“All accounted for,” called a voice. I remember thinking then that if they had counted heads and all were safe—who was that screaming in the fire?
After that even the roar stopped.
First pain, and then enough light to filter through my closed lids. I tried to move my right hand and failed. I opened my eyes and saw the cast on my right forearm. I turned my head.
“Tom?”
I looked up at the speaking blur. Then it wasn’t a blur, it was Hank.
“You’re all right now, Tom. You’re home. My house.”
I turned from him and looked at the ceiling, the window, then back to him. “You tried to kill me,” I said.
He shook his head. “I used you for bait. I had to know if it was in that room. I had to know if it would feed. I had to know what it could do, what it would do. I tried to shoot the gun out of your hand. I missed, and hit your forearm. It’s broken. Your bullet creased your scalp. It was awful close, Tom.”
“Suppose I’d killed myself?”
He said, “Bait is expendable.”
“You booby-trapped the house, didn’t you?”
“After your blow-by-blow instruction in burglary, it was no trouble.”
“You tried to kill me,” I said.
“I didn’t,” he said with finality.
I wondered—I really wondered—why what I had done was that important. And it was as if Hank read my mind. “It’s because of the difference between you and Opie,” he said. “Superficially, you and Opie did exactly the same thing that night.
“But Opie’s own feelings about it will cost her something for the rest of her life. And you didn’t even remember who you were with.”
I lay there like a block of wood. Hank went away. Maybe I slept. Next thing I knew, Opie was there, kneeling by the bed.
“Tom,” she said brokenly. “Oh, Tom. I wish I were dead. Tom,” she said, “I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.…”
I thought, I wish that thing, whatever it was, hadn’t died in the fire. I know what I am now, I thought. I’m immune. And knowing that gives me enough anguish to feed the likes of you for a thousand years.
Talent
MRS. BRENT AND PRECIOUS WERE SITTING on the farmhouse porch when little Jokey sidled out from behind the barn and came cat-footing up to them. Precious, who had ringlets and was seven years old and very clean, stopped swinging on the glider and watched him. Mrs. Brent was reading a magazine. Jokey stopped at the foot of the steps.
“MOM!” he rasped.
Mrs. Brent started violently, rocked too far back, bumped her knobby hairdo against the clapboards, and said, “Good heavens, you little br—darling, you frightened me!”
Jokey smiled.
Precious said, “Snaggletooth.”
“If you want your mother,” said Mrs. Brent reasonably, “why don’t you go inside and speak to her?”
Disgustedly, Jokey vetoed the suggestion with “Ah-h-h …” He faced the house. “MOM!” he shrieked, in a tone that spoke of death and disaster.
There was a crash from the kitchen, and light footsteps. Jokey’s mother, whose name was Mrs. Purney, came out, pushing back a wisp of hair from frightened eyes.
“Oh, the sweet,” she cooed. She flew out and fell on her knees beside Jokey. “Did it hurt its little, then? Aw, did it was …”
Jokey said, “Gimme a nickel!”
“Please,” suggested Precious.
“Of course, darling,” fluttered Mrs. Purney. “My word, yes. Just as soon as ever we go into town, you shall have a nickel. Two, if you’re good.”
“Gimme a nickel,” said Jokey ominously.
“But, darling, what for? What will you do with a nickel out here?”
Jokey thrust out his hand. “I’ll hold my breath.”
Mrs. Purney rose, panicked. “Oh, dear, don’t. Oh, please don’t. Where’s my reticule?”
“On top of the bookcase, out of my reach,” said Precious, without rancor.
“Oh, yes, so it is. Now, Jokey, you wait right here and I’ll just …” and her twittering faded into the house.
Mrs. Brent cast her eyes upward and said nothing.
“You’re a little stinker,” said Precious.
Jokey looked at her with dignity. “Mom,” he called imperiously.
Mrs. Purney came to heel on the instant, bearing a nickel.
Jokey, pointing with the same movement with which he acquired the coin, reported, “She called me a little stinker.”
