Scare Tactics

by Farris, John

  “Hell, I don’t think so. Had to ground Pistol Pete for riding his bike to Flat Shoals after dark. He’s always had the worst temper in the family, but this time he took it like a man.”

  “It’s after twelve. It’s me Buster really wants, you were just a bystander that day, but I’d feel better if you called your house to see that everybody’s accounted for. You know what I ...”

  Layne’s voice trailed off. Papa John didn’t answer. He heard the beer bottle hit the kitchen floor, then an entire shelf of the refrigerator came out with a crash. Layne jumped and ran.

  “John!”

  Layne heard sounds like a dog drinking, like water being powerfully sucked down a drain. The big man was rooted to the floor, hands at his sides. His face was white, and as Layne watched from the door it began to melt; his beard slid down his chest like a tree in an avalanche. The eyes, glacéed chestnuts, followed, slipping and sliding until they were absorbed by a thick churning mass like a milkshake in a blender. His fingers dripped on the linoleum, on packaged hot dogs and a head of lettuce and a jar of mustard. Papa John shrank so swiftly inside his clothes they appeared to be standing there without him. Then the clothes collapsed as if they were falling off a line and the hairs of his beard withered to filings, to mouse dust; the liquid, slurping sounds receded.

  —

  At least an hour passed before Layne came to his senses. He had trampled down some of the fence surrounding Angela’s garden and was lying facedown between rows of leafy green things, hands plunged into fragrant tilled earth. His face was smeared with dirt, he tasted it on his tongue.

  Cheer Cheer Cheeeerrrrriiiiooooo!

  He hated it: hated the sound. He hated all the days of his childhood when he’d given in to fear of Virg Constable. But most of all, he hated Buster Dockins. Layne lifted his head, glaring.

  “Come and get me, you bastard.”

  I’m ready for you.

  The Cheer-i-o Ice Cream truck, wrapped in a spiffy cloud of frost and liquid gold and moonshine, puttered down Oak Hill and came to a stop a few feet from the barricade. He couldn’t see well enough to penetrate the fog, make out the driver. But who else? Layne got to his feet, dirt clinging to his unshaven chin and clothes, and walked slowly down the driveway past his own truck, parked nose to the street.

  The door on the driver’s side of the refrigerated truck opened slowly and Buster Dockins got out. From a hundred feet away, Layne could feel the quick drop in temperature, and he shuddered in his short-sleeved shirt. He had a hand in the back pocket of his khaki work pants. Buster grinned and whistled at him like Harpo Marx, and Layne threw up his other hand, wincing at the blue norther hitting him in the face.

  “You and me, Buster; the way it should have been all along.”

  Cheercheercheercheeriiiiiiii

  The music pumping faster out of his wobbly old wreck of a truck. Buster with a hand shading his eyes looking this way and that, as if scouting for children, his rubbery lips pressed together in dismay. Layne smiled crookedly and slogged on into the deepening cold, his one hand stiff now, no feeling in the fingers, the other hand still in his back pocket.

  Ah! Buster, ignoring Layne, reacted as if he’d spotted someone in the distance. Layne didn’t fall for the pantomime. He was nearly to the last, sadly withered willow tree beside his driveway, and that’s where he’d installed the board with the kick switches, all of his wiring strung from tree to tree through the big sycamores behind the barricade. Their heavy branches arched out and over Buster’s foggy truck. A few more feet—

  Buster held up a white-gloved hand. Wait. He turned and threw open both side doors of the freezer and Layne stumbled, almost losing his balance on the corduroy bridge that now glittered with a coating of ice. Almost lost his mind, because, lined up inside the coldly smoking freezer was a cryogenic nightmare: all of the West End Bunch, rigidly at attention for his inspection. Kent Bafler the next to last, Holy Bible welded beneath his arm like a licorice wafer, then the latest and to Layne saddest addition, Papa John, a slight, perplexed smile on his face: I’d rather be having a Michelob.

  Layne hesitated, then kept walking, the fog around him now, the cold like pliers on the end of his nose, his Angers. Buster wrung his gloved hands ecstatically and reached into the freezer. He held up two ice-cream bars. Layne didn’t have to be told what was beneath the shiny pink and gold wrappers.

