The Axman Cometh

by John Farris

  Papa turns solidly to him, the seat of the stool creaking under his weight (he's wearing a safari jacket with leather trim, camp shorts and knee-length yellow socks). He grins and swipes at his whiskers with one meaty hand and says, "How long does it take you to shake the dew off your daisy? Get over here, Carnes."

  "I beg your pardon?" Don says stiffly.

  "You need some help with your problem, and there's no time to waste, according to the signals I'm getting." He seems to have trouble with his l's and r's, a mild speech impediment. "Shannon just hopes you're up to it. Expect that's what I'm doing here."

  "You, uh, you can't be here. I mean, he can't. So what are you, an actor who impersonates—"

  Don looks around to see if any of his friends are peeking at him from the dining room or behind the coatroom door. But they are alone, in an unnerving wee-hours silence. Silent, except for the rain and the swish of tires on the street outside. Alone, except for the quick shadowy presence of pedestrians beneath umbrellas hurrying past Cabrera's windows.

  Papa slams a fist down on the bar. He is still grinning, testily.

  "Watch what names you call a man, unless you're prepared to defend yourself.

  Actor? Never had any use for the lot of them, except Coop. And the Kraut, of course. Sit down and drink up. You don't quit after four daiquiris, not when you drink with me. The record's eighteen. At one sitting. You're looking at the record-holder. What we need now are some prawns. You know how I like them: cooked in seawater with a little lime juice, some black peppercorns. But the kitchen's closed." His expression sours. "Makes a man wish he was back home in San Francisco de Paula."

  "What problem?" Don says woodenly, edging a little closer to the burly man, anticipating, hoping that he will suddenly laugh or wink or say something to give away the rib, the conspiracy, whatever it is.

  Papa just looks at the rain and then at the two of them in the backbar mirror. He lifts his daiquiri and drinks, two good swallows, leaving a little froth on his whiskers.

  "Always this spooky?" he says, with a sidelong glance at Don. "Or is it the booze? Not a rummie, are you? I don't mind rummies. It's the bores that make my ass ache. They'd come right in the house, down there in Key West, while I was trying to get work done. 'Just wanted to shake your hand, Mr. Hummingbuffer. Personally I never read anything, but the little lady tells me you're aces. Help myself to your booze? Don't mind if I do.' So what are you staring at, Carnes? Sit down, drink your drink, and we'll roll for the next one. Then you've got work to do."

  Don rubs his eyes and his vision blurs; the man in front of him is immediately less substantial. Don, light-headed, is inspired to think he can almost see through him. Panic in his breast. He wants to back away, but is more afraid of the shadowy, empty room behind him than the man on the barstool. Blinking, feeling a chill in his belly that has settled in like a glacier, he eases onto the adjacent stool. Aware he is being stared at, Papa smiles, but grumpily. And Don can smell him: the sportsman's leathery slightly sweaty tang, with a double whiff of sporting dog and gunpowder—did apparitions have an odor? Famous author or not, there is something four-square and trustworthy about him. Loyal to his friends, ruthless to his enemies—why get on his bad side? He only wants someone to drink with, isn't that it? But what is it he's just said about—

  Don's fingers curl around the "Papa doble" mug in front of him.

  "Work?"

  "Sure. Your beauty's in a spot of trouble. Not so bad, maybe, if she were alone in that elevator; but she's not alone. He's coming out now, smoothly and cleverly, yet he's in a beastly frame of mind. Un cabron maldito. We will drink now to your valiant beauty, whose valor is not of itself enough to save her, and consider what must be done. Whatever must be done must be done awfully quickly."

  Don gulps down a third of the frozen daiquiri while Papa continues to sip his own drink at a thinker's pace, the sun wrinkles bunching at the corners of his eyes.

  "Shannon's trapped in the elevator? I knew it! Why didn't Petra call me—I'll call now! The fire department! They—"

  "They will be useless to her. By the time they reach her, by prying open the elevator doors, she will be dead. Muerte. We are talking now of the Axman, not some ordinary evil but un malhecho grandioso—a king of a devil."

  "The Axman died!"

  "No one can be sure of that."

