Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  She went limp, and though he didn’t trust her he let her up, carefully. She sat there breathing hard, then pulled her clothes around and down over her breasts, obliterating those two black eyes. Even in this light she was a mess of lipstick and frazzled platinum hair. Between them their heat rose tiredly. He found her shorts and the remains of her underpants and handed them to her. She slid into the shorts, searched for her pumps and put them on, then stood and stretched as though she’d just got up in the morning. A little wobbly on her heels, but with no further words, she walked out into the kitchen. He heard the outer door slam.

  He went to the bathroom and washed himself, trying to get her oil, her stink of perfume and his sweat off him, got dressed and went back to the kitchen, where Beady still snored. Obviously if she didn’t want Beady to know she wouldn’t pull any of that crap about the police. The two drinks he’d fixed were there, the ice all melted, and he drank part of one of them. It was three in the morning and he had no way to get back to the lake. Dammit, he should have taken his truck tonight. He wished he were back in his bunk at the cabin, dreaming of Letty, of pure sweet Letty, who was a thousand miles away.

  One cigarette was left in a pack on the table—Candy’s pack—and he lit that. He felt sordid, tawdry, stupid. His cheekbone was numb where she’d pasted him with her shoe. All around him were the shoddy remains of gaiety—cigarette butts, ashes, greasy glasses smeared with lipstick—he couldn’t even get all the lipstick off his jowls. No one in this dingy building was anyone he wanted to see. That poor little monkey girl, what had he done to her, and what must she be thinking about herself?

  Candy Palmer’s perfume hung in his nose like ancient fruit. He’d go home to High Street, a long walk he didn’t want to make, and sleep in his room tonight. Where the hell was his Ike jacket? There it was, where Candy Palmer, back when she’d been made up like a confectioner’s masterpiece, had put it solicitously over the back of a chair. When she took it off him she had no idea what else would come off, that seemed quite certain now. He was empty, cruel, weary from the alcohol and that brutal, demeaning wrestle. He had never considered himself a rapist; none of his dreams of sex had ever been without mutual and tender consent. He let himself out into the fumy hall and then to the grimy, narrow old street damp with dew. Across the street Futzie’s was closed and empty. The night light behind the bar, a raw bulb, shone harsh yet dim, like the gleam in a drunken eye.

  27

  “Okay,” Harvey Whipple said, “so the Jews have a country of their own now. Good! I hope they all go there!”

  When his wife’s expression showed contempt, he added, “I mean you’ve got to give them credit, because they fought for it. That, I’ve got to admit. Nobody would have thought it, but they stood up and fought like men.”

  Wood listened. He always listened, and the words came belling like retribution, remorseless but just. He had argued the case time and time again, in chambers, in the horror gallery of his mind, but he always lost. Always the punishment was apt and the administering force implacable but just.

  His father’s smooth, self-satisfied ignorance was no real defect, it was only a symptom of the one grave one. He was a man. But Wood had known this, all of this, since he was a child, and why should that knowledge now have turned into constant anxiety? It was anxiety, a needle forever poised against the heart, the feeling that makes all feelings meaningless. He’d felt it a thousand times in combat, but then it lasted only hours or minutes, even seconds. Now, though everyone thought him calm, inside he was desperate; he fluttered and gasped for fear of something, but he couldn’t quite find that something. Perhaps he was afraid to find it, to define it. He could only concentrate upon those things that gave him horror, pure and powerful beyond the constant breathless flutter below his heart.

  “The only Jew you’ve done business with you cheated, because you didn’t pay him what his tenement was worth,” Henrietta said.

  “Dot’s beesniss,” Harvey Whipple said, shrugging and raising his palms. Then, seriously: “I’ve done business with plenty of them.”

