The Ax (30 page)

“Sure. Do you want a flashlight?”

“You’ve got one? Perfect,” he says, and turns his head toward me, right hand reaching out for the flashlight, and I Mace him in the face. He cries out and slaps both palms to his eyes, as I drop the Mace can on the ground and reach for the hammer. I hit him on the temple as hard as I can, feeling his skull crack. Quickly, I hit him a second time, same spot.

He’s falling. I jump forward, dropping the hammer, and throw my arms around him, holding him up. We must look like drunks dancing, but no one is close enough, with a clear enough view, to see anything going on here at all.

I crab-walk forward, carrying him, staggering under the weight, his limp feet dragging along the ground between mine. Moving like that, I hustle him around to the right side of the car and
lunge
him in onto the clear plastic tarp I’ve spread over the seat and floor. I hunch him up, hunch him up, and he’s completely in.

Now I flip the excess tarp over the body, grab the dark green new blanket from the floor behind the seat, shake it out from its manufacturer’s creases, and fling it over him. Then I step back and slide shut the door.

Brisk now, but not too fast. I walk around the front of the Voyager, closing the hood, picking up the Mace and hammer. I toss them across onto the passenger seat, climb in behind the wheel, and shut the door. Turn the key. Surprise; the engine works just fine.

I join the other laggard traffic rolling toward the exit, turn left, head up Route 9 toward Kingston and the bridge and home.

The only lights showing at my house are one table lamp in the living room, the reading light in Billy’s bedroom, and the light at the head of the stairs. It’s a little after eleven and Marjorie, as I’d hoped, has gone to bed. Otherwise, I’d have to drive around until she did retire, which would make me very nervous. Billy’s awake, but he won’t be coming out of his room.

I don’t like it that I still have this body with me, but I was afraid to stop anywhere along the way to do the necessary preparation. You can find a spot that looks perfectly safe, dark and deserted, and be right in the middle of what has to be done when other people show up, or lights go on, or the police drive by. I’m safest at home, in my own garage, with the family safely tucked in for the night.

I thumb the remote control on the visor and the garage door opens, the light switching on in there. I drive in, hit the remote control again, and wait till the door shuts before I climb out and go over to turn on the main garage light. (That first one automatically switches off again three minutes after the garage door closes.)

Now to take care of the body, at least for tonight. I open the box of plastic bags I picked up at the mall, the very large kind called lawn-n-leaf, dark green, with a tie at the top. I then put on the white cotton gloves I also bought at the mall, open the Voyager’s sliding side door, and look in at that mound of green blanket.

First I pull the blanket off and stuff it into the plastic bag. The hammer and the Mace I drop in there, too, and then I set aside that bag and pull another one out of the box.

This is the difficult part. I fold the clear tarp away from the body, and am relieved to see there’s almost no blood, just a little around his crushed forehead and leaking from his nose and ears. Very little bleeding means he died the instant I hit him, which is better for both of us.

The body is still limber, but it won’t be for long. I move his arms down across his body, elbows nearly straight, so his hands, the fingers partly curled, lie just above his crotch. Then I take the roll of heavy-gauge picture wire—another mall purchase—and loop the end of it around his belt, twisting the wire around itself to hold it secure.

The legs are sluggish, they don’t want to move, but I press and push and force the knees to bend and the legs to fold up toward the body, until his knees are against his chest, his legs pressing down on his forearms. I cross the picture wire over his legs, snap off that length by bending it quickly backward and forward, and then secure this end also to his belt.

Now he’s a compact package, legs and arms and torso all folded together. But I want to be sure nothing goes wrong, so I put my shoulder against his shoes and push upward, to make it possible to slide the next section of wire beneath him, wriggling it up as far as his waist. Then I let the body settle back down, as I snap apart this length of wire by bending it, and twist its ends together over his shins until it’s very tight around him, pressing into him and becoming impossible to twist any tighter.

Getting this trussed body into another of the lawn-n-leaf bags isn’t nearly as difficult as I’d expected. Of course, I might just be running on adrenaline, I don’t know. In any event, in what seems like no time at all I have the second bag standing on the cement floor.

Now I open the first bag again, and stuff the plastic tarp into it. The idea is, the body never touched any part of my car, so if they do find it—which I hope they don’t—there will be no fibers or paint or anything else to connect that body with this vehicle. And the parts that did touch the car, like the tarp and the blanket, go into a separate bag.

Also into this bag goes the rest of the roll of picture wire, the box of plastic bags and, at last, the gloves. When I tie this bag, I smear the plastic with my palms. No fingerprints.

It’s my own work gloves from the workbench in here that I use when I wrestle the two full plastic trash bags into a corner of the garage, surrounded by the rest of the detritus that just naturally seems to grow there, particularly since we sold the Civic. The bags are both bulky, but one is much heavier than the other.

I look around the garage. Everything is normal. Nothing is amiss. I turn out the light and go in to bed.

Driving toward the recycling center, I find myself thinking about the concept of the learning curve, and how far along it I’ve come. And how very lucky I was that first time out, with the original HCE. What was his name? I’m having trouble remembering it.

Herbert Everly, that was it.

How simple that one was, simple and smooth and fast and clean. It encouraged me, it made everything else possible, because it made me believe the whole thing could be that impeccable. If I’d had the second HCE to do first, none of this would ever have happened. I just wouldn’t have been up to it.

