Murder in Little Egypt (19 page)

Dr. Cavaness knew about these excursions. He kidded Eddie about them, saying that if it weren’t for his weekends, Eddie might crack up, what with all the pressure he had from his mother and his responsibilities at the office. There was something nasty, something taunting about the way Dr. Cavaness talked about the weekends, that frightened Eddie. Did Dr. Cavaness want to control the weekends also? Was it not enough that Eddie slaved for him all week, was endangering his sanity for him?

One Saturday evening Eddie was eating alone in an Evansville café when a strange man walked in and said hello, calling him by name, looking him in the eye, then sitting down at another table. The man was rough in appearance, almost an itinerant, dirty, unshaven. He ordered coffee.

The only people Eddie knew in Evansville were members of the Presbyterian church. He panicked. He paid his check and drove straight home to Harrisburg. He felt certain that Dr. Cavaness had had him followed—but why? To intimidate him? To try to get something on him? To see if he was up to something on the weekends?

Only the previous Wednesday Eddie had finally got up the nerve to tell Dr. Cavaness that he wanted to give notice. The doctor had gone into a rage. There was the usual fist-pounding and screaming. The doctor threw a lamp against a wall.

“I won’t stay here!” Eddie found himself shouting back. He was surprised by his courage. It was the first time he had defied Dr. Cavaness.

“You won’t leave, either!” the doctor yelled. “You can bet your sweet ass on that!” He leaned over the desk spraying spittle. “If you think you’re leaving, you’re crazy. What makes you think you can get another job, anyway? I’ll ruin you. I’ll wreck your life. Your mother will be in the street. You have no idea what I can do to you. You’re a nobody. You work here and take what you can get, is that it? Well, let me tell you something, mister. You stay put or you’ll regret it, you can count on that. I guess you haven’t thought about what I can do to you. And I’ve got more than one option.”

Eddie was terrified. He thought of the people the doctor had taken out into the night at gunpoint. He thought of the school principal, of the women the doctor had ruined, of Marian and the children.

And after encountering the stranger in Evansville, Eddie was paralyzed. He saw that he had succeeded in making himself indispensable—but to the doctor’s ego, not only to his business. And he knew too much.

Eddie thought about himself and everyone who worked for Dr. Cavaness. The doctor could not tolerate independence or insubordination of any kind. We are all his slaves, Eddie said to himself.

Understanding the dominance Dr. Cavaness had achieved over him drove Eddie deeper into self-disgust. At home at night, his mother positioned in front of the television set, he shut himself into his room. He came to believe that if he did not quit his job he would end up in an institution. Every few weeks he forced himself to start clearing out his desk at the office, but the doctor always threatened him, jeered at him, and weakened him again. It was like a fatal marriage, Eddie thought. His position was the same as Marian’s. If she ever tried to leave, the doctor would find some way to ruin her, directly or indirectly. She was a prisoner.

Eddie tried to envision himself in another job. He saw himself going to pieces, getting fired, failing his mother. On many days he resigned himself to working for Dr. Cavaness or to going insane, or both. He lived constantly with a sharp pain shooting upward from his chest to his throat. He ate more compulsively than ever and ballooned. His music no longer soothed him: The gloom of the hymns weighed him down. He was like a man with a cancer who can think of nothing else.

11

EDDIE MILLER FINALLY GOT UP THE COURAGE TO QUIT ONE DAY late in 1968. Dr. Cavaness tossed an arts and crafts catalog onto Eddie’s desk and told him to order four hundred dollars’ worth of macramé materials for a certain married woman.

“She needs a hobby,” the doctor said.

Eddie thought over this latest demand. He was dizzy with indignation. He knew the woman, understood her fragile nervous state. The doctor was setting her up and asking Eddie to participate in the scheme, to act as his pander again. If I do this, Eddie thought, I am no better than he is. Before giving himself a chance to change his mind, he took the catalog in to Dr. Cavaness and placed it on his desk.

“I won’t do it,” Eddie said.

There was the expected reaction. But Eddie walked back to his cubicle and began clearing out his desk. He was frightened, but he felt clean and proud. The doctor rushed in ranting, waving his arms. Eddie continued packing up in his careful, methodical way. He wanted to leave everything in perfect order. His last act, before walking out the door with Dr. Cavaness screaming at him, was to straighten the rows of ledgers on his shelves.

