Worlds

37. Death of a Poet

I left for Chicago in the morning. Jeff was going to be out of town for the next three days, on maneuvers with the squad he’d just been given. I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with him even if that had been a good idea.

Chicago was a feint, of course; I was really headed for Atlanta and thence to Benny. But I did have a legitimate reason for going to the aptly named Windy City.

It was a biting cold, clear day, and the wind that rushed through the corridors between the kilometer-high buildings often gusted strongly enough to make you stagger for balance. I spent most of the day wandering through the art and science museums, which were not only edifying but also gave me many opportunities to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

Then I spent a rather awkward evening with my father, who lives in Evanston, outside of the city. We don’t have much in common other than physical appearance—the cube Mother has of him, in his late twenties, looks enough like me that we could be fraternal twins. So now I know what I’ll look like at fifty: flabby and fading. That’s a real comfort.

He was a nice enough man, though. Divorced eight years ago, living alone in a flat only a little larger than my dorm room. Sort of wan and resigned. He was glad to see me, but I think he would have been glad to see anybody.

Afterwards, I felt exorcised, in a way. If he were happy I think I would have been bitter.

I slept on the tube from Chicago to San Diego; San Diego to Seattle; Seattle to Atlanta. Then surface train and public floater to Charlestown and Lancaster Mills, where I drank tea for a couple of hours in an all-nighter, waiting for a U-Rent to open. Rented a bicycle for the last ten kilometers.

I felt exposed and obvious, pedalling down the rutted farm road. I didn’t look up the two times floaters hummed by overhead. There was an unmarked mailbox just past the tenth milestone; I hooked the bike to it and picked my way down a muddy path to an old house that appeared to be made of wooden logs.

It actually was, about half logs and half cement, and it looked handmade. There was a cord hanging from a hole drilled in the door; I pulled on it and a bell rang inside. After several rings with no answer, I stepped off the little porch to peer through a cloudy window.

“Looking for someone?”

I jumped. He was easily two meters tall, but skinny. Cadaverous. Sharp features, dark sunken eyes, black beard stubble, rumpled faded work clothes, a double-barreled shotgun cradled in the crook of his left arm. He had come quietly from behind the house.

“Yes, I-I’m looking for Benny. Benny Aarons.”

“No one here by that name.” He scratched his stomach and the barrels of the gun swung around to line up on me.

“I might have the wrong farm,” I said, and realized that was possible: I might have stumbled on some crazy recluse. “I’m looking for Mr. Perkins’s place.”

He looked at me for a long cold time. “You have the hair for it. You be Mary Anne?”

I nodded vigorously. “O’Hara. Where’s Benny?”

“Supposing I knew this Aarons. Supposing you did too. Where did you meet him?”

“An English seminar at New York University. Dr. Schaumann.”

“And where did you go, the first time you went out?”

“The Bronx Zoo.”

He didn’t move at all during this whole exchange. Neither did I. After a moment, he said, “Guess you’re her.” He let the gun slip and caught it expertly. “Let’s go inside.”

I followed him into the single large room. Where the walls were exposed, they looked the same as they did outside. Most of the wall space was covered with bookshelves, though, and paintings. One of Benny’s pictures was hanging over the fireplace, where a large piece of wood smoldered. It was hot and stuffy.

He motioned me to a rough table with two chairs. “Sit. I’ll get coffee.”

I sat. “I really don’t need any, thank you.” He grunted and poured two cups from the pot that was sitting on a black iron stove. He took a bottle of whiskey off a shelf and poured some into each cup.

He sat down across from me and slid one cup over. He shook his head slowly.

The smell of whiskey and coffee will always bring back to me that feeling of helpless horror growing. “Something’s… wrong.”

“Benny is dead,” he said precisely.

I think my heart actually stopped. A wave of remorse and fear rushed over me, so strong I almost fainted. Perkins reached across the table and steadied me, hand on my arm.

“What happened?”

He let go of me slowly and eased back into his chair. “Not what they say happened.” He raised his cup. “Better drink some.”

It made me cough and finally brought tears to my eyes. Perkins gave me a surprisingly clean handkerchief. “What do they say happened? Who are ‘they’?”

“The police, they say he killed himself.”

“Benny would never do that.”

“I know. And he doubly would never do it without he left a note. Wordy son of a bitch. Excuse me.”

I blew my nose. “No, you’re right.”

“He was murdered. Now what the hell was going on? I knew he was in deep trouble but he wouldn’t tell me a damned thing. He said I was better off not knowing. Was there somebody layin’ for him?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t know who, at least.

He took a cotton bag of tobacco out of his shirt pocket and began rolling a cigarette. “This is what happened. About three weeks ago. I put on some mush to fry for breakfast and went out to the barn to get Benny. He had fixed himself a little room out there in the stable. Don’t have horses no more.

“Well… he was hanging there. Long rope tied up on the rafters by the hayloft.”

“My God!”

“Well, he didn’t do it himself. Somebody marched him up to the loft and put the noose on him and pushed him off.”

