Margaret Millar
The Fiend
For Jewell and Russ Kriger,
with deep affection, as always
The fiend with all his comrades
Fell then from heaven above,
Through as long as three nights and days...
(1)
It was the end of August and the children were getting bored with their summer freedom. They had spent too many hours at the mercy of their own desires. Their legs and arms were scratched, bruised, blistered with poison oak; sea water had turned their hair to straw, and the sun had left cruel red scars across their cheekbones and noses. All the trees had been climbed, the paths explored, the cliffs scaled, the waves conquered. Now, as if in need and anticipation of the return of rules, they began to hang around the school playground.
So did the man in the old green coupé. Every day at noon Charlie Gowen brought his sandwiches and a carton of milk and parked across the road from the playground, separated from the swings and the jungle gym by a steel fence and some scraggly geraniums. Here he sat and ate and drank and watched.
He knew he shouldn’t be there. It was dangerous to be seen near such a place.
“—where children congregate. You understand that, Gowen?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Do you know what congregate means?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Don’t give me that dumb act, Gowen. You spent two years at college.”
“I was sick then. You don’t retain things when you’re sick.”
“Then I’ll spell it out for you. You are to stay away from any place frequented by children — parks, certain beach areas, Saturday afternoon movies, school playgrounds—”
The conditions were impossible, of course. He couldn’t turn and run in the opposite direction every time he saw a child. They were all over, everywhere, at any hour. Once even at midnight when he was walking by himself he’d come across a boy and a girl, barely twelve. He told them gruffly to go home or he’d call the police. They disappeared into the darkness; he never saw them again even though he took the same route at the same time every night after that for a week. His conscience gnawed at him. He loved children, he shouldn’t have threatened the boy and girl, he should have found out why they were on the streets at such an hour and then escorted them home and lectured their parents very sternly about looking after their kids.
He started on his second sandwich. The first hadn’t filled the void in his stomach and neither would the second. He might as well have been eating clouds or pieces of twilight, though he couldn’t express it that way to his brother, Benjamin, who made the lunches for both of them. He had to be very careful what he said to Benjamin. The least little fanciful thought or offbeat phrase and Ben would get the strained, set look on his face that reminded Charlie of their dead mother. Then the questions would start: Eating clouds, Charlie? Pieces of twilight? Where do you get screwy ideas like that? You’re feeling all right, aren’t you? Have you phoned Louise lately? Don’t you think she might want to hear from you? Look, Charlie, is something bothering you? You’re sure not?...
He knew better, by this time, than to mention anything about clouds or twilight. He had said simply that morning, “I need more food, Ben.”
“Why?”
“Why? Well, because I’m hungry. I work hard. I was wondering, maybe some doughnuts and a couple of pieces of pie—”
“For yourself?”
“Sure, for myself. Who else? Oh, now I see what you’re thinking about. That was over two years ago, Ben, and the Mexican kid was half starved. Everything would have been fine if that busybody woman hadn’t interfered. The kid ate the sandwich, it filled him up, he felt good for a change. My God, Ben, is it a crime to feed starving children?”
Ben didn’t answer. He merely closed the lid of the lunchbox on the usual two sandwiches and carton of milk, and changed the subject. “Louise called last night when you were out. She’s coming over after supper. I’ll slip out to a movie and leave you two alone for a while.”
“Is it? Is it a crime, Ben?”
“Louise is a fine young woman. She could be the making of a man.”
“If I were a starving child and someone gave me food—”
“Shut up, Charlie. You’re not starving, you’re overweight. And you’re far from being a child. You’re thirty-two years old.”
It was not the command that shut Charlie up, it was the sudden cruel reference to his age. He seldom thought about it on his own because he felt so young, barely older than the little girl hanging upside down from the top bar of the jungle gym.
She was about nine. Having watched them all impartially now for two weeks, Charlie had come to like her the best.
She wasn’t the prettiest, and she was so thin Charlie could have spanned her waist with his two hands, but there was a certain cockiness about her that both fascinated and worried him. When she tried some daring new trick on the jungle gym she seemed to be challenging gravity and the bars to try and stop her. If she fell — and she often did — she bounced up off the ground as naturally as a ball. Within five seconds she’d be back on the top bar of the jungle gym, pretending nothing had happened, and Charlie’s heart, which had stopped, would start to beat again in double time, its rhythm disturbed by relief and anger.
The other children called her Jessie, and so, inside the car with the windows closed, did Charlie.
“Careful, Jessie, careful. Self-confidence is all very well, but bones can be broken, child, even nine-year-old bones. I ought to warn your parents. Where do you live, Jessie?”
The playground counselor, a physical education major at the local college, was refereeing a sixth-grade basketball game. The sun scorched through his crew cut, he was thirsty, and his eyes stung from the dust raised by scuffling feet, but he was as intent on the game as though it were being played in the Los Angeles Coliseum. His name was Scott Roberts, he was twenty, and the children respected him greatly because he could chin himself with one hand and drove a sports car.
He saw the two little girls crossing the field and ignored them as long as possible, which wasn’t long, since one of them was crying.
He blew the whistle and stopped the game. “O.K., fellas, take five.” And, to the girl who was crying, “What’s the matter, Mary Martha?”
“Jessie fell.”
“It figures, it figures.” Scott wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “If Jessie was the one who fell, why isn’t she doing the crying?”
“I couldn’t be bothered,” Jessie said loftily. She ached in a number of places but nothing short of an amputation could have forced her to tears in front of the sixth-grade boys. She had a crush on three of them; one had even spoken to her. “Mary Martha always cries at things, like sad events on television and people falling.”
“How are your hands? Any improvement over last week?”
“They’re O.K.”
“Let me see, Jessie.”
“Here, in front of everybody?”
“Right here, in front of everybody who’s nosy enough to look.”
He didn’t even have to glance at the sixth-graders to get his message across. Immediately they all turned away and became absorbed in other things, dribbling the ball, adjusting shoelaces, hitching up shorts, slicking back hair.
Jessie presented her hands and Scott examined them, frowning. The palms were a mass of blisters in every stage of development, some newly formed and still full of liquid, some open and oozing, others covered with layers of scar tissue.
Scott shook his head and frowned. “I told you last week to get your mother to put alcohol on your hands every morning and night to toughen the skin. You didn’t do it.”