Narrow Rooms Page 12

  Looking up finally Sidney saw what he thought for a second was another woman who had stepped in to hear his speech, but it was, after all, only Irene, whose face was furrowed and shrunken and disfigured by the grief of his words. She looked seventy years old in that sun-­moted light stretching down to them from the stained-­glass windows and walnut banisters.

  “Do you have any word for me, then, Irene?” he inquired.

  “None, none,” she sobbed then. “But I may later, dear boy.”

  She indicated she wished him to leave the room.

  “You cain’t go to the renderer, do you hear?”

  It was the next day and Gareth was standing over Sidney who was pretending to be asleep still.

  “I won’t let you,” Gareth went on. He took Sidney’s rough, heavily veined hands in his.

  “I might have known your Ma would give me away,” Sidney replied, keeping his eyes closed. “That’s the damned woman for you, spilling my secret to you . . .”

  De Lakes pulled his hands away from Gareth’s grasp.

  It was the first time the young invalid had seen him really mad.

  “Look, if you go to him,” Gareth took his hands again, “I’ll go with you. It’ll be better together . . .”

  “You cain’t go with me, what’s wrong with you! You should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking you could. I am going and I am going alone and have it out with him. I see it all clear now. I have been hiding from him all my life. Did Irene tell you that too? And he has been waiting for me all that while and I have been chicken . . . So I am going and alone. Damn your mother for talking to you. . . .”

  “I’ll go to him, never you mind. I’ll see him,” Gareth responded, raising his voice and throwing down Sidney’s hands from his grasp as he might have thrown down a baseball bat after he had failed to hit a ball for all of an afternoon.

  “I’m glad though to see you full of piss and vinegar,” Sidney opened his eyes wide and smiling now. He pressed his nose quickly against the boy’s long silk-­smooth hair. “But I don’t want to hear no more about you facing the music for me, do you hear. . . . No, no, this is my turn to be valedictorian . . .”

  “What if he should kill you?”

  “Well, then, that would mean it was my fate from the beginning to have him do that to me. Be done in by the scissors-­grinder . . . I won’t hide no more. I hid from him by killing Brian, hid by going to jail, hid from him in the eighth grade and was really hiding from him when I hit him at the Graduation Exercises. No more! Let him do his damnedest . . .”

  Actually it was Gareth who went that same night. He rode one of the only remaining horses after the house got still. The horse acted like it knew how important Gareth’s going was, for it failed to make its usual whinnying sound and didn’t kick once or resist the saddle and bridle. It was like a horse made of fog and air.

  It was the first long ride Gareth had taken since before the train wreck, and he arrived tired. Furthermore he had not put on heavy enough clothing so that he shivered badly as he rapped at the door. For a minute he feared the renderer was not at home.

  But of course he was and opened the door, his mouth going slack when he got a look at who it was.

  “What are you shivering and shakin’ for?” Roy inquired. “It’s spring.”

  “I come to talk.” Gareth pushed his way in.

  “I don’t suppose a well-­brought-­up snot like you imbibes whiskey even after physical exposure, does he?” Roy studied him under the dim light of the kitchen ceiling.

  “Mind your lip now,” Gareth managed to get out with difficulty by reason of his trembling.

  Roy took down a bottle of Weller bourbon and poured him a shot in a high tumbler and banged it down before him.

  “No thanks,” Gareth said. He sat down on a high stool. “I don’t touch it.”

  “You’re a guest in my house and you’ll drink it.” He held the brim of the glass to the boy’s mouth.

  “I come here to ask you a favor, Roy,” Gareth spoke into the glass now as if it were Roy. “If not for my sake, for Brian McFee’s.”

  “Brian McFee don’t need no intervention from you for him . . . I’ll take care of that, and don’t you never mention his name in front of me again unless I give you express permission for it. . . . Now drink this or I will smash glass and booze down your craw.”

  He poured the liquor down Gareth’s throat.

  “Take that fucking swill away from my mouth, do you hear?”

  Roy threw the rest of the liquor in the boy’s face.

  “Suck the rest of it off of your mouth,” Roy jibed. “Or shall I kiss it off of you?”

  Gareth swallowed, trying to keep his anger down, and wanting after all to plead with the renderer for Sidney, for himself, for the house.

  “Don’t hound us, Roy . . . Give us a chance.” He wiped his face dry with a handkerchief.

  “Us. Mmm . . . Say you act pretty spry for a boy who is sick all the time . . . Horseback riding at two a.m. What is your ailment exactly do you say? According to the latest medical bulletin, that is.”

  “Far out, ain’t you . . . ?” Then conquering his ire, he went on: “I come here unbidden and am not put up to it by anybody, Roy. . . . But you got to let Sidney De Lakes off of the hook! You hear? Let him go!”

  “Huh, let him off the hook! . . . What about the hook up my ass . . . ? Did you landed gentry ever think of that hook?” Rolling his eyes, his mouth suddenly as wet as if he had drunk all the bourbon, he continued: “I’ll let him off of nothing. . . . Let him die . . .”

