Donald Westlake: The Ax

Next beyond the Ricks house, back the way I'm now going, is an empty field, strewn with shrubs and low pines, with a For Sale sign — white letters on red, phone number added in black Magic Marker — on a post near the road. Next beyond that is another house similar to EGR's, built around the same time, probably by the same builder, onto which a few additional rooms were pasted over the years. Stucco was applied at some point, instead of aluminum, and painted the color of squash. A large metal For Sale sign from a local real estate agent stands on the unmowed lawn, and the place has an abandoned air to it, as though the family has gone away to live somewhere smaller, less expensive, closer to the Welfare office.

I turn at this decamped home, enter the driveway, stop, and back turning out of it, so that I'm parked off the road in front of the house, with a clear view beyond the offered field to the front of EGR's place. I've been careful not to block the view of the For Sale sign with my Voyager, because I want the occasional passerby to assume I'm waiting for the agent.

I'm getting hungry, but I don't want to give up my vigil, lose my opportunity to finish the day's work. In my mind's eye, a car pulls in at the driveway over there, a man gets out of it, he crosses to the mailbox, I drive forward, and it's all over.

Does he get his mail while still in his car? And then does he drive into the garage before getting out of the car? And does he close the garage door immediately? And do I follow him, the Luger in my hand, or under my jacket?

I can only guess at any of these things. I can only wait to see what happens, and see what I do in response.

Three hours go by, and nothing happens, and I'm getting very hungry indeed. I may be out of work and desperate, but I'm still not used to missing meals. Still, the thought remains, that if I leave my post, EGR will appear immediately, and will be safely inside his house before I return.

Twenty past three. A Windstar minivan, gray, very like my Voyager, drives slowly past me, and what attracts my attention is that the heavyset middle-aged woman at the wheel of it is glaring at me. Glaring. I blink at her, not understanding her hostility. She drives on by, and then she stops at that mailbox just up ahead, in front of EGR's place. Would this be Mrs. Ricks?

Apparently. I see her slide over to the right side of the Windstar, open the mailbox, pull out the mail. Then she drives on into the garage, and the door slides down.

So. It could be that she wasn't exactly showing hostility, after all, but merely close observation. If she did make the assumption I'm hoping for, that I'm a prospective buyer waiting for the Realtor, maybe she was just frowning at me, studying me, as a potential neighbor.

But the question is, where's her husband? She closed the garage door, so she's not expecting him to drive in any time soon. Was he at home all this time? Maybe he's sick today, got a spring cold.

Or maybe he's out on a job interview, won't be back for a couple of days.

It's getting late. I'm very hungry, and I also have to get back to the mall to pick up Marjorie at six. I can see now that nothing is going to happen here today. A wasted day.

I can't have too many wasted days. This whole operation has to be done as quickly and cleanly as possible, without sloppiness or unnecessary risk, to get it over with before the equations change. Still, nothing is going to happen here today.

Now what? Tomorrow, oddly enough, I have a job interview of my own, in Albany, with a man from a package and label manufacturer, an outfit that specializes in the labels that wrap around tin cans. I don't have much hope, since labels are really some distance out of my line, and surely there are label experts who've been downsized in the last few years, but you never know. Lightning might strike.

Well, if it does, I won't be back here on Berkshire Way any more, will I? And EGR will never know what a lucky man he is.

But if lightning doesn't strike, what then? I can't come back up here on Wednesday, that's Marjorie's other day with Dr. Carney, and the next time I come here I'd better leave home a lot earlier. Clearly the mail had already been delivered when I first got here today.

Thursday, then. I'll be back here Thursday. Unless, of course, by Thursday I'm becoming an expert in tin can labels.

When I first got my hands on that great pile of resumes, with more coming in, and still more, what I felt, I now realize, looking back on it, was a kind of gleeful power. I'd put something over on these people, the competition, I'd learned their secrets and they didn't even know I was there, in the darkness, in the shadows, in the corner, in the box number, watching them. I was like a miser with his gold, hunched over the file folders of resumes in my office, secret even from Marjorie, no one knowing the power I had, no one knowing the coup I'd accomplished.

But that first euphoria had to wear off, and it did, leaving only questions in its wake. What would I do with these things? How, after all, could the resumes help me? Or would they merely serve to discourage me, as when I would look at this sheet or that sheet and see someone just slightly better-looking for the job than I am. Look at all these people out here, all of them worthy, all of them accomplished, all of them willing. Look how many there are, and look how few the berths they're all steering toward.

So I went from secret pleasure at my cleverness in amassing this hoard of resumes to just as secret depression. I might have given up then, given up everything — this is before my current plan, of course — I might have given up all hope of finding a new job and maintaining my claw-hold on my life, this life, I might have given in completely to despair, if only there had been any other choice.

But there wasn't. There wasn't, and there isn't. I kept going then, only because there was nothing else to do. And who knows how many of these people in these resumes are in the same state? Going forward with no hope, but only because there's nothing else to do. We're like sharks, in that way; if we don't keep swimming, we'll merely sink.

Suicide is not an option, I wouldn't consider it for a second, though I know some of these people have considered it and some of them will do it. (This world we live in began fifteen years ago, when the air traffic controllers were all given the chop, and suicide ran briskly through that group, probably because they felt more alone than we do now.) But I don't want to kill myself, I don't want to stop. I want to go on, even when there's no way to go on. That's the point.

In any event, I was feeling just about as low as I've ever felt, I was having real difficulty just to rouse my energy enough to send out my own resumes. But just then an article in Pulp caught my eye and got my brain working once more.

It was one of those inside-a-corner-of-our-fascinating-industry pieces, the sort that used to make my eyes glaze over when I was working for Halcyon, but which now I read slowly and carefully, even underlining certain trenchant sentences, because I need to keep up with the industry. Don't ever permit yourself to become yesterday's man, that's one of the basic rules.

Well, this particular piece in Pulp was about a new process at a plant over in New York State, at a town called Arcadia. The company, Arcadia Processing, was a wholly owned subsidiary of one of the biggest paper companies in America, one of the outfits that make their millions in toilet paper and tissues. But Arcadia was a success story in itself, so the owners were leaving it alone.

For much of this century, Arcadia had specialized in turning out cigarette paper made from tobacco leavings, the shreds and stems that are left over after the manufacture of cigarettes. Early in the twentieth century, a couple of different processes were developed to make paper out of that stuff — it's hard to do, because tobacco fibers are so short — and this tobacco-paper was initially used to strengthen the end of cigars, to make them chewable. Later, a variant on that paper was bleached and aerated so it could be used as the paper around ordinary cigarettes, and this is the product Arcadia produced.