Two days later a note scrawled in the doctor’s hand was delivered to Eddie’s house: “You’ll regret this” was all it said. His mother was frantic, but Eddie found another job with a doctor in Harrisburg. Dr. Cavaness telephoned the other doctor and accused him of trying to sabotage his practice, demanding that he fire Eddie.

Eddie held on to his new job. Memories and nightmares about Dr. Cavaness haunted him. At home he was afraid to answer the telephone. But he prayed, immersed himself in music, pleased his new employer with meticulous work. He was encouraged when two other office workers left Dr. Cavaness and visited Eddie to tell him how much they admired him and had been inspired by his bravery. They too had felt trapped and feared reprisals. They all agreed to keep one another posted about notes or telephone calls.

Eddie’s departure meant that Marian’s checks started to bounce, although she had no way of understanding the cause and effect, no idea of the role he had played in keeping her solvent. She took a teaching job at the Harrisburg nurses’ training school that brought home eight hundred dollars a month. The size of her paycheck showed her what it would be like to try to support her children by herself. Thank goodness the house was clear and Dale still paid the grocery bill. With baby-sitting expenses five days a week, she was no longer living the life of the carefree socialite, she kidded herself, no longer part of the Eldorado fast lane, the southern Illinois jet set! One month she found herself with an extra hundred dollars and bought Mark, Kevin and Sean monogrammed shirts to wear to school. They made fun of her and refused to put them on, but she wanted them to know, somehow, that she thought her boys were special.

She wondered how much Dale was giving Martha. She tried not to let her sons know what a bastard their father was being: She despised women who did that; it only tortured the children and screwed them up. They were Dale’s sons, and someday he would pay for their college educations and learn to be proud of them. Dale came by in the mornings for his laundry; she felt foolish doing it, but, she reasoned, apart from the hopes she still harbored, it was an excuse for Dale to see the boys.

Sean was particularly attached to Dale, hugging him and clinging to him whenever he saw him, sometimes getting up early so as to be sure not to miss him, in contrast to Mark and Kevin, who kept their distance. Kevin especially was reserved around his father: But that was Kevin, watchful and self-contained; of them all, Marian worried least about him. In Dale’s absence, Sean followed Mark around and imitated him until people began to say that the two brothers were alike, although to Marian they were not.

Sean had none of Mark’s casual airs and outward self-confidence: Marian knew that in his heart Mark must have been suffering from his father’s coldness to him, but he had many friends, was a great favorite with the girls, seemed to be managing to find his own world. Sean clung to adults and was uneasy at school. He froze when faced with a test, no matter how many hours Marian spent coaching him in reading and arithmetic. Sean was always in search of a grown-up audience and became a kind of local character in his quest for approval. He liked to walk into town wearing his cowboy hat, his little boots and his toy six-gun, buttonholing adults in mimicry of the Westerns he saw on television. He strolled into Lou Beck’s pharmacy one afternoon, settled onto a stool at the soda fountain and called out in his version of a John Wayne voice:

“Why, Lou Beck! I haven’t seen you in well nigh thirty years!”

Raising four boys on her own became a challenge Marian sometimes despaired of meeting. There were continuous crises, some that would have been minimized by having a sensible man around who could exert discipline without losing control, others that required her to contact Dale in spite of everything, as reluctant as she was to rely on him. Grandpa Peck did his best to fill in for his errant son and made no secret to Marian of his disgust with Dale’s irresponsibility. But Peck was pushing seventy. Things happened that were beyond his help.

On an autumn Sunday afternoon in 1969, when Mark was fifteen, Kevin thirteen, and Sean seven, Peck piled the boys into his old Plymouth Fury and took them hunting at the Galatia farm. They were not after anything in particular, squirrels or rabbits maybe, out just to enjoy the Indian summer day in the open. Mark carried a pump-action .22, Kevin the single-shot .22 rifle that Peck had given him and that Kevin was sure was the best gun in the world. Sean trailed along, too young to hunt but anxious to be a part of the adventure.

