Something in the Shadows (6 page)

“You never squashed a mosquito with your hand in the summer? G’wan!”

“All right! If it attacked me, I defended myself. But Louis, I have never in my life bought a special instrument with which to kill a living thing! Never! Not even a mousetrap!”

Louis was laughing at him suddenly. Joseph resented it, interrupted it with a protest, unexpectedly loud in its tone, “I haven’t! I never have!”

“Aw, Joe! You’re going to lose this argument, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, no. No, Louis. I’m speaking the truth.”

“Joe, there’s a fly-swatter hanging out there in the kitchen. Did you ever use it?”

Joseph Meaker’s face was as warm and stung as though he had been slapped hard by this man; he could feel himself blush, feel the shortness of breath in him while he searched for an answer. Louis was laughing again. “Life is life, Joe boy. You’re not a God. You hunt flies with special equipment; the hunter goes after a deer with a gun. Did the fly have any more chance than the deer? Or is our argument really about what life is valuable and what life isn’t? That’s a moral question, a philosophical question. No, Joe, I have you!”

Joseph Meaker was on his feet now, shouting out his retort, pointing his finger at Louis Hart, “And a cat’s life, Louis? A cat’s life?”

“A cat’s life, a dog’s life, a deer’s life, an ant’s life, or the life of a bacterium — any life! Is it up to you to say which is more valuable, Joe?”

“I’m talking about the pleasure in killing!” Joseph shouted. “I’m talking about the deliberation, the certain feeling or sensation of power!
You
know what I’m talking about!”

Louis looked up at him with a smile, a playful one which Joseph wanted to wipe from his mouth with the palm of his hand. Louis said, “Are you talking about the satisfaction you get when you’ve nailed one of those goddam pesty flies with your swatter?”

But Joseph stood there looking at Hart suddenly without seeing him, his eyes given to the stare of a trance which involved him in time past, and not this moment; and Joseph found himself remembering an afternoon months ago, during the first days in the house. He and Maggie had hung up flypaper. There were countless flies all through the house, for Joseph left the screen door open in the beginning, to encourage Ishmael to come and go freely. That afternoon Joseph had gone into the kitchen for a glass of water, when he saw one of the flies wiggling, stuck hard to the paper, his four legs kicking to be loose. Joseph had gone across to get him loose, but when he tried, he had succeeded only in tearing the wing from the creature, and the moment he did it, Maggie had come up behind him, and she had said, “Oh, pulling wings off flies, hah?” and laughed. Something had exploded inside Joseph then, blown his control to bits, and like someone insane, he had yanked the pieces of flypaper from the ceiling, his hands tangling in their sticky glue, until it was almost as though he were handcuffed by them, and a panic started in him which made him run first to the sink to try and wet his hands free, then the stove, as though he would burn the gummy shackles off. Finally, he headed out the door to the lawn, where he buried his hands in the grass, but only more dirt and some bugs from the earth stuck to the paper, and in that brief instant of frustration, he had felt mad, trapped, the same as any madman in a strait jacket. When Maggie came out after him, she was nearly hilarious; it had become, since then, one of her favourite stories, to tell of the time she had cut Joseph free of flypaper with scissors and a hot dishrag. “… and to see the expression on his face!” was the way the story always ended. Whenever she told the story, Joseph’s hands would itch; he would begin to feel all through him the horrible sensation of sticky death on his flesh, sticky death hanging on to him, making him its prisoner; flies he had trapped, trapping him.

“Ah, Joe,” Louis Hart was saying now, “don’t you see? We’re never so guilty as when we’re innocent.”

Then there was the sound of Maggie’s and Janice’s high heels on the wooden stairs leading from the upstairs — and Maggie’s voice, “Do you know we’re a lot alike?” Janice Hart answered, “We could be sisters!”

Louis Hart grinned at Joseph. “They
are
alike too,” he said. “I suppose
we
must be; after all, we picked ‘em.”

