The Ax (32 page)

From time to time, a vehicle passes along the road out there, but not often. I sit here at URF’s desk, with nothing to do but wait and watch and think, and I can’t help but go over and over all the things I’ve had to do the last two months. Some of them were much harder than others. Some were very hard indeed.

On the other hand, some were easy. And I truly think, more recently, I’ve gained more confidence, and that makes it easier yet.

Oh! I’m falling asleep. No good, no good.

I get to my feet, stamping around in a circle in this dark room. I can’t be
asleep
when he gets here.

I leave the office and go down the hall to his bedroom, just to be near some light, to beat off that sleepiness. And now for the first time, as long as I’m in here, and to have something to do, I make a quick search of the bedroom, and the one thing I find of interest is the pistol in his bedside drawer, next to the flashlight and the Tums. Of course I don’t know guns, except my father’s Luger, but I can tell this is some kind of pistol, with that round cylinder to give it the pregnant look. It’s black, and the handle is a bit worn as though it’s old. It looks like the starter gun used in a race.

I don’t touch it. I close the drawer, and merely remember it’s there.

Back in the hall, I glance into and through the kitchen, and out the porch windows, and I see the headlights just as they make the turn into the driveway. Weaving, slow-moving, hesitant.

URF is coming home.

He’s drunk. I can tell that much before I even see him, from the way he drives his car, the excess caution with which he steers this dark-colored Subaru station wagon around the driveway curve toward his house.

There are half a dozen methods, right in this house, by which I can finish him off with no trouble, and even make it look like accidental death. Which would be a lot better than yet another murder of a paper mill manager.

The Subaru jolts to a stop, out front. I’m not watching from the kitchen, I’ve moved on to his living room, his TV room, whatever he might call it. In one of the windows there, I can stand without any light behind me, and watch. I was afraid, if I’d stood in the kitchen doorway, he might see a silhouette.

Everything he does is in slow motion. Some time after he stops, the lights go off, so I suppose the engine went off then, too; I’m not sure I can hear it, through the glass. And then, a little while after that, he opens his door and climbs wearily out. The interior light goes on, but my concentration is on URF—I’m thinking of him now as a kind of dog, named “Urf” —as he slams the car door and makes his way around the front of it.

Come in, come in. Come home, go to bed, rest, sleep. I’ll wait here. Or farther back, in the unused room on the other side of the unused entrance, just in case you decide to come on in here and fall asleep in front of the television set.

He makes his way around the front of the car, leaning on the hood, and then he turns right again, and opens the passenger door, and a woman gets out.

Damn! I stare at her, and she’s about as drunk as he is. A large woman in sweater and slacks, weaving. I see her stand beside the car, holding on to the open door, and I hear her voice, quite loud: “Where the hell is this?”

“
My
place, Cindy! Damn!
You
know my place!” She grumbles something, and moves forward. He slams the Su-baru’s passenger door and follows her, and in a minute I hear him fumbling with his keys.

Not tonight. He picked her up at the bar, and he’s done it before. So not tonight.

But he doesn’t pick up a woman
every
night, not Urf. There are nights he sleeps alone.

As the stumbling sounds of them move across the kitchen, I fade back across the TV room into the hall and to the door I used when I came in tonight. I tug on it, and it opens more easily this time, more quietly. Not that they’d hear much. I slide outside.

There are more lights on now, in the kitchen and in the bedroom. I skirt around all three vehicles parked here, staying out of the lightspill. I walk away down the driveway. I am not at all discouraged.

I park the same place I did on Tuesday, and walk back down the dark country road toward Urf’s house. It’s nine-thirty, Thursday night, the 26th of June, and I am here to kill him. He could have an entire harem with him tonight, I don’t care. Tonight he dies.

I’m feeling such time pressure now. It’s not only that I’ve been at this for nearly two months, though that’s part of it. Having to think about these deadly things all the time, do these deadly things, it’s wearing me down. I take less pleasure in life, and for that I don’t blame the downsizing, the chop, the
adjustment
, whatever you want to call it; I blame this grim hell I’m living through. Food doesn’t taste as good as it used to, simple pleasures like music or television or driving or just feeling the sun on my face have all flattened and become drab, and as for sex, well…

Though that problem
did
start with the downsizing.

Once I’m out of this. Once it’s over. Once I’m out of this and safe on the farther shore, with the new job, with my life back. Then the colors will be bright again.

So that’s a reason to want it over, but now there’s an even more compelling one, and that’s Urf’s children. If they follow their normal pattern, and why shouldn’t they, next week is when they’ll arrive for their summer visit with their father. The 4th of July is on Friday this year, so they’ll surely want their travel to be finished well before the weekend, which means I have less than a week before they show up to complicate my life beyond imagining.

No time at all. Weekends are impossible. Mondays and Wednesdays are impossible as well, because of Marjorie’s job with Dr. Carney. By the time I pick her up at six in the evening and drive her home, with dinner still to come, it’s far too late to set out for Slate, New York. So if I don’t get him tonight, I won’t have another try at him for five days, not until next Tuesday, and by then his children could already be here.

I’m a little later tonight, deliberately, assuming his pattern is never to come home directly from work. And I seem to be right; his house is as dark as it was when I arrived on Tuesday. The nightlight in his bedroom, nothing more.

There’s a learning curve with this house, as well. Tonight, I walk past the two parked vehicles and the entrance to the enclosed porch, go directly on down to the end and around the corner, then straight through the original front door. I walk through the TV room without kneeing the sofa, glance in at the lit bedroom and the dim kitchen, and make my way to the dark office, where I sit again at his desk.

Not home yet. Out drinking his dinner. Anesthetizing himself, just for me.

