The Ax (8 page)

But somehow I can’t think about any of that. I can’t even open the file drawer and take out the folder with those resumés There’s a great discouragement holding me down.

I try to talk myself out of this inertia. I tell myself I’ve gotten away with everything so far, I’m not suspected by anybody, or even thought about. I tell myself this is a good beginning, even if the second expedition was so much sloppier and more emotionally exhausting than the first. But why couldn’t it turn out at the end that that one had been the worst of them, and that from then on they’d all been easy, as easy as Everly?

But it doesn’t work. I am discouraged, and nothing will bring me out of it. I can’t stop now, I know that, or everything till this point will have been in vain. I
have
to go on, now that I’ve come this far. And I have to do it all soon, and I remind myself
why
I have to do it all soon.

The fact is, these vast waves of dismissal move through industries, one after another. A swath is cut through the auto industry, and then everything is calm there for a while. A bloodletting among the phone companies is followed by peace. The computer industry will sacrifice its thousands, and then rest.

Well, the paper industry had its most recent downsizing two years ago, when I got the chop. All of these resumés in my files come from people laid off at just around the same time, in a period from six or seven months before me to a period six or seven months after me. This is the group, this is the labor pool, these are the people I have to concern myself with.

But the reductions are cyclical, and eventually return. If I don’t move ahead briskly, rid myself of the competition, rid myself of Fallon, and get established in that job, I may suddenly find a whole new wave of resumés flooding the mails. And there they’ll be, a whole new batch of people after my job, and some of
them
will be real competition, too. Fresh competition.

Six is a lot, but six I think I can handle. Seven, if you count Fallon. But a dozen? Two dozen? Impossible.

No, I have to do it
now
, move forward, choose the next one, go out there,
get
him, keep the momentum alive.

And here’s another thought. What if Fallon dies ahead of time, without my help, before I’m ready? If that happens, and one of these four still on my list gets that job, what then?

And yet, I remain immobile. Discouraged. I just sit here, at my desk, not even looking at the file cabinet. I keep seeing, in my mind’s eye, that woman struggle ahead of me, across the lawn, the two of us plodding like a couple of cows, the Luger bobbing in the air behind her head, at the end of my arm.

Marjorie calls, “Dinner!”

I turn off the light, and leave the office, and shut the door.

For a while, before the beginning, even when I knew absolutely and positively what I should do, I did nothing. For a while, even though I theoretically and intellectually understood that my plan was my only possible hope, I did nothing. I thought it, I planned it, I prepared for it, but I didn’t yet believe it.

I did the make-work stuff instead. I studied the Luger. I bought a book to help me understand it, and I read the book cover to cover. I cleaned and oiled the gun. I bought it bullets. I took it into a field and shot trees.

I even saw Ralph Fallon one time, though I don’t believe he would have noticed me. What I did, back before I was actually in motion on this thing, as a part of my make-work, my fakery, my stalling, I drove one day over to Arcadia, just to look it over. That’s how it happened.

There are no large highways between our part of Connecticut and that part of New York. I took my time, studying the road atlas, wanting to find the best route because I intended this someday to be my commute to work. The roads went through little suburban towns and even smaller farm villages, past dairy herds grazing and cornfields being plowed for this spring’s crop, and I thought how nice it would be to make this drive, routinely, roundtrip, five times a week. Not much traffic, beautiful countryside. And at the far end, a job I could love.

Arcadia itself turned out to be a sweet old town, very small, a cluster of twenty or so clapboard homes on the slopes flanking a small but lively stream called the Jandrow, a tributary of the Hudson. Mills are built along streams, because they need a lot of water, and the bustling Jandrow clearly provided all the water this mill could want. There was a dam, just upriver from the mill buildings. The main road through town, east-west, dipping down one slope on its way in, crossed over that dam and then climbed up the far slope and away.

Other than the mill, there was little commercial activity in Arcadia. Up the western slope, overlooking the mill, there was a luncheonette where you could also buy newspapers and cigarettes and a few minor grocery items. Farther up the slope, at the edge of town, was a Getty gas station. That was it.

I got to Arcadia around noon, and decided to eat something in Betty’s, the luncheonette. It was only after I was seated at the counter, the only person there not with others at a table, and after I’d ordered a BLT and coffee, that I realized from the conversations behind me that the twenty or so people at the tables were all from the mill.

Had I made a stupid mistake coming here? Would these people remember me, much later, after everything was finished and I had Upton “Ralph” Fallon’s job? Would they suspect what I’d done? Had I ruined my chance to put the plan into effect, even before I’d started?

(I think, during this period of time, I was probably unconsciously trying to find some excuse not to go forward with the plan, even though
there was no other plan
. There was no other plan, and there still is no other plan.)

But there I was, I’d already placed my order, and the one sure way to be conspicuous was to run out now, before my food arrived. So I sat hunched between my shoulders, looking at nothing but the array of items on the counter along the wall ahead of me, and from time to time I heard bits of conversation from the tables behind me. Shoptalk, some of it, shoptalk I recognized. Shoptalk I could easily, gladly, have joined. I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much I’d missed being around that world. Oh, how I would have liked to sit at one of those tables and just let the shoptalk wash over me.

Well, I couldn’t. I sat where I was, at the counter, and the buxom waitress brought my BLT, and doggedly I ate. While behind me, from time to time, people would call in a joshing way to somebody called Ralph, and Ralph would answer, with that kind of hillbilly cracker voice that’s more rural than regional. Not an accent, exactly, but something twanging in the mouth that makes them sound as though they have false teeth even if they don’t.

