The Ax

1

I've never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being. In a way, oddly enough, I wish I could talk to my father about this, since he did have the experience, had what we in the corporate world call the background in that area of expertise, he having been an infantryman in the Second World War, having seen "action" in the final march across France into Germany in '44–'45, having shot at and certainly wounded and more than likely killed any number of men in dark gray wool, and having been quite calm about it all in retrospect. How do you know beforehand that you can do it? That's the question.

Well, of course, I couldn't ask my father that, discuss it with him, not even if he were still alive, which he isn't, the cigarettes and the lung cancer having caught up with him in his sixty-third year, putting him down as surely if not as efficiently as if he had been a distant enemy in dark gray wool.

The question, in any case, will answer itself, won't it? I mean, this is the sticking point. Either I can do it, or I can't. If I can't, then all the preparation, all the planning, the files I've maintained, the expense I've put myself to (when God knows I can't afford it), have been in vain, and I might as well throw it all away, run no more ads, do no more scheming, simply allow myself to fall back into the herd of steer mindlessly lurching toward the big dark barn where the mooing stops.

Today decides it. Three days ago, Monday, I told Marjorie I had another appointment, this one at a small plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that my appointment was for Friday morning, and that my plan was to drive to Albany Thursday, take a late afternoon flight to Harrisburg, stay over in a motel, taxi to the plant Friday morning, and then fly back to Albany Friday afternoon. Looking a bit worried, she said, "Would that mean we'd have to relocate? Move to Pennsylvania?"

"If that's the worst of our problems," I told her, "I'll be grateful."

After all this time, Marjorie still doesn't understand just how severe our problems are. Of course, I've done my best to hide the extent of the calamity from her, so I shouldn't blame Marjorie if I'm successful in keeping her more or less worry-free. Still, I do feel alone sometimes.

This has to work. I have to get out of this morass, and soon. Which means I'd better be capable of murder.

The Luger went into my overnight bag, in the same plastic bag as my black shoes. The Luger had been my father's, his one souvenir from the war, a sidearm he'd taken from a dead German officer that either he or someone else had shot, earlier that day, from the other side of the hedgerow. My father had removed the clip full of bullets from the Luger and transported it in a sock, with the gun itself traveling in a small dirty pillowcase he'd taken from a half-wrecked house somewhere in muddy France.

My father never fired that gun, so far as I know. It was simply his trophy, his version of the scalp you take from your defeated enemy. Everybody shot at everybody and he was still standing at the end, so he took a gun from one of the fallen.

I too had never fired that gun, nor any other. It frightened me, in fact. For all I knew, if I were to pull the trigger with the clip in place in the butt, the thing would blow up in my hands. Still, it was a weapon, and the only one to which I had ready access. And there was certainly no record of its existence, at least not in America.

After my father died his old trunk was moved from his spare room to my basement, the trunk containing his army uniform and folded duffel bag and a sheaf of the orders that had moved him from place to place, way back then, in the unimaginable time before I was born. A time I like to think of as simpler and cleaner than ours. A time in which you knew with clarity who your enemies were, and they were who you killed.

The Luger, in its pillowcase, was at the bottom of the trunk, beneath the musty-smelling olive-drab uniform, its clip lying beside it, no longer concealed in that long-ago sock. I found it down there, the day I made my decision, and brought it out, and carried gun and clip up to my "office," the small spare room we used to call the guest room before I was at home all the time and in need of an office. I closed the door, and sat at the small wood table I used as a desk — bought last year at a lawn sale offered by some particularly desperate householder about ten miles from here — and studied the gun, and it seemed to me clean and efficient-looking, without rust or obvious injury. The clip, this small sharp metal machine, felt surprisingly heavy. There was a slit up the rear of it, through which could be seen the bases of the eight bullets it contained, each with its little round blind eye. Touch that eye with the firing mechanism of the gun, and the bullet leaps off on its only journey.

Could I just insert clip into gun, point, and pull the trigger? Was there risk involved? Afraid of the unknown, I drove to the nearest bookstore, one of the chains, in a mall, and found a little manual on handguns, and bought it (another expense!). This book suggested I oil various parts, and so I did, with Three-in-One oil. The book suggested I try dry-firing the gun — pull the trigger without the clip or any bullets in place — and I did, and the click sounded authoritative and efficient. It seemed that I did have a weapon.

The book also suggested that fifty-year-old bullets might not be entirely trustworthy, and told me how to empty and reload the clip, so I went to a sporting goods store across the state line in Massachusetts and with no trouble at all bought a little heavy box of 9-millimeter bullets and brought them home, where I thumbed eight of them into the clip, pressing each sleek torpedo down against the force of the spring, then sliding the clip up into the open butt of the gun: click.

