Narrow Rooms Page 16

  “That’s because you’ve been torturing him all your life. As the hero of the football team, the diver and swimmer, the pure American stock back to the Revolution or before, looking down on the renderer’s son like he was some nigger or drunk Indian not good enough to spit on your shoes to shine them. . . . Well the renderer is a thousand times better ’n you and that snot Vance ever was . . . And he had the soul to suffer all these years just like what you have put me through with your no-­account loving. You don’t know how to love. And you will die, you cruddy bugger, you will die by my gun when I am good and ready.”

  “Hear him!” Sidney answered.

  But there was something to the way he pronounced these two words that indicated he felt satisfaction somehow in what was now happening. At least everything, his entire life, that is, was approaching a showdown, and he felt more exhilarated than had he smoked the best hash or grass. He was at some summit of his own self, and he was, if not happy, at last himself, and then he was also going to take down the man who when all was said and done had loved him the best and who he now believed after all he was in love with. At least he was his “coach,” and he had loved perhaps only his coach who had made him a star. He was sure every so often that the renderer was now able to confer the same glory on him, and bind his brows as a victor over some unknown and unheralded ordeal. See how already he had done a great thing by nailing him to the door when no other human command could have forced him so to act.

  “We’re getting close now to where he lives or at least used to live, so I am putting this gun down—hear?—but it is cocked and ready to blow your brains out if you don’t obey me as good or better than you obeyed your lover the scissors-grinder. . . . So now pull yourself together for the sequel, Sidney De Lakes.”

  He had hardly said all this before they turned off the road marked Warrior Creek and drove up to the Sturtevant place with its three barns, four farm houses, and the ruins of the old rendering sheds.

  “Did you ever see such a sight now! By God, he was telling me the truth for once in his life!”

  Gareth said this, for he had been the first to jump out of the truck and run right up to the barn door, and there he was, nailed stark naked just as Sidney had told him he would be.

  “Are you dead, Roy? Because you sure look it.” (Sidney closed his eyes as he heard this part of Gareth’s ranting, and made no sign he was about to come out of the truck.)

  “Because,” Gareth’s voice still reached him, “if you are still alive I may aim to shoot you myself and put you out of your misery.”

  He rubbed his hand over the renderer’s chest, and when it came away smeared with red he wiped his hand lazily on his trousers.

  “You let go of my prisoner!” Sidney suddenly shouted, leaning out of the truck window. “I am fulfilling my part of this bargain, and you keep out of it. You hear me? You dry up. I’m sick of you putting the screw on me.”

  “Would you look at them nails, the size of them, the way they have been pounded in!” Gareth’s voice rose over the gray-­white landscape, echoing and re-­echoing from the empty barns and sheds and unused houses. “Why you are a God damned fiend, Sidney De Lakes.” Here Gareth turned, still holding his rifle, which having been pointed at Roy Sturtevant was now aimed in the general direction of the truck.

  “Put that damned gun down, you hear, and get over here and help me with Brian, will you?”

  For some reason Gareth obeyed Sidney. He put the rifle down by a little fence with cottoneaster vine growing all over it, and sauntered up to the truck.

  Sidney, his face flushed, his mouth open, was lifting the dead Brian out of the truck.

  “He’s heavy as lead for some reason or else I have lost all my strength from hearin’ you ravin’ and rantin’ . . .”

  Gareth made a show of holding his nose.

  “You help me with him, curse you, Garey . . . Why don’t you behave!”

  Gareth took hold of the dead boy and helped Sidney carry him directly in front of where the renderer stood against the barn door. They propped Brian up with a few good-­sized boulders that were lying around.

  All at once Sidney turned away, doubled up, and began to cry as if somebody had shot him in the belly.

  “I ain’t dead, Sidney.”

  (Sidney and Gareth were not certain who said these words and they gazed at one another for what seemed like an eternity, and later on in the hospital jail Gareth Vaisey admitted that he had thought Brian McFee had spoken them, and Gareth had thrown himself as a result on the ground and flailed about like someone having a fit.)

