The Houseguest

  “More divided loyalties?” he asked skeptically.

  His father came forward. “Let’s get this straight,” Doug said. “Has Chuck really decamped? By coming back like this do you mean you’ve broken with him for good?”

  “I was never with him!” she shouted. “Will you listen to me? They’re out there, in a car with the lights out. They’re probably all armed to the teeth.”

  Doug’s expression changed from dubiety to fear. “Oh, my God,” he muttered, and then, in a louder voice, “By ‘they’ you mean his gang?”

  “Tedesco was one name, I believe,” said Audrey, “and then you claim to have spoken with a Mr. Perlmutter.”

  “When Lyman left, he threatened to come back with a carload of other relatives who have been drinking all day,” said Lydia, looking for the light switch that ought to have been on the wall near the door. “I haven’t had time to tell you that.”

  “And ransack the house?” asked Audrey. “I thought we were getting off too easy.”

  Doug nodded. “Those Neanderthals who hang around in the back room of the gas station. They’ve been doing that for years, generation after generation.”

  “Goddammit,” Lydia said. “Will you turn the lights off!”

  Doug went to more or less the same place where she had been looking in vain, found a switch, and put the kitchen into darkness.

  In the dark he said, “We’ve got floodlights out there in the car-park.”

  “No,” said Lydia. “Lights will keep them away from where they can be seen. They’ll just keep the car out in the lane, or they’ll shoot out the bulbs. In a minute when our eyes get adjusted, we’ll be able to see as well as they, and they might not know at first that we’re onto them.”

  “I think we might suffer less damage in the long run,” said Audrey, “if we simply surrendered at least some of the items they want. Make a deal of some sort. It has been determined that some of the worst people will often negotiate. Compromise seems to come naturally to human beings.”

  “Not to Chuck. I begged him at the pool!” Doug said with emotion, and then turned hard. “If they come for me, they’d better be ready to shed blood—their own as well as mine.”

  Bobby’s voice came from near the door. “I agree. For everything they are given, they’ll want something else. This is war.”

  “They don’t want your possessions,” Lydia said to the others, whose presences were becoming discernible. “They want me.”

  “You?” Bobby asked, in the kind of voice that could be taken to imply the unspoken question: For what reason?

  “I’m hardly making it up,” she said testily. “Chuck told me.”

  “They want you,” said Bobby, putting it as a statement of dubious authenticity.

  “I don’t intend to stand here in the dark repeating it. That’s what I was told.”

  “You mean to say …” Audrey began to speak, her voice falling away.

  “Look here,” said her father-in-law, in almost a parody of the avuncular tone, “look here, Lydia, we’re certainly not going to expect you to make such a sacrifice for the family. Why should you? You’ve just joined it. Please believe me, you can rely on us to stand back of you one hundred percent on whatever course you choose. That’s what a family’s for.”

  Even after the experience of this half a day, she remained shockable. “But you are asking me, aren’t you?”

  “He just said he wasn’t.” Bobby was speaking. “What more do you want, Lyd? Why make any more trouble than we’ve got?”

  “Will there ever be a way out of this whole thing?” Audrey asked rhetorically. “Short of total ruin? That’s all I’m saying. I just wish I had the answer.”

  Lydia asked bitterly, “You really want me to go out there, don’t you?”

  Doug said, “I don’t know how I could put it in any other way than I already have. I specifically stated I didn’t expect that of you. If something’s beyond someone’s capacities, it’s unfair to criticize them: that’s always been my policy.”

  “Now you can’t say that’s not fair,” said Bobby.

  Lydia tested them. “Okay, I’m going.”

  “Uh-huh,” murmured Bobby.

  “No,” said Doug.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said I wouldn’t ask it of you, and I’m not.”

  “Is that your response?”

  “You’re really being a pain, Lyd,” said Bobby. “Just let me ask you: Do you really want to go? Because that’s what it seems like when you keep asking the same question.”

