Collected Fictions (4 page)

I think I remember saying, "Please, be sensible, you and I are not precisely on such terms." Or I may have said, "Please, be sensible, that is a vulgar and doomed plan."

I do not know what I said. I know that that night, when I had emptied out my briefcase to sort my papers, I found a notation giving this man's name, a restaurant, a date, a time. I still had this in my hand, amazed, when I went to ball up the laundry wrappings to stuff them in the trash. I don't know why I did not discard the slip of paper along with the rest. You will understand that it was not because I must have said yes to the fellow and was unprepared to go back on my word. Perhaps it was because I
had
said yes and was bound not to dishonor the queer impetus in me that had made me do it. In any event, I put the reminder in my pocket and the laundry wrappings in the trash basket, lifted out the plastic liner, cinched it, and tossed the whole arrangement down the stairwell for the custodian to find it when he would.

The bastard.

THERE IS CHICKEN POX
and there is chicken pox—and my boy had the second kind. We cautioned him not to scratch. Please understand that he is the quality of boy who respects a caution. I know he tried all he could to resist. But a mad itching is a vile thing, and when it is rampantly in its mania, there is nothing left for it but to claw.

He did his best.

I tell my wife the lesions that left scars on his cheeks will prove a trifling matter in the years of his growth.

But she cries. She cries when it would, I think, seem to her that I am asleep.

Of course, it occurs to me to wonder if the scars are why she cries. It could be the loss of the sled that makes her cry. Or the specter of the ungovernable custodian. What kind of creature would take away what belongs to a child?

Or it could be something else she cries about.

HE MUST HAVE GROWN
anxious, after all, this fool of ours—because I arrive second, and hear him say he had been sitting and waiting for almost an hour. Yet I was punctual, as is my custom. It was more than clear that he had been drinking for however long he had in fact waited. One would guess that he had come to regret what he had impulsively contrived, and it is to this that I attribute his hurried and avid indulgence.

"Are you afraid?" I said.

He tried to smile in rebuke of this, but what his ambition produced was instead a lopsided impression of grossly disordered zeal. "What kind of thing is that to say?" he said, and threw his face toward the glass of whiskey that he had been elevating a degree or so off-plumb with his lips.

"Lad, you will never make it through the evening," I said.

"Will too," he said, not in the least equipped to rearrange the distortion that had seized his features. "Never felt more alive. Never more magnificently aware. You won't be sorry, buddy boy, I promise you."

I was going to ask my friend to give me a bit of information about the man still to come. Not that I really cared, but only to make conversation until the other diners arrived and the catastrophe got productively under way. It was then, while I was preparing to offer my inquiries and while my friend was laboring to raise his hand to call for a round, that I was strangely overcome by the oddest realization.

I had never seen the custodian
.

The man might actually be anyone. The man could come running right up at me from anywhere—and I would never know that he was the man I should be ready for.

Had my wife seen the fellow?

Of course she must have—for had she not heard his complaint about the sled?

I know it will appear curious when I tell you that the matter of the custodian, my disquiet over my never having seen him, so captured my attention that I've only the scantiest recollection of the drinking and the eating and the table-talk that followed. I know that the second man proved a rather amiable chap and that we more or less discovered mutual interests. The woman was quite pleasant, really—handsome enough and not unintelligent. I cannot, I'm afraid I must say, recall much that anyone said, although I believe that the chitchat went agreeably forward and that the woman seemed genuinely pleased to be meeting the other fellow and myself. Yet she made no great effort, as I remember, to draw either of us out—nor did she appear particularly bent upon an exchange with my friend. To sum it up, she was acceptably polite and sociable, if a stroke remote, and I for one intended to respect whatever distance she seemed to wish established.

I believe I kept to that mark.

I cannot say she showed the least surprise that our fellow was becoming progressively intoxicated by great bounding leaps, or tumbles. I certainly was not—and, speaking for the other fellow, I supposed he wasn't, either. The evening was going off not a little gracefully, considering the ground we were hazarding—it all resolving itself in food and drink, a few peppery but companionable bickerings, and even some moments of downright chummy laughter.

All this time, as I have told you, it was the custodian that remained chiefly in my consideration. Or, to put the point more descriptively, it was in my mind to get him out of it—and to focus my alertness on what was enacting itself before me. But I cannot say to what extent I was able to rid my thoughts of the swinish janitor and to open them to the decorous drama that was playing at the table. What I do remember quite sharply was when my friend began nipping at my sleeve.

"Bathroom," he said.

"You want to go to the bathroom?" I said.

"Bathroom," he said, still pinching my sleeve and tugging at it.

"Lad, lad, you can manage for yourself," I said, more amused than bothered, really.

We all watched him stagger off.

He seemed to make his way well enough—stepping uncertainly, but a reliable bet to carry out his mission without assistance.

We watched him go around a corner and then we fell to chatting again. I believe I introduced the matter of the sled, an unspeakable felony, an outrage that would give me no peace. I must add that my companions seemed eager enough to discuss the matter, to register as yet another insupportable instance of the trying circumstance we urban dwellers are asked to tolerate.

"Vandals," I said. "A city of vandals."

"We live in fear of plunder," the other fellow said.

And the woman added, "No one is safe."

