19 Tales of Terror

by Whit Burnett

  on Frankie Tuttle in the garden next door. He was mooning

  I &4

  Nineteen Tales ol T�rror

  •

  over a flower he held in one hand, while the other hand in a

  mechanical gesture drew up the sandy hair over a spot at the

  top of his head. When a man's hand does that without his realizing it, he fears baldness. The instinct of self-preservation as it can when driven hard by fear, rose to genius, and showed the

  endangered man how to strike, in all safety, a first blow to

  ward off the attack he could not parry. He took off his hat, put

  his hand up to his head and walked rapidly along the sidewalk

  towards the A venue, keeping his eyes on Frankie.

  When Francis, his heart still unguardedly opened to its very

  depths by ecstasy, looked up from his tulip, he saw Bert Warder passing by on his way to the trolley, holding his hat in one hand. With the other he was ostentatiously patting and ruffling

  his abundant dark hair in uncouth caricature of Francis' unconscious fumble. As their eyes met, Bert let fly his arrow with all his might. His words were but trivial and a little common,

  but his panic tipped them well with the poison of the wish to

  hurt, and he put his back into the bending of his bow, his broad

  beefy back. Long before the meaning of the vapid pleasantry

  had penetrated to Francis' mind, the malignity of its intention

  was quivering deep in his opened, softened heart. "That's the

  way to do it, Frankie!" called Bert in a loud coarse tone, his

  fingers leaping about grotesquely in hls hair, "You've got a

  clearing up there. Scratch 'em up into where you can get at

  'em. Scratch 'em up into the clearing."

  For a nightmare second, Francis, like a man who dreams

  he sees a friend run on him sword in hand, felt not pain so

  much as a wild incredulity. His eyes widened, his dumbfounded

  face was blank, his up-raised arm and fumbling fingers froze

  foolishly where they were. From his confusion a gleam of light

  shone into the other's darkness. The constriction around Bert's

  heart loosened. It might really work then, the system of attacking first. He'd sure knocked old Frankie cold, his first try.

  No man who looked like that, could collect his wits for taunts

  about jail-bird brothers. After the hours of helpless dread that

  lay back of Bert, his relief was exquisite. And the hope it gave l

  Hope! He might, after all, be able to defend himself. Drinking

  in greedily Francis' stunned expression and grotesque attitude,

  he burst in a yelling bawl haw! of triumph and clutching hope

  to his breast, ran on courageously to where a fellow-worker

  stood waiting for the trolley.

  By that time the meaning of his words reached Francis' mind.

  He snatched his hand down from his thinning hair with a betraying jerk. Through the quiet morning air Bert's voice came, loudly repeating his joke to Joe Crosby, who remarked, turning

  back to look at Francis, "Why, I never noticed he has a bald

  spot." The trolley roared along the tracks and carried the two

  The Murder oa JeHarson Street • 165

  men away to the office where Francis was at once to follow

  them.

  By the end of that day everybody over in the Stott McDevitt

  works and out on Jefferson Street knew that the Warders didn't

  want to have anything said to' them about this trouble. "Some

  folks take trouble that way," said their neighbors with sympathy.

  So, since that was the way the Warders took it, nobody did

  say anything about it to them. And since it was never mentioned nobody knew exactly what was happening. People naturally took for granted that Bert's first thought had been of his brother's innocence, and that like Joe Crosby at the time of

  his sister's divorce, he was spending his last cent to pay defending lawyers. Since his face grew steadily more haggardly anxious, they supposed that his efforts were all in vain. They sympathized silently, and read without comment day after day the abbreviated accounts of his brother's trial in the local newspapers.

  For they were both brief and colorless. Huntsville was far

  away in another state; one more revelation of the doings of a

  dishonest bank employee was hardly news; the reporters apparently found Don too obscure a thief to be interesting. No revelations about a grubby working-class family were ever

  printed. But the Warders saw in every newspaper mention of

  Don's trial plenty of other material for malicious satisfaction on

  the part of their neighbors. When finally Don was found guilty

  and sentenced to fifteen years in prison Bert Warder said wildly

  to his wife, "Nobody need tell me what they're saying to each

  other. By God! I'd like to knock the words down their dirty

  throats. " Drunk first with shame and then with anger-for two

  weeks after Don's conviction, the bank did fail and the Warders

  did lose their savings-he had a drunken man's glowering

  readiness to take offense at nothing. He snarled and hit out in

  response to harmless greetings; he started every conversation

  with an unprovoked verbal aggression; he protested every decision made against him at the North Side Tennis Club--as Jefferson Street people called the two vacant-lot courts; he took every happening in the office as flagrant and unfair discrimination against him. His neighbors, his fellow-workers knew that his snarls were cries of pain, and for a time-a short timesaid to each other tolerantly, "Poor old Bert, no wonder he's got a grouch." But they had tempers of their own, grievances

