The Ax

by Westlake, Donald E.

  Again he squints. “Halcyon,” he says. He keeps up with the trade journals, but how closely? Will he know it’s all over at Halcyon? He says, “Didn’t they get merged?”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s the whole trouble, it looks like they’re gonna move the whole goddam thing up to Canada—”

  “Cocksuckers,” he says.

  “I just don’t want to lose my job,” I say.

  “Lotta that goin around,” he says.

  “Too much of it. Mr. Fallon,” I say, “I read about you in Pulp, remember that piece a few months ago?”

  “They got some stuff wrong in there,” he complains, “made me look like a damn fool doesn’t know his own job.”

  “I thought it made you look terrific at your job,” I tell him, lying. “That’s why I’m here.”

  He shakes his head, befuddled. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re talkin about,” he says.

  “I’m good at my job, Mr. Fallon, believe me I am,” I tell him, with great sincerity, “but these days you can’t just be good at the job, you’ve got to be perfect at it. I don’t have much time. They’re going to decide pretty soon this summer, do I stay on, does the line stay here or does it get pulled to Canada—”

  “Fuckin bastards.”

  “I thought,” I tell him, “if I could talk to Mr. Fallon, if we could just talk about the job, I could maybe pick up some pointers, get to where I could— I can do the job, Mr. Fallon, but I’m not that good, talking about it, I can’t express myself. In that piece in Pulp, you could express yourself. I was hoping, my idea was, we could just talk, and then maybe I’d be better at it on the job. There’s gonna be an interview, I’m not exactly sure when.”

  He studies me. The revolver now dangles at his side, pointing at the floor. He says, “You sound desperate.”

  “I am desperate. I don’t want to lose that job. I keep thinking about it and thinking about it, and today I finally made the decision to come here and ask you for help, and after dinner I drove over here from Connecticut.”

  “Whyn’tcha use the phone?”

  I give a wry grin and a little shrug. “Be some nut on the phone? I figured, if I come here, I can explain myself. But then you weren’t home.”

  “So you busted in.”

  “The door isn’t locked, Mr. Fallon,” I say. “Honest, it isn’t.”

  He thinks about that, nodding slowly, and then says, “Let’s go see.”

  “All right.”

  He steps back from the doorway, and makes a waving gesture with the revolver. It’s not pointed at the floor any more, but it’s not quite pointed at me either. “You first,” he says.

  I go first, through the house, which now has lights on in every room, all the way to the door beyond the TV room, which I open onto the black night outside. I turn to him and say, “See?”

  He glares at the door. “The goddam thing isn’t supposed to be open like that.” He comes over, switching the revolver to his left hand so he can slam the door, open it, slam it again, and then peer closely at the lock mounted on the inside of it. He tries to turn the lock’s little handle, but it won’t move. “Damn thing’s painted stuck,” he says. “Stuck open. Be a son of a bitch.”

  During this, I could hit him about seven times with the iron pipe in my windbreaker pocket, but I don’t. I think things are going to work out better than that.

  He slams the door again, turns to me, shakes his head. “I gotta get that fixed,” he tells me. “Anyway, you see how it looked, I come home, there’s you right there, asleep in my den.”

  “I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

  “Well, you had a long drive. Wha’d you say your name was?”

  “Burke,” I tell him. “Burke Devore.”

  “Burke,” he says, “I know you won’t mind if I have a look at your wallet.”

  I say, “You still think there’s something wrong with me? All right.” And I take out my wallet and hand it to him.

  He takes it from me with his left hand, gesturing again with the revolver in his right. “Whyn’tcha have a seat on the sofa in there?” he suggests.

  So I do, and he walks across to the other side of the room, weaving a little, to put the revolver on top of the TV set while he looks at all the cards and papers in my wallet, peering owlishly at them, having trouble focusing, I suppose, because he’s had too much to drink.

  Well, this can only help. Not only will he see I’ve told him the truth about my name, but I now realize my old employee ID from Halcyon is still in there, I never did find a moment to throw that away. (I probably didn’t want to throw it away.)

