Night Shift Page 15

  "And always you'd be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a laugh right over your face and a breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your throat."

  Billings was pallid and trembling.

  "So I moved him. I knew it would go for him, see. Because he was weaker. And it did. That very first night he screamed in the middle of the night and finally, when I got up the cojones to go in, he was standing up in bed and screaming. The boogeyman, Daddy . . . boogeyman . . . wanna go wif Daddy, go wif Daddy.'" Billings' voice had become a high treble, like a child's. His eyes seemed to fill his entire face; he almost seemed to shrink on the couch.

  "But I couldn't," the childish breaking treble continued, "I couldn't. And an hour later there was a scream. An awful, gurgling scream. And I knew how much I loved him because I ran in, I didn't even turn on the light, I ran, ran, ran, oh, Jesus God Mary, it had him; it was shaking him, shaking him just like a terrier shakes a piece of cloth and I could see something with awful slumped shoulders and a scarecrow head and I could smell something like a dead mouse in a pop bottle and I heard . . ." He trailed off, and then his voice clicked back into an adult range. "I heard it when Andy's neck broke." Billings' voice was cool and dead. "It made a sound like ice cracking when you're skating on a country pond in winter."

  "Then what happened?"

  "Oh, I ran," Billings said in the same cool, dead voice. "I went to an all-night diner. How's that for complete cowardice? Ran to an all-night diner and drank six cups of coffee. Then I went home. It was already dawn. I called the police even

  before I went upstairs. He was lying on the floor and staring at me. Accusing me. A tiny bit of blood had run out of one ear. Only a drop, really. And the closet door was open--but just a crack."

  The voice stopped. Harper looked at the digital clock. Fifty minutes had passed.

  "Make an appointment with the nurse," he said. "In fact, several of them. Tuesdays and Thursdays?"

  "I only came to tell my story," Billings said. "To get it off my chest. I lied to the police, see? Told them the kid must have tried to get out of his crib in the night and . . . they swallowed it. Course they did. That's just what it looked like. Accidental, like the others. But Rita knew. Rita . . . finally . . . knew . . ."

  He covered his eyes with his right arm and began to weep.

  "Mr. Billings, there is a great deal to talk about," Dr. Harper said after a pause. "I believe we can remove some of the guilt you've been carrying, but first you have to want to get rid of it."

  "Don't you believe I do?" Billings cried, removing his arm from his eyes. They were red, raw, wounded. "Not yet," Harper said quietly. "Tuesdays and Thursdays?"

  After a long silence, Billings muttered, "Goddamn shrink. All right. All right." "Make an appointment with the nurse, Mr. Billings. And have a good day."

  Billings laughed emptily and walked out of the office quickly, without looking back. The nurse's station was empty. A small sign on the desk blotter said: "Back in a Minute." Billings turned and went back into the office. "Doctor, your nurse is--"

  The room was empty.

  But the closet door was open. Just a crack.

  "So nice," the voice from the closet said. "So nice." The words sounded as if they might have come through a mouthful of rotted seaweed.

  Billings stood rooted to the spot as the closet door swung open. He dimly felt warmth at his crotch as he wet himself. "So nice," the boogeyman said as it shambled out.

  It still held its Dr. Harper mask in one rotted, spade-claw hand.

  GRAY MATTER

  They had been predicting a norther all week and along about Thursday we got it, a real screamer that piled up eight inches by four in the afternoon and showed no signs of slowing down. The usual five or six were gathered around the Reliable in Henry's Nite-Owl, which is the only little store on this side of Bangor that stays open right around the clock.

  Henry don't do a huge business--mostly, it amounts to selling the college kids their beer and wine--but he gets by and it's a place for us old duffers on Social Security to get together and talk about who's died lately and how the world's going to hell.

  This afternoon Henry was at the counter; Bill Pelham, Bertie Connors, Carl Littlefield, and me was tipped up by the stove. Outside, not a car was moving on Ohio Street, and the plows was having hard going. The wind was socking drifts across that looked like the backbone on a dinosaur.

