The Houseguest

  Lydia therefore put her finger against her lips in the hush-hush signal, but Bobby perversely chose to disregard it and speak in a louder voice than normal.

  “Wow,” said he. “How hopeless can we get!”

  Doug scowled at his son. “None of that defeatist talk. We’ve had a few setbacks, that’s true, but nothing more. This thing is far from being in the final innings.” He looked at Lydia. “Better leave the strong-arm stuff to me in the future.”

  “It’s just that I had the opportunity,” she said, her eye on the doorway through which Chuck had departed.

  Doug nodded. “I’m not criticizing you. But whether or not you have the physical strength to pull off a trick like that, you are unlikely to have the psychic fortitude—unless you happen to be awfully unnatural.” He grinned quickly so as to dispose of that possibility. “You’re no killer.”

  “But I didn’t even want to hurt him!”

  “Well, now you’re flirting with incredulity,” said her father-in-law. “You don’t hit someone in the head with a bottle—”

  “I wanted him to let us alone! I admit it wasn’t well thought out.”

  “Well, we’ve got our orders,” said Audrey, rising and beginning to clear the table. With a little toss of her well-groomed head, she added, “I’m just relieved I didn’t have to eat this terrible dry rice. That’s the one good thing that came of this matter.”

  “Just a moment,” Lydia said. “Can you tell me one good reason why we should do as he says?”

  “Now don’t start that,” Bobby said urgently. “We don’t want to get in worse trouble than we’re already in. From now on we can’t afford any more of this impulsive indulgence of our emotions.”

  In annoyance Lydia addressed the doorway. “Are you taking notes, Chuck?” To Bobby she said sourly, “He’s listening to all of this, you know.”

  But Bobby winced and made violent gestures. Only now did it occur to her that perhaps he had, all this while, been speaking disingenuously, that it had been she who had not understood that what he said, at least, was for Chuck’s benefit. She nodded vigorously, but the gesture seemed only to irritate him.

  “I envy you, Lyd,” said he, shaking his chin. “I wish I could share your amusement, but I’m really scared. We keep getting deeper in this trouble, like quicksand, the more we struggle to get out of it. Maybe we should just give up all resistance and accept the situation. Chuck may tend toward the tyrannical, but what can he do if we simply say, ‘Okay, you win. From now on we’ll do our best to carry out your commands. You’re a reasonable man. You have attained your goal. What can we do to help you enjoy the fruits of your victory?’”

  Unless this was hypocrisy with the purpose of deceiving the listening houseguest, it was contemptible. In either case Lydia felt she had no option but to assist Audrey in clearing the table. She scraped the contents of her own plate and Chuck’s into the pedal can that was revealed by opening the under-sink cabinet door. As she carried the plates towards the dishwasher, she saw through the back-of-counter windows that parallel headlight beams had penetrated the now established darkness of the parking area. Above the clatter being made by the others, no engine sound could be heard, and the silence of this event, and the slow speed with which it was conducted, suggested the sinister rather than the arrival of aid. Were Chuck’s confederates now joining him?

  To Doug she said, “God! Look here.”

  Doug arrived at the window just as the door of the vehicle opened and its interior was illuminated. He recognized, from the wide-brimmed hat, Lyman Finch, who though dressing like a sheriff was rather the police chief and indeed, except for a couple of part-timers, the entire force on the island, where crime had never been a major problem.

  “The cops are here!” he said. “Our bacon is saved!” He chose to be jocular because now that the danger was at an end it seemed in retrospect to have been negligible. He was almost embarrassed to have played a part in the exaggeration of the possible menaces provided by Chuck Burgoyne. Thus by the time Finch, a large, ponderous figure, had lumbered to the kitchen door, Doug was on the verge of levity.

  “Lyman!” he cried, flinging the door open. “What brings you to our humble abode?” He had known the man since they both were boys. Lyman in fact had as a teenager worked for an uncle whom Doug’s father hired for sometime landscape work: large chunks of stone were to be relocated on the property, requiring oxlike labor performed mostly by the brawny lad, who had since those days put on an additional fifty pounds of belly and jowl.

