Fletch Won

“Hello? Hello?” Fletch knocked loudly on the frame of the screen door. Inside the bungalow a television was playing loudly but nevertheless was drowned out by a child crying, other children yelling, and the noise of some mechanical toy. “Hello!” he shouted.

The front porch was a junkyard of broken toys, a scooter with its neck twisted, a crunched tricycle, a flattened plastic doll, a play stove that looked like it had been assaulted with an ax.

On the television, a woman’s voice said, “If you tell Ed what you know about me, Mary, I’ll see you rot in hell.”

Inside the house, a woman’s voice shouted, “Keep up that bawlin’, Ronnie, and I’ll slap you silly!”

A man’s voice said, “Now, now. Let’s get this eating process completed. The kiddies must eat, Nancy. Keep up their strength!”

Associate Professor Thomas Farliegh’s bungalow was eight blocks from the edge of the university campus. Other humble houses surrounding it had vestiges of paint on them and at least undisturbed stands of weeds in their front gardens. Farliegh’s house was yellow and gray with rot, a front window was smashed in its center, and the front yard was packed dirt, holding, among other things, a wheelless, collapsed, rusted yellow Volkswagen.

Driving to Farliegh’s house, Fletch had heard a repeat of the radio news report Barbara had mentioned. Stuart Childers had confessed to murdering Donald Habeck. He had confessed—and been released.

Fletch stood as close to the screen door as he could and shouted as loudly as he could, “Hey! Hello!”

Noise within the house dimmed fractionally.

A shadow the other side of the screen door grew into a woman who said, “Who are you?”

“Fletcher.”

“Who? I don’t know you. Better come in.”

Inside it was discovered it was not the screen door which had made him less audible.

“Are you a student?” the woman asked.

“I’m from the News-Tribune! The paper!”

“Tom’s back here,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s corrected your paper yet.” She led him into the kitchen at the back of the house. “You said your name is Terhune?”

The house smelled of diapers, burned food, spilled milk, and ordinary household dirt.

“I’m from the newspaper,” Fletch said.

In the kitchen, beside the blaring television set, a battery-operated toy tank treading noisily along the floor, up and down piles of laundry, garbage, and books, were five children, all of whom seemed to be under the age of seven. Two were in diapers, three in underpants. Each seemed to have been freshly bathed that morning in used dishwater.

A short, bald, chubby man was at the chipped kitchen table spooning mushed prunes into an infant in a high chair. The man’s eyes, visible as he glanced up at Fletch for a brief instant, were a startlingly pale blue. Four of the children also had light blue eyes, but none as light as his.

The woman said something.

“What?” Fletch asked.

The television said, “… transporting a cargo of dumdum bullets…”

The woman turned it down, which left just the noises of the tank overcoming all obstacles on the floor, two children shouting and kicking each other, and one small child sitting on a torn cushion against the wall bawling lustily.

“Ronnie,” the woman said to the bawling child, “stop crying, or I’ll kick you in the mouth.” Her threat went unheeded. Her feet were bare.

“Do you have a car?” the woman asked Fletch.

“Yes. Are you Nancy Farliegh?”

“He wants to see you,” the man at the table said.

“I’m sure he wants to see you, Tom. Something about a paper.”

“I want to see you, Nancy. I’m from a newspaper.”

“Oh,” she said. “About my father’s death.” She was wearing a loose, bleach-stained skirt and a green, food-stained blouse. Her arms and legs were thin and white, her stomach distended. Her hair hung in greasy strands. “I don’t care to say anything about that, but I do need a ride.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

“Our car is broken,” the man at the table said. “Smashed. Kaput. Ruined.”

“I should have gone yesterday,” Nancy said.

“Yes, yes,” the man said. “Bobby likum prunes.”

“Sit down.” Nancy picked up a pile of newspapers and a telephone book from another chair at the table, and dropped them on the floor. “I’ll just change.” She looked down at her clothes. “Tom, should I change?”

The child on the cushion stopped bawling. Determination entered his face.

“Never change, darlin’.”

The determined-looking child got up from his cushion. He crossed the floor. He caught the tank and picked it up. He hurled it through the window.

Now three children were in the middle of the floor shouting and flailing each other. Hair-pulling seemed their best strategic device. It caused the best shrieks.

“I’ll just change,” Nancy said.

Fletch looked through the kitchen window. In the yard, the toy tank was assaulting a collapsed baby carriage.

He sat down.

“Choo, choo, choo, choo!” said Tom Farliegh. “Now the choo-choo comes to the open tunnel. Open the tunnel!” The baby opened her mouth. Tom stuck the mushed prunes into it. “Now,” he said, scraping the bottle of the jar clean, “chew, chew, chew, chew.”

“Social Security,” Fletch quoted. “The sidewalks of the city/Offer up without pity/Little old ladies to be mugged.”

