“What is it?” I would ask her. “Tell me. Whatever I can do—”
“It’s nothing,” she would insist. “Really, darling, it’s nothing at all,” and kiss me on the cheek.
In this same period, while matters were unexpectedly worsening in the Dream, a slow improvement had begun in the sore. All the employees who were to be fired were now gone, all the new employees in and used to their jobs, all the new routines worked with and grown accustomed to, Mr. Miller seemed also to be growing accustomed to his new job and the new store. Less and less was he taking out his viciousness and insecurity on me. He had, in fact, taken to avoiding me for days at a time, as though beginning to feel ashamed of his earlier harshness.
Which was fine but irrelevant. What was my waking rime after all but the necessary adjunct to the Dream? It was the Dream that mattered, and the Dream was not going well, not going well at all.
It was, in fact, getting worse. Delia began to break dates with me, and to make excuses when I asked her for dates. The pensive looks, the distracted looks, the buried sense of impatience, all were more frequent now. Entire portions of the Dream were spent with me alone—I was never alone in the early nights!—pacing the floor of my room, waiting for a promised call that never was to come.
What could it be? I asked her and asked, but always she evaded my questions, my eyes, my arms. If I pressed, she would insist it was nothing, nothing, and then for a little while she would be her old self again, gay and beautiful, and I could believe it had only been my imagination after all. But only for a little while, and then the distraction, the evasiveness, the impatience, the excuses, all once more would return.
Until two nights ago. We sat in her convertible beneath a swollen moon, high on a dark cliff overlooking the sea, and I forced the issue at last. “Delia,” I said. “Tell me the truth, I have to know. Is there another man?”
She looked at me and I saw she was about to deny everything yet again, but this time she couldn’t do it. She bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Ronald.” she said, her voice so low I could barely hear the words. “There is.”
“Who?”
She raised her head, gazing at me with eyes in which guilt and pity and love and shame were all commingled, and she said, “It’s Mr. Miller.”
I recoiled. “What?”
“I met him at the country club,” she said. “I can’t help it, Ronald. I wish to God I’d never met the man, he has some sort of hold over me, some hypnotic power. That first night, he took me to a motel, and—”
Then she told me, told me everything, every action and every demand, in the most revolting detail. And though I squirmed and struggled, though I strained and yearned, I could not wake up, I could not end the Dream. Delia told me everything she had done with Mr. Miller, her helplessness to deny him even though it was me she loved and him for whom she felt only detestation, her constant trysts with him night after night, direct from my arms to his. She told me of their planned meeting later that very night in the motel where it had all begun, and she told me of her bitter self-knowledge that even now, after I knew everything, she would still meet him.
Then at last her toneless voice was finished and we were in silence once again, beneath the moon, high on the cliff. Then I awoke.
That was two nights ago. Yesterday I arose the same as ever—what else could I do?—and I went to the store as usual, and I behaved normally in every way. What else could I do? But I noticed again Mr. Miller’s muted attitude toward me, and now I understood it was the result of his guilty knowledge. Of course Delia had told him about me, she’d described all that to me during her confession, relating how Mr. Miller had laughed and been scornful to hear that “Ronald the sap” had never been to bed with her. “Doesn’t know what he’s missing, does he?” she quoted him as saying, with a laugh.
At lunchtime I drove past the motel she’d named, and a squalid place it was, peeling stucco painted a garish blue. Not far beyond it was a gunsmith’s; on the spur of the moment I stopped, I talked to the salesman about “plinking” and “varmints,” and I bought a snub-nosed Iver Johnson Trailsman revolver. The salesman inserted the .32 bullets into the chambers, and I put the box containing the gun into the glove compartment of my car. Last evening I carried the gun unobserved into the house and hid it in my room, in a dresser drawer, beneath my sweaters.
And last night, as usual, I dreamed. But in the Dream I was not with Delia. In the Dream I was alone, in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed with the gun in my hand, listening to the small noises of my mother and sister as they prepared for sleep, waiting for the house to be quiet. In last night’s Dream I had the gun and I planned to use it. In last night’s Dream I had not left my car in the drive as usual but a street away, parked at the curb. In last night’s Dream I was waiting only for my mother and sister to be safely asleep, when I intended to creep silently from the house, hurry down the pavement to my car, drive to that motel, and enter room 7—it’s always room 7, Delia told me. always the same room—where it was my intention to shoot Mr. Miller dead. In last night’s Dream I heard my mother and sister moving about, at first in the kitchen and then in the bathroom and then in their bedrooms. In last night’s Dream the house slowly, gradually, finally became quiet, and I got to my feet, putting the gun in my pocket, preparing to leave the room. And at that point the Dream stopped.
I have been very confused today. I have wanted to talk to Mr. Miller, but I’ve been afraid to. I have been unsure what to do next, or in which life to do it. If I kill Mr. Miller in the Dream tonight, will he still lie in the store tomorrow, with his guilt and his scorn? If I kill Mr. Miller in the Dream tonight, and if he is still in the store tomorrow, will I go mad? If I fail to kill Mr. Miller, somewhere, somehow, how can I go on living with myself?
