Always oblique, cautious in their dealings, hyperalert to the intrusions of authority and their hated rivals, and circling them like watchful wolves—their own instinctive caution easily spooked—the Zorrillas did not deliver the roofies to my house. As far as I could tell, they did not approach the house. I knew they’d keep their word, but I didn’t know how they’d get the drug to me. That made me hyperalert, too, my nerves quickened by suspense, in my impatience to murder Frank.
Then one afternoon (rainy, bleak, the mud season in Littleford), I was walking to Littleford Square for a cup of coffee at Verna’s. I had just turned into Main Street out of Gully Lane, when a man in a black hoodie drew abreast of me. I let out an involuntary squawk of fright as he pressed an envelope into my hand and said in a gnawing nasal accent, “From your friends.”
I was ashamed of my unmanly outburst, but before I could recover he was down the road. He must have been watching the house from a distance. Now, walking fast, he was dissolved by the cold flinty rain. But I had the roofies, and in that same envelope some money, a brick of Benjamins I hadn’t asked for.
Good news, I e-mailed Frank. My old friend Mel Yurick is coming to town. He wants to meet you. I see an opportunity.
The other weakness of snobs—how predictable, how punctual, how easily flattered and fooled.
It’s a private visit. He doesn’t want to be seen in public. He’s coming to the house for lunch. But Victor and Amala need to be somewhere else.
A person does exactly what you want them to and you think, This is pathetic. You despise them for agreeing so readily to walk into your trap; their willingness to be dead meat is the proof they deserve to die. I named a day. I told Victor and Amala they had to be out of the house that afternoon.
Victor said, “It’s okay, Cal. My dad already told me. We’ll catch a movie.”
Months had passed with no progress, but this was a solution. Frank knew that my old friend Melvin Yurick was worth billions, a man who had fulfilled Frank’s boyhood ambition—I want to be so rich I can shit money. Though Yurick was a Littleford man, he was never seen in the flesh. His philanthropy was evident all over the town, yet there was a sort of contempt in his giving money, while never showing up. This frustrated people like Frank, who thought—as schemers do with the very wealthy—What can he do for me?
On the appointed day of the lunch, I made sure Victor and Amala had left for their movie; then I set out drinks and a teapot and waited for Frank.
I had not seen him since Mother’s funeral, months ago. In the intervening time he’d become a monster in my mind, beady-eyed, the whopper jaw, the piratical snarl, a calculating pest, bombarding me with messages and bills and invoices, demands I could not possibly meet, threats that paralyzed me. The burden he’d imposed on me made him seem hideous and huge, stinking with aggression.
And so when he appeared on the porch—he didn’t knock, he swung the door open and swept in (after all, he claimed this as his house)—I was startled to see a smiling man in a well-cut pin-striped suit, red suspenders, stylish horn-rimmed glasses, yellow tie, and a face that was far less grotesque than the one in my memory. He was polished again, with a black briefcase, confident, almost handsome—his fine clothes overcoming the crookedness of his palsied face. He made me feel ferretlike and shabby and conspiratorial.
He put down his briefcase and approached me, as though to offer a hug, then paused, and stepped back, and beheld me, sighing.
“Fidge—aren’t you going to put on a tie?”
“It’s a casual visit. Just a simple lunch.”
“Melvin Yurick,” he said in a blaming way, but smiled, straightening the knot in his tie, as though concluding that his looking smart, in contrast to my scruffiness, would be to his advantage in impressing Yurick.
He sat in Mother’s wing chair and opened his briefcase and brought out a folder, opening it to a stack of newspaper clippings, mentions of Yurick in the Littleford Standard, his success in the Science Fair, his American Legion medal, his Eagle Scout ceremony, as well as features related to his local philanthropy, and items about his parents’ big birthdays and anniversaries. Frank fingered them, shuffling them proudly, showing me how he’d laminated them in plastic.
“Mementos, for the man who has everything, except these overlooked rarities.” He said this as he rose in his seat, as though expecting to see a limo arriving.
“It’s still early,” I said. “You want tea? How about an aperitif?”
“Soft drink,” Frank said, and glancing at the side table, “Ma’s teapot. Wedgwood. That thing’s worth something.”
Rising again slightly, elevating himself to peer out the window again, a slant of light fell on his face, and I saw that what I’d taken to be a shadow or a food smear on his upper lip was a pencil mustache. That, and his red suspenders and his low zippered boots, made him look dandified. I told myself that his trying so hard to impress Yurick revealed his insecurity—or was I justifying my grubby clothes in thinking this?