“Ah!” Tom wiped the baby’s mouth gently with a crusted rag. “You’re familiar with my work.”

“Do you call it the Poetry of Violence?”

“That’s what it’s called.” Tom lifted the baby from the high chair and placed her carefully on the floor.

He crossed the kitchen to where an even smaller baby was lying in a plastic basket-chair on the edge of the stove, looking like something to be roasted. The man was shaped like a rutabaga. He brought the baby in the basket-chair to the kitchen table.

“Your poetry is different,” Fletch said.

“Different, yes.” Tom was trying to unscrew the cap off a bottle of baby formula. “Why don’t you call it beautiful?”

He handed the bottle to Fletch, who unscrewed the cap and handed it back.

“Would beautiful be the right word?” Fletch asked.

“Why not?” Tom screwed a nipple onto the bottle. “Choo, choo, choo.” The baby opened his mouth. Tom inserted the bottle. “There must be a beauty in violence. People are so attracted to it.”

Holding the bottle tipped to the infant’s mouth, he looked down at where four children now fought and cried on the floor. One was bleeding from a scratch on an arm. Another had a new welt over an eye.

“That’s why I have so many children,” Tom Farliegh said. “Look at their fury. Isn’t it wonderful? Unbridled violence. I can hardly wait until this crop get to be teenagers.”

“May your dreams come true,” Fletch prayed. “How many do you think will make it?”

“You are attracted to violence,” Tom said.

“Not really.”

“Do you watch football?”

“Yes.”

“Do you watch boxing?”

“Yes.”

“They aren’t violent?” Tom’s hands were the softest, pudgiest Fletch had ever seen on a man. “The vast preponderance of human entertainment is violent.” He nodded at the television. “That instrument of popular human communication dispenses more violence in a day than most humans, without television, normally would see in a lifetime. What attracts us to such violence?”

“Fascination,” said Fletch. “It is the second greatest puzzle, in life, that people are willing to do unto others violence which, apparently, they want done unto themselves.”

“Beauty,” Tom said. “The fascinating beauty of violence. The ultimate irony. Why has there never been a poet before to admit it?” “Slim, belted hips/ Sprayed across by automatic fire/ each bullet/ ripping through,/ lifting,/ throwing back,/ kicking/ the body at its/ center.// Thus/ The Warrior In Perfection/ bows to his death,/ twists,/ pivots and falls/,” quoted Fletch.

“Beautiful,” said Tom.

“I have seen such things,” said Fletch.

“And it is beautiful. Admit it.” Tom Farliegh tipped the baby bottle higher. “Waisted, he is wasted/ but not wasted.// This death is his life/ And he is perfect/ In it”

“What courses do you teach at the university?”

“The works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Another course comparing the works of John Dryden and Edmund Spenser. Also, my share of freshman English courses.”

“You teach The Faerie Queene?”

“Oh, yes.” Tom took the bottle out of the baby’s mouth. There was a small quantity of formula left in it. He put it to his own mouth, and drank it.

The baby cried.

Tom took the bottle to the sink and rinsed it.

Fletch asked, “Did you do violence to your father-in-law?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “I married his daughter. He never forgave either of us.”

“He never came to see his grandchildren?”

“No. I doubt he knew how many he had, or their names. Too bad. He would have appreciated them.”

Fletch watched one Farliegh child throw a carrot at the head of another. “I think so.”

“There was no honesty in Donald Habeck.”

“You’re living in squalor here,” said Fletch. “Your father-in-law was a multimillionaire.”

“Did I murder my father-in-law?” The short, pudgy man turned around from the kitchen sink and dried his hands on a piece of newspaper. “There would have been no irony in it.”

“No?”

“No. It’s the innocence of victims which makes a poetry of what happens to them. And I’m a poet.”

“Did you know he intended to give almost his entire fortune to a museum?”

“No.”

“If he had died without a will, as I understand lawyers are apt to do, your wife might have inherited enough for you to take up poetry full-time. That is, if his fortune were still intact. Are you saying poets aren’t practical people?”

“Some are.” Tom Farliegh smiled. “Those who get published in The Atlantic and win the Pulitzer Prize. They might be practical enough to do murder. But, surely, you’re not accusing the most unpopular published poet in the country, of practicality?”

Nancy Farliegh reentered the room. She was wearing ballet slippers, a hotter-looking full skirt, and a once-white blouse gray from repeated washing. An effort had been made to brush her hair.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked.

Not knowing where he was going, Fletch stood up.

“Morton Rickmers, the book editor of the News-Tribune, might like to do an interview with you, Mr. Farliegh. Would you be available to him?”

“See?” Tom Farliegh grinned at his wife. “I’m reaping the benefits of my father-in-law’s sensational murder already.” To Fletch, he said: “Sure, I’m available to him. I do anything to deepen my unpopularity.”