Darkness gathered thickly at the close of the long dusk, and Rector, having finished the front yard, pushed the mower around to the garage and went on into the kitchen and plugged a can of cold beer. Carrying the can, he went out through the house the front way and sat down on the front steps and drank the beer slowly and watched lightning bugs. He wondered if Charlie was still on the front steps next door, listening and smelling, and after a while he walked out a few steps into the yard and peered over that way through the darkness, and Charlie was.
“Hey, Charlie,” Rector called.
No answer. No shifting of the shadow on the Treadwell steps.
“Hey, there, Charlie,” Rector called again.
This time, after a moment, the shadow shifted.
“Is that you, Rector?” Charlie said.
“Yes, it is,” Rector said. “You like to have a cold beer?”
“No, thanks,” Charlie said.
Rector felt sorry for old Charlie. It was easy enough to feel sad and lonely in a summer dusk with no good reason whatever, and it would surely be easier and worse if you’d had your wife go off and leave you besides. Especially a dish like Fanny, who wouldn’t be easy to replace, especially by a nondescript little guy like Charlie. So feeling sorry for Charlie and carrying what was left of his beer in the can, Rector walked across and sat down on the Treadwell steps to be neighborly.
“You hearing and smelling a lot of different things, Charlie?” Rector asked.
“Quite a few,” Charlie said, “but not as many as I used to smell and hear when I was a kid.”
“It’s a fact that you lose the knack,” Rector said. “Since talking to you earlier, I’ve been smelling and listening myself, but I’m not so good at it any more, either.”
They were silent for a few minutes, during which time Rector drank the last of his beer and set the empty can beside his feet.
“What got you to smelling and listening all of a sudden?” he said.
“Well,” Charlie said, “Fanny and I had this fight over someone, and I killed her, and afterward I got to thinking about all the smells and sounds I used to know and hadn’t really known for a long time since, and I thought I’d just sit out here and try to know them again while there was still a little time left.”
“What did you say about Fanny?”
“I said we had this fight, and I killed her. I lost my head and began choking her and didn’t quit soon enough. I didn’t really intend to kill her, but I did, and she’s dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s up there in our bedroom where we had the fight”
“Well. Well, God Almighty.”
It occurred to Rector later that this was a rather remarkably casual exchange over a serious matter, but Charlie was so calm and sensible, and so palpably telling the simple truth, that it did not seem remarkable at all at the time.
“What are you going to do, Charlie?” Rector said.
“After a while, when I’ve finished listening and smelling, I’m going inside and shoot myself.”
“You think, when it comes to it, you’ll have the nerve?”
“Oh, yes. I’ll have the nerve, all right. It won’t take much with things as they are.”
Rector sighed and stood up, remembering to retrieve the empty beer can.
“Well,” he said, “you can probably do a better job of listening and smelling if you’re alone, and so I’ll go on back home.”
“You won’t call the police or anything, will you, Rector?”
“I couldn’t get around to calling them before morning at the earliest,” Rector said.
He went back across the yards to his own house. He didn’t feel like sitting on the steps any longer, what with old Charlie sitting there listening and smelling so close at hand, and so he went inside to the bedroom and undressed and lay down on the bed in his shorts. He was pretty sweaty from the mowing, and he badly needed a shower, but he simply didn’t have the heart for one. He lay quietly on the bed, smelling himself, until Gladys got home in prickly heat from having seen Sinatra.
“You asleep, Rector?” Gladys said. “No.”
“You should have seen the movie. That Sinatra’s something.”
Rector didn’t answer, thinking instead with a kind of deadly domestic despair: Will you, please, for Christ’s sake, shut up? I’m sick of Sinatra and sick of myself and most of all, dear heart, I’m sick of you. All I want to know, if there ts anyone to tell me, is why everything must go sour that started sweet, and why a man must be driven in the end to a ruin that seems preferable, at least for a little while, to things as they were.
Gladys went into the bathroom and turned on the light above the lavatory. Rector could hear her washing and brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. Pretty soon she came back into the bedroom in her nightgown and sat down on the edge of the bed across from Rector.
“What in the world’s got into that crazy Charlie Treadwell?” she said. “He’s still sitting out there on his front steps like a stump.”
“I told you. He had a fight with Fanny, and Fanny’s gone.”
“That’s no reason to sit on the front steps all night.”
“He’s listening and smelling for the last time. After a while, he’s going inside and shoot himself.”
“Oh, don’t try to be funny, Rector. How many beers did you have?”
“Never mind. Lie down and forget it. Think about Sinatra.”
Gladys lay down on top of the covers, it being a warm night, and Rector laced his fingers under his head and continued to lie there quietly, on his back, smelling himself and listening for the sound of a shot next door.
The Mourners at the Bedside
by Hampton Stone
1.
Do you know about DA’s? They’re important. They do important people important favors. Assistant DA’s aren’t important. They just do the work, and that explains why it would be Assistant District Attorney Jeremiah X. Gibson and Assistant District Attorney Just Plain Old Me who, when the DA wanted to do the Bardons a favor, had to go see the people.
We saw the small, shriveled remnant of the old man who was William Bardon, glimpsing him dimly through his oxygen tent. We saw the battalions of nurses who rustled softly about him. We saw George Bardon, M.D., who would certainly have been there even if he hadn’t been family. George was an M.D. who wore his stethoscope as a Knight of the Garter wears his star. We saw Emory Kent; and he was to law what George Bardon was to medicine. We saw the family.
There was Hepburn Bardon, the old man’s only surviving son. Even before any of this particular bit of nasty business had broken into the open, Uncle Hep had been one of the notorious Bardons, at least as notorious as his colorful young nephew, Everett Bardon. You may remember Everett. He’s the one who was picked up for shoplifting and who through his trial and conviction was headlined as the Larceny for Larks Lad.
That was a trial. Everett had hooked, just to prove he could, a female bathing suit price-tagged at $199.98. The judge, as a point of information, asked what could make a bathing suit cost that much. As a point of information, His Honor was told that this bathing suit had incorporated into its engineering a fanny uplift.
Even in the face of that, however, Everett’s Uncle Hep stole the limelight at the trial. Day after day in court, the reporters had been equally bemused by the splendor and variety of Uncle Hep’s spats and by the splendor and variety of his blondes. Each day it was a different pair of gaudy spats and each day he had on his arm a different gaudy blonde. For attendance at his father’s sickbed, however, he had no blonde. Otherwise, he was gaudily intact.