The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  It took almost no time to do. He was not only an expert workman, but he was in a fever of impatience to get this over with, to get rid of this unwanted body, the hysterical wife waiting for it, anything to get done with it, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning to the decencies of life—a damaged tug to be repaired, a new tug to launch, a few lazy workers to arouse to better efforts—these were what a man was made for, not this ghoul’s labor.

  Only after the line was strung between the railing of the tug and the top of the wall where I was stationed did I have a good chance to study the Karen from my heights. She made a sad study. Take a toy boat, one of those little metal boats that children play with in the bathtub, and cleave its side open with an axe, and that was the Karen. Of course, the Karen was a good deal larger than any toy boat, but the bow of a five-thousand-ton tanker is somewhat bigger than an axe.

  There were a few men on her, slithering and sliding as they moved back and forth on her deck, and some others were having just as much trouble with their footing as they splashed along the floor of the dock near the gash in her side. A slick of water still lay over the whole floor; out of it rose the dripping plates, scraps, odds and ends left by the Rio de Centrale, and they would be a fine mess of rust by the time she got back to have her hull work finished. Here and there silver-red forms flopped and rustled; fish trapped by the ascending dock, their bellies silver, the sun painting them a brilliant red where it struck them, and I saw an eel among them and thought with admiration of the dockmen who took these eels home and ate them, once the eels were fat enough on sewage.

  It was a long way down and I was high up. The catwalk of the wall up there was comfortably wide, railed in at both sides except where the ladders were attached to the wall. A philosopher could live up there, look around at the world before him—wounded ship, dying fish, dead man—and be quite remote from it all. I was even remote from the few dockmen standing by at the end of the catwalk, but not so remote that I couldn’t think with pleasure of old Jacob’s feelings at having to pay them overtime for this crisis.

  The wait was not long. A man came out of the deckhouse of the Karen with a small black bag in his hand, the doctor, no doubt, although his white jacket and pants were now camouflaged by mud and oil. Then out of the deckhouse came other men, their clothing even more befouled than the doctor’s, bearing a litter with a blanketed form on it. The police, no doubt. And they did their job as well as any first-class rigger. They quickly attached their load to the line leading up to me. They heaved on the line, and the litter slowly started on its way. I closed my mind to what was in it, tried to think of something else, lovely Barbara, beautiful Barbara sitting on the edge of my bed combing her hair, Barbara in her bathing suit, her arms thrown wide, her head back, racing into the murky surf of Coney Island, Barbara any way I could think of her, but nothing helped and the rising qualm in me became a ripe queasiness.

  I hastily crossed to the other side of the catwalk, and Big Noonan lolling in the crane’s cab waved up at me. I waved back at him and gave him the down signal. The crane mumbled and grumbled. The rig overhead with the hook dangling from it slowly descended, slowly, slowly, and when it was a foot from the floor I signaled stop, and the hook obediently became motionless.

  And I became motionless, too. I stood rigid, and I could feel the blood starting to throb in my head, could feel my nerves tighten with anticipation, with foreboding, as I looked down at the visitor in our midst, the landfarer who had journeyed my way from his snug berth aboard Voorhees Number 7. With impeccable timing, Michael Avery had managed to pin me, not against the wall, but high on top of it, which could be even more fatal.

  I looked down at him and he looked up at me, and though his eyes were vacuous and his jaw slack, he knew as well as I did what we were to each other. Then he moved a step forward, and that woke me with a start. I waved an arm at Noonan in the crane, pointed at Avery, who was now at the foot of the ladder, made a negative gesture. Steer this lunatic away from me, the gesture said. I’ll take care of him later but right now I have work to do. Keep him off that ladder.

  Unfortunately, it was not a signal in any craneman’s lexicon. Noonan peered through the crane window at me, he shook his head in bewilderment and did nothing. He wasn’t to blame for that. It wasn’t his fault that I hadn’t made him privy to my romantic problems, and, for all he knew, Avery had been sent to lend me a hand on the line, so what was the fuss about? Yet, because I am as human as my neighbor, all my anger for the moment was directed against the innocent Noonan. It wasn’t until Avery was well on his way up the ladder that the anger boiled up, exploded, and flowed around him, my proper target.

