Killdozer! (4 page)

And she kept saying, “Then go, Eddie. I’ll be all right. I won’t run away from you if you leave me alone for a few hours. Go see your friends.” So I did. But it didn’t work out. Those weren’t stag parties I was going to. The babes all knew I was married, and when they saw me by myself all the time they got the wrong idea. A little bit of this, and I went home one night and laid down the law.

She didn’t like it, but she didn’t argue. She took an unconscionably long time to put on her face, but she came without a peep. I didn’t expect that meekness. I told her so. She smiled without enthusiasm.

“I’ve asked you not to force me to come with you,” she said sadly. “I guess you’ve just got to find out for yourself.”

We started on West Fifty-second Street and did it up pretty well. The evening netted us four dinner invitations, three pairs of tickets to shows on the stem, and a total of ninety-two telegrams on that night’s program. Maria did me proud. There wasn’t a lovelier or more charming woman under lights that night, and after the first half hour or so she seemed to be enjoying it. When I tossed her into a cab in front of the studio at one-thirty, she grinned and squeezed my hand. “Maybe I was wrong, Eddie. I hope so anyway. But it was swell.”

I went on up to the studio, feeling all warm inside, and it wasn’t the highballs either. Jakie Feltner was winding up the “Hits at Home” stretch, two hours of records of bands playing currently in New York spots, with a background of transcribed night-club chatter to make the unwary listener think he was listening to the real thing. He gave me a peculiar look through the plate-glass as I went in, waved his hand toward my table. I threaded my way through the record-stacks
and picked up the sheaf of early wires that fed out of the teletype by my microphone. As a favor to me, Jakie used to read off the one-thirty to two wires and stack up the first few releases for me while his own were being played. I gathered that he had come across a wire of particular moment. He had. Among the run-of-the-mill requests was this little gem, marked “Personal”:

I read it over three times. The Duke was one of my steadies, who apparently went on a telegram binge every payday. I’ve seen him send twenty-eight in two hours. I never did find out who he was, though he apparently saw me very often.

“Pretty, huh?” said Jakie, closing the soundproof door into the other section and coming over to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “The guy’s nuts.” He looked over my shoulder at the Duke’s wire. “Oh—that one. Could be. Maybe all these are nuts too.” He riffled through the pile, tossed out three more wires.

They were all lousy but the last one hurt the most. Harry had been a friend of mine for years. Maria and I had joined his crowd a couple of hours ago at Dave’s place. Bergen and his wife were there. Bergen was Harry’s A-number-one rival and competitor in the printing business. I’d known for quite some time that Harry had a deal coming up with the Williamson concern that would give him weight enough to drive Bergen underground. I gathered that now that the info had leaked out through Maria, Bergen had managed to bear down on Williamson and kill the merger. That was bad enough in itself; but imagine how I felt when I remembered that
I had positively not told Maria one word about Harry Elliot’s affairs!

Jakie said quietly, “Sorry, Eddie.”

I looked at him. I felt my jaw flapping foolishly and waved him away. “Go back to your turntables, Jakie. You’re on the air—remember?”

“Yeh.” He went to the door, turned to give me a long look, and then dashed for the mike as his number played itself out. Jakie was swell. He’d do anything for me, I knew, but there was nothing he could do about this.

How could Maria have done these things? If she had why did she? I could easily see how. Anyone who goes clubbing with me has to spend a lot of time by himself, because I know so damn many people. I’m always hopping from one table to another. While I was making the rounds, I guess Maria had been getting in her work.

“That—stinks,” I said.

Long practice had taught me how to maintain a free-and-easy mike style no matter how I felt, no matter how much good luck or bad
had piled into me before the show. Jakie put my theme on the table and the red light in front of me flashed on. I sat back mulling over the whole dirty business and when the last chorus of my theme faded, I grabbed the mike around the neck and went to work.

“Top o’ the wee sma’ to ye, boys and gals. This is the man behind the mike who makes all that talking noise between the music—Eddie Gretchen’s the name. We’re open for business till the sun comes up and stops us, and if there’s any ol’ thing you want to hear over the air, drop me a wire and tell me about it. Don’t call me up because I haven’t the intelligence to use a phone. Before I play you some transcriptions and stuff there’s a little something on my mind, viz. and to wit: There’s no law yet in this country against sending me personal wires while I’m working. It’s fun for you and fun for me. But there’s nothing funny about hitting below the belt. I just got a sheaf of that kind of thing and I don’t feel so happy about it, boys and gals. I’m not saying to quit sending them, though. Oh no. But when you do, sign your names and addresses. If I find out that the information is phony, I might like to drop around and personally cave in some faces. Think it over while Tony Reddik’s swell little band shows you and you how drums are really kicked around in ‘Suitcase Shuffle.’ ” I spun the platter and let it go.

Well, it brought results. During the show I got fourteen more wires of that sort. I think all of that powder room crowd were represented. Some of them were funny and some of them were nasty and some were just hurt about it. I got my names and addresses too. Nine of them were women. It certainly seemed as if Maria had done the most vicious piece of blabbing I’d ever heard of. She told husbands about their wives and wives about their best friends. She broke up business deals and caused fistfights and broke up more than one otherwise happy couple. I couldn’t understand where she got all her information, or what on earth possessed her to spill it around. Possessed—possessed … the word did something to my brain. That was the thing she was always trying to tell me about. The reason she didn’t want to mix with a crowd. I’d seen loose-tongued women before, but this particular woman—damn it! She was so restrained! Her every thought and movement was so perfectly controlled! Well,
I thought sourly, she’s going to have her chance to explain it all tonight. Every dirty lousy little bit of it.

