Narrow Rooms Page 13

  It was really Sidney who acted like the one who had been raped and torn and whipped with the riding crop and sent home shamed and bare. Even Gareth let up after a while with his sarcasm and biting lip when he saw Sid’s gloom and pain.

  He sat there again like some old pooped lawyer who is trying to get all the facts and details together before going into the court room, memorizing particulars and exact words and phrases from the “crime.”

  Then coming out of his reverie, he gave Gareth a searching cool look as he saw again with incredulous wonder that the boy was “better,” if by better one meant collected and clear-eyed if irritable, and manly, sharp and nasty, sneering and proud, the way a young man in the country probably ought to be. And maybe like a tiger that first feels the coming of his claws.

  Only, Sidney knew in his bones, he was ruined all over again and this time forever. “I mean,” Sidney mumbled now to himself, “what can that young fellow think about or hold on to, if through Brian McFee, who was sent by Roy, he was hit by a train, and now he has been dishonored on Brian’s grave and sent home like side-­bacon on a horse for us to maybe bury or keep hid in the attic. . . . I mean what is to become of him now? . . . What is to become of any of us, if you ask me . . .”

  “There is no way, Gareth,” Sidney now raised his voice, “no way out, that is, but that I go to him, but killing ain’t enough and won’t put nothing back together again. I am in fact so riled I can’t feel nothing. No,” he said, putting his index finger on the veins in his wrist, “nothing, nowhere . . . I feel I have turned to cool air. . . . But wait now” (at a sign of impatience from his friend) “hear me out, I will go there of course . . . Maybe I should walk there naked and just present myself like that . . . But I have to think what I am to say. I can’t just walk into the house of a man with so much blood on his hands and say, ‘I guess this is your last visit from anybody, Roy, in this world anyhow.’ But what punishment is fit for the likes of him, after all? And how can I do it . . . ? Which is why I got to go over it all carefully like memorizing the lines in a play . . .”

  Turning down the counterpane which had slipped over Gareth’s mouth, Sidney touched the boy’s lips with his and then beseeched:

  “Tell me how to punish him, Gareth, and I will . . . I can’t think of a way. . . .”

  Gareth closed his eyes, then opened them at once.

  “Do you hear what I say, Garey?”

  “Yeah, of course I hear . . . Shut up while I think, though . . .”

  “There ain’t nothing bad enough for him I know of . . .”

  “Oh yes there is.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me.”

  “I will whisper it in your ear, Sidney . . . Bend over . . .”

  With some trepidation, Sidney put his ear to Gareth’s mouth, but sat motionless as he listened to the few words that came out. He went very white.

  “You command me to do that, do you?” Sidney said after a silence.

  “If you are a man, yes I do . . . If you love me, yes I do . . .”

  Sidney stood up.

  “All right then if that is your command and your wish, I am your man.”

  “And don’t come back without you do it, hear . . . ? I don’t want to see you again if it ain’t done . . .”

  Raising his arm sleepily, he saluted Gareth. It was not in irony. Then puzzled at such a gesture coming unbidden from himself, he rushed out of the room.

  Sidney stood for a long time outside Gareth’s room, but he was not thinking about the command so much as he was about the man he was now commissioned to kill. He went downstairs and into the seldom-­used parlor and sat in a large heavy chair with gold filigree hanging from it every which way and armrests large enough for a giant.

  Roy Sturtevant, he almost pronounced the words aloud, the scissors-­grinder, the son of generations of renderers, had sent him his life. Brian McFee, prison, Gareth, his nameless fear, his constant thinking of him, always him, thinking perhaps at the same time of scissors, knives, rendering, the grave, and a kind of glimpse of some sunless world beyond which never ends, but like his thoughts, are constant as immortality.

  Gareth’s “punishment” at the railroad crossing, unbelievable, even at times ridiculous, lay at the door of the renderer, as was Brian’s “murder,” but Gareth and Brian and he himself, the “football hero” and “gas-­pump attendant” in his foe’s savage sarcasm, they were all, he saw now, only envelopes belonging to Roy Sturtevant inside of which was concealed a message only the owner understood.

