Strangers on a Train

by Strangers on a Train (2021) (retail) (epub)

  Guy awakened to Bruno’s presence in the dark, though he heard nothing. After the first small start at the suddenness, he felt no surprise at all. As he had imagined, in nights before this, he was quite happy that Bruno had come. Really Bruno? Yes. Guy saw the end of his cigarette now, over by the bureau.

  “Bruno?”

  “Hi,” Bruno said softly. “I got in on a pass key. You’re ready now, aren’t you?” Bruno sounded calm and tired.

  Guy raised himself to one elbow. Of course Bruno was there. The orangey end of his cigarette was there. “Yes,” Guy said, and felt the yes absorbed by the darkness, not like the other nights when the yes had been silent, not even going out from him. It undid the knot in his head so suddenly that it hurt him. It was what he had been waiting to say, what the silence in the room had been waiting to hear. And the beasts beyond the walls.

  Bruno sat down on the side of the bed and gripped both his arms above the elbows. “Guy, I’ll never see you again.”

  “No.” Bruno smelled abominably of cigarettes and sweet brilliantine, of the sourness of drink, but Guy did not draw back from him. His head was still at its delicious business of untying.

  “I tried to be nice to him these last couple days,” Bruno said. “Not nice, just decent. He said something tonight to my mother, just before we went out—”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” Guy said. Time and again he had stopped Bruno because he didn’t want to know what his father had said, what he looked like, anything about him.

  They were both silent for several seconds, Guy because he would not explain, and Bruno because he had been silenced.

  Bruno snuffled with a disgusting rattle. “We’re going to Maine tomorrow, starting by noon positively. My mother and me and the chauffeur. Tomorrow night is a good night but any night except Thursday night is just the same. Any time after 11 . . .”

  He kept talking, repeating what Guy knew already, and Guy did not stop him, because he knew he was going to enter the house and it would all come true.

  “I broke the lock on the back door two days ago, slamming it when I was tight. They won’t get it fixed, they’re too busy. But if they do—” He pressed a key into Guy’s hand. “And I brought you these.”

  “What is it?”

  “Gloves. Ladies’ gloves, but they’ll stretch.” Bruno laughed.

  Guy felt the thin cotton gloves.

  “You got the gun, huh? Where is it?”

  “In the bottom drawer.”

  Guy heard him stumble against the bureau and heard the drawer pull out. The lampshade crackled, the light came on, and Bruno stood there huge and tall in a new polo coat so pale it was nearly white, in black trousers with a thin white strip in them. A white silk muffler hung long around his neck. Guy examined him from his small brown shoes to his stringy oiled hair, as if from his physical appearance he could discover what had caused his change of feeling, or even what the feeling was. It was familiarity and something more, something brotherly. Bruno clicked the gun shut and turned to him. His face was heavier than the last time Guy had seen it, flushed and more alive than he remembered ever having seen it. His gray eyes looked bigger with his tears and rather golden. He looked at Guy as if he tried to find words, or as if he pled with Guy to find them. Then he moistened the thin parted lips, shook his head, and reached an arm out toward the lamp. The light went out.

  When he was gone, it hardly seemed he was gone. There were just the two of them in the room still, and sleep.

  A GRAY GLARING LIGHT FILLED THE ROOM when Guy awakened. The clock said 3:25. He imagined more than remembered that he had gotten up to go to the telephone that morning, that Myers had called to ask why he had not come in, and that he had said he didn’t feel well. The devil with Myers. He lay there blinking his dullness away, letting it seep into the thinking part of his brain that tonight he was going to do it, and after tonight it would all be over. Then he got up and slowly went about his routine of shaving, showering, and dressing, aware that nothing he did mattered at all until the hour between 11 and midnight, the hour there was neither hurry nor delay about, that was coming just as it should. He felt he moved on certain definite tracks now, and that he could not have stopped himself or gotten off them if he had wanted to.

  In the middle of his late breakfast in a coffee shop down the street, an eerie sensation came over him that the last time he had seen Anne he had told her everything that he was going to do, and that she had listened placidly, knowing she must for his sake, because he absolutely had to do what he was going to do. It seemed so natural and inevitable, he felt everyone in the world must know it, the man sitting beside him unconcernedly eating, Mrs. McCausland, sweeping her hall as he went out, who had given him an especially maternal smile and asked if he was feeling well. March 12 FRIDAY, said the day-by-day calendar on the coffee-shop wall. Guy stared at it a moment, then finished his meal.

