Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  “Except, Uncle Homer, there are these really amazing gorillas. They’ve got these young gorillas in a sort of nursery school, and they’re teaching them to do the most extraordinary things, wait till you hear —” But then John caught a glimpse across the field of the long shambling farmhouse that belonged to Virginia and Barbara Heron, and his excitement vanished. He hung his head and gazed darkly at the long bony wrists sunk between his knees. “He’s still got her, you know, Uncle Homer.”

  “Who do you mean? Virginia? You mean, Buddy’s still got Virginia?”

  John nodded his head slightly in dire agreement.

  “Well, it’s like I told Mary,” said Homer, glowering at the maple trees beside Baker Bridge Road, “it will take some violent natural force to stop him. Some grizzly bear, some elephant. A tidal wave, an erupting volcano. The black plague. That’s what I think.”

  “I’m afraid it’s hopeless,” said John. “She’s going away this evening. I almost wish she’d never come back.”

  “Going away?”

  “There’s some ceremony in honor of her father in New York. The New York State Horticultural Society is unveiling a brass plaque. Virginia and Barbara are spending the night in some hotel.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  And as they drove up to the house, there was Virginia, lugging her suitcase down the stone steps. John leaped out of Homer’s car, snatched the suitcase, stuffed it in the trunk of Virginia’s car, murmured a stifled good-bye, ducked past Virginia and ran into the house.

  Homer was shocked by his nephew’s behavior. He got out of his car and made polite remarks. “What’s all this about the Horticultural Society?” he said.

  “Oh, they’re unveiling this plaque.”

  “In honor of your father’s achievements, I understand.”

  “Oh, yes, all those ghastly canna lilies. I’d rather stay home, but Barbara says I’ve got to keep her company. Why should she suffer alone, says Barbara.” Virginia touched Homer’s arm. “Homer, I wonder if you would do something for me? John will be here by himself while we’re gone, and I just wondered if you would stay here with him, just for this one night?”

  “Stay with John? Oh, come on, Virginia, John’s a big boy now.”

  “Of course he is. I know that. Of course he is, of course.”

  Homer gazed at Virginia, and wondered how he could ever have compared her unfavorably with the dawn. Even drawn and pale as she looked now, and harried and uncertain, with wrinkles in her forehead that would one day come to stay, even beside a Virginia like this, the dawn would come off second best.

  There was an unblinking urgency in the way she was looking at him. “You’d like me to spend the night here?” said Homer.

  “Oh, yes. Oh, would you, please?” Virginia scrabbled in her pocketbook. “Here’s the key to the kitchen entry. It’s just for tonight. Just this one night.”

  Homer looked away and examined the airy sprays of sea lavender in the border where he had so often seen her working. “Where’s Buddy going to be?”

  “Oh, he’ll be around, I suppose. He has a key of his own, I think.”

  “Right,” said Homer slowly. “Well, of course I’ll stay. I’ll be glad to. No problem. You can count on me. I’ll just go home and get a few things.”

  Child care again, he thought morosely, turning his car down the rutted drive and heading for home. It had got to the point where anybody who wanted their kid taken care of just called on Homer Kelly, that famous ex-lieutenant detective in the office of the district attorney of Middlesex County, that celebrated scholar and international authority on the works of the American transcendentalists, that sometime Harvard professor — Homer Kelly, babysitter.

  Fifty-Three

  JOHN WAITED IN HIS ROOM FOR THEM TO GO. TAKING THE TOP OFF his tarantula container, he let Fred roam on the plywood table. Fred wasn’t interested in roaming. He stayed put. When John heard the smooth humming of Barbara’s car, he bundled Fred back into his plastic cage and ran downstairs and out to the front yard, suddenly deciding he wanted to say good-bye.

  He was too late. They were gone. The driveway was empty. John stood for a while beside the mailbox, staring at the stony emptiness of rutted gravel, angry with himself for acting like a sulky kid.

  Moodily he turned away and wandered across the lawn in the direction of the vegetable garden. Then he remembered the faint dark line on William’s negative, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t yet examined Buddy’s patch of winter wheat to see if the impoverished strip was visible from the ground with the naked eye. His pace quickened. Running past the vegetable garden, he crossed the edge of the jungle, skirted the stone wall and the last row of apple trees, and walked all the way around the small field.