  The flutter below Wood’s heart increased, and he took a breath. What was the knowledge he feared to have? He’d had a dream in which he came sailing across a blue sea on a day of high cumulus clouds that were at first only interestingly dangerous. They grew from within, massive explosions of clouds that moved ponderously along the horizon, over the curve of the world. Far off, beneath their blackness, lightning forked into a sea grown dark green. But he sailed under blue sky in a light but energetic wind, going before that friendly wind with jib opposite mainsail, to catch it all. He was coming up on an island, or perhaps a mainland, but whatever land it was he didn’t want to go there. Suddenly the wind stiffened and he was afraid he’d jibe. If he came about he was sure he’d swamp, and so he sailed on toward that dark land, searching the breakers for a harbor or a cove. Behind the beach, tall trees, elmlike yet more lissome and ominously flexible, waved and flashed the silver undersides of leaves. On one beach lay a boat, a catamaran broken and bleached out, with the sand smooth around it. A rag of sail no bigger than a handkerchief fluttered from its curved mast.

  In the dream the sea hissed around his prow and in his wake. At that moment he must decide whether to tack or to sail on into the breakers. Right now he must make the decision. Right now!

  And just as he became vividly afraid, full of the sharp, clean fear of breaker and wind and the power of the sea, the thunder finally released itself—the voices of those massive clouds far off on the horizon, and it came in the form of a deep and resonant voice saying: It doesn’t matter.

  But he woke from that dream remembering almost with nostalgia the clean decision he had to make, and the wild trees flashing along the shore.

  Harvey Whipple leaned half on his cane and half against the wood paneling next to the fireplace. Outdoors it was a raw day of rain and drizzle, but in the big room a fire burned bright orange. Wood got up and locked his leg before he limped to the hall closet.

  “Going someplace?” Harvey asked.

  Wood came back with his green Army raincoat and an old duck hunter’s cap. “I guess I’ll take a stack of books back to Northlee Library,” he said.

  “You sure do a lot of reading,” Harvey said, meaning When are you going to do something?

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” Wood said. He saw his father fail to meet his eye—or rather his eye patch.

  When Wood had gone, Henrietta put down her book—a silly little story she didn’t think she’d finish anyway—and stared into the fire.

  “What’s the matter?” Harvey said.

  “Wood,” she said.

  “He’s all right, Hanky. It takes time to get used to some things.” They usually reassured each other; when he worried about Wood, she told him to be patient.

  “Did you ever get used to your arthritis?” she said.

  “No,” he had to admit. “But Wood’s thing is different. You know, the eye too. God!”

  “I hope that’s all that’s bothering him,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t like a lot of the things he studies all the time. Torture, death. The awful things people do to each other. He clips things out of the paper. Did you see where that Negro soldier had his eyes gouged out by a policeman? In a railroad station? He clipped that one out. I saw where it was missing when I put the old papers out.”

  “What’s he do that for?”

  “I don’t know. I can see where a lot of people would find that sort of thing fascinating. But not Wood. I don’t understand it!”

  “Hey, don’t get all upset, Hanky. Come on, now.”

  “He collects pictures. God-awful pictures. There’s one where the S.S. locked all these prisoners in a sort of a shed and set fire to it. This one man tried to dig and push his way out underneath the boards, but he just got his head and part of his shoulder out. He’s so trapped, and you can feel how he tried to push, but it’s just impossible. There’s blood that’
s come out of his nose. It makes you want to jump up and shake yourself. It’s a terrible picture! And Wood studies it. He sits and studies that picture.”

  “Did you ask him about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She jumped up. “Oh, you make me sick!” she said, and went toward the dining room. He came hobbling over and caught her by the arm.

  “Hanky,” he said.

  “You know what I mean! You and your Jews and your communists and all those other words! Your goddam chamber-of-commerce language!” She felt so mean and guilty she couldn’t stop. “What do you think you can do for the rest of your life, parrot everything you hear? You think that will do for a…a philosophy?”

  His mouth hung open; astounded and hurt, he let go of her arm and turned away. His old golf sweater had holes all over it, and one armpit was unraveled, but he wouldn’t let her throw it away.

  “You think I’m so goddam happy?” he said.

