her way up the slope toward me. She took the camera from my hand. “What’s this about?” she said. “Nature study?”

  “I just like to take pictures,” I said. “Nature, waterfalls, anything. Honest to God, if I knew you were here like that, I wouldn’t have even come down this way.”

  “I’ll bet,” Janet said. “You know, you may not believe this, Jimmy boy, but if I thought that picture you just took was for your private album, I wouldn’t even mind. After all, you can’t say we’re complete strangers, can you? But since it’s likely to wind up with a bunch of kids in town having a good time over it—” She opened the camera, pulled out the spool of film, and shoved it into her pocket. She handed me back the camera. “I owe you for that roll of film,” she said.

  That was it. She owed me for it, but she never did pay me for it.

  Not yet.

  Now here she is in this kitchen, she and her mother and sister moving like three ghosts between stove and sink and table, laying out breakfast for Coco and Harvey. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Janet when she doesn’t give the impression she’s in charge of whatever is going on. She figures to be twenty-eight, but with those bleary eyes, and swollen lip, and stringy wet hair, she would never pass for it. She looks like someone in the final stages of something fatal.

  Before I can sit down at the table, Emily says to me, “Jimmy, don’t be angry. But something must be done about Sarah Frisch. I think she’s badly hurt.”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  “Please, Jimmy. You’re getting everything you want. Don’t be cruel about it.”

  I go into the bedroom with her. The old lady must have flooded the bed, because the room stinks of piss. She has her eyes open now, and they shift back and forth between Emily and me as if trying to figure out who the hell we are. Those beady little eyes moving around like that and those toothless skinny jaws make her look like a worried turtle.

  I say to Emily, “You can see there’s no bleeding. It’s just concussion. She’ll be all right.”

  “Would you mind if I untied her? And cleaned her and the bed?”

  “I’d mind if you untied her. I don’t want her rambling around here getting in everybody’s way. If you want her cleaned up, tell Janet to do it.”

  “I’m perfectly willing to do it.”

  “If you want it done, Janet will do it.”

  So Janet does the dirty work while I watch from the doorway, the stink not improving my appetite for breakfast any. When it’s all done, right down to getting rid of the wet linens, and the old lady is stretched out on the bed again, mumbling to herself, Janet says to me, “Is it all right if I feed her?”

  “Your mother can take care of that. You feed me.”

  No protest. Janet takes over as short-order cook and waitress for me while Emily handles the nursing department and Deborah does pan-scraping and racks the dishes in the dishwasher. After breakfast I line up the women in a neat row against the wall and say to them, “You know the rules by now. Anybody gets out of line, somebody else gets hurt for it. I mean, hurt very fast and very painfully. The kitchen and the old lady’s room and her toilet are your territory, and there’s never to be any doors closed here, including the toilet door. Get it straight that is a capital crime. Harve here will be in charge of barracks to start with, and he’s the one who judges how the rules are being kept.”

  “The telephone,” Coco reminds me.

  “That’s right,” I tell the women. “Any time the phone rings, none of you answers it until I’m standing there next to her. Then you answer it nice and friendly and let me know who it is. Then we play it by ear. Otherwise, you never go near any phone in the house.”

  “You see,” Coco says to them, “we want everything clear so there will be no mistakes. This is
a dangerous time for all concerned, so there must be no mistakes. Once the money is delivered, and we are all on the plane, it will be inconvenient for you, but no more than that. Until then, remember the word danger.”

  “End of sermon,” I say. “Any questions?”

  “Yes,” Emily says. “Can’t we at least get dressed instead of going around like this?”

  “As long as your bedroom doors are kept open,” I say. “Harve will keep an eye on yours, the reverend will supervise Deborah. You feel an attack of modesty coming on, you can use your closets.”

  “What about Janet?” Emily asks.

  “She’ll get her turn when you and Deborah are back down here.”

  I can see Janet’s ever-loving mamma doesn’t like that, but there is nothing she can do about it. When Janet and I are alone in the kitchen I say to her, “Sit down,” and she drops into a chair, not seeming to care much how her robe gapes open. Deborah has developed into juicy all-female over the years. Janet, from what I can see, is just where I had left her. I say to her, “Now why do I think that right about this time, every day, you need a handful of pep pills to break the spell?”

  “Because you’re such a smart boy, Flood.”

  “I am. And what makes the spell every night? Nembutal?”

  “Seconal.”

  “And for the ups at sunrise?”

  “Crystals.”

  “Got a crock of them tucked away in your room?”

  “Enough.”

  “Want a handful now?”

  It sticks in her throat but she finally gets it out. “Yes.”

  “Well—” I pretend to think it over. “No, better to have you down and dopey than up and sharp. You seem a lot more reasonable this way. A lot more Quakerly.”

  She takes a deep breath. “You always were a freaked-out little bastard, Flood.”