  Yet he felt that Gareth and Brian meant nothing to Roy. One could not even say that Brian McFee had led Sidney astray, or ruined Gareth since from the beginning it was Roy who had power over Sidney from the day he had extended the luxurious handkerchief when in the eighth grade he had lain unconscious and bleeding in the black youth’s arms, the handkerchief which had staunched his blood was also itself an envelope which contained the same message: You will always be mine and your shed blood seals this pact. The black youth had sensed something of all this too, for looking back at Roy, he had said: “It would be you who turned up now, wouldn’t it. Don’t surprise me none at all.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?” It was Gareth’s lips which pronounced this constantly, hounding him that day and the next, for the invalid himself never said anything again about his “command.”

  “Plenty, Gareth. In time,” Sidney’s own eyes and lips would give answer to his loved one’s mute and querulous wonder.

  “In time! There ain’t no time for such a disgrace. He has to die now, and you know it.”

  So spoke Gareth’s silent face in response.

  Finally, though, Sidney went into Gareth’s room, kissed his hair, and this time spoke aloud: “If it was a stranger, Gareth, he would be dead by now at my hands. But I feel we are dealing with someone outside of human jurisdiction . . .”

  Gareth broke away from his lover angrily.

  “I am just having the scales fall from my eyes . . . He has been after me all my life as if almost he was me. . . .” At this thought he bent over double for a sudden sharp pain perhaps from his having run up the stairs so desirous to see the person he now loved so vehemently. “So you see, for both our sakes, I can’t rush into it like I was dealing with any whichever human being. For no, oh no, he ain’t that . . .”

  “He’s a man like any other. I’ve seen him cut and bleed right here in my stable.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Here he has done this to me in a graveyard, has broke me” (here the thrilling tenor of his voice escaped from the room to go reach beyond the house and the barns and even the little foothills and lose itself in the wind), “and you talk like maybe he was . . . he was . . .”

  “Go ahead, Garey, finish your sentence, why don’t you?”

  Instead Gareth buried his head in his hands and then kept shaking his head imprisoned in his fingers like the pendulum of one of Irene’s heirloom clocks.

  “You know, Garey, you feel like me he is more than human and can’t be dealt with like any other man . . . I know now he holds my life in the hollow of his hand.”

  “Then let me kill him!” Gareth took down his hands and rose. As he spoke he tore off his dressing gown and stood naked in front of Sidney, who folded him against his chest.

  “If you won’t, I will . . . I will kill him,” the boy extricated himself from the other’s embrace.

  “We got to plan it, Garey, plan careful . . .”

  “And how long is that going to take? Till the snow falls again next October?”

  “ ’Twill be before snow. You can count on that . . .”

  But turning away from Gareth he wandered over to the huge window out of which one saw the mountains still resplendently white. A thrill ran down his spine and legs, a fear that what he really might do if he did not exert all vigilance and caution would be to go to the very sheds where Roy’s Grandad had rendered, and call to him, “I am reporting in on account of I can’t run no more.
Hear? The tendons in my ankles have give out, the dust won’t move under my feet no more, my lungs won’t take breath from the air, nor any other organ of my body run right on account of after all—but why tell you?—you have dictated everything and all from the beginning, so here I am to give myself up . . .”

  Even though it was April it kept snowing. The spring flowers were all white with it, the sweet violets and the jack-in-­the-­pulpits and the maidens tress.

  Sidney got out his football shoes and fixed them up a bit for walking. Then he threw them away and took out plain dress shoes that looked incongruous with the kind of rough corduroy pants he wore, but he kept them on. He had some chewing tobacco and he took that along though he didn’t much care for it anymore. He had never smoked, like many men who chew don’t.

  “I don’t know what I will say to him,” he went on with his soliloquy which now even Gareth’s presence did not stop. “That is, what does one say to a man who has been watching you all your life.”

