Strangers

by Mort Castle

  He was making wet, peeping sounds of pain. Michael said, “You fat sonofabitch. Skimming some off the top from Superior, huh? Probably bought yourself this hideaway shithouse with what you stole.”

  “Oh no, oh no…” Herb whimpered, throat tight, squeaking like a mouse in a trap. “Oh.”

  “I am truly sorry, Herbert,” Vern Engelking said, “but we must reprimand you.”

  “Don’t kill me!” Herb peeped.

  “Don’t kill us!” Gretchen Waller echoed.

  They went to the bedroom, Eddie holding the gun, Michael with a butcher knife that he had taken from the duffel bag. Herb was ordered to undress. Sobbing, his belly a rippling white mound, he lay on his back on the bed.

  “Give him some head, bitch!” Eddie Markell said, pushing Gretchen toward the bed. “Get him hard.”

  On her knees at Herb’s side, Gretchen leaned forward, blindly obedient. This was not happening, Herb told himself. He was dreaming, dreaming it all. That was it! Listen to the way Mr. Engelking was joking—“I do regret any damage my Florsheim might have done your manhood, Herbert”—and look at how Michael Louden was smiling as though he were at a sales convention and, hey! Out there in the living room, that was Kenny Rogers on the stereo! Kenny Rogers for crying out loud…So put it all together and it just wasn’t real.

  “Get with it, Herby,” Michael said. “You’ve been humping the lady for a long time. Now get it up so you can have one more good one!”

  I want to live! Herb Cantlon thought. He no longer knew what was dream and what was reality. He was totally attuned to life-need and life-want—Obey them and live!—and his body miraculously responded.

  “Get on him, bitch!” Eddie Markell said. “Take him for a ride.”

  This was a crazy nightmare, Herb thought. Gretchen was crying, straddling him, sinking down, accepting his tumescence into her scratchily dry socket, and circling the bed were three smiling men, saying crazy things, things that made no sense, and Gretchen was moving, her bony hips jutting back and forth, her face as expressionless as a fifty cent Halloween mask, and he felt the tightening within him, so strong now because every nerve was fear-alive and tingling…

  That’s when Michael grabbed Gretchen Waller’s hair and jerked her back and cut her throat with the butcher knife. The hot curtain of blood shot onto Herb’s face and chest. He screamed. Blood in his eyes, blood in his mouth, her blood, not spilling but plopping onto his throat and chest and belly while her body convulsed in death.

  Herb Cantlon was still screaming when he fainted.

  When he came to—and he did not know when that was—he was no longer thinking he wanted to live. He was not thinking at all. He was listening in a disinterested way to men speaking. Vern Engelking, Michael Lauden, and—whatwashisname? No, it couldn’t have been Engelking and Louden; they would never have done such… He did not know any of these men; they were strangers.

  “You’ll take care of it, Eddie?”

  “No problem. Murder and suicide. It’ll look like lard ass killed the chick with the blade and then offed himself.”

  “Very well, then, Eddie. We’ll rely on your expertise.”

  There was a gun in Herb Cantlon’s mouth. He had to shape his lips the way he did at the dentist’s because of the size of the barrel, and his finger was on the trigger and there was a hand over his hand.

  As though all sounds were amplified, he could hear the breathing of the three men who surrounded him, hear the thick drip of blood onto the carpet from the sliced neck of the woman who now lay sprawled across the foot of the bed, and from faraway, the voice of Kenny Rogers. He did not hear the sound of the explosion that sent the .357 magnum bullet into his mouth, up through his palette, bursting his head like a too ripe, sun-heated melon.

  — | — | —

  TWELVE

  AS SHE drove to Lincoln Junior College through a chill, dreary autumn drizzle, Beth was extra cautious at every intersection. The way she felt this Thursday night, she would not have been surprised if a motorist zoomed through a red light to broadside her. Indeed, she thought she would not be overly startled if a Boeing 707 plummeted from the skies and crashed right on top of her!