  Finch stayed on the outside step. “Phone trouble?”

  Doug sighed. “In fact, yes, we do have. We—”

  “Lots of people do, all over the island,” said Finch. “They’s working on it. You have a emergency, you send up a flare. We’ll be right on ya.”

  “Flare?”

  “Get a gun off one of your tubs.”

  It seemed incredible to Doug that on a small island with only a few other families as prominent as his, Lyman could be unaware that he had never personally used a boat since childhood. He decided momentarily to put aside the matter of flares. “Come on in, Lyman. Have a cup of coffee.”

  Lyman stubbornly lingered where he was. “Sour stomach,” said he. “But if you got gin?”

  “Please come in,” said Doug. “I mentioned coffee because I thought you might be on duty.” He realized it sounded like a criticism and would have regretted making it had not Finch’s reaction been anything but indignant.

  “Oh, I am. But I got a hollow leg. It don’t have no effect on me.” Having said which the chief lurched into the kitchen and staggered to the table. He seized the back of a free chair and hurled the seat under his bulk, which was further widened by the accessory-belt below the knitted waistband of his jacket, a quilted, high-gloss garment in dark green with no insignia in evidence (so that, as with the unmarked jeep, he could use it in off-duty, civilian hours). The wide-brimmed hat, however, displayed a dead-centered bright chromium badge of office.

  “Hyah,” he said indiscriminately to Bobby and the women. It was obvious that the man was drunk. Staring at Lydia, he asked, not unkindly, “And who might you be, sister?”

  Doug had no option but to play along at least for the moment.

  Bobby’s face was contorted. “What’s going on here? Aren’t you going to tell him—”

  Doug cut him off. “Come on, we’ll find the gin together.” He took his son by the elbow and more or less forcibly conveyed him from the room into the butler’s pantry in the passage to the dining room. Chuck had last been seen there, but he was gone now.

  Bobby broke away and petulantly opened the cabinet above the wet bar. “Here’s the damned gin.”

  “Lower your voice,” said Doug. “Look, that fat bastard is already stinking drunk. He’d be no match for Chuck. He’s a stupid hayseed even when sober. I think our best hope is to get him even drunker, till he passes out, and then I’ll take his gun.”

  Bobby wore a quizzical scowl. “Are we back to the idea of killing Chuck?”

  “No need for that now. We’ll have a weapon of our own, and transportation.”

  “So we’ll run?”

  “Unless I miss my guess, once Chuck sees that I am armed, and with a working vehicle as well, he’ll pull in his horns, maybe even become downright submissive. We’ll load him into Lyman’s jeep, haul him out some miles down the highway, and leave him there. Oh, of course we’ll take his own gun away.”

  “That’s it?” Bobby asked in apparent outrage, gesturing with the gin bottle. “You’re not even going to have him arrested?”

  “For what? To my knowledge he hasn’t committed an identifiable crime.” Doug grimaced. “In fact, Lydia assaulted him. He could make trouble on that matter, if he wanted to.”

  Bobby lowered his face. As a child he had had positively golden locks, to maintain which he would by now have had to resort to artificial means, and therefore his head looked somewhat dingy. He had none of the Graves features: the s
trong nose, firm chin, nut-brown extra-fine hair. “You’re taking his side now?”

  “Don’t be foolish. I’m trying to speak of what’s possible. I am after all a member of the legal profession. I am obliged to be rational. I assure you that Chuck has yet to break the law—even in the case of the sweaters your mother asserts he removed from her room. Until he takes them from the premises, he really has not committed theft.” He accepted the bottle of gin from his son. “This thing superficially seems simple: an intruder has invaded our domicile and therefore all right is on our side. Not so! It isn’t a matter of justice.”

  Seemingly stunned by this information, Bobby lingered behind as Doug returned to the kitchen, where Lyman’s sweaty, red-faced grin was fixed on Lydia.