WE WERE GETTING ON
rather briskly with the subject, I must say. But conversation suddenly ceased when, as one, we understood our victim had been absent overlong.

Should someone go look?

The woman said, "Oh, it always takes him forever."

I recall thinking this her first coarse remark of the evening, and was a shade disappointed that this item of tastelessness was likely as far as she would let herself go. The other chap was on the point of rising when we all saw our fellow appear from around the corner, stumbling in our direction, but making reasonably effective headway.

When he had seated himself, the woman addressed him with a certain firmness. "It always takes you forever," she said, saying this clinically and not with the familiarity, on the one hand, nor with the irritability, on the other, that you might have expected, given the history that underlay our little assembly.

I believe I was astonished at how even-tempered the whole peculiar affair was turning out to be. In a way, the equable character of the evening was the least tedious aspect of it, one's assumption being that the expectable would in due course happen. Yes, I had liked it for that, or didn't. I cannot think now which.

I HAVE NOT ASKED HER
why she cries. Perhaps she does not know. And what is one to say of this, of knowing?

Besides, whichever of the plausible explanations she chose to give me, am I not already well versed in the plausible?

What the lesions left on my boy's face is exactly what I guessed they would. He picked at them—he could not keep himself from picking at them.

The landlord has sent a letter reviewing the procedure for the discarding of trash. He asks that I return to my customary respect for the premises. I will reply that my respect for the premises has not wavered. I will reply that I am unwavering in every respect.

I will reply that my boy will be unwavering in his time, and that my wife does not waver, either.

I wonder if it would alarm the bastard to know this.

I wonder what the bastard thinks.

I DO NOT KNOW
how much longer we were talking and eating and drinking when our host broke his silence to say:

"Didn't take me forever."

We stared at him.

"Are you answering something I said?" the woman said.

Our host stared back, either past speech or not talking—it was not worth bothering to tell which.

"Are you responding to something one of us said?" I said.

"Telephoning," he said.

"You were telephoning?" the other fellow said. "Or is it that you want to use the telephone now?"

"Telephoning," our friend said.

"You were telephoning," the woman said, "and that's what took you so long—am I right, darling? And who were you telephoning?" she said, her voice uninflected by teasing or annoyance, a mild voice and not without its charm.

"Wife," my friend said, tilting slightly forward with the utterance and then sagging back into his chair again.

And then he slid all the way off it.

I happened to be nearest, and was accordingly the one obliged to hoist him from the floor and get him settled again. But the man was jerking me down by my garment, and I suppose I was the only one to hear him. After all, he could barely speak above a whisper now. As a matter of fact, the others were no longer paying him any mind. Indeed, they seemed to have revisited the topic of urban devastations, and to be exploiting it with some delight.

"Sick. Come get me home. Wife," the silly tick said.

"Not
really
, lad," I said. "You say you called your wife? You told her to come take you home? To come
here?
"

But his only word to me was more of the same.

"Wife," my best friend said.

I WAS READY
when the felon came. Doubtless, he presumed that improvising would throw me off, his randomizing the weekdays and the hours that he cleaned. Certainly he could not have anticipated that I too could keep to an indeterminate routine, varying the time I departed for the office, the time I returned home, never repeating my behavior many days in a row. Make no mistake of it, I am not without my guile.

I was ready.

I could hear him down there, struggling to climb the steps to the second landing, no doubt straining with the weight and bulk of the lumpish vacuum cleaner that he used. I had never seen the machine and I had never seen him, but I imagined that both were big—very large, perhaps. That is why I had the hammer in my hand when I opened the door to take up my station at the top of the stairs.

Of course he left off coming when he saw me.

He lowered the machine to free himself of his burden, a brilliant red canister very like a decorative oil drum, the thick hose looped around his squat dark neck a serpent of a kind, a very serpent!

"What do you want?" he said.

"The sled," I said.

"Sled?" he said. "I have no sled."

He was not a big man.

I am not a big man. But he was not big, either—or so it then seemed to me sighting along the diagonal line that ran from me down to him. And he was old. Sixty or more. Not that one can know with people of his kind.

"You criminal," I said, and raised the hammer to make certain he saw I meant business.

"You're crazy!" he shouted up at me from where he with noticeable awkwardness stood.

"Crazy?" I screamed. "You call me crazy?"

I took two steps down.

He responded by shoving the vacuum cleaner against the iron railing and jamming it there with his knee.

"Crazy man, crazy man!" he shouted. "Leave me alone, you leave me alone, or I tell!"

"
Whom
will you tell?" I screamed. "It is I who will tell! I will tell them that you called me crazy!
I
will tell, you filth! I will tell that you called the father of a boy crazy! I will tell them that if I am crazy, it is you that have made me crazy! Filth! Dirt!" I shrieked. "Go get the sled from wherever you put it or I will give you this!"

I held the hammer higher.

He let go of the vacuum cleaner and it slammed all the way down, its sullen descent thunderous as the steel barrel bashed the stone all the distance to the bottom.

He was quick for a man of his years, huffing up the stairs with bewildering speed. I hardly had a moment to ready myself, to swing with the force that was needed.

I hit him. I hit him in the face.

I think it was a solid blow.

I HAD JUST GOT
my friend upright in his chair again when the woman that was coming toward us called out. She called loud enough for everyone to hear.