  For a week now, she had felt a vague tension, low-key, but as constant as a chronic toothache. She was not sleeping well, waking a dozen times throughout the night to a “worry thought” that refused to linger long enough in mind to become clear. She was irritable, on edge. Like this morning, at breakfast, as she stirred pancake batter, there was a crystalline explosion behind her, a dropped glass. She nearly went through the ceiling. She whirled, yelling, “Kim! You have got to be more careful…”

  Then there was another explosion, Kim’s vocal one, as she hollered, “You’re always blaming me! I didn’t break it! Marcy broke it!”

  Marcy, sheepishly apologetic, said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I did it.”

  Kim was wound up, getting louder with each outraged word: “If I do it, I get blamed! If I don’t do it, I get blamed! I’m just the one you blame things on around here!”

  To Beth, it seemed the girls’ voices were blending into a manic, turkey-gobble chorus, Marcy’s whimpering apology and Kim’s outrage. Beth was on the verge of screaming herself, a wordless scream, a descent into this whirling tumult.

  Kim was still shouting, “Everything that goes wrong is all my fault, Mom. You’ve always been on my case! It’s like with Snowball…”

  Snowball! Beth thought, as she carefully checked for outgoing and incoming traffic before pulling in to the college’s east parking lot. Coming when it did, after a string of disasters and near-disasters, finding poor Snowball was, oh, not the straw that broke the camel’s back, but definitely one that bent and twisted a few vertebrae.

  When the girls came home from school last Thursday, Beth first took care of the unhappy task of telling Marcy what had happened. Marcy was inconsolable for hours. Then Beth took Kim aside, trying to discuss reasonably and calmly the importance of responsibility and the sad consequences of thoughtlessness. That had sent Kim off on a first class, “You’re always blaming me!” tantrum, the equal of the one today at breakfast.

  Michael had taken charge of this morning’s pandemonium calmly, with almost amused nonchalance, telling Kim, to “quit yelling at her mother,” saying to Marcy she’d be better off “cleaning up the mess you made” than apologizing for it, and then offering to take over preparing breakfast, a task that Beth gratefully relinquished.

  Later, the kids sent upstairs to get their things together for school, Michael said to Beth, “You really shouldn’t get upset over nothing like that, honey. After all, a broken glass is no big deal.”

  Somehow it didn’t seem to Beth that Michael thought anything a “big deal.” Last week, when he returned from the trip to St. Louis—“Yes, everything went very well. In fact, I had a fine time!”—she tried to have a serious conversation with him about Kim’s outburst and Snowball; it certainly seemed that Kim’s carelessness had caused the guinea pig’s death.

  Was Kim, did he think, going through a phase? Sure he did—ha, ha. (No big deal!) Wasn’t a kid always going through a phase, from age six months to age twenty one? Perhaps Kim was developing a serious emotional problem, Beth suggested. Michael thought that was ridiculous. Kim was spunky and rebellious the way kids are supposed to be. (No big deal!) So, sometimes she was bratty, but Michael was sure, “ha, ha,” that any problem Kim had in her head could be solved with a whack or two on the other end.

  Yes, Michael, had treated the issue much too lightly, Beth thought. At least, that’s what she thought she thought because, all right, she had to admit it, she was all too ready these days to imagine problems for the Loudens, to believe that there was a mysterious curse of bad luck ‘enveloping them.

  And what had she been imagining about Michael all week long? she asked herself as she stepped out of the car, slipping her notebook and text beneath her green slicker to safeguard them from the lightly falling rain and mist. Oh, the same old thing. Th
e same ridiculous foolish, “He is someone I don’t know, someone who seems to talk to me but isn’t really talking to me and seems to listen to me but isn’t really listening to me and seems to care for me, care about me, love me, but doesn’t give the thinnest sliced damn about me… Someone who is a stranger to me—and to everyone!”

  Uh-uh and put an end to that! Beth ordered herself. It was the height of absurdity for her to torture herself with groundless recurring fantasies about Michael. That made no more sense than getting all wrapped up in a fantasy about, oh, shall we say (just for the sake of saying something), her teacher, Kevin Bollender.

  Kevin Bollender! Now, he really was a stranger, and that was what he was supposed to be. Yet Beth knew she could like him very much. The man was physically appealing, he was intelligent, and he was sensitive; you could tell because… Well, you could just tell.

