The Cannibal Heart

17

He had tried twice. The first time he wrote a note and left it on the drawing board in his study along with the key to his safe deposit box and a copy of his will:

“Janet, I can’t think of any other way but this. Don’t blame yourself. I’ve been getting more and more confused lately. Please destroy this, and notify Roy Standish who will handle everything for you. John.”

He went down the stairs and outside. The night was quiet. The sea roar was muted to a whisper, and even the inexhaustible mockingbirds had been silenced.

He didn’t know what time it was, except that it was after midnight and everyone was asleep. He had always had a strong sense of time; it was one of his vanities that Janet encouraged... “No, I won’t need my watch with John along.”... “It’s wonderful how John can just look at the sun and tell...”

Tonight there was no sun, and the moon cruised behind clouds. He didn’t care about the time anyway. He was stepping beyond it, out of its reach, eluding the innocent trap of the hours.

The air was cold and he was wearing only his pajamas and slippers. He had been lying in bed, not actually thinking about dying at all. He had turned from his right side to his left side and back again perhaps ten times before he thought what a relief it would be not to wake up in the morning. He felt quite sorry while he was writing the note to Janet, sorry in a detached way for the poor foolish fellow who signed his name John, and who had to take such drastic measures because he wasn’t strong enough to compromise.

Poor John, he thought. Poor fellow. It can’t be helped, though.

He crossed the driveway carrying a flashlight but it wasn’t necessary to turn it on yet. His eyes — all his senses — seemed to be alerted, sharpened. Even without his glasses he saw distinctly the golden discs of marigolds beside the garage, and the bristly red pompoms of the castor bean bush. The smell of kelp was overpowering, and to his ears the sound of his feet on gravel was explosive. The pebbles jumped like corn popping.

Though he had made no plans, everything worked out perfectly at the beginning. The garage door was unlocked and slid open without a squeak. The old garden hose was coiled on a nail on the wall. The ceiling light, which had burned out a week ago, had been replaced, and Janet’s keys were in the ignition of the Lincoln.

He cut off a long piece of hose with a hedge clipper, and got down on his back under the rear of the car with the hose lying across his belly like an affectionate snake. He turned on the flashlight and saw that the hose was too narrow to fit over the exhaust pipe. He lay there for quite a while, wondering what he could use to bind the hose and pipe together.

It was rather pleasant lying under the car, smelling the oil and dust and gas, and looking up at the intricate mass of steel, the insides of the sleeping giant. He thought of starting the engine, leaving the throttle open a little, and then coming back to the rear of the car and breathing in the exhaust fumes, holding his mouth right up against the pipe like a child suckling. It would be very quick that way, but he somehow didn’t like the idea of being found on the floor, like a victim. He preferred to be found in the driver’s seat, so that people (except Janet, of course, and Roy Standish, his lawyer) might think his death was an accident, that the wind had blown the garage door shut before he’d had a chance to drive the car out. That was silly, though. The door was too heavy to be blown shut, and anyway he was in his pajamas.

He regretted not having stopped to put on his clothes, but if he had taken that extra time he might have lost his nerve. Though he was stepping beyond the reach of time, he hadn’t yet taken the final step. It was still important, he realized. Time to think, to wonder about his destination and speculate on turning back or taking a detour.

He got up again, and tossed the piece of hose into a corner. It fell against an open carton of snail bait. The carton tipped over, and some of the little pellets of poison rattled out on the cement floor. He picked them up and put them back in the carton, and then he hid the carton on a high ledge behind a can of paint, wondering who had been so careless as to leave it out in the open like that with Billy around. The stuff’s poison, he thought, and wiped his hands carefully on the front of his pajama top.

He closed the garage door. Climbing in behind the wheel of the Lincoln he turned on the ignition and opened the throttle a quarter of the way.

But the car hadn’t been used for a week; the engine was cold and damp. He had to press the starter half a dozen times before the engine turned over with a blast of noise.

He took a deep breath and waited. The sweat of fear erupted on his face like blisters that burst and trickled coldly down his temples.

He tried not to think about himself or Janet. He began to concentrate on the chemical changes that were taking place in the air. He’d forgotten most of his elementary chemistry, but it seemed reasonable to suppose that the carbon monoxide coming from the exhaust pipe was using up the supply of oxygen in the garage and turning into carbon dioxide. When there was no more oxygen left, the carbon monoxide would remain relatively pure, and it was this pure stuff that was deadly to breathe. Or maybe this was all wrong. Maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. It was too late now to find out. He breathed, in and out, his eyes blank, impassive.

