Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  “They have no decency,” said Tierney, his eyes charred, features drawn, like some fanatical, ascetic priest.

  Betty nodded dumbly, nostalgic for his torturer’s hand soon as he withdrew it, though her shoulder still chanted with pain. Tierney rapidly left the bedroom and then the suite.

  When Betty emerged Alloway was still complaining. “You didn’t tell me about the funeral.” He stood there tall and limp, his lower lip dangling.

  “Come along then and we can talk in the limousine,” Betty said, efficient again. “I don’t see any disrespect in that. After all, it’s an appropriate occasion for the subject matter. I sincerely believe my mother and Billie would approve. They never liked Joe Detweiler from the beginning. Now it turns out, in the irony of fate, that they had to die to confirm their intuition.”

  Alloway jotted this down while Arthur tried to clear an obstruction that blocked his throat, barricaded his eyes, and corrupted his breathing. He did not soon succeed: he understood for the first time that Betty was utterly wanting in a sense of justice. As fair play was at the essence of Arthur’s mystique, on the one hand, and his life was unconditionally coexistent with Betty’s, on the other, he must part company with himself or rub elbows with a madman. Therefore he relinquished his integrity and said nothing. Detweiler would presumably not be framed. Whatever Betty said, the police and the courts must establish evidence of his guilt before they could execute the poor devil. Public justice still prevails, whatever the private arrangements under which we labor, all of us who live with women.

  “I foolishly defended him,” Betty went on, not to Alloway but to her readers. “Certainly he was strange, but frankly I never saw the violence in him. The sensitive hands that worked so delicately in clay, that they might be lethal instruments…”

  Alloway requested her to slow down so he could get it word for word.

  “You ought to get a tape recorder,” Betty said. “I’m misquoted repeatedly in the first installment and you added things of your own. I certainly don’t mind cuts, because I understand the space problem, but to see material printed under my name that I did not utter—”

  Alloway felt it politic to caution her. “Of course, we can’t print prejudicial statements against Detweiler until the police find him, and maybe not then unless he confesses immediately. If he does, of course we can go whole hog.”

  “That I know,” Betty said. “‘His hands might be lethal instruments.’ I’m not saying they were. Yours or mine might be.”

  Or mine, thought Arthur, enjoying the newfound freedom of a fragmented personality.

  “Well, anyway,” said Betty, “he will confess when they get him. I know Joe Detweiler. He may be a murderer, but he’s not a liar. As for me, I feel only pity for him, not revenge.”

  Chapter 8

  DETWEILER had a gratifying journey, though many of the other passengers groused about the degeneration of the railroads; the aisle was ankle-high in litter; a half-dozen seats were broken; the water tank was soon dry and never replenished; the conductor materialized only to take tickets, smile at the complaints, and vanish. But, insofar as he had any sense of privation, Detweiler enjoyed roughing it. He thought of the oldtime travelers in their coaches, bumping along behind foam-flecked horses where these twin bands of shining steel now ran: incredible, what time had wrought. Earlier, a trackless waste; and much, much earlier, acres of primeval slime in which dinosaurs wallowed, mastodons trumpeted; preceding all that, the earth had been an undifferentiated, infinitesimal piece of the sun, a whiff of burning gas that had spun off the parent body, cooled, and solidified. A splendid mystery, a source of joy.

  Detweiler put his head against the cushion, his ankles on the opposite seat—one of the broken ones, so that he was denying nobody—and occupied with his universal reflections, in no time at all he had completed his journey. Fellow passengers had come and gone, he spoke to none. He was anonymous, pale and fair, almost invisible.

  In the middle of the night, lamps extinguished, a drunken sailor en route to the toilet fell on him when the train lurched. Awake but quiescent as a bundle of old clothes, Detweiler let the man collect himself and wander on, leaving behind a sour odor, the stench of life unrealized: poor devil, groping through the night, benumbed, forsaking his instinctive strengths. Detweiler found it hard to understand such a person, easier to forgive him; obviously he was the passive type, did not knowingly seek to obstruct the flow of transcendental energy, just occasionally tripped and fell in its way, could be stepped over.

