Neighbors

by Thomas Berger

  Of course Keese obeyed. "Well," he said bluffly, "it's neither here nor there to me." What a childish kind of revenge! While Harry put the shotgun down, Keese with one quick thumb-rub lifted off some of the lipstick. This material might be attractive on a woman but it always looked filthy, even diseased, when adhering to an inanimate surface. He discreetly cleansed his thumb on the inseam of his trousers. His left palm was still gritty-sticky from the powdered coffee: he rubbed it in the same place.

  Harry came to the table and sat down. "Just a minute, Earl. What are you doing, playing with yourself?"

  Keese's hands were still beneath the table, being rubbed clean in his pants. He brought them into sight now. "Please, Harry, I'm trying to tell you something. My daughter—"

  Harry shook a large forefinger at him. "Now, there is a problem, if I ever saw one."

  Keese was taken aback. "'Problem'? Why do you say that?" He began to breathe rapidly. "What do you mean?"

  "Sticks out all over her," said Harry. He took an exceptionally loud, slurping drink of coffee. "I suppose, though, you couldn't see it. Fathers are that way, aren't they?"

  "Listen, Harry," Keese said, and he laughed in keen chagrin. "This is a crazy situation. I don't quite know where to begin." He shouted: "Elaine is a superior person, for God's sake! She's beautiful and brilliant and was always at the head of her class. Don't act as if she is some neurotic warped soul, some mediocrity. Elaine is fluent in several European languages. Elaine belongs to several honor societies, and she will graduate cum laude."

  "Or so she tells you," Harry said cynically.

  Keese repeated his bitter laugh. "Why won't you believe me? How would you know better?"

  "I don't pretend to, Earl. I'm just asking the question. If everything is so perfect about her, then why are you here now?"

  Keese hung his head. "O.K.," he said, "you've got a point. Now, what has happened—this isn't easy to say—"

  "But I'm a stranger, really," said Harry. "Remember that. It should make it easier." He said this with what certainly sounded like genuine sympathy. He was an unpredictable devil, that Harry.

  "Elaine stole a ring!" Keese cried.

  "Oh, is that all?" Harry smiled, fluttering his hands at the wrists. "I thought there was some major catastrophe."

  "If this isn't major, then there is none such," said Keese. "She's been expelled, two months before graduation."

  "What's that to me?" asked Harry. "I have only the slightest acquaintance with her." He stared back at Keese's wild look, and then he said, leaning forward: "Devil's advocate, Earl. Prove it to me!"

  "Prove what?"

  "Why," said Harry, "relate this to the human condition. Aren't we all victims of fate? Why should your daughter be exempt? How are you going to make her predicament important to some poor devil dying of illness?"

  Keese frowned for a while, and then he said quietly: "Harry, you really are a shit."

  Harry took no apparent offense. He shook his head. "You're still not getting it, are you, Earl? I don't mean that your troubles, your daughter's, are to be dismissed. I just mean that I want to have them proved as serious."

  "I don't know how they could not be serious!" cried Keese.

  "This is the culmination of twenty-two years."

  "There's something that's a good deal more important," said Harry, "and you are ignoring it entirely."

  "Yes?"

  "What's Elaine do about sex?" asked Harry. "Where's she getting it?"

  Keese had not touched his coffee. He looked into it now, then lifted the cup deliberately and dashed it at Harry. But in anticipation of this move, Harry had slid his chair away as Keese slowly lifted the cup, and by the time the fluid-laden missile was flung, Harry had dived behind the piled cartons.

  He came out when the splattering was done. "That was foolish, Earl, and it could have got you killed." He nodded towards the shotgun. "Don't think I'll allow you to abuse me in my own home."

  Keese gritted his teeth and said: "And don't think just because it's your house you can say anything you want about my daughter!"

  Harry came forward, avoiding the brown pool and the crockery fragments on the floor. The cup had landed four or five feet beyond the table; therefore the immediate area was clear.

  "If you'll reflect," said Harry, "I said nothing insulting."

  Keese got up, raving. "How do I get sucked into these degrading conversations? Why do I keep assuming that you and Ramona will straighten out?"

  "Ramona?" asked Harry. "What have you been doing with her?"

  "Nothing whatever," said Keese, "and you know it very well. In fact, that's why you make your loathsome insinuations about my daughter: you've got your wife to worry about, haven't you?"

  "Your daughter is sacrosanct, is that it?" asked Harry. "Yet it would be quite O.K. by you if you had some dirt on my wife."

  His tone was not indignant, but resigned, and Keese saw that his neighbor had an argument. "No," he answered reasonably, "it wouldn't be O.K. at all. I'm not looking for dirt on anybody, believe me. This has been a crazy night. Many of the things I've done are completely alien to my normal character. I'm not nursing a grudge against you, and I don't have a thing on Ramona."

  "Then," asked Harry, "where is she? What have you done with her?"

  "She's not here?"