  At first he could see nothing but thick healthy growth of a uniform dark green. Where was the undernourished line of yellow that had been apparent from the air? And then John saw a furrow, a slight shadow, a line of seed heads nodding at a lower level than the rest. The difference in color was negligible, but it was there. John reached down to scratch with his fingers at the soil, wondering if a handful would be different in texture from the rest of the dirt in the field.

  “What the hell are you doing, trampling down my crop?”

  Startled, John stood up to find Buddy staring at him angrily.

  What was he doing? John didn’t know what to say. He felt queer and defenseless. It crossed his mind that he had not very often been alone with Buddy before. He told the truth.

  “I was just wondering if the soil is poor right here. This line of wheat, you see, right here? It’s not as tall. Not as healthy, I guess. I wonder why that should be?”

  Buddy stared at him. His eyes did not glance down to see the blades of wheat brushing against John’s knees. “Get out of there,” he said. “Come on, get out.” Then he threw something past John’s head. Instinctively John ducked, but Buddy had missed him deliberately. The thing sailed far off into the jungle of bramble and honeysuckle. Gazing after it as it clove the air past his head, John knew what it was. That rock had spent the last two weeks on the table in his room, holding down his spider notes. He had studied it and handled it, he had wiped the dust off it, he had killed ants with it, he had shown it to his Uncle Homer. It was the boulder he had taken from the stone wall, the chalk-marked cobblestone. Buddy must have been in John’s room. He had taken the rock from the table.

  Together they walked silently up to the house, the truth walking between them, naked and embarrassing. But at the kitchen door John forgot the heavy menace of Buddy’s presence, and the sense of threat in the red hands hanging at Buddy’s side. “My barn spider,” he said. “There she is. I thought I’d lost her. See her there on the trellis? Look at that web. It’s really huge.” Delighted, John leaned close to the house wall and took a good look at his spider. He was pleased to see that her new leg was nearly as long as the rest.

  He was unprepared for Buddy’s spoiling anger. With a sweep of his hand Buddy knocked the spider to the stone floor of the small courtyard and started after it, lifting a heavy shoe. John leaped at him, and together they fell in a tangled sprawl. “For Christ’s sake, Buddy,” he said, sitting up, “it’s just a harmless little spider. Why can’t you let her alone?”

  “Goddamn you,” said Buddy, getting to his feet. Whirling on his heel, he ran down the steps and set off up the hill. John could hear his heavy footsteps thudding on the road.

  Sighing, he got to his feet and began looking once more for Araneus cavaticus. She was nowhere to be seen.

  Fifty-Four

  “HOMER, BEFORE YOU GO, WOULD YOU RUN UPSTAIRS AND TAKE A picture of Benny? Just one last picture to show his mother and father? They’ll be home any day now, and I’d love to show them how cunning he’s been this summer, sound asleep.”

  “If we’d had any sense, we would have put him into a coma in June,” growled Homer, slinging his camera around his neck. “We could have borrowed some of John’s spiders and paralyzed the little dar
ling and left him cuddled in his bed the whole entire time. We wouldn’t have had to suffer with a wide-awake Benny all day long every day of the week for three interminable miserable months.”

  Mary opened Benny’s door softly, and Homer took the picture, admitting to himself grudgingly that the little bastard did look kind of cute in the glare of the flashbulb, all tucked up in his cot.

  “Thank you, Homer, dear,” said Mary. “Have a nice night over there with John. You’ll take good care of that boy, won’t you?”

  “Well, naturally,” said Homer gruffly. Stuffing a pair of pajamas into a paper bag, he was on his way out the door when the phone rang.

  “Uncle Homer?” John’s voice on the telephone sounded thin and far away.

  “Yes, my boy?”

  “He knows about the stone wall. I mean, he knows I know.”

  “Who knows? Buddy? You mean, Buddy knows?”

  “I just thought I’d tell you.”

  “Well, good for you. Right you are.”

  “Well, so long, Uncle Homer.”