Fifty years this tool had lain in darkness, under brown wool, wrapped in a French pillowcase, waiting for its moment. Its moment is now.

I practiced with the Luger, driving away from home one sunny midweek day last month, April, driving thirty-some miles westward, across the state line into New York, until I found a deserted field next to a minor winding two-lane blacktop road. Hilly woods stretched upward, dark and tangled, beyond the field. There I parked the car on the weedy verge and walked out across the field with the gun a heavy weight in the inside pocket of my windbreaker.

When I was very close to the trees, I looked back and saw no one driving past on the road. So I took out the Luger and pointed it at a nearby tree and — moving quickly so as not to give myself time to be afraid — I squeezed the trigger the way the little book had told me, and it shot.

What an experience. Not expecting the recoil, or not remembering having read about the recoil, I wasn't prepared for how violently the Luger jumped upward and back, taking my hand with it, so that I almost hit myself in the face with the thing.

On the other hand, the noise wasn't as loud as I'd expected, not a great bang at all, but flatter, like an automobile tire blowout.

I did not, of course, hit the tree I was pointing at, but I did hit the tree next to it, making a tiny puff of dust as though the tree had exhaled. So the second time, now at least knowing the Luger was operational and wouldn't explode on me, I took more careful aim, with the standing stance the book had recommended, knees bent, body angled forward, both hands gripping the gun at arms' length as I sighted down the top of its barrel, and that time I hit exactly the spot on the tree I was aiming at.

Which was nice, but was somewhat spoiled by the fact that my concentration on aiming had made me again pay too little attention to recoil. This time, the Luger jumped out of my hands entirely and fell onto the ground. I retrieved it, wiped it carefully, and decided I had to conquer this matter of recoil if I were going to make use of the damn machine. For instance, what if I ever had to fire twice in a row? Not so good, if the gun is on the ground or, worse, up in my own face.

So once again I took the standing stance, this time aiming at a tree farther off. I clenched the grip of the Luger hard, and when I fired I let the recoil move my arm and then my whole body, so that I never really lost control of the gun. Its power trembled and shivered through my body, like a wave, and made me feel stronger. I liked it.

Of course, I was well aware that in giving all this attention to the physical details, I was not only providing proper weight to the preparation but was also avoiding, for as long as possible, any thought of the actual object of the exercise, the end result of all this groundwork. The death of a man. Though that would be faced soon enough. I knew it then, and I know it now.

Three shots; that was all. I drove back home, and cleaned the Luger, and oiled it again, and replaced the three missing bullets in the clip, and stored gun and clip separately in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, and didn't touch them again until I was ready to go out and see if I were actually capable of killing one Herbert Coleman Everly. Then I brought it out and put it into my overnight bag. And the other thing I packed, in addition to the usual clothing and toiletries, was Mr. Everly's resumé.

There's an entire new occupation these days in our land, a growth industry of "specialists" whose function is to train the freshly unemployed in job-hunting, and specifically how to prepare that all-important resume, how to put that best foot forward in the increasingly competitive struggle to get a new job, another job, the next job, a job.

HCE has taken such an expert's advice, his resume reeks of it. For instance, no photo. For those applicants over forty, one popular theory holds that it is best not to include a photo of oneself, in fact not to include anything at all that points specifically to the applicant's age. HCE doesn't even give the years of his employment, limiting himself only to two unavoidable clues: "23 years" and his college graduation in 1969.

Also, HCE is, or at least he wants to appear to be, impersonal and efficient and businesslike. He says nothing of his marital status, or his children, or his outside interests (fishing, bowling, what you will). He limits himself to the issues at hand.

It is not the best resume I've seen, but it's far from the worst; about middling, I would say. About good enough to get him an interview, if some paper manufacturer should be interested in hiring a manager-level employee with an intense history in the production and sales of specialized polymer paper products. Good enough to get him in the door, I would say. Which is why he must die.

The point in all this is to be absolutely anonymous. Never to be suspected, not for a second. That's why I'm being so very cautious, why in fact I'm driving a good twenty-five miles toward Albany, actually crossing into New York State, before turning south to make my way circuitously back into Connecticut.

Why? Why such extreme care? My gray Plymouth Voyager is not after all particularly noticeable. I'd say it looks rather like one vehicle in five on the road these days. But what if, by some remote chance, some friend of ours, some neighbor of ours, some parent of a schoolmate of Betsy or Bill, happened to see me, this morning, eastbound in Connecticut, when Marjorie has been told I'll be westbound in New York or even airborne by now, toward Pennsylvania? How would I explain it?

Marjorie would think at first I was having an affair. Although — except for that one time eleven years ago that she knows about — I have always been a faithful husband, and she knows that, too. But if she thought I were seeing another woman, if she had any reason to question my movements and my explanations, wouldn't I eventually have to tell her the truth? If only to relieve her mind?

