The Listener

by Robert McCammon

  The widow Edson accepted the receipt, unfolded it and looked at it with blank eyes; then she gave it to her daughter, who read it with the attention that John Partner thought a canny lawyer would give to a foreclosure notice.

  “I’m just…I’m not knowin’ what to say,” the woman told him.

  “I understand.” He made a show of examining the house with a wandering but careful gaze, as if he were the banker set on foreclosing. “Well,” he said, “usually it would be five more dollars, cash on delivery, but—”

  “Five more dollars?” The way she said that, it sounded like five hundred.

  “Six dollars is our rate for the Golden Edition. You understand, ma’am, it is a family keepsake meant to last for generations. On the receipt, it says five dollars due.”

  “Oh…yes sir, but…that’s a terrible lot of money.”

  “Mister?” said the little girl. “Can I see the inscription?”

  “Certainly. Bear in mind, it is not in your father’s handwriting. It is printed there by our special process and with ink blessed by Reverend Winston Carter of the First Baptist Church of Houston.” He gave her the Bible and turned his focus again on the distraught woman. “Now, Mrs. Edson, do not fret,” he said gently. “I am not a mercenary man, and our dear Jesus and Father in Heaven would not wish you to be deprived of your late husband’s gift to you. There are costs to consider, though. It is the penalty for living in Caesar’s world. But let me offer you this: the Holy Partner Bible Company will take four dollars for this special edition, and we can call it—”

  “Mama,” Jody interrupted, “don’t give this man no money.”

  John Partner stopped speaking, but his mouth remained open.

  “What?” the woman said. “Don’t be rude to—”

  “The words written here,” the child went on. “They’re what he said they were, but…Mama…it’s got my name spelled wrong.”

  A piece of hard rock seemed caught for a few seconds in John Partner’s throat. When he got his voice out, it sounded thin and shrill in the quiet. “Spelled wrong? How?”

  “My name,” said the little girl, with her defiant blue eyes burning into his skull, “is spelled with an ‘i’, not a ‘y’. Daddy wouldn’t have made no mistake like that.”

  Somewhere out over the pasture, a crow cawed and another answered from the trees at John Partner’s back. Otherwise the world seemed to him to have stopped all other motion and noise, except for the roaring that was beginning to rise in volume in his ears. It came to him to wonder if that sound was what the deputies heard after all the shooting had gunned down Bonnie and Clyde.

  “Her name is spelled J-o-d-i,” said Edith Edson. Her eyes narrowed. “Surely Toby couldn’t have told you any different.”

  It took only three seconds for him to regain his composure. He restrained himself from snatching the Bible out of the child’s hands because he knew full well how he’d spelled it, the name had been spelled that way in the goddamned obituary in the county newsrag. He squared his shoulders and answered, adamantly, “If we have indeed made an error in the spelling, we will be glad to correct it.”

  “My name’s spelled wrong,” said the girl, and she showed him. “See? Right there it is.”

  Her index finger pointed to the offending ‘y’. Then she showed her mother, who if she could not read much else could at least make out the names of her children.

  “Four dollars,” Mrs. Edson said, “is still an awful lot of money, sir. How are we gonna correct this?”

  Before John Partner could reply, the child said, “I think he ought to give us the Good Book for free, mama. Let that be the end of it. Daddy would likely think it was funny. I can see him laughin’ about it right now.”

  “Yep.” The woman nodded, and maybe a small shadow of a smile slipped across her mouth. “I can too.” She took the Bible from her daughter and ran the fingers of one hand over the front cover, which had begun to buckle in the heat. “Seems like this was a nice gift to us from Toby, but my man wasn’t one to throw money away on somebody’s mistake. He’d appreciate the effort you made and all, and he’d say this is a real pretty Bible, but…he’d tell me to pay you one dollar and let that be the end of it, like Jodi says. Does that suit you?” When John Partner didn’t immediately respond, she went one step further. “Don’t think you can sell this one to anybody else, can you?”

  His face felt paralyzed. It seemed a long while until he heard himself say, as if from a great distance, “All right. One dollar.”

