Judul : Palm Beach State College Blackboard
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Palm Beach State College Blackboard
they must be backed up all the way to theturnpike, maybe further. the girl will have to take her turn. i canshow her how. she'll say she can't, but she will. she wants to live. you want to be their slaves? the counterman had said. that's what it'llcome to. you want to spend the rest of your
Palm Beach State College Blackboard, life changin' oil filters every time one ofthose things blasts its horn? we could run, maybe. it would be easy to make the drainageditch now, the way they're stacked up. run through the fields, through the marshy placeswhere trucks would bog down like mastodons and go -
-back to the caves. drawing pictures in charcoal. this is themoon god. this is a tree. this is a mack semi overwhelming a hunter. not even that. so much of the world is pavednow. even the playgrounds are paved. and for the fields and marshes and deep woods thereare tanks, half-tracks, flatbeds equipped with lasers, masers, heat-seeking radar. andlittle by little, they can make it into the world they want. i can see great convoys of trucks fillingthe okefenokee swamp with sand, the bulldozers ripping through the national parks and wildlands,grading the earth flat, stamping it into one
great flat plain. and then the hot-top trucksarriving. but they're machines. no matter what's happenedto them, what mass consciousness we've given them, they can't reproduce. in fifty or sixtyyears they'll be rusting hulks with all menace gone out of them, moveless carcasses for freemen to stone and spit at. and if i close my eyes i can see the productionlines in detroit and dearborn and youngstown and mackinac, new trucks being put togetherby blue-collars who no longer even punch a clock but only drop and are replaced. the counterman is staggering a little now.he's an old bastard, too. i've got to wake the girl.
two planes are leaving silver contrails etchedacross the darkening eastern horizon. i wish i could believe there are people inthem. sometimes they come back jim norman's wife had been waiting for himsince two, and when she saw the car pull up in front of their apartment building, shecame out to meet him. she had gone to the store and bought a celebration meal - a coupleof steaks, a bottle of lancer's, a head of lettuce, and thousand island dressing. now,watching him get out of the car, she found herself hoping with some desperation (andnot for the first time that day) that there was going to be something to celebrate.
he came up the walk, holding his new briefcasein one hand and four texts in the other. she could see the title of the top one - introductionto grammar. she put her hands on his shoulder and asked, 'how did it go?' and he smiled. but that night, he had the old dream for thefirst time in a very long time and woke up sweating, with a scream behind his lips. his interview had been conducted by the principalof harold davis high school and the head of the english department. the subject of hisbreakdown had come up. he had expected it would.
the principal, a bald and cadaverous man namedfenton, had leaned back and looked at the ceiling. simmons, the english head, lit hispipe. 'i was under a great deal of pressure at thetime,' jim norman said. his fingers wanted to twist about in his lap, but he wouldn'tlet them. 'i think we understand that,' fenton said,smiling. 'and while we have no desire to pry, i'm sure we'd all agree that teaching is apressure occupation, especially at the high-school level. you're on-stage five periods out ofseven, and you're playing to the toughest audience in the world. that's why,' he finishedwith some pride, 'teachers have more ulcers than any other professional group, with theexception of air-traffic controllers.'
jim said, 'the pressures involved in my breakdownwere extreme.' fenton and simmons nodded noncommittal encouragement,and simmons clicked his lighter open to rekindle his pipe. suddenly the office seemed verytight, very close. jim had the queer sensation that someone had just turned on a heat lampover the back of his neck. his fingers were twisting in his lap, and he made them stop. 'i was in my senior year and practice teaching.my mother had died the summer before - cancer - and in my last conversation with her, sheasked me to go right on and finish. my brother, my older brother, died when we were both quiteyoung. he had been planning to teach and she thought . .
he could see from their eyes that he was wanderingand thought: god, i'm making a botch of this. i did as she asked,' he said, leaving thetangled relation-ship of his mother and his brother wayne - poor, murdered wayne - andhimself behind. 'during the second week of my intern teaching, my fiancee was involvedin a hit-and-run accident. she was the hit part of it. some kid in a hot rod. . . theynever caught him.' simmons made a soft noise of encouragement. 'i went on. there didn't seem to be any othercourse. she was in a great deal of pain - a badly broken leg and four fractured ribs - butno danger. i don't think i really knew the pressure i was under.'
careful now. this is where the ground slopesaway. 'i interned at center street vocational tradeshigh,' jim said. 'garden spot of the city,' fenton said. 'switchblades,motorcycle boots, zip guns in the lockers, lunch-money protection rackets, and everythird kid selling dope to the other two. i know about trades.' 'there was a kid named mack zimmerman,' jimsaid. 'sensitive boy. played the guitar. i had him in a composition class and he hadtalent. i came in one morning and two boys were holding him while a third smashed hisyamaha guitar against the radiator. zimmerman was screaming. i yelled for them to stop andgive me the guitar. i started for them and
someone slugged me.' jim shrugged. 'that wasit. i had a breakdown. no screaming meemies or crouching in the corner. i just couldn'tgo back. when i got near trades, my chest would tighten up. i couldn't breathe right,i got cold sweat -' 'that happens to me, too,' fenton said amiably. 'i went into analysis. a community therapydeal. i couldn't afford a psychiatrist. it did me good. sally and i are married. shehas a slight limp and a scar, but otherwise, good as new.' he looked at them squarely.'i guess you could say the same for me.' fenton said, 'you actually finished your practiceteaching requirement at cortez high school, i believe.'
'that's no bed of roses, either,' simmonssaid. 'i wanted a hard school,' jim said. 'i swappedwith another guy to get cortez.' 'a's from your supervisor and critic teacher,'fenton commented. 'yes.' 'and a four-year average of 3.88. damn closeto straight a's.' 'i enjoyed my college work.' fenton and simmons glanced at each other,then stood up. jim got up. 'we'll be in touch, mr norman,' fenton said.'we do have a few more applicants to interview -'yes, of course.'
'- but speaking for myself, i'm impressedby your academic records and personal candour.' 'it's nice of you to say so.' 'sim, perhaps mr norman would like a coffeebefore he goes.' they shook hands. in the hall, simmons said, 'i think you'vegot the job if you want it. that's off the record, of course.' jim nodded. he had left a lot off the recordhimself. davis high was a forbidding rockpile thathoused a remarkably modern plant - the science wing alone had been funded at 1.5 millionin last year's budget. the classrooms, which
still held the ghosts of the wpa workers whohad built them and the postwar kids who had first used them, were furnished with moderndesks and soft-glare blackboards. the students were clean, well dressed, vivacious, affluent.six out of ten seniors owned their own cars. all in all a good school. a fine school toteach in during the sickie seventies. it made center street vocational trades look likedarkest africa. but after the kids were gone, something oldand brooding seemed to settle over the halls and whisper in the empty rooms. some black,noxious beast, never quite in view. sometimes, as he walked down the wing 4 corridor towardsthe parking lot with his new briefcase in one hand, jim norman thought he could almosthear it breathing.
he had the dream again near the end of october,and that time he did scream. he clawed his way into waking reality to find sally sittingup in bed beside him, holding his shoulder. his heart was thudding heavily. 'god,' he said, and scrubbed a hand acrosshis face. 'are you all right?' 'sure. i yelled, didn't i?' 'boy, did you. nightmare?' 'something from when those boys broke thatfellow's guitar?' 'no,' he said. 'much older than that. sometimesit comes back, that's all. no sweat.' 'are you sure?'
'do you want a glass of milk?' her eyes weredark with concern. he kissed her shoulder. 'no. go to sleep.' she turned off the light and he lay there,looking into the darkness. he had a good schedule for the new teacheron the staff. period one was free. two and three were freshman comp, one group dull,one kind of fun. period four was his best class: american lit with college-bound seniorswho got a kick out of bashing the ole masters around for a period each day. period fivewas a 'consultation period,' when he was supposed to see students with personal or academicproblems. there were very few who seemed to have either (or who wanted to discuss themwith him), and he spent most of those periods
with a good novel. period six was a grammarcourse, dry as chalkdust. period seven was his only cross. the classwas called living with literature, and it was held in a small box of a classroom onthe third floor. the room was hot in the early fall and cold as the winter approached. theclass itself was an elective for what school catalogues coyly call 'the slow learner'. there were twenty-seven 'slow learners' injim's class, most of them school jocks. the kindest thing you could accuse them of wouldbe disinterest, and some of them had a streak of outright malevolence. he walked in oneday to find an obscene and cruelly accurate caricature of himself
on the board, with 'mr norman' unnecessarilychalked under it. he wiped it off without comment and proceeded with the lesson in spiteof the snickers. he worked up interesting lesson plans, includeda/v materials, and ordered several high-interest, high-comprehension texts - all to no avail.the classroom mood veered between unruly hilarity and sullen silence. early in november, a fightbroke out between two boys during a discussion of of mice and men. jim broke it up and sentboth boys to the office. when he opened his book to where he had left off, the words 'biteit' glared up at him. he took the problem to simmons, who shruggedand lit his pipe. 'i don't have any real solution, jim. last period is always a bitch. and forsome of them, a d grade in your class means
no more football or basketball. and they'vehad the other gut english courses, so they're stuck with it.' 'and me, too,' jim said glumly. simmons nodded. 'show them you mean business,and they'll buckle down, if only to keep their sports eligibility.' but period, seven remained a constant thornin his side. one of the biggest problems in living withlit was a huge, slow-moving moose named chip osway. in early december, during the briefhiatus between football and basketball (osway played both), jim caught him with a crib sheetand ran him out of the classroom.
