The Axman Cometh (5 page)

"Yeah? Hi. What are you—excuse me, I need to hang up the phone. Did you want to come in or something?"

"Just wondered if I could get a drink of water. I was out walking, but I don't know anybody on this street. Except you. Didn't you used to have a dog? I was kind of afraid I'd run into your dog, but nobody answered the front door."

"Borneo. He got leukemia and we had to put him away last month. We were all sick about it. Come on in, I'll just—water's okay? We've got ginger ale and
Dr
Pepper."

"Maybe a
Dr
Pepper if that wouldn't be too much trouble."

"No, have a seat. Perry. Be right back. How did you know we had a dog?"

"Oh, I was this way before. On your street."

"Where do you live?" Shannon asks him, opening the refrigerator. One interruption after another, she really wanted to get some painting done. She takes out a couple of

bottles of
Dr
Pepper. And now it's almost time to think about supper. Dab and Allen Ray both get home a little past six-thirty, and they can be difficult to put up with if supper's not piping hot and on the table the minute they hit the door. Shannon knows Ernestine won't be down for the rest of the day. Not when she's in one of her prize moods. Shannon doesn't want to think about the empty bottles of vodka, but she has no reason to doubt Chap's word. He has always kept an observant eye on his mother, not out of malice but as if she is some sort of long-term nature-study project he has adopted.

"I live at the trailer park."

She might have guessed. There's only one in town, and not a very inviting place to live, filled with the sort of people who drive unwashed pickup trucks, have common-law spouses and get into knife fights.

"I didn't know that." She knows nothing about Perry
Kennold
. He's a recent transfer student, junior, sits in her fourth-period biology class.
Sits
is about all. He seems never to open his mouth or his textbook, but she has observed him surreptitiously reading a paperback edition of Walt Whitman with a kind of avid, worshipful look in his eyes.

Shannon carries the
Dr
Peppers out to the porch, grateful for a breeze that has come

up as the sun sinks just below the high crowns of sage orange and persimmon trees in the backyard.

Perry is looking at her latest watercolor.

"I saw some of your other pictures in the library," he says. "You're real good. I'd like to be able to draw."

"Do you take art?"

"No. I wouldn't be any good at it. I don't have any talent."

He looks up at her as she hands him the
Dr
Pepper. His hand overlaps hers for just a moment, unexpectedly clammy, she feels calluses. He's a real big kid, especially through the shoulders, but unfortunately he has acne, even on the back of his neck where his hair is longest but doesn't hide the lumps. His face is so nicked and scabby it looks as if he went through a windshield. Forget about the acne and he's really good-looking, with a Roman nose and thick, dark eyelashes. But then you notice he's minus a front tooth and always seems to be self-conscious about that, holding his head down when he talks, or shielding his mouth with one hand. He's a moody sort and Shannon is intolerant of people who can't find something to be glad about once in a while; but, perversely, there are depths to his moodiness that arouse her mothering instinct.

Because his acne makes it hard for her

to look him straight in the face, she goes to the screen with her own soda and stares out at the backyard. Behind the Hill house Madge Mayhew is taking wash off her line. Sheets flap briskly in the wind and Shannon thinks, creatively, of sailing ships: some day she will paint the sea in all its moods. The challenge in store gives her gooseflesh.

"So how come you're over here?" Shannon asks, not meaning anything particularly, but it comes out sounding like she thinks he is out of bounds and uninvited. Then, before Perry can answer, she gets that little alerting flash across the horizon of her mind: he's been around before, on West Homestead, he's here this afternoon because—Shannon remembers his first day at the high school, his eyes on her in biology, brooding but appreciative—Perry
Kennold
has a crush on her. How terrific.

"I don't know. I walk around a lot. Nothing else to do, if you know what I mean. I don't have a car."

"I always have more to do than I can find time for," Shannon says blithely, hoping he will take the hint. She glances at him, not smiling. He has taken a couple of sips of the
Dr
Pepper, not as if he is dying of thirst, and that cinches it: he just wanted an excuse to talk to her. Ho hum. He's wearing the same

clothes he seems to wear every day to school.
Unironed
Levi's, a white T-shirt and denim vest with a fleece lining that's too warm for the season, rough-out boots so shabby the stitches appear barely to be holding.

"Do you think Oswald killed Kennedy? I don't."

The assassination was a personal tragedy for Shannon. She doesn't like being reminded of it, or discussing an idol with a virtual stranger.

"I don't know; I try not to think about it
any more
."

"Did you cry?" he asks softly.

Now that is going too far, and Shannon shrugs hostilely. Perry looks at the floor, has another sip of soda.

"Anybody else home?"

The question makes Shannon uneasy. "My mother's upstairs. Resting. My little brother's next door, and Allen
Ray'll
be along in a minute."

"He's the one who played football?"

"You know a lot about us," Shannon says, smiling tautly.

"I just happened to see his picture in the trophy case at school and I thought, wow, he looks a lot like Shannon, he must be—how come he doesn't play college ball anywhere?"

"Allen Ray just got tired of football. And,

to tell the truth, he didn't have the grades for college. Do you play? You're big enough."

"I know. I weighed two-fifteen this morning in the locker room before P-E. I do about three-hundred push-ups every day." He pushes hard with a forefinger, showing her that he can't make much of a dent in a well-rounded bicep. "The good news is I'll probably go out for the team next season. The bad news is I might not be here." Shannon does not ask why. He shrugs as if, silent, she is only trying to hide consternation. "We move around a lot. My father does construction work. Drives Cats. Road graders, bulldozers."

