Grab Bag (3 page)

She said when she heard a mounted policeman riding down the street, she’d run and watch out the front window. If the horse relieved itself, she’d go out with one of the plastic buckets and scrape up the manure for her plants. In spite of this amazing solicitude, the plants never looked thrifty. I always found something yellowish and unwholesome about them, like the man-eating jungle plants I used to scare myself by imagining when I was a child.

During these drying sessions, I got to know the young fellow who popped in and out. David was Monique’s errand boy, I found, though he hardly qualified as a boy, being in his early twenties from the look of him. Monique didn’t like to shop, she told me, even though the grocer was just across the street and the bakery next door, so David did it for her. One night while I was sitting in my robe and hairpins, she sent him out for a barbecued chicken. She spent the entire period of his absence telling me what a lovely boy he was and how much he enjoyed doing her favors. When he got back with the chicken, she tipped him about twice what the chicken had cost. I remember thinking he must get a good deal out of her, one way and another.

Not chicken, however. She did invite him to share it, but he said he had other plans. She invited me, too, but I pretended I had to rush home and cook dinner for the husband I did not in fact have. So she went upstairs alone—she lived in a flat over her shop—to put the chicken away, leaving me feeling silly in nothing but that toweling robe and a headful of pins, and David trying to look suave and poised.

“I only do it out of pity,” he blurted when she’d gone. “I’d turn down the money, but I’m too much of a gentleman to hurt her feelings.”

I made some hypocritical noise and he left quickly because we could hear her coming back. That night I insisted on leaving the shop before my hair was properly dry, but I kept my appointment again the following week.

After that, I saw David a few more times. He was always neatly, even foppishly dressed, and he always went out of his way to impress me with his gentlemanly manners, managing each time to convey the assurance that he only tolerated the gross, middle-aged masseuse but of pity. I began to wonder why I myself tolerated her, but still I went.

It was along toward the middle of March I decided I’d had enough. I was in the chair with the sulphur fumes just beginning to rise around me. Monique was out in the other room, puttering around with her plants. David had come in. I could hear her complaining to him that they weren’t looking so good, as if she’d only just noticed what should have been obvious all along.

Suddenly I felt a blast of cold air on my face. The traffic noises that had been muffled became louder, and over them came the unmistakable clop-clop-clop of shod hooves on asphalt. So it had happened. A mounted policeman was riding down the street. Monique had thrown open a window and stuck out her head to see whether the horse was going to perform.

It must have. I heard Monique shout, “Here’s de bucket an’ shovel. Go kvick.”

“Go where?” said David.

“Out dere. Scrape it up before it gets all skvashed in by de cars.”

“Are you crazy? You expect a gentleman to—”

“What shentleman? You nuttin’ but a young punk wit’ pig ideas. My plants is wort’ more dan you.”

I don’t know what he hit her with. I only heard the thud, and the crash when she must have fallen against the hairdressing table. I only heard him dragging the body through the doorway to the massage table around the corner from where I sat. I only heard him grunting, sobbing, cursing as he boosted his late patroness up on the table. And then I heard a lot more that I wish I could forget.

I knew what he’d got hold of, a big kitchen cleaver Monique had brought downstairs to show me when I’d rung the bell for my appointment. She’d been using it to cut up meat for a stir-fry, which was her latest culinary enthusiasm. She’d laughed and shouted about how she sliced the meat thin like the chef at Benihana. Quick as lightning. Whack! Whack! Whack! She loved doing that, she’d said. She’d whacked the air viciously a little too close to my nose, to show me how.

He was doing it now—whack, whack, whack, cursing and sobbing, yelling at her. “My plants wort’ more dan you. Fuckin’ old bitch! I’m a gentleman!” And then a small splash, like something being dropped into a bucket of water. More whacks, more splashes. God in heaven, he was feeding her to the plants!

And there was I, zipped up to my neck in heavy-duty brown plastic, a helpless prisoner in that accursed chair. There was not one God-blessed thing I could do but sit with the sweat pouring off me, listening to him whack and sob and curse and splash. The smell of blood was overcoming the smell of sulphur. What must that table look like by now?

