The Ax

9

The murders of the Rickses make the TV news, of course, being so much more dramatic than the death of Herbert Everly. Nine hours after I killed them, I sit in my living room with Marjorie, and we watch my crimes described by a solemnly excited blonde woman in a good green suit. Betsy and Billy are not with us. They never watch the news, not being interested in anything much beyond their immediate lives. At this moment, before dinner, I believe Betsy is on the phone, as she often is, and Billy is on the computer, as he usually is, while Marjorie and I watch my murders on the news, and Marjorie says, "Oh, Burke, that's horrible."

"Horrible," I agree.

It's strange, but someway or other I don't entirely recognize my actions from the blonde woman's recountal. The facts are essentially right; I did chase the wife across the lawn and shoot her there, and I did intercept the husband in the garage and shoot him there, and I did leave without a trace, without witnesses, without clues in my wake.

But somehow the tone is all wrong, the sense of it, the feeling of it. These words she uses—"brutal" "savage" "cold-hearted" — give completely the wrong impression. They leave out the error that caused it all. They leave out the panic and confusion. They leave out the trembling, the sweating, the icy fear.

But there's more to the story, all at once. They have a suspect! The police are questioning him, even now, at this very minute.

He's seen being led from an office building on a community college campus. He's a tweedy slope-shouldered middle-aged man with a gray widow's peak and large bifocals. He isn't handcuffed, but he's closely surrounded by beefy state troopers, one of whom puts his hand atop the suspect's head as he's urged into the backseat of a white state police car.

His name is Lewis Ringer, and he's a professor of literature at that community college. He is also the unacceptable lover of June Ricks, eighteen-year-old youngest child of the murdered couple. He is the man her mother thought I was, and I look more closely at that quick glimpse of him from building to police car, the second and third times they show it. I too wear large bifocals, and I too have a gray widow's peak, but other than that I don't see the similarity at all. Mrs. Ricks was a very stupid woman. I try not to think that she got what she deserved, but that thought does hover around the boundaries of my brain.

We also see the daughter, and what a piece of work she is. Not at all like our Betsy. June — or Junie, as her mother had called her when yelling mistakenly at me — is a sly, sullen, secretive girl, pretty in a foxlike way, full of sidelong glances and flickering smiles. Clearly, she's delighted to have caused such emotional upheaval in a man as to lead him to murder her parents, though just as clearly she can't admit to either the delight or the belief that in fact Ringer did it. The camera leaves her as fast as it decently can.

And then we see Lew Ringer's wife, tear-stained and stunned, briefly in the doorway of a modest house on a modest town street. She stares at the media on her lawn, and slams the door, and that's the end of the item. We move on to northern Ireland, where the murders are much more frequent, with far less reason.

After the news, and before dinner, while Marjorie goes to the kitchen, I retire as usual to my office. It is time to decide which of my resumes is next. I have four to go, and then Mr. Fallon.

But somehow I can't think about any of that. I can't even open the file drawer and take out the folder with those resumes. There's a great discouragement holding me down.

I try to talk myself out of this inertia. I tell myself I've gotten away with everything so far, I'm not suspected by anybody, or even thought about. I tell myself this is a good beginning, even if the second expedition was so much sloppier and more emotionally exhausting than the first. But why couldn't it turn out at the end that that one had been the worst of them, and that from then on they'd all been easy, as easy as Everly?

But it doesn't work. I am discouraged, and nothing will bring me out of it. I can't stop now, I know that, or everything till this point will have been in vain. I have to go on, now that I've come this far. And I have to do it all soon, and I remind myself why I have to do it all soon.

The fact is, these vast waves of dismissal move through industries, one after another. A swath is cut through the auto industry, and then everything is calm there for a while. A bloodletting among the phone companies is followed by peace. The computer industry will sacrifice its thousands, and then rest.

Well, the paper industry had its most recent downsizing two years ago, when I got the chop. All of these resumes in my files come from people laid off at just around the same time, in a period from six or seven months before me to a period six or seven months after me. This is the group, this is the labor pool, these are the people I have to concern myself with.

But the reductions are cyclical, and eventually return. If I don't move ahead briskly, rid myself of the competition, rid myself of Fallon, and get established in that job, I may suddenly find a whole new wave of resumes flooding the mails. And there they'll be, a whole new batch of people after my job, and some of them will be real competition, too. Fresh competition.

Six is a lot, but six I think I can handle. Seven, if you count Fallon. But a dozen? Two dozen? Impossible.

No, I have to do it now, move forward, choose the next one, go out there, get him, keep the momentum alive.

And here's another thought. What if Fallon dies ahead of time, without my help, before I'm ready? If that happens, and one of these four still on my list gets that job, what then?

And yet, I remain immobile. Discouraged. I just sit here, at my desk, not even looking at the file cabinet. I keep seeing, in my mind's eye, that woman struggle ahead of me, across the lawn, the two of us plodding like a couple of cows, the Luger bobbing in the air behind her head, at the end of my arm.

Marjorie calls, "Dinner!"

I turn off the light, and leave the office, and shut the door.