Killing Everybody

by Mark Harris

  “God’s team needs more practice,” said Officer Phelps. “Let’s all calm down and go home and get a good night’s sleep,” said Brown, “if the dogs don’t bark all night.”

  Luella stood. Phelps had the opportunity to observe her full, and she was trim for an old lady, and no mistake, and the time was on her bosom, and Officer Phelps said, “By the way, can you tell me what time it is?” She had a really neat bosom, this old chick. She consulted her bosom and told him the time, turned off the television, turned out the lights, and departed with her “husband” Brown and Officer Phelps, locking the door behind them.

  On the sidewalk Phelps said, “I’m worried about this Stanley. If it upsets you I can do something about it. Anyhow, I’ll take his name,” standing poised there to jot down Stanley’s name on Luella’s envelope. “How do you spell Krannick?” he asked.

  “It’s on the envelope,” Luella said.

  “I want to make you easier in your mind,” said Phelps.

  “I’m for that,” said Brown.

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  I’d like that, the policeman heard. Damn it all, she had a neat voice, this old chick. The way she said things! Then, too, there’s nothing like a woman in distress to quicken a fellow’s interest, no matter how old she is. “I’ll drop around,” he said. “Maybe around this time tomorrow night.”

  “If you make it definite I’ll be here,” Luella said.

  “Then I’ll be here, too,” he said.

  “I’m sure,” she said, for she knew men.

  Three

  Luella and Brown walked arm in arm a few steps west on Geary Boulevard, one full block north to Clement Street, and east beyond the intersection of Clement Street with a dark little street known as Narrow Alley. Refer to David Schneiderman’s map on page 258 showing Narrow Alley and adjacent thoroughfares. Narrow Alley was one block long, north and south between Geary and Clement, and that was all. Under other circumstances (that is to say, had Luella been alone) Luella would have walked through the alley from Geary to Clement to her parked car.

  But when she was with Brown she always avoided Narrow Alley. Her reasons will become obvious to us. Recall the artist’s map on page 258! “He’s a very nice young man,” Luella said.

  “I think so,” said Brown. “We need educated policemen.”

  “He must punish Stanley,” she said, as they turned the corner into Clement.

  “Sweetheart, he can’t do that,” said Brown.

  “Is my head unclear?” she asked.

  “It will clear,” he said.

  “Then you’d better drive,” she said, giving him her keys.

  Well, that was better, Brown thought. She was recovering. When Stanley came to the city Luella fell into illusions. Then she returned to reality by stages. “I shouldn’t have gone to that headquarters,” Brown said. “It was in — well, you remember Mordecai’s Toys. That’s where it was. I raced after Schwarzlose to go down in the elevator with him. I should have waited for the next elevator.”

  “You dream of reconciling with him,” she said. “Forgiveness is beautiful.”

  “You’re a beautiful person for believing in forgiveness,” said Brown. “But I’m not.”

  “I know he won’t be there when we get there,” she said, proving her clarity of mind to herself: Junie won’t be there, she meant, because Junie is dead. Upon nights when her mind was less clear she expected Junie to be at home in the house with all the lights ablaze, doing his homework, studying, reading a book, watching television, talking with a friend on the telephone.

  “That’s correct,” said Brown, “he won’t.” He was driving east on Geary, crossing Park Presidio, thinking My Very Dear Officer Phelps, On a recent evening I happened to notice you made an illegal left turn from Park Presidio into Geary Boulevard. One of the worst violations of our civilization is the improper exercise of privilege. If police are above the law, continuing to Divisadero, and south on Divisadero through the sluggish night traffic of the black belt, where bleakness was at least concrete and visible, as opposed to the intangible bleakness of soul he felt tonight. At Divisadero & Oak Streets Luella turned her head slightly to see that store, now vacant, which had once been her father’s barber shop. As a girl of sixteen she had cut gentlemen’s hair for her father. With the corning of the blacks her father moved to the Avenues. At Castro & Market Streets they crossed the streetcar tracks beside the mouth of the tunnel through which Brown’s father for thirty-five years, piloted the “M” car back and forth. At Castro & Eighteenth Brown turned toward the Peaks and ascended, and soon to Yukon Street, turning up Yukon, hoping to see that Junie had left the lights ablaze throughout the house.