  I see the instant he finds the ID; his brow clears at once, and he’s grinning in a much more friendly fashion when he next looks over at me. “Well, Mr. Devore,” he says, “it looks like I owe you an apology.”

  “Not at all,” I say. “I’m the one to apologize, walking in here, falling asleep…”

  “Over and done with,” he says, and crosses the room to hand me my wallet. “You want a beer?”

  “Very much so,” I say, and that isn’t a lie.

  “You want a little something in it?”

  “Only if you are.”

  “Come on to the kitchen,” he says, then looks at the revolver on the TV set as though surprised and not pleased to see it still around. Picking it up, pointing it away from me, toward the hall, he says, “Let me get rid of this.”

  “Fine by me,” I tell him, with a shaky smile.

  He laughs and starts off, saying, “I’m Ralph, by the way. You’re Burke?”

  “That’s right.”

  I stand in the hall while he stows the revolver in his bedside table drawer. Coming back out, he says, “Be damned if I know what help I can be, but I’ll try. A lot of these owners— Come on along.”

  We walk toward the kitchen, and he continues, “A lot of these owners are what I would call pricks. I’ve heard about them. Got no more loyalty than a ferret.”

  “That’s about right,” I say.

  “Fortunately,” he says, slurring the word, “we got good owners at Arcadia.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  In the kitchen, he pulls two cans of beer from the refrigerator and hands me one, then opens an upper cabinet door and brings out a bottle of rye. “Sweeten to taste,” he suggests, putting the bottle on the counter.

  I follow his lead. He opens the beer, takes a deep swig, then fills up the can from the rye bottle. I open and drink, and when he hands me the bottle I do a trick a bartender showed me at a company party years ago. One of the people on my line was getting drunk on vodka and grapefruit juice, and when I had a word with the bartender he told me, “I already cut him off.” “But you’re still pouring,” I objected, and he grinned and said, “Next time, watch.” So I did, and if you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t see it. He put in the ice cubes and then tipped the vodka bottle over the glass, slipping his thumb over the open top just before it would pour, and pulling the thumb back again as the bottle came upright, all in one easy sliding pouring movement. Then he filled the glass with grapefruit juice and handed it to the drunk, who didn’t get any more drunk at that party.

  So that’s what I do now. I drink some of the beer, and then, half turned away from Fallon, I tilt the rye bottle over the hole in the top of the can, keeping the rye in the bottle with my thumb, then stand the bottle on the counter.

  Fallon wants to click beer cans, so we do, and he says, “To the bosses, the rotten ones. May we piss on their graves,” and we drink. “Come on and sit down,” he says, and staggers a bit as he pulls a chair out at the kitchen table.

  We sit across from one another at the table, and he says, “Tell me about your line there. What kinda extruder you got? No, wait a second.” And he gets up and reels over to the counter to grab the rye bottle and bring it back and plunk it on the table between us. Then he reels to the refrigerator and gets two more beer cans and smacks them down at our places. “For later,” he says, and
sits down and says, “So? Tell me whatcha got.”

  44

  I’m sorry when, at last, he does fall asleep. I shouldn’t be sorry, because it’s very late, past midnight by his kitchen clock, but to tell the truth, I enjoyed our conversation. He’s okay, Ralph Fallon. More crude than most of the people I know, because he came up from the laborer ranks instead of out of college like most of us, but a bright guy and very knowledgeable about the job. In fact, he told me a couple of things he’s done on the line there at Arcadia that are very interesting, methods I’ll certainly keep in place when I take over.

  And he can definitely drink. He was already drunk when he came home, and since we’ve been seated together here at his kitchen table he’s had eight more beers, each of them well laced with rye. I haven’t kept up at all (I don’t think he expects people to keep up with him), having only five beers and not adding any whiskey—though I did fake it every time—but I’m feeling it. I’m feeling a lot of things, really; the beer, the lateness of the hour, the knowledge that I’m almost at the end of this series of trials, and a stupid sentimental attachment to Ralph Fallon.