  She took from him the white cardboard presentation box made up to look like leather and slid the Golden Edition Bible into it, and then she went inside to get the money. He was left staring at the little girl, who simply stared back at him in silence, yet her accusing eyes seemed to send to him the message I know what you are.

  When he had the dollar in his fist he gave the woman a cold smile and wished her good day. Then he turned his back on her and the child, went to his car, took off his coat and fedora with regal grace as the mother and daughter watched him, and climbed in. The engine started with a bone-shaking rattle and a harsh bark. Going out he passed the little boy coming from the barn, who waved to him in a neighborly way but John Partner did not wave back.

  He drove away, leaving in his wake roiling clouds of dust.

  Continuing his route by following the “x” marks of recently deceased people in the small towns on his roadmap, he had a mixed day. He sold two Golden Edition Bibles for six dollars and one for three because it was all the old lady could get out of her cookie jar. He stopped alongside someone’s muddy lake near noon, ate some crackers and drank a Nehi orange soda. His next stop was aborted because there was a Texas trooper car parked in front of the house, and the stop after that was to an empty house with a foreclosure sign nailed to the door.

  But all during the day, he thought of how that little girl had stared at him, and how her voice had stung when she’d said Don’t give this man no money.

  It had long been his feeling that people had no idea how hard he worked for his dollars. As hard as any ditch-digger, it seemed to him. Poring over the obituaries in the different county rags, getting the names and the addresses and whatever other information he could, then using his small rubber-stamping machine that allowed him to change the lettering and stamp in gold-colored ink what needed to be on the page. The Bibles and the presentation boxes combined cost him only a quarter from the company in Fort Worth, but the ink was damned expensive at seventy-five cents a bottle and it had to come all the way from New Orleans.

  He thought that he was selling a valuable commodity, and people didn’t realize it. The law didn’t realize it. He was selling a lasting memory. A dream, of sorts. He was selling golden thread to tie up all the loose ends of a life. He was doing society and the grieving families a good service.

  Don’t give this man no money.

  It just didn’t sit right with him. It gnawed at his guts and made the crackers and Nehi orange soda boil in his belly. A few miles outside the town of Wharton he had to pull the Oakland over and throw up on the side of the road.

  After that he felt cooler and calmer and he knew what he had to do. He sat in his car, rolled a cigarette and lit it with his silver lighter that had a pair of praying hands on it just like his tieclip. Then he rolled on into Wharton and in the five-and-dime there bought a baseball bat sized for a child.

  He was surprised to find that Wharton had a movie theater and an afternoon showing of King Kong, which he’d seen last year when it came out, but he had enjoyed the movie and thought it was worth seeing again. When he emerged from the theater dark was beginning to fall, and as he had time to kill he had a plate of pork sausage, creamed corn and turnip greens in a little cafe a block down from the theater. He smoked another cigarette, nursed a cup of coffee down to the last drop and flirted a little with the red-haired waitress who brought him a piece of pecan pie on the sly. Then he paid his bill and left.

  At the next junction of state roads
, under the stars and the faint glow of a half-moon, he turned his car’s headlamps in the direction of Freehold.

  Don’t give this man no money.

  The injustice of it made him want to cry. But his face bore no expression but resolve, and his eyes remained as dry as prairie rock.

  It was after nine o’clock by his wristwatch when John Partner pulled his car off State Road Sixty about thirty yards short of the dirt road that led to the Edson house. He figured he had to work fast, in case any troopers were on the prowl, but he’d already seen today that this road didn’t carry a lot of traffic. The next house was probably a quarter of a mile west. He took the child-sized baseball bat and his can full of gasoline and started walking.

  There were a few lights on in the Edson house. Lantern lights, they looked to be, and burning low. No electricity there. John Partner went to the barn. The door was already open a crack, so much the better.

  When he stepped inside he flicked his lighter. Instantly the mother dog on her red-and-black plaid blanket in the hay almost at his feet started growling and tried to struggle up but the six puppies were feeding and they dragged on her. Before the dog could let loose a bark, John Partner clubbed her in the head with the bat.

