The Axeman Cometh

by John Farris

  "Uncle Gilmore. Mom doesn't think he'll come. Look at the drawings I did for the invitations."

  "Oh. Neat."

  "How did you make out last night in Ellsworth?"

  "Blew a head. Finished fourth."

  "How much was that worth?"

  "Twenty-five bucks."

  "Do you think they'll take you?"

  "What? Oh, the Army. Sure, they'll take me. I'm a perfect physical specimen." Allen Ray, habitually slouchy, straightens and flexes his biceps. The fly front of his pajamas gaps open.

  "So I see," Shannon says with a smirk. Allen Ray grins and turns away to close up. "Allen Ray?"

  "Yo."

  "Why don't you join the Navy first, before you're drafted? That'd make Dab so proud."

  "Boats," Allen Ray says disdainfully. "I'm going to be a tanker."

  "Like Elvis?"

  Allen Ray licks cinnamon and sugar from his fingers. "I think that was all publicity. I'll bet they never let him anywhere near a tank"

  Shannon begins singing "Return to Sender" in a small but true voice and turns the washing machine on again. It doesn't sound right, and her brother is frowning. "What do you think's the matter, Allen Ray?"

  "Bearing."

  "Can you fix it?"

  "Tomorrow. I'm late for work."

  "Oh, would you drop me by school?"

  "Saturday? What's going on?"

  "Prom committee, then I've got to get ready for the art exhibit in the library."

  "Who's taking you to the prom?"

  "Three guesses, first two don't count."

  "Most Likely to Succeed. At what?"

  "At using his head. Full scholarship to Washburn. Are you going to marry Sondra before you get drafted?"

  "Hell no. What is she going to do, follow me around from Texas to Germany?"

  "She could live here with us," Shannon says as the idea pops into her head. "I like Sondra. It'd be great to have somebody almost my own age to talk to."

  "I'm not getting married so you'll have somebody to talk to," Allen Ray replies with that sardonic little twist of the lip that is, to a T, his mother. Shannon mimics him and Allen Ray turns with a shrug. "Look, I'm going to pull on some clothes and go. You ready, or what?"

  "Right with you. I just need to get this load of sheets on the line—"

  "They're pretty bloody, aren't they?" Allen Ray says. But so is he. Shannon looks up from pulling the stained, dripping sheets out of the Bendix to see him hanging by one arm caught in pincers of broken glass in the kitchen door, his throat—open—almost to

  the back of his neck,

  showing the severed ends

  of the tough, bone-white

  windpipe.

  Even

  before she begins to shriek,

  the dark returns: it's very, very

  dark

  there on West Homestead in

  Emerson, Kansas; up and down

  the familiar street where the

  typical night sounds are from dogs,

  insects, television (the

  Rockweilers have a new RCA color

  console that set them back seven hundred

  ninety five dollars;

  it's the first one on the

  block), the rumblings of dual

  carbs on Duffy Satterstall's '57

  Chevy while he endlessly tunes

  the spotless engine, and

  bicycle

  bells

  as the McMicken twins head home

  from a Little League game

  on the diamond behind First Pres,

  quarreling, as they are

  apt to do, over which of them

  made the best or worst plays . . .

  but nobody, nobody

  has ever thoroughly shattered

  the peace of West Homestead

  Avenue with scream

  after

  scream of bloody murder, until

  SIX DEAD IN EMERSON MASSACRE

  (The Wichita Eagle, June 9, 1964)

  "I like to chop."

  (Identical message found on the walls of four houses in Briarwood, Missouri, Crestview, Iowa, Hendricks, Nebraska, and Emerson, Kansas. September 1962 to June 1964.)

  My Godddddd they're llllll' deadddddd

  Shannon. Shannon. Don't scream.

  "I'm going to die! I've got to get out of here, this fucking elevator: somebody, somebody please hear me!!"

  I hear you. I'm with you. I'm listening.

  "But you don't do anything! You're not helping me! I'm choking, I can't breathe! Get Don. Please get Don for me, he'll know what to do, he'll get me out of here!"

