The Ax

by Westlake, Donald E.

  I try not to move around in the bed, I try to do things that will help me get to sleep. I count to one hundred, then back to one. I try to bring up pleasant memories. I try to shut down entirely.

  But I cannot sleep. And I keep seeing the event on Nether Street. And every time I turn my head, the clock-radio shows some later time, in red numbers, just there, to my right.

  I must have been crazy, out of my mind. How could I have done these things? Herbert Everly. Edward Ricks, and his poor wife. And now Everett Dynes. He was like me, he should be my friend, my ally, we should work together against our common enemies. We shouldn’t claw each other, down here in the pit, fight each other for scraps, while they laugh up above. Or, even worse; while they don’t even bother to notice us, up above.

  When the clock says 5:19, I come to my decision. It has to end now. I have to make a clean breast of everything, atone for what I’ve done, do no more.

  I get out of bed. My exhaustion has left me, I’m awake and alert. I’m calm. I turn on the lights and look around for writing paper, but Dawson’s Motel does not equip its rooms with stationery, and I’ve brought no paper with me.

  Paper lines the dresser drawers, white lengths of paper, in the old-fashioned dark wood dresser. I take out the paper from the bottom drawer, and find it stiff, rather thick, smoother on one side than the other. A very simple level of manufacture, this paper. (I could cry all over again, just for a second, when I notice myself noticing that detail.)

  The rougher side is better for writing on. I sit at the table, I smooth the paper in front of me, I pick up my pen, and I write:

  My name is Burke Devore. I am 51 years old and I live at 62 Pennery Woods Rd., Fairbourne, CT. I have been unemployed for close to 2 years, through no fault of my own. Since my army service, I have at all times been employed, until now.

  This period of unemployment has had a very bad effect on me, and has made me do things I would never have thought possible. Through placing a false ad in a trade journal, I got the resumés of many other people who are unemployed, as I am, in my field of expertise. I then determined to kill those people who I feared were better qualified than I was for one certain job. I wanted that job, I wanted to be employed again, and that desire made me do crazy things.

  I wish to confess now to four murders. The first was two weeks ago, on Thursday, May 8th. My victim was a man named Herbert C. Everly. I shot him in front of his house on Churchwarden Lane, in Fall City, CT.

  My second victim was Edward G. Ricks. I only meant to kill him, but his wife mistook me for an older man who’d been having an affair with her young daughter, and in the confusion I had to kill her, too. I shot both of them last Thursday at their home in Longholme, MA.

  My final victim was last night, in Lichgate, NY. His name was Everett Dynes, and I deliberately ran him down with my automobile.

  I am truly sorry for these crimes. I don’t know how I could have done them. I feel so sorry for the families. I feel so sorry for the people I killed. I hate myself. I don’t know how I can go on. This is my confession.

  My last resumé.

  When I finish it, I sign it, but I don’t date it. There’s no need.

  I’m not sure yet what I’ll do tomorrow. Either I’ll shoot myself with that Luger in my raincoat pocket hanging from the pipe rod in the closet over there, or I’ll drive back to Lichgate, find the police station, and show my confession to a policeman there.

  I just don’t think I can kill myself. I think I have to atone. I think I have to pay for my crimes. And I think I’m just not somebody who commits suicide. So I think I’ll turn myself in to the police tomorrow morning.

  I leave the confession on the table, turn off the lights, get back into bed. I feel very calm. I know I’ll sleep now.

  14

  I sleep like a log. I wake up refreshed, comfortable, hungry as a bear. I left no morning call, so I’ve slept until I was finished sleeping, and the clock-radio reads 9:27. I’m usually out of bed by seven-thirty, so this is really coddling myself. I always had to get up at seven-thirty to get to my job, when I had a job, and I did that for so many years that the habit has stayed with me.

  I shower with the curtain only half closed, which is much more comfortable for me, but leaves the floor very wet. I’m sure that’s not the first time that’s happened.