  She began to cry, and went through the dining room into the kitchen, where she sat in a wooden chair and rubbed her eyes. Her glasses were all dirty, probably, so she wiped them with her skirt. She couldn’t see them clearly without wearing her other pair. She was hot; she knew that if she looked into the mirror over the sink she’d have a red blotch on her forehead, and her ears would be flaming. And soon she’d have a chill—just the opposite. She was forty-five years old, and she knew what it was—it was glands and all that wearisome business.

  But no matter what the excuse she shouldn’t be mean to Harvey. He was what he was, and he wasn’t really a mean man. He couldn’t help whatever was wrong with Wood, and she couldn’t expect him to. And another reason she’d been mean to him was she’d seen him smirking over his accounts and his “portfolio.” He’d made some money and he was savoring it before he announced it to her. This irritated her so much, for no reason, that she’d been on edge for days.

  She was trembling. She felt like that man trying to mole himself out of the fire and could never make it.

  On the way down Bank Street toward the square, Wood began to have trouble controlling his car. The hand clutch seemed at first unfamiliar to him, and his leg jerked toward the pedal that wasn’t there. He kept thinking of the rear wheels going around, then the transmission with all its gnashing little teeth swimming in black oil. It was a various and violent machine altogether, and he doubted his authority to make it go where he wanted it to. When he came to the square he pulled over next to the corroded green Civil War veteran who leaned on his gun, his bronze hands dangerously capped over the muzzle. He turned off the engine and sat there, letting his wits settle. One of the results of whatever was bothering him was a recurring physical weakness. He would find himself struggling silently but frantically to get his keys out of his pocket, as though little wires bound his fingers together. While driving he would wonder if, when he turned the wheel, the front wheels would obey.

  The elms leaned over the wet grass, cars passed and confidently turned around the square. Rain bleared and streaked his windshield. In spite of the rain, the town went hurrying along on its business. People walked jerkily along the sidewalks, ducking the rain as if it were chunks and fragments they could see to duck, hurrying for awnings and overhangs. Store windows were lighted against the gray rain, and the matinee at the Strand let out humped, two-legged creatures who ran for Trask’s or their cars or stood forlornly and impatiently beneath the marquee, looking at the shiny wet all around them.

  According to his records, this was his town. Leah—a strange name. A woman in the Bible. Beautiful Rachel and fruitful Leah. Ugly Leah. It depended upon the view you took of it. In a place back in his mind that seemed as isolated as a prison cell, yet brightly lit, clear, cool, he knew that Leah was not an ugly town, as towns went. You could stand in many places and see the great elms, the neat old houses, the ancient maples rooted in green. A matter of some civic pride. He wanted to vomit.

  Wait a minute. He shut his eyes (eye) and let his head fall back. There was nothing he wanted to do, and nothing, no miracle, could give him joy. It was worse to follow any thought at all, because he forgot for a moment the flutter of anxiety, and it came back new again to take his breath before it settled into the almost tolerable, the low-grade fear, fever fear. Death was preferable to the fear of death, but what was this fear that was not really the fear of death? Perhaps he would like to kill someone.

  Now the dream came toward him as he pondered helplessly upon its variations. The vision grew behind his eyes, where he couldn’t shut it out: a room, an institutional yet temporary room, mustard-walled. The construction of the room is hasty, crude. The windows have multiframed lights, and one doesn’t quite match the other because they have been taken from other buildings, even perhaps from houses. The glass is covered by heavy-gauge hardware cloth. Beyond the windows is a high wire fence—electrified, from the evidence of white ceramic insulators. Six strands of barbed wire form an inner fence to keep the electrified one from being touched accidentally—a bit of prevention related almost to benevolence. Or perhaps the barbed wire is to keep back those who would prefer to embrace the current.

  On the far side of the fences can be seen the legs of a wooden tower, wet snow blown against the creosoted poles like frosting, dingy and gray. Stairs angle toward the apex of the tower, an ominous black slitted box.

