The name of the game is Death.
Most people play without knowing, like sleepwalkers dancing to slow faint music. A few play with full awareness of the game and its inevitable end. Bernice Struble thought she was playing the adultery game, but I taught her that it was only a variation of The Death Game.
I noticed that she’d started coming into town every day between nine and eleven a.m. Her husband was at the depot getting ready for the ten o’clock freight. After it left, he’d be clearing up cargo and checking bills.
Bernice did no shopping; met no friends. By the tenth day my interest was engaged. I watched her park at the curb and sit smoking a cigaret. One plump arm lay along the window. Her short fingers beat a desultory tattoo on the side of the car. Her lips looked swollen and sensuous as they pursed and pulled on the white cylinder. Her eyes were moist and hot, measuring the men as they passed. After a time she got out of her car, flipped her cigaret into the gutter, and strolled along the two blocks which made up the business district of Sherman. She carried her bosom high and forward, with its salient points clearly etched against her white-and-green print dress. I watched her amble past the Square Deal grocery store, past the Purina feed store, Grant’s Recreation Parlor and Pool Hall, Stubb’s Tavern, Slavitt’s Repair Shop and Auto Salvage. She cut left just before she reached the schoolhouse. As she crossed the highway toward the park, the sun reflected off white gravel and gave her dress a brief transparency. In five years she’d be coarse and dumpy, but now she had no need to stretch and compress her flesh with latex and elastic. The soft rolling shape beneath Bernice’s dress was Bernice; she was dealing it straight, letting you know in advance, and if you were disappointed later it was your own fault for not looking.
In the park she sat on the wooden steps of the weather-blackened bandstand, cooled by the shade of gigantic elms. It was a hot day in late June; already the thermometer had topped ninety. She smoked another cigaret, then rose, walked across the grass, got into her car and drove out of town. The Strubles had twenty acres and a house two miles east of town. I waited a half hour and no cars followed. I wondered: Was it a mating ritual, or was she simply a woman with nothing to do? She had no close friends in town; a depot agent with two-year tenure never becomes part of a Missouri farm community. Her husband was a mild young man with a taste for beer and a passion for shuffleboard. I weighed the risk and found it non-existent. I got in my car and drove west, then I cut back and took the old south road across the river, drove east two miles and came back toward town on the blacktop. I turned south on the Braden Gravel and reached their house, an old-fashioned two-story structure with tall narrow windows.
She was sitting in her front yard on a plaid blanket drinking a glass of red Kool-aid. I pulled off onto the track worn beside the mailbox and called: “Where’s Bill?”
She rose from the blanket and came forward.
“He’s at the depot,” she said, opening the wooden gate. She negotiated the plank laid across the grader ditch and came up to the car, resting her forearms along the open window. “He don’t come back till around noon. He meets the ten o’clock, then he goes up to Stubb’s and has a beer, so he don’t come home till around noon.”
Her face held no expression. Her two front teeth were prominent; not protruding, but larger than the others. I noticed streaks of flour on her dress where she’d wiped her hands after baking. I felt a pulse of excitement; she’d been in her kitchen cooking something for her man, and here I was about to …
It was hard to keep from breaking into a foolish grin. “Won’t be home until noon, eh?”
“No.” It’s hard to convey the exact tone of her voice. It showed no coyness, no arch, teasing flirtation. She was like a child saying, I want … “You want to take a ride?”
I think she’d already made up her mind; she glanced up the road toward the main highway, then opened the door and slid into the car. I’d just pulled out onto the gravel when she said: “I didn’t bring my cigarets.”
“I’ve got some.”
Thirty seconds later she pointed to a dirt road leading toward the river. “You can turn in there.”
When we were bouncing along the track beneath the cotton woods, I glanced over at her. Beads of perspiration gleamed in the fine white hairs of her upper lip. Despite her neutral tone, she was excited; this was the only adventure she knew.
Before we reached the river she pointed to a thicket of willows. “There,” she said. A breathy tautness had altered her voice.
I killed the engine and set the brake. As she got out of the car I asked: “Who’d you come here with before?”
She shook her head. “That’d be telling.”
“Point is, he might show up.”
“Huh-uh. He left the country.”
Then I knew who it was: Wayne Bergen, a truck driver who delivered gas and diesel fuel to neighboring farms. A tall, easygoing bag of bones with an insolent manner, he’d been fired two weeks ago for getting drunk on the job — just before Bernice started showing up in town….
