The Knife Thrower (9 page)

The men led him toward a parked car. “Where are we going?” Harter whispered as he slid into the front seat.

“To your meeting,” the older man said. Harter felt a deep desire to close his eyes. His lids burned, he felt warm, feverish, and he remembered how, as a child, on late-night car trips, he had struggled to keep awake as he swooned in and out of half-sleep, surrendering more and more to the soothing weariness that spread in him like a sweetness. Suddenly he sat up stiffly. It was important to remain alert. The car had left his street and was passing Koslowski’s grocery, where in the greenish light of a streetlamp a rust-colored cat sat on top of a garbage can with his paws tucked under his chest. In the dark glass of the store window Harter could see a telephone pole and, through the pole, a dim pyramid of soup cans. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he saw gas stations and body shops slipping by. Dark trucks moved on the street, big eighteen-wheelers heading for the thruway. Two raspberry-red gas pumps glowed under whitish lights, and in a brilliant yellow diner a man in a zippered jacket bent over a cup. A truck door slammed. Then they were floating up an entrance ramp and from the thruway Harter looked down at green or orange streetlamps in curving rows, dark factories with broken windows, oil drums shaped like immense tins of shoe polish against a murky
band of sky. “Where did you say we,” Harter heard himself saying, and he thought he heard the word “rendezvous,” which began to hum in his mind, ronday vooronday vooronday, and vaguely he wondered where all the old streetlamps had gone to, the comforting old streetlamps that seemed to cast a kinder light. Then he was bumping along a badly paved road between fields of high grass and stretches of unpainted fence. They came to a stop on a slope of grass before a wood. Harter could feel the car tilted a little to one side. The trees were black against the paling sky. Another car was parked ten feet away.

“They’re going to murder me,” Harter thought, and when he got out of the car he stopped after taking a single step. “I don’t know what you’re up to,” he said, “but I’m not going in there.”

The men looked at each other and looked away.

“Of course,” the older man said with sudden weariness, “it’s entirely up to you.” He lowered his voice. “I shouldn’t say this, but I admit I don’t much care for this way of handling matters.” He raised his voice slightly. “I think I should add you’ve nothing to fear from us. We’re not your friends, Mr. Harter—far from it. We’re his friends, and we don’t care at all for the way you’ve behaved toward him. But it would be a mistake to assume that we’re your enemies, even though we’ve brought you here at his request. We can’t force you to this meeting—wouldn’t if we could. It’s up to you entirely. Of course, you’ll hear from him again. He’s not the sort of man to let things drop, especially in a painful business of this kind. He’ll insist on meeting with you. He’ll never give up. Sooner or later—”

“Oh, let’s get on with it!” said Harter, for the entire adventure had suddenly assumed a grotesque air. The two men, the dawn
reckoning, the gloomy wood—actually Lincoln Forest, where he had picnicked only the week before—it was all the stuff of old movies whose titles you could never remember. He had injured the little man, and so he had to get up in the middle of the night and go through the motions of a farcical encounter of some kind. That much seemed clear. The two men looked at each other, appeared to hesitate, and turned toward the path. Harter followed, with a glance at the other car—Martha’s car? He was sure of it. Of course: the little man’s car. For an instant he imagined Martha tied up inside, with a gag in her mouth, struggling, twisting, but he shook his head sharply and followed the men onto the path.

Dawn was rising, overhead the sky was dark gray with a whitish streak, but night still clung to the forest path. They walked single file: first the older man, then Harter, then the second man. A pungent forest smell made Harter’s eyes sting, a smell of moist earth, sweet rotting wood, and lush ferns the size of peacock feathers. And an odd exhilaration seized him, as he sucked in the sharp fresh air, which made the tissues in his nose tingle and brought water to his eyes. He was going to make amends. He would give the little man all the assurance he needed—and wasn’t the very fact of his presence here proof of his goodwill? He had never intended any harm. Harter’s senses felt wide open, he seemed to take everything in: the great rubbery white growths on a trunk, like saucers stuck in the tree, the yellow gum wrapper lying against a root, the pale, pale blue piece of sky between black leaves, the chuk-chuk-chuk of some bird, like the sound of a spoon rapping the rim of a wooden salad bowl.

The path turned and seemed to become less dark. What was happening? Orange mushrooms grew on top of a rotting stump,
overhead the sky was gray-white and pale blue, and it seemed to Harter that a darkness was lifting from inside him, too. He had done a bad thing. He had never meant to hurt anyone, but he’d done it anyway. He had hurt Martha, and then the little husband, and now he would make amends. It seemed to Harter that if only he could find the right words, he might be the instrument of their reconciliation, and even of a new and deeper life between them. A new life! Yes, and what of his own life? What about that? He breathed deep, taking in the pungent earthy-green smell. He’d allowed himself to fall into shabbiness. He would change all that. He had become stuck in his life and now he saw a way out. It was all connected somehow with the sharp-smelling air, and the strange orange mushrooms, and the brightening sky; and he felt a warm, melting friendliness for these men who had shaken him out of his torpor and were leading him toward a revelation they couldn’t be expected to understand. The world was opening up, bursting with details he had never bothered to notice. He would pay attention to things. He would change his life. And at the thought of the immensity of what he had to say, a doubt came over him and a funny feeling rippled across his stomach. I’ve got to get a grip on myself, thought Harter, and as the path began to climb he sucked in sharp, deep drafts of air.