Frank was dressed as though for a job interview. But, thrown by his stylishness, I found myself—against my will—revising my opinion of him. I needed him nasty, looking like a villain. His silkiness, his way of seeming unpindownable, I decided was sinister, his elegant clothes making him look manipulative. But rather than hate him for it I pitied him. His effort in dressing up to meet Mel Yurick made him pathetic and obvious and needy.
It pleased me that his mustache was a mistake, his lopsided face twisted its pencil line like a cocked eyebrow and exaggerated the crookedness of his mouth.
“Soft drink, right,” I said and went to the ornate bar cart Mother called “the drinks trolley.” I had ground the roofies to powder and mounded it covertly in a tiny dish. With my back turned I spooned some of this white dust into Frank’s drink and stirred it.
“Cheers,” I said, lifting my glass.
“Cheers.” He raised his glass but did not drink.
Wagging his glass, Frank began to walk around the room, reminiscing, tapping a photograph framed on the wall, a certain lamp, a souvenir dish.
“They were a handsome couple,” he said of the photograph, Mother and Dad at a Littleford fete in summertime, Mother in a white dress, Dad in a panama hat. “Dad was always a little too dressy, but that was to impress his clients.” He fingered the fringes of the lampshade and poked the lamp. “This is actually a Japanese bell, mounted with an electric socket. There’s no clapper inside. You’re meant to strike it with a kind of ritual hammer.”
I did not remind him that I’d found the lamp in an antique shop and given it to Mother for Christmas, with this explanation.
Frank raised his glass to his lips, but distracted by the souvenir dish on the mantelpiece, he did not drink.
“Niagara Falls—their honeymoon.” He tapped the rim of his glass against it. “They took a boat ride on The Maid of the Mist. Jesus, is Yurick always this late?”
“He hasn’t been here since we were in high school,” I said. “But don’t worry, he’ll show.”
Frank went to the window, using the back of his hand and his glass to nudge the curtains aside, looking for a limo.
“We were very close in high school,” I said. “He hasn’t forgotten that I was his friend. I never mocked him, like the others.”
Frank was one of the others, but he made no reply. He set his glass down on a side table.
“On second thought, I think I’ll have a whiskey.”
“Right,” I said, back at the bar cart. “It’s a good idea to fortify yourself. But those clippings you brought will please him.” I stirred a spoonful of roofie powder into his whiskey and poured a glass of whiskey for myself. “Let’s do shots, Frank.”
I clinked his glass with mine. Now he was forced to match me, swallow for swallow. He tilted his head back and opened his mouth and took a swig, some drops running out of the corner of his slanted mouth and glistening on his thin mustache, his lips quivering as he pursed them to swallow more.
“One more?”
“I’m good.” He lapped at his mustache. “Mel Yurick—great guy, but a klutz. I wonder if he remembers the time we were out hiking in the Fells. It was a cold day, so when we got to the Sheepfold we decided to start a fire. Yurick pulls out a hunting knife and begins hacking a branch and slices his hand.” Frank stopped and took a long noisy breath. “He’s bleeding like a stuck pig, so I untied my neckerchief and wrapped it . . .” Frank sighed, he glanced at his watch. He said, “Blood,” still looking at his watch. He grunted, “Rescued him.”
He sagged a little, seeming to deflate, pondering his watch, his head twitching, as though struggling to read the dial. He chewed a little, a gummy utterance, then sat heavily in the wing chair, dropping his shot glass onto the carpet.
For fifteen or twenty minutes, fascinated, I stared at him, saying nothing, awaiting the full effects of the roofie, smiling at how he’d again appropriated my story. Then he swayed, and before I could stop him he pitched forward into the bar cart, snatching it clumsily, tipping it, his full face hitting the bottles and glasses, falling on his twisted arms that became tangled and crushed in broken glass. He lay motionless, blinking, squirts of blood starting from points on his face.
“Feel funny,” he mumbled with a mouth full of saliva. I was unprepared for this and became frantic. I pulled him away from the mess.
Seeing how bloody he was, I ran to the kitchen and returned with a roll of paper towels and wiped the blood from his face and hands, picking shards of glass from his cuts—none of them deep, but there were many of them. The deepest one was next to his nose, an inch-long slice that revealed raw meat. I saw that this cut on his face was still seeping blood, and a bruise on his forehead was swollen and darkening where he’d knocked it against the cart. While I plucked the bits of glass from his hands, I lifted his right arm. His hand swung like a rag—he’d broken his wrist in the fall.
I found bandages in the bathroom cabinet but there was no point applying them until his bleeding stopped; so I put a cushion under his head and sat with him and blotted the blood. The mingled smells of whiskey and wine and vodka from the smashed bottles stank like a witches’ brew on the soaked carpet, stinging my eyes, and now I had Frank’s blood on my hands and my shirtsleeves.
