Narrow Rooms Read online

  “I believe he thinks I am a horse,” Sidney muttered.

  Gareth stared at him now. If he had believed in anything like insanity he would have felt Sidney was insane at that moment, but he had never thought about the subject or heard it discussed for more than five minutes in his life, and he was not interested enough in it to take its existence seriously.

  “I wish you was a horse myself,” Gareth had finally commented. “We would have real good times together then instead of sittin’ around here in our nightclothes like old women in the county infirmary. God damn it, I wish I didn’t remember everything so well! That damned train done something to me deep-­down I can tell you. I doubt, damn me, I will ever get over it if we don’t find us a smarter doctor than the ones we have doctored with so far. . . . That’s why I wish you was a horse, Sid, instead of a man. You follow me? You would make a wonderful thoroughbred. Maybe you can’t blame the old renderer as you call him from being soft on you now, can you?”

  “Oh dry up, why don’t you . . . You didn’t hear one word of my dream because all you think about is yourself. . . .”

  “Don’t take on like that, Sid, when you’re just back such a short while. . . . I listened to your dream but you shouldn’t ought to even remember dreams on account of they don’t mean nothing. . . . I knew an old midwife once (folks called her a granny-­woman) who told fortunes for us kids by putting four flies in milk and the ones that didn’t drown right away had a prophecy in the way their wings moved. . . .”

  “And what prophecy did she give you, I wonder?”

  Gareth screwed his eyes up and Sid was sorry immediately he had asked the question for it put the boy in such a state.

  “She said I would be king of the owls.”

  “Oh, Gareth, hell, talk about dreams having no meaning. . . . You can’t remember her fortune right if that’s what you come up with.”

  “I was to be king of the owls.” He spoke testily and his golden brown eyes darkened. “She said it, hear, and I remember it.”

  “Well, then, she was a fraud at fortunes.”

  “No,” Gareth proceeded now in his old moony fashion, “I think she was right. I didn’t understand her, but I feel she told the truth . . .”

  Christmas it snowed deep. It always does this in the “Mountain State,” roads become impassible, drivers and cars are marooned and sometimes freeze to death before they can be rescued. The wind screams through the pine and oak trees as if it could not wait to be rid of the Old Year.

  Each Christmas Roy gave an elaborate celebration for Brian McFee just as he had when he was alive.

  “Nothing is too good for you, Brian,” he had said when they used to celebrate together Jesus’ birth. “Nothing will ever be too good for you, nothing will ever cost enough, Brian,” the renderer repeated the same words now that he belonged to the invisible kingdom.

  “I know I will see you again,” he said, kissing Brian’s photograph.

  One of Brian’s secrets was that he loved toys right up until he died. He was a manly boy from his earliest years, riding horses, shooting like a marksman, hiking, enduring hunger and cold and pain, but he had kept all his dolls from early childhood where they were housed in a special room of their own. To this somewhat large collection Roy Sturtevant added each year a new doll. Brian’s death did not stop his practice, and each Christmas eve he wrapped a new doll in elaborate yuletide wrapping paper, heavy gold twine, and stickers of reindeers and Santa Claus and elves.

  This year, the last year he was to make a practice of this, Roy presented to Brian a $5,000 merry-­go-­round horse. He had not wrapped it, but had kept it hidden in the big closet that lay off his room. On Christmas eve he brought it into the room before the Christmas tree which he had trimmed himself (it had taken him over fourteen hours to get the tree properly trimmed, for Brian in all and everything was so hard to please).

  When he set down the merry-­go-­round horse in front of the yule tree and the large tinted photograph of Brian taken at the age he took his first communion, he had half repressed a sob.

  “Do you like the horse, Brian?” he had addressed the picture. “The eyes are made out of a right nice kind of glass, don’t you think.”

  Then he began to bawl. It was the grass he blamed for his tendency to weep, or again he would blame it on the fact that each Christmas Brian receded a little farther away from him, the pain of losing him was a little less pronounced, and so he sobbed for that too perhaps.

  “Brian, I have a confession to make,” he went on, unwrapping a present which he pretended Brian had given him (a music box from Switzerland). “I am still in love with this little gas-­pump attendant and former football star. . . . That I could be so smitten! . . . And by someone who has always treated me like shit . . . Won’t I never be free of him . . . ?”