  For a moment Homer thought of telling his nephew that he was coming to spend the night with him, but then he thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to insult the boy’s pride. Homer would sneak in and out of the house and John would never know he had been babysat with.

  “So long, old man,” said Homer.

  He found the house dark. The only lights were dancing at the bottom of the lawn, the pale phosphorescent sparks of fireflies. For a moment Homer stood still and watched them. Then, turning around, he looked up at the second-floor windows of the house. Had Buddy gone to bed? It was still early, only eleven o’clock. Well, of course, Buddy was probably up the hill with that thieving politician Croney, who was about to snatch the governor’s job away from Homer’s old friend Mike Brumble. Goddamn the lot of them anyway.

  John’s room was at the other end of the house, in — what did they call it? — the shed. Homer had never been in the shed. Walking past the front door and around the corner of the house, he saw John’s lighted window. But even as he stared up at it, looking for a glimpse of his nephew, the light went out. The boy was going to bed.

  Homer went back to his car for his flashlight and his paper bag, and then he walked up the stone steps and entered the kitchen door, inhaling the pleasant smell of wood ashes and disintegrating plaster, and the indefinable scent of two-hundred-year-old boards. Flashlight in hand, he went upstairs, looking for Buddy.

  The four upstairs bedchambers were empty, the beds unoccupied.

  Buddy was elsewhere.

  Homer went back to the large bedroom at the rear of the house. He guessed it had been Edward Heron’s. Newly emptied of Edward’s possessions and left impersonal, it stood ready for the miscellaneous guest.

  The bed looked inviting. Homer turned off his flashlight, set down his paper bag, drew out his pajamas and fumbled at the buttons of his shirt. His camera was in the way. He began to lift it over his head, and then he stopped and sat down on the bed to think.

  Was Virginia right in worrying about John’s safety? Was Buddy a genuine threat? Turning the matter over in his mind, Homer slowly came to the conclusion that her fears were perfectly sensible.

  The boy was a thorn in Buddy’s side. It didn’t take an expert in affairs of the heart to see that John’s modest claims on Virginia’s affection were a menace to Buddy’s heavy-handed courtship, if you could call Buddy’s territorial takeover of Virginia by so polite and old-fashioned a name. That was bad enough. But John had also thrown a monkey wrench into the great Buddy Whipple Roadworks by buying Mrs. Bewley’s property, snatching it right out from under Buddy’s nose. And now he had discovered the moving of the stone wall. John was in a position to expose Buddy’s grubby devices for robbing Virginia and Barbara of their patrimony. For a skinny kid, the boy was a serious obstacle to the onward progress of wheeling and dealing and empire-building. There was no doubt about it. And there had already been one nasty little incident involving a black widow spider —

  Sighing regretfully, Homer patted the plump pillow of the bed and got to his feet. Tonight his duty as a babysitter meant just what it said. He would be sitting up, not lying down.

  Slowly Homer made a tour of the downstairs with his flashlight, latching doors, fastening bolts. In the kitchen entry he stood for a moment, staring at the door. There was no bolt to draw, no latch to fasten. There was only a Yale lock, and Buddy had a key.

  Oh, God, what did a babysitter do in a time like this? Well, damnitall, he guarded the door. He sat up the whole bloody night and guarded the door. Homer sank heavily to the bottom step of the stairway to the second floor, remembering sentimentally the stalwart defenders who had stood at every entrance to Memorial Hall on a certain eventful evening in the past. That is, at every door but one. That door had been a fatal omission. Well, there were no secret entrances to this house. Homer had locked them all. All but this door right here, where he would sit stoutly awake the whole night through.

  Leaning his head on the newel post, Homer closed his eyes for just a second, thinking bitterly about white-collar crime. Give him an honest burglar any day, a hardened criminal or a habitual strangler. Then you knew where you were at. These college-educated types were so erratic and undependable. You never knew what the hell they were going to do next.

