Scare Tactics

by Farris, John

  “What’s on your mind?” Practice said noncommittally, puzzled by the doctor’s reference to his sister.

  They waited for a cruising taxi to pass and hurried across the street.

  “Why would he just run off?” Dr. Childs muttered. “Suppose I frightened—I might have said something—but no; I remember, I didn’t say ...” He flashed a look at Practice, who was keeping pace with him but not without effort.

  “What I said was,” he went on, as if he were simplifying a point for one of his classes at the medical school: “ ‘Lucy? Is that you, Lucy?’ And I flashed my light in the garden, because it was dark. The moment the light touched him, he threw up his arm, over his face, then turned and ran. Right through the shrubbery. Made a terrible mess. I Lad to call the nursery and have them send a man out. And Lucy ...”

  “What about Lucy?” Practice asked patiently, knowing Fletch Childs well enough to let him run on. He might circle the point of his story several times, but he always landed on it dead center.

  Dr. Childs raised a hand to steady his slipping glasses. The two men had stopped just inside the entrance of the city parking lot, and the doctor burrowed deeper inside his muffler with his chin, as if an icy wind were scouring the street.

  “She just sat there in the swing, long after the boy had run away, with tears on her face, looking after him, crying. Hardly said a word to me. She looked very unhappy. Didn’t stay that way for long. You understand? Came into the kitchen while I was having my medicine and kissed me on the cheek and went up to bed. She was all right then.”

  “This was last weekend, when Lucy was off,” Practice said slowly.

  “Yes, yes. I dozed off about nine o’clock in my room, but the alarm woke me at ten of twelve. Time to take my medicine. You understand? And I heard voices in the garden. Low. Couldn’t make out what was said. But I recognized Lucy’s voice. Didn’t think anything of it. I thought it must have been you.”

  “I was out of town.”

  “Remembered. The other voice got louder, but he wasn’t—talking. More like making a speech. Reciting. Is this clear?” Dr. Childs angled a look at Practice, as if he suspected him of skepticism. “Finally got on my nerves, high-pitched voice, almost hysterical. Took my light and went out by the kitchen door. Just to see—to see ...”

  “To see if Lucy was all right?”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  “She was all right? Except for the tears, I mean.”

  The doctor nodded, almost losing his glasses.

  “Who was it? Had you seen him before?”

  “Well, no,” Dr. Childs said, and peered at his wrist-watch. “Never really saw the boy—until last Sunday night.”

  “How do you mean?”

  He fidgeted. “Once before, when Lucy was home, he came. Knocked on the door. He wouldn’t come inside. They stayed on the front porch for about an hour.”

  “Did Lucy tell you who he was?”

  “He was a friend, she said. A friend who—no—she didn’t say friend. Someone who needed her.” The doctor nodded soberly into his muffler. “I suppose—you understand? When she was in nursing school, all kinds of people came to see her. People with troubles. Too many troubles.” Abruptly he turned away. “Forty minutes,” he said fretfully. “Important night. May I carry you ... ?”

  “I’m just going across the street for dinner, Doctor. Do you know what this boy looks like?”

  Dr. Childs shook his head. “Tall. Taller than you. And thin.” He took several quick steps up the ramp to the parking levels, then turned and looked back. “Very white face. Like a clown’s. Hard to say—that face, that voice. You understand? Maybe it wasn’t a boy at all.”

  In a few moments he had disappeared up the ramp and Practice turned thoughtfully toward the street, chewing on the end of a paper match in the absence of a cigarette. Dr. Childs’s disjointed story had given him several things to think about, all concerning Lucy.

  The parents of Lucy and Fletcher Childs had died when Lucy was very young. Fortunately her brother was considerably older than she, had finished medical school and his residency, and was able to make a home for her—a home inevitably dominated by young doctors and medical discussions, so that Lucy grew up wanting to be a nurse. She was also somewhat timid and lonely; and Fletch, who could spare her little time, was strict about her upbringing. She saw very little of boys until she enrolled at the state university.