  “That’s what I come to ask of you,” Gareth spoke unlike himself, and his voice rose and fell as if he were singing a solo.

  “Don’t hurt him if he comes here,” Gareth began then to plead in earnest. “But why don’t you give us up. Whatever harm we done you long ago or you think we done, let up on us.”

  “Is that the end of your speech?”

  “I can’t tell it in words, Roy,” Gareth almost whimpered, his strength and bravado diminished to nothing. “But I would do anything if you would let him go, once and for all.” He looked up at Roy.

  “I don’t have hold of him. He has hold of me.”

  Gareth let his hands fall to his lap as if he had heard the judge pronounce the sentence. Quickly jumping up then, his face white as the recent snow outside, he pulled out a revolver and pointed it at Roy.

  “You think I’m scared of that, do you, you chicken-­shit little coward . . . Go ahead and shoot.”

  “You’re going to promise me to let up on Sidney.”

  “So it all worked out the way I thought it would,” Roy sneered. “And who reinstated him with you? . . . Did you ever think that out? . . . You must never have taken a good look at the son of a bitch, though, to be in love with him. For if ever you looked at him hard you’d see there’s nothing left of him to love . . . Why, he’s sicker even than you . . .”

  “I prize him and I need him and you shan’t get him from me or I will blow your brains out.”

  Roy turned his back on the boy.

  “Go ahead, shoot,” he would say every so often. This went on until Roy was prepared and ready and then wheeling about like some sparrow hawk from the sky, he swooped upon his assailant and tore the weapon from the boy’s hands, hurried over to a commode and locked it in one of the drawers.

  “Now command me, why don’t you?” He rapped Gareth across the mouth with his knuckles. “You’re like him, though, too incompetent to shoot when you had the chance. Did your old woman send you to kill me?”

  “You’ll regret this, Roy . . . If you don’t let us off the hook, especially him.” Gareth moved to within an inch now of the renderer’s face. “What did he ever do to you that you hate him so?”

  “You got gall to even breathe that question. . . . You never heard then he killed Brian McFee. And if you ain’t heard he killed him, you don’t know before he killed Brian he killed me . . . All those years through grade school and high school h
e was the one I thought about night and day. . . .”

  Gareth backed away now in terror for as Roy spoke these last words he realized that the man speaking them was no longer aware of his presence.

  “All those lonely years with my brute of a father, he was the one night and day who was in my thoughts . . . The first time I played with my own cock it was while I looked at a snapshot of him. . . . He owes me his blood . . . Go tell him he owes me his blood,” he came out of his reverie now enough to glance at Gareth.

  As he looked at the boy, one wild expression was followed by another, if possible, even wilder, at least a different cast of wildness.

  Rushing to the commode, he nearly broke that article of furniture to pieces as he wrenched the drawer loose and pulled out Gareth’s gun, and pointed it at his breast.

  “Do you know where we are going to take the problem?” Roy inquired. “I thought you wouldn’t. . . . Well, you went and mentioned Brian McFee’s name, didn’t you, though I forbid anybody to name him before me. . . . Well, we are going to Sycamore Lane Cemetery and pay him a visit, and ask him his opinion if I should let your lover off the hook . . . We’ll go on your horse since you are so fond of traveling horseback . . . Now you march,” he spat out, pointing the gun at his head and pushing the boy out into the night.

  They rode together at breakneck speed on Gareth’s horse, Roy taking the reins, Gareth holding on with might and main, as the renderer purposely (he felt) chose the worst and muddiest back roads, the loneliest, and of course the most unfrequented. It was beginning to drizzle a thin wet snow, though the crescent moon was faintly visible on a piece of the unveiled part of the sky.

  After what seemed to a stricken Gareth an all-­night ride, they came to the fence which surrounded the south end of the Sycamore Lane Cemetery. Roy studied the height of the fence, armed at its top with heavy iron spikes. Then lashing the horse with the riding crop, and letting out a cry that if any cry could would waken the dead, he cleared the fence with the horse in one mammoth straining of muscle and nerve.

  Then Gareth heard the horse’s hooves on fine gravel (he had closed his eyes almost from the start of the ride), and finally Roy’s “Whoa!” pronounced in maniacal imperiousness.

  In the silence that followed this daring and this outcry one heard the incessant dripping of the snowy rain from the pine trees.

  Brian’s grave lay before them, among many other graves which dated as far back as the Revolution, with a sprinkling of Civil War graves, and then all those other graves in honor of men who had fought and died for a cause. Brian had been allowed to be buried here because both his father and grandfather had fought for their country­­.

  Without warning, Gareth pushed Roy aside, almost knocking him off balance, and taking off his hat, he knelt on the simple tombstone over which a small white angel rose in the act of reading from a tablet.

