by John Gardner
“I just sell ’em, mister,” she said. She was square and blond, large-bosomed, regally bored. When she was old her chin and nose would meet.
A woman with a shopping cart went cautiously past Craine. There was an animal, a huge black-eyed woodchuck, that made a strange clicking noise on the cart’s lower shelf. Craine started violently, so that the bottle in the lining of his coat banged hard against his ankle, and again he almost fell; but nothing happened, the cart and woodchuck moved on calmly down the aisle, out of sight behind the remarkable kelly-green pant legs of the woman’s slacks, legs like two shocking-green elephant’s legs, or two trees wading into a sewage lagoon.
Craine glanced suspiciously at the salesgirl. She stared back at him, straight through him, as if she thought he might be handing out Watchtowers. She had a mouth like an infant’s. “You, young lady,” Craine told the salesgirl, suddenly jerking the pipe from his lips and stabbing the bit in the direction of her face, “you, you scarlet woman, are the sole reason the world’s in the miserable condition it’s in today.” He leaned toward her slightly, a trifle unsteadily, studying her mammoth, fallen breasts. “Cow,” he said. “Prick teaser.”
“You want me to call the manager?” she said.
Near the front of the store, Elaine Glass was pretending to look at paperback novels. Royce stood right beside her. As Craine was watching her (the store was now moving, steadily, evenly, like a merchant ship, and the identity of the girl in the beard had momentarily slipped Craine’s mind), she turned and squinted down the aisle at him, and then, belatedly, jerked away her face and snatched out, quick as a cat, and caught hold of a book.
Behind his false beard, Craine smiled at the salesgirl. “You natives here in Little Egypt,” he said thoughtfully, “have a curious way of speaking. You just set your mouth in one position and talk.
Now for the first time the salesgirl looked at him. “How come you got on that false beard?” she said.
“False?” Craine barked. He leaned still nearer, threateningly, and she drew back from the stink. “I keep up with the times, you she-devil, you foul reprobate, you scandalous little crotch!” he snarled. “The times are false. Look at these brooms!”
She tried to pretend he’d gone away. She unwrapped a stick of gum. Her eyes flicked up at him. “Mister,” she said, “go fuck yerself.”
Craine smiled his murderous, yellow-toothed smile, started away from her, then cautiously went back, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers. “I almost forgot the Good Book,” he said and pointed, then bowed, smiled timidly, and gathered it in his arms.
At the front door he stood for a long time trying to remember why he’d come. Abruptly he went out onto the sidewalk, turned right, and started walking. He stopped again.
Standing with the whiskey bottle weighing down his coat, his eyebrows arched, eyes screwed small, smells all around him from the hippie soap-and-candle shop, Craine thought suddenly of his aunt Harriet, experiencing for no clear reason, and to his great surprise, a burst of memory. Two sets of images came: first an image of his aunt at her dressing table, carefully putting on rouge, then powdering over it. Her hair was copper-colored, shiny as shellac, tightly finger-waved; her slip was blue, as blue as her prints of Maxfield Parrish—small-breasted, naked girls, blue mountains. She had a long nose. Perhaps she was going to a Bible-study meeting—she was fervidly religious, though she no more spoke of it than she spoke of her rabbit’s foot or her aversion to nuns and black cats—or perhaps she was going with her friend Arline, a fellow teacher at the high school, to some lecture. His aunt taught French and Latin. Her room smelled of bath salts, powder, and perfume—artificial lilac, light blue, pink, and ivory-yellow bottles—a scent he had never encountered in connection with a human being since, except once on a younger woman who was nothing like his aunt—a terrible, revolting encounter he had long since blotted out, or virtually blotted out. Her name was Alice; she’d nearly pinned a rape charge on him, though it was she who’d invited him to her prissy little room—town outside Chicago—and she who … memory failed him; he’d been drunk. He could remember almost nothing more about Aunt Harriet; nothing but the fact that her eyes were a startling blue, the eyelids and lashes like a rabbit’s. He hadn’t seen a photograph of his aunt in years and had nothing to jog his memory, but his impression was that, except to the small boy he’d been at the time, she was not pretty. She had yellow-white combs and brushes with pale pink flowers on them, roses. These he remembered with absolute clarity. He had no memory of his parents and did not think of them now, merely studied, for the moment the memory burned, his aunt’s expression: pursed lips, narrowed eyes. He saw her face in the mirror, and his own, behind hers, and saw her little jump of alarm as she realized he was there, at the open door. The memory was intense and painful; he was not sure why. No doubt soon after the moment he remembered, some neighbor had come in to look after him while Aunt Harriet went out, perhaps some neighbor he disliked. His aunt’s hind end, on the dressing-table bench, was to his child eye, in some inexpressible way, mysterious. Even now, in the memory, the lines of her hind end were as mysterious as some blurred old legend or inexplicable ruin. He’d been looking at that part of her the instant before he met her eyes. “Gerald!” she’d cried, startled, then had blushed at having jumped, and had laughed her feathery little laugh. What charged the memory, needless to say, was not the slightly blurry recollection of his aunt, but his own long-forgotten anguish—love and shame. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” he’d said, or something of the sort, and she’d said, smiling eagerly, as if in terrible panic, “Of course not, dear!” and then, in quite a different tone, “Hmm,” and she’d studied him narrowly.