It’s a little warm in here, but I keep my windbreaker on. In the pockets are the things I’ve brought, just in case. The coil of picture wire. The small roll of duct tape. The four-inch length of heavy iron pipe, one end wrapped with electric tape for a better grip. The cotton gloves.

I don’t have a particular plan, not yet. It all depends what the circumstances are, when Urf gets here.

I put my feet up on the desk, and cross my ankles. A car drives by, southbound, out there on the road. Then nothing. I sit and wait for Urf to come home.

Light. I blink.

“Wake up, you!”

“Oh, my God!” I twitch, and my feet fall off the desk and thud to the floor, jolting me forward in the swivel chair. I stare in the harshness of the overhead light. My eyes are gummy, my mouth sticky.

I fell asleep
.

He’s in the doorway. His left hand is still across his body, fingers touching the light switch. His right hand holds the revolver I last saw in his bedside table. He stares at me. He weaves left and right in the doorway. Even as I’m realizing the horror of the situation, I can see that he’s pretty drunk. “Mister . . .” I say, trying to remember his name. Urf, not Urf. Fallon.

“Don’t move!”

My hand has started upward, to wipe my sticky-feeling mouth, but now I freeze, hand in midair. “Fallon,” I say. “Mister Fallon.”

“What are you doin here?” He’s aggressive because he’s afraid, and he’s afraid because he’s bewildered.

What
am
I doing here? I have to have a reason, something I can tell him. “Mister Fallon,” I say again, stuck at that part of it.

“You broke into my house!”

“No! No, I didn’t.” I protest that in full honesty.

“The door was locked!”

“No, it wasn’t.” Even though he told me not to move, I do move, pointing away to my right as I say, “The big door by the living room. I knocked, and…
that
wasn’t locked.”

He frowns mightily, and I see him trying to think about that door that’s never used.
Is
it locked? He doesn’t know. He says, “It’s trespassing.”

Fair enough. Break in or walk in, it is trespassing, he’s right about that. I say, “I wanted to wait for you. I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

“
I
don’t know you,” he says. I’m not being particularly threatening or intimidating, so his aggression and fear are becoming less, but he’s still as bewildered as I am as to what reason I’m going to give for my being here.

Is it because we’re both paper line managers? Polymer paper? I’ve just come by for some shoptalk, a little chat about our fascinating employment? At this time of night? Unannounced, walking into his empty house?

And then I see it, all at once, and I turn my honest face up to him, and I say, “Mr. Fallon, I need your help.”

He squints at me. The revolver is still pointed in my direction, but he no longer touches the light switch. That other hand is pressed against the doorframe now, to help him keep from weaving. He says, “Did Edna send you, is that what this is?”

I remember, from his tax returns, that Edna is an ex-wife. I say, “I don’t know anybody named Edna, Mr. Fallon. My name is Burke Devore, I’m the production line manager for the polymer paper line at Halcyon Mills over in Connecticut, over in Belial.”

Again he squints. “Halcyon,” he says. He keeps up with the trade journals, but how closely? Will he know it’s all over at Halcyon? He says, “Didn’t they get merged?”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s the whole trouble, it looks like they’re gonna move the whole goddam thing up to Canada—”

“Cocksuckers,” he says.

“I just don’t want to lose my job,” I say.

“Lotta that goin around,” he says.

“Too much of it. Mr. Fallon,” I say, “I read about you in
Pulp
, remember that piece a few months ago?”

“They got some stuff wrong in there,” he complains, “made me look like a damn fool doesn’t know his own job.”

“I thought it made you look terrific at your job,” I tell him, lying. “That’s why I’m here.”

He shakes his head, befuddled. “I don’t know what the
fuck
you think you’re talkin about,” he says.

“I’m good at my job, Mr. Fallon, believe me I am,” I tell him, with great sincerity, “but these days you can’t just be good at the job, you’ve got to be perfect at it. I don’t have much time. They’re going to decide pretty soon this summer, do I stay on, does the line stay here or does it get pulled to Canada—”

“Fuckin bastards.”

“I thought,” I tell him, “if I could talk to Mr. Fallon, if we could just
talk
about the job, I could maybe pick up some pointers, get to where I could— I can
do
the job, Mr. Fallon, but I’m not that good, talking about it, I can’t express myself. In that piece in
Pulp
, you could express yourself. I was hoping, my idea was, we could just talk, and then maybe I’d be better at it on the job. There’s gonna be an interview, I’m not exactly sure when.”

He studies me. The revolver now dangles at his side, pointing at the floor. He says, “You sound desperate.”

“I am desperate. I don’t want to lose that job. I keep thinking about it and thinking about it, and today I finally made the decision to come here and ask you for help, and after dinner I drove over here from Connecticut.”

“Whyn’tcha use the phone?”

I give a wry grin and a little shrug. “Be some nut on the phone? I figured, if I come here, I can explain myself. But then you weren’t home.”

“So you busted in.”

“The door isn’t locked, Mr. Fallon,” I say. “Honest, it isn’t.”

He thinks about that, nodding slowly, and then says, “Let’s go see.”

“All right.”

He steps back from the doorway, and makes a waving gesture with the revolver. It’s not pointed at the floor any more, but it’s not quite pointed at me either. “You first,” he says.

I go first, through the house, which now has lights on in every room, all the way to the door beyond the TV room, which I open onto the black night outside. I turn to him and say, “See?”

He glares at the door. “The goddam thing isn’t supposed to be open like that.” He comes over, switching the revolver to his left hand so he can slam the door, open it, slam it again, and then peer closely at the lock mounted on the inside of it. He tries to turn the lock’s little handle, but it won’t move. “Damn thing’s painted stuck,” he says. “Stuck open. Be a son of a bitch.”