The Axman Cometh

by John Farris

  "She said, 'Watch, Donnie,' and pursed her lips in kind of a funny way, rubbed her fingers and thumb on the pencil she'd been drawing with, and the goddam bird flew right off the paper. Shannon looked at me with big dreamy eyes blue as lakes and that's when I felt, hell, like a kid back when I was growing up in Oswego and a wave of Lake Ontario would come barreling in over me; it wasn't any kind of trick, though, she hadn't dragged the bird in from the window ledge feeder just to fool me—I'm telling you truthfully, Papa, right off the damn paper Shannon just smiled as it circled around the bedroom, a real honest-to-God bird, and not at all panicky like birds indoors get. Pretty little bluebird. The bluebird of happiness?" Don honks twice into his soppy handkerchief. "Are you listening to me, Papa?"

  "No. I'll need you to give me some help here."

  Papa has one foot up on a narrow ledge about three feet above the sidewalk. He is sliding the fingers of his left hand along the margin of a handbill pasted over a rectangle of plywood; suddenly his fingers disappear as if sliced off by a guillotine.

  Papa grunts, satisfied. "Thought so." He raises his other hand to pull at the plywood. There is some give in it, a sound of rusty hinges, a narrow space evident despite the dark and the rain.

  "Pull!" Papa says, and Don lends his own strength to enlarging the space.

  "There was a door here once—little wider—okay, I'll hold it while you step inside. Watch where you put your feet."

  Don, prudently, cranes to try to see into the building before offering his body to it The building breathes damply into his face: a tomblike miasma. He shudders.

  "Without a light, maybe we shouldn't— owwww!"

  Don goes sprawling inside from the force of Papa's foot on his backside. He picks himself up off a floor littered with, among other things, sawdust and bits of broken glass. Damn lucky he wasn't cut. He is smarting from indignation. He'd read somewhere that the famous author could be a bully. Skitterings in the dark, and Don turns lumpishly cold: mice, or, worse, rats. He reaches up to reset his glasses, which are near the end of his nose, shudders again and sneezes. He hears paper tearing. A car goes by in the street and in the narrow space of the doorsill he sees a lit-up Papa, salt-and-pepper whiskers glowing like a Halloween cat. He is ripping a couple of old handbills from the street side of the plywood.

  "What are you up to?"

  Papa props the heavy rectangle of plywood open with an elbow and twists the stripe of handbills tightly together.

  "Those won't burn. Aren't they wet?"

  "A little damp. But plenty of glue for fuel. Two of these will give us a good light Fifteen, twenty minutes' worth."

  Papa tosses one of the makeshift torches down to Don.

  "Hold this."

  Don looks away, toward the vague and shadowy flickering.

  "Smoke," Papa says, his nose still working much better than Don's. "Rummies would have a fire on a night like this." He has taken matches from a pocket beneath his sou'wester. Strikes one and gets the end of his improvised torch glowing. Hands it down to Don. "We don't want it to burn too fast," he advises. He climbs down from the ledge, letting the hinged plywood settle into place behind him.

  Don looks around the floor, which is concrete. The former department store was evidently stripped to the bare walls and cleaned out in advance of renovation that has never occurred. The smouldering torch affords just enough light to see a few feet into the blackness, enabling them to avoid pillars or pitfalls. Where are the elevators? He tries to remember how they went in and out on his only visit to Knightsbridge Publishers, the occasion a cocktail party honoring Shannon when one of her ten books for children reached the hundred-thousand copy mark in sales.

  "At one time there were elevators and escalators in the store," he says to Papa. "But the only elevator left was the one they used while they were doing construction work on the upper floors. That has to be the elevator Shannon's in."

  "No use to us if it's stuck up there between floors. What about stairs?"

  "I don't know; there must be a stairway. We'll just have to look around until we—God in heaven, what was that?"

  Startled by the echoing, flattened trumpet call, Don takes a step back on the floor littered with scraps of paper, old bones and copious black droppings, jostling Papa, who keeps his own footing and lifts his head eagerly. They hear it again, eerie, reverberating, and this time a look of almost reverential joy appears in the old hunter's eyes, he smiles from ear to ear.

  "That," Papa says, "is a fornicating elephant. Looks like I've come home again."

  Home.

