A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  Mr. Brown seemed completely unaffected. He gravely studied the photograph. The tailor wiped his face and blew his nose, emerging from this process unscathed, his face exactly as it had been before. Mr. Brown finally looked up.

  “Yes, there is a resemblance,” he said at last, and handed the picture back with a steady hand. I could see his other hand beneath the table, kneading his thigh.

  Beneath my blanket, kneeling on the mossy shingles, I watched and recovered with the tailor. Tabber had returned to his simpler world of bang-you’re-dead, and I was alone. I had never seen a man cry. I, myself, hadn’t really cried for a long time—maybe a whole year. And why were the sloppy tears of this old man, whom I disliked, so catching? I was absolutely disgusted with myself, and with whatever undependable lever had pulled those tears out of me. I felt tricked, unfairly manipulated by the tailor. “God damn you,” I whispered, “God damn you old bastard!” and wiped the traitorous tears into my blanket.

  The tailor, completely recovered, began to set up the chessboard again, but Mr. Brown said that he was too tired. I retreated into the leaves until they left the room. When Mr. Brown came back, the tailor then walking lumpily beneath the street light on his way home, I came back to the window. Mr. Brown sat down in his easy chair, motionless for a moment, his face tight and unhappy. Then he raised his hands to the level of his eyes. They were shaking. I watched him for a while, but he just sat there, so I left him.

  In the afternoons that followed Mr. Halperin’s outbreak and on the long Saturdays, he became, as I watched, overly friendly toward Mr. Brown. The tall man was as precisely friendly as before, but the tailor would rush downstairs to talk excitedly, his hands dangerously wild among the racks and stacks of the main floor. He was making Mr. Brown a suit, and to the barely perceptible annoyance of Mr. Brown descended upon him even when he was waiting on a customer, looped a tape about his chest, the thick arms roughly pushing, the ugly face brushing Mr. Brown’s ear. Then he whipped the tape off and brought it close to his eyes.

  “Forty! Thirty-two!” He roared for everyone in the store to hear. “Magnificent! It is for such men suits should fit!” Humming, nodding, grunting, waving his yellow tape, he rushed back upstairs to his shop.

  At times he came to argue, especially when Chief Atmon stopped by to talk to Mr. Brown about guns. The tailor did not like uniforms and our Chief of Police did little to reassure him. To Chief Atmon the tailor was a living joke, and the sight of him was enough to bring on a ponderous merriment. “Gay cock off in yawm,” he would suggest to the infuriated tailor.

  “If you are going to speak Yiddish, why don’t you correct yourself?” the tailor said.

  “I learned it in the army,” Chief Atmon explained.

  Mr. Brown would not join the Cascom River Fish and Game Club, but he did listen—he had little choice—to Atmon’s hunting stories. Atmon was a big man, as big as anyone in Leah. His blue uniform fitted tightly as the bark of a tree around his great legs and torso. He was an excellent pistol shot, and it was always surprising to see the loud man so steady, so suddenly cool and precise as he fired on the Cascom River range, then bursting again in the vacuum of a crushing bang, breathing the fumes of his smokeless powder, looking for the hole he always found in the black.

  When he hunted he cursed the animal he pursued. “There goes the son of a bitch! Kill the bastard!” he would yell as a deer slipped away through the alders. And when he killed: “I got the son of a bitch right in the boiler room! Right in the goddam boiler room!”

  He was a successful hunter, hunted legally, and got his deer through study and marksmanship. The boys of Leah admired him for this, and we grinned painfully but sincerely as our clavicles unbent after one of his whacks on the back. The big man was fierce and loud, but friendly—there was no doubt about that. He even wanted Mr. Halperin to like him—you could see the little eyes up there in the open red face, searching nervously for signs of affection.

  “A murderer,” Mr. Halperin said, staring at Chief Atmon’s departing back and at the huge Colt .44 that Atmon carried tight and black against his hip.

  Mr. Brown considered this. “No. But maybe he could be.”

  “He hates the animals,” Mr. Halperin said. “He kills out of hate. He carries proudly his pistol. He plays with it.”

