The Ax

10

For a while, before the beginning, even when I knew absolutely and positively what I should do, I did nothing. For a while, even though I theoretically and intellectually understood that my plan was my only possible hope, I did nothing. I thought it, I planned it, I prepared for it, but I didn't yet believe it.

I did the make-work stuff instead. I studied the Luger. I bought a book to help me understand it, and I read the book cover to cover. I cleaned and oiled the gun. I bought it bullets. I took it into a field and shot trees.

I even saw Ralph Fallon one time, though I don't believe he would have noticed me. What I did, back before I was actually in motion on this thing, as a part of my make-work, my fakery, my stalling, I drove one day over to Arcadia, just to look it over. That's how it happened.

There are no large highways between our part of Connecticut and that part of New York. I took my time, studying the road atlas, wanting to find the best route because I intended this someday to be my commute to work. The roads went through little suburban towns and even smaller farm villages, past dairy herds grazing and cornfields being plowed for this spring's crop, and I thought how nice it would be to make this drive, routinely, roundtrip, five times a week. Not much traffic, beautiful countryside. And at the far end, a job I could love.

Arcadia itself turned out to be a sweet old town, very small, a cluster of twenty or so clapboard homes on the slopes flanking a small but lively stream called the Jandrow, a tributary of the Hudson. Mills are built along streams, because they need a lot of water, and the bustling Jandrow clearly provided all the water this mill could want. There was a dam, just upriver from the mill buildings. The main road through town, east-west, dipping down one slope on its way in, crossed over that dam and then climbed up the far slope and away.

Other than the mill, there was little commercial activity in Arcadia. Up the western slope, overlooking the mill, there was a luncheonette where you could also buy newspapers and cigarettes and a few minor grocery items. Farther up the slope, at the edge of town, was a Getty gas station. That was it.

I got to Arcadia around noon, and decided to eat something in Betty's, the luncheonette. It was only after I was seated at the counter, the only person there not with others at a table, and after I'd ordered a BLT and coffee, that I realized from the conversations behind me that the twenty or so people at the tables were all from the mill.

Had I made a stupid mistake coming here? Would these people remember me, much later, after everything was finished and I had Upton "Ralph" Fallon's job? Would they suspect what I'd done? Had I ruined my chance to put the plan into effect, even before I'd started?

(I think, during this period of time, I was probably unconsciously trying to find some excuse not to go forward with the plan, even though there was no other plan. There was no other plan, and there still is no other plan.)

But there I was, I'd already placed my order, and the one sure way to be conspicuous was to run out now, before my food arrived. So I sat hunched between my shoulders, looking at nothing but the array of items on the counter along the wall ahead of me, and from time to time I heard bits of conversation from the tables behind me. Shoptalk, some of it, shoptalk I recognized. Shoptalk I could easily, gladly, have joined. I hadn't realized until that moment just how much I'd missed being around that world. Oh, how I would have liked to sit at one of those tables and just let the shoptalk wash over me.

Well, I couldn't. I sat where I was, at the counter, and the buxom waitress brought my BLT, and doggedly I ate. While behind me, from time to time, people would call in a joshing way to somebody called Ralph, and Ralph would answer, with that kind of hillbilly cracker voice that's more rural than regional. Not an accent, exactly, but something twanging in the mouth that makes them sound as though they have false teeth even if they don't.

I snuck a look around my shoulder at one point, and this Ralph was at a table by the window, and he was a rawboned rangy guy of about my age, but thinner. He looked like that oldtime singer/songwriter, Hoagy Carmichael. His voice, though, with that cracker twang, wasn't as musical.

Their lunch break was finished. All at once they all needed their checks, and the waitress was very busy for a few minutes, writing out the checks, ringing up totals on the cash register. The groups all left, and walked in little clumps downhill, and I turned to watch them through the windows, talking together, having a last cigarette (there wouldn't be smoking allowed inside the mill).

The waitress moved around between me and the windows, clearing tables, and I said to her, "That fellow that was sitting over there. Was that Ralph Fallon?"

"Oh, sure," she said.

"I thought so," I said. "I met him years ago, but I just wasn't sure. Doesn't matter. I'll take my check, when you've got the chance."

Driving home that day, through the pretty countryside, the memory of those lunchtime conversations circling in my head, I knew I had to do it. I had to go forward. I couldn't live without my life any longer.

That was the day, when I got home, I took out Herbert Everly's resume, and looked at his address, and turned to my road atlas.