When I came home from work this evening, I didn’t park the car in the drive as usual, but left it at the curb, a street away from here. My mind was in turmoil all evening, bur I behaved normally, and after the eleven o’clock news I came up here to my bedroom.
But I was afraid to sleep, afraid to Dream. I took the gun from the drawer, and I have been sitting here, listening to the small sounds of my mother and my sister as they prepare for bed.
Can things ever lie again as they were between Delia and me? Can the memory of what has happened ever be expunged? I turn the gun and look into its black barrel and I ask myself all these questions. “Perchance to Dream.” If I arranged it that I would never awake again, would I go on Dreaming? But would the Dream become worse instead of better?
Is it possible—as some faint doubting corner of my mind suggests—even remotely possible, that Delia is not what she seems, that she was never true, that she is a succuba who has come to destroy me through my Dream?
The house is silent. The hour is late. If I stay awake, if I creep from the house and drive to the motel, what will I find in room 7?
And whom shall I kill?
NACKLES
Did God create men or does Man create gods? I don’t know, and if it hadn’t been for my rotten brother-in-law the question would never have come up. My late brother-in-law? Nackles knows.
It all depends, you see, like the chicken and the egg, on which came first. Did God exist before Man first thought of Him, or didn’t He? If not, if Man creates his gods, then it follows that Man must create the devils, too.
Nearly every god, you know, has his corresponding devil. Good and Evil. The polytheistic ancients, prolific in the creation (?) of gods and goddesses, always worked up nearly enough Evil ones to cancel out the stood, but not quite. The Greeks, those incredible supermen, combined Good and Evil in each of their gods. In Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda, being Good, is ranged forever against the Evil one, Ahriman. And we ourselves know God and Satan.
But of course it’s entirely possible I have nothing to worry about. It all depends on whether Santa Claus is or is not a god. He certainly seems like a god. Consider: He is omniscient; he knows every action of every child, for good or evil
. At least on Christmas Eve he is omnipresent, everywhere at once. He administers justice tempered with mercy. He is superhuman, or at least non-human, though conceived of as having a human shape. He is aided by a corps of assistants who do not have completely human shapes. He rewards Good and punishes Evil. And, most important, he is believed in utterly by several million people, most of them under tin; age of ten. Is there any qualification for godhood that Santa Claus docs not possess?
And even the non-believers give him lip-service. He has surely taken over Christmas; his effigy is everywhere, but where are the manger and the Christ child? Retired rather forlornly to the nave. (Santa’s power is growing, too. Slowly but surely he is usurping Chanukah as well.)
Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators(?) society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption? Secondary gods of earlier times have been stout, but surely Santa Claus is the first fat primary god.
And wherever there is a god, mustn’t there sooner or later be a devil?
Which brings me back to my brother-in-law, who’s to blame for whatever happens now. My brother-in-law Frank is—or was—a very mean and nasty man. Why I ever let him marry my sister I’ll never know. Why Susie wanted to marry him is an even greater mystery. I could just shrug and say Love Is Blind, I suppose, but that wouldn’t explain how she fell in love with him in the first place.
Frank is—Frank was—I just don’t know what tense to use. The present, hopefully. Frank is a very handsome man in his way, big and brawny, full of vitality. A football player; hero in college and defensive line-backer for three years in pro ball, till he did some sort of irreparable damage to his left knee, which gave him a limp and forced him to find some other way to make a living.
Ex-football players tend to become insurance salesmen, I don’t know why. Frank followed the form, and became an insurance salesman. Because Susie was then a secretary for the same company, they soon became acquainted.
Was Susie dazzled by the ex-hero, so big and handsome? She’s never been the type to dazzle easily, but we can never fully know what goes on inside the mind of another human being. For whatever reason, she decided she was in love with him.
So they were married, and five weeks later he gave her her first black eye. And the last, though it mightn’t have been, since Susie tried to keep me from finding out. I was to go over for dinner that night, but at eleven in the morning she called the auto showroom where I work, to tell me she had a headache and we’d have to postpone the dinner. But she sounded so upset that I knew immediately something was wrong, so I took a demonstration car and drove over, and when she opened the front door there was the shiner.
I got the story out of her slowly, in fits and starts. Frank, it seemed, had a terrible temper. She wanted to excuse him because he was forced to be an insurance salesman when he really wanted to be out there on the gridiron again, but I want to be President and Cm an automobile salesman and I don’t go around giving women black eyes. So I decided it was up to me to let Frank know he wasn’t to vent his pique on my sister any more.
Unfortunately. I am five feet seven inches tall and weigh one hundred thirty-four pounds, with the Sunday Times under my arm. Were I just to give Frank a piece of my mind, he’d surely give me a black eye to go with my sister’s. Therefore, that afternoon I bought a regulation baseball bat. and carried it with me when I went to see Frank that night.
He opened the door himself and snarled, “What do you want?”
In answer, I poked him with the end of the bat, just above the belt, to knock the wind out of him. Then, having unethically gained the upper hand, I clouted him five or six times more, and then stood over him to say, “The next time you hit my sister I won’t let you off so easy.” After which I took Susie home to my place for dinner
And after which I was Frank’s best friend.
