The Music of Chance (25 page)

“I can understand that,” Murks said, trying to sound sympathetic. “It must get lonely out here all by yourself. I mean, the kid had some peculiar ways about him, but at least he was company. It’ll cost you, though. Not that you don’t know that already.”

“I don’t care,” Nashe said. “I’m not asking for a real piano. It can’t come to that much.”

“First time I ever heard of a piano that’s not a piano. What kind of instrument are we talking about?”

“An electronic keyboard. You know, one of those portable things you plug into a socket in the wall. It comes with speakers and funny little plastic keys. You’ve probably seen them around in the stores.”

“I can’t say that I have. But that don’t mean nothing. You just tell me what you want, Nashe, and I’ll see that you get it.”

Fortunately, he still had his books of music, and there was no shortage of material for him to play. Once he had sold his piano, there had seemed little reason to hold onto them, but he hadn’t been able to throw them out, and so they had spent the whole year traveling around in the trunk of his car. There were about a dozen books in all: selections from a variety of composers (Bach, Couperin, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok, Satie), a couple of Czerny exercise books, and a fat volume of popular jazz and blues numbers transcribed for piano. Murks showed up with the instrument the next evening, and although it was a bizarre and ridiculous piece of technology—scarcely better than a toy, in fact—Nashe happily removed the thing from its box and set it up on the kitchen table. For a couple of nights he spent the hours between dinner and bedtime teaching himself how to play again, going through countless finger exercises to limber up his rusty joints as he learned the possibilities and limitations of the curious machine: the oddness
of the touch, the amplified sounds, the lack of percussive force. In that respect, the keyboard functioned more like a harpsichord than a piano, and when he finally started to play real pieces on the third night, he discovered that older works—pieces written before the invention of the piano—tended to sound better than the new ones. This led him to concentrate on works by pre-nineteenth-century composers:
The Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier
, “The Mysterious Barricades.” It was impossible for him to play this last piece without thinking about the wall, and he found himself returning to it more often than any of the others. It took just over two minutes to perform, and at no point in its slow, stately progress, with all its pauses, suspensions, and repetitions, did it require him to touch more than one note at a time. The music started and stopped, then started again, then stopped again, and yet through it all the piece continued to advance, pushing on toward a resolution that never came. Were those the mysterious barricades? Nashe remembered reading somewhere that no one was certain what Couperin had meant by that title. Some scholars interpreted it as a comical reference to women’s underclothing—the impenetrability of corsets—while others saw it as an allusion to the unresolved harmonies in the piece. Nashe had no way of knowing. As far as he was concerned, the barricades stood for the wall he was building in the meadow, but that was quite another thing from knowing what they meant.

He no longer looked upon the hours after work as a blank and leaden time. Music brought oblivion, the sweetness of no longer having to think about himself, and once he had finished practicing for the night, Nashe usually felt so languorous and empty of emotion that he was able to fall asleep without much trouble. Still, he despised himself for allowing his feelings to soften toward Murks, for remembering the foreman’s kindness to him with such gratitude. It wasn’t just that Murks had gone out of his way to buy the keyboard—he had positively jumped at the chance, acting as
though his single desire in life were to restore Nashe’s good opinion of him. Nashe wanted to hate Murks totally, to turn him into something less than human by the sheer force of that hatred, but how was that possible when the man refused to act like a monster? Murks began showing up at the trailer with little presents (pies baked by his wife, woolen scarves, extra blankets), and at work he was never less than indulgent, always telling Nashe to slow down and not to push so hard. Most troubling of all, he even seemed to be worried about Pozzi, and several times a week he would give Nashe a progress report on the kid’s condition, talking as though he were in constant touch with the hospital. What was Nashe to make of this solicitude? He sensed it was a trick, a smoke screen to cover up the true danger that Murks posed to him—and yet how could he be sure? Little by little, he felt himself weakening, gradually giving in to the foreman’s quiet persistence. Every time he accepted another gift, every time he paused to chat about the weather or smiled at one of Calvin’s remarks, he felt that he was betraying himself. And yet he kept on doing it. After a while, the only thing that prevented him from capitulating was the continued presence of the gun. That was the ultimate sign of how things stood between them, and he had only to look at the weapon on Murks’s waist to remind himself of their fundamental inequality. Then one day, just to see what would happen, he turned to Murks and said, “What’s with the gun, Calvin? Are you still expecting trouble?” And Murks glanced down at the holster with a puzzled look on his face and said, “I don’t know. I just got into the habit of wearing it, I guess.” And when he came out to the meadow the next morning to begin work, the gun was gone.

