Killing Everybody

by Mark Harris

  My Very Dear Mr. Stanley Krannick:

  We have been receiving reports from many sources concerning your alleged mistreatment of your infant child, “Junie.” Although these reports are scattered and incomplete they are sufficiently numerous to warrant our investigation of them.

  Therefore please be advised that a representative case worker of our Federation will visit you at eleven o’clock Saturday morning. We trust that you will be at home at that hour.

  Yours truly,

  DISTRICT SUPERVISOR

  District Supervisor who? There was a problem. What sorts of names had people who worked for the Child Welfare Federation? Washington? Jefferson? Adams? Hamilton? Was Hamilton even a President? No. Brown named the Presidents as well as he could without striking upon a suitable name, and switched without success from the names of Presidents to the names of his classmates at Faith Calvary Central, and then to the names of city streets, his mind racing all over, and down Nineteenth Avenue — Wawona, Vicente, Ulloa, Taraval, Santiago, Rivera, Quintara, Pacheco, Ortega, and so forth and so on into the park in his mind — but once more without success. He could have risen and walked a short distance to the Union Catalogue and found therein within a half-minute (you’d think) dozens of appropriate names. Telephone books, directories of every kind, and immense lists of names were endlessly available, but Brown was unable to move. Against his knees the table throbbed, its clockwork measuring his thirty minutes. It couldn’t be stopped. Pay as you go; it was relentless. He could think of no name. No name. There was a name to consider. Perhaps it was Lithuanian. Everyname. Anyname. Smith, Jones, almost any name would do, or any name forward or backward. Dog was God spelled backward, live was evil spelled backward.

  Why not initials? Even initials would suffice. Yet even initials required arrangement, and arrangement required invention, and that was it: inventing. He had never learned to invent because he had never been permitted to invent. He was of an austere parentage bent upon truth and facts, and he was only beginning to learn here, now, at this age, perhaps from Luella, for example, and certainly from students, artists, and rakes he met during the course of his journalist’s day, how to change or transpose reality toward the end of improving life, how to imagine.

  Then he saw before him the black man with the cracked spectacles. McCracken Black. There was a name! Upon the page he had used to draft the letter Brown now practiced the signature, McCracken Black, writing it several times until he could write it swoopingly, rhythmically, with a flow, a flair, and when he had achieved confidence he signed the mailing copy of his letter, and he addressed the envelope.

  To have invented a name! True, he had only gone from Brown to Black, and yet, for Brown, this was a tremendous breakthrough, a most satisfying departure from his past — to have been able to introduce the existence of a non-existent creature, to have manufactured a man out of his own mind; this was godlike and uplifting; and now, to alter events, too, that would also be satisfying, uplifting, and most godlike of all, for Brown would force Stanley to cease his cruelty to Junie, and thus rescue a child.

  He sealed the envelope. Carrying his sealed envelope, he walked down the steps of the library, past the checkout desk, into the street, and a half-block to the corner of McAllister & Larkin, opposite Mordecai’s Toys, where, as Brown raised his hand to the mouth of the green mailbox, the wind from the west down McAllister Street almost seized his letter, almost ripped it from his hand, but of course it failed, for if winds made the rules . . . Could he now retrieve the letter from the belly of the green box? Could he legally reach down there? He wished to do so. He had done a bad, wicked thing, and he wished to recall his action. Was it a Federal offense to retrieve one’s own letter? Or did “one’s own letter” cease to be “one’s own” the instant it was dropped into the bowels of the ocean-green box? When was one’s own one’s own? After all, one was no longer who one was; one was now “McCracken Black,” like it or not. Tell that to the Feds.

  “At Larkin & McAllister”

  Headlines Writer Seized

  in Mail Theft — Alias Told

  Was this thing “the most notable” of Brown’s good deeds? Consider the outcome. What day of the week had it been? It was likely Tuesday or Wednesday, the letter delivered Wednesday or Thursday, announcing the hour of eleven o’clock on Saturday.