In the two weeks that followed that Friday evening, Lou Hart began to think Janice was right. Joseph Meaker probably
had
heard about him; probably that was the whole point of that dinner: Joseph Meaker wanted a good look at a doctor who was the next thing to a murderer. That kind of gossip could come from anyone in the county, not even a particularly malicious source, either. It was a natural enough thing, wasn’t it, to discuss doctors with newcomers; tell them where the nearest one lived, what he was like, fill them in on the matter for their own safety? Could have been a milkman who told him, or Teller, the local fuel-oil supplier; Overholt, who ran the grocery in Point Pleasant, or Harry, the Sunny Beverage Company driver. Anyone, who did it matter? Anyone could have said, “Well, now, you
do
have a doctor close by, but around here we don’t take much stock in him.”

Then it would come out — all about old Mrs. Tondley calling Lou up seven-thirty at night. Her nephew home on leave from the Marines had been helping out on the farm; his arm got caught in the blade of an electric saw; bleeding badly, and Mrs. Tondley did not drive a car. Dr. Hart said he would be there immediately.

Six hours later Freddy Tondley, who had faced the last-ditch fighting for the city of Taejon in Korea, and the Iwo Jima invasion in the war before that, was dead from blood loss; and seven hours later his old aunt had heart failure because of the shock, but it was a good three hours after all of that when the State Police woke Dr. Hart up on the Mechanicsville road. His car was pointed in the direction of the Tondley farm, but he could not even remember taking the call. Red-eyed, still reeking of rum, he was taken to the Doylestown Police Station. Only luck, translated as lack of sufficient evidence, and love folks in Bucks County felt for Doc Hart, Sr., let him off with a fine, a judge’s lecture, and suspended disciplinary action from the State Medical Licensing Society. But no amount of luck or reverence for his father’s memory could win back what little confidence there had ever been in Dr. Louis Hart, Jr.

He was always a drinker, and no one ever said any differently, but after the Tondley incident, folks no longer overlooked it; in fact, they rarely saw anything else when they saw Lou Hart passing. Was he walking straight? Circles under his eyes? Did anyone get a whiff of his breath; smell anything? Five years and it was still going on. So was the doctor still going on drinking, wasn’t he?

Except for those mavericks who never
would
go along with the consensus, and making allowances for new folks who didn’t know any better, and folks who knew he was cheaper than his colleagues (had to be if he wanted business), he was not a very busy man any more. The New Hope Hospital wasn’t proud; they let him take charity cases during the week, looking him over good to insure his sobriety when he arrived mornings. He did have a steady trickle of patients, but no where near enough to warrant buying a Benz. That took gall, too; flashing around that way; not many were able to resist a certain sarcasm when they saw him. “Well,
there’s
the doctor, if you please,
some
nerve,
I’d
say!” And some, “I hope he’s happy with his fancy car! I just hope he’s happy!”

Lou knew how people talked. Still, it had never occurred to him that that might have prompted Joseph Meaker’s invitation, not until Janice and he were driving home afterwards. There was that awkward moment near the end of the evening when Lou had made the pointless remark about being like Joe, because their wives were alike. Suddenly Joe had grabbed Lou’s lapels, leaned towards him with his face only inches away, and then nearly hissed his words, “You think that do you? You think so, do you?”

And even Maggie had exclaimed, “Jo-seph! What on earth — ” and had come across and pulled him away from Lou. Somebody — Lou couldn’t remember who — made a joke somehow; a take-off on some commercial about tension pounding away, and everyone had laughed, Joseph Meaker joining in. But there was a certain paleness to his face, a certain lack of conviction in his eyes, his stance, in the way he held one hand tightly with the other. Spooky, Janice had called the moment; plain spooky.

That night in bed they had gone over it for hours. Lou had remembered the discussion with Joe on doctors who murdered, and that had clinched it for Janice. The whole thing, she said, was obvious; then both had stayed awake smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out why it was so important to Meaker. There were all sorts of theories between them. Had he been an old Marine buddy of Tondley’s, bent on some subtle revenge? Was he really a folklorist studying hexerei, or was he some sort of popular psychologist doing some kind of research, or a novelist, even? What? Was his wife in on the scheme too, whatever it was? Janice could not believe that Maggie would have anything to do with any scheme.