  Henry'd only had three customers all afternoon--that is, if you want to count in blind Eddie. Eddie's about seventy, and he ain't completely blind. Runs into things, mostly. He comes in once or twice a week and sticks a loaf of bread under his coat and walks out with an expression on his face like: there, you stupid sonsabitches, fooled you again

  Bertie once asked Henry why he never put a stop to it.

  "I'll tell you," Henry said. "A few years back the Air Force wanted twenty million dollars to rig up a flyin' model of an airplane they had planned out. Well, it cost them seventy-five million and then the damn thing wouldn't fly. That happened ten years ago, when blind Eddie and myself were considerably younger, and I voted for the woman who sponsored that bill. Blind Eddie voted against her. And since then I've been buyin' his bread,"

  Bertie didn't look like he quite followed all of that, but he sat back to muse over it.

  Now the door opened again, letting in a blast of the cold gray air outside, and a young kid came in, stamping snow off his boots. I placed him after a second. He was Richie Grenadine's kid, and he looked like he'd just kissed the wrong end of the baby. His Adam's apple was going up and down and his face was the color of old oilcloth.

  "Mr. Parmalee," he says to Henry, his eyeballs rolling around in his head like ball bearings, "you got to come. You got to take him his beer and come. I can't stand to go back there. I'm scared."

  "Now slow down," Henry says, taking off his white butcher's apron and coming around the counter. "What's the matter? Your dad been on a drunk?"

  I realized when he said that that Richie hadn't been in for quite some time. Usually he'd be by once a day to pick up a case of whatever beer was going cheapest at that time, a big fat man with jowls like pork butts and ham-hock arms. Richie always was a pig about his beer, but he handled it okay when he was working at the sawmill out in Clifton. Then something happened --a pulper piled a bad load, or maybe Richie just made it out that way--and Richie was off work, free an' easy, with the sawmill company paying him compensation. Something in his back. Anyway, he got awful fat. He hadn't been in lately, although once in a while I'd seen his boy come in for Richie's nightly case. Nice enough boy. Henry sold him the beer, for he knew it was only the boy doing as his father said.

  "He's been on a drunk," the boy was saying now, "but that ain't the trouble. It's . . . it's . . . oh Lord, it's awful!"

  Henry saw he was going to bawl, so he says real quick; "Carl, will you watch things for a minute?" "Sure."

  "Now, Timmy, you come back into the stockroom and tell me what's what."

  He led the boy away, and Carl went around behind the counter and sat on Henry's stool. No one said anything for quite a while. We could hear 'em back there, Henry's deep, slow voice and then Timmy Grenadine's high one, speaking very fast. Then the boy commenced to cry, and Bill Pelham cleared his throat and started filling up his pipe.

  "I ain't seen Richie for a couple months," I said. Bill grunted. "No loss."

  "He was in . . . oh, near the end of October," Carl said. "Near Halloween. Bought a case of Schlitz beer. He was gettin' awful meaty."

  There wasn't much more to say. The boy was still crying, but he was talking at the same time. Outside the wind kept on whooping and yowling and the radio said we'd have another six inches or so by morning. It was mid-January and it made me wonder if anyone had seen Richie since October--besides his boy, that is.

  The talking went on for quite a while, but finally Henry and the boy came back out. The boy had taken his coat off, but
Henry had put his on. The boy was kinda hitching in his chest the way you do when the worst is past, but his eyes was red and when he glanced at you, he'd look down at the floor.

  Henry looked worried. "I thought I'd send Timmy here upstairs an' have my wife cook him up a toasted cheese or somethin'. Maybe a couple of you fellas'd like to go around to Richie's place with me. Timmy says he wants some beer. He gave me the money." He tried to smile, but it was a pretty sick affair and he soon gave up.

  "Sure," Bertie says. "What kind of beer? I'll go fetch her."

