Dreadful Summit

by Stanley Ellin

  After I quit the Boy Scouts, Flanagan got all steamed up about it and yelled at my father for an hour. My father just said sitting and reading was as good a way of staying out of trouble as he knew, so after that Flanagan never bothered me again.

  Once he saw me just sitting and watching him set up beers, and he got annoyed and said, ‘What are you looking at?’

  I said, ‘I’m just looking at the beers when you set them up. I like the way they look.’

  Maybe he thought I was kidding him or something, because he looked at the beers and then he looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘What’s there to like about the way they look!’

  I said, ‘The way the head comes up from the bottom of the glass right after you fill it. It comes up so slow and easy and it rocks up and down until it comes all the way to the top.’

  So all he said was, ‘You got stones in the head,’ and he didn’t bother about it any more. But I think he got to like it too, because now and then I would see him watching the glasses right after he filled them, and shaking his head.

  Flanagan thought my father was just about the greatest man in the world. He would say to the regulars when my father wasn’t around, ‘Andy LaMain is good-looking and smart and he has more brains than the Pope,’ and if one of them asked why, Flanagan would say, ‘Because he keeps his mouth shut.’

  Sometimes the guy would want to argue about this, but Flanagan would just say, ‘Aw, you got stones in the head,’ and wait on somebody else.

  It was all right with me because I thought the same way. My father was small, a head smaller than me, but he was nice-looking and he had a good build. He had smooth black hair just getting a little grey in front, and a little moustache he used to trim by himself every morning in front of the mirror. And Flanagan was right about my father keeping quiet. He was the quietest man I ever knew.

  He could stand behind the bar all day, and never say more than hello to the regulars. If they got into a battle about politics or something, he would just go to the other end of the bar and read the paper. Mostly, if there wasn’t trade, or just enough so Flanagan could handle it all right by himself, my father would stand looking out of the window.

  He was like that with Frances too. She would walk along holding his arm and talking away a mile a minute, and then when she stopped he would say maybe one, two words, and that was all. I think he gave her the feeling sometimes that he wasn’t listening, because once she got me alone up in the rooms.

  ‘Listen, George,’ she said, ‘I want to ask you something and I want it to be just between you and me.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  She was biting her thumbnail and looking at me like she was trying to figure out how to say it. ‘Look,’ she finally said, ‘does your father ever talk about me? I mean, does he ever say anything about me when I’m not around?’

  I said, ‘No,’ and then she got scared and said, ‘Now remember, George, this was strictly between us.’

  She didn’t have to say that, because I wouldn’t have told him anyhow. I mean, you didn’t just go and tell my father anything until he asked you, and even then he didn’t seem interested. About once a month he would say to me, ‘Is everything all right at school?’ and I would say yes, it was, and in between those times he would just give me my allowance or tell me to get a haircut. I hardly ever talked to my father. I think I was a little afraid of him.

  But when he was laying on the floor with Flanagan slopping whisky over him, everything turned upside down in me. I wasn’t afraid of him any more. I didn’t even have any use for him. A guy had walked in out of nowhere and handed him a licking and he just laid down and took it. With everybody looking at him he stripped down and took a beating like a kid. When I got up from the table and saw all the people pushing around and him laying there, all I thought of was if he couldn’t handle Al Judge, I could.

  I wasn’t a kid any more. I was big. Bigger than anybody standing around there with their stupid mouths hanging open, because I knew something they didn’t. I knew that I was going to kill Al Judge. Kill him right away so there wouldn’t be any mistake about why it happened, but do it so smart and slick that nobody in the world could put the finger on me.

  And the biggest thing. Al Judge had to know before he died why it was happening. He had to get down on his knees in front of me just the way the Jews used to get down in front of the Nazis when they were going to get theirs. And he had to slobber all over me before the finish. Maybe I would get him all undressed first so that’s the way the cops would find him.

  Just that idea made me feel bigger than the whole world. My glasses were bent anyhow. I stuck them in my pocket and I went over to the people standing there and started to shove them. ‘Get out of here,’ I said; ‘Get out of here.’

  One of them started to shove me back, but another one grabbed him. ‘It’s only right,’ he said. ‘Let them alone.’

  So one by one, pushing against each other with their heads still turned back to see, they started to jam out of the door through the people who were crowded around there. The last guy still had some of his beer left and he drank it down before he went out. Then they were all gone and I pushed against the door to get it shut, and then I locked it. After that I pulled down the shade over the door and the big shade over the window, and we were all alone.

  Chapter Three

  FIFTEEN or sixteen is a bad age for a kid.

  I don’t only mean because of the way the juice percolates in him and makes him all jumpy about girls and stuff, even if that is one of the worst things about it. I mean when you’re fifteen, sixteen, you’re right in the middle of nowhere.

  Take a little kid. He can be the worst little punk on the block, but everybody says, ‘Isn’t he cute! Where does he get all the energy! Isn’t he full of the devil!’ and they make all kinds of fuss over him.

  Or take a guy gets to be near eighteen. He’s big stuff. He smokes right in front of everybody. Maybe he lays a girl. And when his old man brings him into the bar, everybody says, ‘He’s a better man than his pa,’ and they buy him a beer.

