Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  Buddy, you’re choking in the clutch. But it isn’t a clutch, friend. That’s a myth. He’d got out of many a clutch. Them he could handle. It was dead certainty that choked him up. He was a gambler, an American; he had to have odds. Save me some sweet innocent odds, God. Shit. Cry, you poor bastard.

  He sat in his wheelchair dry-eyed.

  Peggy came running across the grass toward him, and he was afraid he wouldn’t stop pushing the lawn mower in time; he would do something dumb. “Horace! Horace!” she cried. The maples dipped toward her, thick oily green, and once she slipped on the wet cut grass, her little ankle slipping out and her shoulders tilting to counteract it. With a little hop she righted herself and came on toward him. She had worried him with her running and crying out his name, but her dark little face wasn’t panicky. He stepped between her and the teeth of the lawn mower as she came up to him. She stopped, smiling, her hands on his arms, and looked up at him. “Your father wants you,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s all right. He’s not mad or anything.” She frowned at his worry, and squeezed his arms with her little bird hands.

  He looked up the lawn toward the house. His father sat inside its bulk and darkness. It grew beyond and above the trees, and the grass ended at the black dirt under the hedges and the lilacs rooted next to the gray granite blocks of its foundations. It was the house he had always lived in, yet there were windows in odd and irregular shapes, mouth- and eye-like, whose rooms he wasn’t sure of. There were windows in closets, in stairwells, windows peering out of rooms he may have never dared to discover. The four towers led up into green; David’s, Wood’s, Kate’s and…his. He never went there. They told him it was his tower—David and Kate had—but he was afraid to go there. He’d seen it from David’s tower, and it looked, the little square room on its high shaft, empty of all but cobwebs. But he couldn’t see down over the sills, and he couldn’t see up into the ceiling. He’d lied to Kate, and said he’d gone up in it. He was afraid something else lived there.

  “Go on, Horace,” Peggy said, pulling his arms.

  In the big room his father turned with a creak, the white face coming around slowly, its power turning.

  “You’re tracking grass all over the place. Can’t you learn to wipe your feet?”

  Horace looked back along his path through the hall and saw some blades of grass on the red carpet.

  “Yes, it’s grass,” his father said wearily, “and it’s all over the sides of your shoes, and the tops of your shoes, and in your cuffs, and hanging from your knees.” His father shook his head, as if at himself for going on so. “I want you to do some errands for me.” He looked up, calculating. “Do you think you can? Maybe if I write them down in block letters?”

  “I’m not stupid!” Horace said, his hurt turning toward fear.

  “Look, I just want the errands done. Whether you’re stupid or not is another matter.”

  His mother’s voice came from the dining-room archway. “Cruel!” she said.

  “Shut up! You’re the one says he ought to be trusted more!”

  “You would say that in front of him, wouldn’t you!”

  “God damn it! Who asked you for your two cents’ worth? Go on back and button your pudding irons, or whatever the fuck you were doing!”

  “I ought to let you sit in that chair and rot!”

  “What do you think I am doing, you stinking bitch!”

  Horace felt like a tree; no one had given him the permission or the power to get away from this violence. They went on, cold words shouted, hatred in their icy faces, frowns of absolute zero.

  His mother turned, her face set in that coldness, and went back to the kitchen.

  For a moment his father looked down at his table, his hands over his face. They were pale, fat hands, the nails bitten down halfway, and here and there in the cracks beside what were left of the nails were traces of dried blood. His father wrung his face with those hands, then looked up.

  “Now,” he said. “If that’s all over, I’ll ask you again if you can be trusted to do a couple of errands for me. Wipe your nose.”

  Horace had no handkerchief.

  “Take a Kleenex tissue. Here!”

  Horace took one of the filmy, inconsequential things from the box his father held out to him, and wiped his nose. He felt the wet snot come through on his fingers.

  “Put it in the wastebasket. Now. First I want you to go to the bank. All you have to do is give this envelope to Mr. Ward or Mrs. Wilson. Got it?”