“How do you know?”

“You want a cigarette? I got some real ones around.”

I shook my head. “How can you tell?”

“You really want to know. Well. I cut him down. It was cold in the barn and he was stiff. He didn’t have no clothes on, that was the way he slept.” Perkins lit the cigarette carefully and sipped his coffee.

“I guess I stood and looked at him for a long time. Then I saw there was something wrong, I mean something peculiar.

“His left arm was dislocated, popped right out of the socket. There was a big brown bruise on his left wrist, and another on his right shoulder. You know what a come-along is?”

“No.”

“Well, you put somebody’s arm behind his back and pull it up, like this.” He reached around as if he were trying to scratch between his shoulderblades. “Then you grab his other shoulder and push. He has to come along with you. Police do it.”

“That’s how they got him up into the hayloft?”

“Right. And he must have struggled something fierce, to dislocate his arm and get those bruises.

“I showed that to the police and they agreed with me, at first. But I called them a few days later and they said the case was closed, suicide. Said the coroner said the injuries were caused by Benny trying to get loose from the rope, after he’d jumped. Said a lot of people have second thoughts like that. But that’s a load. It just couldn’t happen.”

“Not Benny, no.”

“Not anybody. How’d he bruise his right shoulder? Did he do it before or after he’d popped out his arm? It’s a load, all right” He took a furious drag on his cigarette and it showered sparks over the table. “The question is, who?” I nodded.

He banged the cigarette out on the jar lid that served as an ashtray. “You know more’n you think you can tell me.”

“I can’t… I hardly know you.” Then he read my mind.

“You think I might not be who I say I am?”

“That’s possible.”

“Well. I don’t have a flier’s license to show you. That wouldn’t do anyhow, I ’spect.” He got up and went to the stove for a refill; picked up the whiskey bottle and put it back down. “Want some more?” I said no. He sat back down and stared into his cup, as if gathering his thoughts.

“Benny and I were best friends in middle school. We’re line cousins. My folks moved up to New York for a few years and we lived in the same line house as Benny.” He waved at the hundreds of books. “He got me to readin’. I guess I was as good a friend as he had. Why don’t you ask me something about him? Like I asked you.”

“Believe me… you’re better off not knowing anything.”

“That just ain’t so. I been walkin’ around with a gun for three weeks. Better off if I knew what I might be up against.”

“I don’t think they’d bother you,” I said without too much conviction. He just stared at me. “All right. Tell me about Benny’s … love life. Did he have any homosexual experience?”

Perkins frowned and took his time answering. “If he did, he never told me about it. Wouldn’t expect him to, though. I know he had a really bad time with a woman some years back, and hadn’t seen many women until you came along. He told me a lot about that—say, I don’t want to embarrass you.”

“Sex doesn’t embarrass me.”

“Well, he was real confused about you because he had a hard time separating out the sex from the love. You know? Not the way most everybody does. Stronger, because he had nothing to go on, nothing good. And all of a sudden he had everything. He said there was nothing you didn’t know, nothing you wouldn’t do.”

“He was wrong there. But the things I won’t do would never occur to Benny.”

He shifted restlessly. “What did he tell me that nobody else would know?… You, um, did it once in the women’s locker room. You had to hide in a smelly little closet.”

I smiled at the memory. “Why?”

“A whole gym class came in. Right at the wrong moment.”

I nodded. The right moment, actually; I’d never seen Benny recover so fast. The situation must have fulfilled some obscure fantasy. “You’re right. That’s something not even the FBI would know.”

He leaned forward, alert “You suspect the FBI?”

“No… I was just—”

“I do.”

“You think the FBI killed Benny?”

“Some part of the government.” He rubbed at his chin savagely with the back of his hand, sandpaper sound. “Look, Benny told me how he got here. He zigzagged all over the country for a day and then went to Vegas. Took off his beard and most of his hair and got his skin dyed, then got all new papers. Then he spent another three days constantly on the move, before he got here. No private person could have tracked him down.

“And look. How come they dropped the investigation, just like that? They only even interrogated me once, the day after he died, and I’m the only real suspect they could have. Somebody told them to get off it.”

I hardly heard what he was saying, for the overwhelming rush of guilt. “What day did he die?”

“January ninth. Why?”

So I hadn’t caused it; that was before I’d told Jeff. “Could we go outside? I—I’m having difficulty breathing.”

He picked up the shotgun on the way out. It was still cold and clear. We went behind the house and walked between rows of dead cornstalks.

“I wanted to get out because I was afraid your place might be bugged,” I said.

“If it’s the FBI you’re worried about, I might be bugged.” He switched the Shotgun to his right hand and buried his left deep in a pocket, for warmth. “They can get you while you’re sleeping, do microsurgery. Leave a bug in your skull for the rest of your life.”

“Come on… that’s just something you see on the cube.”

He shrugged. “Why would the FBI be interested in Benny?”

