Whipple's Castle (73 page)

“Okay, what time you want to start?” said Gordon's easy voice. “Yeah, yeah,” he said with a wry grin, “we'll make it a sort of wake. Hmm? I'll bring a couple new decks of Bicycles and take out of the pot. You get the beer. Okay, Don? Nine o'clock? Okay, Donny-boy.” He listened. “Okay now, cut the humor.” But he chuckled again, shaking his head in mock disapproval.

Behind Gordon, at this angle, stood a tall grandfather clock with a sailing ship painted on its glass panel. The pendulum, a dull sun of brass, appeared and disappeared behind Gordon's crisply pressed chinos. The telephone table stood on delicate carved legs. Everything here was old, thin and carefully polished. The beige wallpaper was etched like brocade, all tiny flowers in vertical lines.

Gordon hung up and turned, reaching for his wallet. With his finger he examined its insides, fingering his money. Then he put it back in his pocket and looked up at Horace. He was badly startled, dead pale between his freckles. He squinted up into the dining room. “Who's that?” he said. “Is somebody standing there, for Christ's sake?” He took two steps forward, craning his neck. “Jesus Christ! Somebody
is
standing there! Say something!”

Horace had nothing to say.

“What do you want?” Gordon said. He reached for the wall switch and turned on the chandelier over the table. “Horace Whipple!” he said, and jumped back when he saw the gun. “What the hell!”

Horace pushed off the safety, and Gordon jumped again at that meaningful click. “Hey, wait a minute, Horace! What's with the gun?” He was so badly frightened his forehead began to glisten. He put his hand to his heart and took short, hard breaths. “Jesus, you gave me a start. Now, what's with the blunderbuss? Come on, Horace, what's the story?”

As if he really wanted to know. In Gordon's wary eye Horace saw a flicker of plan. He had decided that he probably wouldn't get shot, that he would be dead already if he were going to be shot. “I mean, what's the matter, Horace?”

“Susie's dead.” Horace spoke only out of politeness.

“Oh, yeah. Terrible! That's awful. Terrible thing. But you don't blame me for that, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Aw, no, Horace. No you don't, not really. I mean I know how bad you feel and all. All upset, right? It's a terrible thing! Who could blame you?” Gordon's voice was kind and sad, his face serious, avuncular. He seemed to think he was doing pretty well.

“I don't want to hurt you,” Horace said.

Gordon immediately misunderstood. “Of course not, Horace! I can see that! Come on in and let's sit down. Come on.”

Horace despaired of their ever changing, the cold ones.

“At least put the safety back on, huh?” Gordon essayed a smile. “Okay, Horace?”

If only there was a chance for Gordon.

“Well, okay, Horace. We'll stand here and talk. You know, I feel terrible about Susie too. We were damned good friends, you know. Old friends, in spite of whatever you think might have happened way back in high school. Don't believe everything you hear, Horace. You know how everything gets exaggerated. Don't you?” The green-flecked eyes glittered uncomfortably as he looked for some sign. Then they peered straight into the barrel of the shotgun, flickering shut and open. “You know how that happens, don't you?” He tried to wave all that gossip away with his hand, to wave it off into utter insignificance.

The mind shifted, probing. Gordon turned fiercely sad. “You have no idea, Horace, how much I've suffered over an awful drunken mistake I once made. I was too young to drink, and just couldn't know what I was doing. I was absolutely pie-eyed, didn't know what was happening one night, when those drunken bastards found Susie and me and did that to her. Honest to God! I know somehow it was my fault—to get so drunk I couldn't protect her. God knows I tried, but they held me back. God, it was awful!” His mood changed to understanding, warmth, confiding warmth. “And don't think I don't know how upset you were when you heard the rumors, either, Horace. Taking the money and all. A brave thing. I thought it was a brave thing to do!”

That strange quality of lies, how the open brain clicked and telegraphed its points.

He went on, speaking most plausibly to whatever he thought Horace Whipple was. Horace watched down the barrel of the shotgun as the bright face proclaimed its openness. The honest gestures flowed down the shoulders through the snowy broadcloth of the shirt toward the light square hands. He had to admire certain of those skills. The room around Gordon faded until he seemed to stand in a special light. Gordon explained with becoming modesty how he had fought in the war, gone through sheer hell in the service of his country. Then a modest shrug before he returned to the deep seriousness of the tragedy of Susie's death. Sorrow, shock. A moment of silence.