  “Chief Atmon isn’t a bad man, though,” Mr Brown said slowly. “Look how he loves his little beagle…”

  “Of course! He is a sentimental slob. The worst kind of murderer. I’ve seen such swine crying over their dogs while men died. And what is this beagle? A murder dog, meant to break the backs of rabbits!”

  “No. A fine little dog, doing what he is meant to do. But Chief Atmon, now,” Mr. Brown said thoughtfully, “he loves his little dog. You see, it doesn’t run away from him. I suppose he believes the little dog loves him.” He smiled. “Don’t ever run away from him, Mr. Halperin.”

  “I have run away from worse than that punchinello,” Mr. Halperin said.

  “I neither like him nor dislike him,” Mr. Brown said. “I don’t hunt with him.”

  “Yes, you hunt, don’t you,” Mr. Halperin said disgustedly.

  “How can you? Do you gloat over the red blood you spill?”

  “Do you think I do?”

  “I cannot think of a reason for murder.”

  “If you think it is murder I can’t begin to explain it to you,” Mr. Brown said tolerantly.

  “But why? But why?” The tailor waved his hands in Mr. Brown’s face. “Look at it! Here is a beautiful deer, a fine animal; he eats only the little grasses, the little twigs from the trees. He hurts nobody. All he asks is to live, to grow tall and beautiful. You sneak to wound him, shoot big balls of lead through his living body. What did he do to you? He has pain! He falls!” The tailor’s eyes were full of tears.

  “Mr. Halperin,” Mr. Brown said calmly (but from my inconspicuous distance I remembered his shaking hands). “A buck is not a man. He is better equipped than a man. If you want to make a man out of him, the man you make will be an unpleasant one. He is murderous in the rut. He lets his does go first across any dangerous ground. He is completely disloyal, completely selfish. I don’t make a man out of him, and I don’t judge him. He is beautiful and correct for what he is. We’ve driven off most of his natural enemies, like the wolf, because we thought they threatened us. And now he has two major enemies left, Mr. Halperin. Neither is man. One is starvation, and none of his fine talents give him a chance against that horror. Another is the breeding of the defective among him, which will make him small, ugly and stupid and even wipe him out. Hunting man is the only enemy left that he is equipped to overcome. And if the slow and the feeble among him are not killed, he will no longer be the most beautiful animal on earth.”

  Mr. Halperin looked away, his head bent, his hands held out, palms up. “I have heard such theories before, in Germany,” he said.

  “You’re talking about people, Mr. Halperin. I’m talking about deer.…”

  “So there’s a difference?” the tailor said, and abruptly turned away.

  I had never heard such beautiful theories, but in the town of Leah, where hunting is part of life, where school is for girls on the first of November and the paper mill is closed, we never thought too much about killing deer. You got a deer, and he was yours. From the wild flash and flag of him, the noise of his canny rush for escape, he changed. He became your own, to touch, to show, and finally to eat. I retreated to my coat-rack hideaway, gloating over Mr. Brown’s victorious argument. I went to the fitting-mirrors and practiced him, ignoring my pointy profile.

  Mr. Halperin didn’t speak about hunting again, but if anything, his demonstrative affection for Mr. Brown increased. The swoops to measure him, the constant cornerings and contacts began to tell. Once I saw Mr. Brown avoid him—saw him turn and go back to the basement when he saw that Mr. Halperin was waiting for him by the shoe-fitting chairs. The tailor would come up often and put his hand on Mr. Brown’s shoulder—a shoulde
r held rigid. Finally Mr. Brown turned to him, and said, in a clear, cold voice, “Don’t lean on me, Mr. Halperin.”

  The tailor jumped back, his hand still in the air at the height of Mr. Brown’s shoulder. “What? What?” he asked.

  Mr. Brown ignored him, and continued to wait on Bessie, who was stolidly buying her weekly pair of shoes—her weekly impersonal foot caress at the hands of Mr. Brown.

  At the foot of the stairs the tailor turned around. His eyes were wet again, and he smiled a twisty little smile. “So!” he said to me. “So we know! When didn’t it? Look! He waits on that fat pig who has the soul of a garbage can, the mouth like a hemorrhoid!” He shook his head. “Ah, he is so just like! So cold!”