  However, had “a representative case worker” designated by our friend McCracken Black visited the home of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Krannick and their infant son, Junie, at eleven o’clock Saturday morning he would have learned from Luella that Stanley had stepped out an hour earlier with all his golfing equipment. He was expected home for dinner.

  He never returned. He removed to a small city at a distance — probably Ukiah, conceivably Yreka — now and then returning for an afternoon of golf, or to harass Luella, or to express his scorn for Junie by telling the baby how ugly he was, how much a “mama’s boy,” by taunting him with the question, “Is your mother married to that man in her house?” and by frightening the boy with threatening gestures.

  Stanley sometimes returned to this neighborhood, to the corner of Yukon & Eagle, pausing in his automobile to survey the house where Luella lived, which was dark now, this night — and Junie dead now and buried in Asia — which Luella entered now, followed by Brown, and both pursued by the incessant barking, howling, of the dog Paprika.

  “It’s not only his barking,” said Luella to Brown. “He’s vicious, too. He bit the little girls.”

  “He only bit one little girl,” said Brown, “although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he bit the other any day.”

  Luella walked down the hall. Brown watched her to see if her mind had cleared. If she passed Junie’s room (that is to say, the room which had been Junie’s, where he had slept all the nights of his boyhood and young manhood) without entering it, without knocking on the door, and without making an unrealistic remark about it, Brown would know that she was far better now than she had been this morning, and on her way to clearheadedness. Very good, she went right past, not even glancing at the door. Therefore she was improved. Tomorrow she might be all right again, and Brown followed her down the hall, turning out lights behind him, and carrying with him Volume Twenty-Two of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, showing among other things United States of America, Constitution of. “You see what he did,” Brown said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “He had this big sign on the wall quoting the Constitution. Actually, however, he didn’t quote it fairly. He quoted some words of Article One, which is the first article of the Bill of Rights, and some of Article Two, only he ran it together to make it look as if he was quoting consecutively.”

  “Why would he do that?” Luella asked.

  “To give it his meaning,” said Brown.

  “Well, he’s the one that’s running,” she said.

  Her irrelevancies always charmed Brown. He smiled. “It’s really crooked,” he said. “That’s the point I’m making, he’s a crook, steal from the Constitution, misquote it, corrupt it, there’s no telling what such a man will steal next. I don’t see how you can vote for him.”

  She didn’t plan to, really. “They all steal,” she said. She’d rather see McGinley dead than in Congress. “Who bombed him?” she asked.

  “Nobody bombed him,” said Brown with all patience. “Somebody only phoned it in.”

  “I understand that,” she said. She sounded perfectly clear now. “I mean who’d have wanted to bomb him.” She turned on the television for picture, not sound (that is to say, for light), switching off the overhead light of the bedroom. She had a tendency toward modesty. She “knew men,” as we have elsewhere said (page 37), but in her own bedroom with her own Brown she was still his shy “wife,” preferring a slight darkness when she disrobed. “Why did you tell the policeman you telephoned me?” she asked.

  “I was just sitting in the telephone booth resting my feet,” said Brown. “Wouldn�
��t that have sounded silly?”

  “I’m going to have a little something,” she said. Brown said he’d have a little “something,” too, whatever she was having. She discreetly lifted her skirt and lowered her stocking and removed a great deal of money. She preferred green money to checks, and Brown had always been charmed by this irrelevance, too. Possibly there was more to her attitude than he knew; if so, he’d rather not hear about it. Taxes, he supposed. Something she received under the table. The real-estate people were always concealing something from the general public, evading government regulations — charging “points” when forbidden to call it money, for example — and he’d as soon hear none of the details. Therefore, as usual, he took as little notice as possible of the money she withdrew from her stocking.