'if you flunk me, we'll get you, you son ofa bitch!' osway yelled down the dim third-floor corridor. 'you hear me?' 'go on,' jim said. 'don't waste your breath.' 'we'll get you, creepo!' jim went back into the classroom. they lookedup at him blandly, faces betraying nothing. he felt a surge of unreality, like the feelingthat had washed over him before before. we'll get you creepo. he took his grade book out of his desk, openedit to the page titled 'living with literature', and carefully lettered an f in the exam slotnext to chip osway's name.
that night he had the dream again. the dream was always cruelly slow. there wastime to see and feel everything. and there was the added horror of reliving events thatwere moving towards a known conclusion, as helpless as a man strapped into a car goingover a cliff. in the dream he was nine and his brother waynewas twelve. they were going down broad street in stratford, connecticut, bound for the stratfordlibrary. jim's books were two days overdue, and he had hooked four cents from the cupboardbowl to pay the fine. it was summer vacation. you could smell the freshly cut grass. youcould hear a ballgame floating out of some second-floor apartment window, yankees leadingthe red sox six to nothing in the top of the
eighth, ted williams batting, and you couldsee the shadows from the burrets building company slowly lengthening across the streetas the evening turned slowly towards dark. beyond teddy's market and burrets, there wasa railroad overpass, and on the other side, a number of the local losers hung around aclosed gas station - five or six boys in leather jackets and pegged jeans. jim hated to goby them. they yelled out hey four-eyes and hey shit-heels and hey you got an extra quarterand once they chased them half a block. but wayne would not take the long way around.that would be chicken. in the dream, the overpass loomed closer andcloser, and you began to feel dread struggling in your throat like a big black bird. yousaw everything: the burrets neon sign, just
starting to stutter on and off; the flakesof rust on the green overpass; the glitter of broken glass in the cinders of the railroadbed; a broken bike rim in the gutter. you try to tell wayne you've been throughthis before, a hundred times. the local losers aren't hanging around the gas station thistime; they're hidden in the shadows under the trestle. but it won't come out. you'rehelpless. then you're underneath, and some of the shadowsdetach themselves from the walls and a tall kid with a blond crew cut and a broken nosepushes wayne up against the sooty cinder-blocks and says: give us some money. let me alone.
you try to run, but a fat guy with greasyblack hair grabs you and throws you against the wall next to your brother. his left eyelidis uttering up and down nervously and he says: come on, kid, how much you got? f-four cents. you fuckin' liar. wayne tries to twist free and a guy with odd,orange-coloured hair helps the blond one to hold him. the guy with the jittery eyelidsuddenly bashes you one in the mouth. you feel a sudden heaviness in your groin, anda dark patch appears on your jeans. look, vinnie, he wet himself!
wayne's struggles become frenzied, and healmost - not - quite - gets free. another guy, wearing black chinos and a white t-shirt,throws him back. there is a small strawberry birthmark on his chin. the stone throat ofthe overpass is beginning to tremble. the metal girders pick up a thrumming vibration.train coming. someone strikes the books out of your handsand the kid with the birthmark on his chin kicks them into the gutter. wayne suddenlykicks out with his right foot, and it connects with the crotch of the kid with the jitteryface. he screams. vinnie, he's gettin' away! the kid with the jittery face is screamingabout his nuts, but even his howls are lost
in the gathering, shaking roar of the approachingtrain. then it is over them, and its noise fills the world. light flashes on switchblades. the kid withthe blond crew cut is holding one and birthmark has the other. you can't hear wayne, but hiswords are in the shape of his lips: run jimmy run. you slip to your knees and the hands holdingyou are gone and you skitter between a pair of legs like a frog. a hand slaps down onyour back, groping for purchase, and gets none. then you are running back the way youcame, with all of the horrible sludgy slowness of dreams. you look back over your shoulderand see -he woke in the dark, sally sleeping
peacefully beside him. he bit back the scream,and when it was throttled, he fell back. when he had looked back, back into the yawningdarkness of the overpass, he had seen the blond kid and the birthmarked kid drive theirknives into his brother - blondie's below the breast-bone, and birthmark's directlyinto his brother's groin. he lay in the darkness, breathing harshly,waiting for that nine-year-old ghost to depart, waiting for honest sleep to blot it all away. an unknown time later, it did. the christmas vacation and semester breakwere combined in the city's school district, and the holiday was almost a month long. thedream came twice, early on, and did not come
again. he and sally went to visit her sisterin vermont, and skied a great deal. they were happy. jim's living with lit problem seemed inconsequentialand a little foolish in the open, crystal air. he went back to school with a wintertan, feeling cool and collected. simmons caught him on the way to his period-twoclass and handed him a folder. 'new student, period seven. name is robert lawson. transfer.' 'hey, i've got twenty-seven in there rightnow, sim. i'm overloaded.' 'you've still got twenty-seven. bill stearnsgot killed the tuesday after christmas. car accident. hit-and-run.'
'billy?' the picture formed in his mind in black andwhite, like a senior photograph. william stearns, key club 1, football 1,2, pen & lance, 2.he had been one of the few good ones in living with lit. quiet, consistent a's and b's onhis exams. didn't volunteer often, but usually summoned the correct answers (laced with apleasing dry wit) when called on. dead? fifteen years old. his own mortality suddenly whisperedthrough his bones like a cold draught under a door. 'christ, that's awful. do they know what happened?' 'cops are checking into it. he was downtownexchanging a christmas present. started across
rampart street and an old ford sedan hit him.no one got the licence number, but the words "snake eyes" were written on the side door.the way a kid would do it.' 'christ,' jim said again. 'there's the bell,' simmons said. he hurried away, pausing to break up a crowdof kids around a drinking fountain. jim went towards his class, feeling empty. during his free period he flipped open robertlawson's folder. the first page was a green sheet from milford high, which jim had neverheard of. the second was a student personality profile. adjusted iq of 78. some manual skills,not many. antisocial answers to the barnett-hudson
personality test. poor aptitude scores. jimthought sourly that he was a living with lit kid all the way. the next page was a disciplinary history,the yellow sheet. the milford sheet was white with a black border, and it was depressinglywell filled. lawson had been in a hundred kinds of trouble. he turned the next page, glanced down at aschool photo of robert lawson, then looked again. terror suddenly crept into the pitof his belly and coiled there, warm and hissing. lawson was staring antagonistically into thecamera, as if posing for a police mug shot rather than a school photographer. there wasa small strawberry birthmark on his chin.
by period seven, he had brought all the civilizedrationalizations into play. he told himself there must be thousands of kids with red birthmarkson their chins. he told himself that the hood who had stabbed his brother that day sixteenlong dead years ago would now be at least thirty-two. but, climbing to the third floor, the apprehensionremained. and another fear to go with it: this is how you felt when you were crackingup. he tasted the bright steel of panic in his mouth. the usual group of kids was horsing aroundthe door of room 33, and some of them went in when they saw jim coming. a few hung around,talking in undertones and grinning. he saw
the new boy standing beside chip osway. robertlawson was wearing blue jeans and heavy yellow tractor boots - all the rage this year. 'chip, go on in. 'that an order?' he smiled vacuously overjim's head. 'sure.' 'you flunk me on that test?' 'yeah, that's . . .' the rest was an under-the-breathmumble. jim turned to robert lawson. 'you're new,'he said. 'i just wanted to tell you how we run things around here.'
'sure, mr norman.' his right eyebrow was splitwith a small scar, a scar jim knew. there could be no mistake. it was crazy, it waslunacy, but it was also a fact. sixteen years ago, this kid had driven a knife into hisbrother. numbly, as if from a great distance, he heardhimself beginning to outline the class rules and regulations. robert lawson hooked histhumbs into his garrison belt, listened, smiled, and began to nod, as if they were old friends. 'jim?' 'hmmm?' 'is something wrong?'
'no.' 'those living with lit boys still giving youa hard time?' no answer. 'why don't you go to bed early tonight?' buthe didn't. the dream was very bad that night. when thekid with the strawberry birthmark stabbed his brother with his knife, he called afterjim: 'you next, kid. right through the bag.' he woke up screaming. he was teaching lord of the flies that week,and talking about symbolism when lawson raised his hand.
'robert?' he said evenly. 'why do you keep starin' at me?' jim blinkedand felt his mouth go dry. 'you see somethin' green? or is my fly unzipped?'a nervous titter from the class. jim replied evenly: 'i wasn't staring at you,mr lawson. can you tell us why ralph and jack disagreed over -'you were starin' at me.' 'do you want to talk about it with mr fenton?'lawson appeared to think it over. 'naw.' 'good. now can you tell us why ralph and jack -' 'ididn't read it. i think it's a dumb book.' jim smiled tightly. 'do you, now? you wantto remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you. now cananyone else tell me why they disagreed over
the existence of the beast?' kathy slavin raised her hand timidly, andlawson gave her a cynical once-over and said something to chip osway. the words leavinghis lips looked like 'nice tits'. chip nodded. 'kathy?' 'isn't it because jack wanted to hunt thebeast?' 'good.' he turned and began to write on theboard. at the instant his back was turned, a grapefruit smashed against the board besidehis head. he jerked backward and wheeled around. someclass members laughed, but osway and lawson only looked at jim innocently.
jim stooped and picked up the grapefruit.'someone,' he said, looking towards the back of the room, 'ought to have this jammed 'downhis goddamn throat.' kathy slavin gasped. he tossed the grapefruit in the wastebasketand turned back to the blackboard. he opened the morning paper, sipping his coffee,and saw the headline about halfway down. 'god!' he said, splitting his wife's easy flow ofmorning chatter. his belly felt suddenly filled with splinters -'teen-age girl falls to herdeath: katherine slavin, a seventeen-year-old junior at harold davis high school, eitherfell or was pushed from the roof of her downtown apartment house early yesterday evening. thegirl, who kept a pigeon coop on the roof,
had gone up with a sack of feed, accordingto her mother. 'police said an unidentified woman in a neighbouringdevelopment had seen three boys running across the roof at 6.45 p.m., just minutes afterthe girl's body (continued page 3)-' 'jim, was she one of yours?' but he couldonly look at her mutely. two weeks later, simmons met him in the hallafter the lunch bell with a folder in his hand, and jim felt a terrible sinking in hisbelly. 'new student,' he said flatly to simmons.'living with lit.' sim's eyebrows went up. 'how did you knowthat?' jim shrugged and held his hand out for thefolder.
