The Axman Cometh Page 7

  "Captain, but why don't you call me Autry?"

  "That's like Gene, right?"

  He hums the first few bars of "Back in the Saddle Again," and they both laugh.

  "Same spelling, even if I can't carry a tune. Autry's an old family name. We could be distantly related. But I'm from Rhode Island, not Tioga, Texas."

  "No kidding," Shannon says, bustling around, picking up flashlight batteries, tape, twine, safety goggles, a hard hat, a hammer, a chisel, and four different kinds of nails, including a quarter-pound of four-inch-long cement nails which she pours into the scoop of an old-fashioned scale on the counter. "You're the first person I've met who's from Rhode Island."

  "There aren't all that many of us."

  "The ax handles are over there in that barrel. You should pick out a couple you like the feel of."

  "Thanks."

  "What do you think of Fort Riley?"

  "I like it a lot better than where I was last year. Ankara, Turkey."

  "You certainly do get around. I guess your family's used to all that traveling."

  "I'm not married," Autry Smith says, pulling a hickory ax handle from the barrel and running his fingers along the smoothed grain. "My father was a major general, so I was an army brat. I've seen what the life does to women. I won't get married until I can settle down, earn a living at what I really like to do."

  "What would that be?"

  "I'm a composer."

  "Really? What kind of music?"

  "Serious music."

  "What instruments do you play?"

  "Piano, flute, cello."

  "Where'd you find time to learn all that?"

  "I never had to work very hard. When I wanted to learn an instrument, I just—picked it up. It's as natural as breathing to me. So is composing."

  "That's how I learned to draw. Just did it. I've never had lessons."

  "Oh, you're an artist."

  "Well, I like to think I am."

  Autry Smith chooses a second ax handle, glances toward the office in back where Dab can be seen indistinctly, swimmingly, behind the pebbled glass, as if it is one side of an aquarium. He returns to where Shannon is checking off items on his list and puts the handles down on the counter.

  "We seem to have a lot in common."

  "I'd like to hear some of your music."

  "So would I. I've never heard any of it the way it should be played; that would require a full symphony orchestra. The London Philharmonic would be ideal." He shrugs, smiling. "I like the Cleveland Symphony too, since Szell took over. But so far, no one's shown much interest in what I send them."

  "It'll happen."

  "I know it will. I just have to be patient, and confident of my talent. Get through the dry spells. Well, that does it for me, Shannon, did you find everything on the list?"

  "I'm sorry we don't have the three- hundred-pound test fishing line. Not much call for it around here. A five-pound bass down at the reservoir is big news."

  "That's okay."

  "Let's see—including the ax handles, comes to thirty-six eighteen, with tax."

  Autry Smith takes four tens from a money clip with Uncle Sam's eagle embossed on it and hands them to Shannon, picks up the shopping list from the counter, refolds it and places it in one of his shirt pockets. She wonders, fleetingly, why he doesn't just throw away the torn piece of notebook paper; but some people are born savers.

  "Do you have a big family, Shannon?"

  "Well, there's my mom and Dab, which is short for Dabney, and I have two brothers. Allen Ray's going in the service next month, so it'll just be Chap and me at home then. Chap's twelve. We fight all the time, but he's about the best buddy I've got right now." She rings up the sale and takes the change from the drawer of the cash register. "Here you are. Need a hand getting your stuff outside?"

  "No. Nice meeting you, Shannon. I hope your party's a big success. Friday night, huh? Expecting a lot of people?"

  "At least a hundred. We're doing a cook- out in the backyard, and I've got a band—it's just some kids from the college, call themselves the Telstars, but they're pretty good. The whole neighborhood'll be there, except maybe the Wurzheimers."

  "What's their problem?"

  "Oh. I don't know exactly, some sort of feud that goes back to before I was born."

  "Well, so long," he says, picking up the brown paper sack, carrying the ax handles in his other hand. Someone else has come into the hardware store, a seventyish woman wearing baggy carpenter's overalls. Autry Smith smiles, crow's feet springing up at the corners of his slightly hooded eyes, tips the rolled brim of his Stetson a little lower over those eyes with the end of an ax handle and goes out the door as the woman in the carpenter's overalls calls to Dab in the back room.

