The Deadly Percheron

by John Franklin Bardin

  It worked. One day Dr Littlefield told me, “You are much better. We think you are almost well. How would you like to leave us this week?”

  A carefully nurtured smile. Must not be too much of a shock, but at the same time patient should be made to feel the doctor is pleased with his recovery.

  “That would be nice. You really mean it?” Equally carefully contrived incredulity. Doctor must be made to feel patient’s relief and pleased amazement, but doctor must not be allowed to perceive that the game has become very, very boring.

  “Friday. You’re to see Miss Willows today. I think she has a surprise for you.”

  I was not surprised to find Miss Willows fat and sloppy. Social workers so frequently are. This was the woman who was to rehabilitate me! Well, I was willing.

  “I’ve talked with Dr Littlefield about you,” she said. “She tells me that you are thinking of leaving us?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I knew enough to be humble with her. Caseworkers like humble people.

  “We don’t want you to go out and lead the life you’ve led before. Not that it’s your fault. But if you will help yourself, we can help you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “A job in a cafeteria – not a very big job – but one with a good chance for advancement.”

  “You’re very kind, ma’am.”

  “And if you work hard, and be sure to remember to report back to us every month the way Dr Littlefield told you – why there’s no telling where you might end up!”

  “Yes, ma’am. You’re very kind, ma’am.”

  On Friday, July 12, 1944, John Brown stepped onto a crosstown bus. In his pocket was the address of a Coney Island cafeteria where Miss Willows had told him to apply for a job as waiter and busboy. His clothes were cheap and new. His face was studiously blank. If you had looked at him closely, you would have said that he had once seen better days.

  FIVE

  In Which a Man Runs Down

  From then on my name was John Brown. I could not explain, even to myself, the process by which I came to refute my identity. Not so long ago I had been a specialist with a comfortable living, a wife and a certain amount of status in the community. Now the world knew me only as a counterman in an all-night Coney Island cafeteria.

  I had not intended to take the job Miss Willows offered me when I left the hospital that warm July day; there had still been some fight left in me. For weeks I had been shamming, assuming a false character, because I knew this to be the quickest way to return to what most of humanity considers sanity. I had been bitter during those weeks, cynical enough to adopt a fictional character and to play a hypocritical charade; but I had not lost hope. I might well have despaired if once in that time I had been allowed to look in a mirror.

  I had noticed the lack of mirrors in the ward, but I had decided that this was a precaution similar to the banning of belts and braces: a mirror can be broken into sharp shards which can be employed to slit throats. Added care must have been taken to prevent my self-inspection in the last days of my convalescence; however, if it was, I was unaware. I do not blame Dr Littlefield for not letting me have a mirror, although if I had been in her place, I might have considered a confrontation a necessary part of my patient’s adjustment. But, perhaps, this judgment is unfair: Dr Littlefield probably did not realize that I had not always been that way…

  As it was I first caught sight of myself while having a coke in a drugstore, just after I descended from the bus that had taken me crosstown. Behind this soda fountain was a mirror, fancily decorated with gaudy signs urging the purchase of egg malted – milks and black-and-white sodas. I glanced up and looked into it without knowing what I was doing. My mind read the signs first, felt good at seeing a familiar sight while being as usual a little critical of the advertising profession. Then, when the signs were read, my consciousness became curious about the horribly disfigured man who must be sitting next to me. He was not old – about my age now that I studied his face – although he had seemed older at first glance. This was because his short – cropped hair was gray streaked with white and his jaw, that showed the remains of strength, trembled spasmodically. But what made him really fascinatingly ugly was the wide, long, angry red scar that traversed his face diagonally from one ear across the nose and down to the root of the j aw at the base of his other cheek. It was an old scar that had knit badly and in healing had pulled and twisted at the skin until the face it rode had the texture of coarse parchment and the grimace of a clown. One cheek, and the eye with it, was drawn sidewise and upward into a knowing leer – the other drooped, and with it a corner of the mouth, as if its owner were stricken with grief. The skin’s color was that of cigar ash, but the scar’s color was bright carmine. I pitied the man, then was embarrassed to look around at him; surely, he must have seen me staring at his reflection! But as I had this thought I noticed that his glass emptied itself of coca-cola just as I sucked noisily at my straw, and a suspicion crept into my mind. I fought it back, silently scoffed at it, and kept my eyes averted while I waited for my neighbor to go. How long I might have continued this self-deception I shall never know since I was soon forced to admit that the horribly mutilated face I had been staring at was my own. A little boy came in and sat down on the empty stool next to mine – it had been occupied only in my imagination – giggled, and said to his perspiring mother, “Oh, mama, look quick at the man! Mama, how did he get like that?”

  I fled with the child’s taunt ringing in my ears. How did I get to be like this? I asked myself. And then, before I tried to answer that: How can I return to Sara like this?

  I stopped in my tracks, stood staring out into the traffic. It would be so easy to run out into the street, to feel the crushing weight of a bus or truck, a blinding instant of pain, and then oblivion! My legs twitched with this necessity, a great hand pushed relentlessly at my straining back – I took two halting steps to the curb, hesitated at its edge as if it were a precipice. My mouth went slack and the trembling of my jaw increased. Sweat trickled down my side from under my armpits.