  “Was that you who spoke, Roy?” Sidney said cautiously and began walking in the direction of the barn door.

  “Who else?” Roy answered back, and opened his eyes.

  His eyes were like two stones floating in blood, beautiful and eloquent too. He closed them as soon as he saw Sidney.

  Sidney began speaking very close to the renderer: “I done like you told me to, Roy, but it should never have been done if you ask me . . . I hope you are going to be all right, though.” He touched his chest with his forefinger and then drew it away streaming with blood.

  “Where is Brian?” Roy inquired, his eyes still shut.

  “Right in front of you, Roy. Cain’t you see him?”

  Roy opened his eyes and gradually focused them on Brian. They had placed the dead boy on a mound of earth that might have been—who knows?—once an ant hill.

  “How did you get him to sit up like that?” Roy wondered.

  “I guess I had to break his back maybe, to tell the truth.”

  “That’s Brian all right,” Roy agreed. “I have to hand it to you, De Lakes.”

  Sidney had closed his own eyes now, and he kept passing his hand forward and backwards over his face.

  “I want to take you down from the door now, Roy, and put you to bed. Then I will call the doctor . . . Whatever you command though,” he added quickly at a look fearful to behold which came from the renderer.

  “You have changed, Sidney De Lakes.”

  “How have I?”

  “You are different. Different all around.”

  Sidney looked back where Gareth lay on the grass very quiet and still.

  “I think Gareth had some kind of a fit,” Sidney opined.

  Sidney began walking in little circles around the hammer with which he had pounded Roy into place. He circled about the hammer as if it was a dangerous animal which might attack him. Then very deliberately he bent over it, and picked it up gingerly. His jaw closed tight.

  Then very quickly, almost as though he had leaped upon Roy, he wielded the hammer over the renderer and swiftly pulled out one of the nails. There was a scream of pure agony, then Roy fainted, his head falling to his chest which still swam with little circles of blood.

  When Sidney pulled out the next nail the pain must have been so pronounced he came to. Then Roy waited with his eyes open resting on Sidney, and Sidney waited also.

  Sidney’s face drew closer and closer to that of the renderer. His lips then brushed against the nailed man’s beard.

  “What was the meaning of that, Sidney?” Roy questioned him.

  “Does it have to have a meanin’?” Sidney answered huskily. He touched his face against that of the sufferer and held it there as light as a feather.

  “Pull out the rest of the nails.”

  “Can you take it?” Sidney wondered, his words propelled against the cheek of Sturtevant.

  “Well, let me see,” Roy said. He began to hemorrhage from his mouth, and Sidney wiped away the blood with his hand.

  They both waited a lengthy time. Then Roy began again, “Go in the house and in the big kitchen cupboard in the second drawer from the top you will find some medi­cine with a pink label on it. It’s marked Emergency only, dangerous.”

  “But it ain’t poison is it, Roy?” Sidney was touching Roy’s damp hair which now covered almost entirely one eye. His hair too was wet with blood.

  “What do yo
u care what it is? . . . No, it ain’t poison, but even if it was I have already drunk all the poison even old Doc Ulric could prescribe for me . . . So go and get it, or pull out the rest of the nails without you get it. Suit yourself.”

  Sidney acted as if he could not pull his face away from Roy’s, like an insect which has fallen on some intoxicating slippery surface.

  Suddenly their lips met, and remained pressed together.

  Then they kissed several times. The renderer let out a groan, and pulled away. His head fell down again.

  Sidney ran in the back door and rummaged through the commode. He could not lay his hands on any such bottle for many minutes. Then clear behind some heavy lace napkins yellowed with age, it was visible. He looked at it gloomily, took off the stopper and smelled it. He drew away from the odor, gagging. He picked up a glass from the kitchen sink and was about to take it along, then decided the wounded man could drink better from the bottle itself, and put the glass down.

  Roy was unconscious, and his entire body swam with gore. Sidney studied him and watched his breathing, took his pulse, and finally opened his left eye and looked at the pupil.