  "I hope you're not going to tell me I got to wait another day for my greenhouse sashes, Dabney Hill!';

  "They came in this mornin', Myrna. Drive your pathetic old truck 'round to the back and I'll load 'em for you right this minute."

  "How's the world treating you, Shannon?" She's a feisty little woman with a bad overbite, which causes her to spray her s's around like Daffy Duck.

  "Fine, Mrs. Rockett. That Army man who was just in here, he's from Rhode Island." Shannon always got A's in geography. There is a magic in names and places for her, that prompted her to name the late family hound "Borneo" when she was seven. Some day, renowned as an artist, she will travel to all those places in the National Geographic that have caught her fancy.

  "Will wonders never cease?" Mrs. Rockett hands Shannon her truck keys. "Darlin', would you mind so awfully doing me the favor? It's double-parked directly out front. I just got to get off my dogs a minute, they're killing me."

  "No, problem, Mrs. Rockett."

  As she reaches the sidewalk Shannon catches sight of Autry Smith driving by in his station wagon. Now he's wearing sunglasses but he's taken his hat off. In spite of his haircut, he's a very good-looking mam. He honks and she waves, thinking wistfully that she wouldn't mind so much being an army wife if you got to do all that traveling. Ankara, Turkey. Wasn't there an article on Turkey in the Geographic a few months ago, the splendors of Constantinople? Last night she read about Lapland. With faraway lands spinning through her mind she gets into Mrs. Rockett's truck and puts the key into the ignition. But the truck won't start, it just grinds sluggishly underfoot. Exasperated, Shannon sits back and looks around the familiar street near downtown Emerson, Kansas, and wonders if her time will ever come.

  "What's the matter? Can't you get it started? Look, I'm in a hurry, it's an emergency!"

  (Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street, New York City. The cold rain is coming down in monsoon quantities now and the battered old cab has stalled in the intersection after the driver was forced to brake for some fool peddling through the rain on his bicycle. The driver wears a white turban that is none too clean, like cast-off bandages, and English is not his native tongue. He shrugs and waves his hands. "Eempossible!" he says, of the junkpile he has been issued to drive.)

  "We can't just sit here," Donald Carnes says anxiously, seeing only a smear of lights through the windows, which are thickly awash in the downpour. "Somebody's going to hit us. You ought to get out and push us over to the curb."

  "Eempossible!" the driver says, with a cutthroat's glare at the back seat, and Don is thankful for the thickness of the lucite partition, filled with holes like Swiss cheese but more neatly arranged, that separates them. He's not sure where they are, being unable to read a street sign. A bus looms, stops a hair's breadth from the side of the cab where he is sitting, and Don quickly slides to the other side of the bumpy seat, painfully engaging a spring half-sprouted from the stuffing like some evil growing thing. Horns. It's much too warm in the cab, at least the heater has been working, overcompensating for other deficiencies all the way down from Columbus and 79th where, fifteen minutes ago, he counted himseif lucky finding an empty. The heat, coming after five Papa dobles and what he now ascribes to the effects of some sort of dru
g maliciously slipped into one of the drinks, perhaps by the scary Hemingway impersonator in Cabrera's bar, has him nauseated. Anxiety hasn't done him any good, either. He had not looked forward to a particularly peaceful evening, trying to sort out with Shannon at least a few of the difficulties that had aborted their wedding plans five months ago (her difficulties, not his), but now he seems to be in a crisis situation of which he has only a dim understanding, and just about everything is out of his control: Shannon perhaps trapped in an elevator, the possibility of fire (where had that threat come from?), the heavy rain, the stalled taxi—

  "Eempossible," The driver says, in a resigned tone of voice. He turns on the ceiling light in the cab and takes a well-thumbed little book from a pocket of his shirt. He begins turning pages imprinted in Arabic or something, as if searching for inspiration or a temporary suspension from earthly cares. Don hears sirens, the deep-throated reptilian blatting of enormous trucks trying to weave through the traffic maze. Emergency! A woman is about to be murdered in a stuck elevator! Hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He reaches for his wallet, extracts a ten-dollar bill and puts it in the tray centered in the lucite shield.