Still, it was weird, made even more weird when a week later Maggie called Janice for a shopping trip in Frenchtown. The pair spent a very gay four hours with no mention of either Joseph or Lou. The Saturday following — another jaunt together — to an auction up near Carversville. Again, no particular mention of their husbands. Janice steered away from the subject, too delighted with the new friendship to take any chances, and Maggie seemed oblivious to schemes of any kind. Yet Janice reported that once, when she made a casual suggestion that all four have dinner at the Hart’s one night, Maggie answered, “It’s like pulling teeth to get Joseph anywhere, so don’t count on it.”

• • •

None of it made any sense to Lou as he mulled it over in his mind. In between a Mercury Sulfide tattooing for pruritus and a check-up for a young granite worker, Lou gave it a lot of thought. He was still so steeped in the mystery, that for the first few minutes of his examination of the granite worker, he did not get what the fellow was trying to tell him. Something about needing the check-up because of a certain worry, something about losing something. Lou realized what the fellow was saying when he finally became more direct.

“You see,” he told Lou, “I’m Platonic now, and it’s getting my wife down. I been Platonic a month.”

Lou leaned back in his swivel chair and lit a cigarette. “Where do you fellows get that word? I heard it a lot out here. I’ve lived here all my life, but I don’t remember it being a local expression.”

“The fellow writes the column for the
Intelligencer
uses it. You know, the doctor? Writes on health. Well, I read it there, but I never figured I’d get that way.”

“I don’t want you to worry about it,” Lou told him. “We’ll give you a good check-over and — ”

The fellow interrupted him. “I was never once Platonic before this, Doc! There’s got to be something wrong.”

“Okay, we’ll look you over, but it’s not uncommon, Highsmith. It can happen to the best.”

“I knew
you’d
understand, Doc. I’d be embarrassed to tell a regular doctor, but I figured I could tell someone like you.”

Lou Hart never got used to it; he could feel the warmth of his cheeks, spreading to his neck, ears, and the patient saw his embarrassment, tried to undo it, “You know, Doc, I mean you’ve had your troubles too. That’s all I meant.”

“I know,” Lou Hart said. He glanced away from the fellow’s apologetic expression, distracting himself by looking out the window, mechanically telling the fellow to strip to his underwear. It was at that instant he saw the Ford Consul come slowly down the drive, saw Joseph Meaker behind the wheel.

The dreams, of course, were the least of it. Some of them were even rather pleasant, though when Joseph Meaker woke from them, the loss of the cat felt even more terrible to him. But in the dreams there seemed to be neither great sadness nor great exaltation. They were peculiar dreams. In one, Joseph would be opening a can of mackerel, Ishmael rubbing back and forth against his ankles, the way the cat used to do. In another, Joseph would be empying the red plastic pan of kitty litter down the toilet, then lifting the large orange bag over the pan, and pouring in the new litter, turning his head slightly away from the litter’s dust, as he used to. The dreams always seemed to remember the commonplace; unlike some dreams, they had neither beginning nor any conclusion, and no point, really; they were like snapshots of a time past. Still, there they were in Joseph’s head, night after night, and some afternoon, when Joseph would drop off while he was reading, a minute, two or three minutes, it was hard to tell, but each time — the dream of Ishmael. The dreams, he could have stood; that much was predictable about loss, wasn’t it, that dreams would bleed the experience until there was no more life left in the unconscious either; then the loss would be accepted. No, it was not just the dreams upsetting Joseph; it was something else, “getting even,” Maggie said. “You still want to get even with him.”

Maggie had talked it all out with Tom Spencer who had in turn talked it over with his wife, who had reported a conversation she had with Joseph; one in which Joseph had “volunteered the information” (Maggie’s phrasing) that he would retaliate for his cat’s death by finding the killer’s most vulnerable point and then attacking him there.