  Inside the room it is miserably cold. Chill moisture with the look of grease covers the linoleum floor, upon which stand three strange living creatures resembling praying mantises. Each is as large as a human adult. Vividly green, they move and nod, raising their tubular forearms in an awkward fashion that suggests great, if unlimber, strength. Certain relationships can be discerned; the very largest mantis is of lesser authority than the other two. His (or her) black compound eyes glitter, but with a lesser sheen, and he (or she) stands still near the door while the other two jabber in a strange, glottal language, and gesture over what seems to interest them—a large bathtub which they are filling by means of a red rubber hose connected to a faucet. The mantises don’t seem to feel the cold, but they are interested in temperature, for they have several kinds of thermometers, sensory devices connected to wires, tubes, dials, some even suggesting cooking thermometers. One dial records the water in the tub to be 33 degrees Fahrenheit. Room temperature, indicated, is 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Though the damp floor is even puddled in places, the feet of the mantises, encased in the green exoskeleta! chitin, do not seem to be wet.

  The mantises speak in voices one does not expect to have the lilt of human speech. One gives what is, however, an obvious order, and the second repeats this order to the third. This one’s voice is deeper. Perhaps this one is a male, although in these creatures a deep voice might indicate femaleness, one can’t tell. Perhaps they have no separate sexes, and procreate by some other process.

  The deep-voiced one nods to the large one by the door, who nods back, turns and goes out.

  Immediately comes the terrified scream of a human, and in a moment the largest mantis comes back pulling a small human dressed in a ragged uniform that was once striped gray and blue. Without further ado the mantis forcibly removes the shirt and pants of the uniform. The subject, or Test Person, is revealed to be a human girl child of nine or ten years, the hypogastric region naked of hair, the mammary glands undeveloped. She is weeping, a sound rather like the mewing of kittens, and shivering violently. The papillae of her pale skin are erect, as are the immature teats, and wide areas of a bluish cast attest to her discomfort. Her trembling interests the mantises, and they push her to the center of the room, next to the filled bathtub, in order to examine her more closely. When they touch her she screams frantically, but they are intent upon their observations and take many notes, writing with fountain pens upon paper held in clipboards.

  Sometimes words form in her weeping and screaming: “Ooo-hoo eeeuw mama arm arm oh oh arm eeow hawn ee mama maahmaanh!” Her arms are crossed upon the ridges of her ribs, and her head, covered
with short, dirty brown hair, seems to be trying to hide against her thin chest. She is dirtiest around the feet and ankles, and her thighs and trunk are splotched by infected insect bites.

  The mantises observe, remark upon her characteristics, then write the data into their records.

  “Oh oh oh aaaee hawn no no anh hah!” the child cries in panic weakness. The cries, in this room, seem the long echo of all hopelessness, as though the very plaster of the walls has absorbed all the misery it can and is now impervious. At a nod from one mantis, the other takes a metal tube three centimeters in diameter and ten centimeters long, attaches a wire and dial to this tube and swiftly inserts it in the child’s anus. The volume and rising tonality of her cries indicate pain. The largest mantis comes forward to prevent her from removing the tube and wire; because she is not cooperative he binds her wrists together in front with strong wire.

  The mantises talk and observe. The child cries again and again for her mother.

  The largest mantis takes the shivering and struggling child in his sticklike arms and forces her into the bathtub. At the touch of the cold water she screams and kicks her legs, which then have to be bound, knees and ankles, with strong wire. She still cries and struggles, slopping some water on the linoleum floor. The iron-cold room seems to have heard, again and again, every variation of the blat of terror. There is a heavy sense of familiarity.

  The high-voiced mantis moves to the edge of the bathtub, not seeming to mind the child’s high, fragmented screams, and inserts a metal needle, again with wire attached, several centimeters into the starved flesh of her thigh. Notes are made, and much attention is paid to the clock. The child’s screams grow weaker as the long minutes pass. One mantis holds the child’s upper arm in his “hand,” seeming to count her pulse. Soon she screams no more. Later her teeth stop chattering. Labial tissue turns grayish-blue, and examination of the eyes reveals the pupils turned up into the head.