The Axman Cometh (3 page)
Even
before she begins to shriek, the dark returns: it's very, very
dark
there on West Homestead in Emerson, Kansas; up and down the familiar street where the typical night sounds are from dogs, insects, television (the
Rockweilers
have a new RCA color
console that set them back seven hundred
ninety five dollars;
it's the first one on the
block), the rumblings of dual
carbs on Duffy
Satterstall's
'57
Chevy while he endlessly tunes
the spotless engine, and
bicycle
bells
as the
McMicken
twins head home from a Little League game on the diamond behind First
Pres
, quarreling, as they are apt to do, over which of them made the best or worst plays . . .
but nobody, nobody has ever thoroughly shattered the peace of West Homestead Avenue with scream
after
scream of bloody murder, until
SIX DEAD
IN EMERSON
MASSACRE
(The
Wichita Eagle,
June 9, 1964)
(Identical message found on the walls of four houses in Briarwood, Missouri, Crestview, Iowa, Hendricks, Nebraska, and Emerson, Kansas. September 1962 to June 1964.)
My
Godddddd
they're
allllll
deadddddd
Shannon. Shannon. Don't scream.
"I'm going to die! I've got to get out of here, this fucking elevator: somebody,
somebody
please hear me!!"
I hear you. I'm with you. I'm listening.
"But you don't
do
anything! You're not helping me! I'm choking, I can't breathe! Get Don. Please get Don for me, he'll know what to do, he'll get me out of here!"
Donald Carnes?
"Yes! Who do you think I'm talking— but you don't know him. How could you know Don?"
You let him down, Shannon. Called the wedding off. That was five months ago. I'm afraid you won't be seeing—
"I know we haven't
seen
each other, but we've talked—I tried to explain to him why— why I couldn't—but I still love him! He knows that! We're having a drink together, tonight— at Cabrera's on Columbus. Where we met. Oh, God. How long have I been trapped in here? I must be late already. What is Don going to think?"
But he doesn't mean anything to you anymore. I'm the one who matters to you, Shannon. I'm the only one who's ever mattered.
"You're a liar! You don't know me! God, if it wasn't so dark in here—"
But it's the dark that has brought us together. And when you want to see me, you will.
Noooo
. . . no. Don—Donald! For the love of God, come! Find me. Before it's too late!
"Having another, Mr. Carnes?"
(Cabrera's. 385 Columbus Avenue, between 78th and 79th. The food is Cuban. The bar is on your right as you go in, and it's a big bar, popular in the neighborhood. Salsa on the quad speakers, Miami Sound Machine. Fresh, lightly salted
tostones
in wicker baskets spaced along the mahogany bar.
Calamares
to order with Cabrera's special sauce. These go very well with another house specialty, double frozen daiquiris without sugar, "Papa
dobles
,"
made just the way the great author himself used to drink them at the
Floridita
Bar. It is unclear if the owner or owners of Cabrera's knew the Nobel laureate, or if he ever graced their New York restaurant, but behind the bar amid other celebrity photos is one of Hemingway, impressively rotund and shaggy in slacks and a
guayabera
,
standing on the veranda of the
Finca
Vigilia
on the island, holding a cat in the crook of one arm, "Black Dog" at his heel. Papa's expression is beclouded, unsmiling, as he faces down the perhaps barely tolerated photographer.
On a rainy Tuesday night in October, with a radical change of weather in the offing, there are only half a dozen regulars at Cabrera's bar. Along with Donald B. (for Burnside) Carnes, who used to be a
semiregular
, when he lived nearby at Amsterdam and 72nd. Don is thirty-six. His income is sixty-two thousand a year, and he's in his thirteenth year with New York Life. Actuarial, not Sales. He has a secure position in a branch of his depression- proof business, where there is usually a shortage of capable men and women.
Don Carnes turns on his stool to look at the doorway through which no one has come for the last ten minutes, then at the coatroom girl with the dark flowing hair that hides part of her comely, caramel face but not the vivid plump mouth that invites lolling, like a water- bed. She is listlessly turning over the pages of the
New York Post,
looks up to find his eyes on her and smiles, giving her head and mane a little shake as if to exhibit sympathy, realizing that he is waiting for someone now long past due; but Don looks like a man who has known his share of frustration, waiting for blind dates in neighborhood watering holes. He's a little plump and a little short. From his father he inherited male pattern baldness, and from his mother a poor pair of eyes (astigmatism). Yet there's something about Don that invites confidences, when you get to know him. Stability. The staunch in him implicit, like the ribs of a whaling vessel. There are people who like listening to other people, and those, the majority, who are just waiting for their turn to talk. Don is a listener. One night shortly after she met him at a party (they weren't even dating), Shannon stopped making small talk, looked, for about twenty suspenseful and silent seconds, into his serious brown eyes, then began pouring out her heart. Before the evening was over she knew she was in love. Unfortunately for Shannon—
"Mr. Carnes?"