  He sat there groaning, holding his knees. The tears had stopped flowing.

  That was when he decided he would go peek in on the two boys he had brought together.

  After all, unknown to everybody but him and Irene Vaisey, Roy now owned the very house the boys lived in. He was their landlord, though they were unaware of it. And what was to prevent him peeking in on them from the edge of the woods, for both the woods and the property were his.

  “After all, I am on my own land,” Roy said as he stood outside the Vaisey house in the driving snow. It was past midnight by now so Jesus had finally been born again, and as a matter of fact a few church bells down in the valley were ringing.

  Inside the house, and listening to the same bells, Sidney tossed and sighed in that heavy, stertorous way only an athlete or maybe a dying person can, the breath coming from deep down as if the earth breathed for him. He got up and went to the toilet and began to urinate, careful to do it along the sides of the bowl so the noise would be less likely to waken Gareth. His urinating was vehement like his breathing, and as he held his cock in his one hand, steering it away from the water of the bowl, he was somehow reminded of a dray horse which as a child he had used to watch piss with such furious pressure upon the baked dirt road. As he was engaged thus, he lifted with his free hand the curtain of the little window directly beside him and looked out. He blinked his eyes. Could it be? It must be the snow playing tricks, or else his heart was acting up again. . . . But no, the scissors-grinder was down there looking up at his light. He did not even bother to put on his house slippers or his robe (actually Gareth’s). It was, he felt, imperative to touch the specter this time. He would recover, he was convinced, if he touched him.

  The figure of the scissors-­grinder did not move as he heard the storm door open and the dry trudge of Sidney’s naked feet in the snow as he approached him. When he advanced to within a few inches of Roy, Sidney heard his own voice say, “You can slap me now if that’s what you’ve come to do, or if you want to shoot me, suit yourself . . .”

  “I ain’t made up my mind what to do. I’m lookin’.”

  “My face is exposed for you to do whichever thing you want. . . .”

  “Barefooted, too,” Roy said without half looking down at Sid’s feet to pronounce on this. His eyes were focused on Sidney’s mouth.

  Almost before he had got the last word out, Sidney slipped and fell at Roy’s feet. The snow was deeper than it looked so that he sank rather perceptibly in the drift he had landed in.

  Roy did not move for quite a while. Then he slowly bent down, gazing fixedly at the gas-­pump attendant. He nudged him with his foot. Sidney opened his eyes.

  “I’m not ready for you yet,” Roy told him, bending down over him.

  He picked up some snow in his bare hands and rubbed it over the recumbent man’s face, and then opening his pajamas a bit rubbed the snow over his chest and belly.

  “My face is ready for you to do whichever . . .”

  Then Sidney seemed to have passed out. Roy kicked him again with his hunting boots.

  “Oh, well,” he said after studying him for a while. The snow suddenly began to fall now in thick wet
heavy sheets.

  Roy picked up the unconscious man and threw him, unconcerned as if he had picked up a ten-­pound bag of potatoes, over his shoulder. The storm door had been left open so that it was no trouble at all for him to walk right in, and then up the back stairs and into Gareth’s room. Roy flung Sid down on the bed and Gareth woke up, if indeed he was asleep since he almost never slept, and he heard the thump and the words:

  “Unless I miss my guess, I will be back for the both of you before too very long. . . .”

  Later Roy Sturtevant was almost as unsure he had stood outside the football hero’s window and then had seen his “principal” come down and out into the snow barefoot as Sidney himself had been unsure he had seen Roy and not a snowman, which he and Gareth had made the day before for their amusement and idle hours, and to have something like that to gaze down on as a kind of sentinel against their sleeplessness.

  The sight of Sid’s feet naked in the snow on Christmas had for a time mollified the scissors-­grinder’s hatred (yet only by dying could Sidney De Lakes make up for what Roy had suffered, only by hanging on some barren tree forever, ignored even by the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field who would find his flesh too rotten), but then, as Roy had sat in his drafty immense house, like an abandoned castle in the wastes, he went over, with the aid of a notebook he had kept since the eighth grade, all the slights and insults, rebuffs and insolence, the looking straight through him by the hero, as if he was air, the curled princely lip and sneer, the fine-­chiseled nose in the air, the contempt and loathing and fury of all those years culminating in Sidney’s striking him when the renderer had only reached the accomplishment of valedictorian by reason of his love for the football player. He had been slapped then, in other words, as his reward for an achievement which he had pursued and won only to impress the De Lakes.

