Narrow Rooms Read online

  “You’re hard on me today, all right, Gareth, just like you said you were . . .”

  “You don’t love me anymore, Sid.”

  Sidney moved his lips, and walked a step nearer to his friend.

  “I mean, Sid, you don’t love me as much as the renderer loves you.”

  “I love you though.”

  “But it ain’t enough. Not for me. I want to be loved all-­out like he does you.”

  “Don’t say that,” Sid cried in true agony, “when you know I’m going to kill him for you . . .”

  “Now see here, Sid . . . If you kill him you must kill him for and only for yourself. I don’t have no claim on you either so far as killing the son of a bitch is concerned . . .”

  “Gareth, do you know somethin’? You’re well now. You’re a cured boy. You don’t need no caretaker or nurse or nothing . . . I bet you could ride a thoroughbred around the race track now.”

  “What do you mean, I’m cured, you dumb son of a bitch . . . Don’t you know I’m crazy and don’t you know I’m crazy in love with you . . . ? What’s cured about that . . . ?”

  Gareth threw himself into Sidney’s arms and, rare for him, covered his caretaker with wet passionate kisses.

  “Then why do you hurt me and command me? Now I have to go through with killing him and you know it. You won’t love me if I don’t kill him . . .” He pushed Gareth away, and when the boy tried to take him in his arms again, Sid cried:

  “No, keep your distance . . . Don’t you spoil my manhood now I’ve made up my mind to see him and finish it all with him.”

  “He’ll kill you, Sidney, don’t you see?”

  Then with eyes rolling Gareth cried, “He’ll render you. In the boiling tubs . . .”

  “So then he will, and that will be over in a minute.”

  “Don’t you love me no more at all, Sid? . . . You can at least say that.”

  Gareth stretched out his arms to him like someone on the docks will to a person on a moving ship.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow maybe,” Sidney answered, and turned his back on him.

  The night before the day which brings this story to an end, Roy Sturtevant had been smoking grass steadily all the twenty-­four hours before, strong good stuff which made the larynx hoarse and brought sweat out on his palms, and finally made him not see too clearly.

  He was sitting in his upholstered best chair with the massive armrests, and then suddenly he couldn’t see at all. He waited for a few minutes, and then like an automatic lamp which comes on at dusk, he could see, only he was looking at Brian McFee who stood before him in the Sunday clothes he was buried in. His larynx was so spoiled from weed he could not say anything.

  Brian drew near him. He had forgotten how beautiful Brian had been. He had forgotten especially how thick and mahogany his curly hair fell over his smooth white forehead, the furious beet-­red of his cheeks and lips, the dimple on his chin. Only his eyes looked different, but perhaps the light and his own condition made them appear only as deep crevices without reflection or movement.

  Brian took hold of his right arm and then touched several places on his brow and countenance, and then bowing down he embraced his knees and then his feet.

  He did not think he heard Brian speak, but he was sure he gave him a message. The renderer then got back his voice and begged the visitor not to make such conditions, he who had never begged of anybody before. . . . But as he realized very clearly, he was being commanded by someone who had “gone before” and whose command was law. Roy Sturtevant might command by the laws of this world, but not by the laws of the world to which Brian McFee now belonged.

  So he agreed, Roy did. What else was there to do.

  “Is there never to be any end of my punishment?” Roy cried out at last after he had gone over the “command” many times with his visitor. “Ain’t I ever going to be forgiven either?”

  He looked up and there was nobody there.

  But there had been somebody, for all over the floor lay dead flowers, geraniums and the leaves of myrtle and pine cones fresh from the grave, and the imprint of brand new shoes.

  Roy Sturtevant was in a big tub such as people used to employ for their children especially before indoor plumbing, taking his first bath in about ten years when Sidney De Lakes rapped at the screen door—the storm door was open and the glass broken.