  He felt, though he could not say it outright, that the word that was falling like drops of gall on his tongue, was prince. Not all princes he had read about in old books of legends are beautiful and noble and carry their head high, and his mind went back to his old English teacher who had said once when they were studying words: “All the word prince means is first. And chief,” the teacher had gone on (she had looked suddenly in turn at both Sidney and Roy, and this was to be the only lesson he had ever remembered from school except perhaps another piece of until now meaningless knowledge which came back to him that King Philip of Macedon had agreed that any part of his body might be hewed off of him provided that with what remained he might live in honor), “chief, young men, is merely from the Latin meaning head . . .”

  “Treat me then like King Philip!” Sidney had said as his leavetaking that day to a thunderstruck Gareth Vaisey.

  Sidney had walked first the four miles to Sycamore Lane Cemetery in the same drizzling snow which had afflicted the countryside for weeks, he had broken open the lock of the cemetery gate in his haste, ignoring the shouts of the sexton, a shriveled-­up, bent little man, he walked, or rather ran straight to the grave of Brian McFee, uncovering his head, and then stood staring at the same angel Gareth’s eyes had been fixed on as he lay writhing in pain under Roy’s abuse and mastery over his body on the poorly tended Irish ivy and wild arbutus.

  “I will avenge you, too.” He kneeled. “Forgive me, Brian, forgive me because I did care for you . . . Brian, if you see me from some big precipice above or in some bottomless hole somewhere, bless me, Brian, and bring me strength . . . Amen.”

  Now he walked by a detour which took him another four miles out of his way.

  The eagles were soaring even on that bleak and sunless day and of course the hawks and the crows and the ravens were making their infernal complaints, all appearing as if they were mad and disgusted with him too, or smelled the stench of death from his having knelt in the graveyard.

  “I will eventually if not now have the strength to go through with it.” Sidney had looked up now into the vault of the sky which was without warning suddenly cloudless at that moment and the spring snowshower had abated. “I will surrender to what he feels I owe him, but I want my honor. I have to sleep on that before I go. I will keep my honor. Then I may kill him. But first I will say, “If I have wronged you, renderer” (this word so long used in the village was in the end now the only word Sidney could know his enemy by), “wronged you through the years as you are said to claim, then take something from me, but you must likewise pay me back also for what you have done to Brian and Gareth. There must be restitution.”

  Then stopping and looking again into the sky which was rapidly clouding over again, great, thick, ice-­heavy clouds falling even upon his mouth and wet chin, he directed his words toward where the sun lay buried: “But it was me pulled the trigger that killed Brian.” That was the first time he could admit his guilt, his sorrow, his acknowledgment he was the one, erasing his queer words at the trial I am not sorry.

  He began to cry for the first time for his deed, a dry tearless kind of weeping that pulled at his ribcage as if it would bust his ribs and crush also his spine.

  The ravens and crows flew off at the sound.

  “Before I get any further into the territory of the . . . the . . . the . . .” Not daring to finish his sentence, he turned back in the general direction of the Vaisey mansion.

  He got to the mansion about nightfall. Irene had gone out though all the lights in the house were on as though a Graduation Ball were in progress.

  He pitched forward on a dilapidated purple ottoman which stood always in the hallway, and removed his dripping hat. His hair now was almost as long as the scissors-­grinder’s, but it was not tied behind with a pink cord. He loosened his belt to make breathing easier, though his belt was already several sizes too big for him, as he was getting sparer and sparer and harder and harder of muscle as though when he was asleep unbeknownst even to himself he went out and chopped wood or lifted the colts or steers above his head.

  “Did you do it, Sidney?” It was Gareth’s voice of course. He was leaning over the banister from the third floor.

  “Did you kill him, Sidney? On account of if you ain’t going to, I am.”

  “I’ll be right up to tell you,” Sidney almost roared back.

  Upstairs in their room, Sidney tried to take Gareth in his arms, but the boy he felt he loved the best in the world shook him off impetuously.