There was a rush of air. In the rear mirror he saw the garage door swinging open, and in the opening stood Mr. Roma in his old paisley bathrobe.

He had time to switch off the ignition before he slumped sideways in a faint.

Other than a profound regret at his failure, and a slight red flush on the skin of his face and arms, he suffered no after effects.

Everyone was determinedly cheerful, though behind Miss Lewis’s professional smile there was shock, and in Janet’s eyes, reproach and bewilderment. Every minute of the day and night he was under surveillance. He couldn’t take a walk along the beach without Mr. Roma suddenly finding it necessary to gather driftwood or dig for clams; and at night Janet sat up until she couldn’t hold her eyes open anymore. When he went to bed he closed the door of his room, but in the morning it was always open again. They kept Billy out of his way and they didn’t talk about him unless he asked for information.

Later in the week Janet drove him into Marsalupe to see a doctor. The doctor gave him a dozen phenobarbital tablets and told him to cut down on his smoking and eat plenty of leafy green vegetables.

“Brilliant man,” he said, on the way home.

“Who? The doctor?”

“Positively brilliant.”

“Well, but you don’t eat enough greens.”

When they got home he flushed the tablets down the toilet. There weren’t enough of them anyway, to be fatal.

It was harder to dispose of the leafy green vegetables. They appeared at the table in all forms and guises, and he ate them to please Janet.

She had wonderful control during those days. She didn’t once mention the episode in the garage. No questions were asked, and no controversial matters about the future were brought up.

Every now and then he caught her looking at him in a half-hopeful, half-puzzled way. Poor Janet, he thought. She’s waiting for the vegetables to take effect. She can’t believe it was really me who wanted to die — it was only the vitamin deficiency.

He felt terribly sorry for her, but he couldn’t reach out to her through the strange detachment that enveloped him like a fog. She felt the fog and tried to penetrate it by talking of incidents and people from their shared past, playing the game of Remember?

“Remember that couple we met on the boat coming from Panama, the ones who sat and played gin rummy in the bar all day?”

“It was funny, that time I got the measles and you kept saying it was only from eating too many strawberries...”

“I wonder what ever happened to Nancy Howard. Remember? She wanted to go on the stage but she had that awful voice...”

Of course he remembered. He remembered everything. Each new day, people with lost names and faces, forgotten people saying and doing forgotten things, stepped back into his memory. He seemed to have total recall, as if his mind, cleared of the future, had given the extra space to the past. His memories were vivid, but without nostalgia, without even self-pity.

A week later he had a birthday, his forty-ninth. Janet’s gift to him was a new pair of binoculars she had ordered from Hammacher Schlemmer in New York.

“Thank you, Janet. It was very thoughtful of you. I needed a new pair of binoculars.”

He carried them to the edge of the cliff and held them to his eyes. They were very good binoculars, but the sea was endless, the sky infinite; there was nothing to see.

At dinner he ate a piece of birthday cake and afterwards he went upstairs to say good night to Billy. It had been nearly two weeks since he’d seen him, except at a distance, walking with Miss Lewis.

Billy was sitting up in bed playing with a rubber doll that squeaked when it was pressed.

“Good night, Billy. Good night, Old Timer.”

Over the railing of the bed the child looked at him as if he’d never seen him before.

“My goodness, Billy,” Miss Lewis said, “don’t you remember your daddy? This is your daddy. Say it now, say daddy.”

Billy squeaked the rubber doll.

“Children forget easily,” Miss Lewis said.

“Of course.”

“Out of sight, out of mind, that’s how it goes.”

He took one last look at Billy and thought, My son, my freak, my jailer: Goodbye, goodbye, poor baby.

Janet was waiting for him downstairs. She had built a fire in the grate with monkey-puzzle boughs and the living room was subtly fragrant.

“Was he glad to see you?” Janet said.

“Oh, yes. Very.”

“Can I get you anything, John?”

“No, thanks. I thought perhaps I’d go out for a short walk.”

She rose immediately. “I’ll go with you.”

“Not this time.” He went over and took her in his arms and stroked her hair gently. “Not this time, Janet,” he said, staring over her head at the night that pressed against the window. “You’re tired. Sit here and rest for awhile.”

“Promise you won’t be long, then.”

“It’s my birthday. I’m not making any promises.”

“John...”

“Yes?”

“When you come back we’ll discuss things. We’ll come to some kind of decision.”

“All right.”

“I know we can work things out between us.”

“Of course.”

“Perhaps we can go away on a holiday, just you and I. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Very nice.”

Turning away, he took off his glasses and put them on the mantel.