She led me twenty yards into the thicket and stopped in a small clearing. Floodwaters had heaped a dune of sand behind a fallen cottonwood. Wild grapes and elderberries draped the tall trees and wrist-thick willows screened us from all sides.
“Keep these for me,” she said, shoving her panties in my pocket. “If we hear anyone, I’ll roll into the weeds and you can say you chased a rabbit in here.”
There were a few kisses, but hardly worth mentioning, like the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a prizefight. There was also sand and airless heat and mosquitoes. The girl had energy but no art; heat but no style. She seemed to have the nervous system of a dinosaur; one small brain controlling the lower portion of her body, and another in her head. Her face remained the same throughout, eyes closed and mouth open, sweat dewing her upper lip, like a restless child dreaming on a hot afternoon. Poor dumb broad, she had nothing working for her but an extra helping of hormones. I felt like most of me was unnecessary. She’d thrown out her line and I was the fish who’d struck the bait; she’d been sitting there in the yard with the house locked up and it hadn’t mattered who came by, Stubby or the banker or Earless Joe who racked halls in the pool hall….
When it was over she shook the sand from her dress and said that if we came again she’d remember the blanket. I knew there’d be a next time, because I had something to make up with her; she’d used me, and according to the rules of the game, she qualified as a victim.
We managed to meet about twice a week. Bernice was addicted to rituals; when I didn’t show for three days, she’d come to town and do her invitational walk around the square. So I’d get in my car and drive out. She’d be standing at the front gate as though waiting for the mailman to deliver a package. If there was any traffic on the road, I drove on and came back later. If the road was clear, Bernice got in and crouched beneath the dash until we reached the willows. She went ahead while I waited to make sure nobody had followed. I’d convinced her there was reason to be scared and she loved it. With the truck driver she’d been an animal crawling off under the bushes. Now she was risking all for love, like the heroines of the true confessions she read while waiting for me. This amused me because basically she was a neat little German Hausfrau. She used to fold her dress up neatly across her belly so it wouldn’t wrinkle. Once I tore her panties, pulling them from my pocket; suddenly I was no longer custodian of her lingerie; she just didn’t wear them when she expected me. I’d approach the mailbox and think of her standing there with her legs going up and up without interruption, and my mouth would get dry …
But she was too simple, and by September I’d lost interest in the sex game. The less interest I showed, the more she tried, and the more bored I became….
I watched it spiral up and up; I gave her money and that put the whole affair on a new footing. She was puzzled; I told her to buy herself a dress or something. But we no longer met for mutual pleasure. I kept giving her money, and she strained to pay it off in the only coin she had. But when you try, you can’t.
Our last meeting in the willows in October was cramped and shivery, and I said we’d better end it. She said:
“I’ll find a place we can meet inside. Don’t talk about ending it.”
Her dinosaur brain must have been stimulated by need, because she set it up beautifully. I only followed instructions. I drove by her mailbox and she gave me the sign from her window. I parked the car by the willows and walked along the river until I reached their property line. Then I approached the house under cover of a hedgerow. This brought me to the rear of the house. Down three steps, through a door, and I was in the basement. The furnace kept it warm; the presence of her washing machine and clothes hung up to dry filled it with a miasma of soap and wet fabrics. After I was in, she locked the door to the basement. The connubial couch was a rubber air mattress laid down behind the furnace. She asked me if it wasn’t better than the thicket and I told her it smelled like a laundry. She said she felt more secure here, and to prove it she undressed for the first time. She walked around, her bare feet leaving damp tracks on the dusty concrete. She wanted me to say something, but I could only wonder how long it would take that blazing furnace to consume her flesh. I wondered if she would swell and burst like a hot dog; if the dark blonde hair would sizzle and shrink to a black kinky mass. In my mind’s eye I saw the victim’s hat on her head: a black skullcap with a tiny red tassel, like a Talmudic scholar’s. Mine was a wide-brimmed corsair hat with an ostrich plume. You’ve got to have style or the Watcher gets bored. Without style you’re only a butcher.
