The Ax

7

Thursday. I'm on the road by eight-fifteen a.m., telling Marjorie I have some follow-up to do on Tuesday's job interview in Albany, and that I might be late this evening, coming home.

The interview. Well, of course I didn't get that job, I won't be learning the intricacies of tin can labels after all, so here I am once again, on the way to Longholme.

I didn't get that job, and I didn't expect to get it. Just another failed interview. But this time, there was a bit more to it. This was the first interview I've gone on since I've added this second string to my bow, the plan (if I can make it work, make the whole complicated thing work, and not lose my determination), and as a result of that, I guess, I somehow saw Tuesday's interview differently from the ones before it. I saw it more dispassionately, is what it was. I saw it from outside.

And what I saw only increased my desperation. I saw that Burke Devore, this Burke Devore, this man I've become in half a century of life, is not friendly.

I don't mean I'm unfriendly, I don't mean I'm some snarling sort of misanthrope. I simply mean not friendly enough. Back in my young days, in school and then in the Army, I could always build up enough enthusiasm to be a part of the gang, part of the group, but it was never really natural to me. The four years I spent as a salesman, on the road for Green Valley, selling their industrial papers, I did learn how to be a salesman, grinning, cheery, shaking hands, slapping backs, making people feel I was glad to see them, but it was always hard.

Hard. I'm not a natural glad-hander, hail-fellow-well-met, I never was. Studiously, in those salesman days, I would collect new jokes and memorize them and retail them around to my contacts. Earnestly I would have a vodka or two with lunch, to loosen me up for my afternoon calls. I was drinking much too much in those days, and if I'd gone on being a salesman I'd probably be dead of cirrhosis by now.

That's what made the line so perfect for me, the product line, me the manager. Running that, in charge of that, I was expected to be amiable but a little aloof, friendly but always in command, and that suited me right down to the ground.

What I'm supposed to do now, I realized on Tuesday, is be a salesman once again. The resume merely gets me in the door, if it even does that much. My whole work history, my entire life till now, is simply the sales tool to get me in the door. And the interview is my sales pitch, and what I'm there to sell is me.

I'm not good enough at it. Whatever salesman skills I laboriously developed in the old days are gone now, atrophied. An ill-fitting suit, long ago given away.

Am I going to start memorizing stupid jokes again, telling them to the interviewers? Kidding with the secretaries? Giving people hearty compliments about their watch, their desk, their shoes? I just don't know how to get back to that person.

Those resumes in the filing cabinet in my office; a lot of those people are salesmen. You bet they are.

I'll do it once, when the time comes. I'll do it with the interviewer for Arcadia Processing, after the unfortunate demise of Upton "Ralph" Fallon. I'll tell that fellow jokes, you know I will. I'll praise his necktie, compliment his secretary and turn beautifully sentimental over the family photos on his desk. I'll sell, by God.

But not yet. That is then, and this is now, and now is the road to Longholme. I know that road better than I did on Monday, and traffic is light, so it's quite early, just quarter to ten, when I stop the Voyager in that same spot in front of the squash-colored stucco house for sale.

And the first thing I see is that the flag is up on EGR's mailbox, which means he has put letters in there to be picked up, which means the mail hasn't been delivered yet today. I didn't bother to drive past the house before coming to rest here, and from this angle I can't see whether the garage door is open or closed, but I do see the mailflag up, and I know it means the mail is yet to be delivered, so there's a chance, a hope, that today EGR himself will come out to get it. The Luger is on the seat beside me, under the folded raincoat, waiting. The both of us wait.

For twenty minutes, nothing happens. There's very little traffic along Berkshire Way, mostly delivery vans and pickup trucks. I see them out ahead, or in my rearview mirror, and they pass, and they're gone.

And then all at once there's a vehicle braking to a stop right behind me, abruptly large in my mirror, gray, familiar. I stare at it, afraid, with that awful immediate certainty that I've been caught, disaster has struck, exposure, condemnation, Marjorie and the kids staring at me in shock — "We never knew you!" — and a woman in an open gray zippered jacket leaps out of that vehicle and runs toward me.

The woman is the one who glared at me Monday: Mrs. Ricks! What on earth is she doing? Is she a mind reader?

It's a cool day, cloudy, and the Voyager's windows are shut. The woman runs up next to me, yelling, gesticulating, hugely angry and upset about something. But what? I can hear her yelling, but I can't make out the words. I stare at her through the glass, afraid of her, afraid of the whole situation, afraid to open the window.

She shakes her fist at me. She screams in rage. She suddenly cuts away, and runs around the front of the van, and yanks open the passenger door, and thrusts her head in at me, blotchy red face, tear-streaked cheeks, and she yells, "Leave her alone!"

I gape at her. "What?"