  “—believe it,” the chief was saying. “I’ve lived in the country all my life, and I never before seen that kind of stuff you city folk call fun. By God I don’t mind telling you I got real mad when right up there on the big screen out in what used to be a field of rye, where you could see it all up and down the county road, there was this girl taking it up the rear end from a little skinny sumbitch, but he had one on him you wouldn’t believe.” He simulated the colossal member in reference by extending his right forearm and forming a fist at its end, measuring it with a left hand bladed into the crease of the elbow. “My littlest was in the car at the time, we’s coming back late from the mother-in-law’s, over Grampton, and she wakes up and looks out and says, ‘Oooh, what’s that man doing to her heinie?’”

  Doug shuddered. “Here’s your gin, Lyman.”

  The chief snatched the bottle away and glared at him. “Wasn’t for you city people, they wouldn’t try to put a porn drive-in out here, and you know it.” His leer quickly toured Lydia’s body. “But I ain’t got nothing against good clean sex. I like it. I like it a whole lot.”

  This was hardly the time to remind Lyman that a cousin of his, another Finch, owned the drive-in movie, which was patronized almost totally by locals and never summer people.

  “Chief,” Lydia said, “what’s the punishment for rape in this part of the world?”

  “That’s a theoretical question, Lyman,” Doug said quickly. “I’m sure the crime itself is rare on the island.”

  The chief lifted the bottle and sucked at its mouth: but then he had not been furnished with a glass. When he brought the vessel down he inspected the label. “Is this imported? Or did you take a leak in it before handing it to me?” The question, if a joke, was nevertheless put without evidence of humor or even good feeling.

  “Rape?” he said then. “I’ll tell you who commits it around here: the womenfolk.” He winked at Lydia.

  “Well, does that answer your question, Lydia?” Doug had moved into a position back of the chief, so that he could indicate, with violent grimaces, that she should abandon the inquiry.

  But she ignored him and continued to address Lyman. “I assure you I am being serious, and I’ll thank you to answer me with respect.”

  Couldn’t she see that her tone was the worst to use with a brute like Lyman Finch?

  Doug shouted, “Hey, I forgot the ice!” and made as much commotion as he could in going to the refrigerator.

  But behind him Lyman said, “You didn’t bring me a glass, neither. You figured the likes of me wouldn’t drink from a glass, right? We’re all shit to you, ain’t we?”

  Doug turned and said, “No, that isn’t the case at all, Lyman. We’ve been friends for what? Thirty-forty years?” He tried to inject some false warmth into this phrasing, and spoke to Bobby, “Lyman and I knew each other as boys.”

  “I always wanted to whip his ass,” the chief told Lydia. “But they wouldn’t let me, not even when he tried to fuck my little sister. She was doin’ maid work for them, cleanin’ their toilets, and she was only fourteen years of age.”

  The facts were that at that time Roberta Finch was at least three years older and it was she who had propositioned Doug, successfully, and displayed a good deal more sexual technique than he, seventeen himself and already experienced with “bad” city girls and professional whores, had yet to encounter. When questioned on this, Roberta alluded to home study, as the only sister in a family of boys. It was even likely that her father had had at her, given the appearance of her mother.

  “Come on, Lyman,” Doug protested, though of course he could not dare to give his real defense. “We were all just kids in those days.”

  The chief continued to direct his words to Lydia. “What really got Bertie was he offered her fifty cents! Mr. Lottabucks here. A half dollar for her cherry.” He swigged more gin from the bottle and banged it down. Suddenly he threw back his head and emitted a bellow of laughter. “Shit, she might of taken it, if it had been seventy-five!”

  Audrey had been silent till this moment. Now she rose in her place. “You disgusting, squalid man. Get out of this house.”

  As if more conflict were needed! Doug began to gesture ineffectually, but could find nothing to say. It was the women who had brought about this latest debacle, damn them.

  But a remarkable thing happened in the next moment. The chief removed the campaign hat he had been wearing since he entered the kitchen. He surveyed the tabletop and then slid his chair back so as to accommodate the high-crowned hat on his lap. A dank lock of hair clung to his very pale bald spot.