People like that are so impossible to understand. Until the baseball bat episode, Frank had nothing for me but undisguised contempt. But once I’d knocked the sniffings out of him, he was my comrade for life. And I’m sure it was sincere; he would have given me the shirt off his back, had I wanted it, which I didn’t.
(Also, by the way, he never hit Susie again. He still had the bad temper, but he took it out in throwing furniture out windows or punching dents in walls or going downtown to start a brawl in some bar. I offered to train him out of maltreating the house and furniture as I had trained him out of maltreating his wife, but Susie said no, that Frank had to let off steam and it would be worse if he was forced to bottle it all up inside him, so the baseball bat remained in retirement.)
Then came the children, three of them in as many years. Frank Junior came first, and then Linda Joyce, and finally Stewart. Susie had held the forlorn hope that fatherhood would settle Frank to some extent, but quite the reverse was true. Shrieking babies, smelly diapers, disrupted sleep, and distracted wives are trials and tribulations to any man, but to Frank they were—like everything else in his life—the last straw.
He became, in a word, worse. Susie restrained him I don’t know how often from doing some severe damage to a squalling infant, and as the children grew toward the age of reason Frank’s expressed attitude toward them was that their best move would be to find a way to become invisible. The children, of course, didn’t like him very much, but then who did?
Last Christmas was when u started. Junior was six then, and Linda Joyce five, and Stewart four, so all were old enough to have heard of Santa Claus and still young enough to believe in him. Along around October, when the Christmas season was beginning, Frank began to use Santa Claus’s displeasure as a weapon to keep the children “in line,” his phrase for keeping them mute and immobile and terrified. Many parents, of course, try to enforce obedience the same way: “If you’re bad, Santa Claus won’t bring you any presents.” Which, all things considered, is a negative and passive son of punishment, wishy-washy in comparison with fire and brimstone and such. In the old days, Santa Claus would treat bad children a bit more scornfully, leaving a lump of coal in their stockings in lieu of presents, but I suppose the Depression helped to change that. There are times and situations when a lump of coal is nothing to sneer at.
In any case, an absence of presents was too weak a punishment for Frank’s purposes, so last Christmastime he invented Nackles.
Who is Nackles? Nackles is to Santa Claus what Satan is to God, what Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda, what the North Wind is to the South Wind. Nackles is the new Evil.
I think Frank really enjoyed creating Nackles; he gave so much thought to the details of him. According to Frank, and as I remember it, this is Nackles: Very very tall and very very thin. Dressed ail in black, with a gaunt gray face and deep black eyes. He travels through an intricate series of tunnels under the earth, in a black chariot on rails, pulled by an octet of dead-white goats.
And what does Nackles do? Nackles lives on the flesh of little boys and girls. (This is what Frank was telling his children; can you believe it?) Nackles roams back and forth under the earth, in his dark tunnels darker than subway tunnels, pulled by the eight dead-white goats, and he searches for little boys and girls to stuff into his big black sack and carry away and eat. But Santa Claus won’t let him have good boys and girls. Santa Claus is stronger than Nackles. and keeps a protective shield around little children, so Nackles can’t get at them.
But when little children are bad, it hurts Santa Claus, and weakens the shield Santa Claus has placed around them, and if they keep on being bad pretty soon there’s no shield left at all, and on Christmas Eve instead of Santa Claus coming down out of the
sky with his bag of presents Nackles comes up out of the ground with his bag of emptiness, and stuffs the bad children in, and whisks them away to his dark tunnels and the eight dead-white goats.
Frank was proud of his invention, actually proud of it. He not only used Nackles to threaten his children every time they had the temerity to come within range of his vision, he also spread the story around to others. He told me, and his neighbors, and people in bars, and people he went to see in his job as insurance salesman. I don’t know how many people he told about Nackles, though I would guess it was well over a hundred. And there’s more than one Frank in this world; he told me from time to time of a client or neighbor or bar-crony who had heard the story of Nackles and then said, “By God, that’s great. That’s what I’ve been needing, to keep my brats in line.”
Thus Nackles was created, and thus Nackles was promulgated. And would any of the unfortunate children thus introduced to Nackles believe in this Evil Being any less than they believed in Santa Claus? Of course not.
This all happened, as I say, last Christmastime. Frank invented Nackles, used him to further intimidate his already-intimidated children, and spread the story of him to everyone he met. On Christmas Day last year I’m sure there was more than one child in this town who was relieved and somewhat surprised to awaken the same as usual, in his own trundle bed, and to find the presents downstairs beneath the tree, proving that Nackles had been kept away yet another year.
Nackles lay dormant, so far as Frank was concerned, from December 25th of last year until this October. Then, with the sights and sounds of Christmas again in the land, back came Nackles, as fresh and vicious as ever. “Don’t expect me to stop him!” Frank would shout. “When he comes up out of the ground the night before Christmas to carry you away in his bag, don’t expect any help from me!’
Tomorrow's Crimes Page 2
