Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

by Ray Garton

  Someone's died, Roger thought.

  Betty hurried by him from behind, patting his shoulder and saying, "In a minute, hon." She went to the girl's side and gently pulled her away from Leo, whispering something in her ear.

  Roger stepped out of the way as Betty led the girl back to the Munch Room, whispering, "Just come in the back and sit down till we can reach your parents, okay, honey? Okay?"

  The girl had long red hair and a face sprinkled with freckles and streaked with tears.

  Roger went to the meat counter where Leo stood beside the slicer shaking his head as he watched Betty lead the girl into the Munch Room.

  "What happened?" he whispered.

  "Shelly's fiancé was killed," Leo said. "The boy's parents are out of town, Shelly's parents are at work, so they called here to tell her. I went down and...and identified the body." He pulled his palm across his lips, closed his eyes a moment. "Hope I never again have to..." Instead of finishing the sentence, he sighed.

  "What happened?"

  "They're not sure and they don't want me to talk about it. But—" He dropped his voice to a whisper. "—he was a mess."

  A line had formed at the counter. Voices mixed with the radio's music. The deli was back in order.

  "Roast beef and havarti dill?" Leo said.

  "Uh, no. I'm just gonna have coffee for now."

  A few tables were occupied in the Munch Room. A cup of coffee sat beside the morning paper at Roger's usual spot. As he seated himself, Betty came out of the restroom and joined him.

  "Christ, what a horrible thing," she said.

  "Is she okay?"

  "Oh, it'll be a while before she's okay, I think." She lit a cigarette, took a drag, and blew smoke hard from her lungs. "They were gonna be married here. In the deli. Right up front between the potato chip racks and the cash register. Can you imagine that? They met here, so they wanted to get married here." She laughed humorlessly.

  "How long were they engaged?"

  "Not long, about three months. Together less than a year. They're just kids. She's—" Betty lowered her voice. "—pregnant. But they say they would've gotten married, anyway. That they loved each other and..." She waved her cigarette before her face as if to say, You know the rest. "I never liked the boy. Benny Kent was his name. He was nice enough, I suppose, but didn't seem the marrying kind, didn't seem...well, like he was going to commit to her. He'd come in here wearing his jogging clothes—he always wore jogging clothes, but I don't think he ever jogged—and start flirting with the girls. He especially liked Sondra. Can you imagine someone trying to pick up Sondra? She's so...timid. He asked for her phone number once and I thought she was gonna have a stroke. Scared her silly. I tried to talk to Shelly about him, but—"

  "She wouldn't listen."

  "Ah, you're familiar with the problem," she said with a smirk. "Well, I better go back and be with her till someone comes. Later."

  Betty returned to the restroom. Roger opened the paper before him but could not concentrate on the words. Instead of giving any thought to the girl whose fiancé had been killed, Roger found himself thinking about Sondra.

  He wondered what she was so frightened of.

  * * * *

  Roger was still in the deli two hours later. He had chatted with a man in the wine business until Shelly's mother arrived wearing a red grocery store apron and name tag, complaining about being pulled away from work. She told Betty, a bit too loudly, "I never could stand that boy, anyway." He finally read the paper and decided to have a sandwich.

  When he went out front to order, he spotted Sondra coming in the front entrance.

  "You're early," Leo bellowed.

  She seemed to wither a bit at the attention Leo's voice drew to her.

  "They...they closed school early," she said softly. "When they heard about B-Buh-Buh—the boy."

  Roger thought it was odd that she referred to him as "the boy" instead of by name.

  As she hurried by him, hugging her school books to her breasts, he noticed there was something different about her. Something...

  "Hello, Sondra," he said, smiling.

  She turned her head away from him and breathed, "Hi," then went into the Munch Room.

  Roger got his sandwich, a beer, and went back to his table.

  An old man sat at the back table noisily chewing his sandwich.