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

"I had—have a sister. She got married to an ironworker on the Yellowtail Dam site. That's in Montana, near the Little Big Horn. And my mother ran off when we were living in Tucumcari; she took up with an accountant from Buffalo, New York, who was out west for his health. So it's just me and my father now."

"Uh-huh. You can take that
Dr
Pepper with you if you want. I really should get supper started, so I don't have time to talk."

"Oh. Right." Perry gets up looking chastened. "Thanks. This really hit the spot. Is this a deposit bottle? Tell you what, I'll bring it to you in school tomorrow."

("No, keep it," Shannon said, visualizing

Perry
Kennold
passing her an empty
Dr
Pepper bottle in biology lab; the embarrassment—. She turned away as if she was afraid she was going to laugh, but her heart was beating almost savagely and that's when he reached over her shoulder and touched her— touched her cheek with a slit, bleeding finger and said:

"See how sharp it is? I like to chop."

Or
was
it Perry?)

Petra
Kisber
, managing editor of Excalibur Books, thinks she is not alone.

There are two ways off the sixth (and top) floor of the building at Sixth Avenue and Nineteenth Street in lower Manhattan. One is by elevator, which is not working; the other is by the stairwell, the steel door to which is marked by an
exit
light which, as exit lights must do, glows in the blackout. In defiance of
a
city ordinance this door is always locked, although most of the forty-six employees of the Knightsbridge Publishing Company have keys.

Petra thinks she is not alone. Worse, she is sure she smells pigs.

There have been mornings in the city since she came to stay, simmering summer mornings before the streets are washed, when the rancid effluvium has reminded her of the barnyard, of hog wallow and slops and the pigs that terrified her long before a couple of sows devoured a neighbor's toddler back home in West Virginia: but for the most part she has put her country raising well behind her. Studied in Europe. Taken a new name. Petra, not Patricia. Lost the slow-pitch, hillbilly accent and improved herself through sheer willpower: diet, Hatha Yoga, postgrad courses at the New School. She lightened her hair and acquired a soul mate. If she returned to her home state now, after an absence of more than twenty years, not even her closest relatives would recognize her without prompting. She is not, however, about to go back to Buck Creek, West Virginia, for any reason.

But she still smells pigs. And she is not alone.

Sometimes, although there is nothing that specific to focus on (pigs? It could be the smell of the trashy street below, stewing in the rain, an olfactory reminder of her increasingly desperate desire to be out of here, well on her way home to a wood fire in their rent- controlled apartment on West End, drinks with Barbara while they cuddle on the sinfully comfortable plush sofa they have recently sprung for at an estate sale in Bedford Hills), even trivial discomforts or inconveniences can magnify the little fears that lie in the subconscious for their moments to come alive, to screech and howl and demoralize the hardiest of souls. And she has been more than two hours by herself in the dark and draughty offices of the Knightsbridge Publishing Company. Thank God for her lamp. Standing in front of the elevator doors, which are steel and of the clamshell type, opening top and bottom instead of from side to side, Petra raises the lamp, light reflecting from the glossily painted brick wall (puce; somebody's idea of decorator chic), as she turns slowly for a look behind her—hears a grunting, snuffling sound—and the fear drains from the roots of her hair in a cold flood, down her backbone and through her bowels, which have been none too secure today; hits the knees with tidal force and weakens them; surges back to the level of her heart, drowning her lungs.

"Who is that?"
But she knows already.
It's pigs.

Petra turns back and strikes at steel with her fist.

"Is anybody there? Can you hear me?" When there is no reply she presses against the doors at the head-high seam, listening. The sound that eventually comes back to her is faint, as if from the depths of a well: a child's lugubrious weeping.

"Shan? Is that you? Hey, it's Petra! We're going to be all right,
cheri
,
it's ...
it was a power failure. The lights could go back on any—Shannon? Talk to me?"

No words, only the heartbroken weeping, so faint Petra must strain to discern what she hears.

"You'll be fine. I forgot to tell you—"

Petra, panicky for Shannon's sake (but is it Shannon?), takes a couple of deep, gulping breaths that fail to pacify; and she nearly gags on the odor, pig shit and soured garbage, that has filled the floor like fumes from a dump fire.

"Don called. I'm going to call him back now, and tell him you're okay, just a little scared. Me too. Then I'm going to get hold of the fire department, but no telling how long it'll take them—probably not more than half an hour. They'll get you out of there if the power's not on by then—
Shannon, would you answer me!"

She can't bear, any more, the ceaseless, hopeless weeping: as if Shannon's mind has snapped, or she has, in her terror at being trapped, regressed to her childhood. Poor baby—but Petra has her own expanding terror to deal with. She wants to go back to her office,
now.
Slam the door. Shut out the abominable pig stench, even if she must soak a handkerchief in the brandy she keeps in a desk drawer. But even with her nose anesthetized, how can she not hear pigs rooting and squealing (all of the child eaten, all but his clothes and skull with its neat rows of baby teeth)?

First she must deal with her retreat, through the narrow avenues between offices —Accounting, then Editorial, a book-lined maze. She is trying to remember where the nearest fire alarm is located: nothing to it, no phone call required.
In emergency break glass pull down handle.
The problem is—