The Ax

by Westlake, Donald E.

1971–1973—Salesman, Northeast Beverage Corp, Syracuse, NY

  1968–1971—Infantryman, US Army, one tour in Vietnam

  PERSONAL HISTORY

  I am married, with three nearly-grown children. My wife and I are active in our church and our community. I have been a Boy Scout scoutmaster, when my son was of the appropriate age.

  INTENTION

  It is my hope to join a forward-looking paper company that can fully utilize my training and skills in all areas of paper production and sale.

  13

  The New York State Thruway is an expensive toll road. It goes north from New York City to Albany, then turns west toward Buffalo. In that western part, it runs along just to the south of the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal. Just to the north of river and canal is a state road, Route 5, which is smaller and curvier, but doesn’t cost anything. I am on Route 5.

  I was never in Vietnam. Until I shot Herbert Everly, I’d never seen a human being dead because of violence. It irritates me that Dynes, old EBD, has to put right there, in his resumé, that he was in Vietnam. So what? Is the world supposed to owe him a living, a quarter of a century later? Is this special pleading?

  I was stationed in Germany, in the Army, after I got out of boot camp. We were in a communications platoon in a small base east of Munich, on top of a tall pine-covered hill. A foothill of the Alps, I suppose it must have been. We didn’t have much to do except keep our radio equipment in working order, just in case the Russians ever attacked, which most of us believed wasn’t going to happen. So my eighteen months in the Army in Germany was spent mostly in a beer haze, down in Mootown, which some of us called Munich, I have no idea why.

  Mootown. And while the guys in Vietnam called the kilometer a click—“We’re ten clicks from the border”—we in Germany were still calling them Ks— “We’re ten Ks from that nice gasthaus”—though the Vietnamese influence was getting to us, and Ks were becoming clicks in Europe as well. Nobody wanted to be in Vietnam, but everybody wanted to be thought of as having been in Vietnam.

  Like this son of a bitch, EBD. Twenty-five years later, and he’s still playing that violin.

  On a midmorning Thursday in May, there isn’t that much traffic on Route 5, and I’m making pretty good time. Not quite as good as the big trucks I can see from time to time across the river on the thruway, but good enough. The little towns along the way—Fort Johnson, Fonda, Palatine Bridge—slow me some, but not for long. And the scenery is beautiful, the river winding through the hills, gleaming in spring sun. It’s a nice day.

  Mostly it’s just river, there to my left, but some of it is clearly manmade, or man altered, and that would be remnants of the old Erie Canal. New York State is bigger than most people realize, being a good three hundred miles across from Albany to Buffalo, and in the early days of our country this body of water to my left was the main access to the interior of the nation. Back before there was much by way of roads.

  In those days, the big ships from Europe could come into New York Harbor, and steam up the Hudson as far as Albany, and off-load there. Then the riverboats and barges would take over, carrying goods and people on the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal over to Buffalo, where they could enter Lake Erie, and then travel across the Great Lakes all the way to Chicago or Michigan, and even take rivers southward and wind up on the Mississippi.

  Some years ago, I was watching some special on TV, and the announcer described something as being a “transitional technology.” It was the railroads I think he was talking about. Something. And the idea seemed to be, a transitional technology was the cumbersome old way people used to do things before they got to the easy sensible way they do things now. And the further idea was, look how much time and effort and expense was put into something that was just a temporary stopgap; railroad bridges, canals.

  But everything is a transitional technology, that’s what I’m beginning to figure out. Maybe that’s what makes it impossible sometimes. Two hundred years ago, people knew for certain they would die in the same world they were born into, and it had always been that way. But not any more. The world doesn’t just change these days, it upheaves, constantly. We’re like fleas living on a Dr. Jekyll who’s always in the middle of becoming Mr. Hyde.

  I can’t change the circumstances of the world I live in. This is the hand I’ve been dealt, and there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can hope to do is play that hand better than anybody else. Whatever it takes.