  Brown had bought this house from Luella twenty years ago because he loved Luella with her little watch on a chain upside down on her bosom. Oh what a bosom Luella had! Often he asked her the time.

  Here she brought Junie as a baby, too, moving out of Stanley’s apartment item by item, article by article, everything but Junie’s crib, so that in the beginning Junie slept in a bureau drawer, and then she brought the crib, too, piece by dismantled piece, and she was no longer Stanley’s wife but Brown’s now, who — Brown — had apparently quite departed the severity of his beginnings. A few years earlier he had been an earnest student advancing upon his ordination at Faith Calvary Central, but soon he was a writer (so to speak) for a newspaper avowedly secular and essentially godless, living in a house bought upon doubtful credit with a woman and child whose husband and father Brown had routed, and all this — most incredible! — with no sensation of his own wickedness, lawlessness, godlessness, or immorality, but as if, rather, God looking down upon his actions could easily approve these things he had done, and might have said, had God deigned to speak to someone so lowly, “Very well, Brown, I see that you saved that woman and child from a hell of their own. I will take your case under advisement.”

  Needless to say, the house was dark, for Junie was dead. Buried in Asia. A boy’s bicycle stood in the driveway to remind them, as the owner intended, of himself, Christopher, who lived down Eagle Street. Christopher was the “neglected child” whom Brown had mentioned to Officer Phelps in Luella’s “real-estate office.” The boy ran unattended night and day. His parents worked at the Welton plant, manufacturing explosives for “danger pay.” Across the street the Fernes’ dog, Paprika, howled without interruption. Whereas Paprika had formerly howled only by day he now howled by night, too. Paprika would howl all night at every blowing leaf, at every wisp of drifting fog. “I’ve got to do something about this boy,” said Brown.

  But it wasn’t the boy who angered him, or cost him sleep. It was the dog, Paprika, and the Fernes who owned him. He had acted without effect by mail and by telephone, and once having acted anonymously in any matter he judiciously disassociated himself from any outward complaint. Right-o. Why risk it? On some issues he was open, upon others he was anonymous, and things worked better that way: he was effective. Effective? Yes, look at the things he had accomplished, most notably — what? What was the most notable thing he had accomplished with his anonymity? Was it a telephone call? Was it a letter? Had anything good ever come of his letters to Loony Bin Johnson in envelopes addressed thus?

  Former President Lyndon B. Johnson

  “Greatest Mass Murderer of Recent Time”

  Texas

  Or to Harry Truman, addressed with as little courtesy?

  Former President Harry S. Truman

  Atomic Bomber of Japanese Men,

  Women, & Children

  Missouri

  My Very Dear Mr. Former President:

  How does it feel to know that you will be going down in history as the greatest mass murderer of recent time?

  Yours very truly,

  AN AMERICAN CITIZEN

  Such letters would tend to antagonize their recipients. How could Brown even know
if these letters reached their destinations? Could he have registered them? What, register anonymous insulting letters to former Presidents of the United States! Return receipts requested? No, he had no way of knowing his effect, if any. He knew only that these men seemed to go right along in spite of him — building libraries, inviting former associates to the dedications of these libraries, conferring, parading, barbecuing, striding along, telling their rules of health, submitting to physical examinations, proofreading their autobiographies, guarded by the Secret Service, and all this in spite of their having condemned to death thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children, Japanese or otherwise. Were they to go unpunished for such things?