'got to run,' simmons said. 'department headsare meeting on course evaluations. you look a little run-down. feeling okay?' that's right, a little run-down. like billystearns. 'sure,' he said. 'that's the stuff,' simmons said, and clappedhim on the back. when he was gone, jim opened the folder tothe picture, wincing in advance, like man about to be hit. but the face wasn't instantly familiar. justa kid's face. maybe he'd seen it before, maybe not. the kid, david garcia, was a hulking,dark-haired boy with rather negroid lips and
dark, slumbering eyes. the yellow sheet saidhe was also from milford high and that he had spent two years in granville reformatory.car theft. jim closed the folder with hands that trembledslightly. 'sally?' she looked up from her ironing. he had beenstaring at a tv basketball game without really seeing it. 'nothing,' he said. 'forgot what i was goingto say.' 'must have been a lie.' he smiled mechanically and looked at the tvagain. it had been on the tip of his tongue
to spill everything. but how could he? itwas worse than crazy. where would you start? the dream? the breakdown? the appearance ofrobert lawson? no. with wayne - your brother. but he had never told anyone about that, noteven in analysis. his thoughts turned to david garcia, and the dreamy terror that had washedover him when they had looked at each other in the hall. of course, he had only lookedvaguely familiar in the picture. pictures don't move or twitch. garcia had been standing with lawson and chiposway, and when he looked up and saw jim norman, he smiled and
his eyelid began to jitter up and down andvoices spoke in jim's mind with unearthly clarity: come on, kid, how much you got? f-four cents. you fuckin' liar - look, vinnie, he wet himself' 'jim? did you say something?' 'no.' but he wasn't sure if he had or not.he was getting very scared. one day after school in early february therewas a knock on the teachers'-room door, and when jim opened it, chip osway stood there.he looked frightened. jim was alone; it was ten after four and the last of the teachershad gone home an hour before. he was correcting
a batch of american lit themes. 'chip?' he said evenly. chip shuffled his feet. 'can i talk to youfor a minute, mr norman?' 'sure. but if it's about that test, you'rewasting your -' 'it's not about that. uh, can i smoke in here?' 'go ahead.' he lit his cigarette with a hand that trembledslightly. he didn't speak for perhaps as long as a minute. it seemed that he couldn't. hislips twitched, his hands came together, and his eyes slitted, as if some inner self wasstruggling to find expression.
he suddenly burst out: 'if they do it, i wantyou to know i wasn't in on it! i don't like those guys! they're creeps!' 'what guys, chip?' 'lawson and that garcia creep.' 'are they planning to get me?' the old dreamyterror was on him, and he knew the answer. 'i liked them at first,' chip said. 'we wentout and had a few beers. i started bitchin' about you and that test. about how i was gonnaget you. but that was just talk! i swear it!' 'what happened?' 'they took me right up on it. asked what timeyou left school, what kind of car you drove,
all that stuff. i said what have you got againsthim and garcia said they knew you a long time ago. . . hey, are you all right?' 'the cigarette,' he said thickly. 'haven'tever got used to the smoke.' chip ground it out. 'i asked them when theyknew you and bob lawson said i was still pissin' my didies then. but they're seventeen, thesame as me.' 'then what?' 'well, garcia leans over the table and saysyou can't want to get him very bad if you don't even know when he leaves the fuckin'school. what was you gonna do? so i says i was gonna matchstick your tyres and leaveyou with four flats.' he looked at jim with
pleading eyes. 'i wasn't even gonna do that.i said it because 'you were scared?' jim asked quietly. 'yeah, and i'm still scared.' 'what did they think of your idea?' chip shuddered. 'bob lawson says, is thatwhat you was gonna do, you cheap prick? and i said, tryin' to be tough, what was you gonnado, off him? and garcia - his eyelids starts to go up and down - he takes something outof his pocket and clicked it open and it's a switchknife. that's when i took off.' 'when was this, chip?'
'yesterday. i'm scared to sit with those guysnow, mr norman.' 'okay,' jim said. 'okay.' he looked down atthe papers he had been correcting without seeing them. 'what are you going to do?' 'i don't know,' jim said. 'i really don't.' on monday morning he still didn't know. hisfirst thought had been to tell sally everything, starting with his brother's murder sixteenyears ago. but it was impossible. she would be sympathetic but frightened and unbelieving. simmons? also impossible. simmons would thinkhe was mad. and maybe he was. a man in a group
encounter session he had attended had saidhaving a breakdown was like breaking a vase and then gluing it back together. you couldnever trust yourself to handle that vase again with any surety. you couldn't put a flowerin it because flowers need water and water might dissolve the glue. am i crazy, then? if he was, chip osway was, too. that thoughtcame to him as he was getting into his car, and a bolt of excitement went through him. of course! lawson and garcia had threatenedhim in chip osway's presence. that might not stand up in court, but it would get the twoof them suspended if he could get chip to
repeat his story in fenton's office. and hewas almost sure he could get chip to do that. chip had his own reasons for wanting themfar away. he was driving into the parking lot when hethought about what had happened to billy stearns and katy slavin. during his free period, he went up to theoffice and leaned over the registration secretary's desk. she was doing the absence list. 'chip osway here today?' he asked casually. 'chip . . . ?' she looked at him doubtfully. 'charles osway,' jim amended. 'chip's a nickname.'
she leafed through a pile of slips, glancedat one, and pulled it out., 'he's absent, mr norman.' 'can you get me his phone number?' she pushed her pencil into her hair and said.'certainly.' she dug it out of the 0 file and handed it to him. jim dialled the numberon an office phone. the phone rang a dozen times and he was aboutto' hang up when a rough, sleep-blurred voice said, 'yeah?' 'mr osway?' 'barry osway's been dead six years. i'm garydenkinger.'
'are you chip osway's stepfather?' 'what'd he do?' 'pardon?' 'he's run off. i want to know what he did.' 'so far as i know, nothing. i just wantedto talk with him. do you have any idea where he might be?' 'naw, i work nights. i don't know none ofhis friends.' 'any idea at a-' 'nope. he took the old suitcase and fiftybucks he saved up from stealin' car parts or sellin' dope or whatever these kids dofor money. gone to san francisco to be a hippie
for all i know.' 'if you hear from him, will you call me atschool? jim norman, english wing.' 'sure will.' jim put the phone down. the registration secretarylooked up and offered a quick meaningless smile. jim didn't smile back. two days later, the words 'left school' appearedafter chip osway's name on the morning attendance slip. jim began to yvait for simmons to showup with a new folder. a week later he did. he looked dully down at the picture. no questionabout this one. the crew cut had been replaced by long hair, but it was still blond. andthe face was the same, vincent corey. vinnie,
to his friends and intimates. he stared upat jim from the picture, an insolent grin on his lips. when he approached his period-seven class,his heart was thudding gravely in his chest. lawson and garcia and vinnie corey were standingby the bulletin board outside the door - they all straightened when he came towards them. vinnie smiled his insolent smile, but hiseyes were as cold and dead as ice floes. 'you must be mr norman. hi, norm.' lawson and garcia tittered. 'i'm mr norman,' jim said, ignoring the handthat vinnie had put out. 'you'll remember
that?' 'sure, i'll remember it. how's your brother?' jim froze. he felt his bladder loosen, andas if from far away, from down a long corridor somewhere in his cranium, he heard a ghostlyvoice: look, vinnie, he wet himself' 'what do you know about my brother?' he askedthickly. 'nothin',' vinnie said. 'nothin' much.' they smiled at him with their emptydangerous smiles. the bell rang and they sauntered inside. drugstore phone booth, ten o'clock that night. 'operator, i want to call the police stationin stratford, connecticut. no i don't know
the number.' clickings on the line. conferences. the policeman had been mr nell. in those dayshe had been white-haired, perhaps in his mid-fifties. hard to tell when you were just a kid. theirfather was dead, and somehow mr nell had known that. call me mr nell, boys. jim and his brother met at lunchtime everyday and they went into the stratford diner to eat their bag lunches. mom gave them eacha nickel to buy milk - that was before school milk programmes started. and sometimes mrnell would come in, his leather belt creaking
with the weight of his belly and his .38 revolver,and buy them each a pie ~ ia mode. where were you when they stabbed my brother,mr nell? a connection was made. the phone rang once. 'stratford police.' 'hello, my name is james norman, officer.i'm calling long-distance.' he named the city. 'i want to know if you can give me a lineon a man who would have been on the force around 1957.' 'hold the line a moment, mr norman.' a pause, then a new voice.
'i'm sergeant morton livingston, mr norman.who are you trying to locate?' 'well,' jim said, 'us kids just called himmr nell. does that -' 'hell, yes! don nell's retired now. he's seventy-threeor four.' 'does he still live in stratford?' 'yes, over on barnum avenue. would you likethe address?' 'and the phone number, if you have it.' 'okay. did you know don?' 'he used to buy my brother and me apple piea'la mode down at the stratford diner.' 'christ, that's been gone ten years. waita minute.' he came back on the phone and read
an address and a phone number. jim jottedthem down, thanked livingston, and hung up. he dialled 0 again, gave the number, and waited.when the phone began to ring, a sudden hot tension filled him and he leaned forward,turning instinctively away from the drugstore soda fountain, although there was no one therebut a plump teen-age girl reading a magazine. the phone was picked up and a rich, masculinevoice, sounding not at all old, said, 'hello?' that single word set off a dusty chain reactionof memories and emotions, as startling as the pavlovian reaction that can be set offby hearing an old record on the radio. 'mr nell? donald nell?' 'my name is james norman, mr nell. do youremember me, by any chance?'
'yes,' the voice responded immediately. 'piea'la mode. your brother was killed . . . knifed. a shame. he was a lovely boy.' jim collapsed against one of the booth's glasswalls. the tension's sudden departure left him as weak as a stuffed toy. he found himselfon the verge of spilling everything, and he bit the urge back desperately. 'mr nell, those boys were never caught.' 'no,' nell said. 'we did have suspects. asi recall, we had a lineup at a bridgeport police station.' 'were those suspects identified to me by name?'
'no. the procedure at a police showup wasto address the participants by number. what's your interest in this now, mr norman?' 'let me throw some names at you,' jim said.'i want to know if they ring a bell in connection with the case.' 'son, i wouldn't -' 'you might,' jim said, beginning to feel atrifle desperate. 'robert lawson, david garcia, vincent corey. do any of those -'corey,' mrnell said flatly. 'i remember him. vinnie the viper. yes, we had him up on that. hismother alibied him. i don't get anything from robert lawson. that could be anyone's name.but garcia . . . that rings a bell. i'm not
sure why. hell. i'm old.' he sounded disgusted. 'mr nell, is there any way you could checkon those boys?' 'well, of course, they wouldn't be boys anymore.' oh, yeah? 'listen, jimmy. has one of those boys poppedup and started harassing you?' 'i don't know. some strange things have beenhappening. things connected with the stabbing of my brother.' 'what things?' 'mr nell, i can't tell you. you'd think iwas crazy.'
his reply, quick, firm, interested: 'are you?' jim paused. 'no,' he said. 'okay, i can check the names through stratfordr&i. where can i get in touch?' jim gave his home number. 'you'd be most likelyto catch me on tuesday night.' he was in almost every ~ight, but on tuesday evenings sallywent to her pottery class. 'what are you doing these days, jimmy?' 'teaching school.' 'good. this might take a few days, you know.i'm retired now.' 'you sound just the same.'