Nashe didn’t know what to think anymore. Was Murks telling him that he was free now, or was this simply another twist in an elaborate strategy of deception? Before Nashe could begin to decide, yet another element was thrown into the maelstrom of his uncertainty. It came in the form of a small boy, and for several
days after that, Nashe felt that he was standing on the edge of a precipice, staring into the bowels of a private hell that he had never even known was there: a fiery underworld of clamoring beasts and dark, unimaginable impulses. On October thirtieth, just two days after Murks stopped wearing the gun, he came to the meadow holding the hand of a four-year-old boy whom he introduced as his grandson, Floyd Junior.

“Floyd Senior lost his job in Texas this summer,” he said, “and now him and my daughter Sally are back here trying to make a fresh start. They’re both out looking for work and a place to live, and since Addie’s feeling a bit under the weather this morning, she thought it might be a good idea if little Floyd tagged along with me. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t get in your way.”

He was a scrawny child with a long, narrow face and a runny nose, and he stood there beside his grandfather bundled up in a thick red parka, gazing at Nashe with both curiosity and detachment, as if he had been plunked down in front of an odd-looking bird or shrub. No, Nashe didn’t mind, but even if he had, how could he have dared to say it? For the better part of the morning, the boy scrambled among the piles of stones in the corner of the meadow, cavorting like some strange and silent monkey, but every time Nashe returned to that area to load up the wagon again, the boy would stop what he was doing, squat down on his perch, and study Nashe with those same rapt and expressionless eyes. It began to make Nashe feel uncomfortable, and after it had happened five or six times, he was so unnerved by it that he forced himself to look up at the boy and smile—simply as a way to break the spell. Unexpectedly, the boy smiled back at him and waved, and just then, as if remembering something from another century, Nashe understood that this was the same boy who had waved to him and Pozzi that night from the back of the station wagon. Was that how they had been found out? he wondered. Had the boy told his mother
and father that he had seen two men digging a hole under the fence? Had the father then gone to Murks and reported what the boy had said? Nashe could never quite grasp how it happened, but an instant after this thought occurred to him, he looked up at Murks’s grandson again and realized that he hated him more than he had ever hated anyone in his life. He hated him so much, he felt he wanted to kill him.

That was when the horror began. A tiny seed had been planted in Nashe’s head, and before he even knew it was there, it was already sprouting inside him, proliferating like some wild, mutant flower, an ecstatic burgeoning that threatened to overrun the entire field of his consciousness. All he had to do was snatch the boy, he thought, and everything would change for him: he would suddenly know what he had to know. The boy for the truth, he would say to Murks, and at that point Calvin would have to talk, he would have to tell him what he had done with Pozzi. There wouldn’t be any choice. If he didn’t talk, his grandson would be dead. Nashe would make sure of that. He would strangle the kid right in front of his eyes.

Once Nashe allowed that thought to enter his head, it was succeeded by others, each one more violent and repulsive than the last. He slit the boy’s throat with a razor. He kicked him to death with his boots. He took his head and smashed it against a stone, beating in his little skull until his brains turned to pulp. By the end of the morning, Nashe was in a frenzy, a delirium of homicidal lust. No matter how desperately he tried to erase those images, he would begin to hunger for them the moment they disappeared. That was the true horror: not that he could imagine killing the boy, but that even after he had imagined it, he wanted to imagine it again.