  Therefore, in those cases Brown had no way of knowing whether he was effective. Was he even legal? Could he be prosecuted for those crimes — if crimes they were — or, if not punished, chastised, blacklisted, reproved, “placed under observation,” as the newspapers put it, in some first-rate hospital? By now he ceased to care. Let him be caught. He would be happy in a cell. Luella would visit him. Considering the violation of the world, Brown could scarcely complain of anything that might happen to him. He looked back upon his actions to date as generally useful, so that, if pressed to answer the question we have raised, “What was the most notable thing he had accomplished with his anonymity?” he would reply, “My letter to Stanley Krannick, Luella’s unspeakable husband, Junie’s father. . . .”

  That letter was Brown’s first crime, and he knew it was a crime, too, and yet he proceeded, fully aware that he was intervening in processes established by law and precedent governing relationships between husbands and wives. On the other hand, Stanley’s cruelty to the baby Junie continued in spite of Luella’s complaints to the constituted agencies. What, then, when these agencies fail? When they lie on their backs? Even by that age, young as he then was, Brown had become weary of hearing of the virtue of “going through channels,” for it appeared to him that the channels were clogged, like the lines to God, and that all this piety in social controversy was only a way of preventing justice from occurring.

  Take the law into his own hands? Certainly Brown would not have done so had the law appeared to function. He began to feel that he had not only a right but a duty to “take the law into his own hands.” In the matter of Junie he proceeded both legally and otherwise. He personally and in the most legal fashion carried his complaint to the Child Welfare Federation; but once this course appeared to fail he illegally proceeded to write threateningly to Stanley on stolen stationery above a forged or invented signature.

  From the point of view of the Child Welfare Federation, located in those days in a low office building, now demolished, on Market Street near Second, Brown was a suspicious type well known to the Federation (it thought) — a troublemaker, a nut. Besides, the employees of the Federation had tons of things to do. They were behind in their filing. They were soon to move to a new building. And yet when Brown entered their office and saw the various employees at their leisure he wondered why no investigation could be conducted into the case of Stanley Krannick. On the morning Brown entered the office the workers were sitting about drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and munching candy bars, apparently feeling not the slightest contradiction between these actions and their statements to Brown that “we’re just so awfully short-staffed here we can’t undertake new investigations. It will be eight weeks before we can assign a worker to the case. But leave us your address. If you change your telephone number, please inform us.”

  Brown’s primary relationship with the Federation was through a black man (called, in those days, a Negro) wearing cracked spectacles, whose name Brown soon forgot, but from whom, in another sense, Brown borrowed a name. “We can’t wait eight weeks,” said Brown to the black man. “In eight weeks the baby might be dead. This baby is being tortured every night.”

  The black man with the cracked spectacles was experienced, thorough, and skeptical. “Have you ever seen this man torturing this baby?” he inquired. “Can you tell me exact dates and places?”

  “His mother has told me repeatedly,” said Brown. “He pinches the baby’s nostrils. He suffocates the baby.”

  “Are you a friend of the mother?” the black man asked.

  “I’m trying to be,” said Brown.

  “Are you presently a bachelor?” the black man asked.

  “If you think I’m up to something,” said Brown, “why don’t you do something temporary while you investigate? Can’t you bring some temporary restraint against him?”

  “Not without evidence certainly,” said the black man.

  “Look at you standing there smoking cigarettes,” said Brown. “I detest you. I’m beginning to lose my temper. The child is being tortured to death. To death! I guarantee you. And you stand there so coolly. . . .”

  “Why haven’t we heard from its mother?” the Federation worker asked.

  “Its mother,” cried Brown, trembling with rage. “She called you several times. She never reached the same person twice. This child is a human being being tortured by another. He pinches the baby’s nostrils closed while he’s lying in the crib until the baby is almost dead, and then he releases the nostrils. His mother protests. His answer to that is to hit her with a golf club. Then he buys her a gift on Mother’s Day.”