But the rules of the game required a motive, and she hadn’t yet given me one. I beckoned her to join me on the air mattress. She strained to please me and afterward she gave me a piece of apple pie. She wanted a pat on the head but I gave her money and she looked like she was going to cry …
The excitement of bringing the game into enemy camp held my interest until mid-December, but the strain was wearing down Bernice. She started complaining about her husband:
“You know I don’t like him to touch me any more, but that only gets him worked up. Sometimes he comes out from the depot after the midnight train and wakes me up with his damn poking; or it’s after the six a.m. train and he comes in while I’m fixing breakfast and runs his hand up my dress. It’s all I can do to keep from hitting him.”
Another time: “Why don’t we take off together? Don’t say you can’t. You’d find a way if you had to.”
And finally: “I’ve waited for you to do something, but you didn’t. So I went ahead and did it.”
I felt the skin draw tight across my cheekbones. “Did what?”
“I saved the money you gave me. I told my husband I was going to visit my sister in Minneapolis. But instead I’m going to Las Vegas and get a divorce. You can meet me there and we’ll get married.”
“I can’t leave here.”
“You’ll have to when I tell Bill what’s been happening.”
I heard a high, faint buzzing in my cars. I thought, with a mild, remote sort of interest: Well, well, look at what I’ve built, a little death machine. I said:
“Your word against mine.”
“Is it? Remember the day you couldn’t come? You put the note in my mailbox. I’ve still got it.” “Unsigned.”
“But in your handwriting.”
Suddenly I was outside the game; I saw all the pieces strung out on the board below me. I’d put the note in her box without being aware of any ulterior motive; now I saw that my subconscious had been leading me into a trap.
“Wait a few days,” I said. “I’ll think it over.”
“Two days,” she said. Something in the German countenance limits expression to either arrogance or servility; there’s no middle ground. Bernice’s face was wearing the arrogance; now it dissolved into servile apology. “I don’t want it this way. You forced me into it.”
I smiled, because she didn’t know how true that was.
For two days I tried to plan. A car accident … gas … something with the furnace … burn down the house.
My intellect couldn’t help trying to take charge even though I knew it was wrong to plan. If the time is right, everything will be laid out. You just assemble the pieces, like a model plane with each part numbered.
When I arrived two days later there it was: The packing had worn out in their electric pump; the cover was off the well and the pump removed to the shop. Meanwhile water had to be drawn up with a bucket attached to a rope. The morning was cold and clear; telephone wires hummed and the sun was a pale disc which gave light but no heat. As I went in, I noticed that ice had frozen around the curb of the well. Beside the basement door stood the tools they’d used to remove the pump.
I told Bernice I’d decided to go with her, and we spent a quarter hour discussing plans. She prepared to consummate the deal on the air mattress but I said no. I knew that if there was an autopsy, the fact that she’d just had intercourse would be hard to explain.
“I’d like a drink of water before I go,” I said.
“I’ll get it from the refrigerator.”
“It would taste better from the well.”
She frowned. “We might be seen.”
“I’ll just be getting a drink of water. Anyway, does it matter? Your husband has to know sooner or later.”
That reminded her that she had reason to please me, no matter how ridiculous my request. Her felt house-slippers skidded on the ice as she walked to the well. I was behind her, holding a massive pipe wrench I’d taken from inside the door. I waited until she’d pulled the bucket almost to the top, then I called her name.
She turned. In the moment it took her to focus her eyes on my face, she saw the wrench. I watched the awful knowledge come into her eyes; it was a puzzled kind of sadness. Her jaw dropped as I brought the wrench down. My footing was bad and I managed only a glancing blow on her left temple. She dropped the rope and tried to scramble away, skittering on the ice like a hog on a frozen pond. I swung again and caught her behind the ear. She fell across the curbing, dazed but not out. I put my foot against her shoulder and tried to push her into the well. Her hands clawed at the icy bricks and her short crimson nails held like talons. I brought the wrench down with all my strength. The impact jolted it from my hand, but the blow was good. She dropped headfirst like a bomb from a bomb bay. Cool air puffed up into my face as she went down; her legs were bare and she’d prepared for the as usual. That was a pathetic and touching sight, and the last I saw of her. She struck with a hollow Chung! and the bottom of the well exploded into a thousand darting splinters of light. I watched the water until it was a bright silver coin, then I returned to the basement. I cleaned up the cigaret butts and threw them into the furnace. In her bedroom I found her purse; I took out the money she’d been saving and put it in my wallet. I found the note I’d given her and threw it in the furnace. I took the water pitcher from the refrigerator and carried it out to the well. I poured water over the flecks of blood and watched it turn to mush as it froze. I set the pitcher on the curb so it would appear that she’d come out to fill it. I wanted her found quickly; I wanted no mysteries, no inquiries. I thought of the wrench and decided it must be lying at the bottom of the well — unless it had somehow gotten tangled in Bernice’s dress. If that had happened … tough. You can’t anticipate those things.
