Strangers

by Mort Castle

  “I doubt it,” Jan Pretre said. “I told you your wife has a strong will. She’s severed her emotional ties to you. She’s not feeling guilty. She’s not even guilty about not feeling guilty. Oh, she’s flying right now, that first heady whirlwind feeling of romance, but she’s already considering a life without you, thinking about divorce.”

  She was going to divorce him? Hey, lady, Ms. Shit-for-Brains, you could bet the ass that you were pumping in some guy’s bed that Hubby would be the one getting the separation. No alimony, no child support, and nothing but a final settlement. Bitch!

  A question occurred to him but he did, not ask it because the answer simultaneously came to mind: Why had Jan chosen to tell him about Beth this way, in front of Vern? They were both warning him: You fucked up, Michael.

  “So that’s the situation, Michael,” Jan Pretre said. “Now you know…”

  …and before I didn’t know jack-shit, and it took you to tell me, right?

  “…so it’s up to you to handle it as you choose.”

  It would be handled. There was only one more thing he needed from Jan Pretre: a name.

  Jan told him.

  Kevin Bollender. Michael hoped that Beth truly loved him deafly, completely, totally “need him,” “can’t live without him” loved the sonofabitch.

  Then he went to his office and telephoned Eddie Markell.

  In his office in the narrow wing off the library, Kevin Bollender had his feet up on the desk. He burped, tasting the onions from the burgers he’d had for lunch. He had an hour until his two o’clock—“Intro to Phych” class and he thought about spending it napping.

  There was a knock at the door and before he could get his feet down, a handle turned, the door opened, and Eddie Markell stepped into the office. He was wearing a dirty trench coat and his right hand slipped inside it and came out with a .357 magnum.

  “You’re the professor, so you’ve got to be a smart guy. Be smart and be quiet and I don’t blow your fucking head off.”

  “I’m not a professor,” Kevin said and then he could no longer say anything. The full effect of cold terror hit him. Jesus Christ, he’d worked at the Manteno mental institution and there’d been some pretty damned inchy doings there, including one raving maniac who’d tried to rip his face off, but he knew that never before this moment in his life had he been utterly, paralytically afraid.

  “We’re going for a ride, professor,” Eddie Markell said. “You do what I say and your curly head stays right on your shoulders where you want it.”

  Kevin thought that whoever this man was, he sounded as though his entire vocabulary consisted of clichés from old gangster films. Kevin looked at the gun, realized his mouth was as dry as if he’d spent three days lost in the Sahara desert, and thought of a cliché himself: He’d as soon kill you as look at you. The man was drunk, you could see it and smell it, and that made him even more, dangerous.

  “Put your feet on the floor,” Eddie Markell said. “You stand up slow, put on your jacket, and take a walk with me.”

  “This is all a mistake,” Kevin said. The instant the words were spoken, he anticipated what the response would be: Yeah, and you made it.

  He had a dizzying flash of unreality, an impossible answer to all the questions that were leaping like grasshoppers through his mind. This was a 1940s tough guy film and somehow he’d been plugged into it. Boing! Twilight Zone time… He was going to be all right then. He was the good guy, after all, and…

  Kevin tried once more. “You’ll never get away with this.”

  Eddie Markell said, “You know, I don’t give a shit. And if the marines bust down the door to save your sorry ass, professor, I still don’t give a shit. So how about you shut the fuck up and we get out of here.”

  Kevin walked down the corridor. Eddie Markell was a half-step behind him. He’d put away the gun and a dozen times Kevin thought Run! He did not run. The man would shoot, Kevin had no doubt, and there were people in the halls, the custodian with his broom, that guy in a wheelchair, maybe a crippled vet using his GI benefits to further his education, that old woman who was probably on her way to a class in data processing so she could re-join the work force. They were the “innocent bystanders” who always seemed to get hurt, whose injuries and deaths were duly noted in network newscasts and whose names were forgotten during the first Ken-L Ration commercial.

  They took the elevator down and stepped out of the school. There had been a change in the weather, the skies clouding over, and now a light cold rain was falling.