She was asleep when I came in. I stood over her, wanting to kiss her, wanting to punch her lovely mouth, wanting to kick her teeth in, wanting to have her put her arms around me so I could cry on her shoulder. She must have sensed me near her. She put up her arms and smiled without opening her eyes. I took the telegrams out of my breast pocket and closed her fingers on them. Without a word I went into the bathroom and shut the door. As I peeled off my clothes and got into pajamas and a robe I heard her start to cry, and then be quiet again. When I went back she was lying with her face buried in the crumpled telegrams.

“I see you beat me to it,” I said evenly. She turned her head ever so slightly, so that one dark eye regarded me piteously. “What do you mean?”

“Why, I was going to rub your nose in those wires myself.”

She rolled over and sat up. Her face was scared and defiant, and not terribly apologetic. I hadn’t expected any of that except the fear. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said softly. “Don’t say I didn’t try and try to keep you from taking me to those places. Don’t say I didn’t try to tell you about it even before we were married.”

“My mistake for shutting you up. Go on—you have the floor.”

“What do you expect me to say? I’m sorry?”

“Babe, that doesn’t begin to cover it.” I went over to her. My gums hurt, the way my jaw was clenched, driving the teeth into them. “I want the whole story. I want to know why you are such a lousy little blabbermouth, and how you got the dirt you threw around all night.”

“Sit down,” she said coolly, “or you’ll get a seizure and fall down.”

Her eyes were very wide, and that dark something in them that had chilled me on the day we met was there. I crossed the room and sat. She began to talk in a low voice.

“I was possessed last night, Eddie. Not once, but time and time again. Oh, you’re so stupid sometimes! I knew this was going to happen—I knew it, but you had to be so bullheaded and—oh, I
can’t blame it on you, except for not trying to understand. I’ll try once more. You can take it or leave it, Eddie. I’ve known this was coming; I know just what to say. Funny, isn’t it?

“Remember what I told you about the entity that is conceived of suspicion and born of guilt? It’s a wicked little
poltergeist
—an almost solid embodiment of hate. And I’m a susceptible. Eddie, I can’t be in the same room with any two people who bear suspicion and the corresponding sense of guilt! And the world is full of those people—you can’t avoid them. Everyone has dozens upon dozens of petty hates and prejudices. Let me give you an example. Suppose you have a racial hatred of, say, Tibetans. You and I are sitting here, and a Tibetan walks in. Now, you know him. He has a very fine mind, or he has done you a favor, or he is a friend of a good friend of yours. You talk for a half hour, politely, and everything’s all right. In your heart, though, you’re saying, ‘I hate your yellow hide, you sniveling filth.’ Everything will still be all right as long as he is unconscious of it. But once let this thought flicker into his mind—‘He dislikes me because of my race’—and then and there the
poltergeist
is born. The room is full of it, charged with it. It has body and power of its own, completely independent of you or the Tibetan. I am a susceptible. The entity approaches me. I try to avoid it. I make bright remarks. I move around the room, busy myself with some flowers, a book, anything, but it’s no use. I can’t escape it. I can’t fight it away or close my ego to it. Suddenly it has me, completely. I am part of it. It directs me, drives me. Its whole purpose is one hate. It wants to drag your dislike and his suspicion into the light. I am its instrument now. My control is only strong enough to temper the words that burn at my lips. So instead of screaming out ‘He hates you, because he hates all of your yellow kind!’ I move closer to the man. I stop near him, and say out of the corner of my mouth, ‘You’d better go soon. He doesn’t like Tibetans and I don’t know how long he can keep on being polite.’ Once it’s said, the
poltergeist
is nullified. The hatred between you is open, no longer secret, and secret hate is the very essence of a
poltergeist
. It dissipates, and I am free; but the damage is done. The most that I can do is to apologize, make a joke of it, say I was trying to be funny. I won’t be believed, because my statement,
rotten as it was, was true in its very essence and can’t be denied. But if I should be believed in my apology, then the seeds of hatred and suspicion are left, and the entity is conceived all over again, and possession takes place once more, then and there. To be spared that, I never deny what I have said, and never apologize for it. It would only make it worse.

“That’s how it happens, Eddie, and it can’t be changed. I was always susceptible, and I made the condition permanent and acute by my experiments when I was alone in the mountains. I can’t change, Eddie. I shouldn’t have married you, shouldn’t have done this to you. I—guess this is the wind-up. I’ll get out.” She tried a weak little laugh. “Good thing we haven’t been married long enough to have collected a house and a mess of furniture, eh?”

“Yeh,” I said. I watched her as she got up, slipped into a house coat, and began to pack. She moved swiftly about the place, collecting the little odds and ends that I had just been learning to expect in my apartment. It had taken some learning, too. Bachelor digs sure get made over when a woman comes into them. After a while I went over and got into the bed. It was still a little warm and smelled nice. I turned my face to the wall, and in a minute I heard her thump a suitcase down beside the others in the middle of the room. She was looking at me; I could feel her eyes on the nape of my neck. I knew she was dressed for the street, all ready to go.

“Maria …”

“Yes, Eddie?” She answered a little too quickly to hide the fact that she wasn’t as collected as she hoped.

“Wake me up around four, will you? We’ll eat us some scrambled eggs and then take that spin around the park like we did when we were single.”

There was a thump when she dropped her handbag, and then she was all over me. I put my arms around her and held her until she gasped for breath, and then I ginned at her and got me some sleep.

After that I did my clubbing solo and let Maria build me a home. She loved it. If she missed not seeing people, she didn’t complain. I guess she got used to it after a while; I know I did. Things went along
beautifully until Ivor Jones, the station manager, called Jakie Feltner and me into his office one evening. Neither of us knew what was up, but we both had guesses.