Craine shook his head, whether to make the picture clearer or to drive it away he could hardly have said. They had not been close, though she’d made cookies for him—they’d be waiting in the yellow and white cookie crock when he got home, two hours before she did, from school—and whenever they went downtown she’d taken him to tea rooms, where he sat, among blue-haired old ladies and ate cucumber and watercress sandwiches. “Isn’t this fun, Gerald?” his aunt would say (she’d been slightly buck-toothed, it came to him now) and her shy, affected-sounding laugh would float lightly above the table. His aunt had had no idea what to do with him, this knee-splitting, sneaker-wrecking legacy from her younger sister. When his grades were bad—and they were always bad, though she knew he wasn’t stupid, or so she’d told him—she could only say, “Gerald, what are we to do with you, dear?” When he’d quit school and joined the navy she had cried half the night out of guilt and relief. In her letters she implored him to please not do anything dangerous. The letters were full of clippings about people from his high school, usually people he’d never met. “Evelyn Kelley has asked to be remembered to you,” she’d write. He could remember no one named Kelley.
The second set of images that came into his mind began with his aunt at the polished mahogany table, staring down as if at her reflection, her hand, white and thin, around her forehead. He couldn’t recall what it was that had drained all color from behind the rouge, though he remembered clearly, or perhaps supplied now by some mental trick, the dry lace curtains on the window behind her, the parakeets in their cage, the silver-gray flowers on the wallpaper, the blue china cup. He was older in this memory, eleven or twelve, and this time the charge of the memory was guilt and dread. Whether or not there was any real connection, he remembered she’d fired the maid, because he, little Gerald, had told on her. The maid was sixteen, a girl named Delores, from the orphanage. He could recall her face only dimly. She’d been more than just a maid, more like an all-round handmaiden. She’d taken him to movies, washed dishes while he dried, and told him—shyly, both of them blushing, avoiding each other’s eyes—her erotic dreams. Once unfortunately she’d told him something that had not been a dream, or so she’d claimed. She had a boyfriend named Frank, some years older than she was, a brakeman on the Illinois Central. He’d persuaded her t
o let him put his thing inside her, because they wanted to be married and it would be wrong if the two of them didn’t fit. The revelation had distressed Craine immensely, for some reason, and though he’d known it was a secret, the darkest in the world, he’d told his aunt. He had no idea now how he’d managed to bring it up, though certainly he’d known it was treachery. His aunt, ashen-faced, trembling in her fury and cold as winter, had fired the girl at once. “After all I’ve done for you!” she’d whispered. She had the tone of an outraged conspirator. “Unspeakable!” she hissed, “unspeakable!” The girl had backed away from her, her close-together eyes welling tears like a child’s (Craine had seen it all through the crack in the warped bedroom door.) Her door stood wide open when he looked the next morning—the room where she’d taught him to kiss, one night. A cunning business. She’d told him stories about boys who’d lost girlfriends by not knowing the right way to kiss—“and things like that.” She’d taught him in the dark. She’d be embarrassed, she said, to teach someone to kiss with the lights on. What kind of girl did he think she was? He’d gotten stiff as a tree, and when she’d accidentally touched him—touched his trousers, that is—she hadn’t realized and had let her hand linger there a moment. She kissed him harder, making her mouth more wet and soft, and then suddenly his aunt was home, calling up the stairs. They’d both of them nearly had heart attacks.
