Ask the Parrot

7

It wasn’t football Fred saw on the blank television screen, it was the cell. The all-purpose cell, sometimes the one he knew he was headed for, sometimes the one George was in right now—what has happened to our family?—but other times the cell/grave in which lay the man he killed, twitching still in death.

He had never seen George’s cell, of course, so this cell, constantly shifting, existed only in his imagination, fed mostly by old black-and-white movies watched on nights he couldn’t sleep. A small stone room it was, longer than wide, high-ceilinged, with hard iron bars making up one of the short walls and one small high-up window in the opposite wall, showing nothing but gray. The cell smelled of damp and decay. He lay curled on the floor there, or George did, or sometimes that poor man up at Wolf Peak, the last thick dark red blood pulsing out of his back.

It was getting dark outside the living room windows. Imagination had never much bothered Fred before this, but now he was all imagination, screaming nerve ends of imagination, imagining the cell, imagining the shame, and now, as darkness was coming on, imagining the teeth. Destroying the evidence. It gets darker and darker, and all those rustling creatures gather around the body on the forest floor, gnawing at it, snarling at one another, gnawing and gnawing.

His body. The way he sometimes became George, in that Gothic prison cell, now sometimes, too, he became the dead man on Wolf Peak, among all those jaws, all those teeth.

I can’t stand this, he thought, I have to get out of this, and what he meant was, he could no longer stand his mind, he had to get away from his mind, and, of course, he understood what he meant by that.

But what stopped him? Not thoughts of his family, his wife, his son, his daughter, they’d get over him after a while, everybody gets over everybody sooner or later. Not cowardice; he had no fear of eating the rifle, he knew the terror would be short and the pain almost nonexistent.

What stopped him was the thought of that man Smith. Ed Smith, or whoever he was. To send that message home with Jane, to play his little psychological games again, the way he’d done up in the woods, the way he’d done on the drive home. Manipulating him. Sending Jane home with a coded message—don’t kill yourself—because the real code under the first code was to put the idea of killing himself into his head.

That’s what Smith had in mind, that was so obvious. Pretend sympathy—as though that man knew the meaning of the word “sympathy”—as a way to put that little worm into his brain: Wouldn’t it be easier if you were dead?

God, yes, it would. God, he didn’t need Ed Smith to tell him that. But with Smith everywhere around him, it was just impossible. No matter how much pain he was in, no matter how hopeless everything was, he couldn’t kill himself, he just couldn’t, for the one and only reason that he wouldn’t give a bastard like Ed Smith the satisfaction.

Time went on, and his thinking circled around the same points, but gradually the angles shifted, gradually he came around to another point of view. If only Ed Smith were gone. It would be possible to become unstuck, to move forward with life, if only Ed Smith were . . .

No. If only Ed Smith didn’t exist.

Everything would be different then. The weight of the dead man up on Wolf Peak would bear less heavily on him, the fear of exposure would end. Fred knew that Tom Lindahl would never talk about what had happened up there; Tom wasn’t the problem. But how could they trust Ed Smith, how could they be sure what he would or would not do next?

The problem wasn’t Fred’s imagination, that was just inflamed for now by what had happened. The problem wasn’t George, who, of course, would be coming home in a year, less than a year, and, of course, Fred would be here to greet him. The problem wasn’t Fred or George or Tom or that poor wino up on Wolf Peak.

The only problem was Ed Smith.

After all that thinking, when Fred finally did get to his feet and walk to the bedroom, he did it with almost no conscious thought at all. There was nothing to think about when you were sure, and Fred was sure.

He carried the rifle loosely in his right hand, grasping the warm wood of the stock, pleased as always with the feel of the thing. His memories with that rifle, out hunting, had been very good for a long time, and soon they’d be good again.

He knew that Jane, at the very rear of the house, absorbed in her book, wouldn’t hear him drive away, but he coasted backward down the driveway, anyway, and didn’t start the engine until he’d backed around onto the empty street. The houses all around him were warmly lit with families together for Sunday evening. Very soon he’d be back among them. The rifle on the seat beside him, he drove toward Tom Lindahl’s house.