'ah, but if you could see me!' he chuckled,'d'you still like a good piece of pie a' la mode, jimmy?' 'sure,' jim said. it was a lie. he hated piea la mode. 'i'm glad to hear that. well, if there's nothingelse, i'll -' 'there is one more thing. is there a milford high in stratford?' 'not that i know of.' 'that's what i -' 'only thing name of milford around here ismilford cemetery out on the ash heights road. and no one ever graduated from there.' hechuckled dryly, and to jim's ears it sounded
like the sudden rattle of bones in a pit. 'thank you,' he heard himself saying. 'goodbye.' mr nell was gone. the operator asked him todeposit sixty cents, and he put it in automatically. he turned, and stared into a horrid, squashedface plastered up against the glass, framed in two spread hands, the splayed fingers flattenedwhite against the glass, as was the tip of the nose. it was vinnie, grinning at him. jim screamed. class again.
living with lit was doing a composition, andmost of them were bent sweatily over their papers, putting their thoughts grimly downon the page, as if chopping wood. all but three. robert lawson, sitting in billy steam'sseat, david garcia in kathy slavin's, vinnie corey in chip osway's. they sat with theirblank papers in front of them, watching him. a moment before the bell, jim said softly,'i want to talk to you for a minute after class, mr corey.' 'sure, norm.' lawson and garcia tittered noisily, but therest of the class did not. when the bell rang, they passed in their papers and fairly boltedthrough the door. lawson and garcia lingered,
and jim felt his belly tighten. is it going to be now? then lawson nodded at vinnie. 'see you later.' 'yeah.' they left. lawson closed the door, and frombehind the frosted glass, david garcia suddenly yelled hoarsely, 'norm eats it!' vinnie lookedat the door, then back at jim. he smiled. he said, 'i was wondering if you'd ever getdown to it.' 'really?' jim said. 'scared you the other night in the phone booth,right, dad?'
'no one says dad any more, vinnie. it's notcool. like cool's not cool. it's as dead as buddy holly.' 'i talk the way i want,' vinnie said. 'where's the other one? the guy with the funnyred hair.' 'split, man.' but under his studied unconcern,jim sensed a wariness. 'he's alive, isn't he? that's why he's nothere. he's alive and he's thirty-two or three, the way you would be if -' 'bleach was always a drag. he's nothing'.'vinnie sat up behind his desk and put his hands down flat on the old graffiti. his eyesglittered. 'man, i remember you at that lineup.
you looked ready to piss your little old corduroypants. i seen you lookin' at me and davie. i put the hex on you.' 'i suppose you did,' jim said. 'you gave mesixteen years of bad dreams. wasn't that enough? why now? why me?' vinnie looked puzzled, and then smiled again.'because you're unfinished business, man. you got to be cleaned up.' 'where were you?' jim asked. 'before.' vinnie's lips thinned. 'we ain't talkin' aboutthat. dig?' 'they dug you a hole, didn't they, vinnie?six feet deep. right in the milford cemetery.
six feet of -' 'you shut up!' he was on his feet. the desk fell over inthe aisle. 'it's not going to be easy,' jim said. 'i'm not going to make it easy for you.' 'we're gonna kill you, dad. you'll find outabout that hole.' 'get out of here.' 'maybe that little wifey of yours, too. 'you goddamn punk, if you touch her -' hestarted forward blindly, feeling violated and terrified by the mention of sally.
vinnie grinned and started for the door. 'justbe cool. cool as a fool.' he tittered. 'if you touch my wife, i'll kill you.' vinnie's grin widened. 'kill me? man, i thoughtyou knew, i'm already dead.' he left. his footfalls echoed in the corridorfor a long time. 'what are you reading, hon?' jim held the binding of the book, raisingdemons, out for her to read. 'yuck.' she turned back to the mirror to checkher hair. 'will you take a taxi home?' he asked. 'it's only four blocks. besides, the walkis good for my figure.'
'someone grabbed one of my girls over on summerstreet,' he lied. 'she thinks the object was rape.' 'really? who?' 'dianna snow,' he said, making a name up atrandom. 'she's a level-headed girl. treat yourself to a taxi, okay?' 'okay,' she said. she stopped at his chair,knelt, put her hands on his cheeks and looked into his eyes. 'what's the matter, jim?' 'nothing.' 'yes. something is.'
'nothing i can't handle.' 'is it something. . . about your brother?' a draught of terror blew over him, as if aninner door had been opened. 'why do you say 'you were moaning his name in your sleep lastnight. wayne, wayne, you were saying. run, wayne.' 'it's nothing.' but it wasn't. they both knew it. he watchedher go. mr nell called quarter past eight. 'you don't have to worry about those guys,'he said. 'they're all dead.' 'is that so?' he was holding his place inraising demons with his index finger as he
talked. 'car smash. six months after your brotherwas killed. a cop was chasing them. frank simon was the cop, as a matter of fact. heworks out at sikorsky now. probably makes a lot more money.' 'and they crashed.' 'the car left the road at more than a hundredmiles an hour and hit a main power pole. when they finally got the power shut off and scrapedthem out, they were cooked medium rare.' jim closed his eyes. 'you saw the report?' 'looked at it myself.'
'anything on the car?' 'it was a hot rod.' 'any description?' 'black 1954 ford sedan with "snake eyes" writtenon the side. fitting enough. they really crapped out.' 'they had a sidekick, mr nell. i don't knowhis name, but his nickname was bleach.' 'that would be charlie sponder,' mr nell saidwithout hesitation. 'he bleached his hair with clorox one time. i remember that. itwent streaky-white, and he tried todye it back. the streaks went orange.'
'do you know what he's doing now?' 'career army man. joined up in fifty-eightor nine, after he got a local girl pregnant.' 'could i get in touch with him?' 'his mother lives in stratford. she'd know.' 'can you giye me her address?' 'i won't, jimmy. not until you tell me what'seating you.' 'i can't, mr nell. you'd think i was crazy.'. 'try me.' 'i can't.'
'all right, son.' 'will you -' but the line was dead. 'you bastard,' jim said, and put the phonein the cradle. it rang under his hand and he jerked away from it as if it had suddenlyburned him. he looked at it, breathing heavily. it rang three times, four. he picked it up.listened. closed his eyes. a cop pulled him over on his way to the hospital,then went ahead of him, siren screaming. there was a young doctor with a toothbrush moustachein the emergency room. he looked at jim with dark, emotionless eyes. 'excuse me, i'm james norman and -'
'i'm sorry, mr norman. she died at 9.04p.m.' he was going to faint. the world went faraway and swimmy, and there was a high buzzing in his ears. his eyes wandered without purpose,seeing green tiled walls, a wheeled stretcher glittering under the overhead fluorescents,a nurse with her cap on crooked. time to freshen up, honey. an orderly was leaning againstthe wall outside emergency room no.1. wearing dirty whites with a few drops of drying bloodsplattered across the front. cleaning his fingernails with a knife. the orderly lookedup and grinned into jim's eyes. the orderly was david garcia. jim fainted.
funeral. like a dance in three acts. the house.the funeral parlour. the graveyard. faces coming out of nowhere, whirling close, whirlingoff into the darkness again. sally's mother, her eyes streaming tears behind a black veil.her father, looking shocked and old. simmons. others. they introduced themselves and shookhis hand. he nodded, not remembering their names. some of the women brought food, andone lady brought an apple pie and someone ate a piece and when he went out in the kitchenhe saw it sitting on the counter, cut wide open and drooling juice into the pie platelike amber blood and he thought: should have a big scoop of vanilla ice cream right ontop. he felt his hands and legs trembling, wantingto go across to the counter and throw the
pie against the wall. and then they were going and he was watchinghimself, the way you watch yourself in a home movie, as he shook hands and nodded and said:thank you. . . yes, i will. thank you. . . i'm sure she is. . . thankyou . when they were gone, the house was his again.he went over to the mantel. it was cluttered with souvenirs of their marriage. a stuffeddog with jewelled eyes that she had won at coney island on their honeymoon. two leatherfolders - his diploma from b.u. and hers from u. mass. a giant pair of styrofoam dice shehad given him as a gag after he had dropped sixteen dollars in pinky silverstein's pokergame a year or so before. a thin china cup
she had bought in a cleveland junk shop lastyear. in the middle of the mantel, their wedding picture. he turned it over and then sat downin his chair and looked at the blank tv set. an idea began to form behind his eyes. an hour later the phone rang, jolting himout of a light doze. he groped for it. 'you're next, norm.' 'vinnie?' 'man, she was like one of those clay pigeonsin a shooting gallery. wham and splatter.' 'i'll be at the school tonight, vinnie. room33. i'll leave the lights off. it'll be just like the overpass that day. i think i caneven provide the train.'
'just want to end it all, is that right?' 'that's right,' jim said. 'you be there.' 'maybe.' 'you'll be there,' jim said, and hung up. it was almost dark when he got to the school.he parked in his usual slot, opened the back door with his pass-key, and went first tothe english department office on the second floor. he let himself in, opened the recordcabinet, and began to flip through the records. he paused about halfway through the stackand took out one called hi-fi sound effects. he turned it over. the third cut on the aside was 'freight train: 3.04'. he put the
album on top of the department's portablestereo and took raising demons out of his overcoat pocket. he turned to a marked passage,read something, and nodded. he turned out the lights. room 33. he set up the stereo system, stretching thespeakers to their widest separation, and then put on the freight-train cut. the sound cameswelling up out of nothing until it filled the whole room with the harsh clash of dieselengines and steel on steel. with his eyes closed, he could almost believehe was under the broad street trestle, driven to his knees, watching as the savage littledrama worked to its inevitable conclusion
. he opened his eyes, rejected the record, thenreset it. he sat behind his desk and opened raising demons to a chapter entitled 'maleficspirits and how to call them'. his lips moved as he read, and he paused at intervals totake objects out of his pocket and lay them on his desk. first, an old and creased kodak of him andhis brother, standing on the lawn in front of the broad street apartment house wherethey had lived. they both had identical crew cuts, and both of them were smiling shylyinto the camera. second, a small bottle of blood. he had caught astray alley cat andslit its throat with his pocketknife. third,
the pocketknife itself. last, a sweatbandripped from the lining of an old little league baseball cap. wayne's cap. jim had kept itin secret hopes that some day he and sally would have a son to wear it. he got up, went to the window, looked out.the parking lot was empty. he began to push the school desks towardsthe walls, leaving a tough circle in the middle of the room. when that was done he got chalkfrom his desk drawer and, following the diagram in the book exactly and using a yardstick,he drew a pentagram on the floor. his breath was coming harder now. he turnedoff the lights, gathered his objects in one hand, and began to recite.