  In my wooziness, my weakness, I even try to imagine scenarios in which Fallon lives and yet I get what I want. I talk him into retiring, or I explain my situation and he offers me a job as co-manager on the line, or he suddenly wakes up and tells me Arcadia is going to two shifts and will need a night manager on the line.

  But none of that happens, or is going to happen. My long pleasant beery shoptalk session with Ralph Fallon is over; it is time to be serious.

  Weary, feeling as though I weigh a thousand pounds, I get to my feet and reach for my windbreaker, on the back of the chair to my right. In the right pocket is the small roll of duct tape. I take it out and look at it, and then look at Fallon, slumped in his chair across the table from me, chin on chest, left hand on the table, right hand in his lap.

  I don’t want to do this. But there are always things we don’t want to do, and we do them.

  I walk around the table, go to my knees beside Fallon, and very gently tape his right ankle to the chair leg. Then I crawl around him on all fours—it’s too much effort to stand and walk and kneel again—and tape his left ankle to the other chair leg. Then, with a small groan, I do stand.

  It would be safer, surer, if I could tape his wrists to- gether, but I’m afraid if I tried to move his arms he would wake up, so instead I run tape around the chair back and his torso, just above the elbows. It’s tricky doing this without letting the tape make too much noise when I pull it from the roll, but at last I get it around him twice, snug and secure. He’ll be able to move his hands and forearms, but not, I think, effectively.

  With what I do next, he’s certainly going to wake up, so I’d better do it fast and clean. I pull off two small lengths of tape, stand over him with a piece of duct tape in each hand, then with an abrupt motion slap the first piece against his mouth, pressing it against the flesh.

  He does wake up, startled, eyes popping open, all of his limbs jerking. He’s still trying to understand what’s happening and why he can’t move when I press the second piece of duct tape over his nose, squeezing the nostrils shut. Then I step back from him and turn away, to search the kitchen drawers while he dies.

  What I need is a candle. Like the flashlight, and for the same reason of unreliable electric service, every country kitchen keeps a stub of candle somewhere.

  Yes, here it is, in the drawer with the balls of string and the extra twisties and the spare keys, a short fat candle of the kind people light in church when they want their prayers answered. I take down a saucer from an upper cabinet, put it on the counter near the stove, put the candle on the saucer.

  Meantime, Fallon is making terrible noises. Now that I’ve found the candle, now that there’s nothing to distract me, I hate those noises, and so I leave the room, carrying my windbreaker with me.

  I put on the windbreaker as I walk through the house. The gloves and the iron pipe are in the other outer pocket. I won’t be needing the pipe, but I will take it away with me; in the meantime, I put on the gloves. Starting at the far end of the house, at the front door, I use my gloved hands to wipe everything I can think of that I touched, and I turn off the lights as I go, except that I leave the bedside lamp lit in his bedroom.

  Fallon is quiet now, slumped again. I remove the duct tape from his ankles and then his torso, and he falls forward so his head hits the table. I have to lift his head, trying not to see those staring eyes, and when I pull the last two pieces of duct tape away I discover he’s thrown up, into his mouth and then into his nose and lungs because it couldn’t come out through the tape. So he didn’t suffocate, he drowned. A miserable end, either way.

  I use one of his small plastic trash bags for the pieces of duct tape, then put the bag in my windbreaker pocket. I use one of his wooden kitchen matches to light the candle.

  In New York State, gas stoves don’t have pilot lights, they have electric igniters. I switch on the front two burners of his stove, leave them on high, and blow out the flames. I then leave the kitchen, closing its inner door behind me, so there are now no openings from the kitchen.

  By the light from the bedroom, I make my way back through the house and out the door that Fallon hadn’t known was unlocked. I walk briskly past the front of the house, seeing the low winking light of the candle flame, and the four tall skinny metal bottles of propane gas tucked into the corner of the outside wall where the enclosed porch ends. I continue on out the driveway and down the road to the Voyager.