  When he had the time he still worked on Mr. Brown’s suit, still made the necessary measurements—but formally now, with prior permission. Most of the time he sat in his little room, firing off bursts of stitches, waiting to cuss me out.

  …Until that morning in November. Leah Town Square was sere, hardened by a morning frost; the tall elms were creaky in the cold sunlight, and I was hardened and hopeless at the beginning of another endless Saturday. I crossed the green but dying grass, passed the empty benches that would soon be taken in. It was the first day of hunting season and I must wear a necktie and white shirt, hear the sporadic shots echoing down from the dark hills of Leah. The deer, jumped by hunters, would be moving nervously through the quiet spruce, leaping past the bright beeches into darkness. And I must wait on people who didn’t care enough—who didn’t care at all.

  From a distance I had seen Bessie and Mr. Brown standing in front of Trotevale’s, but the frosty wind made my eyes water, and I kept them down, not bothering to wonder why the two didn’t go straight inside on a cold morning. As I came nearer I saw that Bessie was in a state of unrest. Something jiggled that mass, made her stamp her precious feet and open and shut her soundless mouth. Mr. Brown stood next to her, and they both peered in through the big window to the right of the front door. When I came up to them it was a terrible and delicious shock to me, too: the big window was only half there. Slabs and splinters of glass glittered upon the sidewalk, wide sheets of it and millions of jagged darts of it had crushed Mr. Hummington’s window display of two-dollar ties and ten-dollar hats.

  “Something moving around in there!” Bessie whined. Through the unnatural hole we heard bumpings from the rear, thumps and breaking glass.

  The rest of the clerks and Mr. Halperin had come by the time Mr. Hummington arrived at a run, his key foremost.

  “Late! Late!” he explained, as if his lateness were something so odd it must be proclaimed. Then he saw the broken window, and with military precision he stabbed the Yale lock with his key and overran it, nearly shattering the glass of the door with his forehead. We cautiously followed him inside—all except Bessie, who remained outside uttering complaining little squeaks.

  The glass case that had contained men’s jewelry—tie pins and cuff links of coated brass, little arrows meant to look as if they pierced your necktie, springlike instruments to skewer collars down, buckles to personalize bellies and their heaps of interchangeable letters in plastic mother-of-pearl—this case was smashed and trampled, and the shoddy brightwork spewed down the aisle. Stray neckties were everywhere, brightly coiling and dangling like tropical snakes in a zoo. The coat racks at the rear were all tipped over, and piles of blue and brown material lay heaped in rows, a plowed field sown with buttons.

  We advanced, Mr. Hummington in the lead, silent except for the crunch of glass beneath our feet. No sound came from the dark areas at the rear of the store, and we all had the feeling of being watched.

  “Got to call Mr. Trotevale,” Mr. Hummington whispered.

  “We ought to get out of here,” Randall Perkins suggested. Though far in the rear, he had armed himself with or was merely carrying an empty tie rack. Bessie had moved through the door and scared us badly by screaming, “Are you all right?”

  Mr. Hummington turned wrathfully, but before he could say anything the ominous presence we had all been conscious of, the author of this terrible derangement, rose before us; gathered itself before Mr. Hummington: a great buck with bone-white antlers, thick neck and deep, wild eyes. Mr. Hummington must have been close enough to feel the sharp explosions of wind from the buck’s black nostrils.

  With his hands slack at his sides, his mouth open, Mr. Hummington stared. All his famous energy had left him, drawn out at a look as awed sighs were drawn from us. The buck’s brawny neck trembled with inhuman energy, his black eyes struck away what little nerve we had. In the sudden presence of his fierce strength we were all at once aware of our weakness. The coward’s swift insight froze our shy bodies. I, for one, knew in my belly the force of those bony antlers, the power of those sharp hoofs. And the awesome dignity of the huge animal was not dispelled at all by the cheap neckties that flapped from his antlers, gaudy but unfunny: they might have been our own dangling guts.