'dark father, hear me for my soul's sake.i am one who promises sacrifice. i am one who begs a dark boon for sacrifice. i am onewho seeks vengeance of the left hand. i bring blood in promise of sacrifice.' he screwed the cap off the jar, which hadoriginally held peanut butter, and splashed it within the pentagram. something happened in the darkened schoolroom.it was not possible to say exactly what, but the air became heavier. there was a thicknessin it that seemed to fill the throat and the belly with grey steel. the deep silence grew,swelled with something unseen. he did as the old rites instructed.
now there was a feeling in the air that remindedjim of the time he had taken a class to visit a huge power station - a feeling that thevery air was crammed with electric potential and was vibrating. and then a voice, curiouslylow and unpleasant, spoke to him. 'what do you require?' he could not tell if he was actually hearingit or only thinking that he did. he spoke two sentences. 'it is a small boon. what do you offer?' jim spoke two words. 'both,' the voice whispered. 'right and left.agreed?'
'then give me what is mine. he opened his pocketknife, turned to his desk,laid his right hand down flat, and hacked off his right index finger with four hardchops. blood flew across the blotter in dark patterns. it didn't hurt at all. he brushedthe finger aside and switched the pocketknife to his right hand. cutting off the left fingerwas harder. his range hand felt awkward and alien with the missing finger, and the knifekept slipping. at last, with an impatient grunt, he threw the knife away, snapped thebone, and ripped the finger free. he picked them both up like breadsticks and threw theminto the pentagram. there was a bright flash of light, like an old-fashioned photographer'sflashpowder. no smoke, he noted. no smell
of brimstone. 'what objects have you brought?' 'a photograph. a band of cloth that has beendipped in his sweat.' 'sweat is precious,' the voice remarked, andthere was a cold greed in the tone that made jim shiver. 'give them to me.' jim threw them into the pentagram. the lightflashed. 'it is good,' the voice said. 'if they come,' jim said. there was no response. the voice was gone- if it had ever been there. he leaned closer
to the pentagram. the picture was still there,but blackened and charred. the sweatband was gone. in the street there was a noise, faint atfirst, then swelling. a hot rod equipped with glasspack mufflers, first turning on to davisstreet, then approaching. jim sat down, listening to hear if it would go by or turn in. it turned in. footfalls on the stairs, echoing. robert lawson's high-pitched giggle, thensomeone going 'shhhhh!' and then lawson's giggle again. the footfalls came closer, losttheir echo, and then the glass door at the
head of the stairs banged open. 'yoo-hoo, normie!' david garcia called, falsetto. 'you there, normie?' lawson whispered, andthen giggled. 'vas you dere, c holly?' vinnie didn't speak, but as they advancedup the hall, jim could see their shadows. vinnie's was the tallest, and he was holdinga long object in one hand. there was a light snick of sound, and the long object becamelonger still. they were standing by the door, vinnie inthe middle. they were all holding knives. 'here we come, man,' vinnie said softly. 'herewe come for your ass.' jim turned on the record player.
'jesus!' garcia called out, jumping. 'what'sthat?' the freight train was coming closer. you could almost feel the walls thrummingwith it. the sound no longer seemed to be coming outof the speakers but from the hall, from down tracks someplace far away in time as wellas space. 'i don't like this, man,' lawson said. 'it's too late,' vinnie said. he stepped forwardand gestured with the knife. 'give us your money, dad.' ...letusgo... garcia recoiled. 'what the hell -, but vinnienever hesitated. he motioned the others to
spread out, and the thing in his eyes mighthave been relief. 'come on, kid, how much you got?' garcia asked suddenly. 'four cents,' jim said. it was true. he hadpicked them out of the penny jar in the bedroom. the most recent date was 1956. 'you fuckin' liar.' .leave him alone... lawson glanced over his shoulder and his eyeswidened. the walls had become misty, insubstantial. the freight train wailed. the light from theparking-lot street-lamp had reddened, like the neon burrets building company sign, stutteringagainst the twilight sky.
something was walking out of the pentagram,something with the face of a small boy perhaps twelve years old. a boy with a crew cut. garcia darted forward and punched jim in themouth. he could smell mixed garlic and pepperoni on his breath. it was all slow and painless. jim felt a sudden heaviness, like lead, inhis groin, and his bladder let go. he looked down and saw a dark patch appear and spreadon his pants. 'look, vinnie, he wet himself!' lawson criedout. the tone was right, but the expression on his face was one of horror - the expressionof a puppet that has come to life only to find itself on strings.
'let him alone,' the wayne-thing said, butit was not wayne's voice - it was the cold, greedy voice of the thing from the pentagram.run, jimmy! run! run! run!' jim slipped to his knees and a hand slappeddown on his back, groping for purchase, and found none. he looked up and saw vinnie, his face stretchinginto a caricature of hatred, drive his knife into the wayne-thing just below the breastbone. . . and then scream, his face collapsing in on itself, charring, blackening, becomingawful. then he was gone. garcia and lawson struck a moment later, writhed,charred, and disappeared.
jim lay on the floor, breathing harshly. thesound of the freight train faded. his brother was looking down at him. 'wayne?' he breathed. and the face changed. it seemed to melt andrun together. the eyes went yellow, and a horrible, grinning malignancy looked out athim. 'i'll come back, jim,' the cold voice whispered. and it was gone. he got up slowly and turned off the recordplayer with one mangled hand. he touched his mouth. it was bleeding from garcia's punch.he went over and turned on the lights. the
room was empty. he looked out into the parkinglot and that was empty, too, except for one hubcap that reflected the moon in idiot pantomime.the classroom air smelled old and stale - the atmosphere of tombs. he erased the pentagramon the floor and then began to straighten up the desks for the substitute the next day.his fingers hurt very badly - what fingers? he would have to see a doctor. he closed thedoor and went downstairs slowly, holding his hands to his chest. halfway down, something-a shadow, or perhaps only an intuition - made him whirl around. something unseen seemed to leap back. jim remembered the warning in raising demons- the danger involved. you could perhaps summon
them, perhaps cause them to do your work.you could even get rid of them. but sometimes they come back. he walked down the stairs again, wonderingif the nightmare was over after all. strawberry spring springheel jack. i saw those two words in the paper this morningand my god, how they take me back. all that was eight years ago, almost to the day. once,while it was going on, i saw myself on nationwide tv - the walter cronkite report. just a hurryingface in the general background behind the reporter, but my folks picked me out rightaway. they called long-distance. my dad wanted
my analysis of the situation; he was all bluffand hearty and man-to-man. my mother just wanted me to come home. but i didn't wantto come home. i was enchanted. enchanted by that dark and mist-blown strawberryspring, and by the shadow of violent death that walked through it on those nights eightyears ago. the shadow of springheel jack. in new england they call it a strawberry spring.no one knows why; it's just a phrase the old-timers use. they say it happens once every eightor ten years. what happened at new sharon teachers' college that particular strawberryspring. . . there may be a cycle for that, too, but if anyone has figured it out, they'venever said. at new sharon, the strawberry spring beganon 16 march 1968. the coldest winter in twenty
years broke on that day. it rained and youcould smell the sea twenty miles west of the beaches. the snow, which had been thirty-fiveinches deep in places, began to melt and the campus walks ran with slush. the winter carnivalsnow sculptures, which had been kept sharp and clear-cut for two months by the sub-zerotemperatures, at last began to sag and slouch. the caricature of lyndon johnson in frontof the tep fraternity house cried melted tears. the dove in front of prashner hall lost itsfrozen feathers and its plywood skeleton showed sadly through in places. and when night came the fog came with it,moving silent and white along the narrow college avenues and thoroughfares. the pines on thewall poked through it like counting fingers
and it drifted, slow as cigarette smoke, underthe little bridge down by the civil war cannons. it made things seem out of joint, strange,magical. the unwary traveller would step out of the juke-thumping, brightly lit confusionof the grinder, expecting the hard clear starriness of winter to clutch him . . . and insteadhe would suddenly find himself in a silent, muffled world of white drifting fog, the onlysound his own footsteps and the soft drip of water from the ancient gutters. you halfexpected to see gollum or frodo and sam go hurrying past, or to turn and see that thegrinder was gone, vanished, replaced by a foggy panorama of moors and yew trees andperhaps a druid-circle or a sparkling fairy ring.
the jukebox played 'love is blue' that year.it played 'hey, jude' endlessly, endlessly. it played 'scarborough fair. and at ten minutes after eleven on that nighta junior named john dancey on his way back to his dormitory began screaming into thefog, dropping books on and between the sprawled legs of the dead girl lying in a shadowy cornerof the animal sciences parking lot, her throat cut from ear to ear but her eyes open andalmost seeming to sparkle as if she had just successfully pulled off the funniest jokeof her young life - dancey, an education major and a speech minor, screamed and screamedand screamed. the next day was overcast and sullen, andwe went to classes with questions eager in
our mouths - who? why? when do you think they'llget him? and always the final thrilled question: did you know her? did you know her? yes, i had an art class with her. yes, one of my room-mate 's friends datedher last term. yes, she asked me for a light once in thegrinder. she was at the next table. yes, yes, i yes. . . yes. . . oh yes, i we all knew her. her name was gale cerman(pronounced kerr-man), and she was an art major. she wore granny glasses and had a goodfigure. she was well liked but her room-mates
had hated her. she had never gone out mucheven though she was one of the most promiscuous girls on campus. she was ugly but cute. shehad been a vivacious girl who talked little and smiled seldom. she had been pregnant andshe had had leukemia. she was a lesbian who had been murdered by her boy-friend. it wasstrawberry spring, and on the morning of 17 march we all knew gale cerman. half a dozen state police cars crawled onto the campus, most of them parked in front of judith franklin hall, where the cermangirl had lived. on my way past there to my ten o clock class i was asked to show my studentid. i was clever. i showed him the one without the fangs.
