The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  She was a mature woman and well aware of her body. Jannaire had admitted to twenty-nine, so I doubt that she was much more than thirty-one. She was beautiful enough to pick and choose. For every man she turned off by her earthy body odor and underarm hair, and she flouted the latter by wearing sleeveless tops, and taking off her suit jacket in public places—as she had turned off Larry Dolman—she would turn on another man like me who was fascinated by the eccentric, the exotic, the unusual, the untried. Sergeant Weber, my NCOIC at the Pittsburgh Recruiting Station, had told me how sexy luxuriant growths of underarm hair had been to him in Italy during World War II, and to many other GI’s, once they got over the initial shock. And it was sexy. Jannaire was a woman who wanted to know a man well as a person before going to the mat with him. She didn’t have to fall in love with him, or even pretend to be in love with him, but she did have to like him; and the only way that she could tell whether she liked him or not was to get to know him fairly well. Once I had that figured out, I had set out deliberately to make her like me.

  I thought I had succeeded. I had made my pitches at every opportunity, but I had made them lightly, and without using any hard sell techniques. Her rejections had never been outright turndowns; she merely changed the subject, or smiled without saying anything. It was the old waiting game, one I was familiar with, and a game I was willing to play.

  After all, I had some other things going for me, and I could wait as long as she could—perhaps longer, unless she changed the pattern and decided she didn’t like me after all—and she would be a more appreciated lay for the delay. And if I lost, in the long run, there was a good deal of solace in the knowledge that the ratio of women to men in Miami, as I had reminded Larry, was still seven to one.

  But here it was, Sunday, pay-off day, and the afternoon had been wasted. What was going on? The brunch invitation, the shorty nightgown, the exposed cleavage of hard, unhampered breasts across the table as I ate the tasteless food, the time and place available—and then, a runaround.

  I sulked, sitting in a deep leather arm chair across from the white couch, and glared at her silently when she sat and faced me. She had combed her bronze hair, or brushed it, I supposed, and it was fuller as it touched her shoulders. Her alluring musky odor was fainter now, because of her jacket and slacks, and her freshly painted lips, playing card pink, almost matched the string of imitation pearls, as large as marbles, she wore around her neck.

  I quite sulking, making an effort to salvage some dignity, buttoned my flowered bodyshirt, and yawned, stretching out my arms.

  Jannaire, I concluded, was a lost cause. I didn’t mind losing so much as I minded not knowing why. Although I wanted to leave, I was still curious about the why of the rejection. I was also feeling a trifle logy from the two scotches and six cans of beer, and I had the beginnings of a headache.

  She looked at her watch.

  “Humphrey Bogart Theater will be on in a few minutes. D’you want to watch TV?”

  I laughed. “What’s the film?”

  “Knock on any Door.”

  “He doesn’t play Bogey in that one.”

  “We could play checkers.”

  “We’ve been playing that all afternoon.”

  “You can start sulking again if you want to. I think it’s kinda cute the way you can pout with your upper lip without moving your bottom lip. How did you learn that, anyway?”

  “By hanging around cock-teasers in the ninth grade. I thought I’d forgotten how but I remembered how to do it after chasing you around all afternoon. How did you learn such a good game of checkers?”

  “What’s the name of the film where Bogey has a plastic surgeon change his face, and then he turns out to be Bogey when the bandages come off?”

  “Did you ever read The Chessmen of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs?” I asked.

  “No, but I read Tarzan at the Earth Score”

  “You agglutinated that. When you were a kid you probably asked your mother for a napple.”

  “I did not.”

  “Why do you end every sentence with a rising inflection? ‘I did not?’”

  “Do I sound that way to you?”

  “Not really. I can’t get the little catch in the middle right.”

  “You’re really angry with me, aren’t you, Hank?”

  “Not at this moment. I was for a while, but now I’m merely disappointed. Resigned, I suppose.”

  “I couldn’t do it. I meant to, I intended to, and then I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” “Now I’m getting angry again.”

  “If you want to learn how to play checkers, why don’t you study the game?”