  “You don’t ever touch me again till he’s a rotting corpse, do you hear? . . . You’re in league with him if you ask me . . . Why did you kill Brian after all? Why did the train hit me? . . . It’s all his work, but how do I know maybe yours too . . .”

  “Gareth, Christ in heaven, that you could even think such a thing pains me beyond words . . . But to utter it . . .”

  “Words! You don’t have no words. You’re an ignoramus. You never amounted to a shitty tinker’s damn and I spite the day I ever set eyes on you. . . . Now, see here,” he cried, seizing his lover by the throat, “you either kill that son of a bitch or you never set foot in this house again. Now you get.” And in his fury he spat, perhaps involuntarily, in Sid’s face.

  Sidney raised his hand to wipe away the spit, but then his hand fell without touching his face.

  Gareth let out a low little moan.

  “Supposin’ I do kill him. Where will that get us.”

  Gareth did not look at him partly because Sid’s face was still all swimming from where he had spat upon him.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Gareth began again, “it will break the curse he has put on my house.” He was calming down a little as he said this, and in a sudden flurry of motion at which Sidney ducked, thinking he was about to strike him, Gareth wiped the other’s face free of his spit with a working­man’s handkerchief.

  “Never you fear. I’ll go see him the first thing in the morning.”

  “Yeah, you say that with so much enthusiasm. You blighter,” he began to raise his voice maniacally again. “I hate you all over again. I regret night and day I was ever close to you. I hated your lovemaking. What are you now? What do you stand for? I don’t need you. I ain’t even sick anymore if I ever was. Who wouldn’t be sick being hit by a train and the lone survivor, and my horses all gone but a few broken-­down hacks like you, and you to blame for all of it. You take care of him now, God damn you, or maybe I will take care of you both. . . . How do I know you ain’t both in cahoots . . . Tell me, are you in league with him? Why is your face gone so white then?”

  “Because as I’ve told you a thousand times it’s him is after me. All my life. I’ve told you that. It’s all I get done thinkin’ about: him. Look, all right. I’ll do it, but when I do it, you watch out too . . .”

  Sid was halfway out of the room when the “master” called him back:

  “Sit down a minute, why don’t you.”

  “I don’t have no more to say, Garey . . . I’m said out. T
omorrow I go . . .”

  “I may have been too hard on you, Sid. . . . Better not go then, maybe, better forget him. You’re right I guess about if we kill him it will only lead to worse things.”

  This unexpected turnabout after the cruel and devastating speeches his loved one had made to him came too late.

  “No, my mind’s made up, Gareth. Tomorrow at daybreak I’ll go over there and do whatever I feel has to be done at that time.”

  “Come here,” Gareth said. “Come on over here I say and hug me.”

  “I don’t belong to you anymore . . . You killed what I felt for you by talking like you did . . . I can’t stand harsh treatment.”

  “Have you found somebody else better to your taste then?” He spoke without his usual sneering snotty tone. He sounded in fact shaky and a bit hysterical.

  “I guess I realize . . . I guess, Gareth, after all . . . Well . . .” Sid flailed his hat around in his hands, and his own saliva fell now copiously from his mouth and on the hand that held his hat. “I guess anybody that has devoted his life to waiting and hounding me, spying and surveying me, spooring and tracking me, maybe he is the one that I should go over to.”

  “So you are in cahoots.”

  “Not at all, and never was, and you know it. But how can you hide and sneak and run from one that has nothing else in his life to do but be after you. When all’s said and done, I’m all he devotes himself to, don’t you see.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then how can I explain it. I can’t even explain it to myself. But think of the cost and the extravagance and the outgo and all. I mean who ever heard of a man that done nothing but think of another man and the other man hardly ever said more than Good morning to him.”

  “That’s not quite accurate, for the other man as you call yourself struck the valedictorian in the face on his Graduation Exercises night. Ain’t that more than a good morning maybe?”