I felt calm as I followed the hedgerow back to the river. My crepe-soled shoes left no mark on the frozen ground. There was no way they could trace me; nobody was even aware that I knew her.
She made number ten. I searched myself for elation and found none. It was like reaching into a cookie jar and finding nothing. I was empty.
Later it came, of course. Not elation, but a sort of remembrance. I thought of Bernice and her little Hausfrau attitudes: the way she gathered up the tissues and cigaret butts which had accumulated during my visit, bending from the waist and snatching them up like a hen snapping up grains of corn … opening the furnace door with face pinched tight and throwing the little package away with a gesture of rejection … then looking to see if she’d missed anything, biting her index finger with those two prominent incisor teeth. I thought of her brain and its memories of me, now dead. (Within three days she’d been taken from the well, and reburied in her home town nearly two hundred miles away. The well was filled up, and her death ruled accidental.) I thought of the hours she’d spent waiting for me, the hope that must have surged up when she saw me, the habit she’d acquired of washing and perfuming herself in intimate places … something she would not have done if it hadn’t been for me. Before she died I had changed her life. In a sense, I had created her…. I have only contempt for those who go out on a dark street and select a victim at random. They are ending a life they do not understand; they are crude and barbarous vandals, like savages who smash a radio. Let an engineer destroy a radio, that is significant. Let him destroy a radio which he has built himself, that is better still.
Bernice had lived her life. At twenty-one she was complete. She couldn’t grow into something else, no more than a calf can grow into a gazelle; the genetic materials are not available. Bernice could only have become an older, coarser version of what she was; I could do nothing more with the materials at hand, so I destroyed her.
As weeks passed, the memory of Bernice became a sick sweetness, as when you eat too much pork fat. By killing Bernice, I seemed to have killed myself. I had existed in her mind, and when her mind ceased to exist … what became of the man she knew? I walked the street feeling my feet thud against the concrete and I would wonder whose feet they were. Walls began to waver, as in the heat warp from a stove. I worked harder, fitting my days with labor, creating things I could look at and somehow see myself reflected in —
But these things were only wood and metal and plants rising from the soil. I needed a person, a woman — not in a physical way, but as a partner in the game. My thoughts turned, as they often had before, to Velda.
I can walk past the store and see her behind the counter. Usually the store is empty, and she is alone. This quiet woman in this quiet place fascinates me. I stop and took through the plate glass, most of me hidden by posters Scotch-taped to the inside which announce sales on meat, soap powder and canned goods. An open book lies on the counter before her. She sits on a high stool, one bare knee atop the other, running the point of her pencil through the pale rust-colored hair which she has pulled above her ears and bound up in the back. From time to time she shifts her legs, hooking one foot behind the ankle of the other. She is beautiful in a way which does not immediately strike the eye: her features are almost, but not quite, ordinary: a sheen of gold brightens her red-blonde hair, an emerald tone deepens the green of her eyes; her narrow nose ends in a slight upward tilt; her long smooth jaw suggests a masculine stubbornness. Her upper lip forms a tight unmoving line; the lower swells and protrudes slightly. She lights a cigaret without interrupting her reading, thrusting out her jaw and lilting her head so that the lighter does not flare into her eyes. She draws deeply once and allows the smoke to roll from her nose and lips; then she deposits the cigaret in an ashtray and smokes it no more, only waves away the wisps of smoke which trail across the page.
She does not look her thirty-five years: her body seems to have early acquired a toughness, a resilience which resists the sagging effects of age. Her long crossed thighs show faint ridges of muscle through the dress; her calves are smoothly rounded, free of blue swollen veins which are the stigma of the retail trade. She wears a bibbed white apron over a blue cotton dress; her breasts press full and firm against it.