How much to tell? “I think he was in touch with them. If he was murdered, it wasn’t them who got to him.” I gave Perkins a synopsis of our dealings with the sinister political action group. “Before Benny left, I think he tried to penetrate the group as deeply as possible, and then told the FBI all he knew.”

“You think that would make him safe from the FBI.” When I didn’t say anything, he continued. “That sounds paranoid, doesn’t it? Well, you didn’t grow up here. You don’t have anythng like the FBI in the Worlds.”

I shook my head. “I have a friend who works for the FBI. He’s a good man.”

“I’m sure it’s chock full of good men. But believe me, if they want to do something to you, they just do it. They don’t have to answer to anyone.”

Jeff had used the same phrase, in a different context. “What good would it do them? To kill Benny?”

“That’s a point,” he admitted. “You’d think it would be to their advantage to keep him alive and kickin’. They might could use him again.” He pulled a dried cob off a stalk and threw it away, hard. “So what do you think?”

I tried to recall James’s conversation the other night. “I really don’t know. If that group were capable of finding him, I don’t doubt that they’d be capable of killing him.” We ran out of cornfield and started walking toward the barn. I tried to stifle a feeling of dread. “He told me where he was going. Maybe he told someone else.”

“He said not. But it might be that somebody was listening.”

“No, we were alone. Outdoors, in a subway entrance.”

We went into the barn. I glanced up and was glad not to see a rope hanging from the rafters.

“This was his place, here.” Perkins pushed open a plank door.

It was about the size of his room in New York. There was a single window with a sheet of plastic tacked over it. There was a cot and a chair, and two crates pushed together to make a table. The table was covered with a chaotic jumble of books and papers, grey under a film of dust A wood-burning stove and a suitcase, and a drawing of me, pinned over his cot.

“I haven’t touched anything. Is there anything here you’d want?”

That complicated funny man, all the pain and joy of him, and it came down to this. I shook my head slowly but then took down the picture, rolled it up and put it in my bag. We left quickly.

“What about his relatives?” I asked.

“I haven’t told anybody. Far as anybody knows, that was Sheldon Geary and he committed suicide. Anyhow, Benny’s parents disowned him when he left the line. There’s nobody—”

We surprised a large bird and it suddenly clattered into the air in front of us. Perkins dropped to a crouch and the shotgun roared. I was somehow face-down in the mud, the blast ringing in my ears.

Hands shaking, Perkins hinged the gun open and extracted the smoking shell. He got another from his pocket and reloaded. “Christ I’m jumpy,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Sorry.” He helped me up. “Do you have a change of clothes with you?”

“Back at the Atlanta station. Suitcase in a locker. But I’ll be all right, it’ll brush off when it dries.”

“Well, let’s get you inside.” My teeth were chattering by the time we got to the door. He stared back at the field. “Even missed the god-damned bird.”

Perkins handed me a blanket and studied the wall while I got out of my clothes and hung them by the stove. I suppose it was a potentially erotic situation, what with the tension and forced intimacy and his knowledge of my butterfly tendencies. But he just sat me down at the table and made a fresh pot of coffee.

“Look, you might be in as much danger as Benny was.” He took a wooden box off a high shelf.

“I don’t think so. I didn’t get as deep into the organization.”

“That might not make any difference. You were Benny’s lover; they don’t know how much you might know.” He set the box down in front of me.

I lifted the lid cautiously. It was a small silver pistol and a box of ammunition.

“Take it, just in case.”

“I’d never be able to use it.” It was cold and surprisingly heavy, and smelled of oil.

“Never know until the situation comes up,” he said quietly.

“I don’t mean morally… I mean I wouldn’t be able to hit the floor with it. I’ve never touched a gun before in my life.”

“I could show you how to use it. Once your clothes—”

“No.” I put the gun back and closed the box. “I appreciate the thought But if it comes to shooting people I don’t have a chance anyhow. It’s not like the Greeks or westerns, where I’d want to take some of them with me. I don’t have that gland.” Those glands, I thought.

“Then what do you plan on doing?”

“I have to think… I have a pass for unlimited tube and rail travel for forty-five days. I might just keep moving around.”

“That might be a good idea.” He poured coffee and I accepted a cup, to warm my hands.

“What about you?” I asked. “Why do you stay here?”

“I’ve given that some thought. In the first place, I couldn’t get far; don’t have much money. Also, I’m out in the open here, nobody’s going to sneak up on me. Mainly, though, if they haven’t got me by now, they must not be especially interested.

“And this is the best time of year. No crops to worry about I just sit in here and read. My reward for cracking ass nine months.”

We sat for an hour or so, reminiscing about Benny. When my clothes were dry he brushed them off outside and brought them to me.

“Do you mind if I don’t turn away? I don’t see a woman too often.”

“I don’t mind.” I let the blanket fall and dressed without hurrying, in front of his sad and hungry eyes. I normally might have done the friendly thing, but was too depressed and upset I suspected he was, too.

Perkins walked me out to the bicycle and we exchanged awkward goodbyes. I assured him that I would come by if I was ever in the area again, but we both knew I wouldn’t.