  "Get Harrow's Supreme," Henry said. "We got some cut-down boxes back there."

  I got up, too. It would have to be Bertie and me. Carl's arthritis gets something awful on days like this, and Billy Pelham don't have much use of his right arm anymore.

  Bertie got four six-packs of Harrow's and I packed them into a box while Henry took the boy upstairs to the apartment, overhead.

  Well, he straightened that out with his missus and came back down, looking over his shoulder once to make sure the upstairs door was closed. Billy spoke up, fairly busting: "What's up? Has Richie been workin' the kid over?"

  "No," Henry said. "I'd just as soon not say anything just yet. It'd sound crazy. I will show you somethin', though. The money Timmy had to pay for the beer with." He shed four dollar bills out of his pocket, holding them by the corner, and I don't blame him. They was all covered with a gray, slimy stuff that looked like the scum on top of bad preserves. He laid them down on the counter with a funny smile and said to Carl; "Don't let anybody touch 'em. Not if what the kid says is even half right!"

  And he went around to the sink by the meat counter and washed his hands.

  I got up, put on my pea coat and scarf and buttoned up. It was no good taking a car; Richie lived in an apartment building down on Curve Street, which is as close to straight up an' down as the law allows, and it's the last place the plows touch.

  As we were going out, Bill Pelham called after us: "Watch out, now."

  Henry just nodded and put the case of Harrow's on the little handcart he keeps by the door, and out we trundled.

  The wind hit us like a sawblade, and right away I pulled my scarf up over my ears. We paused in the doorway just for a second while Bertie pulled on his gloves. He had a pained sort of a wince on his face, and I knew how he felt. It's all well for younger fellows to go out skiing all day and running those goddamn wasp-wing snowmobiles half the night, but when you get up over seventy without an oil change, you feel that northeast wind around your heart.

  "I don't want to scare you boys," Henry said, with that queer, sort of revolted smile still on his mouth, "but I'm goin' to show you this all the same. And I'm goin' to tell you what the boy told me while we walk up there . . . because I want you to know, you see!"

  And he pulled a .45-caliber hogleg out of his coat pocket--the pistol he'd kept loaded and ready under the counter ever since he went to twenty-four hours a day back in 1958. I don't know where he got it, but I do know the one time he flashed it at a stickup guy, the fella just turned around and bolted right out the door. Henry was a cool one, all right. I saw him throw out a college kid that came in one time and gave him a hard time about cashing a check. That kid walked away like his ass was on sideways and he had to crap.

  Well, I only tell you that because Henry wanted Bertie and me to know he meant business, and we did, too.

  So we set out, bent into the wind like washerwomen, Henry trundling that cart and telling us what the boy had said. The wind was trying to rip the words away before we could hear 'em, but we got most of it--more'n we wanted to. I was damn glad Henry had his Frenchman's pecker stowed away in his coat pocket.

  The kid said it must have been the beer--you know how you can get a bad can every now and again. Flat or smelly or green as the peestains in an Irishman's underwear. A fella once told me that all it takes is a tiny hole to let in bacteria that'll do some damn strange things. The hole can be so small that the beer won't hardly dribble out, but the bacteria can get in. And beer's good food for some of those bugs.

  Anyway, the kid said Richie brought back a case of Golden Light just like always that night in October and sat down to polish it off while Timmy did his homework.

  Timmy was just about ready for bed when he hears Richie say, "Christ Jesus, that ain't right." And Timmy says, "What's that, Pop?"

  "That beer," Richie says. "God, that's the worst taste I ever had in my mouth."

  Most people would wonder why in the name of God he drank it if it tasted so bad, but then, most people have never seen Richie Grenadine go to his beer. I was down in Wally's Spa one afternoon, and I saw him win the goddamndest bet. He bet a fella he could drink twenty two-bit glasses of beer in one minute. Nobody local would take him up, but this salesman from Montpelier laid down a twenty-dollar bill and Richie covered him. He drank all twenty with seven seconds to spare-- although when he walked out he was more'n three sails into the wind. So I expect Richie had most of that bad can in his gut before his brain could warn him.

