by John Cheever
That Hammer planned to murder his fishing companion did not, at this point, strike him in any way as unnatural. Looking at his victim Hammer thought that he would like to leach from his indictment all the petulant clichés of complaint. He knew that Nailles merchandised Spang and he had heard the worst of the commercials on TV. (If you were ashamed of your clothing, wouldn’t you change it? If you were ashamed of your house, wouldn’t you improve it? If you were ashamed of your car, wouldn’t you turn it in? Then why be ashamed of your breath when Spang can offer you breath-charm for periods of up to six hours …) It was infantile to rail at this sort of thing, Hammer thought. It had been the national fare for twenty-five years and it was not likely to improve. He wanted change and newness but he wanted his wants to be mature. Why despise Nailles because he loved the gold cigarette lighter that he now took out of his pocket. The economy was frankly capitalistic and who but a child would be shocked to observe that its principal talisman was gold? The woman who dreamed of a mink coat—Hammer thought—had more common sense than the woman who dreamed of heaven. The nature of man was terrifying and singular and man’s environment was chaos. It would be wrong, he thought, to call Nailles’s religious observances a sham. He guessed they were vague and perhaps sentimental but since Christ’s Church was the only place in Bullet Park where mystery was professed and since there was much that was mysterious in Nailles’s life (the thighs of Nellie and his love for his son) there was nothing delinquent in his getting to his knees once a week. Hammer had chosen his victim for his excellence.
“Didn’t I see your son directing traffic at the Browns’,” Hammer asked.
“Yes,” Nailles laughed. “He directs traffic at cocktail parties. He’s been terribly sick.”
“What was the matter?”
“Mononucleosis.”
“Who’s your doctor?”
“Well we had Mullin until they shut him down and then we went to old Dr. Feigart but neither of them really cured Tony. It was a very strange thing. He’d been sick for over a month when someone told us about this guru. He calls himself Swami Rutuola. He lives over the funeral parlor on River Street. He came to the house one night and I don’t know how he did it but he cured Tony.”
“Is he a holy man?”
“I really don’t know. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t even know what he did. I wasn’t allowed into the room. But he fixed up Tony. He’s fine now. He plays basketball and directs traffic at cocktail parties. I must remind him that the Lewellens are having a party on Friday. Well, shall we go?”
They walked back through the woods, the executioner and his victim, trailed by the old setter. Nailles stowed their tack in the back of the car and then opened the door for Tessie. “Jump in, Tessie,” he said, “jump in, girl.” Tessie whined. Then she made a lurch for the seat and fell to the ground. “Poor old girl,” Nailles said. He picked her up, an awkward armful with her legs sticking out, and laid her on the back seat of the car.
“Why don’t you do something about her,” Hammer asked.
“Well I’ve done everything I can or almost everything,” Nailles said. “There is a kind of serum you can get, a distillate of Novocain. It’s supposed to prolong a dog’s life but it costs fifteen dollars a shot and they have to have it once a week.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Hammer said.
“What did you mean?”
“Why don’t you shoot her?”
The contemptible callousness of his new companion, the heartless brutality involved in the thought of murdering a beloved and trusting old dog, provoked a rage in Nailles so towering and so pure that for a moment he might have killed Hammer.
He said nothing and they drove back to Bullet Park.
XVII
Have you ever committed a murder? Have you ever known the homicide’s sublime feeling of rightness? Conscientious men live like the citizens of some rainy border country, familiar with a dozen national anthems, their passports fat with visas, but they will be incapable of love and allegiance until they break the law. Have you ever waked on a summer morning to realize that this is the day when you will kill a man? The declarative splendor of the morning is unparalleled. Lift up a leaf to find a flaw but there will be none. The shade of every blade of grass is perfect. Hammer mowed his lawns that day. The imposture was thrilling. Look at Mr. Hammer cutting his grass. What a nice man Mr. Hammer must be.
