He passed an old woman with a gray, smashed face and above it a hat of shiny dark blue with light blue flowers on it. Benson’s guilt increased.
The taxi drivers with their golfer’s shirts and dirty-yellow imitation bandsmen’s hats looked equally fat and satisfied, and so did the hotel doormen with their padded coats and buttons down their backs and gold epaulettes on their shoulders. He looked at fat, darksuited businessmen, gloomy as Indians, graying at the temples, hurrying along in small shoes that shone on the sidewalk like tinted steel, and it seemed to him that they were grimly satisfied with their lives of hard bargains and tricky deals. Like wolves, all of them, the same as the people in the jail, but these were the wolves who made it. Even the women. He could have been afraid of them, if he’d let himself. They walked in tight clothes that shone like knives, and their soft, pretty faces or square, blunt faces knew just how to get what they wanted, some by a pretense of helplessness, some by a sweet false gaiety, some by foxy irony or bellowing or crying or endless timid whining. It was not a street, it was a battlefield, and though they might smile from time to time, Walter Benson was not fooled; they were at war, and every man-woman-child of them was fighting for himself. If some of the salesmen were polite, they were polite because that would make the sale. If it worked just as well, they’d have gladly cracked open the customer’s jaw with a pistol. If he, Benson, were to step through the low revolving door and snatch the woman in the green dress, the young one picking through the used-looking talcum bottles on the counter, and hurl her to the floor and smash her head against the marble tile (or whatever it was), not a one of them would lift a finger to save her. They would scream, duck down, look out for Number One. A sobering thought. It filled his chest with a coldness.
He came into the scruffier section now; the department stores and banks and expensive shops had fallen away behind Mm; ahead of him lay the hunting grounds of less powerful thieves, shoemakers working at basement windows, a medical supply store with Maidenform corsets and bras in the window, a body shop with a red and yellow sign, YOU WRECK ’EM I FIX ’EM. He passed two painters working on the front of a beauty salon. Their sleeves were rolled up on their lean brown arms and showed their swollen veins. One of them was swearing. The sign over his head said CHARLES OF PARIS, and there was a picture of a lady with bright blue hair. Charles of Paris would pay those painters through the nose, and Charles’ customers would pay, after that, because it wasn’t enough, just getting along, just making ends meet, paying the bills: a man had to get ahead, retire to the country, a cottage on Silver Lake. He passed a restaurant where people were eating hamburgers in a quick, nervous, wolfish way as though they had important work and could only spare a minute. Some of the people eating were old men who sat alone and had their hats on. By the window sat a man with lifted eyebrows, pouting lips, and a fixed stare; he seemed to be struggling to remember something. In the back of his mind Walter Benson had a feeling he was to blame for all this, too. He walked still more quickly, lost in reverie, and before he knew it he was hurrying down McKinley, his own street.
He slowed down, suddenly remembering his weak heart—his bad ticker as he put it to himself, a phrase less frightening to him. His dread of meeting his wife washed over him again. He’d been away a long time, this time. He could hardly blame her if Marguerite was cross with him, driven past the limits of her patience. What had never entered his mind before came absolutely clear to him now: it wasn’t a kindness he’d done her, bringing that roomer in; it was more work, more worry. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
He walked on toward his house, still a block away, and as he walked he hunted through his suitcoat pockets without the faintest idea what it was he was hunting. In his inside coat-pocket he came upon The Pocket Book of Favorite Poems. Finding it gave him a just barely perceptible touch of comfort. Even so, walking up to his own front porch he felt more like Walter Boyle than like Walter Benson. He glanced over his shoulder, then went up the steps and tried the door. It was locked.
That was something he could not possibly have expected. Marguerite never went out any more, not since she’d broken her hip that time. Had she fallen down again? He tried the doorbell. No answer. He went over to the window behind the porch swing-chair and peered in, but except for the familiar old brown overstuffed chairs and davenport, the mantelshelf with the pictures of her family on it, the standing lamps, and the television, the artificial flowers, there was nothing. It was as if she’d died. The thought alarmed him, and he went around to the side door, where he had a key beside the meter.
Inside, everything was as usual, except that Marguerite was gone. The plants in the kitchen, in clay pots set on old kitchen dishes, were in perfect health; the linoleum shone as usual; everything was clean and excessively neat. Only one trifling irregularity caught his eye, a paperback book on the kitchen table, Castro’s Revolution. It was not the kind of thing she would read. The roomer, then, Benson decided. Leaning over it, he noticed that there was a newspaper clipping in it for a bookmark. He opened the book and, because the print of both the clipping and the book itself was very small, carried it to the window beside the washing machine where he could see. The clipping was about a Negro church being bombed. As for the book, the pages were cluttered with underlining, and along the margin at one point there was a wild, vertical bar in bright red ink.
