The Fiend (7 page)

The two girls sat outside the front door on the single concrete step which they called a porch. Jessie was picking at the loose skin on the palm of one hand, and Mary Martha was watching her as if she wished she had something equally interesting to do.

Jessie said, “You'll probably catch it when your mother comes.”

“I don't care.”

“Do you suppose you'll cry?”

“I may have to,” Mary Martha said thoughtfully. “It's lucky I'm such a good crier.”

Jessie agreed. “Maybe you should start in right now and be crying when she arrives. It might wring her heart.”

“I don't feel like it right now.”

“I could make up a real sad story for you.”

“No. I know lots of real sad stories. My ex-father used to tell them to me when he was you-know-what.”

“Drunk?”

“Yes.”

It had been two years now since she'd heard any of these stories but she remembered them because they were all about the same little boy. He lived in a big redwood house which had an attic to play in and trees around it to climb and a creek at the back of it to hunt frogs in. At the end of every story the little boy died, sometimes heroically, while rescuing an animal or a bird, sometimes by accident or disease. These endings left Mary Martha in a state of confusion: she recognized the house the little boy lived in and she knew he must be her father, yet her father was still alive. Why had the little boy died?
“He was better off that way, shweetheart, much better off.”

“I wish you could stay at my house for a while,” Jessie said. “We could look at the big new book my Aunt Virginia gave me. It's all about nature, mountains and rivers and glaciers and animals.”

“We could look at it tomorrow, maybe.”

“No. I have to give it back as soon as she gets home from the beach.”

“Why?”

“It was too expensive, twenty dollars. My mother was so mad about it she made my father mad too, and then they both got mad at me.”

Mary Martha nodded sympathetically. She knew all about such situations. “My father sends me presents at Christmas and on my birthday, but my mother won't even let me open the packages. She says he's trying to buy me. Is your Aunt Virginia trying to buy you?”

“That's silly. Nobody can buy children.”

“If my mother says they can, they can.” Mary Martha paused. “Haven't you even heard about nasty old men offering you money to go for a ride? Don't you even know about
them?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.”

She saw her mother's little Volkswagen rounding the corner. Running out to the curb to meet it she tried to make tears come to her eyes by thinking of the little boy who always died in her father's stories. But the tears wouldn't come. Perhaps her father was right and the little boy was better off dead.

Kate Oakley sat, pale and rigid, her hands gripping the steer­ing wheel as if she were trying to rein in a wild horse with a will of its own. Cars passed on the road, people strolled along the sidewalk with children and dogs and packages of groceries, others watered lawns, weeded flower beds, washed off driveways and raked leaves. But to the woman and child in the car, all the moving creatures were unreal. Even the birds in the trees seemed made of plastic and suspended on strings and only pretending to fly free.

Mary Martha said in a whisper, “I'm sorry, Momma.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I thought you'd be talking on the telephone for a long time and that I'd be back before you even missed me.”

“You heard me talking on the telephone?”

“Yes.”

“And you listened, deliberately?”

“Yes. But I couldn't help it. I wanted to know about my father, I just wanted to
know,
Momma.”

Real tears came to her eyes then, she didn't have to think of the little dead boy.

“God forgive me,” her mother said as if she didn't believe in God or forgiving. “I've tried, I'm still trying to protect you from all this ugliness. But how can I? It surrounds us like a lot of dirty water, we're in it right up to our necks. How can I pretend we're standing on dry land, safe and secure?”

“We could buy a boat,” Mary Martha suggested, wiping her eyes.

There was a silence, then her mother said in a bright, brittle voice, “Why, lamb, that's a perfectly splendid idea. Why didn't I think of it? We'll buy a boat just big enough for the two of us, and we'll float right out of Sheridan's life. Won't that be lovely, sweetikins?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

(5)

Quickly and quietly
, Charlie let himself in the front door. He was late for supper by almost an hour and he knew Ben would be grumpy about it and full of questions. He had his answers ready, ones that Ben couldn't easily prove or disprove. He hated lying to Ben but the truth was so simple and innocent that Ben wouldn't believe it: he'd gone to 319 Jacaranda Road, where the child Jessie lived, to see if she was all right. She'd taken a bad fall at the playground, she could have injured herself quite seriously, her little bones were so delicate.

He knew from experience what Ben's reaction would be. Playground? What were you doing at a playground, Charlie? How did you learn the child's name? And where she lives? And that her little bones are delicate? How did she fall, Charlie? Were you chasing her and was she running away? Why do you want to chase little girls, Charlie?

Ben would misunderstand, misinterpret everything. It was better to feed him a lie he would swallow than a truth he would spit out.

Charlie took off the windbreaker he always wore no matter what the weather and hung it on the clothes rack beside the front door. Then he went down the dark narrow hall to the kitchen.

Ben was standing at the sink, rinsing a plate under the hot-water tap. He said, without turning, “You're late. I've already eaten.”

“I'm sorry, Ben. I had some trouble with the car. I must have flooded it again. I had to wait half an hour before the engine would turn over.”

“I've told you a dozen times, all you've got to do when the engine's flooded is press the accelerator down to the floorboard and let it up again very slowly.”

“Oh, I did that, Ben. Sometimes it doesn't work.”

“It does for me.”