  I have no idea how long it will take. I don’t want to be here when it happens, but I want to be close enough to know it did happen. And I assume, when the stove blows, it will set off the propane bottles as well. There shouldn’t be too much of Fallon or the kitchen left, but there should be just enough to make it clear what happened. A drunk fell asleep, unaware that he’d miscalculated in turning on the stove. I don’t suppose anyone who knows Ralph Fallon will be surprised.

  I get into the Voyager and drive slowly past the house and on the few miles to the intersection where I should turn right for Arcadia. I stop there, and look in the rearview mirror, and then make a U-turn in the middle of the intersection. There’s no other traffic at all.

  I’m about half a mile from the intersection, on the way back to Fallon’s house, when the sudden yellow light switches on some distance ahead of me, showing woods and houses in silhouette. It begins to die down, as though someone had switched on a bright light and then smoothly rotated the dimmer, but then it flares brighter than before, with red and white mixed into the yellow, and again dims down, and the double blast rolls over the car like a wave, like a physical thing.

  I stop the car. I make another U-turn. I drive home.

  45

  Every era, and every nation, has its own characteristic morality, its own code of ethics, depending on what the people think is important. There have been times and places when honor was considered the most sacred of qualities, and times and places that gave every concern to grace. The Age of Reason promoted reason to be the highest of values, and some peoples—the Italians, the Irish—have always felt that feeling, emotion, sentiment was the most important. In the early days of America, the work ethic was our greatest expression of morality, and then for a while property values were valued above everything else, but there’s been another more recent change. Today, our moral code is based on the idea that the end justifies the means.

  There was a time when that was considered improper, the end justifying the means, but that time is over. We not only believe it, we say it. Our government leaders always defend their actions on the basis of their goals. And every single CEO who has commented in public on the blizzard of downsizings sweeping America has explained himself with some variant on the same idea: The end justifies the means.

  The end of what I’m doing, the purpose, the goal, is good, clearly good. I want to take care of my family; I want to be a productive part of society;
I want to put my skills to use; I want to work and pay my own way and not be a burden to the taxpayers. The means to that end has been difficult, but I’ve kept my eye on the goal, the purpose. The end justifies the means. Like the CEOs, I have nothing to feel sorry for.

  The weekend following the death of Ralph Fallon, I spend in a kind of contented daze, not thinking, not worrying, not making plans. The call will come, I know it will. The position is open, and the call will come.

  But the call does not come on Monday, and by midafternoon, alone in the house, Marjorie at Dr. Carney’s, me pacing and pacing, listening for the phone that doesn’t ring, I’m beginning to picture troubling alternatives. Was there some other resumé I didn’t pay close enough attention to, and he got the call instead of me? Are they promoting from within their work force, over there at Arcadia?

  Am I going to have to go back over there and kill some other son of a bitch? How much do I have to do before I get my fair chance?

  I’m not going to stop, I know I’m not. I’d love to stop, I want desperately to stop, but I’m not going to stop until I’ve got that job.

  I know how to protect myself now. I will not be made a victim, never again. Anyone who tries to make trouble for me, from now on, with what I now know, anyone at all, corporate or personal, is in for a surprise.

  It would be better all around if that fucking phone would ring.

  46

  Tuesday, I’m very distracted during the counseling session. Unless Quinlan or Marjorie speaks to me directly, I don’t listen to what they’re saying, and I add nothing. Fortunately, they’re both involved enough in whatever they’re discussing not to notice my absence.

  What I’m thinking about is Arcadia. I’m thinking I’ll have to go over there tomorrow, find out what’s going on. It seems to me the best way is to get to the luncheonette when the workers come in at noontime, and listen to what they have to say.

  Of course, the danger there is that I might be recognized later. I’m wondering if there’s any theatrical place around where I could buy a mustache that wouldn’t look fake. Or should I start growing a mustache, and be clean-shaven tomorrow and mustached when I finally get the job?