“Really!” breathed Mrs. Purney, bridling. “I think, Mrs. Brent, that your child could have better manners.”
“She has, Mrs. Purney, and uses them when they seem called for.”
Mrs. Purney looked at her curiously, decided, apparently, that Mrs. Brent meant nothing by the statement (in which she was wrong) and turned to her son, who was walking briskly back to the barn.
“Don’t hurt yourself, Puddles,” she called.
She elicited no response whatever and, smiling vaguely at Mrs. Brent and daughter, went back to her kitchen.
“Puddles,” said Precious ruminatively. “I bet I know why she calls him that. Remember Gladys’s puppy that—”
“Precious,” said Mrs. Brent, “you shouldn’t have called Joachim a word like that.”
“I s’pose not,” Precious agreed thoughtfully. “He’s really a—”
Mrs. Brent, watching the carven pink lips, said warningly, “Precious!” She shook her head. “I’ve asked you not to say that.”
“Daddy—”
“Daddy caught his thumb in the hinge of the car trunk. That was different.”
“Oh, no,” corrected Precious. “You’re thinking of the time he opened on’y the bottom half of the Dutch door in the dark. When he pinched his thumb, he said—”
“Would you like to see my magazine?”
Precious rose and stretched delicately. “No, thank you, Mummy. I’m going out to the barn to see what Jokey’s going to do with that nickel.”
“Precious …”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“Oh—nothing. I suppose it’s all right. Don’t quarrel with Jokey, now.”
“Not ‘less he quarrels with me,” she replied, smiling charmingly.
Precious had new patent leather shoes with hard heels and broad ankle-straps. They looked neat and very shiny against her yellow socks. She walked carefully in the path, avoiding the moist grasses that nodded over the edges, stepping sedately over a small muddy patch.
Jokey was not in the barn. Precious walked through, smelling with pleasure the mixed, warm smells of chaff-dust, dry hay and manure. Just outside, by the wagon door, was the pigpen. Jokey was standing by the rail fence. At his feet was a small pile of green apples. He picked one up and hurled it with all his might at the brown sow. It went putt! on her withers, and she went ergh!
“Hey!” said Precious.
Putt-ergh! Then he looked up at Precious, snarled silently, and picked up another apple. Putt-ergh!
“Why are you doing that for?”
Putt-ergh!
“Hear that? My mom done just like that when I hit her in the stummick.”
“She did?”
“Now this,” said Jokey, holding up an apple, “is a stone. Listen.” He hurled it. Thunk-e-e-e-ergh!
Precious was impressed. Her eyes widened, and she stepped back a pace.
“Hey, look out where you’re goin’, stoopid!”
He ran to her and grasped her left biceps roughly, throwing her up against the railings. She yelped and stood rubbing her arm—rubbing off grime, and far deeper in indignation than she was in fright.
Jokey paid her no attention. “You an’ your shiny feet,” he growled. He was down on one knee, feeling for two twigs stuck in the ground about eight inches apart. “Y’might’ve squashed ’em!
Precious, her attention brought to her new shoes, stood turning one of them, glancing light from the toe-caps, from the burnished sides, while complacency flowed back into
her.
“What?”
With the sticks, Jokey scratched aside the loose earth and, one by one, uncovered the five tiny, naked, blind creatures which lay buried there. They were only about three-quarters of an inch long, with little withered limbs and twitching noses. They writhed. There were ants, too. Very busy ants.
“What are they?”
“Mice, stoopid,” said Jokey. “Baby mice. I found ’em in the barn.”
“How did they get there?”
“I put ’em there.”
“How long have they been there?”
“ ’Bout four days,” said Jokey, covering them up again. “They last a long time.”
“Does your mother know those mice are out here?”
“No, and you better not say nothin’, ya hear?”
“Would your mother whip you?”
“Her?” The syllable came out as an incredulous jeer.
“What about your father?”
“Aw, I guess he’d like to lick me. But he ain’t got a chance. Mom’d have a fit.”
“You mean she’d get mad at him?”
“No, stoopid. A fit. You know, scrabbles at the air and get suds on her mouth, and all. Falls down and twitches.” He chuckled.
