Tyler was running full tilt up the grassy slope toward the line of trees with the briefcase swinging choppily along and his shirt blown out cartoonlike behind him like some halfcrazed and ill-dressed commuter chasing a fleeing train. He was holding his breath and expecting the crack of a gun and buckshot snarling about him like angry hornets but all that came was a hoarse cry like the cry of some wounded animal hopelessly snared, a strangled ululating shriek of outrage or despair.
Once he reached the cover of trees he kept on going, crashing through brush with saplings whipping past him and his breath coming ragged, and when he thought how ludicrous the picture of portly Fenton Breece leaping brush and fallen trees was he stopped and sat on a stump to catch his breath.
He listened intently but all was silence save the hammering of his heart against his ribcage. He sat for a time staring at the briefcase. He had to see what manner of beast he had here. There was a businesslike lock on the strap buthe didn’t even try forcing it. He just took out his pocketknife and cut the strap and looked inside.
Papers. He leafed hurriedly through them, glancing occasionally at the woods. Invoices, bills of lading, receipts. Copies of orders placed with various firms for chemicals, caskets, clothing. Curious the trades men follow. Beneath the sheaf of papers lay a flat zippered pouch of the sort businesses use to carry deposits to the bank. His heart sank. A sack of goddamn money, he thought. I take a chance on getting shot and get chased through the woods by a fat undertaker and all I’ve done is prove I’m a thief.
He unzipped it with trepidation.
The first thing he saw was a pair of lavender silk panties. They were discolored up one side and hip with a faded rustbrown stain that had long soaked into the very texture of the fabric and appeared very old. He didn’t even want to know what it was or how it came to be there. He laid them aside and stared at them in a kind of appalled wonder.
Here was more. A rubberbanded stack of glossy black-and-white photographs. He slipped off the rubber band to rifle hastily through them.
He dropped them suddenly as if they’d seared his hand. Or he’d been handling one of those clever medieval boxes with their springloaded needles cunningly hidden and tipped with curare. He felt infected, poison freezing his nerve and brain.
The photographs had scattered, some face up. He stared at them in fascinated revulsion. They were all of nude women. Some young, some old. Some pretty, some not. They were arranged in grotesque configurations they’d probably not aspired to in life and they were all unmistakably dead. Legsspread flagrantly, some grouped in mimicry of various acts of sexual congress. Their faces painted in carmine smiles. Their weary eyes, their sagging flesh. He’d used some sort of timer with the camera for here was Breece himself, nude and gross and grinning, capering gleefully among the painted dead.
He picked the photographs up carefully by their edges and replaced the rubber band and just sat holding them. What to do with them. These trading cards from beyond the river Styx, picture postcards mailed from Hell.
She took the underwear up delicately by its unstained hem. Laid it aside.
Where do you suppose he got them?
He shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. Why might be a better question.
Well, you certainly outdid yourself. I suppose you know what this means. We’ve got the son of a bitch. We’ve got him in a way nobody’s had him before, and it’s going to cost him.
I’ll tell you what, Corrie. You’ve got him. Not me. I want nothing whatever to do with him. I don’t want to talk to him, to see him, to ever hear his voice. I don’t even want to know he’s in this world. I’ve seen some sorry things, but Jesus.
I do. I want to watch his face when I tell him.
He didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. She was studying the pictures clinically, one at a time, laying them aside. Watching her face by the lamplight, he thought she looked somehow fevered, her rapt eyes fired by something akin to religious frenzy. Sister of some secret sect, perusing its dark devotional. Prayers offered to a horned deitysquatting just beyond the rim of firelight. Watching her so he was touched with pity. She’d come up hard. A childhood that passed with an eye’s blinking. Stepping over sleeping drunks on the way to school. With girlhood came the whistles and catcalls on the schoolyard. Hey, Corrie, how about a piece of that? You’ve done it with everybody else, how about me? He’d fought over her and he remembered the coppery bright taste of blood in his mouth. She tried to be like everybody else. To be one of the freshfaced town girls with their air of entitled confidence. She wore the same kind of clothes the other girls wore but somehow without the right flair, and ultimately all her efforts underlined the fact that she was just another piece of the puzzle that did not quite fit.
Why are you looking at me like that?
I was thinking I’ve known you all my life, and yet I don’t know you at all.
There’s nothing to know. I get up, I work, I do the housework. I cook, I go to bed. Then tomorrow I get up and do the same thing over again.
He didn’t answer.
I don’t know you. I don’t know where you go when you’re wandering around. What you think. No one’s ever known what you think. You get what you think out of a book. It’s like you hardly ever talk and when you do it’s in some foreign language. Some language nobody even speaks. But one thing you can know about me is that I’m going to shove the knife in Fenton Breece and twist it. That’s the main thing about me right now.
I wish you’d forget about Fenton Breece. He’s like that card on the wall, the invisible listener at every conversation, the guest at every meal. You may develop a taste for him. He’s going to put us on Easy Street.
This is absolutely crazy as shit. There is just no way he’s going to smile and start counting hundred-dollar bills into your hand. Just no way.
Hellfire, Kenneth, what can he do? Run to the law? There’s nothing he can do but pay up. Try to put yourself in his shoes.
I don’t want in his shoes, Tyler said. And if I was I’d cut my throat.
During the last few years of his life Tyler’s father would reach a certain stage of drunkenness during which he used to sit and watch Tyler with a peculiar speculation, as if he’d see what manner of beast this was he’d sired. Tyler walked a narrow line those years, it didn’t take much to set the old man off.
When Tyler was twelve or thirteen he took to sleeping in the attic. It was quieter up there, and quiet was at a premium, for the house was ofttimes full of drunks by turns convivial and quarrelsome. There were two doors between the attic and the ground floor and on one of these Tyler had installed a lock he’d come by. He liked the slope of the dark oaken rafters over his iron bed, and there was a window you could open to the weathers in the spring and summer. This window faced the back of the house and looked out upon a stony field sloping toward the cedared horizon. There was a hiding place in the boxing over the door for books he chanced upon. The old man possessed an enormous contempt for the writtenword and those who would decipher it.
That year the old man fell to beating him when the notion struck him, and it struck him more often as time drew on. Young Tyler grew wary and careful and watchful as a cat. All his movements seemed provisional and subject to change at a moment’s notice, he seemed always poised for flight.
A schoolteacher who’d befriended him came once to visit. She sat for a time under the malevolent gaze of the old man, glancing about with nervous skittery eyes. She never came back. You better quit hangin around them goddamn schoolteachers, he said, wiping a hand across his mouth. Grayyellow stubble flecked with ambeer and spittle. Washedout blue eyes veined with meanness. You won’t amount to a goddamned thing.