“Let’s hash this thing out!” Maggie had insisted the night before last, “You’ve got it in for Janice’s husband and you won’t admit it. I thought it would stop with that little dinner party you fixed up, but no, no! You’ve got it in for him!”

“Foolishness,” Joseph had answered.

“Oh yes? Throwing out the fly-swatter is foolishness too! Trying to find out the number of doctors who murdered since 1900 is foolishness too! That man didn’t kill a person, you know, Joseph; he killed a cat! You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Personally, I think you’re plain old-fashioned cracking up!”

“You’re the one losing control,” Joseph had answered. He had wondered how many people right at that moment in the world were falling apart inside; everything in them crumbling, yet the body’s façade contriving to keep the same calm, not even a slight flicker of fear in the eyes, nor a trembling by the mouth, but everything intact. Were they hearing the truth screamed at them too, piling another avalanche on top of the quivering debris of busted emotions inside, while somehow they stood there making the mechanical rebuttal sound real? “You’re the one losing control” — saying something like that to their accuser, their definer? And why was it, Joseph wondered, that he could not simply say, “Maggie, yes, I’m losing control.” Would it have brought a cool hand to the head, comfort?

“No kidding!” Maggie had ketchuped the hash. “You’re sick, Joseph!”

“Sure,” Joseph had answered with a wry smile of disdain, a pot-calling-the-kettle-black expression; and he had remembered in that moment some fragment from a poem, read when?

Now he was here in the driveway of the Hart house, at the fork in that road with the pointers: “Office,” left; “Home,” right. He went left.

“Ask him right out if he killed your cat, and tell him it made you angry!” Maggie had said the other night.

There was good sense in that suggestion; good sense shined in Maggie’s world like the sun. Joseph could remember the time Maggie’s Uncle Avery died. Avery had been the only person Joseph had met through Maggie whom he had really cared about. They had been together seldom, on Avery’s rare trips to New York, but Joseph had felt a warmth for this wise old man, which he had experienced so rarely with anyone, that he came to regard Avery as special. As was always true with Joseph, he never conveyed the feeling to Avery or Maggie, yet he sensed Avery knew he was appreciated; he felt almost as though Avery were a much older brother, a father even. Maggie had always smothered her uncle with expressions of affection; Joseph not. Yet when they had set off for the funeral in Schenectady, it was Maggie talking a mile a minute all the way, and Joseph wondering if what he felt tight in his throat was not a horrible gasp wanting escape, a stifled noise of bereavement, not a sob, but a wail, the way some old Jews moaned their grief, a sound of pain and not self-pity. The funeral parlour had smelled of flowers, the sweet sickly odour of them was like a command to the dead to have the gumption to sit up, hold your nose, or stay forever insensitive to insensitivity; and Joseph had felt a rising panic, anticipating Avery’s features frozen with that dread finality. He had followed behind Maggie and even before he had seen the body, he had heard the sound of her weeping, seen her run across fearlessly, bend over Avery, take his meaningless flesh in her hands, pucker up her lips and press them on his. This ritual done, she had turned to Joseph, to beckon him closer, and Joseph had stood there, rooted to the spot on the rug where he had paused on entering the stinking room, a smile, unbidden and uncontrolled, spreading over his countenance. It was as though the smile were some brazen intruder, manipulating Joseph’s mouth, misshaping his face. Joseph had stood there that way, with Maggie staring at him. Maggie never stopped saying, “You laughed when Uncle Avery died. I saw it with my own eyes! You didn’t even have the common sense to pretend you felt bad!”

Joseph parked his car beside a pick-up truck. Next to the truck was the black Mercedes. For a moment, Joseph stayed behind the wheel of the Ford, tapping the Physical Examination Certificate on his knee, the tan form which was his excuse for being here. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania required a doctor’s signature on Joseph’s application for a licence. In addition Joseph had brought with him a book, gift-wrapped by the shop in New Hope from which he had ordered it a week ago. It was a psychological study called
The Unknown Murderer,
by Reik.

On the flyleaf, Joseph had written:

It was certainly not Maggie’s way of doing things, but for Joseph Meaker, it was the closest thing to saying it right out.