  It’s still raining outside, a steady rain out of a low grayish white sky. It won’t stop today. I put my overnight bag, with the Luger in the bottom, into the car, then hunker down in the protection of the roof overhang to look at the front of the Voyager.

  The glass over the left parking light is gone, and so is the chrome rim around the headlight, but the headlight seems to be intact. There are dents on the body-work in the left front. If there was ever any blood anywhere on the car, the rain has washed it away.

  I go back into the room one last time, to see if I’ve left anything, and that’s when I see the sheet of paper on the table. I’d completely forgotten about that, done in the woozy hysterics of the night. Wow, and I almost left it behind.

  I sit at the table, and read what I wrote last night, and that awful dread begins to creep over me again. How terrible I felt last night. Tense, anxious, terrified, unable to sleep. I’m glad writing this made it possible at last for me to lose consciousness for a while.

  I meant all of this last night, I know I did. Everything seemed so hopeless. The first one, Everly, went so smoothly, but both of them since have been absolute disasters. I’m not used to this sort of thing, it would be hard enough to do even if they all went smoothly and cleanly, but to have two horror shows in a row really ground me down.

  From now on, I have to be more careful and more patient. I have to be sure the circumstances are right before I make my move.

  I sympathize with the me from last night, who felt such despair, and wrote these words, and apologized to his victims. I too would apologize to them, if I could. I’d leave them alone, if I could.

  I take the confession with me, folded in my pocket. I’ll burn it later, somewhere else.

  I don’t have to go back through Lichgate, which is good. I head south toward Utica on Route 8, and as I drive I think about the damage to the car. I have to get it repaired. I have to fill out a report for the insurance company, though I’m not sure the damage will exceed the deductible. I have to give Marjorie an explanation.

  And at the same time, of course, I have to remember the police will be looking for this car. Even if they don’t call it a murder back there—and I have no idea if they can tell the body was driven over more than once—but even if they don’t call it murder, even if it’s merely a hit-and-run, that’s still manslaughter, and they’ll be looking for the car.

  What do they have? Probably tread marks. The glass from the parking light. The rim from the headlight. One or all of those things will tell them the make and model of the car. They’ll know they’re looking for a Plymouth Voyager with these specific injuries to the left front. I didn’t see any paint chipped off, so they probably don’t have the color.

  There are a lot of these cars on the road, but there won’t be many with these particular scars. Fortunately, the headlight still works, and the headlights are switched on because of the rain. With that rain falling, and with the light glaringly on, it will be very hard for any passing cop to see the small dings around the front of the car. I should be safe, until I can get it fixed, and I think I know how to do that.

  I told Marjorie I was going to a job interview in Binghamton, so I have to wait until I’m far enough south to be on a route that makes sense for that to be where I’m coming from. Then, with the help of the rain, I’ll take care of this problem.

  My chance doesn’t come until early afternoon, just short of Kingston, New York, where I will cross the Hudson River. For my route back, I continue south after Utica, and although I’m starving I wait a good long time, until almost noon, before I stop at a diner to eat what they would call lunch but I would call breakfast. While I�
�m in there, I make sure to put the Voyager where no one can casually see the front end of it.

  After breaking my fast with lunch, I drive on down through Oneonta, where I turn southwest on State Route 28 through the Catskill Mountains, a winding hilly road, mostly only two lanes wide. It’s in a little town along in there that my opportunity knocks.

  There’s a lumberyard up ahead on the left side of the road, with several vehicles along its front, parked facing in. A pickup truck suddenly backs out from there, too fast and too far, without the driver paying sufficient attention. I could avoid him, if I tromp on the brake, or if I drive briefly onto the shoulder to steer around him, but I do neither. I tromp on the accelerator and ram him, my left front against his left side by his rear wheel.