  But next morning, having arrived at his destination, and taken a quick, refreshing wash-up in the station, Detweiler went out into the breath-catching cold of the yet snowless street, found a lunch counter, and there came across another kind of human being, that specimen who embodied negative principles with positive force.

  It took Detweiler a while to understand, sitting there on the stool, facing the chromium-plated napkin container, that he was being ignored by the individual who should have taken his order: a white-capped man, fully mature, knobby-faced, to whom Detweiler was initially of course sympathetic, looking forward as he was to a cup of steaming coffee milked down to a chocolate tan, and two doughnuts virginally dressed in sugar. He inhaled the perfume of the fried bacon, the bouquet of toast, thrilled to the yellow flow of egg on the plate of his right-hand neighbor. Though he could not himself afford such luxuries, he venerated all those who trafficked in them.

  Therefore he tolerated the counterman, who was deliberately tidying up around the coffee urn with a stained rag, and called to him in a friendly voice. No response. Five other customers applied themselves to their cups and dishes; some were friends and conversed in an amiable hum. Someone departed, squeezing along the narrow aisle behind Detweiler in a bulky coat, pleasantly brushing his back, blowing cigarette smoke over him, which, though he did not himself use tobacco, had an interesting, pungent, stimulating aroma.

  Again he called out, no less genially should the man be deaf, and the subject slowly turned, stared at him briefly in unspecified, neutral hatred, turned back, filled a coffee cup sloppily so that the saucer ran with liquid, served it up.

  “And two sugar doughnuts, please,” Detweiler said for the third time, as he saw the man act as if the exchange were closed.

  Again he was ignored. The counterman as of old worked with his brown rag. Detweiler lifted the napkin dispenser, found it of suitable weight—for he knew what he was doing and though enraged was not the victim of a feckless impulse—and with ardent force and commanding accuracy threw it into the counterman’s head.

  The target jerked with the impact, white cap flying off as though winged. He fell forward into the coffee urn, cut his mouth or nose on a gleaming tap, folded, and dropped to the floor behind the counter, bleeding fore and aft. The other eaters froze in their respective positions, one with fork in the air; another averted his eyes for a long moment.

  Detweiler left the stool, put on his coat, lifted his pack from the wall-hook, and since he had not partaken of the fare, walked past the front counterman, the one who doubled as cashier, without paying. “Hey,” said this person, torn between the cash register and his colleague on the floor, but not at all sure of which represented his principal responsibility, if either. Detweiler was only vaguely conscious of the iterated “Hey’s” as he went through the door, taking the cold air in his face, and having turned the corner, forgot the incident utterly. He was not followed.

  By means of public conveyance Detweiler reached an area which he recognized through elapsed time rather than its name—he had no quarrel with Time in such practical applications, used it without thought—walked three blocks still guided by his instinct, entered a shabby building through a rank of ashcans, climbed three dark, odorous flights of stair, and knocked upon a twilit door.

  He heard someone shuffle up on the other side and throw the latch. It opened not cautiously but all the way, swinging back. There stood a woman, gray-haired, eyeglassed, medium-stout, but resembling h
im all the same, so much so that he got a queer catch in his throat when he looked into the eyes so companion to his own.

  “Hello, Mother,” said he.

  Mrs. Detweiler answered: “Hi, Joey.” She stepped aside for his entrance, scrubbing her hands on her print apron of blue and white. She said: “I bet you never had your breakfast.”

  “‘Bet’?” said Detweiler in ironic amusement, of which he was capable only with his mother, because in all the world she was for him the only eccentric. A spiritualist, she got most of her information from the other world; hence Detweiler’s question: she seldom “bet,” being usually certain.

  In a certain defiance she said: “Wasn’t I right?”

  He grinned and nodded. He was greatly fond of her.

  “Then come on,” she said. “I knew you would be showing up sometime today, so I got ready with all your favorites, made applesauce and a devil’s food cake and bought some of that rattrap cheese you like to melt and everything.”