  At Utica, I take Route 8 north. It goes all the way to Watertown and the Canadian border, but I don’t. I stop at Lichgate.

  A factory town on the Black River. Prosperity, and the factory, left this town a long time ago; more transitional technology. Who knows what used to be manufactured in that great brick pile of a building that molders now beside the river. The river itself is narrow but deep, and very black, and is crossed by a dozen small bridges, all of them at least sixty years old.

  Bits of the ground floor of the old factory have been kept more or less alive, converted to shops—antique, coffee, card—and a county museum. People making believe they’re at work, now that there is no work.

  My road atlas doesn’t include a town map of Lich-gate. It’s after one when I get to town, so first I have lunch in the Red Brick Cafe, tucked into a corner of the old factory building, and then I buy a map of the area in the card shop down the block.

  (I know it would be easier simply to ask directions to Nether Street, but what’s the chance I would be remembered, as the stranger who asked the way to Nether Street just before the murder on Nether Street? Very strong chance, I should think. The idea of seeing myself on TV in an artist’s rendition from eyewitness accounts is not appealing.)

  From the name, I would have guessed Nether Street would run along beside the river, that being the lowest part of town, but on the map I see it’s a street that borders the southern city line eastward over to the river. When I drive over there, I see that the hill the town is built on slopes down to the south, this way, and Nether Street got its name because it runs along the base of that hill.

  This area is neither suburban nor rural, but an actual town, and this a residential area, old and substantial, the houses mostly a hundred years old, built back when the factory was still turning out whatever it was. They are wide two-story houses on small plots, made mostly of native stone, with generous porches and steep A roofs because of the very snowy winters.

  When these houses were built, the managers would have lived here, middle management from the factory, although I don’t think they called it middle management back then. But that’s who they would have been, along with the shop owners and the dentists. A solid comfortable life in a stable neighborhood. None of those people would have believed for a second that the world they lived in was transitional.

  264 is like its neighbors, wide and solid and stone. There are no mailboxes out by the roadside here, but mail slots in front doors or small iron mailboxes hung beside the door. The mailman will walk. And the roadside isn’t a roadside, but a curb.

  There’s a sidewalk as well, and when I first drive down the block a father is using that sidewalk to teach his scared but game daughter how to ride a two-wheeler. I see them, and I think, Don’t let that be EBD. But in the resumé he described himself as having “three nearly-grown children.”

  Most of these houses have garages that were added decades after the houses were built, and most of them are free-standing, beside or behind the house and not attached to it, though here and there, because of those rough winters, people have built enclosed passageways to connect house with garage.

  264 has a detached garage, an old-fashioned one with two large doors that open outward, though right now they’re closed. It’s on the right side of the house, and just behind it, with a blacktop driveway that’s crumbling here and there, overdue for a touchup. In the driveway is an orange Toyota Camry, a few years old. No one is visible anywhere around the house.

  Three blocks farther on, closer to the river,
Nether Street crosses a main north-south road, and there’s a gas station. I stop there, fill the tank, and use the pay phone to call EBD.

  A male voice answers, on the third ring: “Hello?”

  Trying to sound very cheerful and friendly, I say, “Hi, Everett?”

  “Yes, hello,” he says.

  “This is Chuck,” I say. “By golly, Everett, I didn’t think I’d ever track you down.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Who?”

  “Chuck,” I say. “Everett? This is Everett Jackson.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” he says. “You’ve got the wrong number.”

  “Oh, damn,” I say. “I’m sorry, I beg your pardon.”

  “That’s all right. Good luck,” he says.

  I hang up, and go back to the Voyager.

  There’s no trouble parking in this neighborhood. Parked cars take up about half the curb space on the westbound side, facing away from the river, as I am now. There’s no parking at all on the other side, where EBD’s house is, the street not being that wide. It would have been laid out before there were cars.

  The horse: a transitional technology.

