Gray Matter

by Shirley Kennett

  Schultz didn’t show at all. No matter. Pauley Mac knew what his own next actions would be. After lunch, he went home and took a nap. Then he showered and ate an indifferent meal. At five pm, he was waiting, parked on a side street near the building where the bitch worked. She came out about a half-hour later, and he followed her home. She was easy. She didn’t even check the mirror.

  The next afternoon, after his morning shift at the diner, he put on a pair of blue coveralls and drove over to the bitch’s house, where she lived with a son who was just about the age Pauley Mac was when he killed his first human. He wondered what it was like for the boy growing up with a head doctor for a mother. Probably about the same as growing up with Ma and Pa.

  Why, thankee, son, that be right sweet of ya, ya worthless turd, Pa replied.

  He walked around into the back yard with a clipboard, just your friendly gas meter reader at work. It was tidy, with stepping stones leading to a round perennial garden surrounding a bird bath. The recent rain storm had filled the bird bath, and the perennials were up and growing. It was lovely now, but at the height of summer it would be spectacular. Pauley Mac remembered the time he had planted a few beans outside the back door of his house, scraping the poor soil with a bent spoon, watering the little trough he had made. When the bean plants were a couple of inches high, Pa had spotted them. He knew in an instant that they were important to Pauley Mac, so he stomped them to the ground and pissed on them for good measure.

  Boy, you misrememberin’ that. I done stepped on them plants accidental-like.

  “Shut up, Pa,” Pauley Mac said as he picked the lock on the back door. It wasn’t as easy with gloves on as without, but he knew they were necessary. Inside it was cool and dark. Window shades were drawn on the kitchen windows. It looked and felt safe, and he had the urge to sit quietly for awhile, so he did. He dropped into a kitchen chair and closed his eyes. There were so few places of refuge for a man who carried the echoes of thirty or so murders in his head. Not that he regretted them or felt guilty. If he felt anything at all, it was that he was entitled to their skills, their lives. But it was like trying to cover yourself with a blanket that was too small. There was always a little piece of you sticking out, a foot, an elbow, hanging out in the cold nothingness.

  He opened his eyes and inspected the kitchen. There was little clutter. A new toaster, still in its box, occupied a prime piece of counter space. Next to the stove sat a small microwave oven with the label proclaiming all of its features still stuck on the front glass. A single coffee cup stood on a drain board next to the sink. A dinette table and four swivel chairs, one of which he was sitting in, stood under a window. Pauley Mac rose and moved quickly through the kitchen. The lethargy had passed. He had his sense of purpose back. He knew what he was looking for, and it wasn’t in this room.

  The only exit from the kitchen besides the door to the back yard led to a short hallway, only eight feet long or so. Other doors opened from the hallway into the living room, dining room, bathroom, and a multi-purpose room which could have been a guest room or study. The dining room was empty, but the living room had inexpensive-looking new furniture in it. He checked each room carefully, spotting what he was searching for in the study. But he didn’t enter right away; he wanted to spend more time in the house. The front door was in the living room, with no entry foyer. Immediately to the right of the front door was a staircase.

  Sitting on the stairs was a cat, staring at him.

  He had seen that cat before, and it had shed his blood. Dog felt the hairs on his arms and back rising, and a tension in his throat. He growled, low and menacing. At the sound, the cat spun away and ran up the stairs. Before Pauley Mac could interfere, Dog gave chase, taking the stairs two at a time. The cat disappeared into the bedroom on the right just as he lunged, barely missing the tail, which was fuzzed up several times its normal size.

  Pauley Mac put a stop to the chase, because he had a reason for coming that wasn’t four-footed and furry. He wanted to frighten the bitch, let her know she was vulnerable, and give her a message that she should not use the computer again. He wanted to transform this safe haven into one of anxious checking of door locks, nervous starts at any unusual sound. He looked around upstairs. There were two bedrooms and a bath. Both bedrooms had the same kind of inexpensive new furniture he had seen downstairs. He wondered why everything was new.

