Julie finished the first bottle. She was too drunk to stand up, too drunk even to walk, but she was still conscious. I opened the second fifth and held it to her mouth, tipping her head back. She drank, coughed, choked. I let her breathe a minute, then tilted her head back again. Somewhere along the line she passed out. I poured more whiskey down her throat.
Suddenly she turned her head sideways and began to throw up. The sound and smell of it made me retch, but I forced myself to regain control. Only when I had half the second bottle down her did I stop.
I didn’t plan it. I swear I didn’t once think about how to kill her. At least not consciously. But I did throw her over my shoulder and start back down the railroad toward Millville. Two hundred yards from the crossing I put her down in the middle of the tracks, her head resting on a rail. Sitting on the rail next to her, I rested, breathing hard from the exertion.
A train whistle sounded and I jumped to my feet. It was fully dark, but early for another train. Looking east, I saw the light of a train engine. It was well over a mile away, but coming fast. I ran back down the tracks, hoping to reach the hollow log before the train reached Julie.
It was a passenger train, and coming too fast. When I saw I couldn’t reach the spot I wanted, I climbed over a bank beside the railroad and dropped flat. The train passed me, sounding too close and too loud. Passenger trains ran sixty miles an hour and usually weren’t very long. In thirty seconds or less it was past me.
Then I heard the whistle scream long and loud, sounding anxious. A screeching filled the night as the brakes on the train locked and metal wheels ground on metal rails, filling the night with showers of sparks. But brakes on a train are useless for quick stops. It takes a passenger train half a mile to stop from a speed of sixty miles an hour. When I looked down the railroad I could see the train was only then coming to a stop, several hundred yards past the Millville crossing.
With my heart beating fast and my breathing so labored I could hardly run, I hurried the rest of the way to the hollow log and grabbed the half-empty fifth of Canadian Mist. I drank deeply, and kept drinking until the world swam in my vision. I drank more, threw up, drank still more. At some point I either went to sleep or passed out.
When I woke up I felt worse than I ever had in my life. I was still drunk, but knew I had to keep drinking. Two inches of whiskey remained in the bottle, and I drank it all. It was enough to make me pass out again. The next time I opened my eyes it was daylight and two county sheriff’s deputies were shaking me.
Things got pretty scary after that. They asked all kinds of questions about Julie, and I told them she had been with me, but walked back home about dark the night before. They told me she was dead, that a train hit her. I cried. The tears were real.
They believed me. Everyone did. I talked to the sheriff later and told him Randy Carter bought the whiskey for us. They arrested him, and under a law I didn’t even know about, he was charged with manslaughter. He was sentenced to ten years, and I think he served five.
The funny part was he plead guilty. Randy believed the story I told just like everybody else. He honestly thought he was responsible for Julie’s death.
Linda sat the bowl of strawberries on the table in front of me. Picking up the fork, I stuck the tines through the whipped cream and into a strawberry. It was good. Not nearly as good as wild strawberries, but still tasty. I ate until the bowl was empty, then asked for seconds.
“Why don’t you wait until after supper,” Linda said. “You’ll ruin your appetite.”
“All right. Guess I’ll have a drink and watch a little TV. Can I make you something?”
“Sure. What are you having?”
“Canadian Mist and Coke, I think. Somehow the strawberries put me in the mood.”
“Sounds good. Fix me a tall one.”
“I’ll be right back. Just don’t eat all the strawberries while I’m gone.”
Going into the living room, I mixed two tall drinks, putting ice in each. I mixed them a little stronger than usual, favoring the whiskey over the Coca-Cola.
The Eye of the Beholder
by Robert Barnard
© 1994 by Robert Barnard
Though he is best known for his comic mysteries, Robert Barnard is equally adept with darker stories of a psychological turn, and his new novel from Scribners, Masters of the House (September, 1994) is of this sort. For those who enjoy Mr. Barnard’s lighter side, a new book in the Bernard Bastable series is due out early in 1995, also from Scribners...
Simon Carraway’s trowel had been expertly flicking cement between bricks with a vigour and purpose which was the result of a newly acquired expertise. Now it slowed down, as the door to number eighteen opened. Simon knew what was going to happen, but he watched nevertheless: the situation at number eighteen interested him, as the doings at none of the other houses in Gordon Road did. The man came out, had his cheek pecked by the still-pretty woman who was the inhabitant of the house that Simon felt he knew best, then the door was shut from inside, and the man, bowler-hatted and carrying a briefcase and an umbrella, set off in the direction of the Underground.
Simon bent his back down again and his trowel resumed its deft slapping-on of cement and its neat placing of bricks. Nothing more to be seen yet awhile.
Simon was nineteen. When he met his former schoolteachers in the street they shook their heads that he had not changed his mind about going up to university. Oxbridge could have been yours for the asking, they said. Simon replied that university, and especially Oxbridge, wouldn’t be any use to him. He didn’t say, because it sounded pretentious if you said it too often, that the reason university would be no use to him was because he was going to be a writer. The only writer he had ever met had told him that any side job a writer took on should be something that did not take it out of him intellectually or emotionally. “Something mindless,” the man had said. So Simon had joined his father’s building firm as a labourer, putting up rabbit hutches for the newly married, on the site of a former factory in the road named after General Gordon.
His father told people he was working his way up from the bottom. It sounded so much better than that he wanted to be a writer.
Meanwhile Simon stored in his head the personal lives of his work-mates, listened in the pub at lunchtimes to the stories of teenagers and pensioners, watched the people in the old Victorian redbrick houses on the other side of Gordon Road, and made stories out of their lives.
Such as the woman who had just seen her husband off to work. A dull soul, he looked. And Simon knew all about dutiful pecks on the cheek. That was how his father was seen off every morning. But the thing that made the house interesting to him was the question of who the other man in the house was, and what did he do? Was he a lodger? He sometimes left the house, but at irregular times, and often he was — so far as Simon knew — in there all day. What was his work? What did they do — he and the wife? And what did the teenage children of the house think about it?
Simon’s trowel expertly slapped and smoothed the coffee-cream cement, and his mind buzzed.
Isabella Longthorn shut the front door and leaned her forehead against it momentarily. She did so hope things were going well with William at the office. Desperately she hoped that this was a new beginning. She shook herself and went to the kitchen to wash up the breakfast things. Even if this was not the new beginning she and he hoped for, she would go on supporting and loving William as she had always done. “Loving” — that was not too strong a word to use for a brother. Not loving in that way, of course. She felt the force of all the taboos that prevented her loving her brother in that way. But in another, a better, a higher way.