  Sondra was the only other person in the room. Her books were spread out on a table across from Roger and she sat hunched over them, her long hair hiding her face, index finger tracing sentences as she silently read.

  What had he seen about her that was different from yesterday? Was it something about the way she walked? Something about her hair?

  Her hair seemed stringier than yesterday, perhaps greasy, unwashed.

  "Are you a senior this year?" he asked.

  Without looking up, she nodded.

  "Are you going to college next year?"

  "No."

  "Do you plan to go at all?"

  Sondra slowly lifted her head a bit and looked at him through strands of her hair. There were blotches of darkness beneath her eyes and her face looked drawn and weary. Her voice was as fragile as a spider's web. "I don't think we'll ever be able to afford it. I...I might take a few classes."

  "What would you like to study?" he asked, spreading a napkin over his lap.

  She straightened a bit and pulled some of the hair from her eyes. Sondra seemed to puzzle over that question, as if she'd never given it a thought.

  "I...I don't really know," she whispered, looking down at her book.

  "What are your best subjects?"

  "Well..." She frowned. "All of them, I guess."

  Roger raised his eyebrows. "Straight-A student?" She seemed too afraid of everything to be as aggressive as most of the straight-A students he had known.

  She nodded, looking at her book again.

  "Then you'll have a lot of choices," he said. "In a major, I mean."

  She said nothing and didn't look up this time.

  "Have you ever considered teaching?" he asked.

  Sondra shook her head with a jerk, as if startled.

  "Neither have I." Roger chuckled. "I tell people I have. I mean, that I'm looking forward to teaching. But you know what?"

  Roger waited a moment until she finally said, "What?" in a voice as thin as silk.

  "I'm scared to death," he said, leaning toward her a bit.

  Nothing for a long time. Then she slowly lifted her head and turned her eyes to him. "Really?" she whispered. "You're really scared."

  "Sure."

  "Why?"

  "Well, who am I to tell these people whether or not they can write? Just between you and me, most of them probably can't, but I had teachers who told me I was bad, that I'd never sell a word, so..." He shrugged and realized she was still looking at him, looking him right in the eyes. But it was the way a deer looks into the eye of the hunter it has just noticed on its trail. "Do you know what I mean?"

  "Your teachers told you that?"

  "Oh, sure."

  She shook her head slightly and whispered, "But you went to school up—" She stopped abruptly and looked away.

  Roger chuckled. "Up on the hill?"

  A faint nod.

  "Yeah, and most of my teachers didn't like what I wrote any more than how I wrote it. Did Betty tell you that?"

  No reply.

  "Hm?"

  He thought he saw her shake her head once.

  "How did you know?"

  Her book closed with a smack and she stood suddenly, scraping her chair over the concrete floor.

  "I've gotta get back to work," she said as she hurried out.

  He noticed her clothes—a simple brown skirt, maroon sweater and white top—were mussed and in need of a wash, as if they'd been slept in.

  She was an Adventist, all right. If Betty hadn't told her he'd gone to school in Manning, then one of them proba
bly had. They'd probably been expecting him. Probably already knew he'd arrived. Why had he, for one moment, thought otherwise?"

  You're paranoid, he thought.

  But it was true. They always seemed to know where he was, where he was going.

  They watched him.

  In fact, they'd followed him all the way into a breakdown. Now he had a sinking feeling that they were waiting for him, smiling, on the other side.

  6.

  News of the sale of Restraints spread quickly through Manning. The first sign of it was a phone call. It came shortly after midnight. Roger was up working.

  "Hello?"

  "'Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure...let your mind dwell on these things.' Does that sound familiar?"

  It was a woman but he did not recognize her voice.

  "Who is this?"

  "It's the word of God, that's who it is! 'Whatever is true! Whatever is pure!' What you're doing is a perversion! It's dangerous and mind-damaging and—"

  Roger wanted to hang up but was too shocked and fascinated.

  "—God will damn you for it! And you were given the truth, raised in it your whole life, and—and—" She sounded too frustrated to go on. "God damn you for it!"