Fearing that he might have wounds I couldn’t see, I got a pair of scissors from Amala’s knitting basket and sliced his sleeves, cutting away the whole suit coat from his body. Except for his broken wrist, now puffy, none of the wounds were very serious—there was no possibility of his bleeding to death. Within fifteen minutes or so, I’d stanched the blood and was able to apply gauze pads and bandages. I pressed a dressing to the deep cut next to his nose and held it in place with surgical tape that I crisscrossed over his face, securing the pad to his nose.
Unexpected, inconvenient, not part of my plan, but I’d attended to him on impulse—he had fallen because I’d given him roofies, he was lacerated by broken glass, he was bleeding. His wounds were messy and needed attention. He’d been helpless, he seemed to be unconscious. And so I’d acted. I went to the bathroom and washed the blood from my hands—and there was blood on my chin, too, where I’d touched it with my sticky fingers.
I looked at my face in the mirror, a smeared image of incompetence, and yelled, “You fuckup!”
When I returned to Frank, who was stretched out on the carpet among the broken bottles and glasses and the overturned drinks trolley, I knelt down next to him. His eyes were shut, but he was smiling, as though possessed by a cheerful dream.
I had resolved to kill him. My plan had been to steer him while he was semiconscious through the side door, to the driveway, where my car was parked, to tip him into the back seat, where he’d lie like a big grotesque doll, too misshapen to be human. The streetlamps flashing through the car as I passed them would illuminate this heavy, inconvenient bundle, something to be disposed of.
In my weeklong wait for the roofies, I’d rehearsed this, and made the necessary phone calls to prepare the way, how I’d drive north in the night as though through a dark tunnel, to the Maine coast I’d known long ago as a rock hunter, a place that became Frank’s inspiration for a holiday, the place where he’d met Frolic.
Frank was mine, I’d rejoice in his being comatose in the car. He had kept me captive—a greater punishment for a free spirit and a traveler than any I could think of. I had once thrived by going away, liberated myself through travel; but since my divorce and Mother’s passing Frank had found a way to subject me to the stupefaction and slow death of captivity. As his prisoner I was dying and my loss of vitality seemed to delight him and give him energy. But he was my prisoner now. I longed for him to wake up, so that I could remind him of that.
Pushed flat on the seat, a blanket thrown over him, no one at a tollbooth would see him. Through New Hampshire to the Maine state line, and onward to the coast road, tunneling through the late winter murk of Route One, to Thomaston, and a side road to the waiting skiff at Wheeler Bay, a world of granite lapped by cold water.
Unconscious—gaping mouth, green tongue, his shirt and tie stained by slobber—Frank would be unable to resist being dragged into the skiff, where he’d lie corpselike, twisted in the stern, as I shoved the boat into the moonlit rockweed that floated on the surface of the chuckling shore—a chilly night, but with little wind to stir up a chop.
Visible to the south, Eagle Island was small and humpbacked, thick with spruce trees, a cabin tucked at the corner of a granite ledge, above a pocket beach—my destination. I’d row across a moony sheet of water to a ramp of sand and gravel, between the bulge of two smooth-hewn boulders, like a pair of staring eyes, the sign that the island had once been a quarry.
Frank would begin to revive in the cold smack of sea air, would feel for the gunwale to steady himself as I stepped out of the skiff and pulled it above the tidemark.
“Where are we?”
“Eagle Island.”
“Fidge, what are we doing here?”
No memory of Littleford and the failed meeting with Mel Yurick, cold and frightened, hugging the blanket against his shoulders, as he lifted his legs out of the skiff, and staggered as he tried to stand.
“You’re my prisoner, Frank. You’re going to do what I tell you to do.”
“I’m freezing. I can’t see.”
“Never mind. You won’t be here long.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m going to kill you.”
He’d clutch his face and whimper, then turn and begin to run, but after five steps he’d trip against a fallen log and be on his knees when I stood over him, aiming my pistol into his eyes, dramatizing the threat by shining my flashlight on the muzzle, my finger on the trigger.
“Get up”—slashing my beam of light across the cabin—“We’re going there.”
“Don’t hurt me, please.”
Stumbling ahead of me, grunting in fear, he’d press himself against the door, until I unlatched it, thrusting himself inside when it swung open. As I lit a lantern and raised it to fill the cabin with light, he’d flee to a corner, whining, “What’s this all about, Fidge?”
“It’s about the money you say I owe you. Your name on the title deed of the house that is really all mine. Your threats to report me to the IRS.”