  “In other words, somewhere along the line in the last six weeks I made a wrong move, and that cost me the game?”

  “Maybe I made the wrong move, Hank.”

  “I don’t think so. Besides, nothing could make me mad enough to hit a woman.”

  “When you think, you frown, and when you frown your eyebrows meet in the middle.”

  “You’ve never met me in the middle. He escaped from San Quentin.”

  “And this girl in San Francisco took him in. He was trying to prove that he’d been railroaded into prison.”

  “Framed. You haven’t eaten all day.”

  “I don’t eat on Sundays. Sometimes, before I go to bed I…”

  “And you don’t screw on Sundays either. You watch Humphrey Bogart Theater.”

  “I have a toasted English muffin, and drink a glass of skim milk.”

  Downstairs, the door opened, and I listened as footfalls clumped up the stairs.

  “Your aunt’s back,” I said.

  “No,” Jannaire said, “it isn’t my aunt.”

  I got to my feet as she did. A man entered. He jangled some keys in his right hand a couple of times. Jannaire crossed to his side, put her right arm around his waist, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Mr. Norton,” she said, smiling as she turned toward me, “this is my husband, Mr. Wright. And this is Mr. Norton, darling. Mr. Norton’s in real estate, and he’s been driving me around all afternoon showing me some properties. It was so hot in the car, I invited him up for a beer.”

  Mr. Wright, her husband, looked disinterestedly at the six empty beer cans clustered on the coffee table. He was in his early forties, and bald in front, but four inches of black side hair had been combed over the bald spot. He was about five-eight, slight, but wiry looking, and about 150 pounds. There was a deep dent in his slightly crooked blade of a nose, and the two deep lines in his thin cheeks were so well-defined they were black, as if they had been drawn with ink. He had a short upper lip, and to make it seem longer he wore a very long—practically a hairline-moustache. He would have been a plain, even an ugly, man, if he hadn’t had such clear, penetrating, intelligent eyes. His eyes, bluish purple, with the black arching brows above them, almost made him handsome. There was a ragged pink patch of vitiligo on his forehead. His hands were huge, hands that belonged to a much larger man, and his thick wrists dangled below the two-short sleeves of his blue seersucker suit jacket.

  “How do you do, sir?” I said. “I think the acreage west of Kendale Lakes is a good buy for your wife, and I’ll be glad to show it to you sometime, Mr. Wright. At your convenience, of course.” I looked at the beer cans, and shook my head. “Ha, ha, Mrs. Wright, I’ll bet you’ll think twice before asking me in for a beer again, won’t you? But that sun out there really made me thirsty. Well…” I started toward the door “…you’ve got my phone number. It was nice to meet you, sir, and now I’d better get on home. My wife’ll begin to wonder what happened to me.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” Mr. Wright said.

  He followed me downstairs, right at my heels. I wanted to run, but I walked as casually as possible, matching his shorter pace as we shared the sidewalk.

  “Were you showing my wife real estate all afternoon, Mr. Norton?” he said, twisting his head sl
ightly to look up into my face.

  “Yes, sir. All afternoon—since one o’clock.” “Whose car did you use?”

  It was a trick question. But then, he knew her Porsche. Did he know mine?

  “Mine,” I said. “Why?”

  He took a rotor out of his jacket pocket. “Because I have the rotor to my wife’s Porsche.”

  We reached my car, and I took out my keys. “Is this your car, Mr. Norton?” I nodded.

  “This car’s been parked here all afternoon. I checked it four times, each time on the quarter hour.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “You’ve been fucking my wife all afternoon.”

  “??…?…”

  “We’ve already established that you’re a liar, Norton. And you pants are unzipped.”

  I looked down to see, one of the most foolish things I’ve ever done in my life, and yet, it would have been impossible not to look down and check. My zipper was not down, but what could I say? My mind was benumbed. I fumbled with the keys, and finally got the door open. Mr. Wright stood in the open doorway, and held the door open as I slid under the wheel.

  “You cuckolded me in my own house, and in my own bed, Norton. And I’m going to kill you for it.” His dark blue, almost purple eyes, stared at me coldly. He slammed the door, and stepped back.

