Narrow Rooms Page 17
Roy kept saying from time to time: “You’re Sidney, ain’t you?”
“Whoever I am, I am yours. I am all yours.”
“Then why, if you are him,” Roy would repeat after him as if they had both learned these lines, did not understand them, but had to keep repeating them, perhaps for a tape recording in some unknown prison, “why, why did it take you so long then?”
“I don’t follow you, Roy . . . What is it you mean?”
“I said, what took you so long . . . ? All the time you have waited to tell me it wasn’t hate you had for me after all.”
“All I know is I have you now, Roy. You’re mine. That’s all I know.”
“But you’re stoned, so maybe it ain’t real after all, or won’t be tomorrow.” He drew back the upper lids of Sidney’s eyes as he said this, and looked into them. Then taking his head in his hands he kissed Sidney on the mouth solemnly.
“It’s real now, Roy, real also in an hour or so, and ’twill be real tomorrow to boot. Hear?”
“I don’t have no tomorrow,” the scissors-grinder said. “I’m finished.”
The hinges of the door creaked, the door opened, and there stood Gareth with his rifle.
“The state troopers are on the way,” he spoke thickly, sullenly. “It’s on the radio downstairs . . . They discovered the robbed grave . . .”
Gareth had spoken possibly before he had quite taken in what was happening in the bed.
“So then,” he began, but stopped, whirled the gun about and placed it over his shoulders, “so my suspicions were not too ill-founded . . .”
Gareth walked over closer to the bed where the two men held one another in close embrace, their lips half-opened against one another’s face.
“Hey now,” Gareth whispered, going very close to the men, and then kneeling down as if he were looking into a keyhole. “You never kissed me that good, did you, Sidney De Lakes . . . You never was that tender.”
“You go downstairs, Gareth. Roy and I have a lot to talk about.”
“No, I won’t go downstairs neither. I’m going to watch this, goin’ to memorize by heart what I’m seeing.”
They all heard the sirens coming closer to Sturtevant’s property now, then they heard the brakes and tires scream and squeal, and a man cursing. After a few minutes the searchlights moved over and into their room, catching Gareth in the eyes.
Then they heard loud profanity and outcries as the troopers discovered Brian’s body.
Rushing to the window, and lifting it up fiercely so that he almost tore it from its frame, Vaisey stuck his head out into the descending night, and shouted oaths and foul language, threats and vituperation against, it almost seemed, everybody who had ever lived or breathed.
“Come on down, Gareth,” a familiar state trooper’s voice called up. “We have the place surrounded and we know Sidney’s there with you . . . So come on down and turn yourselves in, and we can straighten this thing all out before no time . . .”
In a kind of panic, yet still cool, and holding his rifle with loving caution and poise, he turned away from the window to face the two “lovers” lying in bed.
What he observed now both sickened and thrilled him, stirred in him his deepest yearnings and passion. The two men held one another in a perfervid embrace such as angels might be capable of but which men are said to have lost. They kissed one another oblivious to any other time or place, thirstily, their longing for one another it was clear could never be appeased.
“That’s right, kiss and hug all you want, go ahead, see if I care!”
Then turning to the open window, he shouted below: “We ain’t never coming down till you drag us, is that clear, you shit hounds!”
A warning shot rang from below, and then Gareth, a fury aroused in him, a fury which had lain recumbent and sleep-ridden for so long, was set free, sundered from its chains, and he shot at his target below, brightly lit by searchlights, bringing the deputy to the ground.
“I got the bugger, I got him!” Gareth turned to his two friends.
But the sight of the fraternal rapt and entwined affection of Roy and Sidney made him for a moment speechless, numb, almost as mindless as when Sidney had first come to him.
“And now,” he came again to the bed, squatting, bristling, “I got something to say to you two. I want you to quit what you’re doin’ and listen to me.”
Sidney stirred and turned briefly to him to say, “Go downstairs, Gareth. March!”
“But I killed the deputy!” Gareth touched Sidney with his outstretched left hand. “Did you hear, Sid? Killed him . . .”