Afterward, Delores would never let him kiss her, always teasing him, sliding her eyes at him, letting out, shyly, the details of what she did, or more often almost did, with Frank. Gerald had stolen a pair of her panties and had hidden them in his bed, between the slats and the mattress. So now, the day after he’d told on her, her door stood open, the room full of dust-specked light, stark and empty as a crypt. And so in this later now of Gerald Craine, in the image that had triggered these embarrassing recollections, his aunt sat, drained, at the table; and like the gloomy vaults in the museums where they sometimes went on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, the room was full of serpent coils and wings. “The Babylonians,” his aunt had said on one of those excursions, “worshipped wicked, filthy things.” “What things?” he’d asked. “You’ll learn when you’re older,” his aunt had said. “Like snakes?” he’d said. “Well—” she’d said, “well, yes. Like snakes.” Intuition had leaped in him, and he’d looked at her, cunning. “Horrible dark caves?” She glanced at him, then looked casually over at the guard. “I don’t know if the Babylonians had caves or not,” she’d said.
For all its galaxy of associations, the image of his aunt at the table flashed only for a moment in Craine’s mind, then receded, taking all it had brought with it—sank away to darkness. Its passing, as if it were the passing of his life, left him numb. The world was pink now, as if he were seeing it through a sickly ruby. He felt alarm. Something had gotten into him. It made his stomach convulse, and for an instant he believed he would vomit. But the sidewalk he stared at eased back toward focus—at the edges of his vision small animals scurrying: rats, perhaps, yet not so definite as rats. Whatever they were, they were suddenly gone; the jagged lines of the sidewalk had closed like steel jaws, and his stomach quieted. He remembered, with a start, why he was here. Royce, up the street, was looking at him oddly; and no wonder, no wonder—old Craine planted on the sidewalk like an oak, three fingers on his beard, staring into dazzles of nothing like an old-time prophet out too long in the sun. Had he spoken? he wondered, glancing around in embarrassment. He was speaking now. I’m speaking now, he was saying.
He snapped his mouth shut and started walking.
It was in front of the Varsity Theater that Elaine Glass first became definitely aware that Royce was tailing her. It came about because Craine abruptly stopped, struck by a perfectly terrifying thought—a vision, rather—a great electric flash like an explosion of blinding white snow across his mind, a sudden, awful silence as if all the Muzak in the world had been ended by the indifferent flick of some stellular switch. The wide intersection into which Craine had been preparing to lower his left foot was shoetop deep, from curb to curb, in blood. Staggered by the sight, gaunt and trembling, as gray as a terminal cancer case, Craine turned on his heel (carefully, carefully) and started back in the direction from which he’d come, that is, walked straight toward bearded, stooped Elaine Glass. She stopped, open-mouthed, looking horror-stricken, awkwardly bent forward like an upright ant, then quickly pretended to be studying the glassed-in Coming Attractions. She looked to be maybe eighteen or nineteen, twenty at most. (Her type could fool you though.) She had a sickly, sulfur-yellow doughy complexion, hands so long-fingered you’d have thought she could fly with them. So far as you could tell, considering the baggy, shapeless coat, she was skinnier even than Gerald Craine. Royce nearly bumped into her, coming right behind her when she suddenly stopped dead; and when she turned toward the theater posters, Royce also turned and brazenly pretended he too was interested in the Coming Attractions. She seemed not to know him. If she’d been spying on the agency, as she’d claimed, she was a very bad spy. Craine looked, full of apprehension, above their heads.
