Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

It always irritated her when people slept through the day, even when she was perfectly aware they had driven all night. There was something obscurely wicked about daytime sleep. A body should be up and doing under God’s sun. Even though their money was in the old brown purse hung way up in the back of the upstairs hall closet, she couldn’t stifle her resentment, and several times she caught herself mumbling to herself as she did the day’s chores, and told herself that talking to yourself was a sign of senility. She had planned to drive into York, but she didn’t want to leave the place untended with people there. Tomorrow would be soon enough. As was her habit, she worked off her irritation by finding something she had been putting off. After her meager lunch she went out and scrubbed the whole length of the front porch on her hands and knees, and then scrubbed the porch railing, posts and all.

She heard the old water pump start up at a little after four and it pleased her to know those people were finally getting up. She remembered she hadn’t spoken to the young man about breakfast. It was a funny time of day for breakfast, but if they could eat it, she could cook it, and you couldn’t sneeze at another two dollars and forty cents. Before going to ask them, she went to the kitchen to make certain she had enough to feed four of them. Just enough eggs and more than enough of the corn bread, but the bacon would be skimpy. Two good melons, and oatmeal for those as wanted it, and use the middle-size coffeepot. That should do it just fine.

She took off her apron and hung it on the back of the kitchen door, gave her hair a few pats and went out the back way to walk back to the cabins. When she was twenty feet from the back stoop she heard the slamming of car doors and heard the motor start. She was walking along the driveway, and she began to hurry, adjusting a social smile of invitation.

As the car came toward her she returned its wide smile and held up her hand for them to stop.

The car made a much greater sound and it suddenly seemed to leap upon her. The awareness of death flashed bright and hot in her mind. She had the feeling that she stood frozen by terror for a very long time. In actuality she moved almost as nimbly as an athlete. She whirled and plunged to her left, diving rather than making the mistake of trying to run, diving so that both feet left the ground, her arms reaching forward to break her fall. Even so, the wide right edge of the bumper cracked her painfully on the right ankle bone, turning her slightly so that she landed in the softness of the grass on her right arm and shoulder with a jarring thud and rolled up and over onto her back, legs high and kicking.

She sat up, dazed. Over the years she had had to purchase ever stronger reading glasses, testing them at the counter of the five-and-ten in Lancaster. But her distance vision would have gratified a hawk. In the moment before her eyes filled with tears, blurring everything, she saw the car a hundred feet away, slowing for the turn onto the highway. She was too dazed to think of license numbers. She looked at their faces. A raggedy-headed girl with a mean, pouty look. A man so ugly he could get work in a cage at the carnival. A man driving, going bald, wearing glasses. A pointy-faced one he was, like an egg-sucking fox. She saw them vividly for one instant and then her eyes filled. The car was a shiny blob, turning onto the highway, heading toward Lancaster.

Close at hand she heard a red squirred scolding her. Her eyes cleared. She saw him on a low, fat limb, staring down at her.

“Tried to kill me!” she told him. “Sure as I live and breathe.”

The squirrel survived the first two syllables, before the sheer volume drove him back up into his hole, high in the tree.

Pearl Weaver stood up very slowly, testing every muscle. Her shoulder was wrenched, her right arm numbed. Her right ankle was beginning to puff, and it hurt to put weight on it, but not too much. She hobbled toward the house, and her thinking was still not clear.

“Ready to say something about breakfast and they run you down,” she grumbled.

She went into the parlor and sat in the big leather chair. It had always been and would always be Ralph’s chair, and she would never sit in it without feeling she used it on sufferance.

“Why?” she demanded of the fringed lamp, the pottery cats on the mantel, the floral wallpaper. “Why?” she asked the imitation Oriental rug, the Boston rocker, the cataract eye of the silent television set. She had heard a whoop of shrill derision after she had jumped out of the way. “For fun?” She kept looking at the television set. “Or... didn’t they want to be seen?”

Something stirred in the back of her mind. She’d followed it on television. A terrible thing! That poor girl. And they matched the words said about them, the descriptions, every one of them.

“Lord God Almighty!” she said, and she said it very softly. “They missed me,” she said, “and they can come back for me and finish it.”

She moved with desperate haste. She did not feel partially safe until she had all doors locked, and had Ralph’s shotgun that she had always meant to sell and somehow never had, with a dark-green-and-brass shell in the single chamber, and the hammer back.

She had had the phone taken out six years ago. She waited for them to come back for a full fifteen minutes before deciding they were gone for good. And then she walked down the highway to the Brumbarger place nearly a half mile away, carrying the shotgun just in case. She was limping very badly by the time she got there, and her shoulder had begun to ache.

Two minutes after Pearl Weaver entered the Brumbarger home, a sergeant in the Pennsylvania State Police sat with a comedy look of consternation on his face, holding a phone almost at arm’s length, while two men in the office chuckled. But suddenly the words began to get through to him. The dispatcher nailed the car nearest the area and sent it to the Brumbarger house on the double.

Fifty long minutes later, every entrance booth previously alerted had a new and specific piece of information to put with their previous emergency instructions. Look for a ’58 or ’59 Mercury, brown and tan, two- or four-door sedan, fog lamps, radio aerial, Pennsylvania plates, three men and a woman.

The old lady had been observant, and she was pleasingly positive.

Laughlintown, Pennsylvania, is a not unpleasant small town in the Laurel Hill area of the state, not too far from the 2684-foot summit of that range of not-quite mountains. No resident of Laughlintown could approach in the intensity of his disgust and dismay at having to live there, the strong emotions of Michael Bruce Hallowell. That was not his official name. He was registered in the local high school as Carl Lartch. He was certain that this summer, between his sophomore and junior years, was fraught with more misery than one spirit could safely contain.

In the confidential records maintained on him in the high-school files he was recorded as being highly intelligent, imaginative, a poor organizer, poorly adjusted socially, no athletic ability, inclined to be argumentative and sarcastic. Dedicated teachers considered this limp, spindly, myopic gangling, acned, large-headed, unorganized child a challenge. The journeyman teacher was delighted to pass him through the course and be rid of him. His more muscular contemporaries believed they could make of him a more socially desirable citizen by beating him on the head at every opportunity. But they could never whip him past the point where he could still wipe his bloody mouth and in iciest contempt call them peasants.

His two sisters thought of him as an almost unendurable social handicap. His parents were baffled by him.

Carl Lartch was not confused at all. He had read his way through better than half the books in the Laughlintown library. The world of the books was infinitely more satisfying than the world around him. He kept a private secret journal and wrote his opinions and impressions in it, comfortably aware of the danger that, should it ever be made public in his home town, the reaction would be murderous. A recent exposure to early Mencken had solidified his contempt for the booboisie. His was a total confidence that one day the people of Laughlintown would be astonished that such a man could have once lived among them, and so gratified even his continuing contempt for them would be a welcome recognition of the place of his birth.