“But—why?”
“Well, it’s about the on’y way she can handle Pop, I guess. He’s always wanting to do something about me. She won’t let ‘um, so I c’n do anything I want.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m talunted. Mom says so.”
“Well, what do you do?”
“You’re sorta nosy.”
“I don’t believe you can do anything, stinky.”
“Oh, I can’t?” Jokey’s face was reddening.
“No, you can’t! You talk a lot, but you can’t really do anything.”
Jokey walked up close to her and breathed in her face the way the man with the grizzly beard does to the clean-cut cowboy who is tied up to the dynamite kegs in the movies on Saturday.
“I can’t, huh?”
She stood her ground. “All right, if you’re so smart, let’s see what you were going to do with that nickel!”
Surprisingly, he looked abashed. “You’d laugh,” he said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said guilelessly. She stepped forward, opened her eyes very wide, shook her head so that her gold ringlets swayed, and said very gently, “Truly I wouldn’t, Jokey …”
“Well—” he said, and turned to the pigpen. The brindled sow was rubbing her shoulder against the railing, grunting softly to herself. She vouchsafed them one small red-rimmed glance, and returned to her thoughts.
Jokey and Precious stood up on the lower rail and looked down on the pig’s broad back.
“You’re not goin’ to tell anybody?” he asked.
“ ’Course not.”
“Well, awright. Now lookit. You ever see a china piggy bank?”
“Sure I have,” said Precious.
“How big?”
“Well, I got one about this big.”
“Aw, that’s nothin’.”
“And my girl-friend Gladys has one this big.”
“Phooey.”
“Well,” said Precious, “in town, in a big drugstore, I saw one THIS big,” and she put out her hands about thirty inches apart.
“That’s pretty big,” admitted Jokey. “Now I’ll show you something.” To the brindled sow, he said sternly, “You are a piggy bank.”
The sow stopped rubbing herself against the rails. She stood quite still. Her bristles merged into her hide. She was hard and shiny—as shiny as the little girl’s hard shoes. In the middle of the broad back, a slot appeared—or had been there all along, as far as Precious could tell. Jokey produced a warm sweaty nickel and dropped it into the slot.
There was a distant, vitreous, hollow bouncing click from inside the sow.
Mrs. Purney came out on the porch and creaked into a wicker chair with a tired sigh.
“They are a handful, aren’t they?” said Mrs. Brent.
“You just don’t know,” moaned Mrs. Purney.
Mrs. Brent’s eyebrows went up. “Precious is a model. Her teacher says so. That wasn’t too easy to do.”
“Yes, she’s a very good little girl. But my Joachim is—talented, you know. That makes it very hard.”
“How is he talented? What can he do?”
“He can do anything,” said Mrs. Purney after a slight hesitation.
Mrs. Brent glanced at her, saw that her tired eyes were closed, and shrugged. It made her feel better. Why must mothers always insist that their children are better than all others?”
“Now, my Precious,” she said, “—and mind you, I’m not saying this because she’s my child—my Precious plays the piano very well for a child her age. Why, she’s already in her third book and she’s not eight yet.”
Mrs. Purney said, without opening her eyes, “Jokey doesn’t play. I’m sure he could if he wanted to.”
Mrs. Brent saw what an inclusive boast this might be, and wisely refrained from further itemization. She took another tack. “Don’t you find, Mrs. Purney, that it is easy to make a child obedient and polite by being firm?”
Mrs. Purney opened her eyes at last, and looked troubledly at Mrs. Brent. “A child should love its parents.”
“Oh, of course!” smiled Mrs. Brent. “But these modern ideas of surrounding a child with love and freedom to an extent where it becomes a little tyrant—well! I just can’t see that! Of course I don’t mean Joachim,” she added quickly, sweetly. “He’s a dear child, really …”
“He’s got to be given everything he wants,” murmured Mrs. Purney in a strange tone. It was fierce and it was by rote. “He’s got to be kept happy.”