  “Do you know what a shit you are being?”

  “Sure,” Bobby said, “you can abuse me. That’s always one way of avoiding the issue.”

  Audrey came to her side in the darkness. “Don’t let them bully you, dear. They can’t take away your dignity.”

  Lydia suddenly understood she was speaking of the gang in the car, not her son and husband. “You’re a traitor to your own sex.”

  “Sex has nothing to do with this,” said Audrey, in apparent, perhaps even genuine innocence. “Survival is what’s at stake.”

  “Your survival.”

  Audrey sighed. “I could hardly speak with authority on anyone else’s.”

  “What gets me,” said Lydia, “is that earlier you kept suspecting me of being in collusion with Chuck. Now you are urging it upon me.”

  “Lydia,” Doug said, coming nearer, “the situation’s always changing. You’ll learn that when you get a few years older. Nations soon go to war with their former allies. After acquiring power, revolutionaries invariably begin to execute their old comrades, and starving persons cannibalize their nearby friends. This is beyond right and wrong: it is simple reality.”

  “No it isn’t,” Lydia said with more conviction that she felt. Indeed she suspected he might well be correct, but it would have been unconscionable for her spinelessly to acquiesce, and anyway, just because something is true is not sufficient justification for it to be stated in so many words, thus discouraging those souls who live on hope. “Oh, maybe it is for you,” she went on, “and for them out there. But I’m better than you. I’m better than them.” Having said which, she realized she would now have to make her claim good, else be disqualified forever.

  She breathed deeply and left the house. She was halfway to the parking area before the men in the darkened vehicle were aware of her approach and turned on not only the headlamps but also a row of spotlights mounted on the roof of the jeep. It would have shown a weakness if she had covered her eyes, but she could not help wincing.

  To show disrespect for Chuck, she went to the driver’s side and spoke presumably to Lyman. She would continue to be blind for a few moments.

  “Chief,” said she, “I want to file formal charges against someone for criminal trespass, malicious injuries, possession of a concealed weapon, sodomy, and mala in se.” She impulsively threw in the last, so to speak a catchall, because the penultimate charge was more than a bit doubtful, Chuck’s not having performed unnaturally in bed, and in fact the previous one had slim support, for she had never seen his gun if indeed he had one.

  The window was rolled squeakily down. With it closed, he had probably not heard her statement of charges, and she had now lost the fine edge of energy that had produced it. To make one good attack is within anybody’s power, but consistency is the mark of the champion.

  Before the window was fully open she could smell, in the clean air of the shore, the stale booze-fumes emanating from the interior of the vehicle.

  “Lady,” said Lyman’s voice, “you think you can come up here and do anything you damn please, shake your little ass around in shorts without any underpants under them, wear shirts with the nipples of your knockers sticking out, you talk worse filth than any of the hardworking men I know, I’ve heard your kind in the village, with your fuck-this and fuck-that and shit-on-it and so forth, and we’re supposed to clean up after you and bow down like you’re royalty or something, but I tell you we get sick o
f it. We’re gonna teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.” He threw the door open, and had not her vision by now improved sufficiently to see it coming, Lydia might have been struck.

  But she stepped back and waited for Lyman to emerge, which he proceeded to do as if he had acquired another hundred pounds of flesh since last seen. It was perhaps unfair of her, considering his current state, in which the chief was obviously incapable of giving more than a symbolic performance, but that was the pleasure of it: she kicked him in the groin with all her force. She was amazed at how effective this blow proved: she had never previously delivered one except against a soft dummy in a two-session female self-defense course at college.

  Lyman actually howled in anguish, clutched himself, and sat down heavily in the gravel.

  Figures emerged from the jeep, but before they reached her Lydia had claimed the chief’s revolver from his holster. It was much heavier than she had assumed it would be, took both hands to hold and was not so steady even then.

  “Lydia,” Chuck said, coming from around the rear of the vehicle, “do you realize what you’ve done to an officer of the law?” He was by far the smallest of the four standing men. The others were submissively holding their hands in the air, as if victims of a stickup.