  "I wouldn't be asking if she were," Harry said sternly. "I assumed she was with you. She has some sort of weird fascination with you, old and fat as you are."

  Keese sighed. "Now there you are, Harry. Every time I make a peaceful overture you never fail to insult me in return."

  Harry scowled in puzzlement. "Insult? I should think you'd find it flattering."

  "I meant your characterization of me as old and fat."

  "Well, aren't you? Should I lie? Are you underweight? Ramona is twenty-seven. You're at least in your late fifties, no?"

  "I am forty-nine years of age," Keese said frostily.

  Harry groaned. "The hell you are."

  "You're arguing with me about my own age?" Keese pounded the table. What a humiliating dispute! He had every motive to turn vicious. "If she's wandering around at this hour of the night, what does it say about your capacity?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Keese had turned the tide! He pressed his advantage. "Am I right in gathering that you are inadequate, old boy?"

  Harry winced, quite a dramatic show on such a large face with a bruised eye. "You're a disgusting man, Earl. You'll stoop to any measure."

  "You started it with your vile insinuations about Elaine!"

  "The thief," said Harry. He pointed at Keese. "Don't deny it. It's your own story."

  Keese sagged, and then took some air. "Hadn't we better look for Ramona?" he asked finally. "Where can she be at this hour?"

  Harry made a nasty face. "I assume she's at your house, Earl."

  "No, she left."

  "Then you admit she was there?"

  "Now, please don't try to make anything of that," Keese said. "She was on my threshold briefly. We exchanged a few words and she left. That was, oh, say an hour ago."

  "Well, she never came back," Harry said. "What 'words' did you exchange?"

  "Commonplaces," said Keese.

  "If I know you," said Harry, "it was actually a bitter argument. One word led to another. You finally rose to a pitch of rage and slapped her face savagely. She slipped and fell. Her head struck the concrete with the sound of a smashed cantaloupe. You knelt to examine her. She was dead, her skull crushed." Harry gave this extravagant narrative in an emotionless monotone.

  "You must be mad," Keese said, echoing a clich from the sort of movie he had seen as a child, because the event that Harry had sketched came from the same source in popular entertainment, in which people were always being killed so easily.

  "You saw your chance to get back at me through her," said Harry.

  Keese believed that the only way he could arrest this train of thought before Harry reached the point
of no return (which, given the shotgun, might be dangerous) was to leap to the attack. "You're actually projecting onto me your own crime, aren't you, Harry? You had the argument with her, you slapped her face and watched her fall and break her neck, and then you carried her body down to the swamp!" Keese was proud of his embellishment. He then thought of how to better it. "You put her behind the wheel of the car! You count on the police to assume her neck was broken when the automobile plunged down the embankment."

  The whole thing had been a joke in questionable taste at the outset. Now Keese began to get a horrible sense of disaster, as if by chance he had hit upon the truth: that Harry had murdered Ramona and was trying to pin the crime on him: ineptly trying, because of course Keese had been home all the while, with two witnesses.

  But as it happened neither Enid nor Elaine had seen Ramona during his conversation with her through the door. They had seen only that he was lurking in the front hall. Actually he had no evidence whatever to support his statement, were the police to call it into question. Was there a possibility that he could be railroaded for a crime he did not commit? But if he had no alibi, could Harry have a better one? Also, Keese had no motive. That was the most telling point on his side.

  As if Harry had been privy to Keese's internal dialogues, he spoke up now. "You cornered her somewhere, made the same indecent advances that you have been making all evening"—he ignored Keese's strangulated protest—"and when she resisted, you brutally knocked her down. You would have raped her at that point, but she was dead."

  "On my front step," Keese said sardonically.

  "Is that where it happened?" Harry asked. "Ah, you're beginning to confess, are you? Then I'll have to give you the usual cautions: You have the right to remain silent, you have—"

  Had Elaine been right? Was the man a cop? Keese felt an inchoate agitation at the base of his spine. But then he heard Harry falter in his recitation and finish with: "And so on."

  "No," said Keese, "the law says you've got to repeat them all."

  "Don't think a picayune incidental like that is going to get you off," said Harry. "You're guilty, all right."

  "I want some proof you're a policeman!"

  "I don't have to show you anything," Harry said softly. "You're on my property now. If I feel like it, I can shoot you as an intruder. If you're killed, then it's only my version that would be heard: you broke in here, threatened my life with a shotgun, we grappled, and you were killed when the weapon was discharged in the struggle."

  Keese began to worry that Harry wanted this very sort of encounter and intended to bait him until one began, so as to murder him and be done with it. He decided to be on guard against any attempt of Harry's to lure him into an act of violence. "Look," he said, raising both hands, "I'm not resisting. You're the boss. It would be foolish to deny that."

  "Where's Ramona?" Harry asked. He licked his lips in a desperate way. He hurled himself up, leaned over, and grasped the front of Keese's old shirt. "By God, I'll beat it out of you." He balled his right fist and drew it back, as if stretching a slingshot, to a position opposite his ear.

