Owen Marshall Selected Stories (34 page)

O
n their way to the North Island they had one night in the Astle Motels, Picton, before they were to cross over on the ferry. The motels were concrete block, painted cream both inside and out, so that several times that evening it took Mervyn a moment to recall if he'd come inside, or was still standing outside. There was a shower so confined that it felt like a coffin. ‘Oh, it's only for one night, isn't it,' his wife said. ‘One night won't kill you.'

The owners, the Perrits, had four units near the steep road, then their own home that looked as though it, too, was painted cream inside and out, then a long strip of lawn, with a faded trampoline to justify the phrase, children's play area, in the brochure. Right at the back, by a Japanese box hedge, was a tin garden shed with high windows.

Mervyn had these pills for what ailed him, and after he'd taken a couple he couldn't settle to watch the game show on the television. Whoever was going to win the family sedan, the trip with spending money to Los Angeles, or be dismissed with just the sponsor's products, seemed a long way from the Astle Motels. Mervyn walked past units two, three and four, each resounding with the same game show host, past the Perrits' house. It was dark and the lights of the town glowed below with a spurious magnificence ending abruptly at the sea's edge.

He climbed on to the trampoline, gingerly lest it disintegrate beneath his weight. Much of the elasticity seemed weathered out
of it. Rocking gently there, oddly reassured by the movement, he was high enough to see directly into the window of the lit garden shed, where Mrs Perrit was dancing among laundry powders, empty cartons, and heaped net curtains like Kleenex, which had long ago hung in all the units.

Mervyn had never been introduced to Mrs Perrit, had never heard her voice, knew nothing of her life beyond that day, had seen her just the once before, standing behind her husband and sucking her teeth as Mervyn signed in. Yet, oscillating four feet above the lawn in the summer night, Mervyn glimpsed her in some most private transport of euphoria, dancing by herself in the tin shed. She wore a sleeveless print dress, cut unkindly so that the puckered flesh and hair of her armpits were displayed when she raised her hands to place the palms together. She closed her eyes as she spun as if better to establish the consummate surroundings in which her dance was set. Mrs Perrit was a large, clumsy woman in Picton, who apparently wished to be set free. Her hair was lacklustre and her movements of absurd gentility.

The psychiatrist later was at pains to point out to Mervyn that of course everything at the Astle Motels was the occasion of his breakdown, and not in any way the cause. He found it interesting and important to have Mervyn realise that the dancing, the trampoline, all of it, was merely a conjunction of phenomena. Mervyn had not been driven mad by Mrs Perrit's dancing in the back shed. No, there was a complex series of factors going way back that took a good deal of the psychiatrist's time, and a good deal of Mervyn's money, to identify.

Mervyn knew that his doctor was right, that the dancing Mrs Perrit wasn't to blame, but always afterwards when he thought of his illness, or when he felt very low in himself — how are you, in yourself, Mervyn, his wife would say — then he felt again suspended, oscillating in a summer night, while watching poor, desperate Mrs Perrit dancing in the hope of who knows what release. It was a
parody that struck deep into Mervyn's heart.

He saw, as if the wind had turned suddenly, that the whole splendid ballet of life casts larger shadows, which are the jig of death.

Mervyn had crept down from the trampoline, walked back to his Ford Falcon by the concrete motel unit, and sat with the door open, reciting in sequence of purchase all the cars that he had ever owned. That's where his wife found him eventually. The first one, he told her gently, the very first, was a second-hand 1936 Morris Eight, older than himself, and it was two-toned, black and a wonderful scarlet, and the doors were hinged behind the seat so that, if they opened while you drove, they could scoop in the whole world.

T
he sun lay stretched in the evening and summer sky, the weeping elms sighed and rustled in the cat's-paws of the easterly, and Crimmond's Alsatian, like a wine taster, raised its head to the promise of night.

James Cumuth paused at the doorway of his wooden sleepout before going in at the end of his working day. Tall and spare he stood there, holding his left arm with his right hand in an odd posture of relaxation. In his urban backpack, as well as items from the Super Doop store, were the latest copy of
International Creative Scientist
, his plastic lunchbox with the Glad Wrap folded ready to reuse, and a piece of driftwood shaped rather less like a dolphin than he had first thought. In his jacket pocket was the half-size manila envelope that held his bonus from Palmer's Product Testing.

Cumuth wasn't insensible to the attractions of the natural world, though his was essentially a life of the mind. He registered the subsiding sun, the elms, his landlady's clumped irises, even the gleam of condition on the Alsatian's pelt as it cast an oblique glance to ensure that he hadn't ventured on to Crimmond property. It was all a banality, though, wasn't it? Cumuth still awaited some mission worthy of him: some palpable need that would justify the cool, implacable resolution he felt inside.