  That was when I discovered the conditions under which I could kill a man. Not with cold premeditation, but only out of wild, uncontrollable rage because he pressed me too hard. I could never move toward anyone to kill him, but if he moved toward me far enough I would be waiting for him. All I had to do now was wait for Avery to move that far. There was no doubt that he would. He knew we had business together, and he knew that this was the place for it, here on top of the world where whoever fell had enough distance to fall. And I knew the same thing and was waiting.

  I quickly crossed back to the other side of the catwalk to see how the litter was progressing on its way to me, and I saw the witnesses on and around the Karen also watching its progress. My witnesses, although they didn’t know it yet. Once Avery made the first lunge, struck the first blow, I was home free. The place to finish him was at the opening between the railings where the ladder to the floor of the drydock was attached. It was wide enough for anyone’s body to fall through.

  Avery came over the top of the ladder and stood there on the catwalk breathing heavily. Then he moved toward me with slow, shuffling steps, his face not so vacuous now, almost smiling a little. Why not smile a little when you have your man where you want him?

  When he was ten feet away the litter rode up against the pulley hung on the railing near me, and I saw that while I might have my own problems, the late Pereira had his, too, and under the circumstances his came first, awkward as that was. I steadied the litter with one hand, and pointed the other at Avery the way an animal trainer would point a gun loaded with blanks at an advancing lion. “Wait right there, you son of a bitch,” I said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  It was obvious from the way he stopped that I was born to command. Still and all, it was an untested power, new to me, I wasn’t taking chances. While I tugged at the litter, trying to slide it out of the rig and on to the floor of the catwalk, I kept my eyes fixed on Avery, kept my body always facing him, kept my weight balanced on the balls of my feet. It made it that much easier to guard against the surprise attack he was weighing, but it made it that much harder to handle the litter. It was a cabin door as Andressen had said it would be, but whoever had knocked it loose had not bothered to take off the hinges. The rig caught in one of them, I tugged hard, harder, once again, and, not the door, but the body of Pereira came sliding out of its blanket onto the catwalk.

  He looked, if anything, worse than I had imagined. His clothes had been stripped off, probably in the effort to work his body loose from its trap, and his stark nakedness, his dead nakedness, was made grotesque by the arm stretched out from it, devoid of its hand. That was the wrist that must have been pinned under the frame, and for a wild instant I wondered what the doctor did with the hand after he removed it. Put it in his pocket? Dropped it into his little black bag? In that instant I understood all too well what Andressen meant when he said that sometimes it was good not to be a doctor.

  But even more shocking than that handless stump of arm was the man’s face. It may have taken no more than a minute before the water rushed into the engine room high enough to drown him, but from the look on that terrible face he must have lived every second of it in awareness of what was happening. He had died screaming, and the scream was still stamped there on him. I could hear it in the air around me.

  It was not
Pereira screaming, it was Avery. He looked down at death in its torment, and he screamed insanely, screamed so that I heard slicing through my head the panic sounds I had heard long, long ago in a bedroom I had shared with a hero, the sounds I had heard outside my door so that I opened it and billowing smoke and searing flame roared at me, the sounds of terror in the night, the sounds I had fled from. And Avery, as if trying to flee from his own sounds, flung out his arms and went back and out through the opening in the railing, not like a man stumbling to his death, but twisting his body as he went, like a man throwing himself at it.

  We went together. I had one hand on the rail as I caught at him with the other, got an arm around him, my hand digging into his skin, my nails ripping at it, and the weight of his fall almost tore my arm out of its socket. My hand slid down the rail to the floor of the catwalk, smashed against the floor, and I lost my grip on the rail. I clutched at the edge of the catwalk, a lance drove through my palm, a splinter waiting there all these years to impale me, and then I had a grip on the top rung of the ladder, swinging from it by one arm, my other arm still locked in a rigor mortis around Avery.

