Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (34 page)

Only then did he panic.

“Jan! Jesus Jan!”

He shoved at his door but it wouldn’t move and pain raced hot through his shoulder. He tried again but he was weak and hurt and then he heard her pulling at it from the outside, calling his name.

“Other side!” he said. “Your side. I’m coming! I’m okay.”

Thank God, he thought. Not for himself. For her.

He got out of the harness and edged himself across the seat past the air bag to the door. By the time he got one foot out on the tarmac she was already there in front of
him, leaning toward him, crying and smiling both, her pale thin arms reaching out to him to ease him gently home.

Maybe this is a mistake, he thought.

People just kept going by me.

Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. It was possible.

Near the exit to Toledo Blade Boulevard he pushed it up to eighty, sightless of the speedometer in the roaring dark.

There were lights out there in the distance.

I’ll get flowers, she thought. I’ll make dinner.

Candlelight.

No wine
.

Everything new, she thought. People could start over. People could forgive and if not forget exactly they could take up life sadder and wiser than they were and make something good of it, they could make love again and find a halfway decent job and maybe even someday make a baby, she wasn’t too old, she had her health now that the poison was gone and the dark cloud over her life was gone, she had strength.

I’m coming, Tim
, she thought.
I’m coming home
.

I’m alive. I’m fine
.

I’m waiting for the postman again. I promised myself I’d stop that but here I am.

Most days nothing comes. Not even junk. Nothing.

Which is all to the good, I suppose.

I dreamed last night that I’d broken my leg, so I had to take a cab back to my hotel. Which is silly because there are no cabs here and I live in a little house at the end of a long dirt road and there are no hotels here either. Anyhow I took a cab and got distracted, I was looking out the window and I must have let the driver take a wrong turn somewhere because the next thing I knew I was lost. I cursed the driver. I hated that stupid sonovabitch. By the time we found my hotel we were in deadly emnity. I had whined and bullied. For his part he wouldn’t say a word to me.

I got out without paying and went directly into the bathroom and found two old sticks to which I’d attached some rusty nails and I whipped myself over the back and shoulders until I’d done myself real harm.

As I say, it’s all ridiculous, because I live all alone out
here at the end of this narrow dirt road, it’s so wild that I’ve got a nest of garter snakes just under my doorstep. There’s a beaver dam thirty yards away. There aren’t any hotels.

Yesterday I waited too. I waited all day long.

Jesus! Shit! Fuck the postman!

Think I’ll go to town.

By the side of the road he saw a child long dead, small birds feeding on its entrails. It was impossible to tell if the child was male or female. It stank terribly. There was a horse with a bullet in its brain further on. Just at the town line he stopped to watch some boys nailing a woman to a barn. He watched for a long time. They had put two nails in each hand, one through the palm and another just below the wrist. The woman was naked. Her blood ran down her arms and over her breasts, which were small and tanned. The boys beat her with thin birch switches about the face and head. One of them pushed his thighs against her but he was still too small
.

Mr. Crocker was busy with a customer so he sat down at the soda fountain to wait. In the paper’s op ed page there was a debate over whether whoever finally was to be at the end of the chain letter was determined by chance or personality. A lot of bullshit. Mr. Crocker poured him a cream soda and they watched the building burning across the street. Leary’s drugstore
.

“Don’t like that,” said Mr. Crocker. “Could just as well be me
.”

“Nobody’d burn you out
.”

“Hard to say what some people will do these days, Alfred
.”

“You don’t have to worry.” He opened a package of potato sticks
.

“Postman arrive up your way yet?
”

“Not yet.”

“Been here already this morning. Henley got his letter, y’know
.”

“Did he? No, I didn’t know
.”

“
Got it yesterday
.”

“
What did he do?
”

“
Passed it on, of course
.”

“
That was sensible of him
.”

“
Wouldn’t expect otherwise of Henley
.”

“
No. I guess not
.”

He finished his soda and paid Crocker his dollar eighty and walked outside. So Henley had got his letter. He wondered how he felt. It was the first time anyone he knew personally had ever got one. He thought about Henley’s shy stutter and wondered. Of course now he was a free man. There was no need for him to worry anymore. Though it must have been a shock nevertheless. Alfred himself had taken to worrying far too much these days. It might be better to have it over with. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he envied Henley
.

Though now you couldn’t trust him
.

He walked across the street to the cafe. Jamie was sitting there in front of a cup of coffee, squinting at the smoke from the drugstore
.

“
Damned nuisance,
”
he said
.

“
It is
.”

“
I saw you come out of Crocker’s. He tell you about Henley?
”

“
Uh-huh
.”

“
Too bad
.”

“
You think so?
”

“
Sure.” He took a sip of his coffee. The mug was all but buried inside his hand. His broad bearded face dipped down to the hand and rose again. You barely saw the transaction. “Henley was a decent enough guy,” he said. “Mean drunk sometimes but otherwise he was fine. Now what have you got. Another bloody butcher. Either that or he’ll be having second thoughts or regrets or whatever and he’ll sit himself in a corner somewhere and wait for the brains to crawl on out of him. Either way we won’t be seeing much of Henley anymore. Too bad. I’ll miss him
.”

“
I suppose
.”

“
You’re a cold one
.”