  Then she was, for the first time, on her own, exposed to the attractiveness of university life, enrolled in a difficult school that demanded long hours of work and study. She had no trouble with her books, but the hospital work itself left her with little energy in reserve; a lot of things that other girls in her class took for granted came as a series of small shocks to Lucy: death and affliction and the selfishness and fear of individuals who found themselves threatened by both. She weathered two years, and matured. In her third year she fell in love with a surgeon, who had a minimum of conscience as well as a wife and two children at home; and when he was done with Lucy, a6 he had finished with others like her, she was very near a collapse.

  Fletcher Childs hadn’t been able to stop the affair from developing, although it was rumored later at the hospital that he had expertly removed four of the surgeon’s front teeth with the first and only left hook of his life; but he’d recognized the signs of impending mental breakdown and taken Lucy from the school, not long before her class was due to graduate.

  He turned to a longtime friend, Dr. Edward Mackerras, who was in charge of the state mental hospital. Mackerras was hesitant about recommending either the state hospital or a private institution for Lucy; after several talks with her, he decided to invite her to live in his house on the grounds of the state hospital. There she would be under observation for as long as they both felt was necessary, yet she wouldn’t be exposed to the routine of institutional life.

  Lucy had spent a year and a half with Dr. Mackerras, working part-time in the hospital dispensary to help her therapy. After an initial period of depression and isolation, she had begun to take an interest in the problems of the other patients, and by the end of her stay had several unofficial “cases” of her own—to Dr. Mackerras’s secret satisfaction.

  —

  Lex’s hadn’t filled up yet, and Practice was shown to a booth at the back. He had scarcely looked over the menu and begun his usual debate—prime ribs versus T-bone—when he felt someone standing over him.

  “Hi,” Steppie said. “Saw you come in. Room for me?”

  “Why not?” Practice said casually, but he wasn’t in the mood for his ex-wife’s company, and he hoped she wouldn’t stay long.

  Steppie sat down opposite him with a rustling of some very expensive dress material. The cocktail dress was pale orange, a shade she wore well, and showed most of her bare arms and a good half of her bosom, without showing her true age.

  “How long’s it been?” Steppie asked. “Six weeks? I’ve meant to call you. Keeping busy?”

  He nodded, and she raised her glass to her lips, looked at him over the brim, and regretfully finished the last of the drink she’d brought with her.

  “I thought you’d be married by now,” Steppie said with lofty good cheer. “So I heard—you and Fletch Childs’s sister. The delicate-looking kid who wears clothes so well. No? No marriage yet? Say, Jim, let’s get out of here. You can order your steak in the bar and buy me another one of these, and we’ll have a nice talk before I have to run. Doesn’t bother you in the bar, does it?”

  “No,” he said wearily.

  “Come on, then. I don’t like this crowd I’m with, and if they see me come in with my ex, they’ll leave us alone. Be a sport, Jim.”

  Nothing changed about Steppie, he thought, as he followed her from the restaurant into the adjoining bar. You followed wherever Steppie might go. You jumped out of airplanes or spent the night in a tree house or made long-distance phone calls to political figures in Moscow. That was being a sport.

  They t
ook a booth in the bar next to the rotisserie, and Steppie firmly waved off a couple who seemed inclined to join them. He ordered the T-bone and settled back.

  “So you’ve actually stayed on the wagon,” Steppie said teasingly, holding up a fresh daiquiri to the light. “How about it? Do you sneak one or two before you go to bed? Why don’t you take a little sip now? One sip won’t hurt you. Please.”

  “Don’t be so goddamn childish, Steppie,” he said sharply.

  “Sorry,” she murmured, and withdrew, her gaze wandering around the interior of the bar. She looked forlorn, and he felt ashamed for a moment, wondering if it was yet another act or if he had hurt her. With Steppie it was hard to tell.