  He drank a swallow from the bottle first, and choked on it, but kept it down. Then he managed to waken Roy and had him drink several swallows, but he vomited out the first two. Then he made a renewed effort and this time drank thirstily, and kept the liquid down.

  Sidney’s eyes moved down to where Roy’s cock hung in almost purple folds of flesh, bleeding also as if he had put nails in it, and his testicles which appeared to be naturally large had begun to shrivel up in consonance with the damage and pain done to his arms and legs.

  “I’m goin’ to pull out the remainin’ ones, Roy . . . You hear me, buddy . . . The last ones now, Roy, so bear up . . . Roy?”

  Fearful barely human screams then rose from the barn door. The finches and song sparrows made a great fuss from the nearby pear trees and rose in little flocks into the air and winged their way out into the forest toward the west, and the horses whinnied in the nearby second barn and kicked at the siding.

  Freed from the last of the nails, Roy fell into Sidney’s arms like a young tree will topple directly on you if you have not taken the proper precaution in your having felled it.

  The impact from Roy’s falling body caused them both to stumble and slip to the earth where they lay facing Brian McFee, whose eyes were open, though they were more or less holes now, and the morning sun had begun deepening the look of rot on his face. Still he looked beautiful and young and, thought Sidney, very much like somebody in the colored plates of the family Bible, maybe Jonathan or Absalom.

  Roy coughed up blood from his mouth all over Sidney’s hands and arms, but Sid barely noticed it in his rapt study of Brian.

  Then rising, Sidney lifted Roy into his arms and carried him carefully to the kitchen entrance, but there, slipping, he fell down with him in his arms, and they lay there together on the thick woolen rug pressed against one another so close that they appeared to be one man with the same common injuries.

  Sidney managed to get up again, and carried Roy all the way upstairs, though this staircase if anything was longer and broader than that of Irene Vaisey’s. Upstairs he hesitated as to which room he should choose. He selected the king-­sized one, though actually Roy slept in the small room at the end of the hall.

  He laid the scissors-­grinder down on the bed. A toilet and bathroom adjoined the room, where he found a number of clean wash rags and towels. He waited a long time for the water to get warm, looking within the room anxiously as he waited. He picked up two bars of homemade soap, then selected a little wash basin and brought all this into the bedroom.

  Sidney bathed the sick man with all the care and finesse which he had acquired from his months of having cared for Gareth. But Roy did not open his eyes during these ministrations.

  “I guess that stuff you had in the bottle was the grand-daddy of all pain-­killers, Roy, for I feel like I’m in a sky of clouds though I didn’t begin to drink as much as you.”

  Sidney waited a while studying the sleeper.

  “Can you hear me, Roy?”

  He took his pulse again, and then allowed his hand to rest in his.

  “Sure I can hear you,” Roy replied, but his voice sounded like it was coming from downstairs. “I know all you did and are doing . . . I know it all . . .”

  “That’s good.”

  “You think so?” Roy opened his eyes and stared at De Lakes.

  “Why did you make me do it, Roy?” he wondered, pressing his hand in an ironlike grip.

  “Why did you make me do it?” came the languid weary response.

  “You’re sassing me, Roy . . . Well, go ahead if it suits you. Sass away if it makes you feel better. I deserve sassin’. I deserve, oh, I don’t know what. I am so mixed up, Roy, I don’t know who I am . . .”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Did I ever what? My mind is sort of wandering . . . Know who I am? . . . Oh I don’t know . . .”

  Sidney made dolorous whinnying sounds like those which had come from the horses awhile back when they had heard their owner scream.

  “Everything comes to you in the end,” Roy began speaking now while putting his hands through Sidney’s hair, gently pulling the strands of thick yellow hair, then rearranging it gently this way, that way, then stroking his head. “By and by it all comes down on a fellow.”

  “Why did you want Brian to see you nailed?” Sidney mumbled, almost too low for the scissors-­grinder to catch.

