Eleven (20 page)

But nothing happened. Suddenly there was silence.

“Thank—
God
,” Stanley heard the blonde woman say, wearily.

The telephone would ring, he thought. That would be next. The police.

Stanley sat down in a chair, sat rigidly for several minutes. The rock had weighed eight or ten pounds, he thought. The very least that could have happened was that the man had suffered a concussion. But Stanley imagined the skull fractured, the brain partly crushed. Perhaps he had lived only a few moments after the impact.

He got up and went to his canvas. Boldly, he mixed a color for the entire nose, painted over the messy highlight, then attacked the background, making it a darker green. By the time he had finished the background, the nose was dry enough for him to put the highlight in, which he did quickly and surely. There was no sound anywhere except that of his rather accelerated breathing. He painted as if he had only five minutes more to paint, five minutes more to live before they came for him.

But by six o’clock, nobody had come. The telephone had not rung, and the picture was done. It was good, better than he had dared hope it would be. Stanley felt exhausted. He remembered that there was no coffee in the house. No milk, either. He’d have to have a little coffee. He’d have to go out.

Fear was sneaking up on him again. Were they waiting for him downstairs in front of the house? Or were they still at the hospital, watching their friend die? What if he were dead? You wouldn’t kill a man for playing ball below your window on Sunday—even though you might like to.

He tried to pull himself together, went into the bathroom and took a quick, cool shower, because he had been perspiring quite a bit. He put on a clean blue shirt and combed his hair. Then he
pushed his wallet and keys into his pocket and went out. He saw no sign of the ball-players on the sidewalk, or of anyone who seemed to be interested in him. He bought milk and coffee at the delicatessen around the corner, and on the way back he ran into the blonde woman of about forty who lived on the floor above him.

“Wasn’t that awful this afternoon!” she said to Stanley. “I saw you down there arguing with them. Good for you! You certainly scared them off.” She shook her head despairingly. “But I suppose they’ll be back next Sunday.”

“Do they play Saturdays?” Stanley asked suddenly, and entirely out of nervousness, since he didn’t care whether they played Saturdays or not.

“No,” she said dubiously. “Well, they once did, but mostly it’s Sundays. I swear to God I’m going to make Al stay home one Sunday so he can hear ’em. You must have it a little worse than me, being lower down.” She shook her head again. She looked thin and tired, and there was a complicated meshwork of wrinkles under her lower lids. “Well, you’ve got my thanks for breakin’ ’em up a little earlier today.”

“Thank you,” Stanley said, really saying it almost involuntarily to thank her for not mentioning, for not having seen what he had done.

They climbed the stairs together.

“Trust this super not to be around whenever somebody needs him,” she said, loud enough to carry into the superintendent’s second-floor apartment, which they were then passing. “And to think we all give him big tips on Christmas!”

“It’s pretty bad,” Stanley said with a smile as he unlocked his door. “Well, let’s hope next week’s a little better.”

“You said it. I hope it’s pouring rain,” she said, and went on up the stairs.

Stanley was in the habit of breakfasting at a small café between his house and the subway, and on Monday morning one of the ballplayers—the one who usually wore blue jeans—was in the café. He was having coffee and doughnuts when Stanley walked in, and he gave Stanley such an unpleasant look, continued for several minutes to give him such an unpleasant look, that a few other people in the café noticed it and began to watch them. Stanley stammeringly ordered coffee. The redheaded man wasn’t dead, he decided. He was probably hovering between life and death. If Franky were dead, or if he were perfectly all right now, the dark-haired man’s expression would have been different. Stanley finished his coffee and passed the man on the way to pay his check. He expected the man to try to trip him, or at least to say something to him as he passed him, but he didn’t.

That evening, when Stanley came home from work at a little after six, he saw two of the ballplayers—the dark-haired man again and one of the paunchy men who looked like a wrestler in his ordinary clothes—standing across the street. They stared at him as he went into his building. Upstairs in his apartment, Stanley pondered the possible significance of their standing across the street from where he lived. Had their friend just died, or was he nearer death? Had they just come from the funeral, perhaps? Both of them had been wearing dark suits, suits that might have been their best. Stanley listened for feet on the stairs. There was only the plodding tread of the old woman who lived with her dog on the top floor. She aired her dog at about this time every evening.

