Psychology and Other Stories (12 page)

And unlike any liar she had ever known, he did not seem at all concerned that you believe him. He did not swear, or repeat himself, or say “honest.” He contradicted himself and neither blushed nor took any pains to resolve these contradictions. The fact that he didn't even bother to be consistent proved that he wasn't lying; the stories he told must be, in some fundamental way, true. She even began to
question her earlier doubts. Wasn't it possible that he might need a dictionary of names to write a book on psychology? Wasn't it possible that he was both a psychologist and a salesman? Maybe he sold psychological supplies; or maybe he drove around recruiting new patients, and it was just easier to say “salesman” to a simple-minded waitress than to explain.

But then he did lie. After they finished eating he patted his belly, then his pockets, and told the waitresses that his cheques were in the car. He asked Slim and Missy to help him bring the books in for their friend. But when they were outside, he told them to hop in. Then he'd driven off without a word.

So she knew what he looked like when he lied. He looked the same. Nothing changed. They were miles down the highway before she even realized that they weren't going back.

“We didn't pay,” she said.

“You girls have any money?” asked Mr. Custard. “Didn't think so! So you see, we
couldn't've
paid, even if we wanted to.”

There was none of the exultation that she'd felt when she and Missy had run out of the first diner. She felt now only a sucking emptiness in her chest. She felt like a cheat.

“Is that why you ditched us? You didn't have any money?”

He nodded deeply, like someone making a long-overdue confession. “Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “even if that wasn't why, I'd probably say it was. But it was,” he added quickly, “it was.”

In the back seat Missy made a perturbed sound, and added the gloss: “Why
don't
you have any money?”

Mr. Custard shook his head slowly and sadly. “My hospital.”

Missy made a sound indicative of the inadequacy of this reply.

For a long time he stared out the windshield at the rolling highway.

“It burned down,” he said at last.

Slim had felt better as soon as he opened his mouth; it was some time before his meaning caught up with her relief. She realized now that it hadn't mattered what he'd said, only that he'd said something. He'd taken the trouble to justify himself. It was like the answers her teachers had offered to so many of her questions about the universe: she was happy to accept just about any answer other than “I don't know” or “Because.” To be told that atoms were composed of sub-atoms or that things fell because of something called gravity was satisfying because these
were
explanations, because they were answers. Knowing that her questions had answers was enough. The only insupportable universe was a universe in which things happened for no reason.

“Is that true?” she asked softly, naively imploring him to reassure her, even though she knew what he himself had admitted: that his answer would be the same whether he told the truth or not.

She had seen him lie to those waitresses. Had she seen him, at any time, tell the truth?

The outline of the thought that had blinked on in her mind now returned, and this time she looked at it. Her gramma was going to kill her—because Mr. Custard was going to kill them both. This realization came to her in her gramma's voice:
He's a psycho.

He was not a psychologist. Those were not his books. This was probably not his car. He had taken her and Missy out into the backwoods in the middle of the night. Missy was already gone. He would come for her next. He would have a knife or, what was somehow worse, a rope, and someone opened the car door and she screamed.

“Jumping Jesus, what the hell, I thought you were sleeping,” cried Missy, startled into loquacity.

Slim jumped out of the car, holding her hands up like blades. “Where is he?”

Missy groaned at Slim's ignorance. “Went to find gas,” she said at last, getting into the seat that Slim had vacated. “Thing's below E already.”

“This ain't a filling station. This ain't nowhere.”

Missy hunched her shoulders for warmth. “He went to siphon some out of some goddamn tractor or something I guess. He had a, you know, a gas can.”

They could see their breath in the yellow light that spilled from the car onto the snowy gravel. Slim wanted a cigarette, then felt dizzy at the returning thought: Gramma would kill her.

There was a sound in the distance, a sharp crack like a branch snapping in the wind.

Had he shot the dog?

“Get out the car,” Slim said.

“You're crazy.”

Slim knew she was not being reasonable. He'd only stopped to find gas, she told herself; he'd gone off with a jerrycan, not a gun. But it was no use. The certain dread she'd felt moments ago had not had time to dissipate, and was still being pumped around inside her by her heart.

Slim heard his footsteps, quick little crunches like a mouse gnawing at a wall, before she saw him. He was running towards them, clucking to himself like a hen, and every so often bubbling over into some shout of jubilation: “Oodilolly!” or “Holy coyote!” He was not carrying a jerrycan. Slim took a step back from the car.

Before he could reach them, a black shape came bounding out of the woods and attached itself to his leg. It was the dog. Mr. Custard let out a scream—not of pain or even anger but sheer incredulity. He whipped and thrashed his leg madly, and with a whimper the black shape came loose and fell skidding to the ground. Almost
without breaking stride, Mr. Custard lunged and kicked the dog with all his might, then threw himself into the car, started the engine, and slammed it into gear. Slim jumped back, shielding her face from the spray of gravel and ice. Missy, who had had one foot out the door, shouted incoherently, perhaps to Slim. Then, to keep herself from falling out, she had to pull the door shut—and just in time, as the car fishtailed, shot down the road, and disappeared into the pines.

Slim stood listening to the roar of her own heart; then, as her pulse subsided, she could make out another sound in the distance, a drawn-out rasping sound, like someone continuously sliding open a window that had not been opened in a long time.

She went to the dog, and was at first relieved, then only doubly frightened, to hear it whining. If it was hurt, if it was dying, she would have to do something.