  I started the engine, and pulled away from the curb. Through the rear view mirror I could see Mr. Wright jotting something in a black notebook as he looked after my car. He was probably taking down my license number.

  He is only trying to frighten me, I thought, and he has succeeded.

  11

  By midnight, two hours after Jannaire’s husband had taken a shot at me, I had reviewed the steps leading up to it, and all I had to show for it was a hodgepodge of contradictions. They didn’t hang together, none of them. I could discount Jannaire’s lack of a wedding ring. Many married women nowadays don’t wear one, feeling rightly or wrongly, that a wedding band is a stigma, a symbol that they are possessed by a man. So that didn’t mean much, except, if she had worn one, I would have handled my seduction campaign differently from the beginning.

  The aunt, I concluded, was certainly fictitious. On the other hand, when I had used the john in Jannaire’s apartment, after the second, no, the third beer, I hadn’t seen any evidence of male occupancy in the bathroom. So Mr. Wright—or Wright—I kept thinking of him as Mister Wright—was probably sleeping in the guest bedroom, or living elsewhere. She had said, “my husband,” so they were still married, not divorced—or perhaps estranged. Estrangement, as the newspapers indicate every day, made him more dangerous than a husband who was safely and happily married and coming home every week with a paycheck. It was the estranged and jealous husbands who were always coming around to shoot their wives, their wives’ lovers, and, if they had any, their children sitting in front of the TV set. If a lover was getting some, and they were not, it drove estranged husbands crazy. Almost every day when I picked up the paper I read about some jealous husband shooting up his house, his wife, or pouring sugar into the gas tank of his wife’s lover’s car.

  That could account for Wright’s mean-spirited attitude all right, and yet I couldn’t be certain. The way he came in, juggling the house keys in his hand, the kiss Jannaire gave him on the check, and the calm way she greeted him—no anxiety showing, that I could recall—was almost as if she were expecting him. And if that were the case, although it seemed crazy to consider such a wild idea, she had set me up. She had set me up for the encounter, and she had planned, but had failed to carry through, to let me spend the afternoon in bed with her. Or so she had intimated—except that she couldn’t go through with it.

  If I could talk to Jannaire, or talk to Mr. Wright calmly and reasonably for a few minutes, I could straighten the entire matter out.

  I called Jannaire’s number, and she answered on the thirdring.

  “Jannaire,” I said, “this is Hank. I…” “Just a minute, Hank.”

  I waited, and a moment later Wright was on the phone. “Norton?”

  “Oh,” I said, “you’re still there? Listen Mr. Wright, I…”

  “Where else would I be, Norton? You’re a lucky man, and you’ve got a lot of guts calling here. But the next time I see you, your guts are going to be spread out on the pavement.”

  “Listen a minute…”

  “You were lucky because the damned Wildcat I rented had this emission control that screwed up the engine. Just as I fired, the car surged and threw off my aim.”

  “They all do that, surge I mean. The emission control…”

  “That’s what the man at Five-A-Day Car Rental told me when I turned in the car. So I’ve got another car now, an older car, and next time you won’t be so lucky.”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about. You’re making a bad mistake, and…”

  He slammed the phone down.

  He was crazy, I decided, and so was Jannaire for living with him, or not living with him, whatever, or for ever marrying him in the first place. He was at least fifteen years older than Jannaire, and she was making plenty of money without him, so why had she ever married a nut like that?

  I fixed a drink, a normal one-and-a-half ounce scotch, with an equal amount of soda over ice, and noticed that my hands no longer trembled. I wasn’t panicky, nor was I terrified. I was merely frightened, but it was a good kind of fear, the way you feel before a basketball game, or before making a speech on safety to a large group. In addition to my fear, and it was a fear I could control, I had an odd feeling of exhilaration, an emotion I hadn’t had for several years. It was a feeling that came from thinking. Thinking was something I hadn’t done for a long time. How rare it is nowadays to use your mind to think something out, to puzzle over something; and thinking about this idea, my sudden alertness and feeling of well-being startled me.