  Roy had already emptied the water four times, and was about to get up and empty it again. The water was the color of dark brown river water after a heavy downpour, the kind of water one would expect to find frogs or tadpoles floating around in, but there was, to make up for this lack, pieces of old leaves and other tiny vegetation which had come off from the soles of his feet.

  He was so surprised to see this visitor he stood up stark naked in front of him. Then he started to reach for a big white Turkish towel, but his arms were not long enough and Sidney went over and reached it for him.

  “So,” Roy Sturtevant began, and then he wiped his mouth free from the suds which had gathered over it, “Sidney.”

  “I promised Gareth,” Sidney got out, and almost lunged toward his enemy. “I’m reporting in,” he mumbled inaudibly.

  They seemed like the first words ever addressed by the football hero to Roy Sturtevant, who went on rubbing himself, going over last his ears till they were beet-­red.

  “On whose say-­so did you say you was here?” Roy inquired. “On account of I ain’t required nobody to have you report. I never heard of nobody reporting here and you know it.”

  “I lied when I said Gareth,” Sidney changed his first statement. “I come on my own . . . Still, their hands are pushing me too . . . By ‘their’ I mean not only Gareth and his Dad and brothers but Brian, Brian McFee . . .”

  “See here,” Roy stumbled out of the tub at the sound of the last name. He shivered badly.

  Sidney’s eyes widened perceptibly at the appearance of the renderer, all sinews, veins, tendons, the bones themselves almost touchable in places from the regimen he had pursued and which vetoed any hint of fat accumulating on his body.

  “I don’t believe,” the renderer got his voice at last, “in fact I am sure Brian and Gareth would never send somebody else in their place . . . They’d come on their own . . .” He shuddered violently.

  “So then I have come to surrender to you.”

  Roy Sturtevant stood there still naked as he had been born. Then moving like a great cat he hurried over to a stool on which his pants were resting and stepped into them, and threw a T shirt over his chest. His hair he continued to work into the towel.

  “You don’t deny, do you,” Sidney went on somewhat deliriously, his tones very like a baritone solo rather than a speaking voice, “don’t and can’t deny you have been stalking me all my life. I wonder you was not present when I was born. I feel you have supervised my every breath.”

  “But why come now?” Roy wondered. “When all’s finished and done with . . . I mean you could have come when you was in the eighth grade and needed me so bad, and I would have helped you night and day with your lessons, your fractions, long division, proportion, and Caesar’s Commentaries and all the rest you could not ever get straight in your head . . .” Roy thought a while and then looked down at himself. “My body must have known you was comin’ on account of I have bathed like for being laid out in the Greenbrier Funeral Parlor.”

  “I have been ordered to kill you at least twice, that’s for sure.” Sidney went on like a windy echo.

  Roy grinned on hearing this and began putting salve on his feet.

  “You know you deserve death if for only what you done to Gareth.” He was trying to feel anger, and then explaining this failure to feel it to his enemy he said, “I have been mad for too long at you to show you now how mad I am . . . Yet I don’t feel nothin’ when I see you at present. Why is that?”

  “Then why don’t you go home and think over what it is you plan to do to me if you should report again.”

  But as the ren
derer said this, he drew in his breath, preventing himself from screaming only by biting his lips for between himself and the football star he saw Brian McFee dart across his line of vision and then vanish.

  “I could never get here again, Roy, for one thing. Once is all I could summon up the strength for.” Sidney was speaking unaware of the tumult in the mind of the other man.

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  Roy put on his socks and heavy high shoes and laced them unsteadily, drowsily.

  “How can you be sure as you phrase it, De Lakes, I have been after you all your life? I mean what proof have you?”

  “I don’t have no proof and don’t require or need none. Least ways not for you, who knows it all. I know you have plagued me!”

  As Sidney shouted out this last sentence he half-­rose, and then slumped down as it was becoming more clear now that he was at last in the presence of his tormentor, that he was actually speaking to the one who had done everything against him, who had in sum dictated his life.

