by John Gardner
He slept quietly for a time, though the creaking continued and the walls were full of scraping and gnawings, the scamperings of mice. One poked his head out from the hole in the corner, a hole too small for notice, almost hidden by books, then came cautiously into the room, stopped in the light from the window, and stood listening. Soon the second one came, sister to the first, this one from the closet, darted out onto the carpet and paused, nose tipped upward, whiskers atremble, watching Craine’s bed. Craine slept on, and the mice moved quickly to his trench coat and squirmed into the left-side pocket, where there were crumbs. Now Craine’s eyes began to move under the lids. “Turn under!” he shouted, and the mice in the trench coat froze, hearts slamming, heads down, ears cocked. His voice diminished to a mutter, and they returned to their business, hurrying, still listening for danger.
In an unknown language which Craine was for some reason able to understand, Carnac was explaining, with brightly glowing eyes, that the room where they were locked with the five dead women—their throats had been slit—was a mystery novel; all the walls were words. There were paths across the floor in a pattern like Parcheesi, and above them, out of reach, was a hanged man, slowly turning. Emmit Royce, Craine’s assistant, wearing only his leather jacket, was crawling slowly, on all fours, from one to another of the dead women, spreading the legs of each in turn, then raising them by the hips and inserting himself. He moved mechanically, sweating, as if someone were forcing him. Craine, though the whole thing annoyed him, distracting him from his problems, did nothing to interfere. All reality, Carnac was urgently explaining—looking past his shoulder in terrible fear—was a cliché; that was why they must speak new languages. Someone was watching from the shadows in the corner of the room. “There,” Craine said, and pointed.
Suddenly he was awake. The night was quiet, though he’d almost have sworn that a second ago, before he was awake, he’d heard something—perhaps the door at the foot of the stairs outside his room, possibly a voice. Garbage men? he wondered. There were brown plastic garbage bags at the foot of the stairs. But it was still pitch-dark, and the garbage men never came in for them anyway; they waited for the bags to be moved out onto the sidewalk on the proper days—Mondays and Thursdays. He tried to think what day it was now, but his mind was a blank. He stared at the ceiling, fragments of the dream coming back to him again—so vivid he was tempted to look at his hands to see if he had blood on them. For an instant it seemed to him that he could smell the blood, but then, the next instant, he was uncertain. A car started up on the street below—right in front of the hotel, it seemed to him—and he thought of going to the window to look out. But his legs and arms were heavy, and the car was now far down the block. He let it go. At last he closed his eyes again and, after a time, went back to sleep. Again he lay perfectly still for a while, before his eyes began to move below the lids.
He dreamed he was a child of three, preaching aboard a Mississippi riverboat—a grand old sidewheeler of white and gold, with a Negro orchestra and staterooms of glowing black and crimson. His father and mother stood encouraging him and laughing, his mother’s curls shiny, his father a trim, scientific-looking man, neatly bearded like a pharaoh, the whole crowd admiring their plump child’s stern, slightly pouted lower lip, the ferocious pokes of his finger. “Praise the Lord!” cried a huge old man in gray, with a tie clasp of rapidly changing numbers. He had a huge, loose jowl and heavy eye bags. His laughter seemed malicious. There were streamers, champagne bottles, a peculiar scent in the air that he couldn’t quite place.
Craine was preaching in the way he’d seen his grandfather do—a worldly, vain man, as ministers go, but a showman, and learned; he could read both Greek and Hebrew. In the dream Craine saw himself exploding golden curls; he was looking across the room into a mirror, perhaps. His heart skipped, delighted and baffled at receiving such attention. Why the harmless dream had the effect of a nightmare was not yet clear—the images had nothing to do with the emotion, or so it seemed—but Craine whimpered in his sleep, snatching out frantically at the sheets. In the dream his parents and the rest of the passengers were laughing like children and raising their glasses. A drunkard appeared in the doorway, holding out a very old letter with earth and stains on it, but no one noticed. A woman stood half in shadow behind him. Now the orchestra began to play, some noble old hymn or patriotic piece, and a few of the passengers began singing. More and more joined in, music sweeping around as the lights from the slowly turning mirror-globe swept across the walls of the ballroom—image of the universe from the still, dead center (so he reflected, studying the dream as he dreamed it). His mother wore black. Hastily, by some woman with a face that appeared to be a skull, blue-white as mist, he was whisked away to bed.