  The sure knowledge, now, that Mr. Wright was going to shoot me, was a challenge and an insult. Did the crazy bastard think that I was going to let him kill me? Did he think I wouldn’t fight back? I could feel the anger surge inside me—the way his car had surged when the emission control system grabbed it—and I choked it off. He wasn’t angry. His voice had been cool, controlled, and without a trace of passion or anger. He was carrying out some stupid ritualistic code—the old unwritten law of the pre-Korean War years. A man fucks your wife, so you kill him to protect your honor. That was my lousy luck. Not only was I innocent—I hadn’t even got so much as a finger in it—I had had the bad luck to run into a middle-aged husband with outmoded and outdated social values.

  Wright would never talk with me. The rigid bastard was a damned reactionary, and, if he could, he would shoot me down in cold blood, dispassionately, feeling that he was doing the right thing and that he would be vindicated whether caught and found guilty, or found not guilty under the so-called unwritten law. The worse that could happen to him, the very worst, was a sentence of life imprisonment—if he were found guilty—and a life sentence meant that he would be released, at the maximum, within eight years. If he behaved himself in prison, and that is what reactionaries did—they always followed the rules—he would be released in about three years. For a crime of passion, a one-time killing purportedly done because of an emotional involvement, he could be out in the streets again—with a good lawyer and plea bargaining—within a year-and-a-half, or two years at the most.

  If I knew this much, he certainly knew it, too, and there was no doubt in my mind that he would try to kill me. And that is exactly what he would do, unless I killed him first.

  So starting right this moment, Mr. Wright, I thought, I am going to be looking for you, and we shall see who will be the first one shot—you, or me.

  I unlocked the front door, went to the trash chute down the hallway, and picked up a stack of discarded newspapers. After relocking my door and testing the chain, I crumpled up big balls of newspaper, scattered them on the floor, and went to bed. For a while, I lay on my back, watching the
electric numbers flash on the ceiling from my electric clock projector, and I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep all night. But soon I got so sleepy I couldn’t keep my eyes open…

  12

  I have always been a strong swimmer, but my forte has been endurance, not speed. And yet, here I was, flailing my arms in a loose Australian crawl, with minimum kicking, and I was ploughing through the water at three times my normal swimming speed. My head was high and out of the water, and most of my back was high out of the water as well.

  The light was gray, misty, and swirling with patches of fog. I could only see about three or four feet ahead. A huge amorphous shape loomed in front of me, but I neither gained on it nor lost water. Whatever it was, we were apparently making the same speed. If I didn’t know where I was going, or where I was, what was the hurry? I stopped swimming altogether. Strange. I didn’t sink, and my steady pace continued. I sailed through the murky, pleasantly warm water, as if I were being towed. It was at this point that I felt the wide band around my middle. The band wasn’t uncomfortably tight, but it was snug. I was tied somehow, and the band around my wrist, attached to something or other (a submarine periscope?), was propelling me at top speed behind the shapeless gray form ahead.

  The gray shape swerved sharply to the right, and a moment later I did, too, into absolute blackness. I wasn’t frightened, although I was vaguely uneasy and more than a little puzzled. My pace didn’t slacken as my chest parted the water. I clasped my hands, and rested my chin on my knuckles, peering ahead into nothing. Then, beyond the blacker shape ahead of me, the darkness began to lighten slightly, and I saw a half-circle of white in the distance. As the white circle became larger, I realized that I was in a tunnel, a curving tunnel, and a moment later I was bathed in hot pink light as I shot out of the blackness. The gray shape ahead of me metamorphosized immediately into a garishly painted wooden duck, much larger than me, and there were sudden splashes of dirty water between the duck’s fanning tail and my head. I heard the sound of the shots then, craned my head and neck to the left, and saw the upper body of a man leaning across a wooden plank, perhaps a hundred yards away, aiming a rifle in my direction. For God’s sake, I thought, as my arms flailed the water in an effort to increase my speed, he’s shooting at me! I recognized, or thought I did, a patch of vitiligo on the man’s forehead. It’s Mr. Wright, and he’s shooting at me!