  The pickup skids away sidewise on the wet road, taking my hooked bumper with him, and winding up just off the road in front of the lumberyard. I fight the wheel, roll to the right shoulder, and stop. I turn off the ignition, and get out of the car.

  Three men in mackinaws come out of the lumber-yard, staring at the destruction. The driver of the pickup truck, a skinny kid in his early twenties wearing a New York Giants warmup jacket and a baseball cap on backwards, sits in the truck, stupefied with shock. His engine has stalled, and his right hand is still high on the steering wheel, holding tight, and country music is blaring loudly from his radio. A dozen planks and a big can of joint compound are in the back of the pickup.

  I cross the road and meet the three men in mackinaws. I say, sounding as dazed as that kid over there looks, “Did you see that?”

  “I heard it,” one of them says. “That was good enough for me.”

  “He came,” I say, and shake my head, and point this way and that, and start again. “He came out, all of a sudden all the way across the road. I was going that way, I was way over there.”

  One of the men in mackinaws goes over to tell the kid to turn off his ignition, and he does, and the music stops. Another of them says to me, “We better call the cops.”

  “He came right out,” I say.

  Everybody agrees I am not at fault. Even the kid knows he’s to blame, jumping way out into the road like that, not looking both ways, playing his radio too loud.

  The state police treat me with the calm courtesy reserved for the innocent victim, and they treat the kid with the cold efficiency reserved for assholes. They take down everybody’s particulars, get names and phone numbers from the three men in mackinaws in case witnesses are ever needed, and assure me they’ll send me a copy of the accident report for me to give my insurance company.

  I thank them all for their help, and at last I get back into the car, which still runs, though it has some new rattles, and I drive on, and when I reach Kingston I stop in a little neighborhood bar, nearly empty at this time of day, to have a beer, to quiet my nerves.

  When I come back out, a Kingston city cop is looking at the damage to the front of my car, parked at the curb by the door to the bar. This damage is now considerably more severe than it was. He asks me if it’s my car, and I say yes. He asks to see a driver’s license, and I show it to him. Still holding my license, he says, “Do you mind telling me when you got that?”

  “About half an hour ago,” I tell him, “maybe ten miles back up Route 28. I was just calming myself with a beer in there.”

  He asks me the particulars of the accident, and then asks if I mind waiting while he calls in, and I tell him in that case I think I’ll have another beer.

  “Don’t drink too much,” he says, but he smiles, and I assure him I won’t. He walks off to his own car, carrying my license.

  I’m still in the bar, a warm and dark and comforting place, five minutes later, halfway down this second draft beer, when the cop comes in and says, “Just wanted you to know, it checked out.” He hands me my license. “Thanks for the cooperation.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  15

  We still treat Sunday as something different, Marjorie and I, although there’s no reason to any more. I don’t mean we go to church. We don’t, though we did years ago, when the kids were young and we were trying to be a good influence. Since I was chopped, Marjorie’s mentioned the idea once or twice, going to church some Sunday, but she hasn’t made a real point of it, and we don’t have a church in particular here in Fairbourne, don’t really know any churchgoers, so it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t suppose it will.

  No, what I mean by our treating Sunday as something different, I mean we still act as though it’s the day I don’t go to work. (The other day. Saturdays I get up early and do chores, still maintaining that fiction as well.) We sleep an hour later, not getting up till eight-thirty or nine, and we dawdle over a long breakfast, and we don’t dress until lunchtime, and we spend most of the daylight hours with the Sunday New York Times. Of course, these Sundays I turn first to the help wanted section, so that’s a change.

  So today, this Sunday, is a true time-out. After my experiences last Thursday and Friday up in Lichgate, I’m ready for some time out. Tomorrow I’ll take the Voyager to a body shop for an estimate on the damage, which I hope I can get taken care of very soon. I mean, urgently.

  Originally, I thought I’d spend part of this afternoon in the office, to decide which of the three remaining resumés I should deal with next, and how to deal with him with less chance of the kind of disaster I’ve been having. But then it occurred to me, with that damage on it, the Voyager is a lot more identifiable than it used to be. I probably shouldn’t use it to go after the others until it’s been made anonymous again.