  He glanced sheepishly at Audrey. “I beg your pardon, ma’am. I got a bug yesterday and am on medication.” He nodded at the bottle. “This here is all I had to drink I swear. I been running off at the mouth, I know. I’m really sorry.”

  Doug was relieved but also embarrassed. “Bobby, get some glasses. Why don’t we all have a nice drink at this point?” In making this suggestion he was thinking mostly of Audrey: no doubt much of her indignation towards Lyman Finch was due to his having exclusive possession of the bottle.

  But Audrey said, “No! This man must leave immediately. We’ve been imposed on too much today.” She was displaying an authority that her husband had never before seen in her.

  Saying, “Yes, ma’am,” Lyman got to his feet, holding his shield-bearing hat flat against his crotch. “I didn’t mean no harm.”

  But his hostess would not relinquish her advantage. “Sure you did,” she said. “You’re full of resentment, and you’ll take it out on anybody who will put up with it. Go out and give someone a speeding ticket, and let us alone. We’re what we are.”

  “Just a minute,” said Lydia, rising to her feet. She was speaking to Audrey. “Don’t let him go!” To Lyman she said, “We’ve got a problem, officer. We’re trapped here. It might not look like it, but we’re actually prisoners. We need your help. We’re being terrorized. … .”

  She was exaggerating outlandishly, and Doug would have jumped in to dampen or deflect the worst of this crazy stuff, which if it became public knowledge through Lyman, who was surely the typical Finch gossip, the Graveses would be derided all over the island and perhaps all the way back to the city. Did you hear this? How some drifter, a little nobody, just walked in and took charge?

  Doug would surely have acted had Chuck Burgoyne not strolled in at this moment, saying, “Hi, Lyman.”

  The chief turned and, when he saw who it was, stopped cringing. “Charley! I didn’t know you was still here.”

  “Where else would I be?” asked Chuck, with the warmest of smiles for all. “This place suits me. I’m staying permanently. I hope you’re not leaving right now, Lyman. Let’s have a drink!”

  Lyman put his hat on his head and returned to the table.

  Doug asked, incredulously, “You know each other?”

  “We’re cousins,” said Chuck. He made a shooing motion. “And we want some privacy. You all get out of here and go to bed, chop-chop.”

  Lyman stared at Doug for an instant and then guffawed. “By God, you got ’em trained, Charley.” He winked. “That include the little chippie?”

  Chuck returned the wink. “What do you think, Lyman?”

  Obviously,
new plans had to be made now. Even Lydia seemed to agree. At least she did not launch an attack on the cousins, but decorously left the kitchen with the rest of the family.

  “Now what?” asked Bobby. They were back again in his father’s quarters, demoralized. “Who could know that the law would be on his side?”

  “Not the law, Bobby, just the police chief. There’s an important difference that is basic to our form of government.” He shook his head. “All the same, it is discouraging. I’ve despised the Finches all my life, but they’re local yokels. I would never have thought the likes of Chuck would have a connection with them. At least he’s civilized.”

  Bobby’s mother snorted, and his father added, irritably, “You know what I mean: he eats with a knife and fork, et cetera.”

  Lydia was frowning. Bobby disliked seeing that vertical line appear between her eyebrows. She asked, “These people who run the everyday affairs of the island, they hate you?”

  Bobby’s mother shrugged. “Well,” said she. “You know how it goes.”

  “No,” Lydia said stubbornly. “Don’t people like you furnish their livelihood?”

  Bobby suddenly got the point, but it seemed that Lydia did not.

  “The fact is,” said Bobby’s father, “we now have to arrange a new strategy. We can’t expect much help from the usual agency to which a citizen applies in a crisis.”

  Bobby’s mother said, “I have always respected Mrs. Finch. I can’t say I have ever been actually fond of her, as one is sometimes fond of people who work for you, but then why should that always be the case? Common decency would seem to be all that’s called for, and she certainly got that from me. I haven’t ever lorded it over her, for heaven’s sake.” She sighed. “I am aware that she’s from the same family, but it’s not necessary that she be part of this thing.”

  Bobby said, “Mother’s idea of burning the house down begins to make sense.”

  “Oh, come on,” said his father.