All at once Stanley noticed that his windows were shattered. Now he saw three or four stones and fragments of glass on the carpet. There was a stone on his bed, too. The window that had been broken Sunday had almost no glass in it now, and of the upper halves of the windows, which were paneled, only two or three panels remained, he saw when he raised the shades.

He set about methodically picking up the stones and the larger pieces of glass and putting them into a paper bag. Then he got his broom and swept. He was wondering when he would have the time to put the glass back—no use asking the super to do it—and he thought probably not before next weekend, unless he ordered the pieces during his lunch hour tomorrow. He got his yardstick and measured the larger panes, which were of slightly different sizes because it was an old house, and then the panels, and recorded the numbers on a paper which he put into his wallet. He’d have to buy putty, too.

He stiffened, hearing a faint click at his doorlock. “Who’s there?” he called.

Silence.

He had an impulse to yank the door open, then realized he was afraid to. He listened for a few moments. There was no other sound, so he decided to forget the click. Maybe he had only imagined it.

When he came home the next evening, he couldn’t get his door open. The key went in, but it wouldn’t turn, not a fraction of an inch. Had they put something in it to jam it? Had that been the click he had heard last night? On the other hand, the lock had given him some trouble about six months ago, he remembered. For several days it had been difficult to open, and then it had got all right again.
Or had that been the lock on his father’s store door? He couldn’t quite remember.

He leaned against the stair rail, staring at the key in the lock and wondering what to do.

The blonde woman was coming up the stairs.

Stanley smiled and said, “Good evening.”

“Hello, there. What happened? Forget your key?”

“No, I—The lock’s a little stiff,” he said.

“Oh. Always something wrong in this house, ain’t there?” she said, moving on down the hall. “Did you ever see anything like it?”

“No,” he agreed, smiling. But he looked after her anxiously. Usually, she stopped and chatted a little longer. Had she heard something about his dropping the rock? And she hadn’t mentioned his broken windows, though she was home all day and had probably heard the noise.

Stanley turned and attacked the lock, turning the key with all his strength. The lock suddenly yielded. The door was open.

It took him until after midnight to get the panes in. And all the time he worked, he was conscious of the fact that the windows might be broken again when he got home tomorrow.

The following evening the same two men, the paunchy one and the dark-haired one who was in blue jeans and a shirt now, were standing across the street, and to Stanley’s horror they crossed the street so as to meet him in front of his door. The paunchy one reached out and took a handful of Stanley’s jacket and shirtfront.

“Listen, Mac,” he said in Stanley’s face, “you can go to jail for what you did Sunday. You know that, doncha?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Stanley said quickly.

“Oh, you
don’t
?”

“No!” Stanley yelled.

The man let him go with a shove. Stanley straightened his jacket, and went on into his house. The lock was again difficult, but he flung himself against it with the energy of desperation. It yielded slowly, and when Stanley removed his key, a rubbery string came with it: they had stuffed his lock with chewing gum. Stanley wiped his key, with disgust, on the floor. He did not begin to shake until he had closed the door of his apartment. Then even as he shook, he thought: I’ve beaten them. They weren’t coming after him. Broken windows, chewing gum? So what? They hadn’t sought out the police. He had lied, of course, in saying he didn’t know what they were talking about, but that had been the right reply, after all. He wouldn’t have lied to a policeman, naturally, but they hadn’t brought the police in yet.

Stanley began to feel better. Moreover, his windows were intact, he saw. He decided that the redheaded man was probably going through a prolonged crisis. There was something subdued about the men’s behavior, he thought. Or were they planning some worse attack? He wished he knew if the redheaded man were in a hospital or walking around. It was just possible, too, that the man had died, Stanley thought. Maybe the men weren’t quite sure that it was he who had dropped the rock—Mr. Collins lived above Stanley and might have dropped it, for instance—and perhaps an investigation by the police was yet to come.