  of their own, their tolerance soon wore thin, his unprovoked

  attacks began to strike sparks. Two could play as well as one,

  they reminded him forcibly, at being offensively personal. He

  was not the only one who knew how to give a nasty dig. Nobody

  of course dreamed of sinking so low as to throw his brother up

  118 • Nineteen Tales of Terror

  to him, Don now in stripes behind prison bars. In fact that

  story soon passed out of their minds. They had seen Don only

  once or twice. They were full of their own affairs, their own

  secret troubles and hidden disgraces. They did not mention the

  convicted thief, or remember him. But the convict's brother

  had not forgotten. He imagined in the tum of every exasperated

  retort a reminder that they had something on him, a threat that

  he would hear a thing or two about jail-birds if he went too

  far. So he did not go too far-with them. Every rough rejoinder

  to a brutal sally from him frightened him into choking down

  his ill-nature. A sort of approximate balance was found. After

  a week or so, a Jefferson Street maxim ran, "Anybody can get

  along with Bert Warder-all you got to do is to tell him to go

  to hell once in so often."

  But there was one among them foolishly unable to return

  evil for evil. Or to defend himself from boorishness by being

  boorish. And Bert's first handful of mud had told him where he

  could fling more without having it flung back on him. Mary,

  annoyed to have Bert's ragging increasingly center on Francis,

  used to think, "If Francis only bad more vanity! He'd get mad

  then at teasing instead of feeling ashamed that he's bothered

  by it; and he'd defend himself." But she was wrong. Against the

  blackguardism of the wish to cause pain, Francis now as in his

  youth could devise no defense t
hat he was willing to use. The

  others on Jefferson Street and in the office snatched up whatever weapon came to hand, dirty or not. If a hit below the belt was what reached Bert's sensibilities most sharply, all rightsure-they'd hit below the belt-why not? But to Francis a choice between committing an ignoble act or suffering from

  one, was no choice at all. For him only one of those two

  alternatives was conceivable.

  When in an idiotic pleasantry that became threadbare that

  summer, Bert came suddenly behind him, blew hard on the

  thinning spot in Francis' hair, rattling off with a noisy laugh,

  "Let-the-air-blow-on-the-head-the hair-will-grow-on-the-head,"

  Francis only jerked away in a gesture of nervous annoyance,

  and then grinned apologetically for feeling sore. He was incapable of hitting back as the others did, with a jibe about Bert's pendulous paunch any mention of which, it was an open secret,

  made him wince, or about his big fiat feet, or his bulging eyes,

  or his occasional bad grammar. He could not understand the

  idea the men around him had that hurting Bert Warder's

  feelings eased their own. Rather the contrary, it seemed to him.

  To find a festering wound in Bert's life and to press on it hard

  with a word well chosen for its power to cause him pain-how

  could that do anything but make a bad matter worse? A good

  deal worse. For Bert's uncouth tormentings caused him only

  Tile Murder on JeHerson Street • 1 61

  discomfort and annoyance. But it would be shame, as at a real

  disgrace, which he would feel, to spy upon another's unhealed

  sores and dash his fist into the one that looked as though it

  would hurt the most. From his shadowed childhood on, Francis

  Tuttle had never understood why, with all the unavoidable

  pain in the world, anyone could wish to add to it.

  So he could do no more than try to hide under an apologetic

  grin the annoyance he could not help feeling when week after

  week Bert rang the changes about his looking moth-eaten,

  twitted him with his poor tennis, his mistakes in gardening, his

  inability to carry a tune. He even managed a grin, though a faint

  and weary one over a new stunt of Bert's which emerged in

  June, a strenuous imitation of Francis' tennis serve, winding up

  with grotesquely strenuous contortions to deliver at the end a

  ball of a lamentable young-ladyish feebleness.

  But it was his watchful demon not he who grinned, when

  Bert in a chance remark, stumbled on one of the two secrets in

  Francis' life he was ashamed of. This was the lesser secret, the

  one he had thought he had quite outgrown. One Saturday afternoon in June, at the end of some doubles, as they were pulling on their sweaters, Bert Warder chanced to comment on the

  election of his daughter Imogene to be Vice President of her

  class in the high school- " . . . right over the head of Helen

  Benson, I understand. She's all right, Helen is, but kind o' slow.'

  No S. A. as the boys say." The other men all knew that Helen

  had resigned to make place for the Warder girl and had insisted

  on her election. A self-conscious silence fell on the group.

  Sensitive to silences as a sick man to draughts, Bert went hot

  and cold with his usual reflex of panic-were they thinking that

  because Imogene was a convict's niece--he backed into his corner and bared his teeth.

  But Joe Crosby thought of something to turn the conversation. "I never heard that sex appeal is what swings elections,"

  he said.

  The casual quality of the remark blew away Bert's suspicion.

  But his nerves had been shaken. They needed an outlet. A safe

  one. His eyes fell on Francis Tuttle. "Sure, S. A. is what settles

  elections !" he cried at random, giving Francis a great dig in the

  ribs. "That's why our own Valentino gets elected to all the fat

  offices in town."