  Without warning, turning away violently, Roy vomited up some more blood.

  Sidney patiently, sleepily cleaned the places over which he had hemorrhaged and went then into the bathroom and emptied the basin and brought back fresh water.

  Sidney got very calm then. He was looking at Roy’s breast steadily. It was the pectorals, he decided, of an Olympic runner. One could see not only all the muscles easily defined as in a school anatomy text, but he felt he could perceive also the veins and arteries and even the marrow of his bones. He leant over and kissed Roy again and again.

  The wounded man opened his eyes and looked down at Sidney.

  “It’s too late, Sidney,” he said, scrutinizing the man embracing him.

  “No it ain’t, Roy . . . You’ll get better. See now if I ain’t right. You’ll mend. Let me call the doctor.”

  “No,” Roy spoke with indifferent emphasis. “I don’t want no doctor in my house. I’m a doctor. I know more about the human body than Doc Ulric or a whole college of doctors could learn in another thousand years of study.”

  “You should have nailed me to the door, Roy,” Sidney whispered.

  “No, no, that wouldn’t have worked. It had to be this way.”

  “Do you want me to take it in my mouth to show you,” Sidney said, for his hand had been slowly moving down toward Roy’s sex and now he held it fast.

  “No.”

  “I want to.”

  “Oh well . . . But just for a few moments. I lost me too much blood to do anything like that.”

  Sidney put his mouth over the renderer’s sex and kept it covered, sucking and kissing and licking obediently, until Roy pulled away from him.

  “Not now, not now!”

  “That was strong medicine you had in that bottle in the commode, Roy,” Sidney spoke after a while. He was resting his head on the renderer’s bosom.

  “I sure feel it, Sidney, and that is a fact.”

  “Do you want more?”

  “By and by, yes.” The renderer’s hand plunged then into Sidney’s curls. The football star shivered and shook, and the renderer twirled the curls into fine little threads like gold yarn.

  “You’ll pull through and be as good as new,” Sidney said.

  The hot fluid that suddenly fell on his face as he spoke he mistook for a second for more hemorrhaging, but instead he saw it was tears falling on him. They were hotter than blood.

  “Put me in those pajamas I never wore
and that are in the top drawer of the bureau.”

  “You have everything you want in the drawers of commodes and bureaus, don’t you,” Sid said.

  It took quite a while to get Roy into his nightclothes, and both the pajama shirt and the trousers were soon stained from all the bleeding which had started up again once he had been moved.

  “What time o’ day is it getting to be?” Roy said after a long time had passed.

  “I’ll have to get up and go downstairs to see, Roy. I ain’t sure.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. I can see it’s afternoon by the way the light falls.”

  They heard the police sirens in the distance.

  Sidney remembered how not too long ago, as a matter of fact, once in prison he had gone into the shower room and had unexpectedly run into a man in there alone, a man he had never liked before and who, to put it bluntly, always smelled like a dog after it has been bathed. But in the dim light of evening, this same man looked like a prince (he had actually murdered five people), his eyes flashing baleful messages of beauty and desire, his body like a bronze statue that breathed and moved almost imperceptibly in its grace. Sidney had gone unasked and taken the man in his arms. They had fallen to the floor and had one another all that night. He had lied to Vance, you see, that “terrible things” had been done to him in prison, or rather he had failed to say that he himself had initiated the “terrible things.”

  Remembering prison then, he felt he was transported back there, and that the man he had loved so devotedly that evening was again by his side. There was no renderer, or son of a renderer, no scissors-­grinder or cistern cleaner or tree surgeon or any of the other vocations attached to his enemy’s name, and there never had been any Sidney De Lakes, a football star and gasoline station attendant, for he felt he was back thousands of years ago with this “eternal” lover or husband or sweetheart, whatever name, on whom he now poured out all his love.

  Roy Sturtevant was returned thus from time to time from the dark valley into which he had sunk, by these improbable, lavish, even cruel caresses coming from the man who lay beside him.