by R. E. Klein
“Mr. Corson, did you see the tall man we got this morning? Boy, do I have plans for him.”
“You ain’t goin’ to do nothin’ bad to him, are you—like you done with that fat woman—graftin’ on them extra arms?”
“Wait and see.” Alan smiled.
Later that night Alan entered Mr. Corson’s bedroom.
“It’s under your bed, Mr. Corson.”
“Oh, Alan, Why? Is it to pay me back for all them pranks years ago? You know why I done that.”
“You made me what I am,” cooed Alan.
Mr. Corson bent his frail body down to peer beneath the bed.
“Gah! That’s horrible; he looks like a devil.”
“Good, Mr. Corson; that’s exactly it.”
“How’d you get them steer horns to stick onto his head?”
“Just bored little holes.”
“What’ll you do for the funeral?”
“Why, take the horns out and fill the holes with plaster, just like you taught me.”
• • •
“Oh, Alan, leave me alone. I’m too sick for such pranks. Look at me, I’m a skeleton.” Mr. Corson spent nearly all his time in bed now.
“Come on, open it. It’s a present to you on my twenty-second birthday. Open the nice powder blue coffin. It’s Parson’s grandson,” he whispered.
With tremulous hands Mr. Corson unclosed the lid.
“Alan, you’ve given him three eyes.”
• • •
“I’m a better embalmer than you are, Mr. Corson.”
“Alan, stop all that nonsense.”
“No, sir. I’m an artist; compared to me you’re an amateur. You embalmed Miz Willey seven years ago, and I embalmed George Bradley at the same time. Now I’ve dug them both up. Come see whose work held up better.” He dragged the old man into the workroom.
“Miz Willey surely is no beauty, Mr. Corson. That face wasn’t ash black when you embalmed it. Now look at it. Here’s Mr. Bradley—just as handsome as a department-store dummy, isn’t he? I did that, Mr. Bradley,” he said to the corpse.
“Alan, put ’em back in the graveyard.”
“No, sir, not yet. Let’s give them a bed for the night—your bed, Mr. Corson—with you in the middle to keep ’em virtuous.”
“Alan, you’re crazy. No!”
“I’m afraid we must.”
• • •
Completely bedridden now, Mr. Corson saw Alan only when the younger man brought his meals. Sometimes he wondered at the contents of those meals.
“Mr. Coor-son!”
“Eh? Oh, Alan. I been sleepin’.”
“I’ve good news, Mr. Corson. I’m moving you down to the shed where I used to sleep, remember? Remember when you shoved that sack of remains underneath my covers?”
“Alan, please. I can’t sleep in that shed. It’s too cold and drafty.”
“But, Mr. Corson, it’s near the graveyard, where you’ll soon be going. I’m going to embalm and bury you, Mr. Corson.”
Alan carried the senior undertaker to the shed and laid him on the long-disused cot.
“Pleasant dreams, Mr. Corson. I may come to lock you in the crematory later on tonight.”
“Oh, Alan—”
“Ta-ta!”
• • •
“Good morning, Mr. Corson. Look what I’ve baked you.”
“Alan?”
“We had a fine cremation last night; too bad you missed it. I saved you some leftovers. Look.”
“Alan,” the old man gasped weakly, “you put that stuff away. It goes in an urn.”
“Later perhaps. Mr. Corson, this is Mr. Conroy, the freethinker. I thought you might like to kiss his ashes. Come, Mr. Corson, kiss his ashes. You hear me, boy? Kiss the pretty ashes, or I’ll lock you in the crem-a-tor-i-um,” he sang. Mr. Corson kissed the ashes.
• • •
Another day.
“Where are you carryin’ me, Alan?”
“To the graveyard. I’m going to bury you today.”
“What?”
“You’re weak and sick, but you might live on for years. Nope. Got to bury you, Mr. Corson. I’ll dig you up in a few days and give you a proper embalming.”
“Alan, please! Please, Alan!”
“I’m going to bury you alive, Mr. Corson,” Alan sang happily.