I snuck a look around my shoulder at one point, and this Ralph was at a table by the window, and he was a rawboned rangy guy of about my age, but thinner. He looked like that oldtime singer/songwriter, Hoagy Carmichael. His voice, though, with that cracker twang, wasn’t as musical.

Their lunch break was finished. All at once they all needed their checks, and the waitress was very busy for a few minutes, writing out the checks, ringing up totals on the cash register. The groups all left, and walked in little clumps downhill, and I turned to watch them through the windows, talking together, having a last cigarette (there wouldn’t be smoking allowed inside the mill).

The waitress moved around between me and the windows, clearing tables, and I said to her, “That fellow that was sitting over there. Was that Ralph Fallon?”

“Oh, sure,” she said.

“I thought so,” I said. “I met him years ago, but I just wasn’t sure. Doesn’t matter. I’ll take my check, when you’ve got the chance.”

Driving home that day, through the pretty countryside, the memory of those lunchtime conversations circling in my head, I knew I had to do it. I had to go forward. I couldn’t live without my life any longer.

That was the day, when I got home, I took out Herbert Everly’s resumé, and looked at his address, and turned to my road atlas.

Lew Ringer has killed himself! Who would have guessed?

It’s Monday now, four days since my terrible experience at the Ricks house, and Marjorie and I are watching the six o’clock news, and this has just been announced. Lew Ringer hanged himself in his garage, sometime last night. Lew Ringer is dead.

The police are saying this pretty well wraps up the case. They’d been just about certain Lew Ringer was their man, right from the beginning, but they hadn’t had enough solid physical evidence to pin it on him, and without that solid physical evidence they’d had no choice but to let Ringer go on Saturday afternoon, when his lawyer demanded it.

The principal piece of physical evidence they still didn’t have was the gun Ringer had used. It was a nine millimeter, they knew that much, but they hadn’t yet found the gun nor the dealer from whom Ringer must have bought it. The assumption now among the authorities was that he’d picked it up some time ago, probably in some southern state using false identification, and that he’d thrown it away, after he’d done the double killing, in a nearby river or lake.

In any event, without the gun or any other evidence tying Ringer to the crime, and with Ringer’s lawyer making such a fuss, eventually on Saturday the police had had to let him go, though they did keep a very close eye on him, including a police car parked twenty-four hours a day in front of his house. (That was partly also to keep at bay the crowds of the curious.)

His empty house, as it turned out. When Ringer got there Saturday afternoon, his wife had already left that morning, having announced to the media in a tearful press conference Friday evening that she was returning to her parents in Ohio, where she would begin divorce proceedings.

The police theory was that, with the departure of his wife, with June Ricks having so clearly turned against him (she’d told several reporters that she thought Ringer had killed her parents for love of her, and that she believed he really did love her but had gone too far), with the police so strongly on his trail, and with the awful knowledge of the crimes he’d committed, he simply had not been able to face the world any longer, and that’s why he’d hanged himself, in his garage, in the space where his wife’s car used to be, sometime last night.

Watching this news item, looking at the faces, listening to the words, it seems to me nobody’s sorry Lew Ringer is dead. Everybody’s pleased it ended this way, I think, because it makes less work for everybody and less doubt in anybody’s mind. He was accused of killing Mr. and Mrs. Ricks, his inamorata’s parents, and then he killed himself. QED.

The last four days, I’ve continued to do nothing, not even to
think
about anything. My despondency and discouragement have held me in a tight and smothering grip. Here I’ve come this far, and yet I just haven’t been able to take one single step farther. The wind has been knocked out of me.

But there’s something about Ringer’s suicide that’s making a change in me, I can feel it. Something about the glee and relief of everybody connected with that case, from the police spokesman to the blonde woman reporter, from the furtive and cunning Junie to the anchorman at his desk. The Ricks case is over, and everybody is pleased. No investigation any more, no search for the gun, no hunt for witnesses, no consideration of any other motive. Turns out, I didn’t kill them!

After the news, while Marjorie goes to the kitchen to ready dinner, I return to my office for the first time since Thursday. I sit at my desk, I open the file drawer, I take out the folder with the remaining resumés I study them, and it seems to me the best thing for me to do now is move my activity as far away physically as possible from the first two incidents.

Here he is, in north central New York State. Good, a different state again, though I won’t be able to do that every time.

Lichgate, New York, according to my road atlas, is north of Utica, probably three hundred miles from here. That would put him two hundred fifty miles from Arcadia, too far to commute, but a relocation within New York State wouldn’t be complex. He remains a threat.

I could drive there this Thursday morning. Five or six hours to get there. Stay overnight. See what happens.

When I was a boy, I was for a while a science fiction fan. A lot of us were, until Sputnik. I was twelve when Sputnik flew. All the science fiction magazines I’d read before then, and the movies and TV shows I saw, assumed that outer space belonged by natural right to Americans. Explorers and settlers and daredevils of space were all Americans, in story after story. And then, out of nowhere, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first space vehicle. The Russians!

We all stopped reading science fiction, then, and turned away from science fiction movies and TV shows. I don’t know about anybody else, but, as I remember it, I turned my interest after that to the western. In the western, there was never any doubt who would win.

But before Sputnik turned my whole generation away from science fiction, we had read a lot of stories that talked about something called “automation.” Automation was going to take the place of unintelligent labor, though I don’t think it was ever phrased quite like that. But simple assembly line stuff is what they meant, the kind of dull deadening repetitive labor that everybody agreed was bad for the human brain and paralyzing to the human spirit. All that work would be taken over by machines.