  He followed her into the redolent kitchen, remembering that each time he came to visit she supplied a new list of his favorite foods, presumably obtained through spiritual channels—and never accurate, except in the sense that he was omnivorous and devoured everything with zest. But the few dishes that stood above the rest in his estimation—hot dogs covered with both chili con carne and sauerkraut; very hard to obtain at lunch counters or street stalls, where it was usually either-or; cherry Jello, rice pudding with raisins—she never seemed to hit upon. But then Detweiler had never thought spiritualism held water; his mother was a real crank, though lovable.

  For breakfast he ate three wedges of chocolate cake, a bowl of applesauce, and over his mother’s protests, a cold, not melted, cheese sandwich.

  “Joey,” she said while he was thus occupied, sipping the Postum she favored as an evasion of coffee-nerves, ulcers, and cancer, “Joey, I hear you are getting along very well out there, making progress in every way, and you sure look good. You must be eating well.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Detweiler answered quite seriously. Though he might question the source of her information, which had probably come from some séance, he would not mock her. And anyway, he always told the truth, just as he invariably accepted as truth all that was stated to him. “Yes, I’m doing fine.”

  “Just where is it you are located now?” His mother dipped a crust of bread into the Postum and ate it neatly. Apparently her otherworldly data on him was none too specific.

  He told her, and added: “Everybody is real nice.”

  “Treat someone nice and he’ll be nice,” said Detweiler’s mother. “It runs in a great current, like electricity, around the world. I met a Hindu from India the other day. He said, ‘Hello, sister, we met once in another life’.”

  His mother often encountered Asiatics in her circles and believed they saw farther than Occidentals, using the inner eye.

  She said: “Mr. Lall. He gave me a reading on you, Joey. It seems you are overcoming resistances and are going to make out well in the end if you stay patient. For you, animals represent a positive value. Do you still work with animals, Joey?”

  Detweiler finished his second glass of milk. “Oh, I am always somewhere near animals, Mother. You can bank on that.”

  Beside the plate he found the napkin in his old napkin ring, which had obviously been polished for his homecoming: his mother did give such demonstrations of clairvoyance. Detweiler never denied her gift; it was just that predictions of the future had no utility for him. The central problem remained eternal: how a man might realize his force. All animals did, with no reflection, no doubt, and no apology. A tiger killed, a rabbit ran, an owl sat motionless in daylight, a snake flowed along the ground; and these were not murder, cowardice, sloth, and guile, but rather respective expressions of peculiar truths.

  “Ah!” said Detweiler, slapping the napkin against the tabletop. “I forgot, I have a Christmas present for you, Mother.” He went to his haversack and brought from it a bundle wrapped in a maroon sweater. “Sorry I didn’t have gift paper, but it would have been difficult to make a decent package of it anyway, because of the awkward shape. I hope you like it.”

  He wound off the sweater, being careful because the object within caught here and there on the weave, and at last revealed a common gray squirrel, stuffed and mounted on a base of varnished walnut. The small animal sat on its haunches and held a beechnut between two paws, not yet nibbling but about to: you could almost see the tiny mouth twitch, so true it was.

  Mrs. Detweiler took it reverently into her broad-fingered hands, peered into the bright-button eyes, stroked the fur.

  “I like it, Joey. It is swell. If you don’t mind me saying so, it is more real-life than them clay images you used to make, and represents an advance in thought and mind.”

  Detweiler cocked his head against his right shoulder, an attitude in which he was usually photographed as a boy, an expression not of appeal, which is how it was often interpreted, but rather of contemplation.

  “It isn’t bad,” he had to admit. “Of course you must understand it is dead, Mother, an attempt to preserve or to remember what was once perfect. This is no longer a squirrel, and for that reason there is a sadness about it. But sculpture starts as nothing, and thus if anything results from it, it is a triumph.”

  Mrs. Detweiler got her eyeglasses out of a frayed leather case she carried in an apron pocket, put them on, and further inspected the stuffed animal, from time to time looking benignly over it at her son. “You are reaching out, Joey. You are crossing the barrier.”