  “I was hoping we could be friendly, Jim. I mean that.” She gave him a haunting look he remembered well. “I’m not very happy,” she continued in a low voice, as if she were at a confessional. “No, I’m trying to be serious. You get that suffering look on your face as if I’m talking bull, and I’m not.”

  She reached out and took his hand between her own, and he didn't try to pull it away. Her own were icy, and not solely from holding the daiquiri. He realized they were being observed, talked about, and that the hand-holding would assume a disproportionate significance in the gossip of the city during the next few days. Somehow Lucy would find out, but at the moment it didn’t make much difference to him.

  “It’s just a phase, Steppie,” he said.

  “No, it’s not," she insisted, turning her wrist slightly so that she could see the face of her watch, then leaning toward him to intensify their contact. “Oh, I knew you’d be like this,” she said, shutting her eyes for a moment and looking decidedly more youthful. A strand of hair had worked free of the comb and was dangling; she shook her head like a colt. “I’ve felt this way for a long time, Jim. At least a year. I want to get free of this town and everybody in it.”

  “Eight years ago I couldn’t drag you away.”

  “I’ve changed since then.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes. Will you listen to me? Stop sitting there with that cynical mouth and really listen to me, because I’m in earnest.”

  “I’ve won my right to be cynical, Steppie.”

  “I know,” she said. “Believe me, I know it.” Her hands gripped his more tightly, then relaxed. “I want to sell the shop and be free of this town. I want to move somewhere else. San Francisco, New York. Meet new people ...”

  “Start a new life,” he said.

  “Yes. Start ...” She blinked, and her expression grew a little cold. “Well, then, if you’re going to take it this way ...”

  “Go on, Steppie. I’m listening.”

  Her head was down and a bitter smile appeared.

  “What’s the use? I thought it would be a cinch. I’ve been planning this for weeks. Just walk right up to you and say, ‘Jim, I still love you and I need you. Marry me again and let’s get out of here and ...’” She stopped, her voice dry, and swallowed a couple of times. “It isn’t very goddamn easy,” she said, almost whispering.

  “And this isn’t the place.” He felt the touch of her hands then, for the first time, and a painful wrenching in his chest, through his heart. “Steppie, how can we sit here and talk about love? I don’t even remember us very well. Don’t you realize that? I went almost all the way down. Any farther and it would have meant sleeping in doorways and eating in soup lines the three or four years it took my kidneys to rot. That bad, Steppie. And where the hell ...”

  “Stop it,” she said: there were tears in her eyes. “Stop, I know what’s next.”

  Do you? he thought. And do I believe you now, that your hunger to escape is as pure as mine, or is this more playtime, more calculation, the surefire approach? Was I as good as all that, Steppie? He thought of the years away from Steppie, the other man she had married, all the other men besides himself.

  She withdrew her hands and reached into a small purse for a handkerchief, which she held unobtrusively in one fist to dry the eye that was tearing most.

  “Whatever you want from me,” she said, “I’m ready to give. I want you back, so bad you don’t know. Jim”—she looked up again, her eyes gleaming with tears—“something’s hap-hap—I swear, if you marry me, I’ll be—I’ll try ...”

  He looked down at the table, not able to bear much more.

  “I can have children, still. At least two. I want children, Jim.”

  “Steppie. It’s all over.”

  For almost a minute he heard nothing but the voices around him in the crowded grill, a few fragments of conversation. He wouldn’t lift his eyes.

  “I know how bad I was,” Steppie said, a note of urgency and contrition in her voice. “I couldn’t help it, because you—you let me be that way. I think I was always hoping you’d treat me the way I deserved to be treated. But now I ...” She drew a sharp breath. “All right. I guess I’m not up to her standards, am I? Little Lucy, she’s a—a dish, that’s for sure. Jim, I can see why ...”

  Practice heard the rustling of her dress as she stood up and quickly sidestepped out of the booth. His hands were clenched, separately, on the table. Then she was standing beside him and a hand with surprising strength in it gripped his shoulder.