  Opening his eyes, Homer gazed up at the window on the landing, where a single star was visible, wheeling around the celestial pole. The star reminded him of Henry Thoreau, lying out-of-doors on a summer night, aware of the earth turning under him as a star moved slowly over his head. Maybe this star was Henry’s star, this very star, still proving the rotation of the earth every night of the year as it circled the north pole of the sky. Homer stared at the star until it disappeared behind the stick of wood dividing one pane of glass from the next. Would the star come out on the other side? What if it didn’t? What if the earth stopped turning on its axis at this very instant in the late summer of this year of God? Gazing faithfully upward, Homer pillowed his head on his arm and waited for the star to come back.

  But he failed to see it emerge on the other side of the stick of wood and drift across the next pane of glass. It was not that the earth had ground to a halt. It was simply that Homer had fallen asleep. He was dreaming that he could fly. It was his favorite kind of dream, and Homer was delighted. Of course it wasn’t flying, exactly. It was more like bounding. You just jumped gracefully upward and kept soaring slowly, higher and higher, until you landed in a tree. This time the tree was a colossal blue spruce, really immense. Homer came lightly to rest on a branch and looked all around at the snow-covered landscape. Brrrr, it was cold. What had happened to the rest of the summer and the autumn of the year? Winter had certainly come early. Vaulting gently upward, Homer landed on the windowsill of a tall building next to the tree. Other people were already poised on the edge of the window, drinking tea. “Lemon and sugar?” said a woman, her leg flung casually over the seventy-floor drop. There was a tremendous explosion. Homer dropped his teaspoon and woke up.

  He was freezing. Where was he? Echoes of some monstrous noise were ricochetting in his head. Shambling to his feet, Homer fell off the step and hit his head on the opposite wall.

  The noise, there had been a noise. It had sounded immense in his dream, like a gun going off in his ear. But now the reverberations had a muffled sound, as though something had exploded very far away at the other end of the house.

  And then Homer remembered who he was and where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. He was supposed to be taking care of John. John! His nephew John was sleeping at the other end of the house! Homer’s heart leaped into his mouth. In his blind rush he forgot his flashlight. Blundering through one dark room after another, he found himself struggling with the door to the laundry before it occurred to him to worry about his own safety. Someone might come at him with a gun. Well, who the hell cared? Homer didn’t give a damn. All he could think of, as he tripped over one laundry basket after a
nother, was his nephew John and the terrible silence in the house. Why in the hell was it so quiet? If John were alive and well, why wasn’t he moving around upstairs?

  With an anguished sense of foreboding, Homer stumbled clumsily up the pitch-black staircase. In a moment he was standing in John’s open doorway, gazing in horror at the shadowy room, at the broken body on John’s bed, at the fragments of John that lay all over the floor. A terrible sob burst from Homer. “Oh, the bloody bastard.” Turning, he plunged, half falling, down the stairs again. Where in the hell was the bloody bastard? Oh, God, God, God, what would he say to John’s father and mother?

  Now there were noises in the house, jarring collisions of furniture — beyond the laundry, beyond the room next to the laundry. From the living room at the front of the house came a clatter and thud and a strangled oath.

  With passionate presence of mind, Homer abandoned caution and pounded heavily through the book room, the coatroom, the dining room, and the narrow front hall where he had spent the night, and then he burst into the living room from an unexpected direction. In the grey light of dawn he found Buddy in front of him, his hand just reaching out for the knob of the hall door.

  Homer took him by the throat, sobbing so hard he could hardly speak. “You filthy — filthy — he was only seventeen, you murdering bastard.”

  Buddy was bigger, younger, stronger. Taking hold of Homer’s arms, he lifted him off his feet, then dropped him heavily. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? What the hell?”

  “What do you mean, what the hell? You know goddamn well what the hell. You blew my poor boy’s guts out.” With hot tears running down his face Homer lunged again at Buddy.

  But Buddy merely held him at arm’s length. “Look, you fool, I just came in. I was up the hill. For Christ’s sake, why don’t you go lie down? You see that door?” With one hand Buddy reached for the door of the kitchen entry and yanked it open. The vague grey morning light fell over them. “I just came in that door. If anything happened to that kid nephew of yours, it was that crazy TV repairman that did it. Listen, he may still be around here someplace. Why don’t you call the police?” With a violent shove, Buddy pushed Homer backward against the stairs.