  “Now you guys,” she said, in a voice that started uncertainly but grew more steady as she spoke, “you guys pick up Lyman and put him in the jeep.”

  Chuck slowly advanced. “Lydia,” he said, “can’t you see it was just a joke? You’re going to get into trouble if you keep this up.”

  She waved the pistol at the largest of the big men. “Get going.”

  He made a little bow of acquiescence and bent to take the crumpled chief under one shoulder. Another man took the other side, and the third seized the ankles just above the hightop shoes. The task looked heavy even for three large porters: Lyman hung between them like an overfilled sack.

  Chuck said, “So he goes a little far, but he is the duly constituted authority. He can’t be deposed just like that, at your convenience.”

  Lydia kept the gun on him. “Why is your name Burgoyne and not Finch?”

  “My mother got married.” He stepped closer. “I’m glad to see you’re coming to your senses, Lydia. Now put that gun down.”

  Lyman uttered a new groan of pain. His hat had fallen off: perhaps the men had banged his head trying to insert him into the jeep.

  “Don’t come closer,” Lydia warned Chuck. “I know how to shoot a revolver. My uncle showed me.”

  Chuck said knowingly, “And who would know better than a mobster?”

  “He’s a veteran police lieutenant,” :she lied.

  “Go on,” said Chuck, but he stopped where he was. “Put the gun down, Lydia. Let’s talk this over.”

  “I want you out of here. You’ve become an embarrassment.”

  “You can’t mean that. We saved each other’s lives today. That must signify something.”

  “One person naturally helps another in an extreme situation: that’s only human. It doesn’t mean anything else.”

  “I just wish you could bring yourself to admit it,” Chuck said, in a wheedling tone. “You’re in love with me. God knows, you’ve done everything you can to show that, but you simply can’t say it. Okay, then don’t! But just put the gun down, and we’ll forget this little incident ever happened. Am I right, boys?”

  The other men had by now installed Lyman in the back seat of the jeep and were presumably awaiting instructions. They grunted inscrutably in response to Chuck’s question.

  Lydia waved the pistol. “You guys get in.”

  Chuck pretended to be part of the current directorate and added his own orders as the men were complying with hers. “Go on back to the village. This is it for tonight.”

  “You’re going with them,” said Lydia. “Get in.”

  “Naw,” he said in a lowered voice. “That wouldn’t work at all. I don’t have anything in common with these guys. I left and made something of myself. I didn’t come back to them. I’ve got an education. I’ve got good taste. I know how to act. I can go anywhere.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Lydia, waving the gun at him. “Get in the jeep. We don’t want your kind here.”

  Chuck hung his head for a moment. When he brought his eyes up, he said, “You think your fancy in-laws give you the right to take the law into your own hands?”

  “Yes.” Despite the complexities of reality, or perhaps because of them, the simplest answers are often the most effective: she was learning that. “I could give lots more in the way of justification, but it would probably come down to that simple fact in the end.”

  Chuck stared at her. “You’re my biggest disappointment. I can’t really see you getting, any where in the long run. You’re living in a fool’s paradise. You think you’re clever now, but they’ll eventually destroy you.”

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this,” Lydia said, “because it sounds so phony, but unless you get into the jeep before I have counted to three, I’m simply going to shoot you. One.”

  Chuck shrugged, said, “You’re in charge,” turned and took a step towards the vehicle.

  Lydia felt ridiculous, but she went ahead and said, “Two.”

  At this point, Chuck whirled around and leaped at her. She had no choice but to fire.

  “Good God,” said Doug, at the kitchen windows. “Who’s been shot?” He had seen nothing yet but the shadowy figures of the men who had deboarded from the jeep on the side facing him. The action was on the far side.

  “Put on the lights out there!” cried Bobby, though he made no move to do so himself.

  “Would that be wise, with guns being fired?”