Walter Benson blinked his protruding eyes and pursed his lips and read through it twice. Then he closed the book on his finger and stared up at the wall as if half-expecting a voice to come out of the wall and explain. At last, glancing over his shoulder again, he put the book down exactly where he’d found it and went over to the refrigerator to get himself an Orange Crush. It came to him that she might be in the back yard, working over her flowers, say, so he carried the pop with him to the back door and out onto the porch. She was not there either. The lawn hammock was there, though, and all at once it looked inviting. He went down the rickety steps and across the lawn and got cautiously into the hammock, where he lay on his round back, arms hanging out on either side, almost relaxed though he was still not easy about her being away. Benson closed his eyes.
Here in the back yard it was like being in the middle of the forest, miles from civilization. True, he could see the back yards of all the people on this side of the block, or if not the yards then the trees and garage roofs; and true, he could hear the traffic of the city, the roar of an occasional jet overhead, the televisions a little ways off; but this was, nevertheless, his yard, and even though he could be seen by anyone who bothered to look from a nearby yard or some upstairs window, he felt private here: he felt he was himself. He caught the scent of a barbecue and felt, one moment, pleased by it, the next, restless again. Suppose something had happened to her? Suppose she’d been murdered in her bed, or no (he had looked in her bed), lured out of the house and murdered in the street. He wondered for the hundredth time whether the police had worked out, finally, what he’d failed to tell them, that it was no one else but the Sunlight Man who’d come to let the Indian out. Could it be he was planning some terrible murder and needed the Indian’s help? The murder of Benson himself?
He found himself worrying as badly as he’d worried all that time in the jail. It was dangerous for him. The doctor had said so. For his ticker’s sake if for no other reason, he had to get himself out of this state. He took a drink from the pop bottle, then closed his eyes and lay with his arms hanging over the sides of the hammock as before. But comfortable as the hammock was, good as it was to be drinking Orange Crush again in his own back yard, he could not drive away his heavy dread. He drew the pocket book of poetry from his inside suit pocket and opened it where it opened easiest, from many past readings. The poem began to affect him even before he began to read.
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched.
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
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The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
Walter Benson read it again and again, and gradually the world around him was transmuted. All that had been, a moment ago, grim and dangerous and too heavy to bear seemed now mere passing illusion, and what was real was, he thought, the arched sky and the rose and the sun-path, whatever that might be. Tears brimmed up in his eyes.
Something stirred, nearby. He hid the book quickly and glanced around. It was only the Springers’ dog, so he drew out the book again, cautiously, and reread the poem twice, until he’d gotten back his former emotion. His eyes filled once again with tears, and it grieved him to remember what harsh thoughts he had thought about the people he’d passed on his long walk home. He, Walter Benson, was as much a sinner as any of them, he knew. He’d been looking merely at the outer husks, forgetting the inner fountains, as one of his poems said. He read one more time the poem about friendship and suddenly, ardently, Benson wished he had a friend so he could mail the poem to him.
He closed his eyes and gave out a tiny whimper, profoundly at peace with the world, if only for the moment, and two minutes later the pop bottle dropped almost soundlessly from his fingers onto the lawn.
It was dark when Benson awakened. At first he couldn’t tell what it was that had made him wake up. The cold, maybe. Then he saw the car in the driveway. It took him a moment to recognize it. It was the roomer’s car. He remembered the name now: Ollie Nuper. Marguerite and Mr. Nuper were just in the process of opening the door on the back porch—he young and wild-haired and gangly, she old and crippled and fat—and Mr. Nuper had his arm around her, helping her through the door. They turned the back-porch light on. Walter Benson half sat up in the hammock and was just about to shout his greeting when an incredible thing happened. They kissed. He could not believe his eyes, but there was no mistake: they kissed each other as if with youthful passion, she throwing her fat legs apart, he pressing hard against her. Benson felt himself going pale, his hands as cold as ice. I’ll kill them! he thought. They parted then, and Marguerite laughed. Benson was sick with anguish. “It’s an outrage!” he whispered to himself. He meant to leap from the hammock and run up to them, but he continued to sit in complete silence, holding his breath, watching. The back door closed and the kitchen light went on. A moment later, the porch light went off. He whimpered, “Has she no shame?” Then he thought, “I dreamed it! It’s nothing but a dream! I was asleep!” It came to him that he’d said that before. And yet perhaps it really had been a dream. There was no other explanation.
He got out of the hammock without a sound and began to move slowly, furtively, toward the house.
2
It was a night Walter Benson would never forget. Though a professional thief, he was, in point of fact, a perfect innocent, a babe in the woods. He had heard there were people like Ollie Nuper in the world (had heard once of a rich doctor somewhere in Florida who had a huge bedroom done all in red, with paintings of naked people on the walls, and mirrors all around the ceiling) but he had not actually believed it. Who would?