"Oh, sorry, Francisco, I didn't mean to be rude." Don looks at his empty glass, looks at his watch, a square, sensible Timex he bought for $12.95 more than eight years ago.
Takes a licking, keeps on ticking,
as John Cameron Swayze used to say.
The bartender is about five feet tall, dark and dry as an unwrapped mummy, with a nap of terrycloth-white hair. Everybody else calls him "Frank," but Don adheres to a certain formality in his dealings with people he hasn't known all of his life.
"Your lady," Francisco says, "is running late tonight?"
"She sure is. Forty minutes late. She had a five-thirty meeting with her editor, I think. And the publishing house is pretty far downtown, almost in the Village."
"Ah, the one who writes and illustrates children's books. I have forgotten her name."
"Shannon," Don says, the sound of it unexpectedly sweet to his ears. For a couple of moments his lower lip is unsteady, like a child's.
"We have not seen either of you here for many months,
c
-
verdad
?"
"Yes, well, we—broke off. This is the first time—"
The front door opens to laughter, a gust of chill wet air, the distant electronic blurt of police sirens, said Don turns quickly; but it's three
Latins
, two men in silk suits with rain in their hair, a woman carrying a raffish miniature poodle wearing a rhinestone choker. Don turns around again and catches sight of himself in the
backbar
glass looking uncharacteristically disgruntled as he thinks,
Why did I let her talk me into this? It's no good for either one of us.
"Here you are, sir."
"Thanks, Francisco."
Don glances at the telephone at one end of the bar and wonders if it's worth trying to find out if she's actually coming, maybe just stuck in traffic is all—if her conference with the editor, Petra what's-her-name, was running overtime, then Shannon, flighty and neurotic but never discourteous, would surely give him a jingle after going to so much trouble to set them up for the evening. Maybe worth spending a quarter just to make sure she'd already left.
"I remember some of the
fantastico
pictures she drew. Such strange creatures, enough to frighten small children, I should think."
You
ought to see the ones nobody in their right minds would publish in books for children,
Don says to himself.
I didn't like looking at them either.
But maybe getting those drawings out of her system had been as effective as several more years of psychotherapy.
Don puts one foot on the floor (black Peal shoes, the best, and expensive, but made for a lifetime: one superlative pair of shoes, or twenty pairs of
Florsheims
that lose their shape in a hard rain? Penny-wise or pound- foolish. He is a man who knows the true value of everything he purchases, or contemplates purchasing
some day
), fishes for a quarter in the coin pocket of his dark blue suit pants (Brooks Brothers. Always correct, never out of style).
"Believe I'll just call and see what the delay is," Don says to Francisco, as if he owes the Cuban an explanation for continuing to hang around his bar.
He carries his daiquiri with him and puts it on the sill beneath the telephone after another long sip (the glass only half empty but already he anticipates ordering another; he's feeling a touch reckless as well as disgruntled —might as well go ahead and get well- fortified for what's coming when Shannon arrives; tomorrow he's working at home where he can nurse a hangover privately). From another pocket he takes a thin, credit- card-size calculator that also stores up to two hundred telephone numbers and addresses and recalls the number for Knightsbridge Publishers.
Ten minutes past eight. The phone is ringing, but he is already convinced it won't be answered. So what to do? Sit in the bar and drink frozen daiquiris until it's certain that Shannon has stood him up? Don knows she is not capable of deliberately humiliating him; no, his humiliation lies in his need to see her once more, knowing full well that they—
"Hello?"
"Oh—hello. I—who's this?"
"Who's calling?" she replies, a little curt with him.
"Is this the office of Knightsbridge Publishers?"
"Yes, it is."
"Well, I was wondering, you have an editor there named Petra; I'm sorry, I can't recall—"
"This is Petra
Kisber
speaking."
"My name is Donald Carnes. I believe we've met."
"Oh,
yes,
you're—"
"—a friend of Shannon Hill's. Is she still there? We had a—an appointment, but—"
"No, Shannon left some time ago. As the Fates would have it, I seem to be the only one who's stuck up here."
"Stuck?"
"On the top floor. There's no power. It's the whole neighborhood again, from what I can tell. That's three outages, as
ConEd
quaintly calls them, in the past eight months. It's really a disgrace. But I was ready for this one. I bought a pair of old hurricane lamps in Port Antonio this summer, thank God, and kept one here at the office just in case."
"That is fortunate. I assume the elevator isn't operating?"