“If you’re going for a walk,” she said, “you’d better wear your glasses.”

He remembered the night he’d gone out to the garage how alert his senses had been, how clearly he had seen the bright discs of marigolds and the red blossoms of the castor bean bush.

“I can see better without them at night.”

“Then there must be something the matter. You’ll have to get a new prescription.”

“Tomorrow.”

Perhaps it was a mistake anyway to see too clearly. Through the binoculars the sky had warned him of infinity. To the giant telescopic eye on Mount Wilson the constellations were more remotely mysterious than they were to the curious but uncritical eyes of a child. The final mystery lay not in the vastness of the stars but in the infinitesimal atoms of the mind of man.

He looked at Janet — her face was a little blurred now — and then back at the window again. Below the black horizon was tomorrow, but he felt no regret that he wouldn’t be there to see it. He already knew its size and shape. We’ll talk things over, come to a decision, work things out, take a holiday. It was all rather funny, like the doctor’s advice about eating leafy green vegetables.

“Janet,” he said, “Janet, thanks very much for the binoculars. I really appreciated them.”

He was sure she hadn’t caught the error in tense, and yet there was something queer in the way she was looking at him.

“What are you staring at?” he said.

“Nothing. Let me mix you a drink before you leave.”

“No, thanks.”

“Promise me you won’t be long?”

“No promises on my birthday, remember.”

He thought that at the last moment she would follow him out, but she just sat down again in front of the fire. She watched the flames, her chin resting on her hands. Her face was nebulous, he couldn’t read it without his glasses, or the binoculars, or the giant telescope.

He went outside by the back door and passed the garage. The door had a new padlock, and the spark plugs had been taken out of the jeep and the Lincoln. He had seen Mr. Roma taking them out and Mr. Roma had seen him seeing, but they were both too polite to discuss the matter.

It was high tide. Walking along the edge of the cliff he could hear the hiss of spray and see the white uneven curves of the breakers along the shore.

He took out his watch and looked at the time on the luminous dial. It was nearly nine o’clock.

I’ll wait until it’s exactly nine, he thought.

He stood there until the minute hand mounted the dial and started its descent, but still he couldn’t jump.

Holding the watch in his hand he walked on, blinded by the dark and his own tears.

At ten-thirty they began searching for him, Miss Lewis with the flashlight and Mr. Roma and Mrs. Wakefield carrying the two lanterns that had hung unused in the shed for years.

The lights flickered weirdly through the woods and along the barranca and the edge of the cliff. The birds, startled out of their sleep, squawked distress calls from the uncertain shelter of the leaves. The sound of the surf was like a heavy wind blowing through a forest, pausing, returning.

All this fuss, Miss Lewis thought. There’s fussing about something around here all the time. I’d like a long quiet rest in the city.

But she raised her voice with the others, and called, “Mr. Wakefield, Mr. Wakefield...”

Their voices were feeble against the surf, and their lanterns helpless against the night, no better than glow worms.

“He may be walking on the beach,” Miss Lewis said.

“The tide’s still in,” Mrs. Wakefield said. She was shivering, and her arm ached from the weight of the lantern. “There’s no place to walk.”

“I will look anyway,” Mr. Roma said. “If you will go back to the house, I will look personally, when the tide goes out a little.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I know, I know.”

“He’s dead, I feel it.”

“Go back to the house sensibly and have some coffee, something to warm you.”

“Coffee sounds wonderful,” Miss Lewis said in the bright firm voice she used on Billy. “Come along.”

Mr. Roma set out along the cliff toward the stone steps. When he had nearly reached the bottom, just out of reach of the waves, he sat down with the lantern beside him and waited wearily until the tide went out.

Picking up the lantern he stepped down into the damp sand. Water crept into the top of his shoes and as he walked his feet made a squishing noise that increased his uneasiness; it sounded as though someone was walking behind him. He drew his coat closer, against the insinuating wind that seemed to be coming from all directions and slid up his sleeves and down his collar and up the soggy legs of his trousers.

He moved ahead slowly and cautiously. After each tide the beach changed; things were added and things were taken away. You could never walk along it as you walked on a path through the woods with the certainty that it was the same now as it was yesterday. There were always changes. A boulder had been shifted, a stranded stingray flopped in a tangle of kelp. The tide, heavier than normal, had swept away a foot of sand, exposing hundreds of fist-sized stones.

He paused for a minute, trying to decide whether to ease the stingray back into the water, or to kill and bury it so that no one would get cut by its barbed tail. As he leaned over to free it from the kelp he saw Mr. Wakefield crushed between two boulders, limp and boneless as a sponge, oozing water.