"She's only eighteen! How can you take advan— Don't you have any shame?"

"I'm not—" She's mistaken me, she's got me mixed up with somebody, it's just wrong, but I'm too flustered to correct her: "I'm not, you've got the, this isn't—" Then what am I doing here, if not stalking her daughter?

"Listen to me!" she screams, drowning me out. "Don't you think I could talk to your wife, whatever Junie says? Don't you have any self-respect? Can't you, can't you, can't you just leave her alone?"

"I'm not the man you—"

"You're killing her father!"

Oh, God. Oh, let me out of this, let me away from here.

My silence is a mistake. She's going to reason with me now, she's going to convince this married middle-aged swine to stay away from her eighteen-year-old daughter. "There are doctors," she says, trying to be calm, supportive. "You could talk with—" And now she's going to sit beside me in the van, and she sweeps the raincoat off the seat, out of her way, and we both stare at the gun.

Now we both experience true horror. She stares at me, and in her eyes I see the entire tabloid scenario. The lust-crazed older lover is here to slaughter his nymphet's parents.

I lift a hand. "I—" But what can I say?

She screams. The sound caroms inside the car, and the force of it seems to drive her backward, out of the vehicle and away. She turns, and runs along the road, toward her house, screaming.

No no no no no. She's seen me, she knows my face, she saw the Luger, none of this is happening, none of this can happen, everything's destroyed if this happens. I grab the Luger and jump out of the Voyager (at least, unlike her, I think to slam the door on my way), and I run after her.

I'm a sedentary man, I've been a manager for sixteen years, sitting at my desk, walking along the line, riding my car to and from work. Even more sedentary since I was chopped. I'm healthy enough, but I'm no athlete, and running uses me up right away. Long before I get to that yellow aluminum house, I'm gasping for breath.

But so is she. She's also out of shape, and she's trying to run and scream at the same time. And flail her arms. She had a good lead on me, but I'm catching up, I'm catching up, I'm not so far behind her when we veer to run angling across her unlovely lawn toward the front door of her house, and she's screaming, "Ed! Ed!" and before she gets to the house I catch up with her, and I hold the Luger directly behind her head, bobbing as we both run, and I fire once, and she drops straight down onto the lawn, like a bundle, like a duffel bag, and the momentum flings her jacket halfway up over her head, covering the hole the bullet made.

Exhausted, spent, I sink to one knee beside her, and look up to see the front door opening, the astonished face of what must be her husband, Ed, EGR, my EGR, his astonished face is in the doorway, staring out, and I raise the gun and shoot, and the bullet punches into the aluminum beside the doorframe with a muted twang.

He slams the door, already turning, running away into the house.

Reeling, almost fainting, I force myself to my feet, I lunge forward to the door, I yank the handle, but it's locked.

He'll be in there right now, dialing 911. Oh, God, this is terrible, this is a mess, this is a disaster, how did I ever think I could do these things, that poor woman, she wasn't supposed to—

I can't let this happen. He can't telephone, he can't, I won't permit it, I have to get to him, I just have to get to him.

The garage door is open. Around that way, through the house, find him, find him. I stagger like a drunk as I run along the front of the house and through the gaping open broad doorway. There, to my right, is the closed door to the house. That won't be locked. I hurry to it, the Luger dangling at the end of my right arm, and just as I reach the door it opens and he runs out!

What was he doing? What did he have in mind? Was he going to try to drive away from here, was he so rattled he never thought of the telephone? We stare at one another, and I shoot him in the face.

Much sloppier, this one, blood everywhere, face ruined, body a tangled unknotted mess on the garage floor, one arm flung backward through the open doorway into the house.

No one else at home? Daughters all at university? Or with their unacceptable lovers? How I hate them for making this confusion, driving that woman to mistake me for someone else, attack me, harangue me, discover the gun. Where's the neatness this time, the efficiency, the impersonality?

I'm shaking all over. I'm sweating, and I'm cold. I can barely hold on to the Luger, which I now put away in the inside pocket of my windbreaker, then trot along holding it in place with my left forearm.

I don't know if there's traffic, I don't know if a thousand people are watching me or no one. I only know there's the lawn, with that terrible dead sack on it, and there's the empty field, and there's the Plymouth Voyager.

I drive away, gripping the wheel hard because my hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking. I force myself to drive for ten minutes away from there, away from that neighborhood, staying within the speed limit, obeying all the traffic rules. Then at last I allow myself to pull off onto a dirt road and there, out of view, let the shaking have me. The shaking and the fear.

The sight of that woman's face. The memory of her running, and my hand holding up the gun, and then she falls. Her husband, goggle-eyed, made stupid by terror and grief.

This is horrible. Horrible. But what could I have done? From the instant she pulled away that raincoat, what could I have done differently?

What have I started here? What road am I on?