  To Perry Kennold, home is an Airstream trailer, far from new when his old man acquired it for a little cash, an eighteen-foot speedboat with dry rot where it didn't show and a Mercury outboard that had a bent propeller shaft, also something not at all obvious until you tried to rev it over ten miles an hour. For eight years he has lived in the Airstream in six different states, never far down a dusty road from one vast construction site or another. Lived with his brawling parents and his little sister, who finally fled at the age of fourteen with a bowlegged half-Crow son of a sugarbeet farmer from Harding, Montana. He's had three postcards from Elsie since then, the last from somewhere up in Alberta, Canada, where she was a waitress and her husband was working off six weeks for disorderly conduct and public drunkenness. The good news is, she still isn't pregnant; the bad news is, she has acne too, not as bad as Perry's but as she described her condition, her cheeks look like blueberry muffins.

  Perry misses Elsie and she said she missed him too; but he realizes it is no good asking her to come back, at least not until he is making his own way in the world and has a place for her to stay. When she was eleven or twelve their father had begun taking too much of an interest in Elsie, though he only became real aggressive when he was drunk, and then he couldn't do much, because of how the booze affected him, except with his middle finger. But that was bad enough. It all but killed Elsie's spirit and her sense of humor, and although she would never admit everything to Perry, he knew, and was depressed and afraid, afraid because he couldn't sleep some nights for thinking what it would be like to put a knife in his father's heart. Anyway, Elsie solved their mutual dilemma by eloping, and things improved between Perry and the old man, particularly when Perry put on nearly twenty-five pounds of muscle one summer and, after his father insisted on Indian- wrestling, wrenched his neck badly.

  In the trailer Perry sleeps, as he's always done, on a built-in couch in the larger cabin a few feet away from the vibrating refrigerator and the dripping faucet in the little sink. The interior is pretty much a shambles: a film of grease everywhere from smoky fry-pans, worn-out carpet and upholstery with big chunks missing, as if gnawed on; two windows cracked, Venetian blind slats fly-specked and bent. His father sleeps in back, in the only bedroom, and since he broke his tibia and cracked the patella of his left knee he spends a lot of time on the bed in a midthigh cast watching daytime TV, adding to his beer belly and complaining about his rotten luck.

  There are few grace notes in Perry's life;

  his infatuation with Wait Whitman's poetry is one. {The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me.) His infatuation with Shannon Hill is another.

  Perry has several photos of Shannon. Four of these are in the high-school yearbook, the Road Runner, including her junior class portrait, which is only one inch by two inches and in black-and-white. Not his favorite, because it emphasizes a certain vapid thinness of mouth, a prematurely spinsterish look that he doesn't notice when talking to her. His favorite photo is one he swiped, peeling it off a poster in school one afternoon after lingering until he was sure the halls were empty. Shannon, cochairman of the junior prom committee. Her head is up and she's laughing in this candid color shot (This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds). He carries the purloined photo in his wallet, carefully wrapped in several thicknesses of tissue paper so it can't be sweat-stained or scratched.

  Everybody must have noticed
the photo was missing and probably some of Shannon's friends teased her about it. If she had her suspicions as to who took it, she didn't let on in biology, the one class they shared during the day, or in the halls where he contrived as often as possible to run into Shannon between classes. He allowed himself to believe that Shannon not only knew he had the picture, but approved. It was a comfortable secret they shared, dearer to him than words. Her usual greeting, as she came swirling down the hall with an armload of books, was a quick smile and sometimes a shrug, excusing herself: "Busy, busy, busy." He knew how busy and active she was. Prom committee, newspaper, student council (recording secretary, junior class). Art Club. Girl's volleyball. He was proud of Shannon. He could even manage without a twinge of jealousy when he saw her with other guys: the senior-class president she sometimes dated, the jocks. None of them as big as Perry; he took comfort in that, even though he had no athletic ability. But the football teams always needed beef in the line, so maybe next year—

  Perry's alarm goes off at four-thirty A.M. He wakes up with a skipped heart beat and shortness of breath, something that happens to him from time to time, particularly .after a wet dream. The fly front of the Jockey briefs he slept in is stiff from his emission. But like always, coming in his sleep hasn't afforded total satisfaction.

  Yearningly he turns over on the narrow couch and embraces a pillow. There is a rooster crowing somewhere, a dog barking. His first waking thoughts are of Shannon. He reaches into his shorts. The air in the trailer is stale. He is sweaty all over. In the dark he squeezes himself almost painfully, squeezes again. (The mystic amorous night, the strange half-welcome pangs). He tries to imagine her asleep, beside him, then drowsily opening her eyes. Smiling at him. (O you and me at last, and us two only). Ohh, God! But it's going to take too much time, young as he is. He has to be at work at five-thirty, out on the Interstate bypass. They're pouring today. Saturday, time-and-a-half, he and his father need the money.