  “This is exactly what I feared,” Audrey moaned. “Just exactly.”

  “Well,” Bobby said, “I think my place is with Lydia.”

  His father asked, incredulously, “Unarmed?”

  “There must be something we can do!”

  “We’re doing it, Bobby,” said Doug. “We’re here. We’re standing fast. We’re not running. It would make no sense to go out there and get killed. How would that help?”

  “Still,” Bobby said, “I don’t see how anybody else is going to understand afterwards.”

  Audrey spoke. “If we emerge from this unscathed—and I think it’s possible that we will, if what they really did want all the while was her—we have no business in mentioning anything about this episode to anyone else. Not even, for example, to Mrs. Finch when she comes tomorrow morning.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Bobby. “The jeep is leaving.”

  “Is someone on the ground?” Doug asked eagerly. “I can’t see a thing.” Except of course the parallel shafts of the headlamp beams as the vehicle swung around, and then its red taillights as they diminished in departure.

  Bobby said, “I’m going out there!”

  “An ambush may be just what Chuck has in mind,” Doug told him. “Better wait.”

  Suddenly someone entered the kitchen and authoritatively threw the switch that illuminated the ceiling light.

  It was Lydia. She held a large revolver.

  “Now just think this over,” Doug said urgently, holding up vertical palms. Both he and she were squinting in the bright light. “Don’t do something you’ll be sorry for.”

  “Lyd!” Bobby shouted, but he kept his distance from her. “Did you get him? Is the body out there?”

  “I take it you mean Chuck?” Her hair was tousled and she appeared otherwise the worse for wear, sweaty, soiled, scratched. She was not the kind who looked good without grooming, was nowhere near being a natural beauty, but then Doug had never had a taste for dark brunettes. On the other hand, this was the first time since seeing her in the swimsuit that he had been sexually stimulated by looking at his daughter-in-law. Perhaps it was the gun. “No,” she said in answer to Bobby. “He left.”

  “Did you shoot anybody?” Bobby sounded as though prepared to be disappointed.

  ??
?I fired once between Chuck’s feet. That’s all it took. He won’t be back.”

  Doug peered at the weapon. “Is that Lyman’s gun?”

  “He won’t make any trouble. He won’t want the world to know it was taken away from him by an unarmed woman he and his male relatives, four of them, were going to rape.”

  Bobby turned away with an expression of disdain.

  “Go get some brandy,” Lydia said to Doug.

  “Hadn’t you better put the gun down?”

  She waved it at him. “Get going.”

  “You’re a real heroine, dear,” Audrey said. “This is your moment.”

  “Sit down right there,” said Lydia, pointing the pistol at a chair.

  Doug fetched a bottle of cognac, as ordered, and included a balloon glass: just one. He intended to drink nothing, for he saw a need to keep his wits about him.

  But having directed him to pour—which he did, generously, on the assumption that it would be swallowed by her—Lydia asked him to drain the glass into his own throat. He had no intention of denying the request of an emotionally overwrought young woman holding a firearm. He complied.

  On her command he poured a second glassful of brandy and gave it to Bobby.

  “Oh,” Audrey said, reaching, “I believe that’s mine.”

  “No,” said Lydia. “We’re going to cure you. We’re going to make good use of the rest of the summer, despite this bad start.”

  Bobby took the glass. “All right, I’ll drink it for your sake, Lyd. There’s no need to keep holding that gun, for God’s sake. We’re just family now, and we’re proud of you.”

  “Drink the brandy, Bobby. You’ve just had a narrow escape.”

  “Me?”

  “Just think what would have happened to you if Chuck had stayed.”

  Doug thrust his chin forward. “Now aren’t you going a little too far? It’s true that for a while we assumed you were in some sort of conspiracy with Chuck against us. We were wrong. What more can I say? But look at it from our perspective. No offense, but you both were strangers.”

  Bobby lowered the globular vessel and said, “Wait a minute, Dad.”