  His lips were numb, even his tongue felt frozen, but Layne, pausing again at the edge of the footbridge where the plywood board with the kick switches had been concealed, got it out:

  “Too bad, Buster. They’re in Cincinnati, and you’re fucked.”

  Buster turned his head as far as his broken neck would allow, plucked a silver whistle from one pocket of his white shirt, put it to his lips, and blew.

  Two kids came tumbling out of the front seat of the cab, screaming ecstatically.

  MaryLyn Bannixter, age eight. Toby, age five.

  “Oh, my God—”

  “You scream!” MaryLyn said to Toby.

  “You scream!” Toby said, pointing to MaryLyn.

  “Who screams?” Buster yelled, jumping in between them, holding the ice-cream bars high above his head.

  “We all scream for ice cream!”

  “What k-k-kind of ice cream, kids?”

  “Cheeeerrrrrriiiiiooooooo!”

  “MaryLyn! Toby! Get away from him!”

  “And it’s the best ice cream in the whole world!” Toby recited, licking his lips in anticipation, looking straight at his father as if he were in a school play.

  Buster bowed at the waist, grandly handing out an ice-cream bar to each child. They tore at the wrappers.

  Layne jumped off the end of the bridge and with jabs of his booted foot began closing switches on the electrical board he had constructed earlier.

  Small explosive charges went off in the ice-covered trees at the base of Oak Hill. Weighted nets of chicken wire floated down toward the refrigerator truck and Buster looked up in consternation.

  While he was distracted, Layne went after his children. He snatched MaryLyn’s head back by the hair as she was about to bite into the ice-cream man-on-a-stick, turned, and batted the other chocolate-coated replica of himself from Toby’s hand. He got a better grip on both of them and dragged them out from under the chicken-wire net.

  Another charge went off and suddenly the net was electrified, there was a hissing of acetylene and propane gases from the tanks he had concealed inside the storm grate a few feet from the back wheels of Buster Dockins’s truck.

  Layne pulled the propane jet lighter from his back pocket, flicked it on, and tossed the lance of blue-white flame in the direction of the storm drain. Then, with a writhing, squealing child under each arm, Layne took a fast look back at Buster, who was impotently hopping up and down inside the chicken-wire net that had shaped itself to the boxy truck.

  “You’re a ghost, Buster! Act like one—vanish!”

  He pushed both children down the hill to the creek as the propane streaming out of the sewer ignited. There was a blinding flash and concussion.

  Layne dragged the stunned, crying children across the footbridge toward their house. He fell to his knees and looked again. A fireball had blackened the trees at the end of the street. The barricade was burning briskly; the asphalt in the street beneath Buster’s truck had bubbled and puckered.

  But the Cheer-i-o Ice Cream truck wasn’t even scorched. There was a heavy cloud of vapor around what looked like a shield of ice which the intense heat couldn’t melt. Buster was in the driver’s seat again, grinning out the window. He’d lowered the temperature—to one hundred, perhaps two hundred degrees below zero. And it was getting colder by the second: cold enough to crystallize metal. The flames from the jets fluttered out as the gases froze.

  Buster was in the driver’s seat again, grinning out the window.

  Layne left the children on the lawn near the porch and sprinted to the driveway and his own truck.

  A
gusher of loose rock sprayed from the back wheels as he gunned the engine, foot heavy on the brake. When the engine was revving at the red line he released the smoking brakes and pressed the accelerator near the floor. He had trouble holding the big Silverado on the driveway as he headed directly for the street where hell had frozen over.

  Buster realized what was about to happen and tried to move his truck, but the wheels were mired to the hubcaps in asphalt that was now harder than granite. Layne could see Buster’s face through the aperture he had left in the boarded-up windshield of the pickup. Buster wasn’t laughing. His face was the color of a pickle in brine. His wiry red hair stood straight up. Then the Silverado, its already-considerable weight nearly doubled with a load of sand, cement, and concrete block, rammed the Cheer-i-o Ice Cream truck from the side.

  Layne braced for the impact, but there was no more resistance than if he had driven through a plate-glass window.

  He nearly forgot to hit the brakes. The truck ran up the terrace of the house across the street and stopped almost against the front door.