  Gareth began intoning, holding his big wet broad-­brimmed hat over his heart: “As you was the unknowing cause of the ruin of my family, Brian, and as you hear me on the other side, no matter where you are, I beseech you” (here his sobs from anger and confusion broke through his words) “beseech and entreat you, Save my house from ruin, Brian, and mete out punishment to this hell-­hound who is dragging us into the grave with you. If necessary let us die, Sidney and me and my Mother, but not by the hands of the aforementioned hell-­hound. Brian, goodnight, and Amen. “

  But when he rose he looked into the eyes of the scissors-­grinder, which by reason of the words he had just heard had made his features unrecognizable for a moment so that Gareth let out a gasp of pure terror which was immediately stifled by Roy’s hand clapped over his mouth.

  “We will see if Brian McFee hears you now,” Roy began, and he raised the riding crop and struck the boy across the mouth. Then throwing him to the side of the grave he pushed him flat on his face and with his knees in his spine tore off his trousers. He rabbit-­punched him methodically, drowsily, and slapped the back of his neck until Gareth went into convulsions, then lay quiet, like a small prey the hunter has finished off by striking against an iron post. Loosening his own clothing only sufficiently to bring out his stiffened penis, leaving his balls draped and hidden as on ruined or defaced statues, and ejecting on his prostrate enemy’s backside a profuse rain of spittle he entered exultant his disobedient pupil’s body with authoritative but for him not vicious strokes. Then after a vehement endless time, as he was reaching climax he cried to the dark vault of the sky and also to the querulous statue angel standing guard over the grave, “Do you hear your one-­time lover’s prayer now, Brian McFee, in the hottest center of hell, do you? If so, send him a lightning shaft from wherever you are to show him the dead can do nothing about the living and cannot even tell earth from hell. . . . Do you hear, Brian, do you hear him bawling?” Here he struck the prostrate youth a rain of blows from the crop.

  Pulling off all his remaining clothes, Roy then yanked the body of Gareth up, opened his eyes with his fingers, slapped him vigorously, spitting into his eyes and roaring a hurricane of insults into his astounded countenance, he put him on his horse.

  “We’ll send your ass home in real style now for your bedfellow and your doting Ma,” Roy said as he tied him with cord and heavy rope against his falling off on the road home, and then pulling open a seldom used iron-­gate he gave him a final sendoff with words so obscene and murderously loud Gareth thought his eardrums had burst, before whipping the flanks of the horse to make him run, the scissors-­grinder screamed: “Ride home if you and that spavined brute have the know-­how to and show your mate Sidney what’s in store for him if he ever comes near to my land or property again. . . .”

  Gareth reached home just after the first saffron streaks of dawn were visible above the mountains. The cord which had held him to his horse had come undone almost right away. He had met a few trucks on the way back. The drivers had stared briefly and one truck stopped, but then drove on. The man who brought the hay for the horses was standing in front of Irene Vaisey’s mortgaged property when the horseman arrived, and he immediately turned and called Sidney who had just risen. Sid took one look and ran three steps at a time all the way upstairs for a blanket and house slippers. Then having wrapped Gareth to the eyes in the blanket, Sid let the boy walk upstairs under his own power.

  “Yes, it was him,” Gareth replied to Sidney’s silent question at last. They both avoided looking at one another at that moment.

  “If you feel you want to tell me what happened, go ahead,” Sidney was saying, looking away from the torment and the sound of the boy’s chattering teeth.

  Gareth grinned, blurted out the worst and then lay down on the bed. He acted, Sidney thought with mild disgust, sort of pleased with himself.

  Sidney had barely given Irene more than ten words of the story when she called the sheriff, but then, shamed and fearful of what the scissors-­grinder had done and what more he might do, on Sidney’s advice, she had called the sheriff back and told him not to bother.

  “We won’t need no sheriff,” Sidney had told her. “I should have gone sooner to see him and this might not have happened . . . I will go now. . . .”

  Instead he made a stumbling movement and sat down forcibly in a chair.

  Despite what he had gone through, Gareth actually looked better and spoke more coherently and fluently than he had for some months. He was given a bath and some brandy and milk and put to bed, but he sent word down to Sidney to come up and talk.

  Irene was standing, her arms folded, her makeup carelessly applied, her hair in strings. “You can surely tell your own mother,” she was shouting to Gareth.

  Gareth stared at her stonily. “One’s own mother,” he mimicked her saucily. “You can tell nothing to your own mother,” he scoffed.

  Then Sidney took over, and at a look from him Irene withdrew.

  They began going over what happened, almost like lawyers discussing a badly written will.

  “You already told me fifty times he tied you
to the horse, Garey . . . But before that what?”

  Gareth looked calmly at Sidney, his wild look of the past weeks, even years, was gone, never to come again. He would be collected and severe now until the end.

  But without losing his quiet manner, he now raised his voice so that the whole house could hear him: “He did me in the behind for your information then, you hear . . .” He slapped his backside viciously but somehow grandly. “And how do I know but what he put a whole bottle of turpentine up my ass to boot. . . . You and old Irene are crazy for details, aren’t you. . . . Now does that satisfy you or shall I go up to the turret on the house and shout to the whole countryside showing my bare behind how he did it and on whose graveside it was did, and so forth . . . And how he said, ‘How does it feel to have someone give it to you where the fur is short! . . .’ ”