Craine awoke early, as usual, his eyelids heavy, his body lead-gray—only his hands, neck, and face were red—as tired as he’d been when he went to bed last night. He was filled with a sense that something of the greatest importance had happened, as if he’d made some terrible discovery and then forgotten. He rose irritably, full of inexplicable dread, and reached out, shaking, to the bedpost, the chair back, the wall, then the door frame as he moved into the bathroom, where he poured a little Scotch into his glass and checked the mirror to see if his skin had a yellow tinge—if it was there, he couldn’t see it—then sat for half an hour on his cracked wooden toilet seat. On his bony knees he held his thick, discolored book, The Mystery of Sanskrit. “Tomes,” he muttered, “—tombs,” and grimaced as if someone else had said it. He sucked at his teeth. All around him in the bathroom lay stacks of old hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines. He had no girly magazines. Fifty-some years of existence had taught him, so he often claimed, that on inspection no woman holds up. Show him Cleopatra, show him Helen of Troy, he’d see through her. He’d discern around her mouth a faint hint of crabbyness or weakness, stubbornness, sullenness, or vanity; a certain tenseness around the eyes that showed a slight inclination to take notice of pain and make intolerable small demands; he’d make out that her hands, too quick and strong, suggested a habit of impatience. He understood that his complaint was against humanness itself, even life itself. He knew the antique identification of womanhood and the World, Mother Eve and the Apple, symbol of our bruised, thin-skinned planet. Though he watched fearfully for that tinge of yellow, Craine had lost his taste for the planet.
He read on, sucking at the dryness of his mouth, wincing at the book, muttering as if the page had not only the gift of language but also ears. He remembered his grandfather, for no reason, he believed—for no better reason than that the book spoke of Hebrew. He saw the man standing in his natty robe, arms outstretched behind the pulpit—moustached, slightly plump, his spectacles blanked out by light. He was Presbyterian, Craine remembered; pastor to a well-off congregation in St. Louis. “So that’s it,” Craine muttered, and winced again. It had come to him why at times, when drunk, he flew into complicated, passionate lectures and quoted Scripture, his mind on automatic pilot. He was, at such times, like a man possessed. Facts fell to hand like fruit in Eden; logic revealed itself like a goddess undressing. Afterward, everything he’d said, every wham of his fist, would be gone like smoke.
Suppose glossolalia were a real thing, he’d thought. Suppose Carnac was, in some sense, sane. Suppose glossolalia was what Craine had heard, anesthetized on the table, and the man in the dark, the girl he imagined to be following him, somehow crying out to him, friend or foe …
He got up from the toilet, flushed it, put down the book and picked up a paperback, easier to carry, and prepared to confront another day. In the underwear he’d slept in he brushed his teeth, then shaved and touched up his hair dye, black. Outside his window it was another clear autumn morning, almost no one out yet, two or three cars, a Bunny Bread truck, Ned Bugrum’s mule-drawn junk wagon coming across the tracks, not making a sound.
Craine squinted and sucked again at his loose, dry mouth, thinking about his grandfather as he put on the socks he’d left hanging to air o
ut on the doorknob, then his shirt, trousers, shoes, and shoulder holster, then his sagging brown jacket or rather suit coat, once part of a suit. Some taint of the nightmare emotion remained with him, coloring the miserable gray room around him, decayed and alive as the duff on the floor of a forest—he couldn’t say why; perhaps the discovery that he was haunted. Though his past had been dead for a long time, buried as if under grass and huge stones, it was now clear to him that, somewhere down there, some part of it still wriggled, alive. For an instant, incredibly, he remembered his father, then forgot. He glanced past his shoulder at the window. He couldn’t explain the crotchety feeling, subtle as the look of death in the sheen of a cancer victim’s skin. Scowling, slightly squinting, he poured more Scotch into his glass, drank it, then cracked his revolver, making sure it was loaded, though it always was. He stared at the bullets in their chambers for a moment, vaguely reminded of the brasswork on a ship; then he closed the pistol, slipped it into its holster and, taking the whiskey with him, left his room. At the head of the stairwell his neighbor’s cat sat warming itself in a trapezoid of sunlight, its one open eye on Craine. He moved toward it, then, with a startled look, turned back to his door. He bent over the lock, managed to get the key in, locked it, carefully tried the doorknob twice, and glanced around furtively at the cat. The hallway was full of some strange, strong smell. At last, stepping cautiously, groping like a blind man, making hardly a sound, he descended the long stairway, his right hand on the bannister, in his left the bottle of Scotch in its brown paper sack. The thought of memory rising from the dead had made him think of grave robbers, mysterious incantations, King Tut’s curse. Someone with a beard and a wide-brimmed hat was at the window in the door at the foot of the stairs, looking up at him. Craine paused, gripping the bannister more tightly. The person stepped away. The same instant it seemed to Craine that some animal stirred among the garbage bags. His heart gave a jump and he leaned down to look. His mind went blinding white, then blank.