  Layne got out, shielding his eyes against a blizzard of fine, needle-sharp ice particles that filled the air where the Cheer-i-o truck had stood. Nothing remained of it but four little trenches in the asphalt. He had obliterated the truck, along with Buster Dockins. When Layne looked up toward the smoky sky, he saw a brief, rising tornado, disappearing as it reached the clouds.

  His children were sitting where he’d left them by the porch. Layne sat down between them and gathered them in. Toby was whining as if he’d been rudely snatched from a sound sleep. MaryLyn snuggled bleakly and silently against his shoulder.

  The phone was ringing in the house. He hoped it would be Angela.

  Scare Tactics

  After Clive and Evelyn murdered her husband, Evelyn made arrangements to return with the body to Pebble Hill, Connecticut, where he would be buried in his family’s plot, in the midst of generations of New Englanders.

  Zack Hammons had been a senior captain with the airline, which extended every courtesy and consideration to the newly widowed Evelyn. The flight from San Francisco to Hartford was nonstop. It would take five and a half hours. The airline sent a car for her. Needless to say, Clive couldn’t make the trip. This ordeal she would have to endure alone, or almost alone: Prince Valium was going, too. Without Prince Valium there was no way she could handle it. She needed only to remember not to drink. Oh, a glass of white wine en route. Nothing stronger. Just lean on Prince Valium all the way and don’t think about it. That was easy enough, wasn’t it?

  The police had accepted Zack’s death as accidental. Clive wasn’t worried. In three days they’d be together. How long would the insurance check take? Another week? Then there was Zack’s pension, the investments to be liquidated. Thank God he’d only been interested in real estate. California, real estate. That little building in downtown Sausalito—it took Evelyn’s breath away to think of what it was worth now. Good old Zack. The bastard. Sleep well, Zachary.

  She had an idea of where he was going to be, aboard the Airbus. In the forward cargo hold, almost directly beneath first-class. A few feet away from where she was sitting. An eternity away. Would she have to face him in Eternity? Her stomach was like a rock, her bowels wouldn’t move, it was a wonder the blood could flow through her veins. Time to pay another call on Prince Valium.

  Evelyn looked out the window at a Japan Air Lines 747 taxiing by their gate position. She was the first one aboard her flight. The other passengers would be boarding soon. Departure at eight-thirty. No fog on this winter morning, only a mist streaming off the surface of San Francisco Bay as the sun warmed the water. A big tomato-red sun. Evelyn thirsted for a Bloody Mary. That, or Prince Valium? She had the gold-chain drawstrings of her purse tight in her fists, twisting this way and that, as if she were quietly strangling a stray cat.

  A flight attendant looked at her, what could only be described as a veiled glance. The sort of attention that made Evelyn jumpy. The flight attendant was in her midthirties, and obviously she was well traveled. She’d flown with Zack and had said something commiserating when Evelyn was escorted aboard by a vice-president of the airline. Maybe she’d been to bed with Zack in some exotic port of call. He hadn’t missed much quiff in his long career, flying F-14s, then commercial jets.

  All I ever had was Clive. But you couldn’t accept that. You couldn’t make it easy for either of us. Now see where it’s got you.

  Her hand in her purse, Evelyn felt for the container of Valium. But the other first-class passengers were boarding now, it wasn’t the time to be popping pills. She adjusted the dark glasses that were pinching the bridge of her nose and stared out the window. Below her the ramp rats were loading baggage onto a conveyor. Two cargo doors, fore and aft. He would be in a crated steel coffin. Human remains. That’s what the airlines called it. Them. Zack.

  If you think that would-be actor is going to get a penny out of this arrangement, you’d better give it another think, Evie.

  Clive has been in six plays! He was in a Clint Eastwood movie. He’s going to be—

  Get real. He’s an aging pretty boy who’s convinced he’s latched on to a good thing. I’m going to be generous with you, Evie. Just this one time. You’ve got a week to give him the heave-ho.