  The loud slam that came over the line made Roger jerk the receiver from his ear. When he heard the dial tone, he replaced it in the cradle.

  He called Marjie then, mostly out of habit. He hadn't seen her in almost three months but couldn't get out of the comfortable habit of calling her now and then. He knew her schedule enough to know she'd still be up studying. She had no morning classes the next day.

  A second after Roger said hello, Marjie hung up the phone.

  He stared at the receiver a while, reached down to call her again, but decided against it. Instead, he called Bill Dunning.

  He'd known Bill since first grade when they got in trouble for fighting over a crayon. From that point on, they had been best friends, and roommates in boarding academy, where they had raised no end of mischievous hell without getting caught once. They had always been a couple of teachers' pets and no one ever suspected them of the pranks that befell the school during their two years as students.

  Bill was now an engineering major. They were still close but conflicts in their schedules and interests had driven a wedge between them. Bill was a motorcycle enthusiast and Roger couldn't stand them; Bill was a sports fan and Roger was not; Bill's politics swung hard to the right and Roger's were slightly left of center; and rather than growing away from the church as Roger had, Bill's devotion to it seemed to be growing.

  That night, Bill was working the desk in one of the men's dorms. Roger called him there.

  Bill hung up the second he heard Roger's voice.

  He did not sleep that night, and sat instead in front of the television staring blankly at the screen.

  Two days later, he found the two front tires of his Accord slashed and flattened.

  The following week, someone smeared dog shit all over the front seats of his car. He cleaned it off with trembling hands—it took days to get rid of the smell—and drove to DiMarco's.

  Betty told him to call the police.

  An officer came to the deli and talked with him. He took notes as Roger spoke.

  The officer said, "I don't know what to tell you," he said afterward, tapping his pencil on the table. "You really have no proof of—"

  "I have two slashed tires and a pile of rags covered with dog shit."

  "They won't do us any good. And even if they could, our hands are tied because nothing was actually done to you personally. It's just vandalism."

  "But they slashed my tires and—"

  "Again, that's vandalism, not necessarily a personal threat. We don't know why these people—"

  "But I told you—"

  "You can't prove that. You're speculating at best. We don't know who did this."

  "So...what has to happen before you can do something?"

  "They have to be caught harming you in some way, or trying to harm you. We have to know who it is and they have to at least make an attempt. Proof, not speculation."

  He never could prove it, even though it continued to get worse.

  A rumor started at the college and then spread throughout Manning that Roger had broken into the biology lab late one night and had stolen a dead cat to use in some kind of satanic sex ritual.

  Several nights after he heard about the rumor from an acquaintance, he got a phone call around nine in the evening.

  "What're you gonna steal next, devil worshiper?" a breathy male voice asked. "Babies out of the hospital? Or would you rather—"

  Roger hung up, got in his car, and drove up the hill to Bill's dorm. He looked at no one as he hurried upstairs, not wanting to see their staring eyes.

  Bill's door was open wide and he lay on his bed studying. On the wall above him was a poster of the picture Roger had always hated so much: the giant Jesus about to knock on the U.N. Building.

  "Will you tell me what the hell is going on, Bill?" he said, standing in the doorway on trembling legs. For a moment, he couldn't move. He was paralyzed by the alien look in Bill's eyes.

  When he lifted his gaze from the book to Roger, Bill's eyes flashed, in rapid succession, three reactions: Surprise, sudden fear, then the dawn of solid assurance, the absolute conviction, that he had nothing to fear after all.

  "I'd appreciate it if you didn't come in here, Roger," he said, reaching out to swing the door shut.

  Roger caught it with his foot, stepped inside, and closed it behind him.

  "Bill, why are you doing this?" Roger asked, firmly but quietly.

  Sitting up on the bed, Bill said, "I'd really rather you go, Roger."