The worst part of it was that the boy kept coming back to the meadow—not just the next day, but the day after that as well. The first hours had been bad enough, but then the boy took it into his head to become infatuated with Nashe, responding to their
exchange of smiles as if they had sworn an oath to each other and were now friends for life. Even before lunch, Floyd Junior had crawled down from his mountain of stones and was trotting after Nashe as his new hero pulled the wagon back and forth across the meadow. Murks made a move to stop him, but Nashe, already dreaming of how he was going to kill the child, waved him off and said it was all right. “I don’t mind,” he said. “I like kids.” By then, Nashe had already begun to sense that something was wrong with the boy—some dullness or simplemindedness that made him appear subnormal. He was barely able to talk, and the only thing he said as he ran along behind him through the grass was
Jim! Jim! Jim!
pronouncing the name over and over again in a kind of moronic incantation. Except for his age, he seemed to have nothing in common with Juliette, and when Nashe compared the sad pallor of this little boy with the brightness and sparkle of his curly-headed daughter, his darling dervish with her crystal laugh and chubby knees, he felt nothing but contempt for him. With every hour that passed, his urge to attack him became stronger and more uncontrollable, and when six o’clock finally rolled around, it seemed almost a miracle to Nashe that the boy was still alive. He put away his tools in the shed, and just as he was about to shut the door, Murks came up to him and patted him on the shoulder. “I have to hand it to you, Nashe,” he said. “You’ve got the magic touch. The little fella ain’t never taken to anyone like he did to you today. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

The next morning, the boy came to the meadow dressed in his Halloween costume: a black-and-white skeleton outfit with a mask that looked like a skull. It was one of those crude, flimsy things you buy in a box at Woolworth’s, and because the weather was cold that day, he wore it over his outer garments, which gave him an oddly bloated appearance, as if he had doubled his weight overnight. According to Murks, the boy had insisted on wearing the costume so that Nashe could see how he looked in it, and in
his demented state at that moment, Nashe immediately began to wonder if the boy wasn’t trying to tell him something. The costume stood for death, after all, death in its purest and most symbolic form, and perhaps that meant the boy knew what Nashe was planning, that he had come to the meadow dressed as death because he knew he was going to die. Nashe could not help seeing it as a message written in code. The boy was telling him that it was all right, that as long as Nashe was the one who killed him, everything was going to be all right.

He warred against himself for the whole of that day, devising any number of ruses to keep the skeleton boy at a safe distance from his murderous hands. In the morning, he told him to watch a particular stone at the back of one of the piles, instructing him to guard it so that it would not disappear, and in the afternoon Nashe let him play with the wagon while he went off and busied himself with masonry work at the other end of the meadow. But inevitably there were lapses, moments when the boy’s concentration broke down and he came running toward Nashe, or else, even from a distance, those times when Nashe had to endure the litany of his name, the endless
Jim, Jim, Jim
, resounding like an alarm from the depths of his own fear. Again and again, he wanted to tell Murks not to bring him around anymore, but the struggle to keep his feelings under control took so much out of him, brought him so close to the point of mental collapse, that he could no longer trust himself with the words he wanted to say. He drank himself into a stupor that night, and the next morning, as if waking into the fullness of a nightmare, he opened the door of the trailer and saw that the boy was back—clutching a bag of Halloween candies against his chest, and then, without saying a word, solemnly handing it over to Nashe like a young brave delivering the spoils of his first hunt to the tribal chief.

“What’s this for?” Nashe said to Murks.

“Jim,” the boy said, answering the question himself. “Sweeties for Jim.”

“That’s right,” Murks said. “He wanted to share his candy with you.”

Nashe opened the bag a crack and peered down at the jumble of candy bars, apples, and raisins inside. “This is taking it a bit far, don’t you think, Calvin? What’s the kid trying to do, poison me?”

“He don’t mean nothing by it,” Murks said. “He just felt sorry for you—missing out on the trick-or-treating and all. It’s not like you have to eat it.”