"I was off on a private mission," I would finally have to say, "to kill a man named Herbert Coleman Everly. For us, sweetheart."

But a secret shared is no longer a secret. And in any event, why burden Marjorie with these problems? There's nothing she can do beyond what she's doing, the little household economies she put into place the instant the word came I'd be laid off.

Yes, she did. She didn't even wait for my last day on the job, and she certainly wouldn't have waited until my severance pay was gone. The instant I came home with the notification (the slip was yellow, not pink) that I was to be part of the next reduction in force, Marjorie started the belt-tightening. She'd seen it happen to friends of ours, neighbors of ours, and she knew what to expect and how — within her limits — to deal with it.

The exercise class was cancelled, and so was the gardening workshop. She cut off HBO and Showtime, leaving only basic cable; antenna TV reception is virtually impossible in our hilly corner of Connecticut. Lamb and fish left our table, replaced by chicken and pasta. Magazine subscriptions were not renewed. Shopping mall trips ceased, and so did those wandering slow journeys pushing a grocery cart through Stew Leonard's.

No, Marjorie is doing her job, I couldn't ask for more. So why ask her to become part of this? Particularly when I still can't be sure, after all the planning, all the preparation, that I can do it. Shoot this person. This other person.

I have to, that's all.

Having driven back into Connecticut, well south of our neighborhood, I stop at a convenience store/gas station to fill the tank and to take the Luger out of my suitcase, putting it under the raincoat artfully folded on the passenger seat beside me. There's no one around at the station except the Pakistani nestled behind the counter inside, surrounded by girly magazines and candy, and for one giddy second I see this as the solution to my problem: banditry. Simply walk into the building there with the Luger in my hand and make the Pakistani give me the cash in his till, and then leave.

Why not? I could do that once or twice a week for the rest of my days — or at least until Social Security kicks in — and continue to pay the mortgage, continue to pay for Betsy and Bill's education, and even put lamb chops back on the dinner table. Just leave home from time to time, drive to some other neighborhood, and rob a convenience store. Now that's convenient.

I chuckle to myself as I walk into the station with the twenty-dollar bill in my hand and exchange it with the surly unshaven fellow in there for a one-dollar bill. The absurdity of the idea. Me, an armed robber. Killer is easier to imagine.

I continue to drive east and a bit south, Fall City being on the Connecticut River not far north of where that minor waterway enters Long Island Sound. My state road atlas has shown me that Churchwarden Lane is a winding black line that moves westward out of the town, away from the riverside. I can come to it, according to the map, from the north, on a back road called William Way, thus avoiding the town itself.

The houses in the hills northwest of Fall City are mostly large and subdued, light with dark shutters, very New England, on large parcels of well-treed land. Four-acre zoning is my guess. I wind slowly along the narrow road, seeing the affluent houses, none of the affluent people or their affluent children visible at the moment, but their signs are everywhere. Basketball hoops. Two or three cars in wide driveways. Swimming pools, not yet uncovered for the summer. Gazebos, woods walks, lovingly reconstructed stone walls. Extensive gardens. Here and there a tennis court.

I wonder, as I drive along, how many of these people are going through what I'm going through these days. I wonder how many of them now realize just how thin the ground really is, beneath those close-cropped lawns. Miss a payday, and you'll feel that flutter of panic. Miss every payday, and see how that feels.

I realize I'm concentrating on all this, these houses, these signs of security and contentment, not only to distract myself from what I'm planning, but to make me firm in my intention. I'm supposed to have this life, just as much as any of these damn people on this damn winding road, with their names on their designer mailboxes and rustic wooden signs.

William Way does T at Churchwarden Lane, as the map shows. I turn left. The mailboxes are all on the left side of the road, and the first one I see is numbered 1117. The next three have names instead of numbers, and then there's 1112, so I know I'm moving in the right direction.

I'm also coming closer to the town. The road is mostly downhill now, the houses becoming less grand, the indicators now more middle class than upper middle. More appropriate for Herbert and me, after all. What neither of us wants to lose, because it's all we've got.

The nine hundreds, and at last the eight hundreds, and there's 835, identified only by number, HCE apparently being the modest sort, who doesn't flaunt his name at the brim of his property. The mailboxes are still all on the left, but Everly's house is surely that one on the right, with an arbor vitae hedge along the verge of the road, a blacktop driveway, a neat lawn with two graceful trees on it, and a modest white clapboard house surrounded by low evergreen plantings and set well back; probably late-nineteenth century, with the attached two-car garage and the enclosed wraparound porch added later.

A red Jeep is behind me. I continue on, not too fast, not too slow, and about a quarter mile farther down the road I see the mailman coming up. Mail woman, actually, in a small white station wagon plastered with US MAIL decals. She sits in the middle of the front seat, so she can steer and drive with left hand and foot, and still lean over to reach out the right side window to the mailboxes along her route.