  Then, slowly, I turned and walked down the street toward a subway kiosk. John Brown, waiter or counterman or busboy in a Coney Island eatery, belonged to that face. For the time being, I was John Brown. Dr George Matthews would remain in hiding at least a while longer. I did not know who had persuaded my wife that I had died, but she must have had good reason to think I had or else she would never have left the city. Perhaps, it was better that way. Sara had a small income of her own, enough to take care of her. In the meantime I would have a chance to think things over. I laughed. Once I had been a psychologist and had thought myself capable of adjusting to any predicament. I fingered my scar, its treacherous smoothness –well, I was capable of an adjustment. In fact, I had already adjusted so completely that I was incapable of remembering the face that had preceded that tortured grimace seen in a flyspecked mirror. I had forsworn any personality other than “John Brown, homeless, picked up wandering.”

  I took the BMT to Coney Island.

  Mr Fuller was a small, seedy-looking man with a scrubbed-pink face and bleary blue eyes. He looked like he might take one drink too many too often. The shirt he had on had probably been worn more than once, his tie was of sleazy imitation silk. His shoulders drooped, he looked harried. I know he did not mean to be unkind to me.

  We sat down at one of the tables in the front of the cafeteria. It was the middle of the afternoon and the place was nearly empty. Outside the calliope of a merry-go-round wheezed and clanged and banged. A barker farther down the street exhorted a straggling, sweaty crowd of passers-by to “Step right up and pay a dime to see ‘Zozo,’ the beautiful, delovely Latin who lives with a boa constrictor.” Mr Fuller paid no attention to these sounds. He fingered my slip of paper, studying it as if it were a text. He regarded it for such a long time that I began to debate the possibility that he would ever look up again; whereupon he coughed once, squirmed, blew his nose.

  “Ever work in a cafete
ria before, Mr – ” (here he glanced at the slip of paper) “ – Brown?”

  “No, sir.” I had better say “sir.” Now that I had decided to remain John Brown, I would have very little money. Dr George Matthews’ resources were no longer open to me – if they ever had been – and getting this job was all important.

  “How do I know you can do the work? I’m not used to inexperienced help,” he complained.

  “I’m good with people. I know how to talk to them. I have patience.” As soon as I had said these words, I was sure they were the wrong ones and my heart sank.

  “There’s more to the job than that,” he said. He looked at me inquiringly. “You gotta be careful, you know? I been having too much breakage lately. They don’t like too much breakage.”

  “‘They’?” I asked.

  “The company,” he explained. “They come in a couple of times a week and look around. Once a month they take inventory. If there’s been too much breakage I hear about it. I’d like to put you on, but I can’t be too careful…”

  I spoke slowly and distinctly, trying desperately to sound sincere. “I’d be very careful,” I said. “I wouldn’t break anything.”

  He looked at me for a long time, queerly. At first I did not understand what he was looking at. Then came the shock of recognition – my hand clutched at my face.

  “People hardly notice it,” I said quickly, as the tortured image rose in front of my eyes and partially obscured his face. “I don’t think your customers would mind. They haven’t on other jobs,” I lied.

  He thought for a moment. I could see that the effort needed to make a decision was great for him. “I admit it’s hard to get a good, steady man these days. Maybe a fellow like you has a hard time getting jobs? Maybe, if you got a good job like this, you’d be steady?”

  “I’ll be steady.”

  He thought again. He squirmed around in his chair. He blew his nose.

  “Well, I’ll try you for a week. If you work hard and apply yourself, you may have a steady job. That is, if the customers don’t complain.”

  He stood up and walked to the rear of the cafeteria. I followed him. He gave me two clean aprons, a pair of white duck trousers and a black leather bow tie. Then he told me to report for work at six o’clock that night. My hours would be from six until two, when I would be relieved. We shook hands and I thanked him. Then I left the place to go look for a room.

  During the next month, the sultry, crowded days of August, I worked at the cafeteria six nights a week, slept or sat on the beach and read in the daytime, existed. I would be lying to say that this was an unhappy period. Indeed, I might say the opposite. I had no desire to do anything else. The books I read were adventure stories and the like. I did not dream of my former life, or of an impossibly satisfying one to come. I made no friends or enemies. Yet – if a form of contentment that was not unlike a drug-induced stupor can be called happiness – I was happy.

  I had promised myself a period of time “to think things over.” Yet I thought nothing over, made no decisions. Someday I might try again to be Dr George Matthews, the eminent young psychiatrist. Someday I would return to Sara – Sara, my heart quickened at the thought of her. Yet day after day went by, and I did nothing.