• • •
“Can you hear me down there?”
“Alan,” said the faint voice. “I can’t breathe in this here coffin. Please, oh, please let me out!”
“Here comes the earth, Mr. Corson. Splat!” He sent a shovelful down into the grave. “And another. And one more. Now I’ll cover up all of you.” He whistled as he filled the grave.
• • •
“Happy birthday, thirty-five!” screamed Alan. “Mr. Corson, I’m thirty-five, Mr. Corson.”
Mr. Corson sat still in a chair and said nothing.
“I’m thirty-five, and I’m the senior partner.” A happy thought took him. “Mr. Corson, you’re the silent partner.” The embalmed waxwork said nothing.
How happy he was. The town had grown considerably in the last years. “Pa was right,” Alan mused. “I’m a successful man.”
Periodically he exhumed Mr. Corson’s perfectly embalmed body, just to see how he was getting on. It was good to see old Corson again. Sometimes, in a fit of pique, Alan locked the silent figure in the crematorium for the night, only later to explain apologetically why he had to do it.
It was on a late September afternoon, as he was spooning soft cheese into Mr. Corson’s propped, gaping mouth, that he heard a timid knock on the door. Opening it, he was surprised to see a helpless-looking, frightened child.
“Mr. Patch, sir,” the child whispered, “I’m your new ’prentice.”
“Come in, boy,” said Alan heartily. “Mr. Corson and I were just having dinner. Won’t you join us?”
Harla
I never thought it wrong to murder—bad people, I mean. Killing good people is imprudent and wasteful; goodness knows there are few enough good people. Bad people one can pluck like leaves from an artichoke and never get to the heart. Take my boss, for example, Leonard Rose. He was rude, brash, boorish, foul-mouthed, and insolent. He is the first of the bad people I killed. It happened this way.
I stuffed a sea urchin down his throat.
Oh, it was a crowded Chinese restaurant. I had brought the sea urchin in a minithermos strapped inside my coat. As we sat drinking in a private booth curtained off from the rest of the eaters, I roused Leonard with tall tales about one of the waitresses till his evil face shone red and perspiring.
“She will kiss,” I cautioned, “but only anonymously. Now close your eyes, Boss. Loosen your jaw; any moment her winsome face will part the curtains with kisses unimaginable.”
The second he complied I extracted the sea urchin and ramrodded it down his throat with the tongs.
The next person I killed was Marian, the evil old lady next door. You will enjoy this. We had a community apiary in our apartment complex. One day I got my gloves on and filled a paper bag full of bees, then thrust the whole thing over Marian’s face while the bees stung every bit of face they could. To top the comedy off, I made her swallow battery acid till everything smoked inside her.
Then there was Steve. There was nothing particularly wrong with Steve except that he invariably sat in front of me each week at church. And Steve was tall.
I did not kill Steve; at least I did not kill him all the way. After all, he was a nice enough fellow; his only crime was blocking my view of Parson. I only partially killed Steve.
I tripped him one night as he was jogging home and dragged him into his own garage. There I cut his legs off with a chain saw.
You might think by all this that I am some sort of demented maniac; if so, you have misread me. I have never, knowingly, harmed anybody who did not irritate me in some way.
Except for Joe Saunders, the newsboy—but that was merely an experiment to test the tox
ic quality of fly spray. Anyhow, all the stuff did was make him blind. The good side is that from then on the flies left him alone.
But all this is background, so you will empathize with me in the light of what is to follow.
I was lonely. I had few friends, and even these seemed not to like me.
I wanted a wife.
The least of men is a paragon if he has a woman to believe in him. The most repulsive offal—a human running sore—is made glorious by a good woman’s love. And I was none of these. I am, in all candor—rather kingly. But still I lacked a woman’s heart. (I didn’t say—but I once had a woman’s heart, a bad woman’s. I buried it in the sandbox of the school yard. Some other incidentals I tucked into the Goodwill bin.)
The woman I hoped for finally came into my life.
And her veins ran sweet with plasma. Every tissue had a smile in it, every organ a grin.