  But he didn’t give her a week. Because once he knew about Clive he went straight to the bank. Checked their joint savings account and the safety-deposit box they both had access to. Maybe if he’d been in a rage, Evelyn could have understood; even though she knew she hadn’t been wrong to cash the bonds and loan the money to Clive, weren’t the bonds hers as much as Zack’s? Clive was going to repay her, he’d given her his promissory note. But Zack beat her with a cold and efficient cruelty, taking care not to leave any marks on her body. She lay on the floor for hours after the beating, naked, unable to move, barely able to breathe. He assured her Clive would be next, as soon as he returned from a three-day run to Sao Paulo.

  Evelyn was not violent by nature. She’d been brought up in a happy home in a small Oregon town. She always treated people well, some much better than they deserved. She was the type to shudder at accounts of violence, human beings driven to desperate acts. The women who burned their husbands up in bed, chopped them with a cleaver, or ran over them with the family car, over and over and over them....

  No, she was not like those women. But somehow it had been inevitable: Zack had left her—and Clive—no choice. He had proved, by destroying her dignity, whipping her like an animal, that he didn’t deserve to live. Even before they staged the accident she had seen it happening, repetitively, in her mind. The act itself was almost anticlimactic, as if it were part of a familiar dream. Still, although Zack had been dead for nearly four days, she was slow to awaken. The jangling of nerves, like a distant alarm clock even Prince Valium couldn’t shut off, reminded her of the difficult days ahead—facing Zack’s parents and other relatives, seeing Zack into the wintry ground.

  Then, at last, would come the peace she and Clive had earned. Maybe they could leave the country for a while. Money would never be a problem. She knew the movie Clive wanted to direct, financed by the sale of Zack’s real estate, would be a tremendous hit. He was so talented.

  “Would you care for something to drink now, Mrs. Hammons?”

  Evelyn looked up at another flight attendant. Male, young and good-looking, not too obviously gay. She managed to smile.

  “I think I’d like a glass of white wine.”

  Other passengers were finding their seats in the first-class compartment. Businessmen, mostly; an Asian couple, both small, slim, reeking of wealth. A dowager with a cat in one of the airline’s travel kennels that could fit under a seat. She was on the other side of the cabin, fortunately. She wore more gaudy finger rings than a pasha, and looked to be the chatty type. Evelyn wasn’t in a mood to talk to anyone except the man she loved, and she hadn’t dared even to telephone him before leaving. She had not seen Clive since Zack’s murd—No
. She would not call it that. His death, his justifiable death. And she had not slept for ... Evelyn didn’t know how long. She’d had a few minutes’ worth of doze now and then. But the long flight would take care of that, she’d always been able to sleep on airplanes, with or without a sedative. No one had been booked for the seat next to her.

  The coach passengers were boarding. A tour group from Scandinavia, tall, ruddy people, then some girls in jeans carrying rucksacks and parkas, numerous well-dressed blacks still wearing convention badges. Evelyn sipped half of the wine that had been brought to her, and her eyes closed. A baby wailed in the far end of economy class. Before long all of the passengers had boarded; they were ready to go.

  “Vait! Vait! Don’t close the door! You vere maybe thinking of leaving mittout Nussbaum? That schlemazl of a cab driver—if brains vere his fortune, he couldn’t buy lunch! Shalom, dolling, and may I say you have such beautiful vide-avake eyes for such an ungodly hour. Bronstein, I see vhere you are looking, you should be ashamed ogling her proportions, and before breakfast already. Vhat’s your name, dolling? Maureen? A lovely shiksa. I have never been more in love vith anyone. I am going to send you flowers on your birthday for the rest of your life. Vhich one of you gentlemen in there is the captain? Mazel tov Our fate is in your hands, but I can see you’re a shtarker. Look at poor Bronstein. His face is pale. His knees are knocking. God should have given you vings, Bronstein. But if you had vings, then you’d be a parrot, too, and who vould do the lines?”

  “Seat 2C, right here, Mr. Bronstein.”

  “Thank you.”

  Evelyn opened her eyes and looked at the man across the aisle. He was large and rather slovenly. Two-day growth of beard. Dark blue trousers that were shiny at the knees and had cigarette-ash smudges on them, a shapeless yellow sweater threadbare at the left elbow. There was a large red and green parrot perched on his left shoulder, which was certainly odd: she couldn’t believe the airline would permit—