  “If you couldn’t do simple eighth- and ninth-­grade arithmetic and algebra—for I cheated on all the tests for you till you passed—well then how can you prove I have it in for you.”

  “I already answered that . . . You have haunted me. All my life! You are the one!” It was all he could get out.

  Then raising his eyes and his voice he cried out in tones which reached his opponent like flaming steel: “ ’Twas you killed Brian McFee!”

  Roy Sturtevant laughed, but he laughed too loud and too long for it to be convincing as laughter. Then quieting down he inquired: “If I was to tell you you could be rid of me, would you do it?”

  “I have to!” Sidney cried. “I have to be rid of you. . . . Now I see you and how strong you are, I know that . . .”

  “Good, good . . . Did it ever occur to you though that I might want to be rid of you also?”

  Sidney bent his head down now into his two outstretched palms.

  “That never crossed your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t it?”

  “Because it was you who persisted. You know it. I didn’t do nothing to egg you on.”

  “How can you be so sure of that, Sidney?”

  “Sidney! He calls me Sidney!” He began to weep deliriously.

  “I mean,” Roy began volubly, “since you were so dumb all your life in everything, couldn’t do simple math or Latin, failed in all you undertook except when you were a football star—you did that good didn’t you? Well, how do you know then being such a numbskull though so handsome, that you didn’t do something to egg me on?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Listen then to how you egged me on.” He rose and took Sidney’s face gently in his hand. “Just by existing you did. Everytime you passed by me you threw off energy enough to make me want you forever. You commanded me by just your breathing . . . Like you do now.”

  “Then how can I stop it?”

  “I think there is a way.”

  “Then tell me how, unless . . .”

  “Unless, hell . . . There is this way and this way only.”

  “I can’t kill you even for Gareth . . . I will not kill again! I love him but not that much.” He sobbed shamelessly now. “I am not a killer.”

  “You killed Brian McFee.”

  “I will not kill you even to be free . . . No.”

  “Even with a mock-­killing?”

  Sidney blinked at him through his tears.

  “Supposin’ you were to nail me naked to the barn door all night, say, and then the next day at sunup you brought Brian McFee to see what you had done, owin’ to the fact you claim I killed him through you and so he ought to be present . . .”

  “Brian is in his grave, you low son of a bitch.”

  “But he could be brought out of his grave.”

  “No!”

  Roy had been walking up and down the room as he spoke, and now he approached Sidney De Lakes and took his left hand in his right hand.

  “Don’t touch me, Sturtevant. Don’t, don’t . . .”

  Roy put his mouth on Sidney’s and the latter shivered violently; men have shivered less violently at the moment of death from some pestilential fever.

  “Kiss me, Sidney . . . If you want to be free.”

  “I’m kissin’ you,” Sidney said between his sobs. His face was wet from tears.

  “Let me drink your tears. I ain’t never drunk tears.”

  “Kill me, Roy, why don’t you. I don’t care. You can kill me, then render me, nobody will know.”

  “I don’t want to kill you. Never wanted to.” He went on kissing Sid’s face assiduously all over, his kisses drying it of his tears.

  He took out Sidney’s penis and bent Sidney’s own face over his penis, and said, “Cry on your own cock, Sidney. Go on, cry on it. Refresh your cock.”

  “Kill me or let me go,” he blubbered, his face held against his own sex.

  Pulling up his head with his hands so that Sidney faced him again, Roy said: “If you go home without doin’ what I say you won’t never be free of me ever . . .”

  “I can’t dig up the man I shot, for God’s sake . . . Have some pity or decency.”

  Sidney rose and then threw himself down on the floor, face forward.

  Roy bent down over his prostrate visitor, brought his face upwards, then took Sidney’s penis into his own mouth, holding it briefly.

  “No, no,” Sidney cried. “I can’t bear it, I can’t, I can’t.”

  “Will you do what I say then?” he fulminated.