  I park almost a block away from 264, in front of a house with a For Sale sign on the lawn and no curtains in the windows. Today I’m not trying to pretend I’m a potential buyer, I simply don’t want a housewife peering out at me from behind her blinds, wondering who that is, just sitting there in his car in front of her house.

  EBD is home. Sooner or later he’ll come out. The Luger is under the raincoat on the passenger seat. If he drives off in the Camry, I’ll pull up beside him at a red light and shoot him from the car. If he comes out to mow his lawn, I’ll walk across the street and shoot him there. One way or another, when he comes out, I’ll shoot him.

  On the drive, all the long time coming up, I never thought about EBD or what I had to do here. I just thought about historical forces and all that stuff. But now, seated in the Voyager, watching the front of that house, all I think about is EBD. Quick and clean, and get it over with. Get the bad taste of the Ricks experience out of my mouth. Make this one simple, like Everly.

  Quarter to four. The father and daughter and bicycle have long gone. The mailman has walked down the block, pushing his three-wheeled cart with the long handle. Clouds have come in from the west, and it’s getting cool inside the Voyager.

  I am patient. I am a leopard in the shadow of a boulder. I can stay here, without moving, until the night comes. And then, when it’s dark, if he still hasn’t emerged from his house, I will go in after him.

  That is, I will circle the house on foot, I will look in the windows, I will find him and shoot him. I won’t actually go indoors unless it’s absolutely necessary, and even then with extreme caution. I have no desire to meet the wife, or the three almost-grown children.

  I’ll adapt myself to circumstance, but I am determined…

  Movement, at 264. The door is opening, obscured by the shadow of the wide porch roof. A man comes out, pauses to call to someone inside, pulls the door shut, comes down off the porch. He stops there, on the slate walk that makes a part in his lawn, and looks up. Will it rain? He adjusts his windbreaker collar, pulls his cloth cap down more firmly on his head. He continues to the street, turns, and walks this way.

  It’s my man, EBD. The right age, coming from the right house. He’s walking toward me, on the far side of the street. I can pick up the Luger, hold it against my leg, walk across the street, ask directions. He will turn aside, pointing, head raised. I will shoot him in the near eye.

  My left hand is on the door handle, my right reaches under the raincoat for the Luger. Half a block away, EBD pauses and waves at a house. He stops. He speaks.

  I frown and peer, and now I can see a couple seated on the porch there. I’d never noticed them before. Have they been there all along? This light is difficult, with the sun gone.

  I can’t do it, not in front of witnesses. My left hand leaves the handle, my right comes empty out from under the raincoat.

  Across the way, EBD touches his cap and walks on. He walks past me, on the other side of the street, no parked cars over there to block my vision. He’s a tall man, gaunt, with rounded shoulders. His head is thrust forward and down, so that when he walks he looks at the sidewalk directly in front of himself. His hands are in his windbreaker pockets.

  Those people on the porch; a couple, I think. Still there. When I start my car, they’ll notice me. I have to wait here as long as possible, I have to try to minimize any connection between the passing of EBD and this car driving away.

  I see EBD in my outside mirror, walking steadily away. He’s more than a block off by now, and still moving steadily on. I can risk losing sight of him for a minute or two.

  I start the Voyager. Without looking at the people on the porch, I drive forward, away from EBD. I drive briskly but not crazily down to the corner, where I turn right. I drive rapidly down that block and turn right again, and then a third right, which brings me back to Nether Street.

  Only a few major streets go through here, north to south; the rest, including the street I’m now on, end at Nether. I stop at the Stop sign there, then make the left turn onto Nether, and EBD is perfectly plain, still walking along, out ahead.

  Where I got the gasoline and made the phone call, up ahead on the right, is the intersection with Route 8, my road up. Diagonally across Route 8 from the gas station there is a diner. I can park in its lot, and trail EBD from there. How far can he be going, on foot?