“I heard you, yes, but look here.” He motioned to Roy whom he held in his arms.
“What about him? What about me? Are you mine, Sid . . . ? Answer me.”
Gareth put down his gun and threw his arms around De Lakes.
“Tell me you’re mine, Sid.”
“I don’t know, Gareth,” Sidney replied, letting his head fall over the boy.
“What do you mean, you don’t know.”
A bullet from below all at once crashed through the upper part of the window pane and ricocheted off the wall, but nobody in the room paid the least attention.
“I will give you one last chance, Sid.” Gareth extricated himself from Sidney’s embrace. “Listen good. . . . There’s a passageway through the basement where we can go. It leads to the old rendering sheds. We can hide in them if you’ll go with me . . . Then we can light out together. . . . Are you listening? See, Sid . . . Quit holding him like that. Let go of him . . . You never held me like that . . . You love that filthy son of a bitch, don’t you? Tell me you do, for I can see it. You love him like you never loved me. I see it, I see it!”
Gareth walked to the far corner of the room as he spoke, fingering his rifle again cautiously, barely holding it as though it were fragile or might vanish from his grasp.
“Like you never loved me,” he kept repeating. “You four-flusher. Liar, murderer . . . So all this while you have lied to me about how you hated the son of the renderer and he hated you.”
“I always knew he loved me, Gareth. Never said he didn’t . . .” As he spoke, Sidney looked only in the direction of Roy Sturtevant, whose one hand he held in his.
“You can’t love white trash like him, Sid.”
Sidney’s head fell over on the scissors-grinder’s chest.
Another bullet, also meant probably as a warning, went through the window pane, but it struck Sidney glancingly on the arm, bringing such a gush of blood. But again neither Sidney nor Gareth nor Roy paid any mind to this. One would have thought a film was being made, and all that occurred was foreseen and practiced and therefore merely observed and tolerated, if not indeed almost ignored.
Gareth drew closer to the two men.
“Get your mouth off that carcass, Sid, and come out with me.
“I cain’t, Garey . . . I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I cain’t run no more. I’m bushed and winded and busted from deep down. I belong with the one I have run from so long. I see that.”
“Do you know what, Sid . . . ? You . . .”
A staccato of bullets hit the house now from all sides. A man’s voice warned them deafeningly through a bullhorn.
“I’ll give you just five seconds to tell me you love me the most, Sid, that you will leave that dirty motherfucker you’re holding to your chest, and you come with me . . . Sid, you come with me, or else!”
“Else what? I’m not budgin’. I told you I have run enough . . . I won’t no more.”
Gareth raised his rifle.
“Then you double-crossing corpse-hunter, go join Brian and this cruddy blighter you’re so stuck on . . .”
“Garey!” Sidney cried as the bullet raced through his mouth and another bullet caught him in the chest, and then oddly enough two bullets from the deputies below caught him in the head and arm, and he lay back over the form of Roy Sturtevant, who rising up then said, “What is the time now, can you tell me?”
“It’s two o’clock in hell,” Gareth replied and shot him twice through the head.
It took all of another day to flush Gareth out of the house. He was badly wounded and more or less incoherent, but he was still full of fight, and as the radio kept telling people who listened to it (some were listening to it then for the first time in their lives) “dangerous and armed, and protecting his own body with the bodies of his two buddies whom he had murdered in cold blood.”
Neither the radio nor the police mentioned one dead man very often. That is to say, Brian McFee. They did report of course that he had been dug up from his coffin and brought to the house in what authorities believed was to have been the enactment of some weird and terrible rite. Words failed to explain it, in the phrasing of the report, and after a while the disinterred body was no longer mentioned in print or on the airways. And even at the later inquest, not much was made of it. It was whispered everywhere, though, and never forgotten in this community.