  "And," Don says, confused and sore at heart and scared, "I'm sitting here talking to a dead man too, so I must have got good and drunk when I wasn't counting. I know I haven't lost my mind. There are people who lose their minds and people who will never lose their minds, and I'm one of them."

  "The Axman may have died," Papa concedes, "but he was never laid to rest. More than a technicality is involved here. None of us are ever truly gone, as long as there is a single memory to keep us alive."

  Papa points, as if he is aiming a gun, at the back bar photograph. With no transition Don can be certain of, the flat shadowy cat from the Finca Vigilia is crouched cross-eyed and big as life on the bar in front of Papa, who says affectionately, "How are you, you screwy old bastard?" To Don he says, "Meet a forty- year-old cat."

  "Aaaaggghhh!"

  "If the living recall the dead, the dead will recall the remoter dead, and soon there won't be a decent place in town you can get into. What must be done, then, is simple: keep your beauty from recalling the Axman until she is safely removed from the dark. But no firemen."

  Don, looking him straight in the eye so he won't have to look anywhere else, recovers his voice. "Why not?"

  "With firemen will come the fire. Which only a king of a devil may survive."

  "My God. My God!"

  "Tu lo crea," Papa says solemnly. "And go now. Before she is desperate enough to draw you."

  "Hey, Shannon! Give you a lift?"

  (She is walking east on Cottonwood, four blocks from the high school. It is two o'clock in the afternoon on a very warm but pleasant Monday, the first of June. She has one more exam to go—second-year algebra, at eight-thirty Wednesday morning—and her junior year will be over. Then she has three days left to get ready for Dab's surprise party on Friday night. But an even greater surprise is in store: the Axman cometh. He is, in fact, already there. In Emerson, Kansas, in the spring of 1964.)

  Shannon has been going over her mental preparations for the party, ticking off expenses. She turns her head incuriously to see who has called to her.

  "Oh, hi, Perry—where'd you get the neat pickup?"

  It's practically new, a blue-and-silver GMC. But she keeps walking, with only a block to go before she reaches Dab's hardware store, around the corner and three doors down from the main drag in Emerson, the recently named Dwight D. Eisenhower Boulevard. On Dedication Day there was a parade with six bands, fireworks, and an RCA-

  sanctioned rodeo that night. John Eisenhower was there with his family, but Ike and Mamie sent their regrets.

  "My dad's. Actually he never lets me touch it, but he came home drunk Saturday night, fell in a ditch and broke his leg."

  "Oh, I'm sorry," Shannon says mildly, but she has no great fund of sympathy for men who drink too much and fall in ditches. As if her attitude is in plain view, Perry Kennold hastens to assure her.

  "He hardly ever gets that bad. It was just him and some guys out celebrating, one of them had a kid—I mean, it was his wife who had the kid. So could I take you somewhere?"

  "I'm just going to my dad's hardware store to give him a hand this afternoon. It's right there. Thanks anyway."

  "How'd you make out in biology?"

  Shannon shows him two crossed fingers. "C on the final. That'll give me a C-minus for the year, and I don't have to take any more science for the rest of my life, unless I go to college."

  "Don't know if I passed or not," Perry confides, leaning out the window, driving with one hand as he rolls slowly along keeping pace with Shannon. "I did okay in English, though. I always do good in English. I just always did like to read. My mother taught me, even before I was
old enough to start school.

  She wanted to be a schoolteacher once, but then she got married. She had high school and two years of college. She was really well educated. My dad only got as far as eighth grade, and I don't know how good he can read. I never see him read anything, and it takes him five minutes to sign one of his paychecks. My sister dropped out of ninth grade to get married. I don't know why I stay in school. My mother always said she'd skin me alive if I dropped out. But she's not around any more. Aren't you planning to go to college?"

  "I'm going to art school in Kansas City —or maybe Chicago," she adds, a recent inspiration.

  "If you've got a little time before you start helping your dad, would you like to go to the Dairy Queen? That's where I was headed."

  "Oh, I don't think so, Perry, Dab's doing inventory and needs me on the cash register."