When he reached the back porch the door was locked and the kitchen light was off. They’d gone on into the livingroom. Without a sound, and having not the slightest idea what he really meant to do, Benson opened his jackknife and flipped the doorlatch. He went in, closed the door softly behind him, put the knife away, and stood listening. Mr. Nuper and Marguerite were talking and giggling. They’d been drinking.
“You’re insatiable,” Marguerite was saying. “I never knew such a man!”
Mr. Nuper mumbled something, maybe kissing her or burying his face in her bosom.
Benson curled his lips, but whether with rage or disgust or grief he could not have said. The door to the livingroom was closed. It had no latch, though; he could press it open half an inch and peek in. She was letting Mr. Nuper undress her. She held her fat arms out to the side and had her head tipped up, and Mr. Nuper danced around her like a drunken tailor, unhooking, unbuttoning, unzipping, giving kisses and pats to her bulges as he danced. He was not at all handsome, not at all what one supposes such people ought to be. He had a nose like a sheep’s, with hardly any space from the flesh between his nostrils to the pink of his upper lip. His ears stuck out, his limpid brown eyes were close together, his teeth were full of silver. He was short. His arms and legs were thin and his head was the size of a ten dollar jack-o’-lantern. Benson allowed the door to come shut and leaned against the wall. He ought to have acted immediately. It was too late now, he thought.
When he heard them going upstairs he roused himself and tiptoed into the livingroom where their clothes lay on the rug. He stood at the foot of the stairs rubbing his face with both hands, trying to get his thoughts straightened out, growing more befuddled every minute until finally it seemed to him that he had driven her to it, or worse, that she had endured him all these years only because she’d known nothing any better; he was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, a miserable person, a freak who ought to have been mercifully killed at birth.
They were having a wonderful time up there, making not only the bedsprings but the whole house, as it seemed to Benson, squeak and creak and sway. He went cautiously up the steps and bent his ear toward the door.
“Tell me what you’re doing to me,” Marguerite said.
Benson clapped his hands over his ears and hissed with rage. They didn’t hear him.
It came to him suddenly, with perfect clarity, as though someone right there in the hallway with him had whispered it into his good ear, that even if he himself was partly responsible, it was nevertheless a terrible thing they were doing to him. A terrible crime! He had feelings, didn’t he? And there was his health! They ought to have thought about that! He would kill them! It was what anyone would do! He closed his hand around the jackknife in his pocket. The blade would be too short. But he’d find something. Yes! It was the natural thing! The right thing! He would tear out a post from the banister and go in there and stove their heads in!
But immediately he thought of a great many complications. Nuper was younger and probably stronger than he was, and perhaps, if the whole truth were known, Marguerite was just pretending to enjoy it. Some kind of blackmail, say. Also, his picture would be in the paper if he murdered them, and someone would see it and remember Walter Boyle. Also, it was really his own fault in the first place. His own stupid fault—yes! Tears suddenly welled up into his eyes. Here he was, fifty-six years old, and his whole life was a waste: long, wasted nights sleeping in the Rambler in some unheard-of little town, wasted weeks sleeping in a jail, poring over some newspaper he didn’t care about one bit, and he was getting on in years now—for what? all for what?—and what would they do with no social security coming in? He thought of his father, wasting away on some desert island or some flophouse in Chicago or wherever it was he’d gone when he disappeared, and his poor mother wasting away in the poor folks’ home, and his poor sister wasting away with that brute of a husband the bus driver, who would beat her every Saturday night and walk out on her and the four little children and come back again Tuesday morning, sure as doom. He sat down on the top step to cry but then thought better of it: there was not a sound coming from the bedroom now. The small, familiar pain came over his ticker.
The bed creaked. Somebody was sitting up.
Mr. Nuper said as if sadly, “I can’t stay any longer, love. Pamphlets to deliver.”
“Must you?” she asked. A groan of satisfaction.
A sound of kissing. “Forgive me, dearest.”
Giggles.
The sense of what they were saying broke into Benson’s mind and his eyes widened with alarm. He got downstairs and out of sight just in the nick of time, before Mr. Nuper came padding barenaked out to the hall and down the stairs behind him. Benson fled to the kitc
hen and stood there clenching and unclenching his fists, wondering why the devil he’d run away. It was his house, wasn’t it? It was his wife, too, in fact. He heard Mr. Nuper dressing in the livingroom, whistling to himself under his breath and then having another drink. Again just in the nick of time Walter Benson got out the back door and down on the lawn, out of sight, before Mr. Nuper came into the kitchen. As he crouched at the foot of the steps, waiting, Benson’s hand accidentally fell upon a dew-wet two-by-four he’d forgotten to put away a month or two ago when he was fixing the back-porch steps. His heart raced. He lifted it up—it swung easily, a little like a baseball bat—and he ducked behind the spirea to wait for Mr. Nuper. When the man reached the bottom step Benson would leap out behind him and blam! He clenched his teeth and held his breath, smiling.