Two-heads Carnac sat motionless among the brown plastic bags as if someone had hastily and indifferently dumped him there, one more piece of trash for the garbage truck. Craine ground his fists into his eyes, then looked again. It was no mistake. Craine stood staring, his hands out for balance, then hastily dropped to his knees to see if Carnac was alive. He reached toward Carnac’s one good eye, the right one, with the intention of opening it and peering in, but three inches away his hand stopped as if of its own accord and jerked back. Caked blood lay on Carnac’s cheek and forehead, blood from a scalp wound, Craine thought at first, but then he found that that was wrong: though Carnac was sitting upright, the blood was from his nose. He’d lain somewhere head upside down at least long enough for the blood to dry, then someone had picked him up and moved him. There was more caked blood on the chest and right shoulder of his robe. It wasn’t likely, then, that he’d been hit by a car, knocked into a ditch, and then later picked up and brought here. He’d been upright when the bleeding started, then later he’d lain upside down, then still later he’d been moved. All this Craine took in in an instant, by second nature, no longer than it took for his hand to jerk back then move forward again without a pause, and open the eyelid. It was too dim in the hallway for Craine to be sure of anything; he pressed his ear to Carnac’s chest. He got the heartbeat at once, steady as the rumble of train wheels.
Only now did emotion leap up in him—panic, rage, whatever—so that he jerked back, twisting his head around, yelling, “Help! A man has been injured!” And then: “Ira! Help me!” No sound came from above, though he’d shouted with all his might, and he scrambled as if drunkenly to his feet and leaped to the door onto the street, pushed it open, and yelled, “Help! A man has been injured!” On the sidewalk people jerked and looked at him, hesitated an instant, then moved toward him. Now there was a thundering on the stairway behind him as Ira Katz came rushing down crazy-haired, wearing just a bathrobe, crying, “What’s the matter? Jesus, Craine!” Then he stopped, seeing Carnac, and his eyes went comically wide.
“Call the police,” Craine yelled, “call an ambulance!”
Bug-eyed, as if in slow motion, Ira Katz turned and began to climb two steps at a time back toward his room. Now three of the people from the sidewalk were with Craine in the entryway, standing like rabbits, their hands in front of them, looking at Carnac and waiting to be told what to do.
“Don’t touch him,” Craine said, “a call has been put in for an ambulance and the police.”
One of them, a man Craine knew from somewhere, said, “What’s happened? What’s going on?” The door had closed behind the three who’d come in. Outside, others stood peering through the window, crowding to get a look. None of them made a motion to open the door. The three inside had a trapped look, as if suddenly they’d realized they should have moved more slowly.
“He’s been injured,” Craine said. “I was coming down the stairs to go to work …” He explained how he’d found him, just sitting there like that; apparently someone had beaten him up again. Craine had a queer, familiar sense of floating above himself, watching himself chatter. He thought of the curious expression he’d used: Help! A man has been injured!—and felt the faintest flicker of an impulse to laugh; but all the while he mused on the absurdity, he was talking, chattering away like a citizen, telling his audience how he’d seen Carnac sitting there and couldn’t believe it, would have thought he was a drunken bum just sleeping it off except the blood—the smell of it—had stopped him right away. He couldn’t believe it. One of the three, an apartment-house owner by the name of Ayers—Craine had had dealings with him, off and on—stepped partway out, holding the door open, to tell the crocodiles on the street what had happened. The crocodiles began to argue, God knew why. Ira Katz was coming down the stairs again, gray-faced; he’d pulled on black pants and slippers. “The police will be right over,” he said.