  He could not get much of a feeling of the type of person she was. Pauley Mac always liked to study people, although sometimes the only opportunity he really had was the look in their eyes when he drew back his machete. He knew he was different from others, or rather that others were different from him. He wondered what it would be like to fall asleep with only your own thoughts inside your head, rather than the babble of voices—voices like pinballs bouncing around inside his skull, careening from ear to ear, spinning down into that place just behind his eye sockets.

  He went back downstairs and into the study. There was a folding card table in the center of the room, and on top of it rested a computer. He picked up the chair and smashed the computer, pounding repeatedly until he was sure it was unusable. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator. There wasn’t much inside, a few cans of soda, a package of lunch meat, but evidently someone liked ketchup, because there were two bottles, one opened and one unopened. He took the opened bottle and poured out a large pool of thick red sauce on the kitchen table. He dipped in a gloved finger and wrote the letters “YUR RONG” on the wall next to the table, coming back to load up his finger numerous times. One of his voices, a schoolteacher, chided him for his spelling, but he was used to that. Sometimes he wished he could get rid of Henry Wu. He should have been more selective.

  Pauley Mac could read well, well enough to make sense of news magazines, which put him ahead of millions of other Americans. He had attended school, anything to get out of the house. He had dragged himself in when he was sick, so sick that he should have been in a bed with blankets piled high and his mother bringing him steaming soup.

  But of course there wasn’t much chance of that happening.

  He had even gone on holidays, hoping that Ma and Pa didn’t find out that he spent the day in the woods. But whenever he had tried to express himself in writing when he was a child, when he brought home carefully lettered paragraphs about pets or summer vacation, he was severely put down for it. Ma didn’t read, and neither did Pa. They simply didn’t realize what a banquet the written word presented to their son, because they didn’t partake of it themselves. They didn’t object much when he learned to read in school, but Ma found it threatening that he could take a blank piece of paper and make marks on it that she couldn’t decipher, and she made sure he knew about it. So Pauley Mac ended up with a strange dichotomy: he could read, but sweated and trembled whenever he had to write something, and what he produced was childish. He knew it was an emotional block of some kind, but he couldn’t break through it, especially not with Ma around him twenty-four hours a day.

  Pauley Mac appraised his message, and was pleased that the ketchup seemed to add a threatening tone. He wanted to deliver a clear message for the bitch to back off, not to use her computer anymore, that she was headed in the wrong direction. And he especially wanted to frighten her, to let her know that he could enter her private space whenever he wanted and do whatever he wanted. That gave him another thought, another way to heighten his message. He went to the sink and rinsed the ketchup off his gloved fingers, then opened drawers until he found where the utensils were kept. It was a pitiful assortment. There was only one knife, an all-purpose one with a blade about eight inches long and a worn handle. He looked with disdain at the dull, nicked cutting edge.

  Telling Dog to be quiet, he took the knife in his hand and moved toward the staircase.

  “Here, kitty, kitty…”

  CHAPTER 14

  PJ LEFT WORK EARLY to pick Thomas up at school. Since the incident with Schultz in the hotel room, Thomas had been alternately subdued and angry. B
ut he had coped amazingly well with the move, and even had his friend Winston over yesterday. The two of them had gone into the study to use PJ’s computer directly after dinner, closing the door. When Thomas came out for some snacks a couple of hours later, she had gotten a glimpse into the room. What she saw cheered her. Thomas and Winston were using a multimedia encyclopedia, and the screen was filled with colorful dinosaurs. Papers were scattered about, and it looked as if the boys were working on their homework together. Megabite was on top of the monitor, which PJ knew was warm and a coveted nap spot for the cat, with her front paws loosely dangling over the edge. Then Winston activated the dinosaur scene, and a triceratops began fending off a tyrannosaurus rex. Megabite pawed tentatively at the moving figures, a predator finding something in common with the two behemoths twisting and lunging on the screen.