  But a kid fifteen, sixteen, is a pain all around and mostly to himself.

  He always opens his mouth at the wrong time, and he always says the wrong thing, and he’s always doing the wrong thing. And it’s not only that everybody else picks on him, but it’s like he was always walking around with a mirror in front of him, and a phonograph playing back everything he says. He knows he’s acting dumb, but he just can’t seem to straighten himself out.

  I think part of it is girls. First they’re only like washboards running around on sticks and then all of a sudden they’re all curves and lipstick, and every time you see a nice one you get all red in the face and think how it would be to grab her.

  But that is only part of it. The other part is the way a smart kid like me could never open up and let people know how smart he was. I think sometimes it was worse than the girls.

  You know how it is when two people start talking to each other and each one is talking about something different but they don’t know it, and you do? If you’re big you can step in and straighten everything out and maybe get right into the middle of the talk. But if you’re a kid you just have to listen and swallow it. It sticks like a lump in you, but you swallow it just the same.

  I read a lot of books, and plenty of times I could have straightened guys out, but the only time I tried it they said, ‘Shut up, kid,’ and shoved me away. I never tried it again.

  But when I was pushing everybody out of the bar and pulling down the shades, I was making up for all the lumps I swallowed. I was bigger than they were. I told them what to do, and they did it. That was the best time in my whole life up to then, and it all happened because I knew I was going to kill Al Judge. When you’re going to kill somebody, you’re not a kid any more, and when you know in your heart you’re not a kid, somehow or other, everybody else seems to know it too.

  After I pulled down the shades I went back to the end of the bar where Fl
anagan was helping my father get up. When he got up, he sort of leaned on the bar and shook his head hard. Then Flanagan filled half a short beer glass with the rest of the whisky from the bottle, and my father slugged it all down in one drink. I had a good look at his back then, and when I saw it my stomach knotted up in me, and my heart started to bang so loud I was afraid they would hear it too. It shortened up my breath for a minute so I could hardly take in air.

  It was all stripes, so big they stood out like purple ropes. There was a mess of blood too, and some of it had run down on his belt and pants. There was whisky splashed all over his pants too, and it smelled bad. Whisky doesn’t smell when you pour it in a glass, but just knock over a bottle and you can smell it from one end of a room to the other.

  My father was a classy dresser. I mean, even when he was working the bar he would wear a good pair of pants, and they had to be pressed just so. And the first thing I thought was that the blood and whisky had sure ruined those pants, and he would be plenty mad about it. Then I remembered he wasn’t mad about the whole thing, only yellow, taking it and not doing anything about it, and I got so mad I forgot and talked to him like he was some dumb little kid.

  ‘Why did you let him do it?’ I yelled. ‘What did you let him do it for?’

  I thought Flanagan was going to hit me across the face. ‘Shut up!’ he yelled. ‘Have you got stones in the head?’

  I grabbed the glasses out of my pocket and tried to put them on. It feels funny talking to somebody without your glasses on when you’re used to them. Only they were all twisted and my hands were shaking so much I couldn’t get them fixed right.

  My father didn’t say anything at all. He took his underwear top and started to lift his arms to put it on, but it must have hurt too much. He put it down and picked up his shirt. Flanagan held it so he could slide his arms in. He stood there looking at the ceiling with his eyes shut while Flanagan buttoned the shirt and shoved it into his pants.

  I said, ‘Aren’t you going to get even with him? Even if he is a big shot, are you going to let him get away with it?’

  Flanagan untied the apron and pulled it off, and my father turned around and looked at me. ‘Forget it.’

  I said, ‘What do you think everybody on the block is talking about now? Why don’t you go and tell them to forget it too?’

  Flanagan grabbed my shoulder. ‘What do you mean, talking to your father like that!’ but my father said, ‘Let him go, Flanagan.’

  I pulled away anyhow. ‘Maybe you think I’m still a kid! Well, I’m not! If Flanagan wasn’t holding me down before I would have jumped that guy myself! And I will anyhow, only when I do it there won’t be anybody around to bother me!’

  And right there it was like the mirror and the phonograph were in front of me, only for once it felt good. It made me feel just like my muscles were made out of iron and my mind was like a needle, sharp and shiny, thinking the right things to say and to do so nothing could go wrong. That’s the way grown-ups feel, and why they can walk around the way they do without worrying every second about what they say or do. It’s a wonderful feeling.

  Even the way my father looked at me couldn’t take the edge off that feeling, because he didn’t know I was going to kill Al Judge, so maybe to him it was still a kid talking. And if my father never did know I was the one who killed Al Judge, I would know it all right, and that was enough.

  So all my father said to me was, ‘Forget it,’ and then he said to Flanagan, ‘Close up the place. I’m going upstairs.’

  We waited, just standing there, while Flanagan checked the lock on the door, then took the dirty glasses off the bar and dumped them into a tub of water. Then he took out the cashbox from under the bar and dumped all the money from the cash register in it without even counting it. After that he pulled the strings oh the two big lights and turned on the night light so that everything turned into shadows and dirt and made knowing I was going to kill Al Judge something like in a movie, only real.