  "Well, maybe I'll see you again some time this summer. I'm going to work for the Highway Department." He smiles, apparently not caring about the vacancy in his dental arch; he has something to be proud of. "I have to get up at four-thirty in the morning. But I'll be making a dollar-seventy an hour."

  "That's good, Perry," Shannon says, opening the door of the hardware store to the accompaniment of a little brass bell announcer. "See you." As the door shuts behind her she leans against it. "Whew!" Maybe he'll get over his crush on her, or just move on when his father's leg heals. But now he knows two places to find her, with school out. Should she give him a big thrill and—no; one of her hard-and-fast rules is not to date boys who drive pickup trucks. The other is more vague but implicit, having to do with status in her peer group and boys with serious complexion problems. She's in love anyway. Last night Robert called, from Pittsburg, Kansas, his last stop on his sales trip before heading home to Chicago. Mentioned something about her coming up for a visit to his family's summer place in northern Wisconsin. Shannon can just imagine what her folks would have to say about that. Hopeless. But in another sixteen months—fifteen-and-a-half months—she will be eighteen, and there are scholarships available from the Chicago Art Institute. In the meantime, she loves being in love.

  Dab is angry about something, on the telephone in the office behind the store, or with a customer. Which startles Shannon, who almost never hears him raise his voice.

  "I personally don't guarantee the merchandise, because the merchandise comes with a perfectly good guarantee from the manufacturer. I'm saying if you've got a complaint about the quality of that saw, and I must've sold a hundred of 'em in the last six years without hearing another single complaint, then you need to ship it back to the factory. The condition it's in, Leon, looks like it was run over by a road grader or dropped off a roof, and the guarantee specifically excludes that kind of careless wear and tear. You been around tools your whole life, and you know what I'm telling you is true."

  "I'm saying this chainsaw's a no-account piece of shit, and I want my money back from the one I give it to in the first place, and that's you!"

  Shannon lays her school notebook down beside the cash register and drifts toward the back of the store, which is narrow and deep and only about fifteen feet wide, crammed with floor-to-ceiling bins and shelves, smelling mustily of nails, varnish, raw rope, cold steel. There are no other customers at the moment. She can see Dab with the dissatisfied chainsaw owner, a chronic sorehead and town troublemaker named Leon Burtis, behind the pebbled-glass partition.

  "Dab? It's me!" Shannon calls to her father, thinking her presence may cool the dispute, because she's afraid of Leon Burtis and some other Burtises, younger, who are marking time at the high school until they are old enough to be excused from formal education. Both heads turn momentarily, but they

  can't see out and she can't see in.

  Dab says, "With you in a minute, honey." The watercooler belches a big floppy bubble inside the five-gallon bottle and Shannon heads toward it for a drink.

  Leon Burtis says, "I don't have no more time to waste on this matter. Do I get my money back or not?"

  "Not from me," Dab says firmly.

  "Well, you are a cocksucking son of a bitch, and God damned if I'll ever do another dime's worth of business in your fucking store."

  "You won't use that kind of language in here as of right now, because that's my daughter outside!"

  Shannon steps back from the water- cooler near the office door, tilting her head a little to see inside. Leon Burtis has long sun-reddened forearms and his knuckly hands have formed fists. Dab, not small by any means but a couple of inches shorter, just stares him down. Leon's nostrils are flared as big as his ears. His eyes have no definition, they are just an electric blue glow of rage, and sweat beads stand out among the few reddish hairs still sprouting from the crown of his head. Shannon can't swallow; rage and violence in others always chokes her up, freezes her in place. Leon looks at her looking in on him. His taut mouth flinches as if he is going to spit out more choice profanity. Dab won't look away or back off an inch but there is no truce between them, the air they breathe is laced with black powder close to the flash point. Shannon hears the little bell over the front door, but she doesn't look around to see who it is.

  Shannon says, "Could I get you a cup of water, Mr. Burtis? You look awfully hot."

  Now she has his full attention; before he can say yes or no or refocus on Dab, Shannon quickly pulls a pleated cup from the dispenser and fills it, enters the office as Dab, lowering his hands, takes a step back to make room for her. Once she is more or less in between the two men, the tension of their confrontation lessens and Leon, with a faint show of politeness but no apology, dampens his ire with the cup of Mountain Valley spring water. Then he crushes it in his fist.