  Nonsense. Just a cat responding to motion, to creatures she saw as gray and about the size of mice.

  The next time she saw Thomas was when he came out and asked if she could drive Winston home. On the way back, after dropping the boy off, she tried to question Thomas about his new friend. All she learned was that Winston lived with his dad, that his mom was in a treatment center someplace, and that Winston was generally thought of as a nerd because he was smart, not athletic, and liked computers.

  She could understand why her son had approached this boy. Thomas was an outsider, the new boy in class. Rather than try to push his way into the social circles that existed there, he had circled the outside like a predator—there’s that word again—eyeing a herd of antelope, looking for the easy target. It wasn’t an ideal situation, because she felt that Thomas might just be using Winston. But at least they both got some companionship out of it, someone their own age to bum around with. If Winston was as smart as Thomas said he was, then he certainly was able to see right through the sudden friendship. And who knows, maybe the boys would become good friends in spite of their beginnings.

  That was yesterday. Today Thomas had been angry, barely speaking to her, barely able to keep his voice civil, his words stinging like sleet driven by a vengeful wind. The ride home from school was silent and tense.

  PJ pulled into her driveway, a gravel one almost entirely given over to grass, with two narrow wheel paths still defined. Driveways were an oddity in her neighborhood. Most people had to park on the street. The city lots were too narrow for an attached garage. The occupants of those few homes which had detached garages in the rear were considered uppity, and generally it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The most common sight in the neighborhood, though, was a statue of the Virgin Mary next to the front steps. Most were modestly surrounded with a well-tended flower bed, with bricks set on a slant for edging. A few went so far as to have spotlights set into the lawn, so that Mary was on duty twenty-four hours a day.

  Around the back, PJ’s driveway ballooned out into a rough circle, again mostly taken over with grass. She turned the car around and left it pointing back out toward the street. She and Thomas got out at the same time, but she paused to admire the lilies-of-the-valley that were blooming at the base of the birdbath.

  “Mom, the door’s open. And you’re the one who’s always telling me to lock up.”

  She turned around, but before she could respond, Thomas had shoved the door open and gone into the kitchen.

  “Holy shit!” he yelled.

  PJ dropped her purse and ran for the doorway. Inside she saw Thomas standing still, staring at the wall. There were letters on the wall, large and crudely drawn, in something red, terribly red, that had dripped down the walls like bloody tears. For some reason she couldn’t make out what the letters spelled, but the implication was clear: someone had been in her home, some sick person had violated her clean white walls.

  “Megabite! Where’s Megabite?” Thomas said, his voice cracking. He suddenly took off toward the stairs, and PJ was too far away to grab him.

  “Stop!” PJ ordered in her most commanding, professional voice. It worked. Thomas halted on the third step. “Turn around and come back here immediately. We’re going outside to call the police. Whoever did this might still be in the house.”

  “Now what?” he said, as they stood in the back yard, staring at the house like it had just fallen there from outer space.

  PJ tried to compose herself. She was the adult here. “We’ll both go next door and call from Mrs. Brodsky’s house. Then you’ll stay there until after the police check the house.”

  “Like hell I will.”

  “Thomas!” Her voice was harsh. She softened it, reached out to touch his hand. “Just go along, OK? Just let me deal with this. Don’t make things harder than they are.”

  She walked next door. The yards weren’t fenced, so she simply cut across to Mrs. Brodsky’s back door and knocked. She knew the old woman was slow getting to the door, so she counted to fifty before knocking again. This time she only got to twenty before the door opened.

  “Why, hello, Penelope,” Mrs. Brodsky began. Then she took in PJ’s face. “Whatever is wrong, dear? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Mrs. Brodsky, could I please use your phone? My house has been broken into, and I need…I need…”

  “Come in. You too, Thomas. I’ll phone for you. It’s ever so easy, now that all you have to do is dial 911.” She ushered them into her kitchen, hands gently guiding, touching PJ’s shoulder, the top of Thomas’s head. PJ let herself be led and coddled, just for a few minutes. Then, after Mrs. Brodsky had placed the call, she dialed Schultz’s number at work. He picked up after the first ring.