  After the long moment of fear, the deer rose on its hind legs to turn in the narrow aisle. Mr. Hummington fell solidly to the floor and scuttled, with swimming motions, back toward us on the slippery plastic. His head thumped against my shin, and he looked up, without his glasses, astounded at my unmoving presence. His eyes were metallic little beads deep under his forehead. None of the rest of us had run because the deer had—one smooth leap had taken him directly into the banister of the basement stairs. He took the heavy wood downstairs with him as easily as if it had been a spiderweb across a trail. From the basement we heard a clatter and a thump, then nothing. We had been hearing, but not caring about, Bessie’s screams for help. She stood blocking the front door, importuning the town of Leah and the police. Eventually both came.

  With the deer more or less safely in the basement, Mr. Hummington took charge. Bessie was led to the elevator and installed in her office on the balcony, Mr. Halperin was sent to his shop, and the rest of us were directed to begin cleaning up. The shoe department hadn’t been damaged, and we didn’t miss Mr. Brown. While we were sweeping up the jewelry he had been in the basement.

  “He’s back in the corner by the work shirts,” Mr. Brown said. “I’m afraid he’ll hurt himself.”

  “Hurt himself! Hurt himself!” Mr. Hummington said.

  “He may break a leg if we scare him too badly.”

  “He may break his goddam neck! He damn well will break his goddam neck! I’ll do it myself! Look at this place! Look at the hoof marks in my new floor! Look at the glass!” Mr. Hummington yelled.

  Mr. Brown looked gravely down at him, a certain amount of contempt detectable in his calmness. Mr. Hummington turned away.

  “What’s Mr. Trotevale going to say? We can’t get any new glass until Monday and he has the shingles again. We’ll have to borrow a mattress box from the furniture store and put it over the hole and it’ll look just goddam awful!” Some of this was private moan.

  People had begun to gather on the sidewalk, and they stood two-deep, staring in, steaming the good window so that they had to keep wiping to see. They all seemed to be waving at us. The front door had been locked, but this didn’t stop Chief Atmon, who jumped crushingly through the broken window, scattering hats and glass over the floor I’d just swept.

  “Where is he?” Atmon yelled, his big hands held open and forward like a wrestler’s.

  “He’s down in the basement and he’s as big as a horse,” Mr. Hummington said.

  “Hah!”

  “He’s bigger’n you, Harold,” Mr. Hummington said.

  “You’re not going to wrestle him out of there.”

  Atmon looked questioningly at Mr. Brown.

  “Three hundred pounds. Ten points,” Mr. Brown said.

  “Wow!” Atmon’s hand dropped tentatively to the butt of his big revolver. On his face was an expression of fierce anticipation.

  “Goddam, Harold! You shoot him and you’ll ruin half the work clothes. Blood all over the place!” Mr. Hummington cried. “You can’t do t
hat! All those chinos! You can’t do it!“

  “I can drop him in his tracks. One shot. No splatter. Right in the goddam boiler room.”

  “No! No! You’ve got to lasso him. Tie him up!”

  “I ain’t no cowboy,” Atmon said. “What about you, Brown?”

  “You might tie him up, but by the time you do he’ll have wrecked everthing down there, and hurt himself,” Mr. Brown said.

  “Shoot him!” Atmon said. “Only thing to do.”

  “Why don’t we just let him go?” Mr. Brown said.

  An immediate, wondering silence. We all looked at Mr. Brown as if at a stranger, and from that point on he lost force; he seemed to fade before our eyes, and the more he said, the less his opinion counted. Aside from considerations of retribution for the damage done to the store, and especially the damage done to our equilibrium, the idea was impossible. The deer would have to come back upstairs and leave the store at street level. Then he would have to find his way back to the woods, a matter of a half-mile in the best direction. Such gaunt majesty as his would be too alone, too terrible upon the quiet streets of Leah. He’d be sure to get into more trouble somewhere along the line.

  “He got in here by himself,” Mr. Brown said. “If he isn’t driven crazy he might be able to find his way back where he belongs.”

  “He don’t belong here,” Mr. Hummington said.

  “Belongs in my freezer-locker, that’s where he belongs,” Chief Atmon said.

  “Listen,” Mr. Brown said, “he isn’t stupid. He’s big and he’s old, and you don’t get that way by being stupid.”

  “So who says he was?” Atmon said.

  “He just doesn’t belong here. You can’t shoot him here. It’s too strange for him. Out in the woods he’d make us all look like fools.”