  He wanted to keep moving. He decided by the time he walked up Madison Avenue, then Fifth to the end of Central Park, down Central park West to Pennsylvania Station, it would be time to catch the train to Great Neck. He began to think of his course of action for tonight, but it bored him like something in school he had already studied too much, and he stopped. The brass barometers in a Madison Avenue window had a special appeal now, as if he were soon to have a holiday and possess them and play with them. Anne’s sailboat, he thought, didn’t have a barometer as handsome as any of these, or he would have noticed it. He must get one before they sailed south on their honeymoon. He thought of his love, like a rich possession. He had reached the north end of Central Park, when it occurred to him he didn’t have the gun with him. Or the gloves. And it was a quarter to 8. A fine, stupid beginning! He hailed a cab and hurried the driver back to his house.

  There was plenty of time after all, so much that he wandered about his room absently for a while. Should he bother to wear crepe-soled shoes? Should he wear a hat? He got the Luger out of the bottom drawer and laid it on the bureau. There was a single plan of Bruno’s under the gun and he opened it, but immediately every word was so familiar, he threw it into the wastebasket. Momentum smoothed his movements again. He got the purple cotton gloves from the table by his bed. A small yellow card fluttered from them. It was a ticket to Great Neck.

  He stared at the black Luger which more than before struck him as outrageously large. Idiotic of someone to have made a gun so big! He got his own little revolver from the top drawer. Its pearl handle gleamed with a discreet beauty. Its short slender barrel looked inquisitive, willing, strong with a reserved and gallant strength. Still, he mustn’t forget he’d been going to leave the Luger in the bedroom, because it was Bruno’s gun. But it didn’t seem worth it now, to carry the heavy gun just for that. He really felt no enmity toward Bruno now, and that was the odd thing.

  For a moment, he was utterly confused. Of course take the Luger, the Luger was in the plan! He put the Luger in his overcoat pocket. His hand moved for the gloves on the bureau top. The gloves were purple and the flannel bag of his revolver was lavender. Suddenly it seemed fitting he should take the small revolver, because of the similar colors, so he put the Luger back in the bottom drawer and dropped the little revolver into his pocket. He did not check to see if anything else should be done, because he could simply feel, having gone over Bruno’s plans so often, that he had done everything. At last he got a glass of water and poured it into the ivy in the wall brackets. A cup of coffee might make him more alert, he thought. He would get one at the Great Neck station.

  There was a moment on the train, when a man bumped his shoulder, when his nerves seemed to go quivering up and up to a pitch at which he thought something must happen, and a flurry of words rushed to his mind, almost to his tongue: It’s not really a gun in my pocket. I’ve never thought of it as a gun. I didn’t buy it because it was a gun. And immediately he felt easier, because he knew he was going to kill with it. He was like Bruno. Hadn’t he sensed it time and time again, and like a coward never admitted
it? Hadn’t he known Bruno was like himself? Or why had he liked Bruno? He loved Bruno. Bruno had prepared every inch of the way for him, and everything would go well because everything always went well for Bruno. The world was geared for people like Bruno.

  It was drizzling in a fine, directionless mist as he stepped off the train. Guy walked straight to the row of buses Bruno had described. The air through the open window was colder than New York’s, and fresh with open country. The bus moved out of the lighted community center and into a darker road with houses along both sides. He remembered he hadn’t stopped for coffee in the station. The omission threw him into a state of irritation just short of making him get off the bus and go back for it. A cup of coffee might make all the difference in the world. Yes, his life! But at the Grant Street stop, he stood up automatically, and the feeling of moving on established tracks returned to comfort him.

  He step had a moist elastic sound on the dirt road. Ahead of him, a young girl ran up some steps, along a front walk, and the closing of the door behind her sounded peaceful and neighborly. There was the vacant lot with the solitary tree, and off to the left, darkness and the woods. The street lamp Bruno had put in all his maps wore an oily blue and gold halo. A car approached slowly, its headlights rolling like wild eyes with the road’s bumps, and passed him.