  Keese suddenly couldn't bear the idea of passively allowing Harry to batter his face—that it might be considered as deserved retaliation for his earlier blackening of Harry's eye was an argument without eloquence for him. He found that the large hand on his shirt did not impede him from rising and moving sideways, away from the table. To pursue him Harry had to alter his own situation and let the shirt go.

  Keese then kicked him powerfully in the groin. Harry grunted in pain, doubled up, moved backwards, and fell into the pool of coffee. Keese left the kitchen by the back door. He was astounded to see that the dawn was well under way. Appealing to Harry had been useless. The man simply did not work out as a friend.

  He was now faced with going back to the same problem from which he had come away. His car was in the drive, around back. Then Greavy had at least returned it before assaulting him. Keese had by no means forgotten that incident.

  But now he had still another score to settle. Someone, presumably Greavy himself, had written in large white-paint letters, along the left side of the blue car, with two painted arrows, from as many directions, to indicate the driver's window:

  PIMP

  CHAPTER 10

  BUT for the infamous inscription Keese would have jumped into his car and driven away to the end of the earth. Of course that was unthinkable now.

  What had he done to Greavy to call for such savage retaliation? It was strange how a man whom he had not aggressed against would punish him so severely, while Harry, for all the damage received at Keese's hand, had been able to do so little against him.

  Keese had been a young man when he was last outdoors at dawn, and he had forgotten its peculiar aroma, at least in spring: green, it went without saying, but also with a touch of mustiness. There was now light by which to see Harry's car, and he went to the end of the road and looked over the smashed guardrail. The vehicle had vanished without a trace: sunk, probably, in quicksand. No, there it was, to the left. He had been looking in the wrong spot. Perhaps the wheels had struck an object which caused them to turn leftwards. The car looked undamaged from the rear, and the water in which it sat rose not even so far as the hubcaps. One had the illusion that it could be driven away, none the worse for the experience.

  If the past could not be changed, sometimes measures could be taken to cause it to be forgotten. Even at this late date he was sure he could expunge the foregoing night from memory insofar as were concerned the friends he had consulted by telephone. A confession of drunkenness and an abject apology would surely suffice. If Ramona could be taken as an individual, separate from Harry, then she had no great claim against him. Twice he had ordered her from his premises, true enough, but between those moments had been extended intervals in which he had been very genial, even hospitable. On their latest meeting he had not been unpleasant for so much as an instant.

  Harry was another case. Keese had definitely damaged him in several ways, and it could not be said that his few and usually unsuccessful bids for retaliation had brought things anywhere near even. Were his car retrieved, however, and not only restored in appearance but improved—e.g., a completely new coat of paint!—he would not come away empty-handed. Which left only the matter of bodily harm. This was somewhat more serious. Harry had after all been repeatedly bested in hand-to-hand encounters with a shorter, older, fat man. His physical hurts were probably inconsequential, but the damage to his pride should not be underestimated. Keese could appreciate that. He was no monster. That Harry had brought it on himself was true, but that was no excuse for gloating.

  Then there were the Greavys. The boy (in his thirties) was hardly involved, but he was unlikely to stand by when his father was under fire (unlike Keese's daughter). The attack must therefore be stealthy or, if open, include Perry though he had no quarrel with him. Keese frankly would have jumped at the chance to forgive the old man. The surprise blow to his gut had been barbarous, but he had himself sucker-punched Harry for what he believed a good cause.

  But the painted epithet on the car cried out for vengeance.

  As Keese reached his front door he remembered that Ramona was supposed to be missing. This was where he had seen her last: just here he had closed the door in her face. If, locked out of his house, she had been carried off by a bear or band of gypsies, he supposed he would be blamed. Neighbors!

  "Earl!"

  He looked up and saw Enid in the window of the master bedroom. He expected her to be disapproving; therefore his response was a silent glower.

  "Earl," said she, "have you been up all night?"

  "Enid," he said, "I'll thank you for showing me a certain tolerance. If you reflect you will realize that it takes all kinds."

  "I wanted to tell you something."

  "Please," he moaned, "no moralizing at this point. I'm worn thin."

  "There's a new version now." Only her head could be seen, as if she were standing ere
ct and looking from a window that was five feet above the floor. This annoyed Keese. Even at his angle he should get some sense of where her body was.

  He shouted angrily: "Are you kneeling?"

  "Now it seems that the ring was taken, but no one confessed to the theft, and there would seem to be no evidence against the thief—or so, anyway, it is supposed."

  Keese lowered his head, only to raise it and say: "Do you realize what this means? Nothing is lost. All is O.K., as it was before. Everything can be put back where it belongs." He had to restrain himself, else he might have wept in relief.

  He twisted the knob. The door was locked! He pressed the button. When this summons was not responded to within a reasonable period of time, he stepped down onto the path and shouted at the window from which Enid had spoken.