  He closed the notebook with a resounding bang, almost a crash like that of an entire forest of pine trees falling in a lonely stretch of timberland.

  The De Lakes must die!

  Nonetheless because he had felt such pleasure at having carried Sidney over his back that day and because he had felt such intense happiness at seeing those naked feet in the snow, Roy now stripped in front of a seven-­and-­a-­half-­foot mirror. He would punish in himself for once and all the pleasure he had taken by carrying the unconscious body of the De Lakes snot. His own body must be held to account for such weakness. His body must never yearn again for Sidney De Lakes. His body indeed was his enemy, along with the football star. And his enemy must die, but first to punish his body.

  His father’s German-­manufactured straight razor lay nearby.

  With a short-­lived delirious kind of prayer, at least he closed his eyes and let certain words sizzle and boom from his white lips, then throwing his head back, with (to his regret) a sudden look of admiration at the way he had made his physique resemble that of a Roman statue by dint of incessant hard physical labor about his house and farm and pasture and woodland (it was his body after all which had made Brian McFee dizzy with delight and which in the end had been the instrument of his death), he slashed then his wicked arms which had enjoyed the weight of the gas-­pump attendant, and when these bled to his satisfaction he slashed his feet and their veins for having admired the naked feet of Sidney De Lakes, and then he slashed the flesh over his heart for, despite all his warnings to his heart, it had continued to love and adore his arch-­enemy.

  But he would not die! No, he must live as a real renderer and grandson of a renderer, with these new scars, with the fluent loss of new blood, he must live in order to fulfill his final revenge against the enemy who had dictated the whole tenor of his life.

  The worst of winter was perhaps over. Roy had recovered from his wounds. He spent hours admiring the scars on his body, the pink cicatrices of his victory. As he grew older he looked more and more like an Indian. There was not an extra ounce of flesh on his spare sinewy body which resembled certain trees or vines so austere in their configuration that it is said even birds dare not alight on their branches and animals pause on confronting them and then make a wide detour around them.

  He combed out his long black hair meticulously today, almost tearing from the roots any strand which snarled or refused to go through the fine-­toothed yellowed ivory dressing comb. He put on a suit of clothes which he had purchased through the mail. (He hated the haberdashery store which was located a few steps from Doc Ulric’s.)

  He polished his shoes until they gleamed like silver pools in the forest. Then he put his fingers and hands in soapy water, and tried to manicure his nails which like wild creatures suddenly trapped and tamed by men remained no matter what was done to them indomitable and black.

  In his ears, after sudsing and rinsing them incessantly, he daubed an expensive bay rum which he had bought also through a mail-­order catalogue.

  When he was perfect, he got in his car and drove to the door of Irene Vaisey’s house.

  At first she had sent word with her “butler” that she would not receive him.

  “Tell her if she wants a roof over her sick brat’s head tonight, to get down here.”

  “And,” he shot at the retreating back of the servant, “tell her I don’t have forever . . .”

  She appeared almost instantly, trembling badly, at least in her hands, much thinner than he had ever remembered her, and despite her haggard cheeks and eyes, younger and even more beautiful. Her beauty infuriated him even more than it disgusted him.

  “What more can you have to say to me? . . . I have re­instated him, I have followed your orders . . . Shall I go live in the county infirmary for you?”

  “You will not address me in that fashion,” he spoke so low, yet so loud.

  “I beg your pardon,” she whispered.

  “You have no right to sue for or bestow pardon. Everybody knows your moral character, and that you are unfit to take care of Gareth. Whores like you have no right to see their sons after the moment the son has emerged from your stinking . . .”

  “Get out of my house,” she said, offering to hit him.

  “You will sit down and listen to me, or Gareth and you will spend the night on the road.”

  Irene Vaisey raised her hand to slap him again, but she had no energy, no will. She sat down.

  “Leave her alone, Roy.”

  It was Sidney who had just said this as he entered the room.

  The renderer opened and shut his eyes several times. The Sidney that stood before him just then looked like three men, he looked like the snapshot he had taken of him when he was the idol of the high school, he looked like Brian McFee when Brian had bestowed all his love on him, and he looked like the yellow-­gold-­eyed Gareth. He was all the temptations of his life standing there in blinding glory.