Monique had taken away my sheet, the way she always did, to put under me when I’d finished steaming and was supposed to lie on the table and be dripped on with the loofah. He was cutting her up on my sheet.

I must have been getting feverish by then. I found myself worrying about how the laundry was going to get the bloodstains out. Don’t ask me how long I sat in that scalding trap. One doesn’t think of a nightmare in terms of how long it lasts. I could feel the blood pounding in my head, harder and harder, as if it was going to burst out and mingle with all that other blood. It was either the chair or the cleaver. I started to scream.

“Monique! Monique, where are you?”

I heard the cleaver clatter to the floor. Poor David, I thought quite unreasonably. He must have got the shock of his life. Then I thought, “Now he’ll have to come and kill me.”

But all he did was stammer, “M—Monique isn’t here.”

“Oh, David!” I put everything I had into hailing my rescuer. “Thank goodness it’s you. Monique left me here and I fainted from the heat. I’ve been unconscious a long time, I think. I can’t remember anything. Where is she?”

“A horse went down the street.”

“You mean she ran out with that silly bucket and left me here? Doesn’t she know how to treat a lady?”

“Sh-she wanted me, to go.” His voice was all to pieces.

“A gentleman like you?” I cried. “She must be out of her mind. Look, David, could you possibly come in here and unzip me? I know it’s an embarrassing thing to ask a gentleman, but I’ll keep my eyes shut so you won’t be embarrassed. On my word of honor.”

I’d keep the promise. I had no desire to see the bloodstained cleaver swinging down at me, though in fact I was almost past caring. Anything, anything to get out of this ghastly chair. I was in hell already. At least the grave would be cool.

“I’m a gentleman,” he said.

“I know you are, or I wouldn’t ask. My eyes are closed. Truly.”

I heard him dithering around the doorway. Then, incredibly, the zipper was moving.

“Thank you, David,” I said. “You’ve saved my life.”

He started laughing, crazily, hysterically. So did I. I suspect he was high on something. I know I was. Finally I got myself under control.

“I know I don’t have to ask a gentleman like you to please step out into the other room while I get my clothes on. Would you mind just shutting the door as you leave?”

It worked, feeble as it was. He did exactly what I’d prayed he would, slammed the door and locked it from the other side, forgetting about that back exit to the alleyway. I put on what few clothes I had. The rest were still in the other room, but thank God I’d brought my pocketbook with me into the steam room. One doesn’t leave one’s pocketbook anywhere, not in the city.

The shock didn’t really hit me until I got outside. Then I had to hold on to the trash cans to keep from collapsing. A bitter wind had come up and perhaps that saved my life. I don’t know. Anyway, it prodded me to grope my way to the curb and flag a taxi.

Somehow or other, I managed to give the right address and remain conscious until we got there. I believe I grossly overpaid the driver, because he was willing to leave his cab and help me up the stairs. I told him I was just out of the hospital after an operation and must have overdone. He would have come in, but I said my husband would be there to help me, and shut the door in his face. Then I flopped down on the rug in the foyer and passed out.

After a while, I suppose I must have roused myself enough to crawl into bed. Anyway, there I was and there I stayed. It did occur to me in flashes that I ought to telephone the police, but I couldn’t hold on to the thought long enough to do anything about it. It wasn’t until the following evening that one of my co-workers, disturbed because I hadn’t called the office, stopped by the apartment. He took one look at me and sent for an ambulance.

I was in the hospital for several days before any visitors were allowed. I’d developed a rather spectacular case of pneumonia, it appeared, perhaps from the alternate steaming and chilling. During all this time, I wondered off and on about telling the police, but then somebody would come along to adjust my oxygen or pump some more antibiotic into me and I’d drop off to sleep again.

Finally they let my co-worker in to see me. I thanked him for his efforts on my behalf and for the strong, healthy, blooming plant the office staff had sent. I couldn’t very well say I wished they hadn’t because it made me think of unwholesome yellowish leaves and doughy white fingers dropping into buckets. He said that was okay, they all missed me.

“I was worried sick when you didn’t show up on Friday. I thought you’d been hurt in the fire.”