The deputy sheriff, Bracken, came in the middle of the night, and again the next day, and the next.

Bracken was a barrel-shaped man who wore a ten-gallon hat and Western boots. He had started out as a man of ideals. But as the gap increased between his ideals and the facts, he found himself owning a ranch almost paid for by contributions from the Mexican aliens who’d been smuggled into Marsalupe. They arrived by plane, they swam in from freighters, they came in false-bottomed trucks and bales of hay, and in other ways so diverse and ingenious they surprised even Bracken. The aliens didn’t want to be picked up by the Immigration officers and sent back to Mexico, and Bracken didn’t want to help pick them up, as long as they behaved themselves and laid off greasing their knives. After he’d had a few drinks, Bracken got very sad thinking of what a hell of a fine fellow he’d been once, before those damn jigaboos came pouring into town.

He knew Mrs. Wakefield by sight. She had never spoken to him or even nodded at him, and Bracken was sensitive to slights. He thought it was a wonderful opportunity to let her know she was no better than he was, no matter where her money came from.

“Funny thing,” he said, “us being neighbors all this time and never getting together for a powwow until this tragic occurrence.”

She sat in silence, rubbing the knuckles on her left hand and wondering why this terrible man kept coming back to ask her the same questions over and over.

“I’ve told you everything I could,” she said finally.

“Sure, sure, you have. We got to have an inquest, though. It’s the law. You don’t want to break the law, do you?”

“Naturally not. But all this endless prying into my husband’s affairs... He’s dead. What difference does it make whether it was accidental or intentional?”

“The law says we got to find out. I got to collect evidence, see what I mean?”

“Surely you’ve collected enough evidence already.” Enough evidence, she thought, and beer and coffee and ham sandwiches and anything else you could cram into your fat mouth.

Billy came to the door to stare at the man with the funny shoes.

Bracken said, “Get rid of the kid, will you? He gives me the heebie jeebies. I can’t think.”

It was that same day that the curiosity-seekers began to arrive from town. They came up the driveway in cars and along the beach on foot, pretending they were collecting shells or gathering mussels or looking at the view. They took away, as souvenirs, Mr. Roma’s No Trespassing signs and boughs of jacaranda and pieces of stone from the beach.

Though Billy was kept in the house, he could see the people from the windows and he sensed the excitement. The terrible and mysterious excitement made his legs tremble and brought quick tears to his eyes. No one could explain it to him, and no one tried. He was isolated in bewilderment. It was the same house he’d always known, only it was changed, like the beach after a tide.

On the morning of the inquest he was left alone with Carmelita. He sat on her lap for a long time while she rocked back and forth in her chair by the kitchen window. They were both quiet.

In the courtroom, under the drab light of the fly-specked chandeliers, a verdict of suicide was returned.

Before she had time to get away, Bracken came over and told her what a real pleasure it had been meeting her.

“Only one thing bothers me, Mrs. Wakefield. It’s about that there watch of his that’s still missing.”

“I know nothing about it except what I’ve told you. He had it with him when he went out that night. He liked to — he was very conscious of time.”

“Brainy guy, oh?”

She looked at him with hatred. “Oh, yes, very brainy.”

“Some of these brainy ones go off their rocker just like that.” He snapped his fingers; the nails were bitten to the quick. “Well, if the watch turns up, let me know. I’m a curious guy. Facts, that’s what I like.”

“I see.”

“Well, it’s been real nice meeting you anyhow. Now we’ve broke the ice, like they say, how about me coming over and...”

She turned and walked away.

She never saw Bracken again. Four days later she drove away in the Lincoln with Billy and Miss Lewis.

Looking now at the horses on the hillside that belonged to Bracken, she wondered what he would say if she phoned him and told him that the watch had been found: Yes, on the side of the cliff, Mr. Bracken, by a little girl who is as curious as you are. How did it get there, in a cormorants’ ledge? I have no facts to satisfy you, Mr. Bracken. But he must have had the watch in his hand when he was standing at the top of the cliff. I’ve told you how he was always checking the time, looking at the minute hand on his watch, marking off the days on the calendar. Well, time was ending for him. He threw the watch as he fell, he threw it away from him, perhaps he was sick of time... Quite a brainy guy, Mr. Bracken.

But the words would never be spoken. She could no longer feel any real anger at Bracken’s boorish stupidity. We are all victims, she thought, of ourselves and of each other. Bracken, John, Billy, myself, and now Mark, whom I love.

She rose, turning her eyes to the sky, and thought how foolish they must all look in the eyes of heaven, how foolish and impotent and grubby, not fit to live.