  I drive slowly by him, and he simply walks methodically along, a man with a destination but in no real hurry to get there. I continue on.

  The diner, called SnowBird, faces Route 8, with its blacktop parking lot in front of it and spreading around to its left side, away from Nether Street. There’s a traffic light at the intersection, and it’s red against me when I arrive. I stop and wait.

  In my mirror, EBD walks diagonally across Nether Street behind me, and keeps coming.

  The light turns green. I turn left onto Route 8 and then right into the diner’s parking area. I drive on around to the side, and take a space near the front corner, where I can watch the intersection. The parking area’s almost empty.

  I switch off the ignition, and look up, as again the light turns red for Route 8, and EBD comes walking across the road. He almost looks as though he’s coming to me.

  No. He’s coming to the diner. He crosses the parking lot, goes up the three brick steps to the entrance, goes into the glass-enclosed vestibule—the severe winters up here have surely caused that to be built there—and I can see him as he pushes open the inner door and goes inside.

  All right, this is easy. He’s here for a late lunch or a mid-afternoon snack. When he’s finished, I’ll see him as he comes out to the vestibule. I’ll have time to start the engine, lower the window, pick up the Luger. As he comes down those brick steps, I’ll drive by and stop in front of him. I’ll call his name, and when he looks at me, I will shoot him.

  There are exits from the parking lot both onto Nether Street and Route 8. Depending which way the traffic light is green, after I shoot EBD I’ll take one or the other of those exits, and head straight down Route 8. No witness will have any idea what was going on.

  I’ll be home for the eleven o’clock news.

  Four-fifty. He’s been in there almost an hour. Does he have a girlfriend in there? How much longer do I have to wait? How long can you spend in a diner, in the middle of the afternoon? He wasn’t carrying a newspaper, but I suppose he could have a paperback book in a pocket of his windbreaker. Maybe his wife is doing the housecleaning, and he’s agreed to stay away from home for a few hours.

  I have to find out what’s going on. I make sure the Luger is completely concealed by the raincoat, and then I get out of the Voyager to find that the day has become raw, with a sharp wind rushing down Nether Street from the west. I lock the car, and walk into the diner, and he isn’t there.

  I have a mad instant of
dislocation, something out of a melodrama. He’s snuck out a back entrance and into a waiting car and he’s off…

  Doing what? An assignation with that girlfriend I’d given him earlier? Is he robbing banks while waiting for a new job to come through? (I’d thought of that.)

  Is he after me?

  All of which is ridiculous. He’s undoubtedly in the restroom, and I see the sign for it down to the left, so I go to the right, find a place at the counter, take the menu out of the metal rack that sticks up there.

  There’s only five people in the place, three solitaries drinking coffee along the counter, and an elderly couple having dinner in a booth. I think, when he comes out of the bathroom, why not just shoot him here? Who would be able to identify me, in the shock and suddenness of it? I’ll have to go back to the Voyager, get the Luger, wear the raincoat—it’s chilly enough for that, anyway—and then come back and wait till he comes out of the men’s room, and do it right then.

  No. Wait. Wait until he’s seated again, wherever he’s sitting, that would be best.

  He comes out of the swing door behind the counter. He’s wearing a green apron and he’s carrying a plate of fish and chips, which he places in front of a customer down to my left.

  He works here.

  I’m so stunned I’m still sitting there when he comes over to me. “Afternoon,” he says. He has a pleasant smile. He looks like a nice guy, with an honest glance and an easygoing manner.

  Middle management, and he’s working the counter in a diner. It won’t pay his mortgage on that house three blocks from here. I’m sure it helps, the way Marjorie’s days at Dr. Carney’s office help, but not enough. And it isn’t the same thing as your own real life back.

  I’m still stunned. I don’t know what to do, what to think, what to say, where to look. He keeps smiling at me: “Know what you want?”

  “Not yet,” I say. I’m stammering. “Give me a minute.”