In the neatness of his one room he emptied the bag in a manner that did not lessen the order. It was the neatness of a man who puts no store on possessions: a travelling, on-the-road man who, by whim or principle, could pack in half an hour and blow, leaving nothing of
himself behind. He took his one chair to the open door where he sat in the rectangle of amber sun and read from
International Creative
Scientist the Popoffvich article on salinity trends in large European catchment lakes.

Cumuth had not forgotten his bonus envelope, but it remained unopened. A cursory thing. He knew that he was not considered a valued employee, and he knew from experience that Paul Bigelow was right when he said that the rich have a touching faith in the efficacy of small sums. At Palmer's Product Testing, Cumuth's task that week was the determination of epidermal resistal material in Paree Natural Parfume Creme after atmospheric exposure — in other words how thick a skin was likely to form on the top when the lid was left off. A man doesn't establish a personal creed on such things.

Cumuth had a BSc, but more than that he had a pioneer ancestry: lean men who had walked slow and tall through their time, proudly reticent men who could spit a double metre from the side of their mouth, without leaving a trace on their chin, when they heard a personal vanity spoken. Solitary men with a natural focus on mountain peaks, even the stars above them. Such men despise the even tenor of the life of the mass of citizenry and wait with a quiet half-smile for a challenge sufficiently cataclysmic to justify their acceptance. Their progeny are not numerous, for such pioneers are loath to spill their seed recklessly.

Cumuth himself told no one of such things of course, never consciously exalted himself. It was more a disposition, a detachment of view. He knew, however, that his paternal grandfather had done something in the war so special that no one spoke of it. So he sat in the open doorway of his sleepout, letting the dying sun copper his aquiline features and listening to the soughing of the elms.

Mrs Burmeister, his landlady, watched from the kitchen window and talked with her divorced daughter. I reckon he's a sandwich short of a picnic, she said. He's sunning himself with his mouth open. You could fart in his face and he'd still look at the mountains. Nadine
gave her low, even laugh, full of knowing derision concerning men. A loser, she said. A loser with bells on. Neither mother nor daughter set much store by taciturn, frontier values.

He always seems to look past you, said Mrs Burmeister.

Always has an idiot half-smile, said Nadine.

James Cumuth was aware of them at the periphery of his line of sight, aware of the tilt of the Alsatian's muzzle also and the pulsation of the Harley Davidson, about two blocks away he reckoned. The magazine had fallen to the floor in the doorway and his hands were relaxed in the dying sun. The hands of a pianist, or a fighter pilot. When the hog was out of earshot it was quiet in the suburb, but not too quiet.

In the labs at Palmer's, Mrs Burmeister's opinion of James Cumuth was unknown, yet shared nevertheless. He was a loner all right. He was the cat that walked by himself. A one man band, that's for sure. Odd ball city, all right. He was a queer fish. He contributed little to the harmless gossip and advantageous obsequiousness of the staff cafeteria. He drank his coffee black, his bourbon neat, and if he was looking out of the third floor lab window at the small people scurrying below when Errol Golightly PhD came around, then he made no pretence to be doing anything but that, watching the small people scurrying.

You can see that he wasn't one for cultivating the approval of other people, and he had this habit of screwing up his eyes a bit and looking into the far distance as if to check for some menace there. One or two women at Palmer's, and one or two men, were initially attracted to his steady silence and his slender hands, but they found he meant no invitation by them. The personnel manager said that there was no reason for family pride; that Cumuth was brought up by an uncle who ran a video parlour, and that he lived in a one-room sleepout over in Kodacks. No truth at all, he said, in the idea that Cumuth was part Easter Island chief on his mother's side. None at all.

And people don't like idiosyncrasy in a quiet person, whereas in a boisterous one they see it as being just hard case behaviour. Now that's the truth. Cumuth wore tan stock boots; always he wore them, when everyone knew that there wasn't any stock for miles and miles around. Even way out of the city what you got was crops, horticulture and stuff. Everyone knew that. Aaron Schoone came from the country. He'd survived out there for years and he said nobody wore stock boots. Glasshouses and orchards and nurseries and poultry farms were the things out there, Aaron told the cafeteria crowd at Palmer's Product Testing.

Once they had this full-day professional motivation course run by Clarence Best Associates and Cumuth came in a full twenty minutes late after lunch and never said as much as a word, but walked slowly to his chair and screwed up his eyes a little and put his left stock boot on his right knee — after he'd sat down of course.

On the fourteenth, Wesley Igor Drom, the notorious garrottist and entrail fetishist, broke out of the maximum security institution at Happy Glades with a body count of twelve. Some papers said more. Drom moved through the pigeon blue summer dusk like a kauri tree stump. He bit a man half to death at the motorway overbridge and even took flowers without paying from a little boutique next to the Bonafide Dance Academy and the waterbed shop. Blazing red roses, the boutique lady said, and when the top psychiatrist being interviewed on television was told that, he said, ooh, red you say, ooh, now that's not a good sign by a long chalk.