She was younger than I, about thirty-five. And she was tall and big, with green eyes and hair the color of marmalade. She wore a short green dress and cowgirl boots the night I met her at the bowling alley.
“You bowl good,” I said, adapting my grammar to the surroundings.
Her green eyes took me in. Then she smiled.
“You was watchin’ close. It made me bowl extra.”
I felt the love mechanism tightening. I could have proposed to her then, before I even knew her name.
It was Harla.
“Call me Mr. Tim,” I said. “Let us bowl together.”
We did. She let me win. I am sure of it. That is the sort of person she is. We bowled and ate tongue sandwiches, and I was a ball of love and thought only of her, Harla.
Now Harla lived in a little apartment on top of a garage. We spent our evenings cuddling there while we listened to her Leonard Spevack records.
It was summertime, two weeks after we met. Through the screen door tiptoed all the summer smells of night-howling plants. Harla wore her shorts, I my swim trunks. Outside, the plants butted heads, the he-plants courting the she-plants.
The landlord stepped up then, a brash man, mostly bald head and belly. He climbed the stairs, thrust his head against the screen door, and peered in at us.
“That’s too loud. Turn that imbecile stuff off, now!”
I knew he had to die, and at once, but I did not know how my darling might react. It might mean losing her. Even murder was scarcely worth that. I tried to choke it off, to focus on the beautiful music of Leonard Spevack.
“Turn off that hog vomit!”
I decided to hazard all.
“Uh, Landlord,” I said. “Bide. Harla, darling—Landlord, I say, remain on the stairs. Harla, dearest, kindly hand me a weapon of some sort.”
Reaching into a kitchen drawer, she handed me a barbecue skewer.
“Here,” she winked. “Stick him good.”
I paused to kiss her. Next I twirled my wrist and shot the skewer right through the screen door and into Mr. Landlord.
“How loud is that music?” I asked impishly. Harla laughed. The landlord gurgled as he thumped his way down the stairs.
“Come again for another song,” Harla called after him.
Landlord staggered into his own kitchen and died by the sink.
But I had no thoughts for Landlord, only for Harla, for she had done more than participate in the murder.
She reveled in it.
Do you know that rapport when people pelt each other with revelations? This was the euphoria Harla and I swam in. It must have been hours we sat smelling the plants while we exchanged tenderness to the music of Leonard Spevack. Abruptly Harla sat up.
“Mr. Tim, all my life I put up with sass and meanness. But you have shown me a better way. Now you start kissin’ on me while I think back on all the enemies I ever had.”
There must have been many; I could tell by the kisses. Mostly I just kissed and let her think.
We began in earnest the next day with a chronological list, beginning with those who wronged her in childhood—three or four names—and continuing with the abusers of her teens—say, seven or eight. The last part cataloged the predators of her adult years—perhaps two dozen. By an amazing coincidence one such name was that of my old boss, Leonard Rose. (See supra.); we laughed uproariously over this, as we looked up names and addresses.
• • •
We married two days later, honeymooning in pursuit of her enemies. Some we could not find at all, so we pretended they had met gruesome deaths by spontaneous combustion. Others had already died; we dumped garbage on their graves. But close to a dozen remained alive and reachable, although many affected not to remember her. We spent two agreeable months in this fashion. When the last of them had perished from unremitting pain, she came to me with a coy little smile.
“Mr. Tim, darlin’, you cleaned my life good. Now it’s time you make your list and watch me clean yours.”
Her eyes filled when I told her I had done so myself shortly before we met.
“Well, darlin’, you’ll think I don’t love ya if I don’t kill some o’ your enemies. Can’t you make new ones?” Her eyes radiated hope.
I put my arms around her.
“They will come,” I said. “They always do. We will not force it.”
“Well, couldn’t we kill some o’ your friends?”
But I had none to spare.
“I surely would like to murder all kinds o’ your enemies,” she sobbed.
So for love of Harla, I set out to make an enemy.