“You must love him very much,” snapped Mrs. Brent viciously, suddenly determined to get some reaction out of this weak, indulgent creature. She got it.
“I hate him,” said Mrs. Purney.
Her eyes were closed again, and now she almost smiled, as if the release of those words had been a yearned-for thing. Then she sat abruptly erect, her pale eyes round, and she grasped her lower lip and pulled it absurdly down and to the side.
“I didn’t mean that,” she gasped. She flung herself down before Mrs. Brent, and gabbled. “I didn’t mean it! Don’t tell him! He’ll do things to us. He’ll loosen the house-beams when we’re sleeping. He’ll turn the breakfast to snakes and frogs, and make that big toothy mouth again out of the oven door. Don’t tell him! Don’t tell him!”
Mrs. Brent, profoundly shocked, and not comprehending a word of this, instinctively put out her arms and gathered the other woman close.
“I can do lots of things,” Jokey said. “I can do anything.”
“Gee,” breathed Precious, looking at the china pig. “What are you going to do with it now?”
“I dunno. I’ll let it be a pig again, I guess.”
“Can you change it back into a pig?”
“I don’t hafta, stoopid. It’ll be a pig by itself. Soon’s I forget about it.”
“Does that always happen?”
“No. If I busted that ol’ china pig, it’d take longer, an’ the pig would be all busted up when it changed back. All guts and blood,” he added, sniggering. “I done that with a calf once.”
“Gee,” said Precious, still wide-eyed. “When you grow up you’ll be able to do anything you want.”
“Yeah.” Jokey looked pleased. “But I can do anything I want now.” He frowned. “I just sometimes don’t know what to do next.”
“You’ll know when you grow up,” she said confidently.
“Oh, sure. I’ll live in a big house in town and look out of the windows, and bust up people and change ’em to ducks and snakes and things. I’ll make flies as big as chicken hawks, or maybe as big as horses, and put ’em in the schools. I’ll knock down the big buildings an’ squash people.”
He picked up a green apple and hurled it accurately at the brown sow.
“Gos
h, and you won’t have to practice piano, or listen to any old teachers,” said Precious, warming to the possibilities. “Why, you won’t even have to—oh!”
“What’sa matter?”
“That beetle. I hate them.”
“Thass just a stag beetle,” said Jokey with superiority. “Lookit here. I’ll show you something.”
He took out a book of matches and struck one. He held the beetle down with a dirty forefinger, and put the flame in its head. Precious watched attentively until the creature stopped scrabbling.
“Those things scare me,” she said when he stood up.
“You’re a sissy.”
“I am not.”
“Yes you are. All girls are sissies.”
“You’re dirty and you’re a stinker,” said Precious.
He promptly went to the pigpen and, from beside the trough, scooped up a heavy handful of filth. From his crouch, Jokey hurled it at her with a wide overhand sweep, so that it splattered her from the shoulder down, across the front of her dress, with a great wet gob for the toe of her left shiny shoe.
“Now who’s dirty? Now who stinks?” he sang.
Precious lifted her skirt and looked at it in horror and loathing. Her eyes filled with angry tears. Sobbing, she rushed at him. She slapped him with little-girl clumsiness, hand-over-shoulder fashion. She slapped him again.
“Hey! Who are you hitting?” he cried in amazement. He backed off and suddenly grinned. “I’ll fix you,” he said, and disappeared without another word.
Whimpering with fury and revulsion, Precious pulled a handful of grass and began wiping her shoe.
Something moved into her field of vision. She glanced at it, squealed, and moved back. It was an enormous stag beetle, three times life-size, and it was scuttling toward her.
Another beetle—or the same one—met her at the corner.
With her hard black shiny shoes, she stepped on this one, so hard that the calf of her leg ached and tingled for the next half-hour.
The men were back when she returned to the house. Mr. Brent had been surveying Mr. Purney’s fence lines. Jokey was not missed before they left. Mrs. Purney looked drawn and frightened, and seemed glad that Mrs. Brent was leaving before Jokey came in for his supper.
A Saucer of Loneliness Page 27