“I didn’t mean it—please, I’ll take my name off the deed. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Yes, of course you will.”
“Then can I go?”
“No. Like I said, I’m going to kill you.”
Howling, throwing himself at me, but too weak and dazed from the roofies, he’d fall, upsetting a chair, and lie on the rough planks of the floor, pillowing his head on his arm.
To frighten him further I’d lift the lantern to my face, to create a play of wicked shadows, like kids do at summer camp. “It doesn’t matter whether you sign. When you’re dead, the house will be all mine.”
“I’ll do anything, Fidge. You can’t kill me.”
“Yes, I can, but I want you to suffer first. You kept me captive out of pure spite. Now you’re my prisoner.”
He’d roll over and become doglike, scrambling on all fours past me and finally getting to his feet, staggering out of the cabin into the distortion of milky moonlight on the clumps of yew bushes, collapsing against them, moaning for help.
After a contemptuous glance from the doorway, I’d go inside and start a fire in the potbellied stove, soon warming my hands; then the door would open and Frank would appear, holding his arms high in surrender.
“Anything, Fidge. Name it.”
“Admit that you tried to cheat me. That you broke your word.”
“Yes, yes. I’ll make it up to you”—edging toward the warmth of the crackling stove, his arms still raised, his sleeves muddy from where he’d fallen, flecks of pine needles coating his face, his knees smudged, his bald scalp scratched, his side hair wild.
“There’s nothing you can do. You can’t make it right. You’ve done too much damage. You corrupted my son. You turned my wife against me. You bankrupted me.”
Feeling for his wallet, snatching at his pockets—“Money, Fidge. I’ll give you money.”
“Admit it—you’re a phony and a scammer.”
“I tried my best . . .”
“A phony and a scammer.”
“I’m a phony”—an eager voice, almost a screech—“I’m a scammer.”
“Say, ‘I deserve to die.’”
His face crumpled, clawing at his eyes with his fingers, he’d begin to cry, as I raised my pistol.
That was my plan, the way I imagined it. I’d bury him at the back of the island and bide my time until one morning, before dawn, I’d row ashore and flee, with the money from the Zorrillas. Frank’s body, covered with granite slabs, would never be found. The perfect crime.
But I was still in Tower House on Gully Lane, Frank twisted on the floor that was littered with broken glass, a white pad stained with leaked blood taped to his face, one hand bandaged like a mitten, the other slack and dark and claw-fingered from his broken wrist. I’d scissored his whole coat and half his shirt away, and so he lay half naked in a mass of rags. Emitting bubbly snores, his tongue thick in his half-open mouth, he’d been asleep over an hour. His smile had softened, he was wounded, but he didn’t look defeated.
Appalled by the mess, I made an attempt to clean it up, but there was so much of it—stains and spikes of glass and the splintered cart—I smacked my broom at it all in frustration. Agitated by the disorder, hating the delay, watching him sleep, I kicked Frank’s arm—not hard, just a prod—then dropped to my knees again and peered at his slumbering face. It was less palsied for being relaxed in sleep. I saw smugness on his lips—saw the bandages I’d carefully taped, the lacerations I’d blotted, having picked out fragments of piercing glass, all my efforts at easing his pain, my impulse at ministering to him—irrational, given that I intended to murder him. His clattering ill-timed fall had delayed my proposed trip north, the planning I’d done, frustrating me in my scheme to kill him.
Maddened by these botched plans, and hunched over him like a monkey, I couldn’t control myself. I grabbed his pale head and held it to scream at, which I did, howling into his face. Then, intending to nip it maliciously, to leave a mark, I clamped his cheek in my jaws. I could not let go, I bit hard into his flesh, breaking the skin, my teeth almost meeting in his muscle, tearing at him so fiercely I was whinnying with the effort, horrifying myself with his blood, a taste that gagged me, and only then did I let go of his bleeding head.
On my feet, but unsteady, ashamed, I wiped my lips, but the salty sourness of Frank’s blood remained on my tongue. The raw wound I’d made, this mouth-shaped declivity on his cheek—crimped, hickey-blue teeth marks—the bite of my fury on his face, was the Mark of the Beast.
My cannibal rage had exhausted me. Sitting across from him, watching him sleep, listening to the flutter-blast of his breath, I now saw him as helpless and sad and soft, and for the first time in ages—perhaps the first time ever—this soulless calculating crook with the hideous wound on his lopsided face seemed human and breakable.
Oh, just shoot, I thought, and pointed my pistol at him, when the front door scraped open—Amala.
She clapped her hands to her face, her eyes bugged out above her black fingernails, the silver rings, the stipple of tattoos on her knuckles giving it drama.