  He raised his head and felt a little stunned at the look of terror in Steppie’s eyes as she bent to whisper in his ear, “Something awful’s going to happen to me!”

  He started up, but she was already moving rapidly through the rear of the bar, thrusting her way through knots of men, who glanced after her in astonishment. Practice hesitated, still a little shocked by the look in her eyes and the anguish in her voice. Then he hurried after Steppie, pushing against the same men, who yielded resentfully a second time, to the back entrance where an arriving couple blocked the door.

  By the time he reached the stairs of the alley he saw Steppie by the light of a printer’s shop across the way, sitting in the back seat of an old Cadillac limousine, a stiff smile on her face. The limousine pulled quickly away with the smooth roar of a well-tended engine. But not before Practice had a glimpse of Major Starne Kinsaker in the seat beside her.

  • 5 •

  He had a two-room apartment in an old brick building that was located midway between the waterworks and a Catholic cemetery overlooking the river, where no funerals had been held for at least thirty years. From his bedroom window Practice could see the water stack, which had been abandoned when the city outgrew its capacity.

  One window of his apartment was open, and the curtains, which Lucy had picked out for him, billowed occasionally in the strong evening breeze. He lay on the bed with his feet up on iron headboard and smoked. On the back steps of the building a milk bottle toppled, rolled, and broke. He shifted his weight on the bed, holding his cigarette at the tip end as it burned closer to his fingers. He was remembering a marriage.

  —

  The Army had claimed him at seventeen, and he was at Schofield when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, already a seasoned soldier; his first three stripes came quickly after that.

  Following the war, he finished at the state university in three years, attending all sessions. For extra money he parked cars and drove a milk truck. Before he was half through his undergraduate courses, he knew he wanted to be a trial lawyer. He went out with a lot of women, some of them perpetual students, practicing intellectuals, not too predictably cynical to be boring as yet. All the relationships were casual, beer and two hours of bed, the sort of thing that made younger men grind their teeth with envy; and because his background was more glamorous than that of other bachelor vets—two battlefield commissions—a lot of the prettiest girls went out of their way to cross his path.

  Steppie Saunders never went out of her way. They met by accident, parted friends, ran into each other a couple of more times, started dating.

  Steppie, the only daughter of a fairly prosperous automobile dealer in town, was the enfant terrible of a generally rich and lamebrained crowd. By her senior year she had two br
oken engagements behind her and a reputation for sexual liberality which she in no way deserved; the truth was, boys didn’t last long enough with Steppie for any real intimacy to develop. She had a sharp tongue, an eye for the ridiculous, and no hesitancy about speaking her mind. On the other hand, when she thought she was overmatched, she could be gracious and devoted.

  Practice never intended to fall in love with her. She was a decided contrast from the girls he was usually involved with. And, when he met Steppie, he was bone-tired. The war had sapped him, and five years of uninterrupted study had dulled his purpose. Her light touch and amusing, sometimes childish viewpoints were refreshing.

  Things began to go sour when her father died. Steppie and Wilbur Saunders had fought ferociously all her life, but in a complex way she was devoted to him, and his death was torture for her. Practice was then angling for a place with a good law firm in Fort Frontenac.

  “I won’t leave Osage Bluff,” Steppie had told him.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s always been my home.”

  “I can’t afford to turn down the chance,” he protested.

  “You’d better turn it down.”

  He hadn’t argued with her, because of her dead father and because he was a little uncertain of himself in the face of her ultimatum. His first mistake—the others multiplied quickly after that.

  “Why don’t you take over the auto agency?” she said one morning, when he was still sounding out job opportunities in the capital. There weren’t many.

  “I’m a lawyer, honey. I don’t know anything about selling cars.”

  “Of course not,” Steppie said impatiently, “but you’ll learn. I can’t bear to see the agency sold. It’s been in the family for fifty years.”