  Horace nodded. Then his father told him to go to the Water Street tenement and get the rents that had come due that week from Sam Davis. Sam Davis was supposed to get up at one o’clock in the afternoon, so he’d be awake, right?

  Horace accepted the two envelopes, one to be given to the bank, one to be filled and brought home. He placed them both deep in the side pocket of his pants, and then he was allowed to go. His bike had a flat tire, so he had to walk.

  Downstreet among all the eyes he hulked, looked down and into corners, avoiding the eyes as much as possible. The bank was echoey and cool, and Mrs. Wilson smiled voraciously through her teller’s window as he pulled the envelopes from his pocket. One said BANK, underlined, and she seemed too pleased to accept it. She was thinking of the money he stole, she must be, and that he must be rehabilitated or something if his father trusted him. On the way out he was careful not to bump into Miss Colchester, who was just coming through the big doors. “Hello, Horace!” she said, but he noticed how careful she was of him. “My, you’ve grown,” she said, moving out of range.

  On Water Street he came to the stoop of the tenement, where grass and cindery dirt competed for the narrow strip between the steps and the crumbling sidewalk. The stoop and steps had been painted gray over the gray weathered wood, to keep down splinters. The glass in the front door had been painted gray too, for some reason. He entered the hallway, which was lighted from the far end by a grimy double-hung window, and from the front by a transom so deep in spider webs the light was brown. It smelled, the hall and its painted walls, of something that had once been hot, and had cooled. Some kind of food, or maybe even clothes. Cellar air leaked up through the floorboards, potatoey, mixed with coal fumes.

  He knocked on Sam Davis’ apartment door, the first on the right, and heard quick steps coming. The door opened. It was Susie, and his heart began to skip and hammer. He stuttered something about his father. She smiled and smiled, wider and more delighted and happier to see him. Even her combed brown hair, with the comb furrows in it, seemed to spread away from her ears as she welcomed him.

  “Come in, Horace! My goodness! I haven’t seen you all summer! Come in and sit down!”

  He sat at the kitchen table, careful to keep his arms and hands off the table and in his lap. He was so pleased and excited he was frightened of his pleasure. The table and the chairs, the jar of brown-eyed susans, the ashtray with a lipsticked butt in it—all the delicate things seemed to have been placed according to exact and precise measurements, and he must not alter any part of that plan by the millionth of an inch.

  “Are you surprised to see me?” Susie said. She pulled her chair recklessly next to his, took his hands in hers and squeezed them. He wanted to run away, because she seemed to be giving him too much, too much all at once. “Horace, my good, good friend!” she said. Then her expression seemed to say: Back to the subject. “You see, we’re on split shifts, or something like that. The war. Friday’s my day off, now, so if you come regular for the rent money I’ll be the one here. Won’t that be nice, Horace? My dad’s over to the other building this after…I think, anyway.” A dark bit of worry crossed her face. “He’s been…sad since we lost the farm. You know. And poor Mrs. Garner had to go to the County Farm.”

  “Oh,” Horace said.

  “But this is so nice! You want a Coke? I’ve got some cold in the icebox, and I’ll have one too.” She squeezed his hands and got up, so happy-looking and walking so lightly, almo
st dancing to the refrigerator. “We’ll see each other every Friday. Won’t that be nice? I’ll look forward to it, won’t you, Horace? I see David sweeping up the scraps and thread all the time, but I never see you! But now we can have a nice visit every week!”

  She poured him his Coke and sat beside him, asking him questions about himself only, no one else. He told her he was making twenty-five cents an hour. It was all love and pleasantness, and he began to grow calm inside, as though some sort of fusion of intent had occurred between his needs and his muscles. Calm and control; his arms did no more than his will bade them to. He drank from his glass and set it on the table lightly, easily. No fear of dribbling on his chin or on his shirt made his throat perversely contract, and he felt no need to squeeze the glass, nor to measure the distance to the table with his eye before putting it down. It descended lightly and surely to the oilcloth, with no bump at all.