  He hit her a second blow, all his strength behind it, just to make sure.

  Then he surveyed what he had done and went on to finish the rest of it. He covered the puppies with handfuls of straw. He poured the gasoline.

  His lighter flared.

  In the red glare of the flame, John Partner no longer resembled someone’s angel. For an instant it was as if the flame revealed the face behind the face, and it was not something that John Partner wished to have on public view.

  He picked up a final handful of straw and touched it with fire.

  “J-o-d-i,” he said quietly. His eyes were dead.

  He dropped the burning straw upon the gas-soaked puppies on their gas-soaked blanket beside the body of their mother. They went up with a hot little whoosh that almost took his eyebrows and some of his curly blond hair before he could step back.

  As much as he would have liked to have stayed to watch them burn, it was time to get out.

  But he left the baseball bat. Jess might get some use from it.

  John Partner returned to his car feeling as if a heavy burden had been lifted from him, or a terrible wrong set right. He put away the gasoline can, and with his load of Golden Edition Bibles he drove away into the night, into the dark, away and long gone.

  Two.

  “How long you figure on stayin’ with us, Mr. Partlow?”

  “I am not sure yet. I may get lucky.”

  “Oh? How would that be?”

  John Partlow looked into the gray eyes behind the glasses. The old man had a heavily-lined face, a spatter of age spots on his forehead and gray eyebrows as thick as broomcorn. “The mechanic at the garage—Henry by name—tells me he will get the necessary part for my car from Shreveport as soon as possible, within three days if all goes well.”

  “I know Henry Bullard. Does good work but he tends to underestimate. I’d say you’d be settlin’ in for a goodly stay, dependin’ on what kinda part you’re needin’.”

  “A new carburetor, unfortunately. I broke down about five miles out and had to be towed in. If I had not flagged down a haytruck I might still be out there.”

  “Hm,” said the boarding-house keeper, whose name was Grover Nevins and whose wife Hilda was standing just beside him, both of them behind the black-lacquered waist-high desk where John Partlow had just signed the register. “Carburetor ain’t good,” he went on, with a rise of the mighty eyebrows. “Bet you’ll be with us goin’ on a week.”

  “That may be so, but I hope you don’t mind that I pay on a day-by-day basis?”

  “Don’t mind at all, we ain’t ones to put the squeeze on nobody.”

  “As long as you pay by ten a.m. sharp,” said the woman, whose crimped mouth hardly moved as she spoke. She had large, owlish eyes and swirls of gray that swept back through her dark brown hair from the temples. “Sharp,” she repeated. “We’re kindly folks but we don’t suffer no freeloaders.” Her eyes had already seen the praying hands tieclip. “’Course,” she added, “I figure you’re all right.”

  “I appreciate your trust, ma’am. I would never intend for anyone to suffer on my account,” came the reply, with a soft and cherubic smile to accompany his most musical voice. “I will be at an uncomfortable disadvantage if I have to stay here any length of time, as I have not even a change of underwear with me.” He said that directly to her face, so he could watch her sallow cheeks bloom some color. He turned his considerable focus upon the man again. “This seems to be a quiet little town. I hope there’s a place to find some supper? Or does my money buy at least a sandwich and a cup of coffee from your kitchen?”

  “I don’t cook for the boarders, Mr. Partlow,” said the woman, with a lift of her sagging chin. “Groceries are too expensive nowadays.”

  “Stonefield Cafe is two blocks south,” Nevins offered. “They stay open ’til eight. Good fried chicken over there.”

  “Thank you.” Upon entering the boarding house at the corner of Second and Third streets in Stonefield, Louisiana as Bullard the mechanic had directed, John Partlow—alias Partner, but all those business cards and that identity had been destroyed a couple of weeks ago—had taken stock of the place with its dark-panelled walls, its rather threadbare carpet and on the shelves the collections of little ceramic bells, thimbles, figurines of horses and other such knick-knacks and decided these two would be easy touches, no matter how canny a judge of character the woman thought herself to be. The sense of order in here made him want to start shattering things. He wanted to seize their pitiful sense of control and wring all the blood out of it right in front of their faces. They knew nothing of the world, whereas he knew it all too well. He could imagine taking one of the ceramic horses and jamming its hooves into Hilda Nevins’ eyeballs.