  “Schultz.”

  “Leo, this is PJ. Somebody broke into my house and wrote things on the wall,” she blurted.

  “You didn’t go in, did you?”

  “Just right inside the kitchen. Then Thomas and I went next door. The neighbor called 911.”

  “Good. Stay there. I’ll be right over.”

  “Leo? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah. What?”

  “I’m worried about my cat.”

  “Stay put. Let the uniforms go in the house. You hear me?”

  It seemed like only moments until two blue-and-white patrol cars pulled up at the curb, but it had been long enough for Mrs. Brodsky to thrust a cup of hot tea in her hands. She heard the woman offer to fix Thomas some hot Ovaltine, heard him decline in a polite but strained voice.

  Soon afterward, Schultz’s bulk occupied the center of the kitchen. Mrs. Brodsky orbited, offering tea, but was chased from the room by a glare from Schultz. Thomas wandered outside, under strict orders not to leave Mrs. Brodsky’s yard.

  “OK, tell,” Schultz said.

  “I left early to pick up Thomas from school. Well, you know that. When we got home, the back door was open. Thomas went inside before I could stop him. On the wall of the kitchen, there’s some writing, big drippy red letters. I don’t know what they spell. Thomas started to go upstairs to look for Megabite. That’s our cat. I stopped him, and we both came over here to Mrs. Brodsky’s.”

  “The boy shouldn’t have gone inside,” Schultz said gruffly. “Could’ve taken a bellyful of shot or a knife in the throat.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” PJ flared.

  “All right, take it easy,” Schultz said.

  “That writing—it’s red. Do you think maybe,” PJ swallowed and lowered her voice, although she and Schultz were the only ones in the room, “it’s cat’s blood?”

  “I hope not. I’m going over to talk to the uniforms, make sure the house is empty. You stay here.”

  “No, I want to come.”

  Schultz sighed. “Suit yourself. You will, anyway.”

  They walked over to the house and Schultz consulted with the two patrolmen who had remained outside. As he was talking with them, the other two came out the back door.

  “Nobody there,” one of them said. “Writing on the kitchen wall, some smashed equipment in one of the other rooms downstairs.”

  Schultz nodded and headed
for the door. PJ quickly caught up with him, and found that Thomas was right at her elbow.

  Schultz stepped inside and stood, gazing at the two-foot-high letters, now almost obscured by the watery tracks the liquid made running down the wall. Then, to PJ’s horror, he walked over, stuck his finger in the red stuff and sucked it noisily into his mouth.

  “Ketchup,” he said. “You really ought to get that thick kind that doesn’t drip.”

  It was decided to have an Evidence Technician Unit come out to photograph the wall and dust for fingerprints in the kitchen and study, especially around the smashed computer. Schultz didn’t think that the break-in was associated with the investigation of the murders, but he decided not to take that chance. The ETU came and went, doing their jobs quickly and professionally.

  “So you think some neighborhood punk broke in here?” PJ asked.

  “Some semi-literate punk who just got the urge to trash someplace.”

  “And that’s your considered professional opinion?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I don’t think much of it. Why…”

  “Mom,” Thomas interrupted, “can I look for Megabite now that the ETU’s gone?”

  “Of course. I’ll help you,” she answered before Schultz could get a word in. “Let’s try the bedrooms. I think she would have been too scared to stay down here.”

  They went upstairs and separated. She was on her knees looking under a dresser when she heard Thomas.

  “Mom, I found her!”

  A moment later: “Yuck! She’s got crap all over her rear end.”

  She grabbed a towel from the bathroom on her way into Thomas’s room. He was sitting on the bed, cradling the young cat, oblivious now to the mess and smell. She sat down next to him and wrapped the cat in the bath towel, holding it on her lap. Megabite purred softly and began kneading the terry cloth with her paws, pulling up little picks in the material.