  Detweiler stubbornly shook his head, not at her but at a thought of how little he had achieved. “I don’t do sculpture any more. It doesn’t go far enough.” A constriction developed in his throat, a weight fell behind his forehead. He sat down again. “Nor taxidermy. I quit my job with that guy. I worked for a while at a zoo, cleaning out cages and feeding animals so I could be near them, study their methods. But they don’t have methods, Mother, but ways, which are hard to understand if you are a human being, though we are also basically animals.”

  “With spirits, son,” his mother said gently, placing the squirrel alongside her cup. “Why don’t you come and lay down now awhile, and if you want I’ll find the old book, which I always kept, and I’ll read you about Peter Rabbit and Reddy Fox, like I used to and what started you out on animals in the beginning.”

  Though a crackpot perhaps, his mother was one of the finest people in the world and Detweiler tried always to please her, so he followed along patiently into the bedroom. Then, having removed his shoes, he lay down on the crazy quilt. His mother soon found the childish book, drew her chair from the sewing machine to the bedside, and in the light that penetrated the sooty curtains began to read.

  Before long Detweiler fell asleep. His mother continued to read aloud, simulating the various voices, Peter Rabbit in a high yet robust tone, Reddy Fox with a sinister half-lisp. The pages opened easily and lay quite limp; years ago the binding had been cracked when Detweiler’s father threw it at her.

  Clegg had a big mother of a hangover in the morning, owing not so much to his own drinking as to being all night at close quarters with Starr. When he raised the window for a clean breath, Starr woke up howling about the cold, predicting pneumonia. So down it came again, and Clegg returned to the twin bed alongside his subject’s, where he sat, too warm in shirtsleeves, in near asphyxiation from the sweetish rye-fumes emanating from Starr’s open mouth and the glassful on the night table between them.

  Soon as Starr’s breathing again indicated somnolence, Clegg began his crafty appeals to the man’s subliminal self.

  The first pitch, put in a soft, crooning voice, was: “I don’t blame you for doing it, Andy. They had it coming if anybody ever did.”

  Starr breathed on; it was still too soon after the extinguishing of the lamp to get any optical intelligence of him. But even when Clegg’s night-vision was fully instituted, the room proved too dark to see much. He put on t
he bathroom light, leaving the door ajar, but shortly Starr cried out. So it was utter darkness and foul air: Clegg’s image of hell.

  “How did you do it?” he said next, after an appropriate interval and in a voice of wonder. “That’s what I can’t understand. A slender, sick man like yourself. Appleton outweighed you by forty pounds.”

  Starr turned over. Clegg persisted: “Tell me, Andy. I admire you, a man who defends his home!” Starr murmured into the pillow. Clegg stole across and put his ear close: “Beg pardon?” He stopped off his inhalation, to defend himself against Starr’s noxious exhale. Silence. “Billie was some piece,” Clegg whispered. “I envy the man who had her. She’d be worth killing for.”

  Starr stirred. Clegg trembled, had to turn his head away to catch a breath. When he came back, Starr said in a dreamy mutter: “Shur off at fockin radio, lemme shleep.”

  Clegg withdrew, still far from discouraged. He had got a response that indicated he had been at least heard. Having planted the seeds, he would stay awake all night to listen for the bloom. After some hours, however, the warm air and the darkness degenerated his will; he fell into a coma, starting awake from time to time at the sound of human speech, but was too groggy to comprehend it: he seemed to be capped in foam rubber.

  When he at last came fully to, his watch put the time at 10 A.M. The drapes were pulled wide, and a snowy, eye-hurting light was extant. Starr sat eating breakfast from a wheeled tray of silver-domed dishes. He was dressed again in the resort clothing.

  Turning his skinny neck in the Hawaiian shirt, he said to Clegg: “You know you talk in your sleep? Kept me awake half the night. I almost walked out on you, and then where would your story be? I want a private room from now on, get me? I ain’t anybody you can push around. I can sell my story to any paper in town, and don’t forget it.”

  He used Clegg’s desolate look to flog himself into further indignation, strutting with his head and shoulders, though seated, spitting out little fragments of toast. “I ought to call your boss.”