  Donald Carnes?

  "Yes! Who do you think I'm talking—but you don't know him. How could you know Don?"

  You let him down, Shannon. Called the wedding off. That was five months ago. I'm afraid you won't be seeing—

  "I know we haven't seen each other, but we've talked—I tried to explain to him why—why I couldn't—but I still love him! He knows that! We're having a drink together, tonight—at Cabrera's on Columbus. Where we met. Oh, God. How long have I been trapped in here? I must be late already. What is Don going to think?"

  But he doesn't mean anything to you anymore. I'm the one who matters to you, Shannon. I'm the only one who's ever mattered.

  "You're a liar! You don't know me! God, if it wasn't so dark in here—"

  But it's the dark that has brought us together. And when you want to see me, you will.

  Noooo . . . no. Don—Donald! For the love of God, come! Find me. Before it's too late!

  "Having another, Mr. Carnes?"

  (Cabrera's. 385 Columbus Avenue, between 78th and 79th. The food is Cuban. The bar is on your right as you go in, and it's a big bar, popular in the neighborhood. Salsa on the quad speakers, Miami Sound Machine. Fresh, lightly salted tostones in wicker baskets spaced along the mahogany bar. Calamares to order with Cabrera's special sauce. These go very well with another house specialty, double frozen daiquiris without sugar, "Papa dobles," made just the way the great author himself used to drink them at the Floridita Bar. It is unclear if the owner or owners of Cabrera's knew the Nobel laureate, or if he ever graced their New York restaurant, but behind the bar amid other celebrity photos is one of Hemingway, impressively rotund and shaggy in slacks and a guayabera, standing on the veranda of the Finca Vigiia on the island, holding a cat in the crook of one arm, "Black Dog" at his heel. Papa's expression is beclouded, unsmiling, as he faces down the perhaps barely tolerated photographer.

  On a rainy Tuesday night in October, with a radical change of weather in the offing, there are only half a dozen regulars at Cabrera's bar. Along with Donald B. (for Burnside) Carnes, who used to be a semiregular, when he lived nearby at Amsterdam and 72nd. Don is thirty-six. His income is sixty-two thousand a year, and he's in his thirteenth year with New York Life. Actuarial, not Sales. He has a secure position in a branch of his depression-proof business, where there is usually a shortage of capable men and women.

  Don Carries turns on his stool to look at the doorway through which no one has come for the last ten minutes, then at the coatroom girl with the dark flowing hair that hides part of her comely, caramel face but not the vivid plump mouth that invites lolling, like a waterbed. She is listlessly turning over the pages of the New York Post, looks up to find his eyes on her and smiles, giving her head and mane a little shake as if to exhibit sympathy, realizing that he. is waiting for someone now long past due; but Don looks like a man who has known his share of frustration, waiting for blind dates in neighborhood watering holes. He's a little plump and a little short. From his father he inherited male pattern baldness, and from his mother a poor pair of eyes (astigmatism). Yet there's something about Don that invites confidences, when you get to know him. Stability. The staunch in him implicit, like the ribs of a whaling vessel. There are people who like listening to other people, and those, the majority, who are just waiting for their turn to talk. Don is a listener. One nig
ht shortly after she met him at a party (they weren't even dating), Shannon stopped making small talk, looked, for about twenty suspenseful and silent seconds, into his serious brown eyes, then began pouring out her heart. Before the evening was over she knew she was in love. Unfortunately for Shannon—

  "Mr. Carnes?"

  "Oh, sorry, Francisco, I didn't mean to be rude." Don looks at his empty glass, looks at his watch, a square, sensible Timex he bought for $12.95 more than eight years ago. Takes a licking, keeps on ticking, as John Cameron Swayze used to say.

  The bartender is about five feet tall, dark and dry as an unwrapped mummy, with a nap of terrycloth-white hair. Everybody else calls him "Frank," but Don adheres to a certain formality in his dealings with people he hasn't known all of his life.