The Enderby twins were roller skating at the Kodacks rink on the night of the fourteenth. Normally they'd be safe home, but it was Easter Mulheron's birthday and a whole bunch of them were skating before being picked up. Wesley Drom, irritated by the noise, crippled the gatekeeper with a twist of his left hand and took the Enderby twins as lightweight hostages. Tucked both of them under one arm, it was said, so that their blonde ringlets hung in the night. The armed offenders squads were all over, but no sign, and they had
to be careful because of the twins.

To Mrs Drom, Wesley Igor was just her boy who took a wrong turning, I suppose: to the city he was the nation's galvanised degeneracy, and to James Cumuth he was manifest destiny.

Mrs Burmeister and Nadine were woken by the sound of Drom beating the Lewis-Smythes so that they would rustle up a breakfast for him in quick time. Dawn is a good time for screams to carry. Cumuth was at the door of the sleepout when his landlady came out on to the veranda, and she told him all she knew about Drom and the breakout from television. Sweet Jesus, she said, that'll be him all right, murdering someone.

Oh God, he's at it. Right here and he's killing everybody, said Nadine. He's butchering people and there's nothing to be done. She stood in her pink, candlewick dressing-gown and pressed both hands to her throat.

James Cumuth reached back into his sleepout for his boots, and sat on the step to draw them on. There is a bleak, steely quality to the first dawn light and it seemed reflected in JC's eyes as he ran a hand through his hair before going over to the house of the Lewis-Smythes. You can't do anything there, said Nadine. You'll get torn to pieces. Jesus yes, but for the first time there was an uncertain note in her derision. Cumuth looked past her as ever and gave his half-smile redolent with a stoical serenity. He walked across the lawn belonging to the Crimmonds, and the Alsatian bounded towards him with its ears back and lip up, but was checked by some emanation of the man's presence, and began fawning and dragging its head sideways on the grass. Attaboy, said Cumuth softly.

Wesley Igor Drom realised that it was almost the end of the line and was intent on taking a few more down with him. He still had the Enderby twins under one arm like bagpipes so that the sharpshooters wouldn't risk a shot at a distance. The breakfast can't have been to his liking, for he gave both host and hostess their quietus head down in the full sink, and when a brave unarmed combat expert made a rush
through a skylight, thinking Drom had his hands full, Drom proved adept with a novelty bottle of peanut butter in the shape of Princess Di. It struck the expert's head with a sound like a greywacke stone on a rotten pumpkin.

A good many people formed a ring behind the police cordon as the light improved. Somehow JC got through both ring and cordon without so much as a word. People felt a need to step aside. They watched him stroll across the dewy grass and pause to trail his relaxed hand in a jasmine bush. He stopped on a nice piece of crazy paving between the back door and the barbecue area and stood balanced there with his hands relaxed by his side and his legs somewhat apart. The morning sun coppered his face in profile, glinted on his tan stock boots. The breeze made hush, and not a bull horn sounded. Nellie Hambinder later swore that there was in the sky a cloud the exact shape of a tombstone. No mistaking it, she said.

How long am I going to be waiting here, Drom? said JC. His voice was even and dispassionate, coming from a long way inside the man.

Then Wesley Igor Drom stepped out of the door to face him, and there was no shouting, no frothing. He saw the green grass, the elms, the summer flowers, the barbecue area, all in the light of a new day. He heard the uncaring birdsong and the water dripping from the overflowing Lewis-Smythes' sink. Tree trunk Wesley saw many of the police and gawpers who crouched at a distance, and he saw as well the one man who stood before him and he dried his hands on the ringlets of the Enderby twins and gave the moment its due.

Put down the Enderbys, said JC, and for once his eyes were focused not on some distant thing, but on the man to whom he spoke. It was a match, you see. It was black and white, day and night, fire and water, it was the Greek guy and the Minotaur, it was the circle of the agonising grace of man's free will to face his destiny. For both of them.

Put down the Enderbys, said JC. And Wesley Drom put the twins
aside as you put a pair of fire tongs aside, and in the same movement drew a chromed sawn-off shotgun from beneath his coat and fired, and the police started firing, and when it was all over in slow motion and the birds had flown up from the elms in startled alarm, then the police came forward urgently to check the dead, and Nadine said, he lived with us, in a voice of reverential exultation and Nellie Hambinder began to sing ‘Rock of Ages', and Crimmond's Alsatian slunk away into history.

That's just as it happened and just how it's remembered. People still visit the place today.