  Which I don’t like. I want to do it now, I want to get it over with, I really want to get this whole thing over and done with. While I was burning that confession in the backyard yesterday, during the time Marjorie was away at her movie-house job, I realized the tension of this situation could get to me again, that I could have more weak moments, and that some time, in dread and despair, I might even actually make a phone call to the authorities, blurt it all out, destroy myself. So the sooner I get this over with, the better.

  “Burke! Burke!”

  We’re in the living room, Marjorie and I, in our robes, with the sections of the Sunday Times and our cooling coffee. I’m in my regular chair, with its view slightly leftward to the TV set on the far side wall and its view slightly rightward through the picture window to the front of our yard and the plantings that partly shield us from the road and our neighbors. Marjorie is, as usual, on the sofa to my left, feet curled up under her, newspaper spread all across the sofa beyond her.

  And now I realize she’s calling to me. I start, the paper rattling, and look at her. “What? Something wrong?” Something in the paper, I mean.

  “You haven’t heard a word I said.”

  She looks surprisingly tense, agitated. I hadn’t noticed that before. Is this about something that isn’t in the paper?

  I’m a pretty big guy, now going to seed a bit, and Marjorie’s what they call petite, with very curly brown hair and wide bright brown eyes and a wholehearted way of laughing that I love, as though she’s about to blow herself over. Though I haven’t heard that laugh for a while, really.

  When we first started going together in ’71, back in Hartford, we had to put up with a lot of not-very-witty jokes from our friends because I was so big and tall and she was so skinny and short. I was still a bus driver, then, for the city, and in fact I first met Marjorie when she got on my bus one morning. She was a college student, twenty years old, and I was an Army vet and a bus driver, twenty-five, and she had no intention of getting involved with somebody like me, and yet that’s what happened. And even though I was a college graduate myself, she took a lot of ribbing from her friends at school when she started going out with a bus driver, and I suppose it was that as much as anything that led me to apply to Green Valley, and get the job selling paper, and find my life’s work, that’s now been temporarily lost.

  And now she’s telling me I haven’t heard a word she’s said, and it’s tru
e. “I’m sorry, sweet,” I say. “I was distracted, I was a million miles away.”

  “You’ve been a million miles away, Burke,” she says. There are little white blotches under her eyes, high on her cheekbones. She almost looks as though she might cry. What is this?

  I say, “It’s the job, sweet, I just can’t—”

  “I know it’s the job,” she says. “Burke, honey, I know what the problem is, I know how much this has been weighing on your mind, driving you crazy, but—”

  “Well, not entirely crazy, I hope.”

  “—but I can’t stand it,” she insists, not letting me interrupt or make a joke. “Burke, it’s driving me crazy.”

  “Sweet, I don’t know what I can—”

  “I want us to go into counseling,” she says, with that abrupt matter-of-factness people use when they finally say something they’ve been thinking about for a long time.

  I automatically reject this, for a thousand reasons. I start with the most explainable of those reasons, saying, “Marjorie, we can’t afford—”

  “We can,” she says, “if it’s important. And it is important.”

  “Sweet, this can’t go on forever,” I tell her. “I’ll find another job before you know it, a good job, and—”

  “It’ll be too late, Burke.” Her eyes are bigger and brighter than I’ve ever seen them. She’s so serious about this, and so worried. “We’re being torn apart now,” she says. “It’s been too long, the damage is being done. Burke, I love you, and I want our marriage to survive.”

  “It will survive. We love each other, we’re strong in—”

  “We’re not strong enough,” she insists. “I’m not strong enough. It’s wearing me down, it’s grinding me down, it’s making me miserable, it’s making me desperate, I feel like a… I feel like a woodchuck in a Hav-a-Hart trap!”