  "Your lady," Francisco says, "is running late tonight?"

  "She sure is. Forty minutes late. She had a five-thirty meeting with her editor, I think. And the publishing house is pretty far downtown, almost in the Village."

  "Ah, the one who writes and illustrates children's books. I have forgotten her name."

  "Shannon," Don says, the sound of it unexpectedly sweet to his ears. For a couple of moments his lower lip is unsteady, like a child's.

  "We have not seen either of you here for many months, ¿verdad?"

  "Yes, well, we—broke off. This is the first time—"

  The front door opens to laughter, a gust of chill wet air, the distant electronic blurt of police sirens, and Don turns quickly; but it's three Latins, two men in silk suits with rain in their hair, a woman carrying a raffish miniature poodle wearing a rhinestone choker. Don turns around again and catches sight of himself in the backbar glass looking uncharacteristically disgruntled as he thinks, Why did I let her talk me into this? It's no good for either one of us.

  "Here you are, sir?"

  "Thanks, Francisco."

  Don glances at the telephone at one end of the bar and wonders if it's worth trying to find out if she's actually coming, maybe just stuck in traffic is all—if her conference with the editor, Petra what's-her-name, was running overtime, then Shannon, flighty and neurotic but never discourteous, would surely give him a jingle after going to so much trouble to set them up for the evening. Maybe worth spending a quarter just to make sure she'd already left.

  "I remember some of the fantastico pictures she drew. Such strange creatures, enough to frighten small children, I should think."

  You ought to see the ones nobody in their right minds would publish in books for children, Don says to himself. I didn't like looking at them either. But maybe getting those drawings out of her system had been as effective as several more years of psychotherapy.

  Don puts one foot on the floor (black Peal shoes, the best, and expensive, but made for a lifetime: one superlative pair of shoes, or twenty pairs of Florsheims that lose their shape in a hard rain? Penny-wise or pound-foolish. He is a man who knows the true value of everything he purchases, or contemplates purchasing some day), fishes for a quarter in the coin pocket of his dark blue suit pants (Brooks Brothers. Always correct, never out of style).

  "Believe I'll just call and see what the delay is," Don says to Francisco, as if he owes the Cuban an explanation for continuing to hang around his bar.

  He carries his daiquiri with him and puts it on the sill beneath the telephone after another long sip (the glass only half empty but already he anticipates ordering another, he's feeling a touch reckless as well as disgruntled —might as well go ahead and get well-fortified for what's coming when Shannon arrives; tomorrow he's working at home where he can nurse a hangover privately). From another pocket he takes a thin, credit-card-size calculator that also stores up to two hundred telephone numbers and addresses and recalls the number for Knightsbridge Publishers.

  Ten minutes past eight. The phone is ringing, but he is already convinced it won't be answered. So what to do? Sit in the bar and drink frozen daiquiris until it's certain that Shannon has stood him up? Don knows she is not capable of deliberately humiliating him; no, his humiliation lies in his need to see her once more, knowing full well that they—

  "Hello?"

  "Oh—hello. I—who's this?"

  "Who's calling?" she replies, a little curt with him.

  "Is this the office of Knightsbridge Publishers?"

  "Yes, it is."

  "Well, I was wondering, you have an editor there named Petra; I'm sorry, I can't recall—"

  "This is Petra Kisber speaking."

  "My name is Donald Carnes. I believe we've met."

  "Oh, yes, you're—"

  "—a friend of Shannon Hill's. Is she still there? We had a—an appointment, but—"

  "No, Shannon left some time ago. As the Fates would have it, I seem to be the only one who's stuck up here."

  "Stuck?"

  "On the top floor. There's no power. It's the whole neighborhood again, from what I can tell. That's three outages, as ConEd quaintly calls them, in the past eight months. It's really a disgrace. But I was ready for this one. I bought a pair of old hurricane lamps in Port Antonio this summer, thank God, and kept one here at the office just in case."

  "That is fortunate. I assume the elevator isn't operating?"