Gordon glanced at his wrist watch. Perhaps he still wanted to make that poker game. Yes, he probably did; he was thinking ahead. A self-deprecating slyness entered Gordon's expression, as though he were asking if it showed too much: “Hey, Horace? Is that gun really loaded? I never thought you were the hunting type. You know what I mean?”

Did the man think he was playing poker already? This man, Horace saw too clearly, would be successful in the world. His little talents would hurt many before he was through. Even afterward the poisonous lessons of his success would remain. The stupid gulling the stupider, the power of minor cunning. He hadn't Horace's education in evil, and was therefore hardly aware of his tools, of their origins. These were not the tools he had used on Susie, though he didn't know it. He had used her love. And of course they couldn't work on Horace. Gordon's fear was real, and gave him reason to scheme, but he was also depending upon Horace's reluctance to kill—an interesting card to hold.

Let him dig his grave.

“Why don't you say something, Horace?”

“I could never gamble,” Horace said. Once David had tried to teach him how to play poker, but he could never lie about the cards he held, or understand why the other person enjoyed the necessity of lying. David had informed him that he was slightly mad, slightly un-American. He moved the barrel up, so Gordon had to look straight down the hole.

“Horace, I think there's something else you ought to know about Susie.” Horace watched him with curiosity because his method had changed again. Gordon was serious, rather manly, rather sad about what he had to say. “I suppose you don't know that…that time, you know, wasn't really the first time anything like that happened to poor Susie. Now don't get upset about what I have to say. But Susie was not—I'm sorry to say this—a virgin when that unfortunate thing happened.” Gordon smiled them into a slight conspiracy of knowledge: men of the world, they could shrug sadly at human foibles. “Now, I know how you felt about her! Don't get me wrong. She was a sweet kid, one of the nicest persons there ever was, anywhere. She just…well, it had been that way with Susie for a long time. Horace?” He was gravely serious now. “Do you know what a nymphomaniac is?”

Gordon wasn't even aware of the nature of his crime, had no idea why he was being judged.

“Well, Susie had a kind of mental disease called nymphomania. I hate to say it, Horace, but that's the way it was. You won't get mad, now, if I explain what it is? Okay? By the way, if you decide to put that safety back on, be careful, huh? I mean don't pull the trigger by mistake? Okay? Well, nymphomaniacs just have to sleep with everybody that comes along. It's not their fault, now. Remember that! It's a disease. You know Susie's mother's in Concord. You knew that. Well, there's a history of mental illness in the family, you know.” He shook his head sadly.

Gordon had been sweating, but now he was full of confidence, for some reason. It began to seem dangerous, just a little dangerous. Gordon peered carefully out of his head, seeming to see great results Horace couldn't see. His hair gleamed like red metal, and his big chest expanded with confidence. Freckles overlapped like plates upon his face and hands. It must have been that name for her that had generated such confidence. Horace raised the shotgun.

“Horace! What the hell? Are you
crazy?”

Yes, he was mad. The man he knew to be Gordon Ward had become for an instant Zoster. Chitin slid, smooth sheaths along the jaws. The red was the blood of victims, the green eyes were cold as absolute zero. Horace had never chosen to guard against them. He wanted to explain it all to Susie, how they would come to suck her warmth, how they liked torture. He had never told her about the flayed dog screaming for its skin. They were power, the ones who always had the power, didn't she understand? They could kill her any way they chose and never be made to suffer. He must warn her about them again. He saw her lying in her sleep, so frail, no lock on the door. Their grins, bloated parts, teeth, smirks, cold armor. It was almost too late. It was hard, what he had to do. He had almost died of fright at the unnaturalness when he ran at Leverah's window, staring with his open eyes. She fell, exploding in blood and her own terror. It was hard to do, wrong to do. Unnatural. But they made these rules, not he. Anticipating attack or flight, he quickly fired into the head of this one.

As the big body jackknifed, part of the head pushed off toward the wall. Long ropes and finer bells of blood painted the wallpaper, lay ribbon like along the floor. He had expected power from Wood's shotgun, but the head! Pieces of scalp still grew orange hair. Pinkish-gray cereal gleamed on the carpet, crawled down a table leg.

In the silence of the gaudy hallway he remembered who he was and saw what he had done.