A customer enters; a bell rings above the door. She closes the book and marks it with a sliver of cardboard; she slides off the stool and stands erect, placing her palms flat on the wooden counter. A diamond-crusted circlet glitters on her third finger, left hand; the large center stone shoots out arrows of blue light. The customer is a talkative woman. Velda converses with her: she laughs — a half-amused chuckle which ripples only the surface — she carries her verbal share of the conversation … but always there is something reserved, some little chamber of emotion she does not open. (The local people have forgotten that she is beautiful; they have seen her so often they no longer see her. A woman comes to town only half as lovely as Velda and all heads turn to follow her because she is new. In a year or two she will also become invisible, condemned to the peculiar anonymity a small town conveys.) Probably this is good for Velda, for she has acquired none of the self-conscious poses of women who are accustomed to attention. She has no false modesty because she knows no reason to feel proud.
All this is speculation. I don’t really know her — though I know her as well as or better than anyone else in Sherman, because I have studied her and they have not. At midmorning she often disappears behind the green plywood partition which segregates her office and a small bathroom. She locks the door and remains for sometimes an hour. I wonder what she does in there, but the bell over the front door always rings when I enter. Even when I muffle its ringing — as I did once by winding tape around the clapper — the wooden floor creaked and she came out looking flushed and surprised. (Does she know I am studying her now? Probably not, I am a familiar face; my behavior undergoes no major change, and in minor changes I am shielded by the same anonymity which protects everyone else in this town.) Oh, I’m not teased by the mystery of what women do when they’re alone … little dabs of grooming, searching out gray hairs, pushing hair masses here and there to see how it would look in a different style, checking for new pimples and wrinkles, squeezing blackheads … But what does she see when she looks in the mirror? What image is reflected to her and why does it dissatisfy her? Because there is discontent in the way the lips sometimes curve downward. It could be her marriage, but then she would need only to give some sign of availability and the men would come. Strangers make overtures, true, which she studies and rejects. The rejection is not important, but the study is. She desires, she does not obtain….
Another symptom is her reading. New worlds inside the covers of books. Surrogate experience, proving that reality falls short. Like any avid reader she knows words, good words, big ones. But, living in cultural isolation, she often mispronounces them, or drops them in the middle of a sentence, like a rock which destroys the symmetry of her speech. Her information is spotty, another result of undisciplined reading. She discovers history and devours all she can find on the subject, at the same time lacking even a high school graduate’s knowledge of astronomy or philosophy. She is a strange blend of knowledge and naïveté. Normally she talks in a studied, level tone, letting no emotion out, merely communicating. Yet when she is angry, the blunt country words break through, pungent and steaming and barbed with the directness of the hills. The emerald eyes sparkle with green fire, the lips stretch tight across even white teeth, and you see that the words belong to her. You see her as she was when I first saw her, sitting in the back of a Studebaker wagon, her bare feet swinging a foot above the dusty road, She was a woodland creature born and raised in the hills of Brush Creek, taking her first look — not really, but it seemed so — at neon lights and movies and fountain Cokes. She was no beauty then; she had vivid freckles dusted across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Her teeth were small and not quite closed up, with dark gaps between them. Her sunbleached hair was a hue most accurately described as mustard. It framed a long thin face which may have been clean when she started to town, but had since acquired a gray coating of road dust. She wore a dress made from a flowered Parina sack; it lay not quite flat across her chest; her immature breasts did not bounce with the movement of the wagon….
Now she is by local standards a rich man’s wife. Nylon sheathes the legs which knew only wool in winter and the wind in summer. She has grown used to imported silk and French perfume and gold which does not turn green; her small hands know the satiny smoothness of new money and the wheel of the powerful, expensive car….
But this latter woman is totally divorced from the poor little hill girl. Velda is either one or the other, she is never a blend of the two.
I see her as a victim. This is as natural as a beautician seeing her with her head beneath a dryer, a policeman seeing her behind bars, or a surgeon seeing her with her stomach cut open. I think of how she would look dead, or in the process of being killed. (She would fight, this is certain; I visualize her as a naked, clawing, spitting savage.) But the picture is unsatisfactory, because she is not ready. Even at thirty-five, she is an unformed, immature woman.
An element is missing, a catalyst which will blend the hill girl with the rich man’s wife and make her complete. The element is not me, for I am already in her life, and have blunted my power to affect her without risk. The element is not even in Sherman, for she has adapted to all those who live here, examined them and shoved then aside. The element must come from outside. Until she changes, Velda is immune….