  Several times in the first weeks I worked at the All-Brite I experienced recurring fits of self-consciousness. I would suddenly become acutely aware of my disfigurement (perhaps, a customer would stare at me too long), and I would leave my work, go to the lavatory and peer at my face in the looking glass. In time, though, the first horror of my discovery passed and there came in its place a peculiar, perverted sense of pride in my distinction. No other quality of my adopted personality differed in the least from that of any man I might meet on the street or find sitting on the beach. In all others ways I was cut out of the same bolt of cloth as everyone else: I had a small job, I was lonely, I had little security. But I did have a bright scar on my face, and this disfigurement soon stood in my mind as a symbol of my new identity. I was John Brown, and as John Brown I had a scar that ran from my ear across my face diagonally. It was a strangely satisfying attribute.

  There were times when a little of my old objectivity returned to me and I stood aside and looked at myself in self-appraisal; but these times were rare and soon they stopped altogether. I knew that being proud of a defect was a defense, a stepping-stone to neurosis, but I did not care. I concentrated on my tasks, saw to it that there was always one piece of each variety of pie on the counter, sufficient shaved ice on the salad trays and that the water was changed every hour in the percolators. I waited on trade and learned to be obsequious to get nickel and dime tips. And in all this time the thought of Sara, the home that had been ours, my practice and former prestige, was only a faint and annoying memory that came in the night like the ache of a hollow tooth and which I dismissed easily from my mind, ignored as I would any petty distraction. My life had become the product of my own distorted imaginings, and I did not dare let visions of a former reality disturb my precarious equilibrium, even though in my secret mind I may have longed for my former life.

  Nor did I allow myself to think of Jacob Blunt. The whole warped history of Dr George Matthew’s last day remained a forgotten thing. There are some memories we have, and which we are aware of, but never allow to become entirely conscious. Such memories are always lurking directly beneath the surface of our reason, and in times of crisis certain of our actions can only be explained in terms of these remembered experiences; yet they never become tangible and we never allow ourselves to speak of them in telling of our past. So it was with me regarding the details of Jacob Blunt and his “little men” and the other vicious nonsense of that last day which may or may not have resulted in the death of Frances Raye and my accident in the subway. I knew they had happened but I chose to forget them. They were no part of my present life.

  I even became proficient at my craft, if you can call being a counterman in a cafeteria a craft. There were three of us to a shift and each of us had a particular section of the counter to care for. The coffee urn, the salad table and the desserts were my province; it was my responsibility to see that the kitchen kept a sufficient quantity of these items on hand for me to replace the empty dishes as soon as the customers deplenished the stock. A simple job, but one that had its difficulties. Some of my troubles lay with the customers: patrons would insist on handling each of the sweets before choosing one or would demand special orders that took extra time to prepare and then get testy because they had to wait. Often it was the cook who was slow in preparing foods that were the most popular, while flooding me with huge quantities of the slower-moving delicacies. I worked out systems by which I could balance supply and demand, push butterscotch pie and sell less apple, get rid of the avocado salad when the avocados were not all they should be – systems that worked so well that the day came when Mr Fuller had a little talk with me and gave me a raise.

  He stood behind me, watching me work and making me nervous. I heard him snuffle and blow his nose. He even cleared his throat before he said, “They’re pleased with the way you’ve turned out, Brown. Mighty pleased. Along with me they felt that maybe the customers would complain, but we haven’t had any complaints. The breakage is down this month, too. You’ve turned out pretty well.”

  “I try my best,” I said.

  “They told me to tell you that they wanted you to stay with us, and not to get any foolish notions in your head about working someplace else. We’re going to raise your salary two dollars a week.”

  He snuffled again and wiped his nose on an unclean handkerchief. Why should Fuller or his ever present “they” fear my leaving? Why should I look for another job? I was satisfied where I was.

  The two dollars more a week meant nothing to me. I had been living on what I earned, spending it all on food, shelter, an occasional clean shirt, but needing nothing more. Now that I had it, I did not know what to do with it. Eventually, I put the extra money in my top bureau drawer, adding t
o it each week; not saving the way a cautious man saves with a goal in mind or for a prudent principle, but only putting it away because I had no desire to spend it and the bureau drawer seemed a more appropriate place than the wastebasket.

  During the day and early evening the cafeteria was patronized by ordinary people out for a good time: small businessmen with their families, clerks with their girls, bands of teenage youngsters who dropped in for a hamburger and a coke and stayed long enough to be a nuisance. But after ten o’clock the character of the clientele changed radically. It was at this hour that the carnival people began to appear.

  They were of all sorts and all kinds. Gaunt, undernourished men would sidle up to the counter, order coffee and rolls, take their orders to a table and sit there the rest of the night. These were the less prosperous ones, the “drifters.” They earned their livings by taking tickets, operating rides, selling hot dogs and floss candy, by doing odd jobs. They sat with each other and did not mingle with the second group, the “artists.”

  Brassy blondes, flashily made-up redheads, rarely a glossy-headed brunette, showgirls, wives of entrepreneurs, lady shills – all of these were considered “artists”; as well as their masculine counterparts in checked suits and pointed-toe shoes, barkers, grifters who operated the “sucker” games, pitchmen and the “big boys” who owned the concessions. The “artists” came in later than the “drifters,” spent more money and were more convivial. They were a society to themselves, but a friendly, openhanded one; I learned that the “drifters” did not mingle with them of their own choosing, not because the “artists” were snobbish.