  “I will try . . . But for God’s sake don’t make love to me . . . Kill me first . . .”

  “Tryin’ ain’t good enough.”

  He began sucking him again.

  “Yes, I’ll do it . . . I’ll do it, Roy . . .”

  “But if you don’t do it right, Sidney,” Roy said, getting up, “I will do something so bad to you you will remember it for a billion years in hell.”

  Sidney nodded.

  “I say, will you do it now if I let go of you,” for he still held on to his penis with his hand.

  “I’ll do it.”

  He pushed Sid’s penis back into his trousers, and buttoned him up.

  “I’ll need some shovels and a pickaxe and stuff,” Sidney spoke.

  He began to sob more violently and then he screamed once or twice in such a hideous way even Roy looked aghast. Quieting down then a little, he asked, “Must I do it, Roy?” He kept asking this over and again.

  “Yes, Sidney, if you would be free . . .”

  “All right, now listen to me,” Roy began, for he knew what he was about to say, what he had indeed been commanded now to say were words that would not be believed, would not indeed be thought of as having been correctly heard.

  “After you gather up the picks and shovels and other tools, just before you go off to the cemetery, I want you to nail me to the barn door. Do you hear?”

  Sidney waited. He nodded slowly. Then he went over to the screen door, opened it quickly, and vomited out onto the geraniums and petunias and morning glories all growing wild in disarray. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and came back on in.

  Roy was busy with collecting the nails out of a box, and had brought out two hammers, a large heavy one, and another of lesser weight but hefty utility.

  He took off all his clothes, and then picked up a revolver which had been resting, unseen by Sidney, on a small commode.

  He pointed the gun at Sid and they walked over to the great barn, newly painted and shining bright, and Roy pulled open the largest of the barn doors.

  “This is the door you are to nail me to, do you see?”

  Sidney nodded. Roy did not know whether to be relieved or angered by such calm compliance.

  But then after this wooden docility, Sidney kneeled down in front of the renderer, saying, “Release me, or kill me. I can’t, I can’t go through with it.”

  “The only way you can releas
e yourself is to nail me fast to the barn door. Now I will give you some dope to drink if you want it, but I got to be nailed there, and you got to bring Brian to see me in the morning. Otherwise, you won’t never be free of me. . . . Is that clear now?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Sidney kept muttering.

  “Well, stand up, then, for if you don’t do it I am going to shoot you. Understand?

  “All right. Now I want you to bathe my right wrist and arm and my right foot and thigh with this alcohol I brought along.” Roy took out the stopper from a large bottle, and Sidney listlessly rubbed these portions of his body with the solution.

  Then Roy pointed to the nails lying all ready in a row on some white cloth beside the two hammers.

  “Now you nail me to the door just like you was as smart as the next fellow, get it? You owe it to both of us, Sidney. Nail the son of the renderer to the barn door. You know you want to. A slap was not enough that night of the Graduation Exercises.”

  Suddenly a great cry came out of Sidney’s chest which made even the scissors-­grinder wince a bit. Sid had the nails in the palm of his left hand, and then after a long wait of pure silence he raised the heavier of the two hammers.

  The first nail went through Roy’s wrist with more ease than he had thought possible.

  The renderer went pale, especially in the mouth, but no sound escaped from him. The blood perhaps spoke for him as it jetted about everywhere staining Sidney’s shirt and hands, spurting even on his hair.

  Then driven by some force unknown to him, Sidney had soon nailed his arm, the foot and ankle with several heavy nails to the barn door. In his haste to hammer he stumbled over a small box which spilled out more nails.

  Sidney then drew back from his handiwork. Roy appeared to have passed out, but then all at once he opened his eyes again. He was badly stained with blood which kept on running, trickling, even gurgling.

  “Then in the morning,” Roy began to speak, but stopped. “In the morning you bring Brian, don’t forget,” he got out somehow.

  “I think your arm needs a couple more nails,” Sidney spoke, his mouth open and working furiously.