  There was a back door to the bar, and it opened on a little hallway with stairs going up to our apartment. We all went into the hallway with my father carrying his underwear shirt, and Flanagan carrying the cashbox. Before we went upstairs, Flanagan opened the back door which opened on a little yard, only it was cement instead of dirt, and he called, ‘Kitty, kitty, kitty.’

  Nothing happened, so he called, ‘Pss, pss, pss,’ until a big old she-cat came running in. She didn’t have any real name, only Kitty, and she wasn’t even Flanagan’s cat. She was just a mangy little thing once, and he picked her up and took care of her until she ran away. But she still hung around a lot, and every night he would try to get her into the bar so she would catch rats there.

  He said the nights she ran in meant there was going to be rain, so she was better than the weather reports on the radio, but it mostly didn’t work out like that. When I showed him a couple of times it didn’t work out right, he said that meant it was ready to rain but it cleared up overnight. I think he started the whole thing for a joke and then he really got to believe it.

  The cat came running in and Flanagan closed the back door behind her, but before he closed it I had a good look outside. It was windy out, and starting to get cold, and the old tree in Ehrlich’s yard next door was shaking so hard it looked like it was getting ready to pull out of the ground and take off. Mr Ehrlich kept the candy store next door, and the tree was his peach tree, and he used to take care of it all year round. He used to fuss around with his glasses sliding down his nose, cutting off dead parts and pulling out leaves here and there, and even watering the ground when it didn’t rain for a long time. You’d think it was his own kid.

  For all his work, he never got any peaches off it. Near the end of the summer some hard little peaches would show up, and as soon as they got ripe the kids from the block would swipe them. But Mr Ehrlich never quit trying.

  The tree was seesawing back and forth, and a couple of newspaper pages came flying along and plastered up against the fence and started flapping there, and that was all I could see because it was so dark out.

  Than Flanagan closed the door, and my father started going up the stairs very slowly with me behind him and Flanagan in back of me. From the way my father walked I knew it was hard for him climbing those stairs and I could feel tears in my eyes because of it. But underneath, I felt hot and strong because Flanagan was only carrying the cashbox up, and not the revolver that lay right in back of it in the big drawer.

  It was important, because that was the revolver I was going to use tonight.

  Chapter Four

  WHEN you got to the top of the stairs, you were standing right outside the parlour door in the front part of the house. If you walked back along the hall there instead of going into the parlour, next was the bedroom, then the bathroom, and then the kitchen where you could look into the back yard. The parlour was my room, and the bedroom was my father’s room.

  There was a great big double door between the parlour and the bedroom. Big enough so if you opened it all the way it would be almost like one big room, but I never saw it opened. Sometimes I woke up very late at night because there was talking and noise in the bedroom, but those big double doors were so tight together you couldn’t see through the crack what was going on.

  Mostly in the morning my father was sleeping when I had to go to school, so I made my breakfast and pulled out as quiet as I could. But Saturday and Sunday I would get up late, and we would have breakfast together, and then he would take his paper and read it by the front window in the parlour. He sat in the big armchair and he had his feet on a little chair, and for about an hour all you could see was cigarette smoke coming up out of the newspaper.

  Sometimes I had something important to talk to him about, but I learned to wait until he was all done with the paper. Then, while he was getting on a clean apron to go down and open the bar, I would say what I had to.

  The parlour was the best room in the house. All the other rooms only had linoleum on the
floor, but the parlour had a real carpet. It didn’t have a real bed, but the day bed was plenty good enough for me and it was easier to keep fixed up. When I was in the Boy Scouts I used to fix up the day bed every morning with the sheet straight and the blankets good and tight, but after I quit the Boy Scouts it didn’t seem to matter so I didn’t bother any more. When Frances came up she would yell about it and straighten up the day bed and my father’s bed and dust around. I didn’t mind her yelling, because if she dusted around she saved me the trouble.

  In the parlour there was the armchair and the day bed, a big bureau, some plain chairs, and a little rickety table that was no good at all, except the radio was on it and my grandfather’s picture.

  Once when I was a dumb little kid I picked up the frame with my grandfather’s picture to look at it better, and right behind it in the frame. I saw there was some other picture. I dug around with my fingers until I could pull it out, and then I saw it was a picture of my mother. I remembered a little about my mother, and somehow I knew right off this was her picture.

  I got a creepy feeling when I saw it, because around the house we never talked about my mother, and it was like seeing spooks or something. So without even thinking, I took it into the bedroom to show to my father. He was just getting up, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing his hair when I went in. I held out the picture and said, ‘Look, I found Ma’s picture.’

  For a second he looked like he was standing in heavy traffic with a truck coming at him and not able to get out of the way. Then he took the picture out of my hand and started to tear little pieces off it. He tore and tore until there was no more picture at all, just little pieces laying all around him on the floor. Then he said through his teeth, ‘Get out of here!’ and I was so scared I ran out almost bawling.

  He didn’t come out after me either. He shut the door and stayed there so long that Flanagan had to open the bar and get everything fixed up.