  Perry gets up and peels himself out of the soiled underwear. He finds another pair in one of the drawers built into the underside of the couch and carries the shorts into the bathroom, which he has to enter at an angle because of the width of his shoulders; the doorway is only about a foot and a half wide. He uses the toilet and splashes his face with water, takes inventory. Traces of brownish Clearasil above his eyebrows, on his cheeks. No better or worse than yesterday. The dermatologist in town says he won't scar much, if at all, just wait it out, Perry. There's a new one on his chin by the deep cleft and he attacks almost savagely, punishing the zit until the core is out and the hole that remains fills with fresh blood. He blots it, applies more Clearasil everywhere and stares at himself in the bleak mirror, feeling cast down and afflicted, even though his day has barely started.

  He'll drive by her house before going to work.

  O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you ...

  Just the thought of driving down West Homestead before the crack of dawn, pulling over in front of Shannon's house and looking up at the windows where he thinks her bedroom is (last two windows on the left, second floor), and where he has seen her, twice, at night, in silhouette against the drawn shades and flimsy curtains, the thought is sufficient to revive and fill him with an electric anticipation, the mainspring of certain and desirable Fate winding ever-tighter in his breast.

  He wears frayed jeans and a T-shirt to work, taking along his denim vest because it will be chilly out on the road until an hour after dawn. He munches handfuls of dried Wheaties, washes them down with bottled orange juice, then makes his lunch. Six slices of bologna and a lot of mayonnaise on white bread, two Hostess cupcakes (needs the energy, although he knows the sugar will add fuel to all the little volcanoes on his face and neck and shoulders), pours a quart of milk into a thermos. He attaches his Buck knife in its scabbard to his belt. No trouble yet with the guys he works with, but he has been in a lot of fights and knows the value of intimidation—a scowl, his big shoulders, the plainly visible Buck knife, which, opened, has a five-inch blade.

  Four forty-five. His father is snoring. When he's awake he has trouble getting around with the cast on his leg, and twice has spilled the cam he pees and expectorates in at night, trying to get it to the sink to empty it. Adding to the general squalor and disagreeableness of their cramped living space. Perry thinks maybe he ought to go in there and attend to this bothersome chore, but the old man probably will wake up and think of six other things Perry needs to do before he takes off for work. Hell with that. Truck keys in a pocket of his fleece-lined vest, a coming-apart paperback edition of Leaves of Grass in another. He leaves the Airstream quietly, not rocking it much with his weight as he steps out and takes a slow look around.

  More than one rooster is stirring in semirural coops across the willow-lined river from the trailer park. Stars still visible directly overhead but the sky is lightening eastward. Some lights on in the mobile homes around him. A collicky baby screaming, probably the same baby he heard just before falling asleep, nine hours ago. The bad news is they cry a lot. But the good news is they don't stay babies for long. Before you know it they're three or four years old, and kids can be a lot of fun. Perry has gazed at a pearl of semen on his fingertip and thought of how many babies it would make. Flunked biology through sheer lack of interest, but he learned this much: one drop of the fun stuff, a thousand babies. Ten thousand. But one baby will be enough for him— his baby. Shannon's. He gets into the GMC truck, carelessly knocking an elbow in his mooniness, wondering what her stuff looks like, tastes like. His only sexual experience with a thirty-five-year-old woman he babysat for in New Mexico. Three kids, the oldest three-and-a-half. Aroma of fried food in her hair, on her skin. In heat her secretions had a harsh odor, like soap with lye in it. Nipples tasting of dried mother's-milk. A wolfish sneer on her face as she came, straddling him, twisting down and down into his lap, getting hers with a vengeance. A little later, in a lull, she would teach him to go after her pussy as if he were sucking the juice from an orange. Breasts heaving, eyes way back in her head.

  He hadn't really liked her but was excited by her excitement, her wild, red hair.