'do you carry a knife?' the policeman askedcunningly. 'is it about gale cerman?' i asked, afteri told him that the most lethal thing on my person was a rabbit's-foot key chain. 'what makes you ask?' he pounced. i was five minutes late to class. it was strawberry spring and no one walkedby themselves through the half-academical, half-fantastical campus that night. the foghad come again, smelling of the sea, quiet and deep. around nine o'clock my room-mate burst intoour room, where i had been busting my brains
on a milton essay since seven. 'they caughthim,' he said. 'i heard it over at the grinder.' 'from who?' 'i don't know. some guy. her boy4riend didit. his name is carl amalara.' i settled back, relieved and disappointed.with a name like that it had to be true. a lethal and sordid little crime of passion. 'okay,' i said. 'that's good.' he left the room to spread the news down thehall. i reread my milton essay, couldn't figure out what i had been trying to say, tore itup and started again. it was in the papers the next day. there wasan incongruously neat picture of amalara - probably
a high-school graduation picture - and itshowed a rather sad-looking boy with an olive complexion and dark eyes and pockmarks onhis nose. the boy had not confessed yet, but the evidence against him was strong. he andgale cerman had argued a great deal in the last month or so, and had broken up the weekbefore. amalara's roomie said he had been 'despondent'. in a footlocker under his bed,police had found a seven-inch hunting knife from l. l. bean's and a picture of the girlthat had apparently been cut up with a pair of shears. beside amalara's picture was one of gale cerman.it blurrily showed a dog, a peeling lawn flamingo, and a rather mousy blonde girl wearing spectacles.an uncomfortable smile had turned her lips
up and her eyes were squinted. one hand wason the dog's head. it was true then. it had to be true. the fog came again that night, not on littlecat's feet but in an improper silent sprawl. i walked that night. i had a headache andi walked for air, smelling the wet, misty smell of the spring that was slowly wipingaway the reluctant snow, leaving lifeless patches of last year's grass bare and uncovered,like the head of a sighing old grandmother. for me, that was one of the most beautifulnights i can remember. the people i passed under the haloed streetlights were murmuringshadows, and all of them seemed to be lovers, walking with hands and eyes linked. the meltingsnow dripped and ran, dripped and ran, and
from every dark storm drain the sound of thesea drifted up, a dark winter sea now strongly ebbing. i walked until nearly midnight, until i wasthoroughly mildewed, and i passed many shadows, heard many footfalls clicking dreamily offdown the winding paths. who is to say that one of those shadows was not the man or thething that came to be known as springheel jack? not i, for i passed many shadows butin the fog i saw no faces. the next morning the clamour in the hall wokeme. i blundered out to see who had been drafted, combing my hair with both hands and runningthe fuzzy caterpillar that had craftily replaced my tongue across the dry roof of my mouth.
'he got another one,' someone said to me,his face pallid with excitement. 'they had to let him go.' 'who go?' 'amalara!' someone else said gleefully. 'hewas sitting in jail when it happened. when what happened?' i asked patiently. sooneror later i would get it. i was sure of that. 'the guy killed somebody else last night.and now they're hunting all over for it.' 'for what?' the pallid face wavered in front of me again.'her head. whoever killed her took her head with him.'
new sharon isn't a big school now, and waseven smaller then - the kind of institution the public relations people chummily referto as a 'community college'. and it really was like a small community, at least in thosedays; between you and your friends, you probably had at least a nodding acquaintance with everybodyelse and their friends. gale cerman had been the type of girl you justnodded to, thinking vaguely that you had seen her around. we all knew ann bray. she had been the firstrunner-up in the miss new england pageant the year before, her talent performance consistingof twirling a flaming baton to the tune of 'hey, look me over'. she was brainy, too;until the time of her death she had been editor
of the school newspaper (a once-weekly ragwith a lot of political cartoons and bombastic letters), a member of the student dramaticssociety, and president of the national service sorority, new sharon branch. in the hot, fiercebubblings of my freshman youth i had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for adate - turned down on both counts. and now she was dead. . . worse than dead. i walked to my afternoon classes like everyoneelse, nodding to people i knew and saying hi with a little more force than usual, asif that would make up for the close way i studied their faces. which was the same waythey were studying mine. there was someone dark among us, as dark as the paths whichtwisted across the mall or wound among the
hundred-year-old oaks on the quad in backof the gymnasium. as dark as the hulking civil war cannons seen through a drifting membraneof fog. we looked into each other's faces and tried to read the darkness behind oneof them. this time the police arrested no one. theblue beetles patrolled the campus ceaselessly on the foggy spring nights of the eighteenth,nineteenth, and twentieth, and spotlights stabbed in to dark nooks and crannies witherratic eagerness. the administration imposed a mandatory nine o'clock curfew. a foolhardycouple discovered necking in the landscaped bushes north of the tate alumni building weretaken to the new sharon police station and grilled unmercifully for three hours.
there was a hysterical false alarm on thetwentieth when a boy was found unconscious in the same parking lot where the body ofgale cerman had been found. a gibbering campus cop loaded him into the back of his cruiserand put a map of the county over his face without bothering to hunt for a pulse andstarted towards the local hospital, siren wailing across the deserted campus like aseminar of banshees. halfway there the corpse in the back seathad risen and asked hollowly, 'where the hell am i?' the cop shrieked and ran off the road.the corpse turned out to be an undergrad named donald morris who had been in bed the lasttwo days with a pretty lively case of flu - was it asian last year? i can't remember.anyway, he fainted in the parking lot on his
way to the grinder for a bowl of soup andsome toast. the days continued warm and overcast. peopleclustered in small groups that had a tendency to break up and re-form with surprising speed.looking at the same set of faces for too long gave you funny ideas about some of them. andthe speed with which rumours swept from one end of the campus to the other began to approachthe speed of light; a well-liked history professor had been overheard laughing and weeping downby the small bridge; gale cerman had left a cryptic two-word message written in herown blood on the blacktop of the animal sciences parking lot; both murders were actually politicalcrimes, ritual murders that had been performed by an offshoot of the sds to protest the war.this was really laughable. the new sharon
sds had seven members. one fair-sized offshootwould have bankrupted the whole organization. this fact brought an even more sinister embellishmentfrom the campus rightwingers: outside agitators. so during those queer, warm days we all keptour eyes peeled for them. the press, always fickle, ignored the strongresemblance our murderer bore to jack the ripper and dug further back - all the wayto 1819. ann bray had been found on a soggy path of ground some twelve feet from the nearestsidewalk, and yet there were no footprints, not even her own. an enterprising new hampshirenewsman with a passion for the arcane christened the killer springheel jack, after the infamousdr john hawkins of bristol, who did five of his wives to death with odd pharmaceuticalknick-knacks. and the name, probably because
of that soggy yet unmarked ground, stuck. on the twenty-first it rained again, and themall and quadrangle became quagmires. the police announced that they were salting plainclothesdetectives, men and women, about, and took half the police cars off duty. the campus newspaper published a stronglyindignant, if slightly incoherent, editorial protesting this. the upshot of it seemed tobe that, with all sorts of cops masquerading as students, it would be impossible to tella real outside agitator from a false one. twilight came and the fog with it, driftingup the tree-lined avenues slowly, almost thoughtfully, blotting out the buildings one by one. itwas soft, insubstantial stuff, but somehow
implacable and frightening. springheel jackwas a man, no one seemed to doubt that, but the fog was his accomplice and it was female.. . or so it seemed to me. if was as if our little school was caught between them, squeezedin some crazy lover's embrace, part of a marriage that had been consummated in blood. i satand smoked and watched the lights come on in the growing darkness and wondered if itwas all over. my room-mate came in and shut the door quietly behind him. 'it's going to snow soon,' he said. i turned around and looked at him. 'does theradio say that?' 'no,' he said. 'who needs a weatherman? haveyou ever heard of strawberry spring?'
'maybe,' i said. 'a long time ago. somethinggrandmothers talk about, isn't it?' he stood beside me, looking out at the creepingdark. 'strawberry spring is like indian summer,'he said, 'only much more rare. you get a good indian summer in this part of the countryonce every two or three years. a spell of weather like we've been having is supposedto come only every eight or ten. it's a false spring, a lying spring, like indian summeris a false summer. my own grandmother used to say strawberry spring means the worst northerof the winter is still on the way - and the longer this lasts, the harder the storm. 'folk tales,' i said. 'never believe a word.'i looked at him. but i'm nervous. are you?'
he smiled benevolently and stole one of mycigarettes from the open pack on the window ledge. 'i suspect everyone but me. and thee,'he said, and then the smile faded a little. 'and sometimes i wonder about thee. want togo over to the union and shoot some eight-ball? i'll spot you ten.' 'trig prelim next week. i'm going to settledown with a magic marker and a hot pile of notes.' for a long time after he was gone, i couldonly look out the window. and even after i had opened my book and started in, part ofme was still out there, walking in the shadows where something dark was now in charge.
that night adelle parkins was killed. sixpolice cars and seventeen collegiate-looking plain clothes men (eight of them were womenimported all the way from boston) patrolled the campus. but springheel jack killed herjust the same, going unerringly for one of our own. the false spring, the lying spring,aided and abetted him - he killed her and left her propped behind the wheel of her 1964dodge to be found the next morning and they found part of her in the back seat and partof her in the trunk. and written in blood on the windshield - this time fact insteadof rumour - were two words: ha! ha! the campus went slightly mad after that; allof us and none of us had known adelle parkins. she was one of those nameless, harried womenwho worked the break-back shift in the grinder
from six to eleven at night, facing hordesof hamburger-happy students on study break from the library across the way. she musthave had it relatively easy those last three foggy nights of her life; the curfew was 'beingrigidly observed, and after nine the grinder's only patrons were hungry cops and happy janitors- the empty buildings had improved their habitual bad temper considerably. there is little left to tell. the police,as prone to hysteria as any of us and driven against the wall, arrested an innocuous homosexualsociology graduate student named hanson gray, who claimed he 'could not remember' wherehe had spent several of the lethal evenings. they charged him, arraigned him, and let himgo to scamper hurriedly back to his native
new hampshire town after the last unspeakablenight of strawberry spring when marsha curran was slaughtered on the mall. why she had been out and alone is foreverbeyond knowing - she was a fat, sadly pretty thing who lived in an apartment in town withthree other girls. she had slipped on campus as silently and as easily as springheel jackhimself. what brought her? perhaps her need was as deep and as ungovernable as her killer's,and just as far beyond understanding. maybe a need for one desperate and passionate romancewith the warm night, the warm fog, the smell of the sea, and the cold knife. that was on the twenty-third. on the twenty-fourththe president of the college announced that
spring break would be moved up a week, andwe scattered, not joyfully but like frightened sheep before a storm, leaving the campus emptyand haunted by the police and one dark spectre. i had my own car on campus, and i took sixpeople downstate with me, their luggage crammed in helter-skelter. it wasn't a pleasant ride.for all any of us knew, springheel jack might have been in the car with us. that night the thermometer dropped fifteendegrees, and the whole northern new england area was belted by a shrieking norther thatbegan in sleet and ended in a foot of snow. the usual number of old duffers had heartattacks shovelling it away - and then, like magic, it was april. clean showers and starrynights.