  Francis was astonished to feel a sharp twinge from old bitterness. He had not then, not even yet, left behind the boyish chagrin over all those elections in school, in college, when

  Roger again and again had been chosen to any office he would

  accept, and Roger's dead loss of a brother had never been so

  much as thought of. It was absurd that he still cared anything

  about that. But an involuntary quiver had passed over his face,

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  ol Terror

  just one. It was enough for his tormentor. "Why for fair!

  Frankie, there's more truth than poetry in what I say. You

  never do get elected to anything, do you? Were you ever?"

  This was the time of course, for Francis to tell him to mind

  his own damn business. But he could never tell anybody that,

  and now could think of nothing but a sorry shame that he felt

  even a last throb of that trivial adolescent hurt. He kept his

  eyes on the racket be was putting into its case; he fumbled with

  its fastenings; he was silent. He felt diminished and looked it.

  As half-asphyxiated lungs strain joyfully to draw in a life·

  giving gush of fresh air, Bert felt his own painfully diminished

  self expartding in the other's discomfort. What suffocating man

  would hold his hand from the one window he can open? "Poor

  old Frankie!" he cried gloatingly. "Never had no luck with

  'lections. Let's 'lect him to something right now. I nominate

  him to be Honorary Fly-Swatter to the Ladies' Aid Society.

  Haw! Haw!"

  As they walked down the street together, he composed variations on this new theme. Mary, coming out to meet Francis, heard his horse-laugh, heard him as he turned in at his front

  walk bawl out, "I nominate Mr. Francis Tuttle to be score·

  keeper in the One-legged Men's Athletic Meet. Who will second

  my motion?"

  "What's he talking about?" she asked.

  Francis answered, "Oh nothing."

  Sitting that evening over her accounts, Mary chanced to

  glance up at Francis, reading, and was startled to see an old

  shadow on his face. He wore the shrunken look that had always

  frightened her. She had not seen it for a long time now. His

  relapses in the last years had come seldom and were short; but

  they still made her almost as miserable as he. Adding up a total

  and transferring it to the next page she thought, "It is like an

  old tubercular lesion. Doctors tell you that even when they are

  healed--or almost-they feel strains that are nothing to normal

  tissue." Looking down fixedly at her column of figures but not

  seeing it, she fell for the hundredth time into a puzzled wonder

  at the inexplicable difference between what people feel about

  bodily and mental sickness. "If it had been a temporary breakdown in a normal lung, acquired in childhood by direct infection from the outside, now almost but not quite healedwhy, we'd have told everybody about it, sure of their sympathy.

  We'd have given it as the natural explanation for the things

  Francis isn't quite well enough to do yet. There'd have been

  nothing to hide. Everybody would be interested, and sort of

  proud and encouraged when Francis recovered. But because

  it's a temporary breakdown of a normal personality he's recovering from�and yet that was forced on a sensitive mind

  The Murder on Jefferson Street • 1&9

  by
a direct infection from the outside as much as any disease

  germ!-we have to hide it as though it were a disgrace. We

  can't even talk it over together, and plan what's best to do."

  More than by anything else, she was worn by the need to appear unconscious of what was the center of her thoughts. Now, for instance, to be forced to cast about in the dark for a possible

  explanation of the recurrence on Francis' face of that old look

  of sickness. Not even to be sure she was not imagining it.

  What strain could have come into their safe Jefferson Street

  refuge that was just the same now as ever? Nothing had happened there to change anything. She did give one fleeting thought to Bert Warder's joshing. But be had always been a boor.

  And anyhow, he was only teasing. Teasing. The word brought

  up recollections of child play. And child play was always unimportant. The thought reassured her. She began to emerge from her concentration, set her pen down to the paper again,

  added 23 to 44, and thought in the phrase she had beard her

  elders let drop so often, "Oh, teasing's nothing." She shot a sidelong look at Francis again. He was reading. His face looked quiet. Yes, she must have been mistaken. It could be no recurrence of his old trouble, vague and dimmed as that was now.

  Perhaps his tennis had tired him. Presently the idea occurred to

  her that he might have a real worry, a present one, something

  at the office perhaps. No matter how bad that was, it would be

  less dangerous.

  IV

  She was right. It was a present worry. About a real danger.

  But not in the office. In his past, close to the foolish weakness

  uncovered by Bert's random thrust lay his other secret-the

  base and bad one. The two were woven together by a thousand

  connecting nerves. Bert's hammering on one had set the other

  a-quiver. Suppose-he thought, horrified, that some day, with

  a reflex. reaction like this, some involuntary quiver of his face

  should betray his feeling about Roger. That he had such a secret

  to hide was his shame. That Mary might learn it, was his terror.

  Great-hearted as she was, she would never go on sharing life

  with him if she knew of his mean jealousy of Roger-fiercely