  Luella, one stocking drooping, poured two small glasses of sherry, their little “something,” and sat with them before her at her dressing table and counted her green money, and entered the sum upon a deposit slip of the Hibernia Bank at Eighteenth & Castro Streets, and rolled the money and the deposit slip together into the shape of a small, tight tube, and bound it with a rubber band. Then she carried Brown’s sherry and the money to him, and she sat with her own sherry on the bed beside him, and she said, “The toy store depressed you.”

  “That dog depresses me,” he said, sipping a little sherry. To help me sleep, he thought, for whenever he drank a spirituous beverage he felt the need to offer himself a reason for doing so. Luella thought of alcoholic drinks as “restoratives . . . relaxants,” borrowing medical terms from advertising.

  “The astronauts are sleeping,” she said, watching the silent television.

  “They’ve got no barking dogs out there,” he said.

  “Or else they’re dead,” she said. “Nobody knows because of the radio problems. You should work on the grandmother because she’s as down on the dog as you are, on account of him biting the girls.”

  “He bit only one girl,” Brown said.

  “He bit her bad, however,” said Luella. “Tomorrow they’re going to land.”

  “If they land,” said Brown.

  “If they’re not dead,” she said.

  “They’re not going to land,” said Brown, “they’re going to sea.”

  She knew he meant this as a joke. He was big on words. But that was just his trouble, too, big on words and small on deeds, whereas, as far as she was concerned, she didn’t much care what she said so long as she did what she did. He talked a lot. He made jokes with words. He studied the Constitution. There he sat now, studying Volume Twenty-Two of the Constitution, pillows propped behind his head, knees up, shoes off, shirt open. He cared a great deal where someone claimed to stand upon an issue, but Luella cared nothing for claims; it didn’t matter where you claimed you stood. Why argue? Just do. She turned the sound up to hear the McGinley advertisement. Standing, watching McGinley, she removed her stockings. Here he came, wheeling his son in the wheelchair. The music was solemn. Now here came McGinley in his Legion cap. The music was patriotic. Here was McGinley, Chairman of the Draft Board, sitting at his desk signing papers. “Hello there, fellow-citizens,” said McGinley.

  “Good-bye there,” said Brown.

  “I’m Bob McGinley,” McGinley said, “and I’m going to tell you seven reasons why I know you’ll want to vote for me on Election Day.”

  “Look at the Constitution up there behind him,” said Brown.

  “Nothing can be done,” Luella said. “Don’t agitate yourself.”

  Brown did not tell Luella that McGinley had cursed him. It came sharply to him now, the obscene phrase assaulting his mind, entering his mind like an invader. McGinley would go off to Congress — nobody ever said that life was just. A vacuum existed for McGinley to fill with the love of guns. Day after day, night after night, stupidity spiraled higher, shooting accelerating, guns improving, bombs growing larger, poison gas in long freight trains. McGinley was a very small thing considering the general slaughter of mankind during the last fiscal year alone.

  “Stop thinking,” said Luella. “Put it out of your mind.” Although McGinley had passed from the screen Brown continued to stare at the advertisements, and Luella supposed he was thinking of Junie because of the toy store.

  Stopping the meeting . . . what good had it done? Brown now briefly considered kidnapping the boy in the wheelchair, although not for ransom, writing My Very Dear Congressman-Elect McGinley (for he would be elected tomorrow), Resign your office and your boy shall be returned to you unharmed. But Brown was uncertain whether McGinley cared for his son in the first place. A man who could send boys to war hadn’t much in the way of fatherly feeling. Brown had heard of such things. Nothing in his reading had made so enduring an impression upon his mind as the story of Abraham and Isaac. He couldn’t believe it. It turned him off. He could neither read it nor resist it, reading forward with horror while averting his eyes, following Abraham and Isaac up the mountain into a land called Moriah transformed in the imagination of Brown the boy to Mount Davidson beneath the great cross, where he had gone with his father up the climbing streets. There went Abraham in his motorman’s cap, and axe, and knife, and there went little Isaac, asking his father over and over again, “Where is the lamb we’re supposed to sacrifice?” God will provide the lamb, Abraham replied, but God provided no lamb, no lamb, no lamb at all, and the boy became aware with new black terror each time that he was the lamb, the axe was for the burning wood, the knife for Isaac’s throat, although, luckily, just as Abraham stretched forth his hand to slay his son, the angel of the Lord called, saying, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad.” Whew!