  He was determined to make it hard for me. He was obsessed by the frenzied desire to go alone or take me with him, either way would do, but it must be one or the other. So I hung there by one arm, and I kept the grip of desperation around Avery while he writhed and twisted and hurled himself against that grip, blood trickling down my hand now from my nails clawing into his flesh, and I kicked out furiously trying for a foothold on the ladder but always being pulled away from it by this stinking, pissing, squalling horror that I hugged to me like a lover. And out of the corner of my eye I got fleeting glimpses of men skidding, falling, stumbling toward me across the floor of the dock, and others running along the catwalk above, and I gave them three seconds—two—one—three again—and then a hand went under my chin almost pulling my head off, hands got me under the shoulders, others caught Avery by the hair, the arms, anywhere they could find a hold on that demoniac bundle, and we all went over the top of the ladder and piled together on the floor of the catwalk.

  But I got up and Avery didn’t. He lay there thrashing from side to side, his eyes rolled up in his head so that only the whites showed, and he fought off all the men trying to hold him down until four policemen together managed to do it.

  He was, in fact, a lot more trouble to bring down to the ground than Pereira, and when it was all over I had the pleasure, once the muddied and oil-smeared doctor had desplintered, cauterized, and handsomely bandaged my hand, of sitting in the office of the absent Jacob Voorhees and matching Andressen drink for drink until old Jacob’s bottle was empty.

  God knows, we both needed it.

  SEVEN

  It was Ethel Waterhouse who woke me late the next morning, and when I bestirred myself to answer her knock on the door and her cry of “Telephone call, Mr. Egan,” which could be heard clear to the waterfront, I found that every part of me was shot full of aches and pains. I got out of bed with great care, pulled on a robe, and opened the door.

  “Call from whom?” I said with a grammar and diction my uncle would have applauded, and my landlady said, “Don’t mind if I come in, do you?” and came in, her cigarette holder cocked at a jaunty angle, a pair of newspapers under her arm, the Times I had delivered to me every morning and her tabloid. She pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her blobby nose with her thumb and surveyed me closely. “You look all right,” she said, and she made it sound like an accusation.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” I said. “Who called me?”

  “Only you got black and blue on your shoulders there. You ought to take a nice hot shower for that. And put a towel down on that floor when you do. There’s leak blisters on the ceiling downstairs, and it’s coming from right up here. It was Mrs. Thwaite called.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Thwaite. She said it was your sister.”

  Then I realized that, of course, it was my sister, but it was the first time I had ever heard her spoken of by her married name, or had even thought of her by that name.

  “What did she want?” I said.

  “She wanted to talk to you, and I told her you’d call back. I guess she saw about you in the papers. Here, take a look.” She spread the newspapers out on the bed and bent over them to join me in reading the history I had made. “I don’t know why you did it though,” she said. “I would have let the old bum kill himself twenty times over.”

  I had not made much history. In the tabloid the story about the Karen Voorhees was on page five along with a picture of Mrs. Pereira. The photographers had not waited in vain; her expression when they recorded it was almost as gratifying as her husband’s had been when unveiled to me. And in the story itself I was only a paragraph after During the efforts to—. I was an even smaller paragraph in the Times after In the course of—and the sole difference between the two stories was that the tabloid saw Avery as workman run amok while the Times viewed him as crazed shipyard employee. Neither of them said anything about the cause of Avery’s fit which was something I comprehended only too well. For that matter, even a case-hardened reporter who got an unexpected look at Pereira’s face would readily understand why a half-drunken, addled specimen like Avery would go overboard at the sight of it. It was all that anyone flirting with the d.t.’s would need to finish him off.

  I returned her paper to my landlady, and she said, “You can keep it if you want. Maybe you’d like to cut out that clipping and save it.”

  “No, that’s all right. Does Barbara know about this?”

  “Are you kidding? We been the busy little beavers here all morning over it. They had a cop here to talk with her about it, and a lady from the hospital, and the insurance man—”

  “Insurance man? What for?”