“You called the ambulance?” Craine said.
Katz nodded. He was looking down at Carnac. “Shouldn’t we do something?” he asked. “Wash off the blood or something?” Then, quickly, as if interrupting himself, “Jesus, what do you think happened?”
“Offhand,” Craine said, “I’d say somebody pounded the shit out of him.”
He would have thought it was obvious—in fact he’d said it before—but all of them jerked up their heads at him at once, as if thinking they too might have the shit pounded out of them. “Listen,” Craine said suddenly, pointing at Ira Katz, “did you hear anything? A car? Something that might’ve been a scuffle?”
Katz thought, then shook his head. Half a mile away, a siren began to wail. The people who’d been looking in from outside began to leave, two by two, three by three.
One of the men who’d come in—a short, splotchy man with frizzled gray hair—said, “How long you think he’s been laying here?” He glanced at the door as he spoke, thinking of getting out.
“No telling,” Craine said.
The man nodded soberly, pulling the front of his coat together, struggling painfully over whether or not it would be morally acceptable to leave.
Craine leaned toward him, sly. “Listen,” he said, “if I were you I’d make a run for it.”
The man stared and blinked, then laughed. “No,” he said, blushing, “it’s all right. I have an appointment, that’s all I was thinking. It’s all right.” He blushed more and pushed his hands into his pockets.
The police car pulled up, and, a few minutes later, the ambulance.
The patrolman was Jimmy Throop, fat and officious. The cloth of his pant legs, when he bent down on one knee to look at Carnac, was as tight as skin. He peeled his gloves off, then put one hand gently on the underside of Carnac’s chin—no nurse at Johns Hopkins could have done it more gently. With the other hand he lifted the eyelid. “Mareezus, Craine,” he said.
Craine scowled and said nothing.
Throop laughed, boyish, as if afraid he’d offended. His dimple showed. “If you’re gonna have these wild parties, y
ou should warn us in advance!”
“Next time for sure,” Craine said.
Throop had bright straw-yellow hair and freckles. He was big as a horse, maybe two hundred seventy pounds, mostly fat; farmboy from Makanda. Craine knew him well. When Throop was a rookie, the first job he’d been sent on was a female drunk and disorderly. She’d refused to be arrested and had hit him in the jaw, though she was only a third his size. Believing it was wrong to hit a lady, he’d called home for help. He’d never live it down, but as a matter of fact he wouldn’t willingly hit a lady even now. The part he liked best in policework, he said, was speaking on bicycle safety in the schools.
“It’s something, this town,” Throop said, sliding his hat off. “Months of quiet, and now suddenly two in one night—first the woman, now Carnac!”
“Woman?” Craine said.
“Woman with some kind of funny name, like—April?”
Craine glanced up the stairway. “Dead?” he asked.
“Gone to glory,” Throop said. He gave his head a little shake, not smiling now, embarrassed.
“Where’d you find her? What happened?”
“She was sitting in somebody’s van, no clothes on. It wasn’t in the van that she was killed though. Mud and leaves on her.”
Craine breathed softly, his right hand automatically going for the whiskey. “That’s all you know?”
“That’s all we know.”
Katz was coming down the stairs now. For some reason, Craine kept his mouth shut. Behind them on the street, the ambulance siren started growling.
Over breakfast, at the diner where he always ate, crowded at this hour with working people and thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of fresh coffee, Craine skimmed his paperback, his ears shut tight against the talk all around him. The book spoke of how the pit viper can see waves of light we cannot see, namely infrared, and so lives happily in dark places. Craine didn’t necessarily believe what he read; he had his own opinions. But his cheek muscles twitched and he sucked at his teeth, interested. He closed his book and for a long time stared blankly. People spoke to him, asking him things, passing behind him to reach the stools still empty, farther down; he did not hear them. At the window, a bearded, stooped figure stood watching, then fled. Craine did not notice.