  He came upon it suddenly, and it was as if a curtain had lifted on a stage scene he knew already: the long seven-foot high wall of white plaster in the foreground, darkened here and there by a cherry tree that overhung it, and beyond, the triangle of white housetop. The Doghouse. He crossed the street. From up the road came the grit of slow steps. He waited against the darker north side of the wall until the figure came into view. It was a policeman, strolling with hands and stick behind him. Guy felt no alarm whatever, less if possible than if the man hadn’t been a policeman, he thought. When the policeman had passed, Guy walked fifteen paces beside the wall, sprang up and gripped its cornice across the top, and scrambled astride it. Almost directly below him, he saw the pale form of the milk crate Bruno had said he had flung near the wall. He bent to peer through the cherry tree branches at the house. He could see two of the five big windows on the first floor, and part of the rectangle of the swimming pond projecting toward him. There was no light. He jumped down.

  Now he could see the start of the six white-sided steps at the back, and the misty frill of blossomless dogwoood trees that surrounded the whole house. As he had suspected from Bruno’s drawings, the house was too small for its ten double gables, obviously built because the client wanted gables and that was that. He moved along the inner side of the wall until crackling twigs frightened him. Cut cattycornered across the lawn, Bruno had said, and the twigs were why.

  When he moved toward the house, a limb took his hat off. He rammed the hat in the front of his overcoat, and put his hand back in the pocket where the key was. When had he put the gloves on? He took a breath and moved across the lawn in a gait between running and walking, light and quick as a cat. I have done this many times before, he thought, this is only one of the times. He hesitated at the edge of the grass, glanced at the familiar garage toward which the gravel road curved, then went up the six back steps. The back door opened, heavy and smooth, and he caught the knob on the other side. But the second door with the Yale lock resisted, and a flush of something like embarrassment passed over him before he pushed harder and it yielded. He heard a clock on the kitchen table to his left. He knew it was a table, though he could see only blackness with less black forms of things, the big white stove, the servants’ table and chairs left, the cabinets. He moved diagonally toward the back stairs, counting off his steps. I would have you use the main stairway but the whole stairway creaks. He walked slowly and stiffly, stretching his eyes, skirting the vegetable bins he did not really see. A sudden thought that he must resemble an insane somnambulist brought a start of panic.

  Twelve steps up first, skip seven. Then two little flights after the turn. . . . Skip four, skip three, step wide at the top. You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm. He skipped the fourth step in the first little flight. There was a round window just at the turn before the last flight. Guy remembered from some essay, As a house is built so the pattern of activity of those will be who live in it. . . . Shall the child pause at the window for the view before he climbs fifteen steps to his playroom? Ten feet ahead on his left was the butler’s door. This is the closest you’ll come to anyone, said Bruno in a crescendo as he passed the door’s dark column.

  The floor gave the tiniest wail of complaint, and Guy resiliently withdrew his foot, waited, and stepped around the spot. Delicately his hand closed on the knob of the hall door. As he opened it, the clock’s tick on the landing of the main stairway came louder, and he realized he had been hearing it for several seconds. He heard a sigh.

  A sigh on the main stairs!

  A chime rang out. The knob rattled, and he squeezed it hard enough to break it, he thought. Three. Four. Close the door before the butler hears it! Was this why Bruno had said between 11 and midnight? Damn him! And now he didn’t have the Luger! Guy closed the door with a bump-bump. While he sweated, feeling heat rise from his overcoat collar into his face, the clock kept on and on. And a last one.

  Then he listened, and there was nothing but the deaf and blind tick-tock again, and he opened the door and went into the main hall. My father’s door is just to the right. The tracks were back under him again. And surely he had been here before, in the empty hall that he could feel as he stared at Bruno’s father’s door, with the gray carpet, the paneled creamy walls, the marble table at the head of the stairs. The hall had a smell and even the smell was familiar. A sharp tickling sensation came at his temples. Suddenly he was sure the old man stood just the other side of the door, holding his breath just as he did, awaiting him. Guy held his own breath so long the old man must have died if he too had not breathed. Nonsense! Open the door!