“Our little mountain town here, in remote West Virginia,” Dr. Ulric had said later, “has had its veil torn away, and there have been revealed things just as terrible as those we read about in great seaports and immense metropolises the world over. Only more terrible, I do believe. . . . In my day it was the story of Jesse and Ruthanna Elder . . . Now it’s these young men who have such strong passions . . . We’ve been brought up to date.”
The sheriff himself put the handcuffs on Gareth Vaisey even as he was put down on the stretcher and borne away.
“You don’t need to say anything, son,” the sheriff had told Gareth that evening when he looked in on him in the hospital jail, situated only a few miles from Warrior Creek and Roy’s rendering shacks and the place of the shooting. Despite the fact he was dying, surgery having been deemed out of the question, Gareth’s room was heavily guarded by five or more deputies, and two state troopers, and his ward was sealed off. A television crew was waiting outside, and the story of what had happened was being reported all over the world. The mountain village Dr. Ulric had spoken of for him at such length was being called by name and discussed, photographed and documented for the eyes of five continents.
About midnight, Gareth rallied. “I want to talk about it, sheriff,” Gareth began.
“The sheriff has gone home,” one of the state police answered him.
Gareth took the officer’s hand and held it.
“I’m not sorry for what I done,” he told the deputy. “Killed them, that is.”
“You can wait to say that,” the man who had listened to his words commented thickly. This old deputy who had heard his words had known Gareth, as Dr. Ulric had, from birth. He had known Irene Vaisey from the time she was a girl.
“I couldn’t be shut out again. I couldn’t lose Sidney, you see, after I had already lost my horses, and my father and my two brothers. . . . Yet that was happening right in front of my eyes, officer! Them shutting me out with their better love-making. I was closed out . . . I had to kill them both because of the famished way they loved one another before my very eyes, you see. Like I didn’t exist anymore for them, nor never had existed—they loved one another like that. That hard. It was like they was angels. They looked into one another’s eyes like they had found the promised land.”
The deputy called the nurse and asked her to “do something.” The officer had stood up from his chair where he had listened to Gareth, but the boy pulled him down again into his seat.
“You listen to me,” he said. “God damn, law or no law, you listen to me. I am making my statement and you arrogant son of a bitch, you listen to me or take off your badge and quit. . . . I had to kill them. I couldn’t let Sid go over to his own enemy. Everybody knows Roy Sturtevant had been his mortal foe from the time they were both in the eighth grade, and yet here they were lookin’ like they had been admitted into the gates of Paradise. . . . I warned them, but they would not listen or pay me any mind. ‘You cain’t go over to the other side, Sid . . . I’ve stood by you for a long time, and you got to remember that it was because of you and Brian McFee that I had that accident in front of the train. I would never have had that happen to me had you not initiated me into your special gang, and you know that God damn well. I am the way I am today on account of you and the renderer, for it all come through your plans. He planned to kill Brian and Brian was made to plan to kill me, all so he could have you finally to himself, and you know it. We two was just makeweights, Brian and me. He knew in the end you would fall into his lap, and you have done just that . . .’ I warned him, officer, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. They were famished for one another’s lips, do you hear?”
At about two o’clock in the morning the sheriff came back, and walked over to the nurse who was changing Gareth’s bandages. The other officer had gone, and Gareth’s eyes were closed.
“We can’t give him anything more, sheriff,” the nurse was saying. “He’s had all the morphine now we dare administer.”
“How bad does the doctor think he is hurt?” the sheriff wondered.
The nurse whispered something.
“Did you take down all I said,” Gareth began after he had been silent for some minutes. There was nobody in the room as he said this, the nurse and sheriff having stepped out for a moment. His shouts and angry cursing brought the nurse back.
There were tears all the time at the rims of Gareth’s eyes. The return of the nurse, and a few minutes later, the sheriff, caused the Vaisey boy to become even more voluble, and demand that all his words which contained the “truth” be taken down and given to everybody to read. He wanted to make “our simple mountain people” (as Dr. Ulric called them in moments of pique and discouragement) hear all the truth about Sidney De Lakes, the train wreck, and how Brian and he had been “betrayed.”