  Afterward, in the long psychological treatment Junie endured, the doctor discovered that Junie’s father, Stanley, smothering Junie daily, pinching Junie’s nostrils, clapping his palm over Junie’s mouth, had simply left Junie with the impression that this is how life must be — “Well, this is life, I guess,” the baby Junie concluded, lying in his crib — for, later, when Stanley was gone and Brown was Junie’s “father,” Junie continued voluntarily in the same way, smothering himself, pinching his own nostrils, “carrying on his father’s work,” in the language of the physician. This was the way things were supposed to happen. This was the father’s duty in life, to smother his child, and if the father (Stanley) went off and abandoned his work, then it was the duty of the son to carry on the father’s work, which included, also, the work of standing in the middle of the living-room hitting a little white plastic golf ball, and sleeping in the mother’s bed, too, until at last Luella expelled Junie from her bed and room besides. Brown remained, the “father,” and yet not the father, either. Oh, how confusing for the boy!

  “I think we can speak of this without undue anger,” said the black man.

  “I’m being quite calm,” said Brown, “and I’m telling you calmly that if you don’t attend to the matter very quickly I’m going to take the law into my own hands.”

  “What will you do?” the black man asked with genuine curiosity.

  “Sir,” said a second Federation worker, who had joined them at the counter, “you must leave things to the discretion of the proper agency.”

  “I’ll kill him,” said Brown.

  “Now, please,” said the black man, taking several sheets of Federation stationery from a shelf, and making notes of the substance of Brown’s remarks, but with less interest, Brown feared, in the data regarding Stanley than in Brown’s own furious and threatening manner of relation.

  “We know you can’t mean what you say,” said the second worker.

  “I mean what I say,” said Brown.

  “Killing?”

  “You’re not listening to me,” Brown said in a low, controlled voice. His hot rage had passed to ice, and to show how, from his point of view, the matter was ended, he snatched the Federation stationery from the hands of the black man, and walked away, out, down the wooden steps of the old building, into the street, and to the Chronicle office, where he composed an abusive letter to Stanley Krannick, signed his name, addressed an envelope, and sealed the letter within.

  Luckily, however, before he mailed that letter he considered it, and in those moments of delay his life fortuitously altered. Was the letter productive? Coul
d it persuade Stanley? Hardly. Perhaps Stanley already knew, as Brown had just learned, that carrying matters to constituted agencies was a long, tedious, futile process. “Why, for gosh sake,” Stanley might easily say, “I can go on torturing my baby as long as I golly-well please. I know all about the snail-like ways of these so-called constituted agencies,” and laugh, and crumple the letter and toss it in the basket, and whack Luella once or twice with a golf club.

  At this point the Federation stationery, which he had carried away with him, appeared to be of potential use. He rolled one sheet into a typewriter at the Chronicle. But no, typewriters might be traced, might they not? If he were to impersonate the Federation, and forge a signature, as he now planned to do, it was well to leave no trace behind. Therefore, leaving the Chronicle office, he traveled all the way to Luella’s “real-estate office,” a distance of five miles, thinking he would use her typewriter, only to discover, when he arrived there, that her office was locked, she was gone, and his plan had in any case evaporated. How was Luella’s typewriter less traceable than Brown’s?

  His fury impeded his mind. Why hadn’t he telephoned her first? Five miles to no purpose! No doubt she was out showing houses (so he imagined). Standing in the doorway of Luella’s “real-estate office” he forced calmness upon himself. Think! Think! He had been racing about like a simpleton from Federation to Chronicle to Luella’s. Was he some sort of primitive man unable to think ahead? He sensed the success of his project, if done right. Think of Junie, he thought. Think of Luella. Take your time and do it right.

  At length, his mind clear, he drove from Luella’s “office” to Station M, United States Post Office, Sixth & Clement, where he bought a stamped envelope, and drove thereafter to the Public Library, McAllister & Larkin, and entered, and walked up the long, wide stairway to the row of coin-operated typewriters soon to become so tempting to him, like the coin-operated telephone, anonymous, untraceable, begging to be used. They were there. They were available. Use me, they cried. He inserted ten cents and a sheet of plain paper and he quickly drafted a brief letter. When that was done he inserted a sheet of stationery of the Child Welfare Federation and he carefully copied his draft, producing the letter which was to become in his opinion “the most notable thing he had accomplished with his anonymity.”