  He heard what sounded like a woman’s shout from upstairs. Quick and then gone. A curse word, it had sounded like, but it was over too soon for him to register exactly what it had been.

  In any case, it had been nearly a snarl.

  “Ah,” he said, with a reappearance of the soft smile. “I thought I would be alone here tonight.”

  “Don’t mind those two,” said the woman, who had no idea her eyes were bloody holes in the imagination of the man she spoke to. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “A Dr. Honeycutt and his…well…I don’t know what she is, but she ain’t his wife.”

  “Interestin’,” he remarked, with a tilt of his head and purse of his lips that said tell me more.

  “When they got here yesterday afternoon, he wanted just the one room. But she said she wasn’t havin’ any of that and she wanted her own.”

  “Hilda,” said Nevins, “I don’t think we ought to be—”

  “Givin’ a talk at the Elks Lodge Hall tonight, in the auditorium,” she went on, and John Partlow thought she was obviously gratified to find a willing ear to dish her swill into. “Know what the talk’s about?”

  “No ma’am, I don’t.”

  “They’ve been puttin’ up broadsheets all over town. Grover brought one to show me, but I wouldn’t have it nowhere but the garbage can.”

  “Hilda!” The man’s face was starting to cloud over. “Come on now, let’s—”

  “A sex talk,” she said, with a quick glance at the staircase to make sure nobody else was listening. “It’s called ‘Better Understandin’ Of The Facts Of Life’, but it’s a sex talk all right. How they got a permit to spew such trash I don’t know, and there ain’t time to get my church group together to run ’em out.”

  “We don’t want ’em run out,” said Nevins with a long sigh, and this sounded to John Partlow like a statement that had been made many times today, as the man seemed weary of saying it. “We need the money, and I reckon the Elks Lodge don’t want to turn down a night’s rent. Likely givi
n’ Eugene a cut too.”

  “Eugene?”

  “Our good-for-nothin’ sheriff.” The lady of the house was now running full steam ahead on the fuel of stored-up indignity. “He got his job years back on the money of bootleggers and he ain’t give it up yet.”

  “Hilda,” said Nevins, who actually sounded near tears. “Please stop.”

  “All right,” she answered curtly. “All right, I’ll stop. For now. I’m just sayin’, we’re in a fix here.” Her gaze returned to John Partlow’s tieclip. “Are you a preacher, sir?”

  “No, but I do try to spread blessin’s wherever I go. I appreciate the compliment.”

  “You look like a preacher. You have a very kind face.”

  He bowed his head slightly, as if this were a humbling observation. “Now…I suppose I should get on to the cafe, shouldn’t I?” He was hoping she would invite him into the kitchen, but the biddy’s charity obviously ended at compliments.

  “Good fried chicken there,” Nevins repeated. “Tell Ollie you’re stayin’ with us, he’ll take some off your bill. Room Four.” He handed the key over. “We lock the front door at ten thirty.”

  “Sharp,” the woman added.

  John Partlow took the key, put it in the pocket of his white suit jacket and thanked his hosts for their hospitality. Then he left the boarding house, visualizing in his mind what the faces of Grover and Hilda Nevins would look like if they were half eaten away by cancer. He set off in a southerly direction through the streets of a small town that like most had been hit hard by the Depression. He doubted that Stonefield had been much of a boomer even before the banks had started shutting down, but added to the setting sun there was a glow in the sky to the southwest that indicated some kind of mill or plant was in operation. He had passed much farmland, many pastures and cottonfields on the road before his Oakland had choked and died, so he figured this area might indeed be a fertile field for Dr. Honeycutt and the doctor’s rather sharp-tongued female to be plowing, with all the farmboys around. A sex talk. Indeed, he thought. A nice little moneymaker, if it was handled right.