  Through the small clean panes of the side window were the sprung, flaking white clapboards of the next building. Past the front window’s white curtains was part of Petrosky’s Tavern sign—blue neon, flickering—and past the corner of that old building, once a private house, he could see down Water Street as it turned to the railroad tracks where the black and white wooden bars now slowly descended. The floor hummed from the train that was coming from Vermont, maybe all the way from Montreal, but he couldn’t hear the jangling bell he knew rang from the black box. The alternate red lights blinked on and off, as though one stole the other’s light, then gave it back. Susie stopped whatever she was saying and they both watched as the train became the only thing happening on the street. Two long black engines, whooshing oily black smoke in ponderous rhythm led the train. The second engine was turned around backwards, so that it looked somehow more violent than the other, as if it were being punished, and its power and pressure were that of resentment. Freight cars slid heavily past; he counted forty, then stopped counting. The building seemed tuned to the deep rumble, each room a sounding box, each doorway growling. The heavy rumble seemed to be louder in the room behind him than it was in the kitchen. Then, finally, when he’d almost got used to that deep continuing presence, another black engine, longer and lower than the others, pushed by greasily and with it the sound diminished. The black and white bars of the warning gate went up lightly, and now they seemed frail, as their counterweights fell and they pointed straight up again.

  It was as though he came back into the room. Susie’s smile seemed frail too, very tender and fleeting.

  He didn’t want to leave her, but he said he guessed he’d better because his father would suspect he’d fouled up again.

  She frowned, concerned. “I know you did something for me, Horace,” she said, and she blushed and looked down at the table. He couldn’t think what she meant. “I heard,” she said. “I know you meant well, about the money, but I wouldn’t have gone with them. You believe that, don’t you, Horace?”

  That. “It was stupid,” he said, stammering. “Sus-stupid. Stupid. I threw it away and Wood had to pay it back.”

  “But did you think I’d go with them, really?” She was very serious.

  “They seemed so strong,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have gone. Gordon asked me, but I wouldn’t have gone, Horace. After what he did to me. I wouldn’t have gone, not for anything.”

  “Yes,” he said. He couldn’t understand why she cared so much what he thought. Of course she wouldn’t have gone of her own free will. Didn’t she understand that?

  “Do you believe me?” Tears slid back and forth at the bottoms of her eyes. Each tear was a little globe, and her eyes were so blue. His throat began to ache.

  “Don’t cry,” he said. “That isn’t it. Of course you wouldn’t say you’d go. Yes! I believe you!” He sounded as if he were mad at her. His voice came out that way, like one of his accidents, and he was afraid she wouldn’t understand.

  “Oh, I know you believe me, Horace!” She said that and leaned over toward him, getting bigger and bigger and more lovely and powerful and she put her lips on his forehead. He sat shocked as she went to the sink and wiped her eyes, a quick dab at each eye with the damp dishcloth. He stood up, and she came back to him, a strange interest in her eyes that melted him. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t understand, until she took the dishcloth and cleaned the lipstick from his forehead. “See?” She showed him the red that had been on his skin, and was now on the cloth. “I got lipstick on you.” She laughed, and he laughed back, a quick bark that was strange to him because he seldom laughed.

  They would see each other again next Friday, whether he was given the errand or not. As he walked home he saw clearly, almost too clearly, the sun on the houses, the elms shining, glints of reflected sun on windows. All the lawns seemed a brighter green. For a moment he felt his strength—a moment of daring, because his strength couldn’t be trusted. But he raised his arms over his head, clasped his hands and pulled until something in his shoulder nearly broke: a warning. But a deep thing had happened, a thing almost to hurt, an alliance, a secret deep thing. They had touched deeply, where nothing was hidden. Nothing came between the feelings they had for each other, no disgrace, no freak disaster, nothing mean and cramped and murderous at all.