“This way. Over here,” said the leader, and Harter followed him off the path and through a space of trees with nearly smooth places between them. Harter saw everything very sharply. It all seemed to have a meaning for him, a meaning that had always been there but that he had failed to understand, as if he had spent his life with his head turned in the wrong direction. Suddenly he stepped into a clearing. Morning light lay on a broad sweep of cuff-high grass.
The tops of the highest trees were in sunlight. In the darkness at one end of the clearing stood the little man, stiff and unmoving. He wore a dark suit and held a trench coat over one arm.

The two men walked over to him. A yellow butterfly rose from the grass and Harter watched its crazed, nervous flight in astonishment.

The two men walked to the middle of the clearing and spoke for a moment before the older man walked slowly and deliberately away from the other. No one seemed to be paying attention to Harter, who felt a sudden shyness, as if he were a schoolboy waiting to be noticed by the principal in his leathery brown office. The older man had stopped and was digging in the grass with his heel. Harter could feel a morning warmth beginning to penetrate the chill. It was going to be a hot, sunny autumn day.

The older man was now coming toward Harter, who looked up in surprise, as if he had forgotten where he was. In the shade the little husband stood motionless, staring straight ahead. And it seemed to Harter that never, never would he be able to speak to this man, locked away in his stiff white anger. Harter felt how nice it would be to lie down in the soft grass for a moment and close his eyes; and a nervousness came over him, as he tried to remember what it was he had wanted to say.

“… at this mark,” said the man, who had led Harter across the grass and was pointing to the ground. Harter noticed that the man was placing something in his hand, and he was surprised at how heavy it was, for an object so small. Bang bang you’re dead. Somewhere in the woods a bird was banging a spoon against a wooden bowl, and suddenly Harter remembered his father striding into the room with a new comic book as he lay in bed with the mumps
beside the open window. Through the window screen he could look down at the backyard swing with its two dirt patches, at the two crab-apple trees, at the garden with its rows of corn and its tall sticks for tomatoes, and on top of one of the sticks sat a bird that suddenly rose into the air and flew higher and higher into the blue sky. Harter looked down at the gun in his hand. He was standing in a field with a gun in his hand, and it was all absurd, so absurd that he wanted to laugh out loud, but the thought of his loud laughter ringing through the quiet clearing made him uneasy and he reminded himself to pay close attention to what was happening. The man had explained something to him and was walking away, and now from the shade emerged the little husband in his dark suit and without his coat—where was his coat?—and strode into the field in the pale morning light, and stopped. In the light his face was very pale. The exposed temples seemed fragile as eggshell. Harter tried to remember what he had wanted to tell him back on the path, long ago, but he felt exhausted, his chest heaved, and he stared with fascination at the pale little man across from him who stood at attention with his arm pressed to his side. Harter had the sensation that if he stepped up to the man and tapped him on the temple with a forefinger he would fall over in the grass. All at once Harter understood very clearly what was happening and he wondered whether he should shout or run away, but a giddiness seized him and he imagined himself bursting into loud, hysterical laughter—in another second they would all burst into laughter and big, fat tears would roll down their cheeks. One of the men was saying something to him and with a quick shake of his head Harter said “No” and threw the gun away. He watched it move through the air and sink into high grass. He took a step forward and saw the little
man raise his stiff arm. The arm reminded him of something, he had seen it long ago, back in his childhood, or maybe some other time, yes now he had it: it was the arm of the cowboy in the penny arcade. But how long ago was long ago? Harter heard a sound like a shot. “That’s all over,” Harter said aloud, and took another step before the ground slipped away from him. He had a fierce desire to explain something, something of immense importance, but it was difficult to collect his thoughts because his chest itched, somewhere a train was roaring, hundreds of yellow butterflies were beating their wings like mad.

I
N THE LONG
summers of my childhood, games flared up suddenly, burned to a brightness, and vanished forever. The summers were so long that they gradually grew longer than the whole year, they stretched out slowly beyond the edges of our lives, but at every moment of their vastness they were drawing to an end, for that’s what summers mostly did: they taunted us with endings, marched always into the long shadow thrown backward by the end of vacation. And because our summers were always ending, and because they lasted forever, we grew impatient with our games, we sought new and more intense ones; and as the crickets of August grew louder, and a single red leaf appeared on branches green with summer, we threw ourselves as if desperately into new adventures, while the long days, never changing, grew heavy with boredom and longing.

I first saw the carpets in the back yards of other neighborhoods.
Glimpses of them came to me from behind garages, flickers of color at the corners of two-family houses where clotheslines on pulleys stretched from upper porches to high gray poles, and old Italian men in straw hats stood hoeing between rows of tomatoes and waist-high corn. I saw one once at the far end of a narrow strip of grass between two stucco houses, skimming lightly over the ground at the level of the garbage cans. Although I took note of them, they were of no more interest to me than games of jump rope I idly watched on the school playground, or dangerous games with jackknives I saw the older boys playing at the back of the candy store. One morning I noticed one in a back yard in my neighborhood; four boys stood tensely watching. I was not surprised a few days later when my father came home from work with a long package under his arm, wrapped in heavy brown paper, tied with straw-colored twine from which little prickly hairs stuck up.