  "I'm going to walk from here," he says, and is ignored. He turns up his trenchcoat collar, puts on his waterproof bogtrotter's hat and steps out into the slashing rain, confronting a solid two blocks of unmoving traffic, a many-eyed beast of manic displeasure. At the curb and below the level of the clogged street, protected by a yellow tent over a deep square shaft carved through thicknesses of asphalt and rock, the hard hats of workmen can be seen in clouds of saffron steam. Don is momentarily disoriented, not remembering which way is downtown or how to proceed to the Knightsbridge Publishing Company. He splashes through pools of water on the sidewalk to a newsstand, glancing at the face of the proprietor inside his toolshed-size sanctuary, seeing the whites of eyes beneath lids like twisted rubber bands, but no pupils; yet the blind man, anonymous in his muffler and old-world cap, seems to know that Don is passing.

  "Time!"

  "What?" Don says, hesitating as if addressed, although with so many horns blowing and the fire apparatus edging closer, somehow finding passage through the clutter of other vehicles on Eighth Avenue, it is difficult to hear anything. The old man's face, pale and rugged as a drip-formed stalactite, is turned toward him, and there is a glow in the vacant-looking eyes, perhaps reflections from the little electric heater on an isolated shelf inside the newsstand.

  "Getcher time?"

  Don removes his glasses to clean the lenses with a handkerchief and wipes rainwater from his eyelashes; he takes a step back

  toward the box. "Are you speaking to me? I don't under—"

  "Time! Time!" the newsie says with a stern upraised finger, and Don lifts his eyes, to a row of magazines under the roof, diagonally secured to a line of wire by wooden clothespins. They are all Time magazines, and it is his own face Don sees, or thinks he sees, under the heading "Man of the Year."

  Disbelieving, he moves closer, fascinated by the portrait, crudely drawn but recognizable: the chubby cheeks, high forehead, round, horn-rimmed glasses—in the light from a Nedick's window across the sidewalk he can be certain now: it is Shannon's work. But it's only October; doesn't Time announce the Man of the Year in their last issue of—

  The delayed shock starts somewhere between his shoulder blades and travels with numbing, forked velocity to the brain, exploding in a fireball across the frontal lobes. He tastes the aftermath of electricity in all the fillings of his teeth and staggers, dumb to his surroundings like a newborn, into the path of a couple of black men who, charitably, prevent him from falling on his face. "Hey, m'man; where you at?" Don seizes one of them by the wide lapels of his rain-slick leather jacket "Look. There. See? Who is it? Is it my face?"

  "Hmra. Well. Sure enough is. 'Man of the Year.' Congratulations. Come as a surprise to you, or something? What did you do, make a lasting contribution to world peace? Looks like you been celebratin' too hard."

  "Come on, man," the other one grumbles, unimpressed. "If there's been a world peace lately, I ain't heard nothin' about it."

  They leave Don leaning against the side of the newsstand, cut across Eighth and the paralyzed body of traffic to Madison Square Garden. Very slowly he edges around to the front of the newsstand and stares into the sightless eyes of the man inside. The blind man's mouth opens in what may be an expression of mirth but which reminds Don unpleasantly of the maw of a rattlesnake being milked of venom. The newsie holds out a copy of the "Man of the Year" issue and Don snatches the magazine, rolls it, thrusts it into a pocket of his trenchcoat. He runs down Eighth Avenue, dodging umbrellas, and as he reaches the corner of 32nd looks back.

  Where the newsstand was he sees a growing mushroom of flame and smoke, now two stories high, now three. But the pedestrians on the sidewalk go plodding by in pelting rain as if it is nothing unusual, as if they are totally unaware that something is burning furiously only a few feet away from them.

  Don's heart lurches, and then it's his stomach, and he leans over a wire trash basket as everything he's had to eat and drink today comes out in a lurid stream.

  There are people who lose their minds, and people who will never lose their minds, he hears himself plead. To a ghost in a bar.