Marietta had gone to Blenville for the weekend. Hammer was kept busy with his lawns until noon when he had a drink. He drove to the supermarket and bought a can of Mace and a loaded truncheon from the Self-Defense counter. Everything was ready, everything but the gasoline. He shook the can with which he had refueled the lawn mower. It was empty. He had this filled and then sat on his terrace. At three o’clock the mailman drove his truck down the street, stopping at the mailboxes that stood at the foot of every walk and drive. There was no mail for Hammer but from every house but his someone appeared—a cook, a mother-in-law, an invalid—and opened their boxes in a way that seemed furtive, intimate, almost sexual. It was a little like undoing one’s trousers. They groped inside for some link to the tempestuous world—bills, love letters, checks and invitations. Then they returned. It was a cloudless day. The birds in the trees seemed, to Hammer, to be singing either an invitation list or the names of a law firm. Tichnor, Cabot, Ewing, Trilling and Swope, they sang. He went into the pantry, smiling at the bottles. He did this three times and on his fourth trip to the pantry poured himself a stiff drink. He drank, he thought, not for courage or stimulation but to make the ecstasy of his lawlessness endurable. He drank too much. Hammer was not the sort of drinker who repeats himself, staggers and drives dangerously; but the inflammation of his thinking was hazardous. Towards dusk he wanted to tell someone his plans; he needed a confidant.
He settled on the holy man over the funeral parlor and settled on him so decisively that he must, unconsciously, have made the decision earlier. He drove into the slums and pounded on the door of the Temple of Light, “Come in,” said Rutuola. He sat in a chair with his right hand covering his bad eye.
“Are you the holy man?” Hammer asked.
“Oh no, no indeed. I’ve never claimed to be that. You must excuse me. I am very tired tonight.”
“You cure the sick?”
“Sometimes, sometimes. I help with prayers but I am so tired tonight that I cannot help myself. I have said a hundred times that I am sitting in a house by the sea at four o’clock and that it is raining but I know that it is half past five and I am sitting in an old chair over a funeral parlor.”
“You remember Tony Nailles?”
“Yes.”
“I am going to kill him,” Hammer said. “I am going to burn him on the altar of Christ’s Church.”
“Get out of here,” the swami said. “Get out of the Temple of Light.”
The Lewellens’ guests had been invited for seven thirty. Tommy Lewellen stood on his terrace. His idea of a party was a day and a night he had spent in West Berlin with three Kurfürstendamm whores. That was a party. Things were different in Bullet Park, he thought, as he watched the caterer’s waiters set tables for fifty under a tent lighted with paper lanterns. “The Amalgamated Development Corporation and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lewellen cordially request the pleasure …” The business name on the invitation was put there so Lewellen could claim the party as a tax exemption. If the claim was accepted the party would cost him nothing and he would net a thousand. Lewellen was more interested in the financial arrangements of his wife’s parties than in anything else. He sometimes got so bored that he seemed to see straight through the display of elegance to the bills, canceled checks, even the nails in the floor. What was wrong with friendly talk and well-dressed men and women eating ham and chicken? Nothing, nothing, nothing at all except that the blandness of the scene would be offensive. No one would get drunk, no one would fight, no one would likely get screwed, nothing would be celebrated, commemorated or advanced. If the gathering he awaited
stood at the brink of anything it stood at the brink of licentiousness. Sheer niceness, he thought, might drive a man to greet his guests wearing nothing but a cockwig. Gross and public indecencies would cure the evening of its timelessness and relate it vigorously to death. The waiters were setting out bowls of flowers. The flowers looked fresh enough but Lewellen guessed they had spent the afternoon at a wedding reception and would, after a night in the refrigerator, wilt during a fund-raising lunch in Greenwich, Connecticut.
The energies of change were almost unknown to Lewellen, but that the scene that was about to begin would claim to be totally innocent of change made it half a scene, half a loaf, half an anything, a picture cut from a magazine and pasted against the evening sky, and what a miserable thing was the sky—thought Lewellen—a boring reach of blue with some thunderclouds stacked up in the west like the towers of an old-fashioned West Side apartment hotel, the last abode of funky Hungarian widows who left their dirty dishes in the hallway. What a bore was the sky! Thunder sounded. The rhythm of thunder, thought Lewellen, was like the rhythm of a large orgasm. He liked that.