  Now there was Shannon, skin cleanly shining, unblemished as a doll's. Shannon, virginal, will be different. Perry doesn't like to think about the possibility that she might have done it with somebody else already. No. He's sure. Girls who have done it have a different way of looking at you, their eyes sooner or later just go to your crotch. Shannon Hill is a virgin. Does she get crabby once a month, like Elsie did? Circles under her pretty eyes? He is going to see Shannon. What if, what if there's a chance he could just open the door of her house and tiptoe upstairs to where she sleeps and—. He aches. His genitals are hot as a toaster, he's swollen in his Levis, which makes it difficult and a little painful to drive. Her photo in his wallet. Would she like to go to a movie tonight? Is it too soon to be calling her? Please, please, go with me tonight, Shannon!

  I have somewhere surely lived, a life of joy with you

  Two deaths have been improvised, and done as well as he could do them.

  But this is the part the Axman likes best:

  With the stately symphonic poem taking shape in his head (reminiscent of, but certainly not borrowed from, Siegfried's Funeral Music in the third act of Die Gotterdammerung), he takes the time to again look around the master bedroom with his pencil flashlight. This time there are sleepers, whom he does not disturb but studies with what amounts to familial compassion as he waits for those moments in the course of the threnody that are certain to move him to tears: waits to lead them in their unmarriage vows, to unjoin them in holy bloodletting.

  (If one should wake, and if one could see in the dark, and had chilling moments of apprehension, of realization, then one would see a yellow hard hat, and beneath its narrow brim clear polycarbonate goggles already besmirched, little pinpoints of quick-dry bloodspatter. One would see the unblinking unwavering eyes of a curious man. Yes, curious, not inimical, nor
gloating, nor wishing the sleepers pain, which is the beauty of the heavy ax he, holds, no bone a barrier to the sharpness of the blades he carefully hones after every third or fourth stroke, circumstances permitting. He is respectful of his victims, aware of the very great privilege they afford him in the drawing of their blood. He wishes they all could hear the music, but that's the rub: the music is of their dying, during their dying; no one will hear the full symphony except she who he has chosen to be the last, his gift to her fine, unblemished soul.)

  The beam of the penlight moves with the silence of a butterfly over surfaces, is reflected in its poignant searching from mirrors, glassware, the screen of a bulky TV set, rabbit ears wrapped in crinkly aluminum foil. As he looks, he moves, never more than a step at a time, gradually coming ever-closer to the bed with the high birdseye-maple headboard, forming a scrolled crest a third of the way up the wall above which are positioned family photographs. Her family? His? Axman doesn't know. There is a thinness, a sallowness to the countryfolk in the group photos, not a smile to be spared, a certain dogged reluctance to look the camera in the eye. Churchyard. After a wedding, no doubt; who poses for photographs following a funeral? To a man they wear dark suits and fedoras; the women's flowered dresses reach to the top ankle strap of their best shoes. 1930's, even earlier, to judge from vintage high-roofed automobiles parked in the background.

  The

  beam

  traces

  down the papered wall, the headboard, steadies there as a sleeper shifts beneath the quilt, breaks wind obliviously. He waits, agreeably chilled by the recurrence of the leitmotiv conceived so effortlessly at the first fall of his ax downstairs. He listens intently, but there is nothing in the music he would change. Impatient to get on with what he is creating—but this is the inevitable lull before the next gorgeous, incredible gush of inspiration. As the music begins to fade from his mind (not losing it, no, it is always there even though he must sometimes shift his concentration outside himself, as if taking a short stroll away from the concert hall), he lets the light play on the wiry unkempt head and freckled brow of Ernestine Hill. Her eyelids shiny, purplish ovals. She is lying on her stomach, breathing through slack lips. One bare arm is thrown over the side of the bed, fingers trailing on the floor near where an ashtray, matches, a packet of cigarette papers and sack of tobacco are piled on top of a seed catalogue. Very small diamond in the wedding band which in turn is deep in the flesh below an enlarged, obstructive knuckle. She is wearing some kind of corset-thing beneath her flimsy sleeveless nightgown. Maybe it's for her back. One other problem, the sheet and quilt, though folded back and covering the sleepers only to about their waists, are still in the way. He has to remove them. But first a look at Dab, face-up and snoring less than two feet apart from his wife. Undershirt and skivvies. One knee raised. He moves the light across Dab, back to Ernestine, again to Dab from tattooed arm to hairy shoulders, all the while approaching the bed. The light in his left hand. The ax in his right, at his side, the bit swinging in a short arc just off the floor. Which squeaks under his weight. Not much of a noise, but in the bed Dabney Hill breaks off in mid- snore, jerks, mumbles. Instantly the light is off.