  “I’ll surrender to you, Roy . . . You can have me . . . instead of . . . them.”

  He waved his arm in the direction of Irene.

  “Just go, Roy, and I’ll make up for everything . . . All the back payments.”

  Too astounded even to accept such an offer, too blinded again by the countenance of the man who in the end directed his every move, he took up his brand-­new hat which had the price tag still sticking in the brim, and left the room, walked down the long tier of front steps, and they heard him drive off like the north wind.

  “It ain’t right you and Gareth should be involved,” he began, unaware of her condition, unaware of her bewilderment and even horror, and certainly unaware how he and not the renderer had frightened her by this speech he had made, by his “surrender.”

  “I don’t understand any of it, do I, Sidney?” she implored him.

  He never looked at her as he began speaking, much in the way he had spoken in court and said, “I’m not sorry,” which the judge and jury had thought meant “I am not sorry I killed him” when he had meant “I am not sorry I loved him. I am not ashamed I have been the lover of Brian McFee.”

  “He has been waiting for me all our lives, him,
me, like two heavenly bodies in space that they have predicted will one day collide.”

  She cried a little, then stopped in order to listen more accurately.

  “I have been running away from him since at least the eighth grade when I was fourteen, and he used to hand me the correct answers to my arithmetic test under the seat behind me. He used to hand me the right answers also on history and geography exams when he seen I was stumped. . . . All those years, though I pretended I never saw him, I guess though I saw only him and knowed he was always present. I felt when I was in jail he was in the next cell. So why should I spoil the rest of everybody’s lives, so why not quit hiding lest I go shooting maybe somebody else, why not just go to him. . . . When I had this trouble with my heart in prison they thought for a while maybe I could use a pacemaker . . . Then they said no, I didn’t need no pacemaker. And the reason they arrived at that decision is I think they realized already I had my own pacemaker, which is the renderer. For the pacemaker that they finally heard ticking in me is the scissors-­grinder’s heart, which beats for me. When he is happy, which ain’t often, my heart beats better, but when he scowls and is mad, my heart is sluggish and beats thickly like now. . . . When he is quiet, I am at prayer. . . . I have been too proud, Irene, but my pride ain’t no match for his. He has the pride of some king of a whole world of hemispheres, under the ground and the rivers maybe, but he is king. I see that now. He is stronger and bigger and smarter and both younger and older, he is taller and more cunning and runs faster despite all the years he just stood idle and watched me run for him, why, I bet he would outpoint me in football now and maybe would of way back then, and I have been running away from him when had I just thrown myself at his feet like he wanted me to do at the High School Graduation Exercises, I would have maybe been rid of him, yes, had I throwed my arms around him in the eighth grade or marched with him to the urinal and let him do every whichever, with me, it might have been better, though I doubt it. Even when I surrender, if I do, and I know it is what I will have to do now, it won’t be enough for him, or say I lay down my life for him and let him render me into fine perfumed soap for him to wash his hands with and maybe his rectum, it won’t be enough. He will curse this soap for not being Jesus and his sunbeams. It won’t be enough, for nothing will ever be enough for him, why, as I say, if Christ and the Angels was to come down to earth and renounce their power, and say, ‘Scissors-­grinder, use us meanly as you wish, destroy us and render us, and make us into tallow, and we will fall down on our knees and worship you,’ he would do it. That is, he would render Jesus Christ and the Angels, but he would not be satisfied. If he was King of the Moon and the Sun and the mountains of the furthest away galaxy and appointed Emperor of all Space, it would not be enough for him. I know I am right. . . . Nonetheless, my offer to him holds good. I told him I would surrender, and I am tired of the waiting and the pretending, and thinking I see him everywhere, in snowmen, in dusty roads in autumn, in the sunflowers when they droop in the drought, in the moon when she is horned or with a halo, and in the setting sunbeams, since he is everywhere then and I am cursed with him and yes I guess he with me, why not go to him on foot now the snow has begun to clear from the mountain roads. . . . Yes, I will walk over to his place and say, ‘Roy, I’ve come to give myself up . . . You can render me, you can cut off my offending parts which have hurt you so long, you can do as you please, but I can’t stand no more dilly-­dallying putting off and procrastination. . . . Is that clear? I am winded and bushed and beat . . .’ ”