  Of course, Kevin Bollender was only her teacher, nothing more, and certainly he wouldn’t ever be anything else but, yet still…

  Beth stepped into the school’s fluorescent-lighted entranceway. She had the disoriented, stomach-fluttering sensation that her eyes weren’t exactly seeing what she was looking at. It was, she thought, like being on an abruptly ascending elevator in a skyscraper.

  Then the non-existent elevator arrived at a non-existent floor. This floor, Reality, Beth told herself. She took a deep breath, smelled the cleanliness of the rain that had accompanied her into the building. Her head cleared.

  She went to her class.

  “Well, we’ve had a chance to consider some bona fide weirdos so far,” Kevin Bollender said. “There’s your basic, run-of-the-mill schizophrenic who’s convinced he’s a pitcher of orange juice. You’ve got your paranoid who knows you’re out to get him but figures he might just be okay because his friend, God, is personally looking after him. And let’s hear it for the catatonic, the manic-depressive, and, the ever-popular multiple-personality!”

  With the class’s appreciative chuckle, Kevin Bollender sat on the edge of his desk. He stroked his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. “But seriously, folks,” he said, “tonight we’re going to consider the weirdest of the weird, the strangest of the strange, an anomaly to even the most abnormal. I’m talking about the psychopath.”

  Beth wondered if Kevin had ever thought of a career as a stand-up comedian or a newscaster. He was a natural communicator, approaching what could well have been a cut and dried subject with bantering humor, never letting the study of psychology become stuffy. As usual casually dressed, tonight in jeans and a tan chamois hunter’s shirt, he seemed less an academic than an old-time carnival pitchman pulling a crowd for the sideshow. But there was no question Kevin Bollender was a real teacher. His joking manner kept you laughing, but his questions made you think.

  And he definitely was quite good looking…

  Beth ordered herself to pay attention to the lecture and not the lecturer.

  Rising, Kevin went to the board, and with his right hand took chalk from the ledge and lightly tapped the knuckles of his left hand.

  “The psychopath,” Kevin said, his tone becoming more formal, “has been termed a moral imbecile.”

  That brought a raised hand, that of the snowy-haired woman in the rhinestone-decorated glasses. Everyone else in the class was addressed by his or her first name but she was, as she had requested, always called “Miss Fletcher.” Had Kevin Bollender stated, “Icebergs are cold,” she’d have challenged it or asked for a clarification of exactly what he meant by “cold.”

  “Are you saying that a psychopath has a low IQ?” Miss Fletcher asked.

  “Uh-uh.” Kevin shook his head. “In fact, I’ll say the direct opposite. The intelligence quotient of a psychopath is typically far above average, near genius or even genius.”

  “Then why,” Miss Fletcher persisted, would he be an imbecile?”

  “A moral imbecile,” Kevin replied. “A psychopath might have the brain-power to solve the country’s inflation problems or to discover a cancer cure, but when it comes to morality, to a deliberation of ethics, that’s where Mr. Psychopath gets a failing grade.”

  Lee Thompson, the middle-aged man whose questions always had a purpose, said, “The psychopath doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong?”

  “Oh,” Kevin replied, “he knows what society deems right and wrong, but that has no bearing on what he himself does. Laws and codes of conduct are for others.”

  Kevin turned to the board and drew a large circle with three smaller circles within it. “From your previous classes in general psych, you’re all familiar with Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality. Let’s say the large circle represents the whole of one’s personality structure. Within it, we have the Id”—he so labelled one of the smaller circles—“and this is the inborn drive for gratification. It’s a raw and aggressive instinct, nothing but an unrestrained pleasure seeking impulse. It lusts for control, for total power. Then there’s the Ego, right here.” Kevin wrote the word in the second small circle. “The ego is the rational segment of the personality. Ego is the thinking mind, the mind that figures out how to meet the demands of reality and finds way for the id to achieve its necessary gratification.

  “But, aha!” Kevin said, as he wrote the word Superego in the third small circle, “The superego, last component of the personality to develop, is basically the conscience. Here we learn from parents, from authority figures, from our own experience in society. The superego limits what the ego is free to do to gratify the raw, aggressive wants of the id.”