He could see against the clear afterglow in the northwest clouds of black smoke rising from the ghetto on the riverbanks. The wind was from the south, and if there had been any shooting he would not have heard it.
Tony Nailles, who would direct traffic, came over the lawn with a flashlight. “Hi Tony,” said Lewellen. “You want a drink?” “I’d like a beer,” Tony said. “There isn’t any beer,” said Lewellen, “why don’t you have a gin and tonic?” As Tony went over to one of the two bars, a car came up the drive and stopped on the lawn. It was the Wickwires. They were, as always, impeccably dressed and incandescently charming but he wore dark glasses and had a piece of court plaster over one eye. “What a divine idea to have a tent,” she exclaimed. She was in a wheelchair.
Nailles, stepping into the bathroom, found Nellie naked and took her in his arms. “If we’re going to do it,” Nellie said, “let’s do it before I take my bath.” They did. Then Nailles prepared to dress. Nellie had put his clothes on the bed and, standing naked above them, Nailles felt a powerful reluctance to dress. Having, in his experience with trains, learned something about the mysterious polarities that moved him, he wondered what would happen if his unwillingness to dress turned into a phobia. Would he spend the rest of his life padding naked around the bedroom while poor Nellie tried to conceal his condition from the rest of the world? He did not cherish his nakedness but he detested his suit. Spread out on the bed it seemed to claim a rectitude and a uniformity that was repulsively unlike his nature. Did he want to go to the party in a fig leaf, a tiger skin, nothing at all? Something like that.
Nailles thought about his mother. He had visited her on Tuesday night. “Are you feeling any better, Mother,” he had asked. “Would you like Tony to come and see you. Is there anything I can get you.” She had not replied for nearly a month. Then from some part of his mind, deeper than memory, he heard singing:
“The poor soul sat singing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow,
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow.”
Dressed, Nailles began to look for his wallet. It would be in the jacket pocket of the suit he had worn that afternoon. When he reached into the pocket he found it empty. The empty pocket seemed mysteriously portentous, as if he had asked some grave questions about pain and death and had got no answer; had been told there was none. “I came into the house,” he said aloud, “and I made a drink and then I went upstairs and undressed and took a shower so it must be in the bedroom somewhere.” He must have put the wallet on some surface in the bedroom and now he examined all of these—the dressing table, the chest of drawers, etc. It was nowhere. He could not recall having been in any of the other bedrooms but he examined them. He heard Nellie’s heels coming down the hall. “I’ve lost my wallet,” he said. “Oh dear,” said Nellie. He had no use for the wallet that night, she knew, but she knew that he would not go to the party without it. The loss of any object was for both of them acute as if their lives rested on some substructure of talismans. “I came into the house,” Nailles kept saying, “and I made a drink and then I went upstairs and I undressed and took a shower so it must be here somewhere.”
For the next half hour or longer they were upstairs, downstairs, in and out of the living room, opening unused drawers onto collections of Christmas ribbon, feeling under chairs, lifting up newspapers and magazines, shaking out pillows and grabbing under cushions. To look into their faces you would have thought they had lost their grail, their cross, their anchor. Why couldn’t Nailles go to the party without his wallet? He couldn’t. “I came into the house,” he said, “and I made a drink and then I went upstairs and undressed and took a shower.” “Oh here it is,” cried Nellie. It was the pure voice of an angel, freed from the mortal bonds of grossness and aspiration. “It was in the pantry under the minutes of your last meeting. You must have put it there when you made your drink.” “Thank you darling, thank you,” said Nailles to his deliverer. They started for the party. Thunder sounded. The noise reminded Nailles again of what it had felt like to be young and easy. “You know I was awfully happy that summer I climbed in the Tirol,” he said. “I climbed the Grand Kaiser and the Pengelstein. In the Tirol when there’s a thunderstorm they ring all the church bells. All up and down the valley. It’s very exciting. I don’t know why I tell you all of this. I guess it must be the storm.”