  "I'm gonna puke," Richie says. "Look out!"

  But by the time he got to the head it had passed off, and that was the end of it. The boy said he smelt the can, and it smelt like something crawled in there and died. There was a little gray dribble around the top, too.

  Two days later the boy comes home from school and there's Richie sitting in front of the TV and watching the afternoon tearjerkers with every goddamn shade in the place pulled down.

  "What's up?" Timmy asks, for Richie don't hardly ever roll in before nine. "I'm watchin' the TV," Richie says. "I didn't seem to want to go out today."

  Timmy turned on the light over the sink, and Richie yelled at him: "And turn off that friggin' light!"

  So Timmy did, not asking how he's gonna do his homework in the dark. When Richie's in that mood, you don't ask him nothing.

  "An' go out an' get me a case," Richie says. "Money's on the table."

  When the kid gets back, his dad's still sitting in the dark, only now it's dark outside, too. And the TV's off. The kid starts getting the creeps--well, who wouldn't? Nothing but a dark flat and your daddy setting in the corner like a big lump.

  So he puts the beer on the table, knowing that Richie don't like it so cold it spikes his forehead, and when he gets close to his old man he starts to notice a kind of rotten smell, like an old cheese someone left standing on the counter over the weekend. He don't say shit or go blind, though, as the old man was never what you'd call a cleanly soul. Instead he goes into his room and shuts the door and does his homework, and after a while he hears the TV start to go and Richie's popping the top in his first of the evening.

  And for two weeks or so, that's the way things went. The kid got up in the morning and went to school an' when he got home Richie'd be in front of the television, and beer money on the table.

  The flat was smelling ranker and ranker, too. Richie wouldn't have the shades up at all, and about the middle of November he made Timmy stop studying in his room. Said he couldn't abide the light under the door. So Timmy started going down the block to a friend's house after getting his dad the beer.

  Then one day when Timmy came home from school--it was four o'clock and pretty near dark already--Richie says, "Turn on the light."

  The kid turns on the light over the sink, and damn if Richie ain't all wrapped up in a blanket.

  "Look," Richie says, and one hand creeps out from under the blanket. Only it ain't a hand at all. Something gray, is all the kid could tell Henry. Didn't look like a hand at all. Just a gray lump.

  Well, Timmy Grenadine was scared bad. He says, "Pop, what's happening to you?" And Richie says, "I dunno. But it don't hurt. It feels . . . kinda nice."

  So, Timmy says, "I'm gonna call Dr. Westphail."

  And the blanket starts to tremble all over, like something awful was shaking--all over--under there. And Richie says, "Don't you dare. If you do I'll touch ya and you'll end up just like this." And he slides the blanket down over
his face for just a minute.

  By then we were up to the corner of Harlow and Curve Street, and I was even colder than the temperature had been on Henry's Orange Crush thermometer when we came out. A person doesn't hardly want to believe such things, and yet there's still strange things in the world.

  I once knew a fella named George Kelso, who worked for the Bangor Public Works Department. He spent fifteen years fixing water mains and mending electricity cables and all that, an' then one day he just up an' quit, not two years before his retirement. Frankie Haldeman, who knew him, said George went down into a sewer pipe on Essex laughing and joking just like always and came up fifteen minutes later with his hair just as white as snow and his eyes staring like he just looked through a window into hell. He walked straight down to the BPW garage and punched his clock and went down to Wally's Spa and started drinking. It killed him two years later. Frankie said he tried to talk to him about it and George said something one time, and that was when he was pretty well blotto. Turned around on his stool, George did, an' asked Frankie Haldeman if he'd ever seen a spider as big as a good-sized dog setting in a web full of kitties an' such all wrapped up in silk thread. Well, what could he say to that? I'm not saying there's any truth in it, but I am saying that there's things in the corners of the world that would drive a man insane to look 'em right in the face.