they called it strawberry spring, god knowswhy, and it's an evil, lying time that only comes once every eight or ten years. springheeljack left with the fog, and by early june, campus conversation had turned to a seriesof draft protests and a sit-in at the building where a well-known napalm manufacturer washolding job interviews. by june, the subject of springheel jack was almost unanimouslyavoided - at least aloud. i suspect there were many who turned it over and over privately,looking for the one crack in the seemless egg of madness that would make sense of itall. that was the year i graduated, and the nextyear was the year i married. a good job in a local publishing house. in 1971 we had achild, and now he's almost school age. a fine
and questing boy with my eyes and her mouth. then, today's paper. of course i knew it was here. i knew it yesterdaymorning when i got up and heard the mysterious sound of snowmelt running down the gutters,and smelled the salt tang of the ocean from our front porch, nine miles from the nearestbeach. i knew strawberry spring had come again when i started home from work last night andhad to turn on my headlights against the mist that was already beginning to creep out ofthe fields and hollows, blurring the lines of the buildings and putting fairy haloesaround the street lamps. this morning's paper says a girl was killedon the new sharon campus near the civil war
cannons. she was killed last night and foundin a melting snowbank. she was not she was not all there. my wife is upset. she wants to know wherei was last night. i can't tell her because i don't remember. i remember starting homefrom work, and i remember putting my headlights on to search my way through the lovely creepingfog, but that's all i remember. i've been thinking about that foggy nightwhen i had a headache and walked for air and passed all the lovely shadows without shapeor substance. and i've been thinking about the trunk of my car - such an ugly word, trunk-and wondering why in the world i should be afraid to open it.
i can hear my wife as i write this, in thenext room, crying. she thinks i was with another woman last night. and oh dear god, i think so too. the ledge 'go on,' cressner said again. 'look in thebag.' we were in his penthouse apartment, forty-threestories up. the carpet was deep-cut pile, burnt orange. in the middle, between the basquesling chair where cressner sat and the genuine leather couch where no one at all sat, therewas a brown shopping bag. 'if it's a payoff, forget it,' i said. 'ilove her.'
'it's money, but it's not a payoff. go on.look.' re was smoking a turkish cigarette in an onyx holder. the air-circulation systemallowed me just a dry whiff of the tobacco and then whipped it away. he was wearing asilk dressing gown on which a dragon was embroidered. his eyes were calm and intelligent behindhis glasses. he looked just like what he was: an a-number-one, 500 carat, dyed-in-the-woolson of a bitch. i loved his wife, and she loved me. i had expected him to make trouble,and i knew this was it, but i just wasn't sure what brand it was. i went to the shopping bag and tipped it over.banded bundles of currency tumbled out on the rug. all twenties. i picked one of thebundles up and counted. ten bills to a bundle.
there were a lot of bundles. 'twenty thousand dollars,' he said, and puffedon his cigarette. i stood up. 'okay.' 'it's for you.' 'i don't want it.' 'my wife comes with it.' i didn't say anything. marcia had warned mehow, it would be. he's like a cat, she had said. an old tom full of meanness. he'll tryto make you a mouse. 'so you're a tennis pro,' he said. 'i don'tbelieve i've ever actually seen one before.'
'you mean your detectives didn't get any pictures?' 'oh, yes.' he waved the cigarette holder negligently.'even a motion picture of the two of you in that bayside motel. a camera was behind themirror. but pictures are hardly the same, are they?' 'if you say so.' he'll keep changing tacks, marcia had said.it's the way he puts people on the defensive. pretty soon he'll have you hitting out atwhere you think he's going to be, and he'll get you someplace else. say as little as possible,stan. and remember that i love you. 'i invited you up because i thought we shouldhave a little man-to-man chat, mr norris.
just a pleasant conversation between two civilizedhuman beings, one of whom has made off with the other's wife.' i started to answer but decided not to. 'did you enjoy san quentin?' cressner said,puffing lazily. 'not particularly.' 'i believe you passed three years there. acharge of breaking and entering, if i'm correct.' 'marcia knows about it,' i said, and immediatelywished i hadn't. i was playing his game, just what marcia had warned against. hitting softlobs for him to smash back. 'i've taken the liberty of having your carmoved,' he said, glancing out the window at
the far end of the room. it really wasn'ta window at all: the whole wall was glass. in the middle was a sliding-glass door. beyondit, a balcony the size of a postage stamp. beyond that, a very long drop. there was somethingstrange about the door. i couldn't quite put my finger on it. 'this is a very pleasant building,' cressnersaid. 'good security. closed-circuit tv and all that. when i knew you were in the lobby,i made a telephone call. an employee then hot-wired the ignition of your car and movedit from the parking area here to a public lot several blocks away.' he glanced up atthe modernistic sunburst clock above the couch. it was 8.05. 'at 8.20 the same employee willcall the police from a public phone booth
concerning your car. by 8.30, at the latest,the minions of the law will have discovered over six ounces of he**in hidden in the sparetyre of your trunk. you will be eagerly sought after, mr norris.' he had set me up. i had tried to cover myselfas well as i could, but in the end i had been child's play for him. 'these things will happen unless i call myemployee and tell him to forget the phone call.' 'and all i have to do is tell you where marciais,' i said. 'no deal, cressner, i don't know. we set it up this way just for you.'
'my men had her followed.' 'i don't think so i think we lost them atthe airport.' cressner sighed, removed the smouldering cigaretteholder, and dropped it into a chromium ashtray with a sliding lid. no fuss, no muss. theused cigarette and stan norris had been taken care of with equal ease. 'actually,' he said, 'you're right. the oldladies-room vanishing act. my operatives were extremely vexed to have been taken in by suchan ancient ruse. i think it was so old they never expected it.' i said nothing. after marcia had ditched cressner'soperatives at the airport, she had taken the
bus shuttle back to the city and then to thebus station; that had been the plan. she had two hundred dollars, all the money that hadbeen in ~ny savings account. two hundred dollars and a greyhound bus could take you anyplacein the country. 'are you always to uncommunicative?' cressnerasked, and he sounded genuinely interested. 'marcia advised it.' a little more sharply, he said: 'then i imagineyou'll stand on your rights when the police take you in. and the next time you see mywife could be when she's a little old grandmother in a rocker. have you gotten that throughyour head? i understand that possession of six ounces of he**in could get you forty years.'
'that won't get you marcia back.' he smiled thinly. 'and that's the nub of it,isn't it? shall i review where we are? you and my wife have fallen in love. you havehad an affair. . . if you want to call a series of one-nighters in cheap motels an affair.my wife has left me. however, i have you. and you are in what is called a bind. doesthat summarize it adequately?' 'i can understand why she got tired of you,'i said. to my surprise, he threw back his head andlaughed. 'you know, i rather like you, mr norris. you're vulgar and you're a piker,but you seem to have heart. marcia said you did. i rather doubted it. her judgement ofcharacter is lax. but you do have a certain.
. . verve. which is why i've set things upthe way i have. no doubt marcia has told you that lam fond of wagering.' 'yes.' now i knew what was wrong with thedoor in the middle of the glass wall. it was the middle of winter, and no one was goingto want to take tea on a balcony forty-three stories up. the balcony had been cleared offurniture. and the screen had been taken off the door. now why would cressner have donethat? 'i don't like my wife very much,' cressnersaid, fixing another cigarette carefully in the holder. 'that's no secret. i'm sure she'stold you as much. and i'm sure a man of your experience knows that contented wives do notjump into the hay with the local tennis-club
pro at the drop of a racket. in my opinion,marcia is a prissy, whey-faced little prude, a whiner, a weeper, a bearer of tales, a -'that'sabout enough,' i said. he smiled coldly. 'i beg your pardon. i keepforgetting we are discussing our beloved. it's 8.16. are you nervous?' i shrugged. 'tough to the end,' he said, and lit his cigarette.'at any rate, you may wonder why, if i dislike marcia so much, i do not simply give her herfreedom -' 'no, i don't wonder at all.' he frowned at me.
'you're a selfish, grasping, egocentric sonof a bitch. that's why. no one takes what's yours. not even if you don't want it any more. he went red and then laughed. 'one for you,mr norris. very good.' i shrugged again. 'i'm going to offer you a wager. if you win,you leave here with the money, the woman, and your freedom. on the other hand, if youlose, you lose your life.' i looked at the clock. i couldn't help it.it was 8.19. 'all right,' i said. what else? it would buytime, at least. time for me to think of some way to beat it out of here, with or withoutthe money.
cressner picked up the telephone beside himand dialled a number. 'tony? plan two. yes.' he hung up. 'what's plan two?' i asked. 'i'll call tony back in fifteen minutes, andhe will remove the. . . offending substance from the trunk of your car and drive it backhere. if i don't call, he will get in touch with the police.' 'not very trusting, are you?' 'be sensible, mr norris. there is twenty thousanddollars on the carpet between us. in this city murder has been committed for twentycents.'
'what's the bet?' he looked genuinely pained. 'wager, mr norris,wager. gentlemen make wagers. vulgarians place bets.' 'whatever you say.' 'excellent. i've seen you looking at my balcony.' 'the screen's off the door.' 'yes. i had it taken off this afternoon. whati propose is this: that you walk around my building on the ledge that juts out just belowthe penthouse level. if you circumnavigate the building successfully, the jackpot isyours.'