  Kevin drew an “X” over the superego circle. “Zip! The psychopath isn’t burdened with one of these. That means he’s free to do what he pleases—and that’s anything he thinks he can get away with that will make his id purr with happiness.”

  Rob Gretsh, the long haired young man who often posed the most difficult questions, raised his hand. “What causes someone to become a psychopath?”

  “Hmm.” Kevin Bollender slowly nodded. “That’s a wonderful question, Rob. Too bad I don’t have a wonderful answer. Instead, I can give you all kinds of theories. Yessir, psychology is loaded with hypotheses, variables and theories!

  “Here’s one: If a kid is raised in conditions of near-total rejection and neglect, he could become a psychopath simply in order to survive without becoming psychotic. His coping behavior’ is lying, cheating, stealing, and so as a child, he learns to get what he wants and needs in the most cunning ways. As an adult, he goes into the world doing the same thing, following the pattern that has been successful for him.

  “Then we’ve got the theory that psychopathy, like any other form of mental illness you can name, is caused by a chemical imbalance. That’s a popular notion. You know, ‘better living through chemistry.’ The chemists are sure that once they determine the formulas, they can turn a schiz, a paranoid, or a psychopath into Norman Normal. That means’ that many of my colleagues who make fifty bucks an hour and up will have to get themselves honest jobs!

  “And here’s another theory for you. I guess you could call this the ‘Bad Seed’ concept if you’d like. Just the way some people are born to be tall, a psychopath is born to be psychopathic. Maybe the mass murderer with a tattoo that reads ‘BORN TO RAISE HELL’ is showing he has real insight into who he is and how he got that way!”

  Rob Gretsch couldn’t accept the last concept. “Uh-uh, that’s blaming it on Fate. That kind of thinking is right out of the Dark Ages!

  Kevin shrugged. “Actually, the idea belongs to Carl Jung, and he’s right up there with Freud and Adler.”

  People totally without a conscience, Beth thought. People who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, or Lincoln, Nebraska, or Clearwater, Florida or right next door, doing what they wished without the slightest consideration for others, without fear of law or morality—without guilt. Considering the number of psychopaths who might be on the loose was not, Beth reflected, the way to develop a sense of trust in your fellow man. And yet the subject was intriguing. She ha
d a question.

  “How can we tell if a person is a psychopath?”

  Kevin said, “That’s extremely difficult to determine. The psychopath seems to be normal—in fact, super normal. He’s a terrific actor. His relationships with others appear to be intense and involved but are actually cold, calculating, and without any emotional intimacy.

  “So the only time a psychopath reveals himself is when he acts in illegal and immoral ways. He’s the charming con man who sells the sweet old lady the Brooklyn Bridge. He’s the regular churchgoer who steals every penny from the church’s building fund. Or he’s a bluebeard who murders twenty wives before he gets caught. And that’s a specialty for psychopaths: murder. It’s a chance to exercise total dominance over another human being.

  “I’m saying, then, that we can recognize ‘moral imbecile’ only when we have proof of his actions.”

  “There’s no, oh, predictive test or anything?” Beth said. It seemed there ought to be. A tendency toward schizophrenia, for instance, could frequently be shown by a standard projective test that psychologists had employed for years.

  “I’m afraid not,” Kevin said. Then, laughing, he added, “Oh, maybe God does put the brand of Cain on ’em, but it doesn’t seem He gives others the ability to see that mark. So it’s only when the psychopath’s actions have been found out that we have proof of the psychopathic personality.”

  “But if psychopaths are so smart,” questioned Rob Gretsch. “right at the genius level, do they get caught?”

  “They do indeed,” Kevin said. “You’ve heard the old expression, ‘Pride goeth before a fall.’ After he’s had a number of successes, the psychopath comes to believe he’s invulnerable, much too clever to be caught by the police or found out by anyone. He gets careless, makes mistakes without realizing it or takes chances he previously would have avoided. Then, zap!”

  It was all fascinating—and frightening, Beth thought. Anyone, anyone at all, the mailman, the bank teller, the television repairman—Doctor-Lawyer-Indian Chief!—could be…