“Well, you've got a real way with cars. You command their respect.”

Ben turned. He didn't look in the least flattered, as Charlie had hoped he would. “Louise called. She'll be over early. She's getting off at seven because she's taking another girl's place tomorrow night. You'd better hurry up and eat.”

“Sure, Ben.”

“There's a can of spaghetti in the cupboard and some fish cakes.”

Charlie didn't particularly like fish cakes and spaghetti but he took the two cans out of the cupboard and opened them. Ben was in a peculiar mood, it would be better not to cross him even about so minor a thing as what to have for supper. He wanted to cross him, though; he wanted to tell him outright that he, Charlie, was a grown man of thirty-two and he didn't have to account for every minute of his time and be told what to eat and how to spend the evening. So Louise was coming. Well, suppose he wasn't there when she arrived. Suppose he walked out right now…

No, he couldn't do that, not tonight anyway. Tonight she was bringing him something very important, very urgent. He didn't understand why he considered it so important but it was as if she were going to hand him a key, a mysterious key which would unlock a door or a secret box.

He thought of the hidden delights behind the door, inside the box, and his hands began to tremble. When he put the fish cakes in the frying pan, the hot grease splattered his knuckles. He felt no pain, only a sense of wonder that this grease, which had no mind or will of its own, should be able to fight back and assert itself better than he could.

“For Pete's sake, watch it,” Ben said. “You're getting the stove dirty.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“Put a lid on the frying pan. Use your head.”

“My head wouldn't fit, Ben. It's too small.”

Ben stared at him a moment, then he said sharply, “Stop do­ing that. Stop taking everything literally. You know damned well I didn't mean for you to decapitate yourself and use your head as a lid for the frying pan. Don't you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Damn it all, why do you do it then?”

Charlie turned, frowning, from the stove. “But you said, put a lid on the frying pan, use your head. You
said
that, Ben.”

“And you think I meant it like that?”

“I wasn't really thinking. My mind was occupied with other things. Maybe with Louise coming and all like that.”

“Look, Charlie, I'm only trying to protect you. You pull something like this at work and they'll consider you a moron.”

“No,” Charlie said gravely. “They just laugh. They think I'm being funny. Actually, I don't have much of a sense of humor, do I?”

“No.”

“Did I ever? I mean, when we were boys together, Ben, before—well, before anything had happened, did I have a sense of humor then?”

“I can't remember.”

“I bet you can if you tried. You've always had a good mem­ory, Ben.”

“Now I've got a good forgetter,” Ben said. “Maybe that's more essential in this life.”

“No, Ben, that's wrong. It's important for you to remember how it was with us when we were kids. Mother and Dad are dead, and I can't remember, so if you don't, it's like it never happened and we were never kids together—”

“All right, all right, don't get excited. I'll remember.”

“Everything?”

“I'll try.”

“Did I have a sense of humor?”

“Yes. Yes, you did, Charlie. You were a funny boy, a very funny boy.”

“Did we do a lot of laughing together, you and I and Mom and Dad?”

“Sure.”

“Louise laughs a lot. She's very cheerful, don't you think?”

“Louise is a very cheerful girl, yes.”

Slowly and thoughtfully, Charlie turned the fish cakes. They were burned but he didn't care. It would only be easier to pre­tend they were small round tender steaks. “Ben?”

“Yes.”

“She wouldn't stay cheerful very long if she married me, would she?”

“Stop talking like—”

“I mean, you haven't leveled with her, Ben. She doesn't realize what a drag I am and how she'd have to worry about me the way you do. I would hurt her. I would be hurting her all the time without meaning to, maybe without even knowing it. Would she be cheerful then? Would she?”

Ben sat down at the table, heavily and stiffly, as if each of the past five minutes had been a crippling year.

“Well? Would she, Ben?”

“I don't know.”

Charlie looked dismayed, like a child who's been used to hear­ing the same story with the same happy ending, and now the ending has been changed. It wasn't happy any more, it wasn't even an ending. Did the frog change into a prince?
I don't know.
Did he live happily ever after with his princess?
I don't know.

Charlie said stubbornly, “I don't like that answer. I want the other one.”

“There is no other one.”

“You always used to say that marriage changed a man, that Louise could be the making of me and we could have a good life together if we tried. Tell it to me just like that all over again, Ben.”

“I can't.”

“All right then, give me hell. Tell me I'm downgrading my­self, that I'd better look on the bright side of things, start putting on a front—that's all true, isn't it?”

“I don't know,” Ben said. “Eat your supper.”

“How can I eat, not knowing?”

“The rest of us eat, not knowing. And work and sleep, not knowing.” He added in a gentler voice, “You're doing all right, Charlie. You're holding down a job, you've got a nice girlfriend, you're keeping your nose clean—you're doing fine, just fine.”

“And you're not mad at me any more for being late?”

“No.”

“I flooded the engine, see. I had to wait and wait for the gas to drain out of it. I thought of calling you, but then I thought, Ben won't be worrying, he knows I'm behaving myself, keeping my nose clean
….” I watched from the road. The house is a long way back among the trees but I could see the child sitting at one of the front windows. Poor Jessie, poor sweetheart, rest­ing her little bruised body. Why don't her parents protect her? If anything happens to the girl it will be their fault, and their fault alone.