  Eddie Markell took him to a rusted-out green 1976 Chevrolet Impala. Glancing around the parking lot, Eddie unlocked the trunk. “Get in,” he said.

  Kevin didn’t move. “Look,” he said, “someone’s going to see…”

  Eddie slammed a knee into Kevin’s crotch. The pain fanned up, twisting his guts and spearing his lungs. He whoofed and Eddie toppled him into the trunk, forcing his legs inside.

  The trunk lid slammed.

  The darkness was total. Breathing hard, Kevin lay on his side. The stink of gasoline and grease curled around him. The roar of the engine as the car started was as loud as the rushing cylindrical hurricane in a wind tunnel.

  The car was moving, picking up speed. He had to do something.

  The wires to the rear lights! He had them, cold and plastic-feeling. He tugged, ripped them loose.

  Now he had a chance! A red light, a stop sign, slowing for a crossroad, an intersection, merging traffic, and a cop would be there. “That guy’s brake lights are out. Let’s write him a ticket!”

  Except how many cars without brake lights or headlights, taillights, turn signals traveled a zillion miles every day without being stopped? And who in the hell didn’t know that “There’s never a cop around when you need one”?

  He kicked. He yelled. “Help me! Help!” He pushed against the trunk lid.

  The car slowed, pulled to the right, and then stopped. The trunk opened. From the corner of his eye he saw the gray sky and felt the welcome cool rain.

  Eddie Markell leaned down. “Shut up!”

  Kevin tried to move, to sit up, and Eddie hit him twice, on the temple and then on the cheekbone. The pain was a kaleidoscopic burst behind his eyes.

  “I said shut up and I mean shut up,” Eddie Markell said.

  In the putrid closeness, he lay silent. He drifted from full consciousness to a state of mercifully dulled awareness that let him view what was happening in a detached way. He decided it was very possible that he would be killed. It was numbly bothering that he might not learn why.

  It was sometime later—sometime because fear has its own clock and a minute might be a day or an hour the sharp finger—snap that connects terror then to terror now—that Kevin Bollender’s claustrophobic journey ended.

  The rain had stopped. On shaky legs, he climbed out of the trunk into a wet coldness. They were in the woods, a forest preserve, Kevin thought. The battered Impala stood alongside a Ford LTD on a gravel parking patch. Kevin thought it might be the Glenvale Forest Preserve but he could not be sure.

  “That way,” Eddie Markell said. He gestured with the pistol at a picnic shelter fifty yards away. The wall-less structure had a concrete floor: a gently pitched roof was supported by redwood columns.

  Kevin saw a man there. He was of average height, sandy-haired, wearing mechanic’s baggy, dark green coveralls. At his feet was a canvas bag.

  “Move it, shit-heel,” Eddie Markell said.

  An adrenalin-spiked hate coursed through Kevin. He was bigger and stronger than this motherfucking sonofabitch! He could pick him up and snap him, toss half of him north and the other half south.

  But there was the gun.

  Kevin walked to the picnic shelter.

  “Glad to see you, Kevin,” said the man in the coveralls.

  “I don’t know you and I don’t know what this is about,” Kevin said.

  “You don’t know me? You know my wife. You’ve fucked her, you sonofabitch!” />
  “You’re…”

  “I’m the Lone Ranger,” Michael said. He punched Kevin in the jaw.

  Kevin staggered back. He had no doubt now. They meant to kill him. He felt like a dead man and because he had nothing to lose, not anymore, when Michael swung again, Kevin grabbed his arm and the wrist and elbow and spun him around into Eddie Markell.

  “Sonofabitch!”

  Kevin tried to run. Off-balance, Michael whirled, caught him around the waist. Kevin shot his elbow into Michael’s mid-section. Michael grunted.

  Eddie Markell smashed the long ribbed barrel of the magnum against the side of Kevin’s head.

  Kevin’s knees buckled. Once more, Eddie hit him.

  “You can turn the pus-bag loose,” Eddie said. “He’s not in the mood for the hundred yard dash.”

  Michael unfastened his grip and Kevin dropped to his hands and knees. Kevin ordered himself not to surrender to the churning undertow that was trying to pull him down into unconsciousness.

