John Gardner - October Light

Horace said — only Sally and, possibly, Ariah had known exactly how angry he was—“I understand in the end he shot himself, your uncle Ira.”

“It want because his feet was cold,” James came back.

The memory made her realize what a chittering devil her brother had always been. It had momentarily slipped her mind. He was a kind of savage — even to the stick, the snake’s head, the outlandish magic charms. He hadn’t been that way as a boy, of course, though the seeds were no doubt there. She’d had to lead him by the hand to church or school, he was so shy and diffident; had had to protect him from the older boys; later had had to tease and cajole him or he’d never have made a move toward a girl. It was his uncle Ira that had changed him. He was a strange man, Uncle Ira. Not exactly human — he even smelled like an animal — as if his mother’d been brought low by a bear. No one would’ve been surprised, who knew her — Leah Starke, great-great-granddaughter of the famous colonel. “Boy!” Uncle Ira would say, voice low, and little James would leap. It was almost the only word the old man ever said.

She gave her head a little shake, as if the memories were dreams and she meant to awake from them. Still no sound in the house. Surely he was asleep — and sleeping like a log half buried in a pughole, if she knew her brother James. She’d find him there at the kitchen table, where he was waiting in ambush, and she could walk right around him and cook a Christmas dinner if she wanted and he’d never twitch his nose. She put the book on the white wicker table and dropped her legs over the side. At the door she stood listening again. Not a sound. Sally opened the bedroom door, and froze.

Aimed straight at her, suspended from the ceiling above the stairwell, was James’ old shotgun, and all around her, stretched in some impenetrable pattern like the strands of a drunken spider’s web, were strings leading up to the trigger. If she’d come out less cautiously, or happened to trip, James’ shotgun would have blasted her head off. Her heart beat so painfully she had to gasp for air, pressing both hands to her chest. She couldn’t believe it. He was worse than that horrible Captain in her novel! She touched the sides of the door to ward off dizziness, carefully stepped back, took one last, long and careful look, as repelled as she’d have been, perhaps, at sight of Mr. Nit’s eels, then gently closed the door. “He’s gone crazy, Horace,” she said, and realized only now that it was literally true.

The thought of Horace, fully conscious this time, changed her mood — her husband gentle and generous to a fault, a man who’d been famous far and wide for his painless dentistry, a cultured man who’d had a record player in his office long, long years before Muzak, a reader of serious and worthwhile books. His image rose up in her mind so strongly — his image and the bitter memory that he was dead, he who had done so much good in the world — that Sally, all at once, could think of nothing but violence and terrible revenge. She could see Horace sorting through the records on his table, his bald head tipped, glowing in the lamplight like an infant’s head with its soft new hair, his soft lips pursed, his dimple showing; and when he’d chosen the records that would please him most and placed them ever so carefully on the spindle, he would push up his glasses with a quick, gentle motion, an absentminded flick of the middle finger of his immaculate right hand against the black plastic bridge, and he would stand looking down into the thick, hooked rug, his plump fingertips tucked into the pockets of his vest, listening happily to the first few measures, before striding — for that was how he walked, striding, though he was chubby and short — to his bookshelves to choose this evening’s book, then carrying it back like a prize of war, where the teapot sat waiting on the marble-topped table, beyond which she sat, Sally Page Abbott, knitting — in those days still handsome, still a beauty. He was not a man who wore greens or blues. He wore brown, like the scant hair remaining on his head, the warm brown of dark, new-ploughed earth on a mountainside, or the lighter, still-warm brown of autumn oak leaves. He took cream in his coffee, and sugar: three lumps. He smoked tobacco which he kept in an amber-glass, copper-covered humidor. He had a curious, boyish habit, with which she never interfered, of chewing little pieces of the newspaper while he read it. He cried at movies, knew poems by heart, had a garden he labored over hour after hour. He was a sensualist, he’d said once to James, with a smile. It had never occurred to him that her brother James despised him.

Sally had a feeling that her husband’s ghost was very near just now, and would sadly disapprove of the hatred in her heart. But facts were facts, and the fact was this: she could sooner make Niagara Falls run backwards than kindle the slightest spark of warmth in her heart toward her brother. With clenched teeth, glinty-eyed in spite of her tears, scheming murderously in the back of her mind, as if James her brother were solely responsible for the decay of all values, the coming of the Militant, death and decline throughout the universe, she used the bedpan, dumped it out the window, and, being too het up to imagine sleeping, returned some part of her attention to her book. Where the gap left off, she gradually made out, the Militant had not yet caught up with her friends on the Indomitable.

… The Captain laughed. “Not likely. They’ve got three times our speed. They got a tiny little boat, very light and quick. That’s Dusky’s style. We’d never get a hundred yards.”

Peter Wagner started for the sextant, but just as he reached the bridge he saw their lights: a red flicker on the horizon, hardly lights at all — what was the phrase? — “darkness made visible.” Again he felt he was something not alive — not himself, that is: a character in some book. It was as if his life had been somewhere meticulously plotted from start to finish — his life and all their lives — and even if the end were happy he would find it poisoned when he reached it: intolerable because brutally preordained. He’d read too many novels, he understood; had taken the clicks of their well-oiled tumblers unnecessarily to heart.

But for all that, his body moved quickly and efficiently, separate from his head. He — that is, his body — ducked into the wheelhouse and took a bearing across the compass, waited thirty seconds, and took another. The Militant was angling north, would miss them by maybe a half mile. Even with the darkness, it wouldn’t be enough. He went down the steps to the others. “They’ll pass about a half mile north,” he said “Unless they’re blind, they’ve got us.”

“What shall we do?” Jane said. She unwittingly clapped her hands in her excitement. Mr. Nit looked disgusted, exactly as he’d looked when he talked about accident and invention. It was that same disgust, Peter Wagner understood, that he’d been feeling himself: the futile, idealist rejection of the body’s cold mechanics. He felt a sudden urge, not new to him, to resist every impulse of his bestial system, revoke his plot. Impossible, of course. They depended on him. “Wind up the engines,” he said, “we’ll head south.”

“Aye aye sir,” Jane said, and darted for the hatch and to the engine room.

They watched the Militant sliding toward them, Peter Wagner scowling, the others pale as ghosts. He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes at most to get away, and the engine still not running. Suddenly the sound of the Militant’s engine — and the same instant, the Militant’s lights — was gone, as if swallowed by a whale. Captain Fist hobbled over to the rail and shaded his eyes.