‘But we’ll starve,’ Elizabeth protested. ‘The three girls will starve.’
John Frederick Walters stared at the burning cigarette in his hand. He felt giddy from nicotine and lack of food. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I guess we will, unless something happens.’
‘But what do people do in India, places like that? Cambodia? They starve, sure, but they sometimes scratch some kind of a living.’
‘They know how, that’s why,’ said John Frederick Walters. ‘They know how to live on a small bowl of rice, how to make it last. They’ve never seen a T-bone steak in their lives, and they’d probably puke up at the sight of it if they did. They know how to grow the damned rice, too. Do you know how to grow rice? I mean, if you do, get out back and get planting. We’re all gonna need it.’
Elizabeth stared at him as if she hadn’t heard or understood a word he was saying. She probably didn’t. She said, slowly, ‘There’s some Alpo I bought for Florence’s dog. There’s a can of that left.’
‘Alpo? Are you kidding? You can’t eat dog-food.’
‘But how can I produce milk if I don’t eat? Can’t you hear her screaming up there? What am I supposed to do? Stand by and watch my children wasting away? I don’t know how you can sit there apd smoke and listen to that stupid wore-out radio and let it happen!’
John Frederick Walters stared at her coldly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess you don’t know, do you? You don’t know that this whole world’s fallen in on us, and because we’re at the bottom to begin with, the entire weight of everything falls on us cripples and incompetents first.’
She looked back at him, her mouth patchy with blood. Then she turned without a word and went through to the kitchen.
He switched the radio back on, and, listened to a short bulletin about a shooting outside of Los Angeles. Fifty police had ambushed a band of vigilante looters, and slain all of them, including eight women and a child of twelve. Most state highway patrols had now formed themselves into anti-looting squads, hunting down looters and killing them on sight. What the bulletin didn’t mention was that almost all of the recaptured loot was divided up amongst the arresting officers, and the district attorney’s office, and anybody else the highway patrols considered to be ‘close and special friends.’
It was still possible to buy certain foods on the black market. An NBC reporter had paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for a can of Chicken of the Sea at a warehouse in Brooklyn, and he had been offered whole canned hams from Denmark and the United Kingdom for well over one thousand five hundred dollars each. Pots of Marmite, the British yeast extract, were selling at sixty dollars and upwards.
John Frederick Walters switched off the radio again, puffed twice at his cigarette, and then stood up. He limped unevenly out of the living-room, along the narrow corridor with its scenic print of Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey, still splattered with dried-up tomato sauce from the evening two years ago when he had thrown his pasta at Elizabeth in a fit of frustrated temper. He opened the kitchen door, and there Elizabeth was, sitting at the table beside the cheap cream-painted dresser, her fork raised, her eyes staring back at him in defiance and fright.
In front of her was a plate – one of the nice white octagonal plates that Elizabeth’s mother had given them for a wedding gift. There were only three left, out of eight. The plate was heaped with brown glistening lumps of meat. On the draining-board was a red-labelled can, with an open lid.
John Frederick Walters walked into the kitchen, and around the table. Elizabeth kept her eyes on him warily, her fork still poised.
‘Is that Alpo?’ John Frederick Walters asked harshly.
Elizabeth nodded.
John Frederick Walters went to the draining-board and picked up the empty can. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘you could do worse. It says here that it’s a complete and balanced diet. So why don’t you go ahead – eat it.’
Elizabeth hesitated for a while, biting at her lips. Then, in jerky slow-motion, she dug her fork into the dog food and lifted up two gravyish chunks. John Frederick Walters stared at her unblinking and said nothing.
Closing her eyes, Elizabeth put the dog food into her mouth. She slowly began to chew it, moving it from one side to the other, her eyes still closed, her empty fork held up beside her.
‘You’re lucky,’ said her husband, in a shaky voice. ‘Do you know how lucky you are? That’s an expensive brand. Some brands are nothing but fat, and tubes, and minced up gristle. Mind you, I should think that even Alpo has its fair share of offals.’
Elizabeth chewed and chewed, tried to swallow, and gagged. Saliva and half-chewed dog meat trailed from her lips.
‘God,’ breathed John Frederick Walters, ‘what are you doing? What about Jenna? How’s Jenna going to survive if her mother doesn’t eat dog meat to turn into milk? How are any of us going to survive?’
Elizabeth was weeping. She gagged again, and held her hand over her mouth to keep the food inside.
John Frederick Walters told Fort Wayne police officers early Friday morning that ‘I acted quick.’ He said, ‘I never thought the day would have to come when a wife of mine would have to eat dog food to nourish our baby, and I never thought the day would have to come when my girls would go without a meal. I’m not rich, I know that, and we could never afford much since my accident, but this is America, isn’t it? How come suddenly there was nothing to eat, and no prospect of nothing to eat?’
As Elizabeth choked over her mouthful of dog food, John Frederick Walters pulled down the frayed cord which was suspended over the stove for drying the girls’ undervests during the winter, twisted it twice around his hands, and then once around Elizabeth’s neck. She fell backwards to the floor, hitting her head on the beige linoleum. Her eyes bulged at John Frederick Walters in horror, but she was unable to speak, unable to breathe, and her face turned grey and shiny, the same colour as grey leather shoes. After five minutes, with the string cutting into his bare hands John Frederick Walters decided she was dead.
He went upstairs, leaving Elizabeth lying in the kitchen. Alice and Wendy shared a bed in the small second-storey bedroom over the living-room. They were both asleep in the darkness, in their white flock cotton nightdresses, and John Frederick Walters stood at the end of the bed watching them – their upraised wrists, traced with blueish veins, their thin ankles. He reached down and held Alice’s bare toes in his hand, gently and lovingly. He wanted to kill them, he knew he had to, but he didn’t know how. How do you kill children you love? How can you instantly end their lives without hurting them?
He picked Wendy up, and carried her sleeping into the bathroom. Her arms lolled beside her as if she were already dead. He felt as if he were mad, or drugged, or even as if he were someone else altogether. Supposing there wasn’t really a famine at all? Supposing his radio had been telling him lies? But he looked around him at the white enamel bathtub with its green-coloured stain; at the can of lavender talcum powder with the rusted rim; at the fingerprinted mirror where Elizabeth had plucked her eyebrows and he had always shaved. And even if the radio was lying, what the hell was the use of a life like this, for any of them?
He took a safety-razor blade between finger and thumb, and then sat on the toilet seat with the sleepy Wendy on his lap. She mumbled, ‘Daddy… what are we doing?’ but he shushed her soothingly as he stroked her forehead, and then gently but firmly gripped her hair and slit her throat, as deeply as he could, from one side to the other. She didn’t even protest; didn’t even seem to realise what was happening. But then there was a sudden explosive gargle of blood and air, and the whole bathroom was arrayed in red. He dropped Wendy off his lap, in horror and utter fear, and she lay kicking her left foot against the side of the bath, kick, kick, kick, as she died. It was like watching a run-over dog die, only a thousand times worse, and he reeled with the dreadfulness of it.