“
I didn’t know him all that well
.”

“
Sure you did. Anyway I knew him
.”

He ordered coffee just to sit with Jamie awhile. It was too soon to go back. He really didn’t want to go back
.

“
You ever hear of anybody the same after the letter?” Jamie said. “Damned right you haven’t. They all change. Always for the worse, seems to me. And they call this a religion. Bullshit
.”

“
There’s something of a . . . religious nature about it
.”

“
Sure. In the old days they used to rub shit in their hair
.”

“
At least there’s the problem of conscience
.”

“
There is that
.”

The two friends sat silent for a moment. The wind had shifted so it was pleasant sitting there. Alfred wondered if Henley had put his name down. Or Jamie’s. The letter might be waiting for either of them
.

“
See the paper today?” said Jamie
.

“
Yes. They’re wondering what kind of man it will be who stops the letter. Again
.”

“
A saint of course
.”

“
You don’t think so?
”

“
No
.”

“
What kind then?
”

He shrugged. “Some fucking lunatic. Somebody tired, disgusted. No promethian, you can bet on that. Somebody without the stomach for it, without the imagination—I figure suicide is about lack of imagination. Somebody missing the urge to make use of all that permission.”

“
You?
”

“
Hell, no. I’ve got a few scores to settle. Enough to keep me busy for a while. I’ll take my turn. I expect to enjoy it. The freedom I mean. I don’t swallow a word of it but I’ll play the game according to the rules and then I’ll probably blow my damned fool brains out. Far too late for heroics or sanctity or whatever the fuck they’re calling it, but probably it’s inevitable. My imagination will just give out on me. What to do next? Followed by instant remorse. Conscience will hit me far too late to do anybody any damn good but it’ll hit me eventually. And
then of course I’ve had it. I think of conscience as a kind of pulling of the blinds, you know?
”

“
I have no desire to hurt anybody. Nobody
.”

“
Sure you do. Just wait
.”

It was the age they lived in, he thought—but that was hardly an explanation. Somewhere along the line he’d lost the track. It was the age they lived in but how? And why? It was impossible to see an evolution going on from the inside. All you could do was point to its most outlandish deformities, its most hideous incarnations. But the substance of the change lay hidden. Some mystery of the blood
.

He walked the same route home
.

The woman was still there, bleeding against the barn. He wondered if she was still alive. The boys were gone. The dead horse and the child were gone too. He wondered for what amusement they’d been dragged away. Someone had been using plastic explosive on the second-growth timber along the roadside. Trees cracked and scarred everywhere. No life exempt
.

He approached the house as he always did, carefully, soundlessly. By now it was his habit. An old woman had got Wayne Lovett with a shotgun as he walked through his own front door one night
.

His letter had fallen through the mail slot
.

He opened it
.

Just above his own name was Henley’s. It amused him to think that such a dangerous world should also be so damn predictable. He read the letter through and then read it again
.

The aforesigned pass on to you all responsibility for their actions, past, present and future. We deem this the highest honor, the highest challenge . . .

The colorless language disappointed him. There was nothing here either to inspire or elate. Was that exactly unexpected?

You may of course choose to accept or reject this responsibility . . .

He knew the contents. The contents were a matter of public record. It was the wording, the exact form and syntax which had fascinated him, which remained secret to any who had not
already got the letter and now he found that they had no power to stir him
.

To reject, merely add a new name to the space provided beneath your own. Be sure to check the list thoroughly to see that you do not repeat any name already entered above . . .

If this was the most important moment of his life he felt no resonance to it. Everything, everything was missing! He felt nothing. Only a great void in which a stranger who looked like himself held an odd but commonplace form letter. Who exactly dreamt this up? he wondered. And where? In what grey office building? At what grim bar?

Its conclusion was worst of all
.

Declared by the will of God and the First Congress of Faith, Abraham White, founder. All bless.

His Gethsemane bored him
.

I keep standing staring at the thing wondering who to send it on to. Someone in the family, maybe, some uncle or cousin. Maybe one of the kids. No point making them wait as long as I have, getting old waiting, getting more and more nervous. Besides, a lot of kids seem to enjoy themselves at this.

Maybe I should send it to Jamie. Not strange at all that we should talk about it today, as though it were understood between us—first Henley, then me, then Jamie. Or Jamie and then me. Whichever.

I wonder if I can do this. It’s as hard for me to choose freedom as it is to choose the other. I should not have got this letter. I’m not cut out for such decisions. Jamie would have been much more suitable. He’s smarter, tougher, more thoughtful.

Strange it doesn’t say what to do in order to end the chain. Everything else is so neatly and clinically spelled out for you. But I guess that’s understood. It’s the old, old concept of sin-eater again, only more extreme.

To end the chain you’d have to die. To accept responsibility
for all these crimes nothing short of death makes sense. And a hideous death at that. The worst death imaginable. What’s needed is a martyr, a brand-new Christ. If it were me I’d start by putting out my eyes.

Do I send the letter to somebody I hate or somebody I love? Do I spare those I love the pain of waiting or take a chance that the letter might miss them entirely, as unlikely as that seems? Henley neither loved me nor hated me. He just knew me. Was it fair of him or even decent to involve me? I wonder what went through his mind, writing down my name.