  “Get up, asshole,” Eddie Markell said. “Take your clothes off.”

  Kevin tried to rise but couldn’t. They hauled him up, stripped him. They pushed him against one of the shelter’s roof supporting beams, cranked his arms back around it, and tied his wrists with picture-hanging wire.

  Michael said, “My wife a good lay, Kevin? You make her suck your cock? You know, I taught her that. That your idea of fun? Having another man’s wife give you head?”

  Michael drew back his fist. There was nothing Kevin could do to avoid the blow or lesson its force. Michael smashed him squarely in the mouth. “Well, my idea of fun is killing shit-heads like you.”

  Kevin’s mouth opened bloodily.

  “I think he’s interested in some conversation,” Eddie Markell said.

  “Beth,” Kevin croaked. “Don’t… hurt her…”

  Michael patted himself on the chest. “My wife has broken my heart, but no, how could I hurt that dear sweet lady? Shit, what kind of guy do you think I am?”

  Kevin glared at him with pain-slitted eyes. “Bas…tard…”

  From the canvas bag, Michael took out a jack-knife and opened it. He touched the point to Kevin’s chest at the center of the sternum. Then he pressed just hard enough to pierce the skin.

  Kevin jerked, slamming the back of his head into the column. Tears rolled down his cheeks as Michael slowly sliced a shallow line down to his navel.

  “He’s going to scream,” Eddie Markell said.

  “He’s got damned good reason.”

  “No, let’s keep him quiet,” Eddie said. “I don’t think we’re going to be interrupted by any goddamned nature-lovers on a day like this, but just in case, we don’t want to have to leave the asshole until we’re finished with him.”

  They gagged Kevin by shoving one of his socks in his mouth. Then Michael began cutting, not hurrying in the least, talking to Kevin with the tone of a shoe store clerk saying, “Have a good day.” After a time Kevin couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear hearing the cold whisper of the blade opening his flesh so that the pain could hellishly flower along new lines of nerve-endings. He passed out.

  He came to to biting cold and a smell so stingingly sharp that it overpowered the scent of his own blood.

  Michael’s coveralls, saturated with gasoline, were draped over his neck and wrapped around Kevin’s lacerated chest and stomach.

  Michael struck a match.

  “What’s up, Doc?” Bugs Bunny asked the hapless Elmer Fudd. With the door to the basement open, the rabbit’s question carried up from the rec room, where the girls were watching Saturday morning cartoons, to the kitchen.

  Michael sat at he kitchen table with the newspaper. Beth was at the sink, finishing the breakfast dishes.

  Michael checked the front page of the Sun-Times, then opened the newspaper and skimmed the headlines until he found what he was looking for on page five.

  “Beth?”

  She turned around.

  That smile… he thought. All right, in about five seconds, she was going to swallow that grin and get puking-sick on it!

  “Don’t you know a”—he glanced down at the paper—“Kevin Bollender? I think you told me he taught your psychology class?”

  She tipped her head to the side, reminding him of a parakeet contemplating a new cuttlebone. She was still smiling. “That’s right,” she said.

  He stood up, walked over to her, and handed her the paper. “Here’s something about him. Bottom of the page.”

  Nothing happened quite as he’d been expecting.

  A half-minute later, Beth threw the paper at him and as he started back, the pages flying around him, she screamed, “You killed him! You son of a bitch!” and punched him in the nose.

  “Ow!” Michael cried out. Tears flooded his eyes. He touched his nose; there was a trickle of blood seeping through the left nostril. “You hit me!”

  “You… You killer!”

  Footsteps banged up the stairs. Kim stuck her head in the door. “Who killed someone? Hey, Dad, you got a bloody nose!” Marcy peered over her sister’s shoulder.

  “Nobody killed anybody…”

  “Your nose—did Mom pop you?”

  Michael pointed. “Both of you, scoot back down there and stay put until I tell you otherwise. Now!”

