A Meaningful Life (27 page)

Actually, it was his body that heard the noise downstairs and which sprang instantly to its feet. Although his mind was remarkably clear, it evidently wasn't very smart, and for a moment, as he stood there nude in the moonlight with his shoes on, he couldn't imagine what on earth he was doing there like that, and he started to lie down again like a sensible fellow. Then a beer can was dropped somewhere. Lowell's body went taut, alert and listening. Someone was moving around in the parlor. Before Lowell could make up his mind about the nature of his visitor or decide on a course of action, he found himself in possession of a crowbar, stealthily creeping with it toward the head of the stairs. Volition and action completely severed, his brain more or less along for the ride as his body moved forward with silence and deadly purpose, he dimly felt himself creep along the hall on floors the consistency of marshmallows, between walls as soft as mattresses. There were moments, as he crept cat-like down the stairs with his crowbar, that he seemed to go to sleep or something very like it, drifting effortlessly in and out of his detached consciousness with a slow, gentle motion, like the soft uncoilings of an undersea plant in the waters of a warm lagoon. Meanwhile his body continued down the stairs in his shoes, and every time he woke up, he found himself on a lower step.

A wavering, smoky moonlight drifted through the parlor doors into the hall. Lowell paused, his mind drifting sleepily along with it, his muscles tense and alert. The front door was standing wide open, and beer cans were scattered carelessly about the floor. They were not his brand.

Minutes passed. Then, with a stumble and a wheeze, a shadow of a man appeared in the doorway. Lowell sprang, and although he had never been agile and was not particularly strong, the crowbar went through the intruder's head as if it had been a rotten pumpkin. The dead intruder had been holding a can of beer. He threw it into the air when Lowell smashed his skull, and his body hit the floor first. The body didn't make much noise, but the beer can made one hell of a racket. A part of Lowell's mind marveled at how easy it had all been. Another part of his mind fainted. The front of him was an absolute mess.

Still peculiarly detached and now also in a state of partial shock, Lowell perceived the events of the next hour in an odd way, sort of like a movie from which big hunks had been edited, totally at random. One minute he was in the front hall, and the next he was in the backyard, pouring water over himself from a bucket. He didn't even know he owned a bucket, and hoped he would remember where he put it when he was done with it, but the very next minute he was standing in the parlor, dripping wet but unencumbered, as though having been transported there by magic in the twinkling of an eye, except that he was also in the middle of a thought that he couldn't remember having started. He was deciding that he would wrap the remainder of the dead man's head in one of the plastic garbage bags. That was a good thought, and he was glad he'd had it, even if he couldn't remember starting it. The plastic bag would keep the head from dripping all over the sidewalk when he carried the body out and put it in the portable garbage bin, and he went straight into the kitchen and got one. There was no sign of the bucket.

His mind averted its eyes while he wrapped up the head, and the next thing he knew, he was standing out on the sidewalk, heaving the body over the side of the bin. He was still naked, and the moon was very bright. The drunks were perched attentively on the stoop next door, but if they found anything note-worthy in the spectacle of a naked white man dumping a dead body into a portable garbage bin at three in the morning, they didn't let on. Lowell swiftly forgot all about them. The next time he encountered himself, he was busily engaged in loading the bin all the way up to the top with the remaining junk from beside the house, working with the superhuman strength and subaqueous movements of someone who was stoned out of his mind. When he thought about it, he realized that he was still pretty drunk. It seemed like an irrelevant thing to be, and he did his best to ignore it. Once he caught himself wondering why he hadn't called the police instead of going to all this trouble, but evidently the answer was in the part of his brain that had fainted; the question just hung there in his mind until he forgot about it, and his body went right on working as though nobody had spoken to it. He guessed he really ought to go indoors and put on some clothes, but by the time he had finished thinking about it, he'd finished all his work and it was time to go back into the house anyway. Once there, it made no difference whether he had any clothes on or not.