It was a theater from the thirties. Over the marquee and on the walls around the entrance there were comets, stars, planets, also large Egyptian-looking symbols, probably meaningless. Great, mindless red lines flowed out from a tombstonelike central wedge, then plunged toward the sidewalk like the copper-wire groundings of a lightning rod. The girl was clearly frightened—though not, like Craine, of the theater’s strange symbols. She could think of no escape, merely stood there, bent toward the picture of a man who held a rifle with a telescopic sight and a woman in a partly torn-away red gown, her hands covering her breasts. Craine walked by, quiet as the moon, watching like a man in grave peril, listening behind him without turning his head. As if absentmindedly, but making it obvious, Royce slowly drew out his pistol enough to expose the barrel. Then, as if encouraged, he drew it all the way out from the left-side pocket of his scruffy leather jacket and shifted it to the right. Elaine Glass, adjusting her beard, froze, then turned her head, mouth gaping, and stared at him, then swiftly turned back to look at Craine. The lenses of her glasses, especially the right one, were extremely thick. Royce smiled. His silver tooth was like stainless steel.
Craine shuddered, unthinkingly checked to see that his gun was still there and his headpiece straight, then hurried on.
Earl Denham, standing at the door of his tobacco shop, said, “Morning, Craine.” Craine paused and turned, touching the black beard and looking up at the man from the shadow of his hat. Denham was a large man of English stock, a tasteful moustache, a Yorkshire vest. Inside his store, full of tobaccos and teas, it was the nineteenth century. Except for an occasional whimsical pipe, he sold no novelties, no gewgaws, no trifles, but a customer could get from him curlicued signs like the one hanging over his cash register: DUE AND REGULAR CONDUCT.
“Good morning,” Craine said. He shifted the Bible around in front of him, to hold it in both arms.
“I see you’ve got the Word this morning,” Denham said, and grinned. He fit the pipe back in between his gold-framed teeth.
“So I have,” Craine said thoughtfully, as if with perfect seriousness, and decided, on sudden inspiration, to go in. He gave Royce the signal for the sandwich.
The capture went, an observer might have said, as smoothly as a person in Craine’s condition could reasonably expect. He stood at the antique, greenish glass counter looking down at the pipes, both hands and elbows still closed on the Bible. Denham went around behind the counter, the soul of dignity and duty, thoughtfully smoking, bent forward just slightly in the gesture of a storekeeper pleased to be of use, though perhaps, for all that, ill at ease. When his wife came in from the stockroom in back—a small, pretty woman, lightly moustached—Denham said at once, with a careful nobility that made Craine smile, “It’s all right, you won’t be needed, Margie.” She pursed her lips, looked startled, then instantly withdrew. Elaine Glass was at the window, full of panic, staring in. Royce was not in s
ight.
Craine bent down as if to look more carefully at one of Denham’s pipes. “D’you mind if I use your back exit?” he said, and reached up and tipped his hat.
“Do I mind—” Denham said, straightening a little. He was in a momentary quandary. Craine’s request—Craine’s very existence, in fact—was by no means due and regular. But Denham’s habitual good manners resolved the question. “Be my guest,” he said. His smile was, under the circumstances, hearty. He seemed, even now, only mildly surprised and, though helpless in the face of this affront to regularity, not alarmed. For all his gentility, for all the comfortable dimness of his shop—the dark glowing wood of pipes and shelves, the civilized smell of Virginia, Turkish, and Latakia, the quiet so deep you could hear Denham’s wife humming “You Wore a Tulip” in the stockroom, Denham was not out of touch with the world. He’d seen movies; he read the papers. He perhaps even had, in his shaded, high-gabled house on Springer, a television set.
There was still no sign of Royce. Craine made his way to the door of the back room, looked past his shoulder one more time, then stepped through into the gloom of carefully stacked boxes, tobacco canisters, shelves of tea. Mrs. Denham was nowhere to be seen, at first; but when he’d gotten further in, he saw that she stood over by the workbench, under the hanging light, wielding tin snips. Neatly stacked around her on the floor she had wired-up parcels, their latest shipment. “Can I help you?” she said. Her eyebrows lifted. Craine silently raised his finger to his mouth and she pursed her lips, puffed her cheeks out, and said no more. He lurched awkwardly between the floor-to-ceiling storage shelves that darkened the right-hand side of the room—blocks of shadow in which stood faintly glowing tobacco cans—and stumbled around behind the last of the stacks out of sight. A window loomed behind him, high on the wall, and Craine had a sharp, unsettling impression that under the window, among carefully stacked cans and packing crates, stood a large black bird. Fighting down fear, he bent to look more closely. It vanished, became a stain on the wall. Craine pursed his lips and tapped the white plastic Bible cover.