  “The yard sent him. And you’ll never guess what. They gave her three hundred dollars for signing a paper that she won’t make any claims against them. I told her not to do it, but she did it anyhow. The way I see it, anybody wants to give you money to sign a paper, you get a lawyer first and you’ll get a lot more. But you know how she is, she’s like a big baby. I guess she figured that trading the old buzzard in for three hundred dollars is a bargain, no matter what. Do you have to pull that window shade down all the way? Let it up a little bit and then you won’t bust the spring in the roller again. Those rollers cost money.”

  “Sure they do. Is Barbara in her room now?”

  “No, she went out. I think she went shopping downtown, and from the look in her eye that money ain’t going to last long. Well, what do kids know about money? Anyhow, she’ll be back soon enough. We’re going over to the hospital in a taxi so she can sign some papers about keeping him there. Of course, it’s got to be a taxi. I told her I could get her there by subway just fine, but she’s only looking for ways to spend every cent she can.”

  I said: “You can stop worrying about it. I’ll drive her over there myself.”

  Ethel’s face sagged with disappointment. “You’ll never make it back to work on time. She’s got to be at the hospital at one o’clock.”

  “I’ll make it on time. When did you plan to leave?”

  “Half past twelve. But it’s no trouble for me. I don’t mind going along one bit.”

  “That’s nice of you, but I’ll take care of it. When Barbara comes in tell her I’ll be ready at twelve thirty.”

  “If that’s what you want,” Ethel said, and flounced out with ponderous disapproval. But I knew she would faithfully give the message to Barbara. She lived behind the curtains of her front window, followed everyone’s comings and goings, and meddled in them avidly. Not that she didn’t mean well, as Joe Guion had once remarked about her, because she sure as hell didn’t. Her trouble was that she was of the wrong nationality. From my uncle Charles’ description of his youthful days in Paris, Ethel should have been a Parisienne concierge named Germaine. It was her bad luck that Brooklyn wasn’t Paris.

  At twelve thirty I left
my room just as Barbara was coming out of hers. It was the first time we were together since the past Sunday morning, and while I was prepared for her bruises it shocked me to see the extent of them. Behind the dark glasses one eye was still swollen and half shut, the cheek below it puffy and discolored, and the corner of her mouth drawn out of shape. When I looked at all that I wondered again, as I had a dozen times since awakening, about the wild, uncalled-for impulse that led me to save Avery’s worthless life. It was a mystery to me, that impulse, now more so than ever.

  Barbara put her hand to her cheek and said, “Don’t,” and I forced myself to turn my eyes away from the damages.

  I said: “Ethel told you about my driving you to the hospital, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, but you don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  She looked at my bandaged hand. “Can you drive with your hand like that?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it. The doctor took a splinter out of it, and he wanted to show what an artist he was.”

  “It must have been some splinter.”

  “Well, call it a small piece of lumber. Come on, no use hanging around talking. We might as well be on our way.”

  She was silent during the ride, sitting beside me with her eyes fixed straight ahead. Only once did she break the silence, and that was to suddenly say, “I don’t have to see him, do I?” and when I said, “No, not if you don’t want to,” she nodded and went back to her own thoughts.

  I knew my way around Brooklyn well enough by now to easily find the general location of the hospital, but, as it turned out, Brooklyn State Hospital where mental cases were treated was only one of a whole city of hospitals behind a seemingly endless iron fence, and I made a couple of false landings before I finally hit the right building. Then I idled my time away in an arena-sized waiting room while Barbara was led off by a clerk to an office. It was a sad waiting room, not so much because of its dreary institutional look as because of the people waiting in it. Negroes and Puerto Ricans were in a majority, but everyone there had the same look about him as he sat on those hard benches. A hunched-forward look, elbows resting on knees and hands clasped. A look of resignation which said, Yes, I know, Jack. It’s tough to be a human being, it’s hard to be Homo sapiens, but what can you do when it’s the only game in town?