  He saw her every Friday afternoon, and that brief half-hour became his counter for time itself. She always had the rent money ready, and never let him forget it when he left. When he arrived she hugged him briefly, and they talked, sitting at the kitchen table. Always at the back of his mind was the question “Why does she regard me with such joy?” Me. She was in love with Wood, and that seemed right. He had fantasies of a family—Wood, Susie, children. What justice and calm! And he would somehow be part of that family, almost as a child. But no, there was something else he would be, and this part he shied from, because he felt danger. As if he were a soldier. Something like a soldier, only secret, a secret force to avenge, to obliterate the murderers who crept, scaly and cold, toward the children’s windows. He shivered with fear when this began to come to mind, but it was not fear for himself. He couldn’t place it. He couldn’t get it straight.

  But in his nights a strange thing began to happen. Sometimes it was as though Leverah and Zoster and the Herpes crept out, their cellar stench falling from scale and tooth, but not for him. Toward him, but not for him. Beyond him, and he was the last outpost of the warmth. Arm thyself, he seemed to hear whispered. Monsters. They are monsters.

  19

  In Leah Town Square the sun met the summery September fog, and the town, hot and sleepy, seemed totally deserted. It had been a warm night—as warm as day—and now day had come back to find the streets as empty as they had been in the darkest part of the night. Already David’s shirt stuck to his shoulder blades, and he had fifteen miles to go. The few automobiles that had been left parked overnight looked abandoned. The marquee of the Strand, in this new light, revealed the necessities of its construction: bolts, iron rods, white block letters uneven on their slides, spelling out the monster of the deep.

  Goodbye! he thought exultantly. The stores and trees, that had been too familiar, now in the humid dust of fog passed behind him newly, as if forever. “The monster of the deep,” he said out loud. “The monster of the deep.” Did a monster lurk within the Strand, living on dried chewing gum? And because he pedaled with an unhurried rhythm, the phrase “The monster of the deep” stayed with him all that morning, and recurred later, miles later, coming up upon his breath.

  As he rode down the slight grade of Bank Street he passed the houses whose families he knew, the white clapboard houses under elms and maples, then the red-brick high school he would no longer attend. He would have little nostalgia for that building, even though his friends would be seniors this fall. Not Ben Caswell, though, who still slept in Northlee Hospital, fed through a tube, still powerful, still a presence, though fading sadly from the minds of his friends. One had to get on with it, to move toward something real. The only half-stable thing in that school now seemed to
be the anarchical rule of the students themselves, who had all turned into something like prisoners of war, bound upon their honor to give back to their guards as little information as possible.

  He had taken to turning on his radio late at night, so low no one else in the house could possibly hear it, and from some distant city heard classical music, its clean, deliberate dignity of cadence and sound. He would somehow translate himself through all that distance, through the medium of that clean, intelligent sound, into the great world where he wanted to be. And this journey might be the first step.

  He had been taken to Dexter-Benham once, for an interview. Its buildings were Georgian, arranged around a mall on top of a hill under huge elms. The students wore sport coats with leather elbow patches, and white shirts with striped neckties. The headmaster, Mr. Barnes, a tall man with light blue eyes, had shaken his hand and led him into a round office with tall windows, where everything was polished and light. The furniture seemed very old, permanent, and at the same time fragile. Mr. Barnes was very formal in his manner, yet friendly. He told David to call him “Chief,” and through the friendliness David seemed to see the one reservation he wanted to see—that he must do well, that he must perform, that there was no substitute for this. All would be serious, dignified. Rules would be respected and upheld. They would all be men.

  As he rode out of Leah, his tin suitcase creaked and crackled as it moved within its bindings of clothesline tied with many doubtful knots. His trunk was being sent on to Dark Hill Farm, where he would live. That had been arranged by his mother, and he didn’t worry about it.

  He rode east on a narrow asphalt road, past well-kept houses that had once been farmhouses, although on this road the fields grew smaller as the land rose, and the stone walls that had once marked their borders were deep in the woods, submerged in the dark spruce that advanced behind hardwood brush. Dark little houses, then, that stood in clearings small as rooms, and then a few shacks covered roof and sides with tarpaper, some with no windows. These sat in clearings that seemed to have been claimed from the woods by no cutting instruments at all, but trodden out by feet. And then only the dark woods.