Eliot and Nellie got to the party at quarter to eight. Ten minutes later Hammer parked his car at the foot of the driveway. He was very drunk and had not changed his clothes. He wore a sweater. Tony called down to him: “Please bring your car up. There’s plenty of room on the lawn. Please bring your car up.” When Hammer did not move Tony jogged down the drive. “Please bring your car up the driveway,” he said. “There’s still plenty of room on the hill.”
“I have to leave early,” Hammer said, “and I thought that if I parked here it would be easier to get away.”
“You won’t have any trouble,” Tony said. “They’re only expecting about thirty cars.”
“Well get in then,” Hammer said, “and I’ll drive you up the hill.”
As soon as Tony slipped into the car Hammer flushed the Mace into his eyes. Tony let out a loud, hoarse roar of pain and fell forward, striking his head on the dashboard. Hammer gave him a vicious, a murderer’s blow with the truncheon. He drove the short distance to church, where the door was, as usual, unlocked for prayer and meditation.
He was luckier than he knew. Ten minutes earlier Miss Templeton had finished arranging the roses on the altar. He dragged Tony into the narthex and then went back to his car for the gasoline. Then he locked the narthex door, the only door into the church, excepting the door to the vestarium. The only light that burned was the vigil, and in this faint light he dragged Tony down the aisle to the chancel. He found the switch for the chancel lights and was about to pour the gasoline onto Tony when he thought he would first smoke a cigarette. He was tired and winded. He laughed when he noticed how expertly the Lamb of God on the altar hooked its hoof around the wooden standard of Christendom. He heard a stir from the narthex and he thought his heart would explode until he realized that it was nothing. It had begun to rain. That was all.
When Rutuola got out of a taxi at the Lewellens’ the headwaiter stopped him. “If it’s a delivery,” he said, “you’ll have to go in the back way.”
“I have to see Mr. Nailles,” the swami said.
“You can’t come in here.”
“Mr. Nailles, Mr. Nailles,” he shouted. “Mr. Nailles, come here quickly please.”
Nailles, who was standing at one of the bars, heard his name called and left the tent. “Go to Christ’s Church,” Rutuola said. “Don’t ask me any questions. Go to Christ’s Church now.”
Nailles felt, from Rutuola’s voice, that Tony was in danger but he did not run to the car and did no
thing else hurriedly. His lips were swollen. His nerves were unusually steady. Some cars, coming up from the railroad station where the late train had just arrived, slowed him down but he did not take the risk of trying to pass them. When he got to the church he recognized Hammer’s car. In some way he had expected this. He pounded on the locked door.
“Who is it,” Hammer asked.
“Nailles.”
“You can’t get in. I’ve locked all the doors.”
“What are you doing, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill Tony.”
Nailles returned to his car. There was a loud and painful ringing in his ears that seemed like some part of his purposefulness. He was neither frightened nor confused. He drove directly to Chestnut Lane, got the chain saw from the cellar and returned to the church.
“Hammer?”
“Yes.”
“Is Tony all right?”
“He’s all right now but I’m going to kill him. First I want to finish this cigarette.”
Nailles put his foot on the strut of the saw and gave a steady draw to the starting cord. The cylinders made a putting sound and then, as the transmission caught, the chain began its howling. The lancet door was paneled but the interstices were made of thin wood and the chain splintered and cut through them. He made a diagonal slash across the door and broke it easily with his shoulders. Hammer was sitting in a front pew, crying. The red gasoline tank was beside him. Nailles lifted his son off the altar and carried him out into the rain. It was pouring. Water seemed to crowd into the light. The rain fell with such force that it stripped the leaves off the trees and the air smelled of bilge. It was the cold rain that brought Tony around. “Daddy,” he mumbled, “Daddy. Who was that man in the sweater? What did he want?”