David stopped at Anna's Teach Your Dollars More Cents and bought five twelve-ounce bottles of beer. Anna made him show his driver's license before she'd believe he was twenty-one, in spite of his having bought beer there less than two weeks before. Though he suffered slightly from this insult, the redeeming thing was that she had forgotten it was Sunday, when beer wasn't supposed to be sold. With a bottle of beer cooling his crotch, he resumed his meaningless patrol of the town.

He was pleased by his little truck. Its flathead V-8 purred along nicely. The only jarring thing was the one rattle in the body or bed somewhere he couldn't locate, but such a little imperfection made him more constantly aware of his machine's general well-being. And his nagging, wavelike concern about Horace—or more likely his awareness of responsibility for Horace—made his neat truck, his ride through the warm night with the big white instrument dial glowing, the crisp feel of shifting gears, more enjoyable too. Procrastination, a kind of hooky, but it was good to pass along the streets, the houses, under the tall trees.

He went down Water Street past the tenement. Window glass glittered where it had been pushed back from the sidewalk; the windows of Susie's kitchen were soft black holes. No Horace skulked between the old buildings, along the railroad tracks, behind the American Legion Hall. He cruised down Mechanic Street, crossed Poverty Street, then passed the mills, only night lights glowing deep in their huge rooms, floodlights on cinder parking lots empty now of all but a watchman's car or two. A whiff of tannery, a moonlit gleam of the river. Because he was pointing that way, he followed the Cascom River to the Connecticut and crossed the long covered bridge into Vermont, then turned and came back to Leah, to cruise the Town Square once again.

A few lights were on in the Wards' big brick house. Horace might blame Gordon in some way, and in spite of seeming foolishly dramatic, he thought of possibly warning Gordon. But there were many reasons for his not wanting to do this. Horace was not one to enter upon violence without being forced into it. They had always counted upon Horace's gentleness. It was himself he always hurt, unless by pure accident. He didn't want to betray Horace with that sort of bad judgment, either, especially to Gordon Ward. Horace had a queer enough reputation already. But the main reason for not seeing Gordon was what Kate had told him. He wouldn't be able to look Gordon in the eye. Perhaps he would never, on his own initiative, see Gordon again. Strange, because the facts of the matter were not that horrendous. Face it: when girls liked boys, boys who liked girls did that to girls. Sometimes it took longer than at other times, but it happened. Then why couldn't he think of looking Gordon casually in the eye? Because he hated the son of a bitch. Because Kate Whipple was too beautiful and good for the likes of Gordon Ward. Gordon Ward should never have been allowed to play with her responses, even to touch her.

As he came around the square past the post office, the little round library, Trask's, the hotel, the Town Hall, people began to emerge from the first show at the Strand. He parked near the marquee and watched, doubting that Horace would have gone to the movies under these circumstances. But he doubted that he would find Horace anyway. He turned off the engine and leaned back.

Then strange things began to happen.

It was the beginning of an adventure he would always remember with a great deal of awe. Strange imperfections in timing and desire, childhood returning in force, with ironic lessons implied; he would begin to think of his whole life in terms of such timing. He would always seem destined to survive, to
move
on toward an ironic skewing of desire. He would remember the air-raid tower, when the little bullet born of a wishful yearning for action had missed his chest by the smallest hairline crack of timing. He had just missed, just been missed, how many times? He thought of Lucifer of the golden eye, the desperate screech of tires on asphalt, a short round in basic that demolished a nearby truck, a tree branch slowly giving way. There had been other times, and there would be more, but after this confrontation they would all fit together with a haunting, adhesive quality that would always cause him to dream upon his possibilities.

After most of the people had come out of the Strand and gone their way, Carol Oakes came out alone. She stood next to the coming-attractions display cases, striking as she always was, just slightly more a woman than other women. This quality could have been measured, he supposed, in tenths of inches, but slight though the measurements might have been, they were highly visible. She wore a light summer dress, chalky blue, and she struck him with all the force of high school. She seemed pale, worried, her large face translucent as marble. He sat within the sanctuary of the cab staring avidly, letting all the guilt shocks, fantasies, the masturbation flashes of his adolescence come back as he examined her forbidden, always impossible excess of femaleness. Letty was smooth, possible, his likeness, friend and comrade. Carol Oakes was that somnolent goddess of breadth and burning, fragile and voluminous, wasp and cloud.