The Return (4 page)

William Burns

William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story
to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman in Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on
to me.
According to Monge, the North American was a laid-back guy who never
lost his cool, a description that seems to be at odds with the following account
of the events.
In Burns’s own words:

It was a dreary time in my life.
I was going through a rough patch at
work.
I was supremely bored, though up till then I’d always been immune to
boredom.
I was going out with two women.
That I do remember clearly.
One of them
was getting on a bit—she must have been about my age—and the other
wasn’t much more than a girl.
Some days, though, they seemed like two ailing,
crotchety old women, and other days like two little girls who just wanted to
play.
The age difference wasn’t so big you’d mistake them for mother and
daughter, but almost.
Though that’s the kind of thing a man can only guess at;
you never really know for sure.
Anyway, these women had two dogs, a big one and
a little one.
And I never knew which dog belonged to which woman.
They were
sharing a house on the outskirts of a town in the mountains where people went
for summer vacation.
When I mentioned to someone, some friend or acquaintance,
that I was going up there for the summer, he told me I should take my fishing
rod.
But I didn’t have a fishing rod.
Someone else told me about the stores and
the cabins, taking it easy, clearing the mind.
But I wasn’t going there with the
women for a vacation; I was going there to take care of them.
Why did they ask
me to take care of them?
What they told me was that some guy was out to harm
them.
They called him the killer.
When I asked what his motive was, they didn’t
have an answer, or maybe they preferred to keep me in the dark.
So I tried to
work it out for myself.
They were afraid, they believed they were in danger, and
maybe it was all a false alarm.
But why should I tell people what to think,
especially when they’ve hired me, and anyway I figured that after a week they’d
come around to my point of view.
So I went up into the mountains with them and
their dogs, and we moved into a little stone-and-timber house full of
windows, more windows than I think I’ve ever seen in the one house, all
different sizes and scattered haphazardly.
From the outside, the windows gave
you the impression that the house had three floors, but in fact there were only
two.
Inside, especially in the living room and some of the bedrooms on the first
floor, they produced a dizzying, exhilarating, maddening effect.
In the bedroom
I was given there were only two windows, both quite small, one above the other,
the top one almost reaching the ceiling, the lower one just over a foot from the
floor.
Anyway, life up there was pleasant.
The older woman wrote every morning,
but she didn’t shut herself away, like they say writers usually do; she set up
her laptop on the living room table.
The younger woman spent her time gardening
or playing with the dogs or talking with me.
I did most of the cooking, and
although I’m no chef, the women praised the meals I prepared.
I could have gone
on living like that for the rest of my life.
But one day the dogs ran away and I
went out to look for them.
I remember searching through a wood nearby, armed
only with a flashlight, and peering into the gardens of empty houses.
I couldn’t
find them anywhere.
When I got back to the house, the women looked at me as if I
was to blame for the dogs’ disappearance.
Then they mentioned a name, the
killer’s name.
They were the ones who’d been calling him the killer right from
the start.
I was skeptical, but I listened to what they had to say.
They talked
about high school romances, money trouble, grudges.
I couldn’t get my head
around how both of them could have had relationships with the same guy in high
school, given the age difference between them.
But they didn’t want to say any
more.
That night, in spite of the reproaches, one of them came to my room.
I
didn’t switch on the light, I was half asleep, and I never found out which one
it was.
When I woke up, with the first light of dawn, I was alone.
That day I
decided to go into town and pay a visit to the guy they were scared of.
I asked
them for his address and told them to shut themselves in the house and not to
move until I got back.
I drove down in the older woman’s pickup.
Just before I
got to town, I saw the dogs in the yard of an old canning plant.
They came over
to me looking abashed and wagging their tails.
I put them in the cab of the
pickup and drove around the town for a while, laughing at how worried I’d been
the previous night.
Predictably, I found myself approaching the address the
women had given me.
Let’s say the guy was called Bedloe.
He had a store in the
middle of town, a store for vacationers, where he sold everything from fishing
rods to checked shirts and chocolate bars.
For a while I just browsed the
shelves.
The man looked like a movie actor; he can’t have been more than
thirty-five.
He was strongly built, had dark hair, and was reading a
newspaper spread out on the counter.
He was wearing canvas pants and a tee
shirt.
The store must have been doing good business; it was on one of the main
streets, which had trams running down it as well as cars.
Bedloe’s stuff was
expensive.
For a while I checked out the prices and the stock.
As I was leaving,
for some reason I had the impression that the poor guy was lost.
I hadn’t gone
more than ten yards when I realized that his dog was following me.
I hadn’t even
seen it in the store: a big black dog, maybe a German Shepherd crossed with
something else.
I’ve never owned a dog, I’ve got no idea what makes the damn
things tick, but for whatever reason, Bedloe’s dog followed me.
I tried to get
it to go back to the store, of course, but it paid no attention.
So I kept
walking toward the pickup, with the dog at my side, and then I heard the
whistle.
The storekeeper was whistling his dog back.
I didn’t turn around, but I
knew that he had come out looking for us.
My reaction was automatic and
unthinking: I tried to make sure he didn’t see me, or didn’t see us.
I remember