  "We used to be so close, you and me. And Marjie? The three of us were—" Roger felt his voice weaken and start to crack. He took a breath, swallowed. "—we were inseparable. Ever since we were six, for Christ's sake."

  "Don't talk like that in my room," Bill snapped, standing.

  "What?" Roger was genuinely surprised and stared slack-jawed at Bill for a moment. "My swearing's never bothered you before."

  Bill frowned and seemed to carefully choose his words as he shuffled his weight from foot to foot.

  "I've lost patience with you," he said finally.

  "Lost...patience?"

  "You were always interested in such...bad things. Fiction, movies, comic books...all things you knew were wrong. You knew it as well as we did, Roger, and you still know it. You were raised and taught the same way we were. But you kept rejecting the truth. No matter how much we prayed. You..." He shook his head sadly. "You're our failure."

  "Fai...failure?" A moment before, Roger had feared he might cry. Now boiling anger surged through him.

  "Maybe you're not a failure as a writer. But you know, Roger...you know what you write is wrong."

  Roger turned around, leaned forward and pressed his clenched fists to Bill's desktop.

  "It's not of God, Roger. And there's only one other source. You know that."

  On the desk, Roger saw a paperweight he had given Bill in high school. It was a scorpion encased in a clear half-sphere of resin about the size of a man's fist. Roger touched it lightly with his fingertips. It was hard and cool.

  "Your work is evil, Roger," Bill said. "Plain and simple. Evil."

  Roger's anger grew hotter and made him tremble. Grinding his teeth together, he swept up the paperweight, spun around and threw it blindly. He regretted it even as his arm was slicing through the air.

  Bill threw himself on the bed.

  The paperweight hit the poster and stuck in the gypsum wall behind it with a loud thwack, tearing a gash into Christ's ghostly head.

  Roger stared silently at Bill, mouth hanging open. He had shocked himself with his action.

  Bill slowly rose from the bed, gawking at the paperweight sticking out of the side of Jesus's head. He
turned and looked at Roger as if he had just committed cold-blooded murder. "I'm calling campus security."

  "I-I'm sorry, Bill, really, I-I-I'm just so...frustrated!"

  Bill went to the phone on his dresser, lifted the receiver and began punching the keys angrily with a stiff forefinger.

  Roger moved toward him, saying, "Wait, Bill, just listen to me for a—"

  "Don't come near me!" Bill said, his voice unsteady. He held the receiver to his ear with a white-knuckled hand and looked at Roger with wide, terrified eyes.

  "Just tell me who's calling me at night, Bill just tell me—"

  "Jesus Lord, protect me now from this evil," Bill whispered, hunching over the phone. "Shield me from whatever demon has—hello, security?"

  Roger heard no more. He hurried out of the room and down the hall.

  "Stay away from him!" Bill shouted from his doorway.

  Doors opened and heads peered out. A young man wearing a bathrobe stopped on the way to his room and stared as Roger passed.

  "He's evil!" Bill shouted. "Stay away from him! He tried to kill me!"

  Roger resisted the urge to turn around and shout back, even though he had no idea what he would shout. In the stairwell, he could still hear Bill, no matter how hard he tried not to.

  "He's evil! Stay away from him! He's evil!"

  Roger sometimes heard it still.

  7.

  Josh looked as if he had died some time ago but stubbornly refused to accept it. He stood in the doorway, pale as fishmeat, a skeleton with a thin sheen of human skin stretched over his bones. His brown hair was greasy and flat and seemed much thinner than when Roger last saw him.

  His smile came slowly as his drawn, skull-like face craned forward on a wrist-thin neck to peer at Roger.

  "Roger? Roger Carlton?"

  "Hey, Josh." Roger tried to smile and almost held out his hand to shake, but a sickening image flashed in his mind that held him back: Josh's arm snapping at the elbow with a crisp, hollow crack and breaking off in his hand.

  Josh held out his hand anyway, and Roger could not ignore it. It was cold and feather light with almost no grip at all.