“Cal, what the fuck happened?” she murmured slowly through her hands.
I thought a moment, then said, “Frank fell down.”
She backed away. “What are you doing with that gun?”
Instead of answering, I said, “Aren’t you supposed to be at a movie?”
“Vic told me to go home. He said he hates me meditating. He called me a Buddhist freak. He can’t stand me anymore.” She began to cry, and she stroked her baldness with sorrowing fingers as she sat on the floor, holding her head. “And now this, oh god. Cal, are you flipping out?”
Again I pondered. “No.”
“You’ve got blood on your lip.”
I dabbed at it—Frank’s blood. “I’m okay.”
“Are you trying to, like, kill him?”
I felt prodded by her to reflect on why I was holding the gun. I can’t shoot him while he’s sleeping, and if I do kill him here in the house, he doesn’t go away. What do I do with him? He’s heavier than ever, more obnoxious, a bad smell like this spilled booze and sour crusted blood.
“Don’t you think he deserves it? After the way he treated you?”
“Hurting him wouldn’t make me feel better,” Amala said. “I’d feel a whole lot worse.”
I remembered Chicky saying that saying that if he killed him, it would make him “feel great—for about five minutes.”
“I had a plan,” I said. “Justifiable fratricide. Make him dead.”
Thinking hard, she swagged her mouth sideways, her face emphatic and memorable and masklike from her Tibetan tattoos and her nose ring, her ghoulish mascara smeared with tears. But she was not shocked, she was holding her breath, considering what I said.
“Frank.” She looked pityingly at him. “As far as I’m concerned, the way he treated people, all that bad karma, he’s pretty much dead already.”
This tearful bald tattooed girl stating the simple truth. Yes, in every important respect he was dead, had been dead for years. My hatred for him he’d taken for fear, giving him an illusion of power, and that hatred had weakened me. But now he lay snoring like a whipped dog, a bubble of snot swelling in one nostril.
My pistol was in my hand, aimed at his inert body. I knew I could shoot him when he woke, when he faced the horror of his death—a bullet in his heart. Then what?
The music in my head stopped and gave way to a hum like a rock drill opening a seam. Stumped by the delay, I sensed the blur of drama draining from my plan, Amala, an inconvenient witness—staring at me—making me hesitate. I saw that by murdering Frank, he’d belong to me, he’d follow me, I’d have to explain him, his death would always be part of my life, a bigger burden to me than if I left him alive.
“Who put all those bandages on him?”
“I did.”
“You missed the one on his cheek.”
That wound shocked me. The bite mark on his face had become a puffy and livid mouth, scored with teeth punctures. The strange thing was that this puckered snarl seemed to address the lopsidedness of his features, giving them balance, a kind of alignment his face had never known before. It was now a cadaverous version of a face much like mine. But the bite mark would be visible to anyone who looked at him, a barbaric scar he’d forever have to explain.
Amala said, “When do you think he’ll wake up?”
“I don’t know. I gave him roofies.”
“Roaches,” she said, knowingly. “Mind erasers.”
“Maybe a few hours.”
“More like a ton of hours.” She seemed more composed now that she realized I was listening to her.
“He makes me sick.” I waved my pistol over his body and pointed it at him.
Suddenly, Amala lost it, her affronted face tightened, looking bruised with righteous anger, and she flung herself onto me and clawed at me, whimpering. Though much shorter than me, she clung to my shirt and pushed me away from where Frank lay, rage reddening her wet face, saying, “I won’t let you. I’ll call the cops.” She gasped and took a breath. “That’s killing a sentient being!”
I held her, hugging her, so that I could pin her flailing arms to her sides. “He was horrible to you.”
“He’s a horrible person. I’m not.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Cal.” Amala gagged on my name, breathless from her shouting, then said in a small, sane whisper, “You could just walk away, genius.”
Years ago, deep in the emerald mine in Colombia, I’d heard an ominous creaking from a gallery—a small audible lurch of cracking stone, but cautioning, also like a warning whisper, an angel’s wingbeat, that made me back away into a refuge chamber—and just as I did, there came a great crash, the whole stone ceiling of the gallery collapsing before me. Dusting myself off, I had walked into the sunlight at the mouth of the tunnel, reprieved, exhilarated.
I put my pistol down, my arm becoming light, almost buoyant, and felt a surge of health and hope.
“I want to be gone before Vic gets back,” Amala said, lifting the top of her smock and pressing it at the look of relief on her face.
I gave Amala my car at the airport and flew that night to Phoenix and Paco Zorrilla, who welcomed me like a true brother. I was free—a wise fugitive, a happy wanderer.