First I insulted the druggist, but he was a forgiving soul and apologized to me. Next I made derisive gestures at a traffic cop; he laughed uproariously and told me to go along. Finally, I threw a pail of cold water on the postman. He remarked that the weather was warm and thanked me for the refreshing bath.
I sought consolation in Harla’s arms after each successive failure. She was, of course, supportive though her eyes betrayed a sense of secret injury. I tried twice more to make an enemy, both attempts ineffectual. Still, Harla’s arms remained soft, her manner gracious and forgiving. Yet the unspoken reproach persisted to torment, until, in desperation, I closeted myself one entire evening to ponder the problem. Resolutely did I pace the room, conjuring all the successful enmities of my career, only to contrast them with my current social bankruptcy. Why, I asked over and over—how was then different from today? Is it Harla? Surely, it could not be Harla. Twice I nearly gave over to despair. Then, shatteringly, after steadily resisting through hours of vain cerebration, the solution suddenly exploded all over the room.
“I have figured it out,” I said, dashing into the parlor, where Harla sat at her needlework. “I know why I am such a washout at making enemies.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know that all my life I have gathered enemies like burrs on a woolen stocking?”
“I do.”
“And that I am no longer able to do so?”
“So you tell me, darlin’.”
“Why, it was killing all your enemies on top of my own that did the trick.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you see? Killing sweetens one’s temper. You know I am right if you will think about it. Are we not much kinder, more tolerant of others after each homicide? Well, I have been killing for years. It did not occur to me before, but subtly, imperceptibly, I must have been sweetening with each murder. Then, in the last few months you and I enjoyed such a banquet of murders as to produce in me an overdose of sweetness from which I may never recover. The inevitable result is that I am too sweet-tempered to make enemies.”
“Oh, darlin’”—she sobbed convulsively—“is it bad as all that?”
“Tell you what,” I said, kissing her, “why don’t we search out some nice young fellow, find out who his enemies are, and kill them for him?”
She brightened at this.
“Well, sweetheart,” she said, “it’s not the same, but we can try it.”
We went out every day during the next two weeks, seek
ing an agreeable person with a superfluity of enemies. We met many potentials, some of whom we seriously considered during our discussion each evening after dinner. But for one reason or another, none was satisfactory.
Then one day we stopped to buy a pipe wrench.
His name was Rick Puter, and he was short and skinny and sold aluminum siding at a third-rate hardware store. Right away we knew he was our man when a customer tried to get him to lower a price.
“Ehhh . . .” he said timidly, “I can’t do that, sir.”
“Then damn you,” the customer retorted. “Damn you to hell!” and walked out. Harla nodded at me and followed, while I engaged the young man in conversation. In about thirty seconds a piercing little scream arose from the parking lot. Then another. Then another. Harla returned with the pipe wrench.
In the next week Harla and I extinguished two more of Rick’s customers. One by glass splinters, the other by forcible ingestion of a liquid intended for other purposes. Rick’s immediate boss had an unfortunate experience with some rats.
We became friends, the three of us. We had Rick over to dinner a few times, while sometimes he invited us out to a barbecue place.
“Ehhh . . .” he would say. “Mr. Tim and Harla . . . ehhh? I surely wish I could invite you folks over to where I live, but Mother don’t like me to have friends. She don’t even like me coming over here. In fact, she don’t like me to do much at all.”
Not too long after, Harla paid a visit to Mother.
“You shoulda seen her, darlin’,” she whispered as we cuddled for the night. “She was all over fat and—well, I ain’t never seen a bald woman before. She didn’t talk about nothin’ but her problems. I give her a rubdown with that electric cattleprod you wired up for me. She don’t have no problems now ’cause she’s a ash.”
Rick languished a couple of days, after which he seemed relaxed and confident. He even stopped saying “ehhh.”
Harla and I rubbed each other’s ribs in mutual congratulation.
The next day Rick made his play for Harla.
Of all places, it was at our house. I had gone downtown to sell some securities, while Harla remained behind to work in her garden. As it was warm, she wore her shorts. Rick appeared suddenly, threw his arms around her, and suggested she leave me.