They walked down the graveled road, tire tracks with weeds sprouting in the center hump, Mark in the lead, Kevin a few yards behind him, Sean and Peck bringing up the rear. Mark and Kevin were shooting as they walked, picking out tree trunks, rocks, tin cans.

Mark stopped to shoot at the surface of a pond. Kevin kept on, wondering whether Mark had found a turtle, drew up next to his brother on the left and, as Mark paused in his firing, walked past him. Mark fired again.

Kevin fell to his knees. He was still holding his rifle. He saw blood on the rifle. He felt pain on the right side of his face and was conscious of a terrific ringing in his right ear.

Kevin heard Grandpa call his name, felt him grab from behind and pull him to his feet. He swayed in Grandpa’s arms and figured he was about to pass out. His face throbbed, blood ran down his T-shirt. He bent his right arm and the blood was warm in the crook. He brought his hand up to his face, fingered a wound in the wet, loose flesh at the bottom of his ear and below.

Maybe Mark only shot a hunk out of my ear, Kevin thought, maybe I’m lucky. He took deep breaths and was surprised that he was standing, with all this blood.

Then he heard Mark’s voice:

“I killed him! I killed him!”

“Do I look dead?” Kevin wanted to say, but the words would not come out. Grandpa’s face was horror-struck. I guess he thinks I’m dead, too, Kevin thought. Maybe I am, but why am I standing?

Mark threw his gun into the woods, shouting, “I killed him, I killed him.”

“Get the gun and help me get Kevin into the car,” Grandpa said. “Hurry up.”

“He hates me! He hates me!” Mark cried.

It was about two hundred yards to the car. Sean ran about speechless, frantic.

They helped Kevin into the backseat, still holding tight to his face with his right hand. He could make out two wounds now, one with his thumb, just below the ear, the other with his little finger, up beside his nose. He pressed his fingers into the holes to try to stop the blood. I survived a gunshot, he thought, but I might bleed to death.

Mark was crying. I’m the one who’s hurt, Kevin thought, but I’m not crying. On the main highway Grandpa pushed the Ply-mouth up to ninety, fishtailing around curves. Kevin wondered whether they would fly off the road and die that way, all of them together.

“Are you all right back there?” Grandpa shouted.

“It hurts,” Kevin said. His head felt like someone was hammering it with a sledge. Sean, squeezed in beside Mark in the front, started crying.

“What are
you
crying for?” Kevin said.

“It hurts!” Sean said.

It was eleven miles to Eldorado. They had to find Dale. The Fourth Street house was on the way to Pearce Hospital and Grandpa stopped there first: Marian might know where Dale was. On a Sunday he might be anywhere.

But Dale happened to be at the house picking up some clothes; they spotted him in the garage. Mark leaped out of the car shouting “I killed Kevin! I killed Kevin!” and Marian ran down the steps, took one look at Kevin and started jumping up and down.

“Get him to the hospital,” Dale said.

The bullet had tunneled through the side of Kevin’s face, entering near the jawline below the ear and exiting beside the nose. It had been such a close shot that stipplings of gunpowder dotted the face and dirtied the entrance wound. For some reason the hospital’s stock of proper cleansing agents was depleted, and it was a Sunday; so Dale contacted a local gun merchant, had him open up his shop, and swabbed the wound with gun solvent. He ran a wire up the entrance wound and out the exit to remove bullet fragments.

Friends gathered with Marian at the hospital during the two-hour operation. Everyone crowded forward as Dale emerged from surgery.

“He’s going to make it,” Dale said to no one in particular as he walked down the corridor, striding past Marian without looking at her.

Marian waited at Kevin’s bedside for him to wake up. When Dale strode in with a nurse to check on his patient, he spoke to Marian for the first time since the accident.

“Don’t think this is going to make any difference in our relationship,” he said.

Standing holding the still-unconscious Kevin’s hand, feeling as if she had just been knifed, Marian thought that if Dale felt compelled to be that cold and cruel he might have had the decency to wait until the nurse was out of the room.

Kevin recovered. The facial nerve had been hit but not severed; the right side of his mouth drooped for several weeks, as if he had had a stroke, then returned to normal. Kevin held no grudge against his brother. He knew he ought not to have walked in front of Mark, who had been aiming with his right eye, his left eye shut. Kevin had come up on Mark’s blind side.