'you're crazy.' 'on the contrary. i have proposed this wagersix times to six different people during my dozen years in this apartment. three of thesix were professional athletes, like you-one of them a notorious quarterback more famousfor his tv commercials than his passing game, one a baseball player, one a rather famousjockey who made an extraordinary yearly salary and who was also afflicted with extraordinaryalimony problems. the other three were more ordinary citizens who had differing professionsbut two things in common: a need for money and a certain degree of body grace.' he puffedhis cigarette thoughtfully and then continued. 'the wager was declined five times out ofhand. on the other occasion, it was accepted.
the terms were twenty thousand dollars againstsix months' service to me. i collected. the fellow took one look over the edge of thebalcony and nearly fainted.' cressner looked amused and contemptuous. 'he said everythingdown there looked so small. that was what killed his nerve.' 'what makes you think -' he cut me off with an annoyed wave of hishand. 'don't bore me, mr norris. i think you will do it because you have no choice. it'smy wager on the one hand or forty years in san quentin on the other. the money and mywife are only added fillips, indicative of my good nature.'
'what guarantee do i have that you won't double-crossme? maybe i'd do it and find out you'd called tony and told him to go ahead anyway.' he sighed. 'you are a walking case of paranoia,mr norris. i don't love my wife. it is doing my storied ego no good at all to have heraround. twenty thousand dollars is a pittance to me. i pay four times that every week tobe given to police bagmen. as for the wager, however . . .' his i thought about it, and he left me. i supposehe knew that the real mark always convinces himself. i was a thirty-six-year-old tennisbum, and the club had been thinking of letting me go when marcia applied a little gentlepressure. tennis was the only profession i
knew, and without it, even getting a job asa janitor would be tough - especially with a record. it was kid stuff, but employersdon't care. and the funny thing was that i really lovedmaria cressner. i had fallen for her after two nine-o'clock tennis lessons, and she hadfallen for me just as hard. it was a case of stan norris luck, all right. after thirty-sixyears of happy bachelorhood, i had fallen like a sack of mail for the wife of an organizationoverlord. the old tom sitting there and puffing hisimported turkish cigarette knew all that, of course. and something else, as well. ihad no guarantee that he wouldn't turn me in if i accepted his wager and won, but iknew damn well that i'd be in the cooler by
ten o'clock if i didn't. and the next timei'd be free would be at the turn of the century. 'i want to know one thing,' i said. 'what might that be, mr norris?' 'look me right in the face and tell me ifyou're a welsher or not.' he looked at me directly. 'mr norris,' hesaid quietly, 'i never welsh.' 'all right,' i said. what other choice wasthere? he stood up, beaming. 'excellent! really excellent!approach the door to the balcony with me, mr norris.' we walked over together. his face was thatof a man who had dreamed this scene hundreds
of times and was enjoying its actuality tothe fullest. 'the ledge is five inches wide,' he said dreamily.'i've measured it myself. in fact, i've stood on it, holding on to the balcony, of course.all you have to do is lower yourself over the wrought-iron railing. you'll be chest-high.but, of course, beyond the railing there are no handgrips. you'll have to inch your wayalong, being very careful not to overbalance.' my eye had fastened on something else outsidethe window . . . something that made my blood temperature sink several degrees. it was awind gauge. cressner's apartment was quite close to the lake, and it was high enoughso there were no higher buildings to act as a windbreak. that wind would be cold, andit would cut like a knife. the needle was
standing at ten pretty steadily, but a gustwould send the needle almost up to twenty-five for a few seconds before dropping off. 'ah, i see you've noticed my wind gauge,'cressner said jovially. 'actually, it's the other side which gets the prevailing wind;so the breeze may be a little stronger on that side. but actually this is a fairly stillnight. i've seen evenings when the wind has gusted up to eighty-five . . . you can actuallyfeel the building rock a little. a bit like being on a ship, in the crow's nest. and it'squite mild for this time of year.' he pointed, and i saw the lighted numeralsatop a bank skyscraper to the left. they said it was forty-four degrees. but with the wind,that would have made the chill factor somewhere
in the mid-twenties. 'have you got a coat?' i asked. i was wearinga light jacket. 'alas, no.' the lighted figures on the bankswitched to show the time. it was 8.32. 'and i think you had better get started, mr norris,so i can call tony and put plan three into effect. a good boy but apt to be impulsive.you understand.' i understood all right. too damn well. but the thought of being with marcia, freefrom cressner's tentacles and with enough money to get started at something made mepush open the sliding-glass door and step out on to the balcony. it was cold and damp;the wind ruffled my hair into my eyes.
'bon soir,' cressner said behind me, but ididn't bother to look back. i approached the railing, but i didn't look down. not yet.i began to do deep-breathing. it's not really an exercise at all but a formof self-hypnosis. with every inhale-exhale, you ~row a distraction out of your mind, untilthere's nothing left but the match ahead of you. i got rid of the money with one breathand cressner himself with two. marcia took longer - her face kept rising in my mind,telling me not to be stupid, not to play his game, that maybe cressner never welshed, buthe always hedged his bets. i didn't listen. i couldn't afford to. if i lost this match,i wouldn't have to buy the beers and take the ribbing; i'd be so much scarlet sludgesplattered for a block of deakman street in
both directions. when i thought i had it, i looked down. the building sloped away like a smooth chalkcliff to the street far below. the cars parked there looked like those matchbox models youcan buy in the five-and-dime. the ones driving by the building were just tiny pinpoints oflight. if you fell that far, you would have plenty of time to realize just what was happening,to see the wind blowing your clothes as the earth pulled you back faster and faster. you'dhave time to scream a long, long scream. and the sound you'made when you hit the pavementwould be like the sound of an overripe watermelon. i could understand why that other guy hadchickened out. but he'd only had six months
to worry about. i was staring forty long,grey, marcia4ess years in the eye. i looked at the ledge. it looked small, ihad never, seen five inches that looked so much like two. at least the building was fairlynew; it wouldn't crumble under me. i hoped. i swung over the railing and carefully loweredmyself until i was standing on the ledge. my heels were out over the drop. the flooron the balcony was about chest-high, and i was looking into cressner's penthouse throughthe wrought-iron ornamental bars. he was standing inside the door, smoking, watching me theway a scientist watches a guinea pig to see what the latest injection will do.
'call,' i said, holding on to the railing. 'what?' 'call tony. i don't move until you do.' he went back into the living room - it lookedamazingly warm and safe and cosy - and picked up the phone. it was a worthless gesture,really. with the wind, i couldn't hear what he was saying. he put the phone down and returned.'taken care of, mr norris.' 'it better be.' 'goodbye, mr norris. i'll see you in a bit.. . perhaps.' it was time to do it. talking was done. ilet myself think of marcia one last time,
her light-brown hair, her wide grey eyes,her lovely body, and then put her out of my mind for good. no more looking down, either.it would have been too easy to get paralysed, looking down through that space. too easyto just freeze up until you lost your balance or just fainted from fear. it was time fortunnel vision. time to concentrate on nothing but left foot, right foot. i began to move to the right, holding on tothe balcony's railing as long as i could. it didn't take long to see i was going toneed all the tennis muscle my ankles had. with my heels beyond the edge, those tendonswould be taking all my weight. i got to the end of the balcony, and for amoment i didn't think i was going to be able
to let go of that safety. i forced myselfto do it. five inches, hell, that was plenty of room. if the ledge were only a foot offthe ground instead of 400 feet, you could breeze around this building in four minutesflat, i told myself. so just pretend it is. yeah, and if you fall 'from a ledge a footoff the ground, you just say rats, and try again. up here you get only one chance. i slid my right foot further and then broughtmy left foot next to it. i let go of the railing. i put my open hands up, allowing the palmsto rest against the rough stone of the apartment building. i caressed the stone. i could havekissed it. a gust of wind hit me, snapping the collarof my jacket against my face, making my body
sway op the ledge. my heart jumped into mythroat and stayed there until the wind had died down. a strong enough gust would havepeeled me right off my perch and sent me flying down into the night. and the wind would bestronger on the other side. i turned my head to the left, pressing mycheek against the stone. cressner was leaning over the balcony, watching me. 'enjoying yourself?' he asked affably. he was wearing a brown camel's-hair overcoat. 'i thought you didn't have a coat,' i said. 'i lied,' he answered equably. 'i lie abouta lot of things.'
'what's that supposed to mean?' 'nothing . . . nothing at all. or perhapsit does mean something. a little psychological warfare, eh, mr norris? i should tell younot to linger overlong. the ankles grow tired, and if they should give way . . .' he tookan apple out of his pocket, bit into it, and then tossed it over the edge. there was nosound for a long time. then, a faint and sickening plop. cressner chuckled. he had broken my concentration, and i couldfeel panic nibbling at the edges of my mind with steel teeth. a torrent of terror wantedto rush in and drown me. i turned my head away from him and did deep-breathing, flushingthe panic away. i was looking at the lighted
bank sign, which now said: 8.46, time to saveat mutual! by the time the lighted numbers read 8.49,i felt that i had myself under control again. i think cressner must have decided i'd frozen,and i heard a sardonic patter of applause when i began to shuffle towards the cornerof the building again. i began to feel the cold. the lake had whettedthe edge of the wind; its clammy dampness bit at my skin like an auger. my thin jacketbillowed out behind me as i shuffled along. i moved slowly, cold or not. if i was goingto do this, i would have to do it slowly and deliberately. if i rushed, i would fall. the bank clock read 8.52 when i reached thecorner. it didn't appear to be a problem - the
ledge went right around, making a square corner- but my right hand told me that there was a crosswind. if i got caught leaning the wrongway, i would take a long ride very quickly. i waited for the wind to drop, but for a longtime it refused to, almost as though it were cressner's willing ally. it slapped againstme with vicious, invisible fingers, praying and poking and tickling. at last, after aparticularly strong gust had made me rock on my toes, i knew that i could wait for everand the wind would never drop all the way off. so the next time it sank a little, i slippedmy right foot around and, clutching both walls with my hands, made the turn. the crosswindpushed me two ways at once, and i tottered.
for a second i was sickeningly sure that cressnerhad won his wager. then i slid a step further along and pressed myself tightly against thewall, a held breath slipping out of my dry throat.
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