  (and I'm one of them)

  When the retching and cramping of stomach muscles eases he straightens up, using his sodden handkerchief to wipe his lips. He licks at a trickle of rainwater with a vomit-seared tongue, looking around him blankly at the other people in the rain, in doorways, at discarded flowers in a soaked cardboard carton at the curb, flowers waiting for a funeral to come around. The newsstand has vanished, the fire is out, leaving, perhaps, only a small scorched place on the sidewalk. He is not about to go back to see. Slowly he pulls the squashed Time from his raincoat pocket; rain has stuck some of the pages together. He crosses the sidewalk to a doorway, already occupied. Old men with stubble who smoke and say nothing. But they make room for him. He slumps down sobbing and peels his way through the magazine to the front cover and is not surprised to see his face is no longer there.

  What he sees is a white square with pink splotches as color bleeds through, enclosed by a black border.

  Inside the border, these words:

  THE AXMAN COMETH

  On another fair evening in Emerson, Kansas, creeping up on full dark with the moon, in its late phase, just rising above the trees that line West Homestead, he hears the backbeat of the drummer a good three blocks before he gets there. Already there is no place to park on either side of the street. Judging from the turnout, Dabney Hill's surprise fiftieth birthday party is a smash success.

  He changes his grip on the handle of the heavy square package wrapped in peppermint-striped paper, the package he has been carrying since he left his car half a mile away in a location where it is not likely to attract attention for a couple of days. A car comes down the street, slowly, going in his direction. A dog barks at him from a porch. An old man in his undershirt sits rocking, listening to the radio. A couple of girls are sitting on the front bumper of an old Packard at the curb, gossiping in ecstatic whispers. They glance at him and the birthday present he is carrying and pay no more attention. The rock-and-roll band in the backyard of 298 West Homestead is pounding out a version of "Tutti Fruiti" and he winces. A smoke-colored cat battles moths under a misty street light at the intersection of West Homestead and—he checks the name of the cross street on the white concrete pylon—Columbia Avenue.

  He stands there for a few moments, looking down the long block, studying the homes. Fourteen in all. Architecturally it's a mixed neighborhood: one, two, even three- story houses, some set close to the street, some farther back on little terraces. There are turn-of-the-century frame houses with deep front and side porches, gambrels, turrets, paladian windows, a touch of stained glass, television aerials strapped to the chimneys;

  California-style brick or stucco bungalows dating from the thirties; big boxy house
s of no distinction. Most of these are three stories, with screened front porches and dormer windows all around. There isn't much to separate the houses: a couple of formal hedges along driveways, some post-and-wire fences that probably serve to train climbing roses or trumpet vine. The shade trees are mostly cottonwoods, although a few elm trees remain and look healthy. There's a black walnut or two, and plenty of mulberries: the sidewalks are darkly stained from their maturing fruit.

  The smoke-toned cat gives up the moth game and looks at him, eyes picking up some glassy red from the lights of another car behind him. He starts walking again, slowly. The car, an old bottle-green Hudson, stops halfway down the block and a couple of elderly women help each other out: one needs two canes to get around. They have birthday presents with them. They go up a driveway between two houses, one of them saying, "I don't know how much of that I can take," no doubt referring to the rock-and-roll band.

  He pauses again, looking over the Hill house. One of the big boxy types, but there's no screen on the front porch, just some trellis with pale green vines growing on it on either side of the steps; from the sidewalk, looking up toward the house, which is elevated by perhaps six feet but not on a defined terrace, four front windows on the first floor are visible; but he can't tell much about the rooms inside. The front door, with a tall oval of clear glass in it, is standing half open. From the perspective of the sidewalk or the street no one can be seen unless he or she is standing directly in front of the door. The porch lighting is meager: a couple of yellow bug-repellant bulbs in small fixtures.

  He likes all he has seen so far; he likes it very much.

  Upstairs, over the porch roof, which is slanted to either side of the house, are five more windows, these with shades, and two dormer windows jutting from the roofline above those of the second story—they are the only windows in the house that are dark. Attic, he presumes, with a generous amount of space judging from the height of the roof. And there appears to be a full solidly constructed cellar, to be expected in this cyclone- conscious part of the country.