  With the children gone, he closed the door and leaned his back against it. He wiped the half-mustache of blood from his lip. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell is going on with you, Beth…”

  “Don’t you?” She rigidly stood at the sink. A tic in her cheek twitched and fluttered like a mouse’s beating heart.

  “No,” Michael said, “I do not. You smack me in the nose, call me a killer…” Shaking his head—He was the long-suffering husband doing his damnedest to be patient and understanding—he walked over to her—but he was angry now, angry and hurt!—and, raising his voice said, “If I killed someone, this Kevin Whatshisname, then you’d better call the police, Beth.”

  She stared at him.

  “Go on!” His voice got louder still. “You don’t want to be in the same house with a murderer. Call the cops. Now!”

  She maintained her stare for only another second and then she lowered her head and her shoulders drooped. “I… I’m going to call Dr. Pretre,” she said in tight, barely audible whisper. “I feel like I have to talk to him. Today if he can see me.”

  “All right,” Michael said. He sighed deeply.

  “If I can get an appointment, Michael… would you take me to his office? I don’t want to drive myself.”

  Now what happened to the independent New Era woman Beth thought she was? Michael asked himself. And all because her between-the-sheets buddy got barbecued!

  “Of course,” he said. He was extremely pleased with his next gesture. He put his hands on her shoulders and she flinched but did not pull away. In the most sorrowful, syrupy voice he could produce—It was a goddamn shame he couldn’t cue the violins—he asked, “Beth, what’s happening to us?”

  It was an emergency, she explained over the phone, and Dr. Pretre agreed to see her at one o’clock. Marcy and Kim were dropped off at the Engelkings. Michael drove her to the psychiatrist.

  During the one hour session, Dr. Pretre said, “I see,” and “I’m following you,” and “I understand,” or echoed her statements rephrased as a question. What she needed more than anything else, he told her, was rest, relief from this crushing anxiety. He handed her a plastic pill bottle. “Here, this is one of the samples I get from the drug company. Take one as soon as you get home. If it makes you groggy, that’s fine. Sleep would be good for you.”

  Later that afternoon, Beth sound asleep, Michael telephoned Jan Pretre. They spoke for five minutes. They agreed that Beth should go on a vacation where there was no chance of her saying something that might cause anyone any trouble.

  Dr. Pretre had just the ticket to send her on her trip.

  — | — | —

  EIGHTEEN

  IT
WAS a few minutes after eight on Monday night. The Loudens were in the rec room, watching MASH like most of the United States. The girls were already in their pajamas. Michael and Beth sat on the couch and she was losing her mind.

  On Saturday, when Michael had brought her home from Dr. Pretre’s, she took a pill and fell asleep within minutes. After that, Beth knew only that she awakened some time later—Was it still Saturday?—and there was Michael with another pill, and she went back to steep: awake, a pill, asleep, a cycle, repeated and repeated.

  Beth thought she had to have eaten during that time—all that time: awake asleep a pill—gone to the bathroom. She didn’t think she had washed her face. She knew she hadn’t changed out of this faded nightgown; she wanted to be flannel—warm in something that held her own scent. It was like wrapping up in an additional layer of self.

  When had she last brushed her teeth? she wondered.

  “Brush your teeth!” says Mr. Hap E. Tooth. “Curses!” says Mr. Tooth Decay, “Foiled again!”

  She remembered the children had gone off to school this morning—it had to be this morning—and she was with them at breakfast—was that this morning or last week?—and that Michael had stayed home from the office today to give her pills.

  It was again pill time, not more than a half-hour ago. She did not feel sleepy, not now. She was marvelously alert, attuned to everything around her. She heard the sudden flare of the burner of the hot water tank in the utility room, the delicate—alive breathing of the girls—Marcy exhaled when Kim inhaled and when Kim exhaled, Marcy inhaled, they were so opposite in every way—even the hydraulic rush of blood through her own veins and arteries.

  There was a wondrous precision to this moment of intense hearing and her muscles were taut with the effort of holding onto it.

  She realized, then, that she was not breathing. Everyone else in the room was breathing—she could even hear Hot Lips and Colonel Potter on television—but she was not. She had to breathe! If you stopped breathing, you died.