hiding behind a dark red tram, the color of dried blood, with the dog pressed
against my legs.
Just when I was feeling safely hidden, the tram moved off and
the storekeeper saw me from the opposite sidewalk and moved his hands in a
gesture that could have meant Grab the dog or Hang the dog or Stay right there
till I come over.
Which is exactly what I didn’t do; I turned around and
disappeared into the crowd, while he shouted something like Stop, my dog!
Hey
buddy, my dog!
Why did I behave like that?
I don’t know.
Anyway, the
storekeeper’s dog followed me submissively to where I’d parked the pickup and as
soon as I opened the door, before I had time to react, he jumped in and refused
to budge.
When they saw me arrive with three dogs, the women said nothing and
started playing with all three.
The storekeeper’s dog seemed to know them from
way back.
That afternoon, we talked about all sorts of things.
I started by
telling them about what had happened to me in town, then they talked about their
past lives and their work: one had been a teacher, the other a hairdresser, and
both had quit their jobs, although from time to time, they said, they looked
after kids with problems.
At some point, I found myself talking about how the
house should be guarded around the clock.
The women looked at me and agreed with
a smile.
I regretted having put it like that.
Then we ate.
I hadn’t prepared the
meal that night.
The conversation lapsed into silence broken only by the sound
of our jaws and teeth working, and the scuffling of the dogs outside as they
raced around the house.
Later, we started drinking.
One of the women, I don’t
remember which, talked about the roundness of the earth and protection and
doctor’s voices.
My mind was elsewhere, I wasn’t following.
I guess she was
referring to the Indians who had once inhabited those mountain slopes.
After a
while I couldn’t stand it any more, so I got up, cleared the table and shut
myself in the kitchen to wash the dishes, but I could hear them even there.
When
I went back to the living room, the younger woman was lying on the sofa, half
covered with a blanket, and the other one was talking about a big city; it was
as if she were talking up some big city, saying what a great place it was to
live, but in fact she was running it down; I could tell, because every now and
then both of them would start sniggering.
That was something I never got with
those two: their humor.
I found them attractive, I liked them, but
something about their sense of humor always seemed false and forced.
The bottle
of whiskey I’d opened after dinner was half empty.
That bothered me; I had no
intention of getting drunk, and I didn’t want them to get drunk and leave me
out.
So I sat down with them and said that we had to talk a few things over.
What things?
they asked, pretending to be surprised, or maybe they weren’t just
pretending.
This house has too many weak points, I said.
We’ve got to do
something about it.
What are they?
asked one of the women.
OK, I said, and I
started by reminding them how far it was from town, how exposed it was, but I
soon realized they weren’t listening.
If I was a dog, I thought resentfully,
these women would show me a bit more consideration.
Later, after I realized that
none of us were feeling sleepy, they started talking about children and their
voices made my heart recoil.
I have seen terrible, evil things, sights to make a
hard man flinch, but listening to the women that night, my heart recoiled so
violently it almost disappeared.
I tried to butt in, I tried to find out if they
were recalling scenes from childhood or talking about real children in the
present, but I couldn’t.
My throat felt like it was full of bandages and cotton
swabs.
Suddenly, in the middle of that conversation or double monologue, I
had a premonition and I started moving stealthily toward one of the
windows in the living room, a ridiculous little bull’s-eye window, in a
corner, too close to the main window to serve any useful purpose.
I know that at
the last moment the women looked at me and realized that something was
happening; all I had time to do was put my finger to my lips, before pulling
back the curtain and seeing Bedloe’s head, the killer’s head, outside.
What
happened next is hazy.
And it’s hazy because panic is contagious.
The killer, I
realized immediately, had started running around the outside of the house.
The
women and I started running around inside.
Two circles: he was looking for a way
in, trying to find a window left open, while the women and I went around
checking the doors and shutting the windows.
I know I didn’t do what I should
have done: gone to my room, got my gun, gone outside and made him surrender.
Instead I found myself thinking that the dogs were still out there, and hoping
nothing bad would happen to them; one of the dogs was pregnant, I think, I’m not
sure—there’d been some talk about it.
Anyway, just at that moment, while I
was still running around, I heard one of the women say, Jesus, the dog, the dog,
and I thought of telepathy, I thought of happiness, and I was afraid that the
woman who had spoken, whichever one it was, would go out to look for the dog.
Luckily, neither of them made any move to leave the house.
Just as well.
Just as
well, I thought.
And then (I’ll never forget this) I went into a room on the
first floor where I’d never been before.
It was long, narrow and dark,
illuminated only by the moon and by a faint glow coming from the porch lights.
And at that moment I knew, with a terror-driven certitude, that destiny (or
misfortune—the same thing in this case) had brought me to that room.
At the
far end, outside a window, I saw the storekeeper’s silhouette.
I crouched down,
barely able to contain my shaking (my whole body was shaking, the sweat was
pouring off me) and waited.
The killer opened the window with bewildering ease
and slipped quietly into the room.
There were three narrow wooden beds each with
a bedside table.
On the wall, inches above the beds I could see three framed
prints.
The killer stopped for a moment.
I felt him breathe; the air made a
healthy sound as it went into his lungs.
Then he groped his way forward, between
the wall and the feet of the beds, directly toward where I was crouched, waiting
for him.