There remained the little matter of the bloodstain on the floor. Lowell could always try telling Mr. Busterboy that he'd brought home a whore and she'd turned out to be a virgin, but he didn't think anyone would really believe it was possible to be
that
virgin: the bloodstain was a good three feet across, and there were splashes on the wall. He supposed it would be possible to rip up the floorboards and dispose of them, but on reflection he realized that he really didn't want to do that, at least not now. He really wanted to go upstairs to bed. The luminosity seemed to be draining from the moonlight, and the darkness had begun to close in again. It was as though the room were slowly filling with sand and deadly gas, and Lowell was barely able to make it back to his dropcloth before he passed out completely.

He was awake again in what seemed like mere seconds, horribly, totally awake, shooting bolt upright as if electrodes had been applied to the bottoms of his feet. Sunlight flooded the room, a very bad kind of terribly bright sunlight that seemed to be made of ground glass. From outside the house there came a noise of grinding and clanking. The part of Lowell's mind that had fainted was awake now, and the part that had been drunk was sober; it was telling the other part all about what had happened after it left. “Jesus Christ,” Lowell said.

He was glad it had been dark. Boy, was he ever glad. He hadn't the faintest doubt that his runaway body would have butchered the man if the lights had been on, but at least Lowell didn't have to remember the look on his victim's face. Thank God for small favors. He didn't even have any idea what kind of face it was. For that matter, he didn't know what color it was either. He searched his memory as thoroughly as he could, but nowhere in it was the remotest hint as to whether the man had been black or white. It seemed like the kind of thing you ought to know about the man you've just killed. Maybe Lowell hadn't killed anybody at all. Maybe it had been a dream, a drunken dream. How wonderful to have had nothing but a horrible nightmare. Too bad he was never able to remember his dreams when he was drunk. He was left with the conclusion that a terrible thing had happened to him. It was one of the most terrible things that had ever happened to anybody since the world began. It just wasn't possible.

Wrapping himself in the dropcloth, he climbed slowly to his feet and staggered to the window. Another surprise awaited him in the street. The garbage bin was gone. Not a stick or scrap remained to show that it had ever been there. Lowell stared at the empty curbside for a long time. Then a car came and parked in the space, and a man got out of it and walked briskly down the street. Lowell's last hope was gone.

The truck had come and taken it away. The bin was going wherever bins went. Soon the garbage workers would start unloading it. They were in for quite a shock. Lowell could well imagine it. He didn't know how, exactly, he could have improved his situation, but as long as he'd been in possession of the body he had been willing to study the problem. There was little use in doing that now. His goose was cooked.

He supposed he'd better put on some clothes. It would not improve his case to receive the police dressed only in a dropcloth and construction boots unless he was going to plead insanity, and he knew he would never get away with it. He was the sanest person he'd ever met in his life, and hundreds of people could be called upon to testify to his blandness and total lack of peculiarity. He would only make an ass of himself if he tried to act peculiar now. The attempt would make him self-conscious and he would undoubtedly blush and queer the pitch before he'd gotten past the introductions.

Getting dressed was hard. His clothes, thrown down with drunken abandon the evening before, were wadded and dank and inside out, and his body was all thumbs with hangover and terror and had to be lashed forward with threats and exhortations. Buttoning his shirt in all the wrong holes with one hand and supporting himself on the banister with the other, he dragged himself downstairs to the scene of the crime.

There was a bum sleeping in the middle of the floor. Lowell had been prepared for many things, but he hadn't been prepared for this one, and it gave him quite a turn. He stood and stared into the room for the longest time, leaning exhaustedly against the doorjamb while his nerves strummed like piano wires and his heart did its best to keep him alive.

This wasn't the first bum. It was another bum entirely. A part of Lowell's mind wanted desperately to believe that it was the first bum, and another part of his mind was convinced of it, but Lowell really knew better than that. He wasn't even sure that the first bum had been a bum at all. Maybe he'd been a building inspector. Maybe he'd been a cop. (Lowell wished he hadn't thought of that.) Anyway, whoever he'd been, this wasn't him. It was someone else. Lowell knew it was someone else because of the bloodstain. The bloodstain was a hard argument to refute. Lowell would be willing to bet that even Norville Gepford, champion debater of his class at Boise Senior High, would have a hard time refuting it, and Norville Gepford could refute anything. Lowell hadn't thought about Norville Gepford in years, and he almost immediately forgot about him again, although not before experiencing a queer twinge.