“What fire?” I asked him.

“Oh, didn’t you know? That place where you got your hair done.”

“My hair?” I had to stop and think. Then I remembered he’d dropped me off once on his way home. I’d forgotten Monique’s sign read HAIRDRESSING.

“Yes, it was a bad one,” he said. “The whole shop was gutted. It started from overheated wiring, I believe, a dryer left on too long or something like that.”

The chair. I hadn’t thought to switch off the steam. Neither, of course, had David.

“Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t feeling well Thursday?” he was asking in a somewhat injured tone. “I’d have been glad to run you home. Anyway, you sure picked the right time to skip your appointment. One of the hairdressers … hey, probably I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“No, tell me,” I said. “I want to know.”

“Well, they found a body. The remains of one, anyway. A young fellow who worked there.”

“David?”

“I guess so. Did you know him?”

“I’d seen him a few times. He just came in to do … odd jobs. Was he the only one?”

“Yes, and the police are wondering why. The woman who owned the place seems to have disappeared.”

I started to say, “Did they look in the buckets?” Then I didn’t. What was the point, now?

“It turns out she didn’t have a very good record.” He was trying to be delicate, I noticed. Prostitution or pandering, I guessed, thinking of those coarse white hands, the restaurants and taxicabs, the fluffy powder puff, and the way she hadn’t liked to walk the streets anymore. “They think she may have torched the building for the insurance, then got scared when the man was trapped in the fire, and took off.”

“That’s as reasonable an explanation as any,” I said.

It was, you know.

THIS LITTLE VIGNETTE WAS
written sometime around 1965, rejected with the speed of light by
Yankee
magazine, and allowed to lie fallow for ten years or more. Then it occurred to me that here was the beginning of a full-length mystery novel. Peter Shandy’s original approach to the Yuletide scene was retained, but prosaic Bemis College metamorphosed into Balaclava Agricultural College for the Peter Shandy novels.

“I do think, Professor Shandy, you might show some consideration,” sputtered the bursar’s wife.

“It’s only once a year,” pleaded the Dean of Women. “I’d be only too glad—”

“I thank you,” said Professor Shandy. “I shall keep Christmas in my own way, as usual.”

“But you don’t keep it,” wailed the bursar’s wife, sounding like Scrooge’s nephew only less cheerful.

The professor did not reply, “Bah, humbug.” He merely backed his visitors out the door. His adroitness was the result of long practice.

This was the seventy-third such interview. Professor Shandy had kept count. He had a passion for counting. He would have counted the spots on an attacking leopard. If the hairs on his head were indeed numbered, he would have known the exact number. As it happened, however, he was bald.

Every Christmas season during the eighteen he had spent teaching natural science at Bemis College, he had been tackled by virtually every faculty wife and civic leader in Bemisville. Over the years faces had altered, come and gone, but the plaint was ever the same.

“We have a tradition to maintain.”

The tradition dated back, as Professor Shandy’s research had revealed, no farther than 1907, when the wife of the then president of the college had found herself stuck with a box of Japanese lanterns left over from the alumni ball. Being of a temperament which combined artistic leanings with Yankee thrift, she conceived the notion of staging a Grand Illumination of the common on Christmas Eve, producing a dramatic effect at practically no expense. As the years wore on, the professor had come to feel a deep sense of personal injury because it had not rained that night.

In fact, the event had attracted so much attention that it had been repeated with ever-accumulating embellishments ever since. As time went on, the village green had become a positive welter of blue lights, red sleighs, and whimsical figurines of carolers in quaint costume.

The householders around the common, and eventually throughout the village, had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the jollification. Of late years, Bemisville had become one multicolored blaze of Yuletide spirit. People drove miles to look at the lights. Pictures appeared in national magazines.

However, the photographers always had to avoid one dark spot in the gala scene. This was the home of Professor Shandy. He alone, like a bald, pudgy King Canute, stood firm against the all-engulfing Christmas tide.

In the daytime, as even the bursar’s wife admitted, it was not so bad. In fact, the small house of rosy old bricks looked quite festive in its frame of snow-covered evergreens. This was what really galled the ladies of the village.