The idea of the learning curve is, the first time you do something you aren’t very good at it, but you learn something about how the job is done. Then the second time, you’re better, but still flawed, and you learn a little more. And so on, until you’re perfect. The learning curve is an arc, beginning with a steep upward sweep, because you’re learning a
lot
each time in the early days, and then gradually it flattens out to a level, as you learn in smaller and smaller increments the nearer you get to the ideal.

Well, I’m not perfect at this yet, God knows, I haven’t attained the ideal, but I’ve come a long way up that learning curve since Herbert Everly. Of course, the irony in this one is, as the arc of my learning curve flat-tens toward complete competence, I’ll have mastered a skill I’ll never use again.

I certainly hope I’ll never have to use it again. But it is, I admit, a useful skill to possess.

Earlier today, I took Marjorie to her Saturday job at the New Variety, and when I backed the Voyager out of the garage even I couldn’t readily see anything different in there. The dark bulky bags leaned together well in the back, away from daylight, amid birdseed bags and paint cans and winter boots and all the rest of the stuff garages breed when no one is looking.

On the way to the movie house, I told Marjorie the story I’d made up in bed last night, before falling asleep, about the friend’s moneymaking scheme that had caused me to go out for several hours after dinner. The story I told her was that my friend reminded me that the United States government shreds its old paper money to destroy it, and it was his idea to talk the government into letting us make fresh paper out of the shredded pulp. We would make paper bags, colored green, with dollar signs on them, and market them under the name Money Bags; they would be both useful and a great novelty item.

I told Marjorie I’d thought it was a clever idea—she seemed less sure—but that I’d asked my friend what were
we
supposed to do with it? We’re both knowledgeable about turning pulp into paper, but that’s all. His scheme needed a politician, to talk the government into letting us have the paper, and a marketer, to get the Money Bags out there. “I told him,” I explained to Marjorie, “if he could find a couple of people like that, and they were serious about it, I’d be happy to join in.”

“Not in a million years,” she said, and I had to agree. When I came back home, after dropping Marjorie at the movie house, both Betsy and Billy were out, she at a rehearsal of a play she’s doing at college—
Arsenic and Old Lace
; she’s one of the aunts, in much makeup—and he off at a friend’s house, engrossed in the friend’s new computer software (he’ll make do that way until life improves around here).

I opened the garage door, drove the Voyager in, shut the garage door, moved the rear seat of the car out of the way, and loaded the two plastic bags. And now I’m on my way to the recycling center.

The recycling center, of course, is what used to be called the dump, and part of it still is that. There’s private trash collection in our neighborhood, but it’s considerably cheaper to sort the trash yourself and bring it to the recycling center. Glass and tin and paper and cardboard they take for free, and garbage they take for fifty cents per large plastic bag. The bags are tossed into a chute, and from there they go into a compacting garbage truck, and from there they’re taken to a landfill operation down on Long Island Sound.

A sea voyage for Hauck Exman. He’s a Marine, he’ll like that.

My friend with the Money Bags idea turns out to be named Ralph Upton, in honor of Upton “Ralph” Fallon, the last obstacle between me and my new job. It became necessary for this friend to have a further existence, I realized, once Hauck Exman was out of the way and it was time to think about dealing with URF.

Here’s the thing: URF is employed. He’s got my job, which means he’s at work at the mill five days a week, which means I won’t be able to ever get at him until the evenings. Weekends are complicated by Marjorie’s job at the New Variety and by our own fixed weekend rituals, the Sunday
Times
and all that. So it’s a work-night or nothing, and it isn’t going to be nothing.

And that meant the creator of Money Bags had to go on being a presence in my life. “He has more ideas,” I told Marjorie, when I picked her up from Dr. Carney’s office at six on Monday, yesterday, three days after I dealt with Exman. “He has a million ideas, and who knows, one of them might turn out to be something. Anyway, he likes to bounce his notions off me and show me the presentations he’s done and all that, and to tell the truth, sweet, I’d rather be doing something than nothing.”

“I know you would,” she said, and gave me a tender smile, and that was that.

This morning, we drove down to Marshal to spend our hour with Longus Quinlan, and to my surprise I’m enjoying these sessions now, finding them more valuable than I would have guessed. I think any marriage, after a while, falls into routines and automatic responses. Time goes by, and you no longer
see
each other clearly, you just act as though the other person’s a robot, with machined and well-known responses to everything, and then
you
act like a robot, and all the life has drained out of the relationship.

Now that the awfulness of Marjorie’s affair is finished, and now that Quinlan has given up trying to probe into my personal view of the world, we’re dealing with what we went there to deal with, the marriage, and I think it’s helping. We’re becoming surprised by each other again, we’re remembering why we liked each other in the first place.

If only I could tell her about this other business… but of course I never can. I know better. There are some strains you don’t put on a person, no matter what.

Anyway, that was this morning, and this evening we ate dinner at six-thirty, and now, at quarter past seven, I am on the road, heading west toward Arcadia, NY.

The long days of June, the long bright evenings. I’m driving along, crossing into New York State, and it’s still sunny and nice. It occurs to me, as I drive; I’m beginning my commute. My new commute.