Lowell was even able to figure out how the new bum had gotten in: through the front door. Lowell had forgotten to lock it again after his murder, and it was standing wide open. For a moment he thought that he was going to have to kill this new intruder too, so that nobody would find out about the first one, and it was only with some difficulty that he managed to shake the notion off. His mind felt like it was full of green Jell-O, and even garbled thoughts weren't moving through it very well. He was in pretty bad shape.

Meanwhile the bum woke up, regarded Lowell dully and without much interest, and slowly proceeded to get to his feet, where he farted loudly. He was in pretty bad shape too. His nose was large and incredibly lumpy, as though recently stung by dozens of obscene bees, and his body was shaped like that of

an emaciated pregnant woman. It was a rack of bones with an immense, sagging belly. Presently, when he was finished with scratching his kidneys, he glanced over at Lowell again with an expression that was inquiring and mildly irritated, as though a point of etiquette had been violated. With a sudden flash of lucidity that was well-nigh incredible under the circumstances, Lowell realized that the bum thought he was another bum. He was waiting for Lowell to do whatever bums did when they met other bums. This realization enraged him, but his condition was too delicate for such a strong emotion, and instead of bellowing with proprietary rage and brandishing his fist, he nearly sat down on the floor.

“Get out,” he croaked. His voice was weak and sounded curiously artificial, as though emanating from an antique radio speaker emplanted in his throat. “Scram.”

The bum stared at him for a moment. Then he wiped his nose with his sleeve, went to the far corner of the room, and prepared to take a shit.

“Now, you just stop that,” Lowell ordered weakly. His eye was caught by the bloodstain in the middle of the floor. There was blood on the ceiling too, not to mention the walls, and now a bum was going to shit in the corner. Lowell was very bewildered. Bewilderment only seemed to confuse him further, if that was possible. “The police,” he heard himself saying, as much to himself as to his uninvited guest. “The police are coming.”

The bum perked up briefly, as though he'd heard a familiar sound in the far distance, but when it was not repeated, he went back to his business, and Lowell vowed to pay no more attention to him. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the edge of the doorframe. He'd become so many different people that he no longer knew who he was anymore. Nothing seemed to fit together. Locked within the same imperfect and hungover envelope of flesh were a managing editor and a guilty murderer, a man who hadn't gone home last night, a man whose marriage was on the rocks, a homeowner, taxpayer, dupe, nice guy, and nonentity. All of these people were badly hungover, but otherwise they seemed to have nothing in common; they

were all sort of tumbled together like rubbish in a desk drawer, and he couldn't make heads or tails of any of them. He just stood there with his eyes closed and watched them float past, like disembodied spirits in one of the nicer parts of hell.

“Shit biscuit,” said a voice in his ear, very loudly. “Jesus Christ Almighty, it looks like somebody slaughtered a hog in here!”

Lowell slowly opened his eyes and discovered one of Mr. Busterboy's workmen beside him in the doorway, gazing into the room with a speculative expression. “I'll be a motherfucking son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Whooee.”

Lowell guessed that if you didn't expect to see blood, brains, and bum shit when you looked into the room, they must come as something of a surprise. A melodious chuckle sounded at his elbow, and presently Mr. Busterboy moved into the edge of Lowell's field of vision. That was good, because Lowell was too tired to turn his head and wasn't sure he would be able to even if he tried.

“Now, this is really too bad,” said Mr. Busterboy. “This is enough to make a man sick. I can tell you, we've got a job of work to do today. We've got our work just about cut out for us. Get the fuck out of here. I won't tell you twice.”

The bum left by the window. He did not change his expression.