  Shannon smiles and moves back toward her father, leaving the doorway open.

  "We were all sorry to hear about Leona," Shannon says.

  He clears his throat and there is something besides rancor simmering in his eyes, not grief but defeat: despite all the anger he can muster, the world will have its way with him. His daughter, a pretty fair barrel-racer, hung around with some of the bigger names in bronc and bull-riding until she was accidentally kicked in the head by a mustang; recently she passed on after two years in a coma. Leon stares at the unworkable chainsaw he has dumped on Dab's desk, is reminded, perhaps, of Leona, clears his throat more loudly and contemptuously, brushes past Shannon and goes quickly down the single aisle of the store, veering past the customer who entered a little while ago.

  Dab whistles in a low tone through his

  teeth.

  "Arguing with Leon is like trying to nail Jell-0 to the wall."

  "I thought he was going to hit you," Shannon says, still worried, a tingling in her hands and around her heart.

  Dab cradles his right fist affectionately in his left. "Well, if he had," he says. Dab fought in the navy, and was runnerup in his division, the Fifth Fleet championships in '43. Overweight now, he knows he could still give a good account of himself. But the trouble with fighting a Burtis is that it's like issuing a challenge to the whole clan: they just keep coming around looking for satisfaction.

  "Do you want a drink of water?" Shannon asks him.

  "I'll get some myself," Dab says, laying a hand on her shoulder for a moment. "See if you can help that man that came in."

  "Sure."

  Like half of the adult males in town, their customer on this Monday afternoon is wearing a plain Western-style shirt and jeans, a pair of boots with bulldogger's heels and a rancher's straw Stetson. His hair is coarse and worn in a style known locally as military Mohawk. But, although he has the cheekbones, he's too pale to be tribal. His sleeves are rolled up. He has powerful forearms without a trace of hair on them. His hands are long, but not those of a workingman. They're well cared-for, the nails clean and neatly clipped.

  "I wonder if you dropped this?" he says with a smile, extending one of the invitations to Dab's surprise birthday party.

  "Oh, it must have fallen out of my notebook; thanks," Shannon says, retrie
ving the invitation. She lowers her voice. "I wouldn't want Dab to see this. Trying to keep it a secret, and so far it's working."

  He leans against the counter near the cash register. "Oh, a surprise birthday party." He glances at the back of the store, remembering to keep his voice as low as Shannon's. "Mr. Hill? That's your father?"

  “'Uh-huh. Dab's going to be fifty."

  "That's an important milestone, all right. I'm Autry Smith. Nice to meet you—"

  "Shannon." His voice is deep, cultivated. Like a radio announcer's. No placeable accent. Not a Kansan, as far as she can tell, nor a Westerner, although he seems at home in the rig he's wearing. She shakes his hand, looking into his eyes, which are a dark chocolate color. His face is widest at eye level, his brows heavy but plucked, only a millimeter of space between them over his high-bridged nose. He has an easygoing smile and not a tooth out of line. He must be about thirty, Shannon thinks. Unlike the recently departed Leon Burtis, a man furiously at odds with himself and everyone else, Autry Smith has an unmistakable air of competence, even command. So that could be it: he's one of the jet jockeys from the nearby air base, enjoying an afternoon out of uniform. She glances at the class ring on his finger.

  "That's not KU, is it?"

  "No, West Point."

  "Ohhh."

  "I'm stationed at Fort Riley," he says, obligingly holding up his hand so that Shannon can get a better look at his ring.

  "What brings you down this way?"

  "I had some time off, so I'm visiting an old friend of my father's, Colonel Bark Bonner. He's retired now, has a place ten miles south of here. The colonel's got a bad hip and hasn't been keeping his place up, so I thought I'd do a few repairs." Autry Smith takes a list from his breast pocket, which Shannon scans.

  "Just take me a couple of minutes to get all of this together. Would you like some cold water, uh—sir—I don't know what your rank is."