These days, I am almost always home when the mail is delivered, because these days I have a more than casual interest in the possibility of good news. Had there been good news in my mailbox last month or last week or even yesterday, I wouldn't be here now, on Churchwarden Lane, in pursuit of Herbert Coleman Everly.

Isn't he likely to be at home as well, watching out the front window, waiting for the mail? Not good news today, I'm afraid. Bad news today.

The reason I've given this full overnight trip to the Everly project is because I had no idea how long it would take me to find and identify him, what opportunities I might have to get at him, how much time would be spent tracking him, waiting for him, pursuing him, before the chance of action would present itself. But now, it seems to me, the likelihood is very good that I'll be able to deal with Everly almost at once.

That's good. The waiting, the tension, the second thoughts; I hadn't been looking forward to all that.

I turn in at a driveway to let the Jeep go by, then back out onto the road and head uphill once more, back the way I'd come. I pass the mailperson, and continue on. I pass 835, and continue on. I come to an intersection and turn right, and then make a U-turn, and come back to the Stop sign at Churchwarden. There I open my road atlas, lean it against the steering wheel, and consult it while watching for the appearance of the mailperson's white station wagon. There is almost no traffic on Churchwarden, and none on this side road.

The dirty white car; coming this way, with stops and starts. I close the road atlas and put it on the seat behind me, then make the left turn onto Churchwarden.

My heart is pounding. I feel rattled, as though all my nerves are unstrung. Simple movements like acceleration, braking, small adjustments of the steering wheel, are suddenly very hard to do. I keep overcompensating, I can't fine-tune my movements.

Ahead, a man crosses the road from right to left.

I'm panting, like a dog. The other symptoms I don't object to, I half expect them, but to pant? I'm disgusting myself. Animal behavior…

The man reaches the mailbox marked 835. I tap the brakes. There's no traffic visible, either ahead or behind. I depress the button, and my driver's side window silently rolls down. I angle across the empty road, hearing the crunch of tire on roadway now that the window is open, feeling the cool spring air on my cheek and temple and hollowly inside my ear.

The man has withdrawn letters, bills, catalogues, magazines; the usual handful. As he's closing the front lid of the mailbox, he becomes aware of my approach and turns, eyebrows lifted in query.

I know him to be forty-nine years old, but to me he looks older. These past two years of unemployment, perhaps, have taken their toll. His mustache, too bushy for my taste, is pepper and salt with too much salt. His skin is pale and drab, without highlights, though he has a high forehead that should reflect the sky. His hair is black, receding, thin, straight, limp, gray at the sides. He wears glasses with dark rims — tortoise? — that look too large for his face. Or maybe his face is too small for the glasses. He wears one of his office shirts, a blue and white stripe, under a gray cardigan with the buttons open. His khaki pants are baggy, with grass stains, so he's perhaps a gardener, or helps his wife around the place, now that he has so much free time. The hands holding his mail are surprisingly thick, big-knuckled, as though he's a farmer and not a white-collar worker after all. Is this the wrong man?

I pull to a stop next to him, smiling out of the open window. I say, "Mr. Everly?"

"Yes?"

I want to be sure; this could be a brother, a cousin: "Herbert Everly?"

"Yes? I'm sorry, I—"

…don't know me, I think, finishing the sentence for him in my mind. No, you don't know me, and you never will. And I will never know you, either, because if I knew you I might not be able to kill you, and I'm sorry, but I really do need to kill you. I mean, one or the other of us must die, and I'm the one who thought of it first, so that leaves you.

I slide the Luger out from under the raincoat and extend it partway through the open window, saying, "You see this?"

He looks at it, expecting no doubt that I want to sell it to him or tell him I just found it and ask if it's his, or whatever happens to be the last thought that crosses his brain. He looks at it, and I squeeze the trigger, and the Luger jumps up in the window space and the left lens of his glasses shatters and his left eye becomes a mine-shaft, running deep into the center of the earth.

He drops backward. Just down and back, no fuss, no lunging, just down and back. His mail frets away from him in the breeze.

I make a sound in the back of my throat like someone trying to pronounce that Vietnamese name. You know the one: Ng. I put the Luger on top of the raincoat and drive on down Churchwarden, my trembling finger on the window button until the window completely shuts. I turn left, and then left again, and two miles later I finally think to put the Luger under the raincoat.

My route is now planned out. A few miles farther on, I'll find Interstate 91, which I'll take north through Hartford and on up into Massachusetts at Springfield. A little north of that I'll turn west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, heading once again for New York State. Tonight I'll stay in an inexpensive motel near Albany, paying cash, and tomorrow afternoon I will return home jobless from my interview in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Well. It seems I can do it.