  "Ha! It doesn't run half the time when there is power. I hate and despise the damned thing, it's as big as a cattle car and sooo slow. And it never hits the floor exactly even; you have to step up eight inches, or down six inches—"

  "You can't use the stairs to—"

  "In this building? This neighborhood? It was a department store a hundred years ago, but the building went to pot after World War Two. A few years ago somebody got the bright idea of restoring the façade, which I have to admit is quite elegant, and converting several floors inside to office space. But they ran out of money, so the first couple of floors are deserted except for derelicts and God knows who else—walk? This far downtown, with the lights out? Not Petra Kisber. I'm perfectly happy to sit here with the doors locked, and I just hope the paraffin in this lamp doesn't give out . . . hmm, what was that?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "I thought I heard something just now. Someone scr—yelling. No, it must have been outside on the street."

  "Miss Kisber—"

  "Just call me Petra. I'm now managing editor, by the way. Excalibur Books."

  "Yes, I've seen some of them. Very impressive. I wonder if—how long after Shannon left your office did the power fail?"

  "I'm not sure. Let's see. I didn't walk her out, as I usually do—frankly, I had to use the little girl's sandbox, so that's where I was, sitting on the john when the lights went off. I'm telling you, I just about wrecked my shins getting back to my office—in the dark this floor is a maze of partitions and bookshelves. And wastebaskets: people will leave their wastebaskets anywhere. I'm writing a memo about that first thing in the—"

  "There's a possibility that Shannon and perhaps others could be in the elevator, between floors?"

  "Nobody else from here. I was the last one in the office. The floor below is vacant. And I doubt if the night cleaning crew shows up much before midnight."

  "Is there an emergency alarm to ring?"

  "Not in the elevator. Like I said, it's an old freight job with these massive gates Superman couldn't open by himself."

  "Would you mind going to find out if anyone's trapped?"

  "The elevator's clear on the other side of the building, and I don't mind admitting I'm getting a little stressed out being here all by my lonesome. I'd just as soon stay—"

  Don pauses to drain the rest of his daiquiri, and, in the lifting of his arm, is aware that his armpits are icy, he is feeling more than a little apprehensive.

  "Petra, if, just possibly, Shannon's in that elevator—by herself—imagine how she must feel."

  "Weren't you two going to get married? I got the invitation and bought the most elegant—then wasn't it about three days before the wedding—?"

  Don has long ago become sick of hearing about wedding gi
fts that had to be returned. "It's a long story. Listen to me, now. You don't know Shannon as well as I do—no one does. It would—be very bad for her to be by herself in that elevator. There could be serious psychological consequences."

  "You mean she's claustrophobic?"

  "Oh, I mean much worse than that." And he feels the sliding of icy sweat beads down his right side beneath his shirt.

  "Hmm. Then I suppose I should—but I don't think there's a thing I can do if she's actually trapped—"

  "The fire department will deal with that situation."

  "I could stay here and call them. But if she's not in the elevator, then it's like turning in a false alarm, isn't it?"

  "Petra. Please. Go find out if Shannon is in that elevator!"

  "You're right. I ought to do that. I can put myself in her shoes. I'd certainly want somebody to come looking for me."

  "Call me back. I'm at Cabrera's, on Columbus Avenue. The number is—"

  Don reads it off for her, solicits further assurances that Petra will proceed to the elevator to find out if it is occupied, then notify the fire department. And call him. He hangs up and goes back to his seat at the bar with his empty glass; as soon as he sits down Francisco slides a fresh "Papa doble" toward him. In the photograph on the back bar old Hemingway looks testier than ever, probably wishing somebody would fix him a frosty strengthener.

  "I heard," Francisco says. "I hope your lady is not in the elevator after all."

  "Oh, God," Don says dismally, wiping his brow with a cocktail napkin, "you and me both, Frank."

  Draw me.

  I'm so thirsty! I wish I had something to drink. What I'd like right now is a draft beer—no, better than that, one of Cabrera's huge frozen daiquiris, in a goddamn beer mug. I'd give anything for—what did you say?