She crouched and placed a hand on its lumpy skull until the animal stopped growling.

The moon was overhead, but, in the direction from which Mr. Custard had come running, a dim orange glow had appeared above the black outline of the trees. She walked towards it. The dog followed, at a distance.

The road curved and began to widen, the gravel gave way to deep tracks of frozen mud, and the pines parted to reveal a farmyard, littered with hulks of machinery and tufts of grass, all bathed in the same undulating orange light. The rasping sound grew louder until it became a crackling roar. She rounded the farmhouse and saw the fire.

It was a barn, or had been. The fire had consumed all the structure's details in the brilliance of its blaze, so that it looked like a child's drawing of a barn: thick black lines for walls, a gaping black opening for a door, and clumsy black triangles for rafters, which
had already begun to sag. Shivering, Slim walked towards it, and imagined she could feel its heat.

A man stood motionless, as if suspended in gelatin, halfway between the house and the conflagration. A stick lay in his outstretched arms like a dead thing that he was afraid to touch. As Slim came nearer she saw that it was a gun.

He looked at her, and at the house, and at the barn. His eyes were wild and unseeing, as if he'd just been struck blind.

“What happened?”

“Burnt my barn,” he said thickly. “Burnt my goddamn barn.”

“Why?”

He peered at her then, flames in his eyes. “Who're you? Where do you come from? What do you want here?”

She opened her mouth but nothing would come out. She shook her head and looked around dismally.

“My dog,” she blurted at last, scratching her arms till they bled. “My dog's hurt.”

Dr. Yard was talking to him but Mr. Custard was finding it difficult to concentrate. He had never felt so sleepy in all his life. There was a prickly pain in his leg where the dog had bit him, and a clenching pain in his shoulder where he supposed the crazy man had shot him—actually
shot
him!—shot
him
! He'd never been shot at before, not in his entire life! He hadn't felt anything at the time but a cold wet sting, neither pleasure nor pain; but now it felt as if his stomach had relocated to his shoulder and begun digesting itself. His blood, too, was everywhere. He was surprised at how dark and rich and thick it was, almost like oil. He was disappointed to find that it tasted like salt, only salt.

The girl had her face pressed against the window like she was trying to draw air through it. Everything was slowing down, time
was coming in drops—the better to help him register the situation's novelty. But every so often the highway snapped its neck suddenly to one side as if trying to buck him off. Dr. Yard was talking to him—not, he thought, altogether without approval—but he could not distinguish the words.

The same thing had happened at the hospital. Whenever Dr. Yard spoke to him at any length, his words dissolved into mere gabble, strings of isolated syllables more like Morse code than human speech; and even his face, as Mr. Custard watched, would gradually fragment into its constituent features, so that he found he could attend to the man's spongy nose, or to the scraping of his eyelids over his flat grey eyes, or to the flapping of the dewlap beneath his chin, or to the slick, darting movements of his wet tongue, or to the flecks of spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth; but he could never attend to all of them at once. The harder he tried to make the sounds fit together into words or the words into sentences, the more they disintegrated, and it was the same with the face. Two eyes plus one mouth plus one nose equals one face, he assured himself. But it wasn't true. Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth did not make a face. Something was missing.

The car was almost out of gas. He was amazed that it hadn't run out already. What would he do when it stopped? He didn't know, and the not-knowing excited him. Anything could happen! He was open to experience. His mother called it “selfish,” but Dr. Yard, a professional psychologist, had called it being “open to experience.”

But Dr. Yard had been wrong about his mother. She
had
been a saint. She would never have let him be thrown in jail for hanging a few lousy bucks' worth of paper! And if he had never been put in, he would never have had to pretend he was nuts in order to get out. She had always taken good care of him; he was her baby. But Dr. Yard didn't like that story, so Mr. Custard told him another one.

The thought of his mother made him think of Francine. Would she be angry at him for missing his appointment? Well, she'd certainly forgive him when she saw the blood. She would clean him up, put him to bed. He would cry a little; that would help.

The scene suddenly bored him; it had happened just like that hundreds of times. Francine in her nightgown, screaming at him, then comforting him; slapping his face, then holding his head to her freckled chest. Francine with her young body and her old face, the skin that seemed to have slipped half an inch down her skull. No, he couldn't go home. Anyway, it didn't matter. He'd never make it. He was almost out of gas.

But that had happened before too, plenty of times. He could see it now, unfortunately; the not-knowing was gone. He would wait, preferably for a woman, or else a family, and would hitch a ride into the nearest town. He would tell them a story and borrow five bucks. He would pass a cheque at a filling station. He would go to a restaurant and pick up a waitress. He would go back for the car, or he would call up Francine collect and he would cry and she would come get him.

He yawned. He was sleepier than ever. The ditches on either side of the road yawned with him. The highway bridled, trying to shake him. Dr. Yard smiled grudgingly, shook his head in admiration. “Get some rest,” he advised. “You've earned it.”

He was talking about the fire. It had been a good fire.

Mr. Custard stomped on the gas pedal. The highway straightened out, momentarily subdued.

“Hey, slow down,” pleaded the doctor—or perhaps it was the girl, the skinny one. Perhaps it was she who had been talking to him all along. He realized he'd gotten her alone. He'd won. The thought gave him no pleasure. She was not, after all, very pretty.