  McGinley might sacrifice his son to a seat in Congress. This now seemed clear to Brown: not that God had told Abraham any such thing, but that Abraham in his ignorance, ego, will, blindness, or stubbornness had invented God’s message for some end of his own, as McGinley would do or invent anything to win office. Brown, having kidnapped McGinley’s son, would be left stranded somewhere in a hideaway with the boy in the wheelchair. Certain kinds of men would abandon their sons to their own ambitions. Such men could never be instructed by loss. They considered themselves too manly to grieve. Loss never increased their compassion, but only hardened them, steeling them against their own best and softest emotions, they were he-men, they were men of practical affairs, they were men who got things done, balanced the budget, met the payroll. And they were numerous, and increasing, so that the world tonight, from Brown’s point of view, especially at such a late hour following upon the excitement of the event at McGinley headquarters, appeared to be especially bleak, gloomy, hopeless, and he himself, at such an hour, especially desperate to avenge the murder of Junie. Boys died for politicians. Let one politician die now for a boy. “I’m not thinking,” said Brown, “I’m just staring.”

  “It’s midnight already,” Luella said, consulting the watch upon her bosom, appearing to be staring down at her bosom, as unavoidably she was. He loved to watch her consult the time. It was his little special affectionate pleasure. Maybe everybody has a soft spot. Anyhow, that was Brown’s — watching Luella consult the time on her bosom. She was mainly very shy (he supposed). He didn’t know that she “knew men,” as we have said elsewhere (page 37, and then again on page 53).

  Soon Luella, too, lay with a pillow propped behind her head, and they watched an old motion picture which perhaps they had seen as children, or perhaps (as they sometimes speculated) even seen sitting side by side unknown to each other in the old palatial Fox beneath the soft glow of the fabulous chandeliers. In those days they hadn’t beans at home, but the Fox was a palace of Heaven. Often they compared their childhoods. Luella remembered brocade chaises at the Fox. Brown remembered velvet hand-railings. Perhaps, one day, Luella had been Brown’s father’s passenger on the “M” car on her way to the theater. Such an event appeared not only possible but likely. Possibly, sitting side by side as strangers in the old palatial Fox, the
y had touched one another; touched elbows. There sat Luella years ago, engrossed in the dream of the beautiful man upon the screen, and there beside her was the man who was to become the man of her life, one Brown, motorman’s son. Perhaps her father had cut his hair. Would she have turned her eyes from the screen to him and said, “It’s predestined, let’s go, no sense dreaming these other dreams”? It was almost beyond imagining, this, that they who sat side by side as children should be side by side again thirty-five years later, watching the same film under circumstances so altered, then sitting, now reclining, then the Fox, now Yukon Street, then Junie unborn, now Junie dead, murdered at war, and nothing as it was except this chicken-lady on the screen wiping the flour from her forearms and answering the door in her apron for the sheriff (we knew it was the sheriff) arriving with the news that someone was dead, and they were all dead now, the actor, the actress, the horses and the chickens all dead, poor things, in the terrible flood, and Paprika howling ceaselessly. . . .

  Oh, that Paprika, woof, woof, woof, again and again, howling, howling, howling — how could the Fernes themselves sleep? But apparently the Fernes and their girls slept very well to the clamor of the dog’s barking through the night at every leaf and rare passerby, at every fantasy of the dog’s own. “He’s alert,” said Harold Ferne to Brown when Brown complained, “and that’s all I care about is an alert dog. I don’t care for the dog myself. I don’t mind the barking. An alert dog makes the wife feel safe; she doesn’t care about the noise.”

  “As a friendly neighborly matter,” Brown asked, “couldn’t you prevent the dog from keeping me awake at night?”