  He took the knob in his left hand, and his right moved automatically to the gun in his pocket. He felt like a machine, beyond danger and invulnerable. He had been here many, many times before, had killed him many times before, and this was only one of the times. He stared at the inch-wide crack in the door, sensing an infinite space opening out beyond, waiting until a feeling of vertigo passed. Suppose he couldn’t see him when he got inside? Suppose the old man saw him first? The night light on the front porch lights the room a little bit, but the bed was over in the opposite corner. He opened the door wider, listened, and stepped too hastily in. But the room was still, the bed a big vague thing in the dark corner, with a lighter strip at the head. He closed the door, the wind might blow the door, then faced the corner.

  The gun was in his hand already, aimed at the bed that looked empty however he peered at it.

  He glanced at the window over his right shoulder. It was open only about a foot, and Bruno had said it would be open all the way. Because of the drizzle. He frowned at the bed, and then with a terrible thrill made out the form of the head lying rather near the wall side, tipped sideways as if it regarded him with a kind of gay disdain. The face was darker than the hair which blended with the pillow. The gun was looking straight at it as he was.

  One should shoot the chest. Obediently the gun looked at the chest. Guy slid his feet nearer the bed and glanced again at the window behind him. There was no sound of breathing. One would really not think he were alive. That was what he had told himself he must think, that the figure was merely a target. And that, because he did not know the target, it was like killing in war. Now?

  “Ha-ha-ha-a!” from the window.

  Guy trembled and the gun trembled.

  The laugh had come from a distance, a girl’s laugh, distant but clear and straight as a shot. Guy wet his lips. The aliveness of the laugh had swept away everything of the scene for a moment, left nothing in its place, and now slowly the vacuum was filling with his standing here about to kill. It had happened in the time of a heartbeat. Life. The young g
irl walking in the street. With a young man, perhaps. And the man asleep in the bed, living. No, don’t think! You do it for Anne, remember? For Anne and for yourself! It is like killing in war, like killing—

  He pulled the trigger. It made a mere click. He pulled again and it clicked. It was a trick! It was all false and didn’t even exist! Not even his standing here! He pulled the trigger again.

  The room tore up with a roar. His fingers tightened in terror. The roar came again, as if the crust of the world burst.

  “Kagh!” said the figure on the bed. The gray face moved upward, showing the line of head and shoulders.

  Guy was on the porch roof, falling. The sensation awakened him like the fall at the end of a nightmare. By a miracle an awning bar slid into one of his hands, and he fell downward again, onto hands and knees. He jumped off the porch edge, ran along the side of the house, then cut across the lawn, straight for the place where the milk crate was. He awakened to the clinging earth, to the hopelessness of his pumping arms that tried to hurry his race against the lawn. This is how it feels, how it is, he thought—life, like the laugh upstairs. The truth was that it is like a nightmare when one is paralyzed, against impossible odds.

  “Hey!” a voice called.

  The butler was after him, just as he had anticipated. He felt the butler was right behind him. The nightmare!

  “Hey! Hey, there!”

  Guy turned under the cherry trees and stood with his fist drawn back. The butler was not just behind him. He was a long way off, but he had seen him. The crazily running figure in white pajamas wavered like leaping smoke, then curved toward him. Guy stood, paralyzed, waiting.

  “Hey!”

  Guy’s fist shot out for the oncoming chin, and the white wraith collapsed.

  Guy jumped for the wall.

  Darkness ran up higher and higher about him. He dodged a little tree, leapt what looked like a ditch, and ran on. Then suddenly he was lying face down and pain was spreading from the middle of him in all directions, rooting him to the ground. His body trembled violently, and he thought he must gather up the trembling and use it to run, that this wasn’t where Bruno had said to go at all, but he could not move. You just take the little dirt road (no lights there) eastward off Newhope south of the house and keep going across two bigger streets to Columbia Street and walk south (right) . . . To the bus line that went to another railroad station. All very well for Bruno to write his damned instructions on paper. Damn him! He knew where he was now, in the field west of the house that never in any of the plans was to be used! He looked behind him. Which way was north now? What had happened to the street light? Maybe he wouldn’t be able to find the little road in the dark. He didn’t know whether the house lay behind him or to his left. A mysterious pain throbbed the length of his right forearm, so sharp he thought it should have glowed in the dark.