Finally, Irene came in, but Gareth did not look at her. He never stopped talking now, lickety-split, telling how he had refused to give up Sidney to the renderer. After a moment she hurried from the room.
The next day when he was dying, Vance, accompanied by Dr. Ulric, was admitted.
Gareth started up at the sight of Vance, and put out his right hand in his direction. At that moment, Vance must have resembled Sidney more than he had at any time in his life.
Gareth motioned for him to sit down in the chair nearest the bed. Then he began at once, the same speech as before, on endlessly.
Dr. Ulric watched Vance with, if anything, more apprehension than he showed toward Gareth, who was, after all, beyond anything he might do for him.
“Sidney never kissed me the way he did Roy.” Gareth’s words sounded both loud and far-off to everybody assembled in the room, and Vance raised his head as if the words themselves or perhaps an explanation of them were being written on the television screen which was blank and gray before him.
But something had happened also to Vance, Dr. Ulric noted. Gareth’s words, or the cataclysmic events of the past days, had relieved his ward of most of his old-maid prissiness and Presbyterian stiffness, or he had lost all that earlier when he had looked into the coffin which held his brother. “He had no more strength in any case to keep away the truth,” Irene Vaisey is said to have commented later with regard to him.
So now Vance listened, and nodded as Gareth spoke of forbidden kisses and embraces and hopeless love, jealousy and murder.
“They belonged to one another, Vance, and they shut me out, you see,” Gareth finished.
Vance rose to go then, having, he felt, taken all the punishment he could stand, but seeing him leave Gareth cried out, calling his name over and again so that the brother of the dead man relented and seated himself once more by the bed.
“I was in love with your brother,” Gareth repeated.
Vance bowed his head. Dr. Ulric fidgeted, and signaled to Vance again and again that he rise and leave.
“Where are the nurses?” Dr. Ulric began, perhaps merely to have something to say. “And where is the doctor in charge of this patient?” But in the end he
too relapsed into silence, and his thoughts went back once again to the time of Jesse Ference and Ruthanna Elder, and their story which now seemed to him such a simple, naive, pathetic, and clear love idyll compared to the one that was now being concluded with the death of Gareth Vaisey, after the violent passing of Sidney and Roy.
“So you see, Vance,” Gareth’s voice continued, but losing its volume and eloquence, losing gradually its color and tone and emphasis, “I was deceived by Sidney and he was deceived by himself, and the only one who was not deceived was the scissors-grinder. For he knew if he waited long enough he would have Sidney, that Sidney would come to him, and that is what happened. They shut me out. So I had to shoot them. . . . And yet that only allowed them to lose me for good, didn’t it, and go away after all with one another. . . .”
“I missed the funeral, didn’t I?” Gareth spoke now in a voice nobody could believe was his.
Dr. Ulric had finally summoned back the nurse, but for Vance and not for Gareth, and on his instructions they brought Sidney’s brother a tablet which he swallowed dutifully, indifferently, and for him contemptuously.
“Am I getting the same kind of medication Gareth has been given?” Vance surprised the doctor by inquiring.
“No,” Charles Ulric replied. “Yours was something I have prescribed for you before.”
“On account,” Vance explained, “I would hate to tell outright, like Gareth, all the things that are on my heart and mind . . .”
Without warning, Gareth was silent. The doctor felt his pulse. But the outpouring heart Vance had spoken of still beat on, but less regularly.
Dr. Ulric asked the nurse to call in Irene again.
Irene surprised everybody then by her glacial, almost beatific calm. She had been waiting for this final summons, but she had come in without hope or expectation. Her son had never spoken to her on any of the previous occasions she had entered his sick room. She did not expect therefore to hear his voice addressed to her now.
Charles Ulric saw that she had gone beyond grief into some other chamber that is reserved for those who have lost all hope, all hint of promise or benediction, and who had found a calm, if not a peace, in the acceptance of nothing. The doctor thought her pulse must beat even more faintly than that of her son at that moment.