On Thursday evening, he passed Mr. Collins on the stairs as he was coming home. Mr. Collins was on his way to work. It struck Stanley that Mr. Collins’ “Good evening” was cool. He wondered if Mr. Collins had heard about the rock and considered him a murderer,
or at least some kind of psychopath, to have dropped a ten-pound rock on somebody’s head?

Saturday came, and Stanley worked all day in his father’s hardware store, went to a movie, and came home at about eleven. Two of the small panes in the upper part of one window were broken. Stanley thought them not important enough to fix until the weather grew cooler. He wouldn’t have noticed it, if he hadn’t deliberately checked the state of the windows.

He slept late Sunday morning, for he had been extremely tired the night before. It was nearly one o’clock when he set up his easel to paint. He had in mind to paint the aperture between two buildings, which contained a tree, that he could see straight out his window above the lot. He thought this Sunday might be a good Sunday to paint, because the ballplayers probably wouldn’t come. Stanley pictured them dampened this Sunday, at least to the extent that they would find another vacant lot to play in.

He had not quite finished his sketch of the scene in charcoal on his canvas, when he heard them. For a moment, he thought he was imagining it, that he was having an auditory hallucination. But no. He heard them ever more clearly in the alley—their particular sullen bravado coming through the murmuring, a collective murmur as recognizable to Stanley as a single familiar voice. Stanley waited, a little way back from his window.

“Okay, boys, let’s
go-o-o
!”

“
Yeeeeee-hoooooo!
” Sheer defiance, a challenge to any who might contest their right to play there.

Stanley went closer to the window, looking, wide-eyed, for the redheaded man. And there he was! A patch of bandage on the top
of his head, but otherwise as brutishly energetic as ever. As Stanley watched, he hurled a catcher’s mitt at a companion who was then bending over, hitting him in the buttocks.

Raucous, hooting laughter.

Then from above: “F’gosh sakes, why don’t you guys grow up? Why don’t you beat it? We’ve had enough of you around here!” It was the blonde woman, and Stanley knew that Mr. Collins would not be far behind.

“
Ah, save yer throat!
”

“C’mon down ’n get in the game, sister!”

There was a new defiance in their voices today. They were louder. They were determined to win. They
had
won. They were back.

Stanley sat down on his bed, dazed, frustrated, and suddenly tired. He was glad the redheaded fellow wasn’t dead. He really was glad. And yet with his relief something fighting and bitter rose up in him, something borne on a wave of unshed tears.

“Let’s have it, Joey, let’s
have
it!”

Thud!

“Hey, Franky! Franky, look! Ah-hah-
haaaaaa!
”

Stanley put his hands over his ears, lifted his feet onto the bed, and shut his eyes. He lay in a Z position, his legs drawn up, and tried to be perfectly calm and quiet. No use fighting, he thought. No use fighting, no use crying.

Then he thought of something and sat up abruptly. He wished he had put the hedge bushes back. Now it was too late, he supposed, because they had been lying out on the ground for a week. But how he wished he had! Just that gesture of defiance, just that bit of beauty launched again in their faces.

THE EMPTY BIRDHOUSE

The first time Edith saw it she laughed, not believing her eyes.

She stepped to one side and looked again; it was still there, but a bit dimmer. A squirrel-like face—but demonic in its intensity—looked out at her from the round hole in the birdhouse. An illusion, of course, something to do with shadows, or a knot in the wood of the back wall of the birdhouse. The sunlight fell plain on the six-by-nine-inch birdhouse in the corner made by the toolshed and the brick wall of the garden. Edith went closer, until she was only ten feet away. The face disappeared.

That was funny, she thought, as she went back into the cottage. She would have to tell Charles tonight.

But she forgot to tell Charles.

Three days later she saw the face again. This time she was straightening up after having set two empty milk bottles on the back doorstep. A pair of beady black eyes looked out at her, straight and level, from the birdhouse, and they appeared to be surrounded by
brownish fur. Edith flinched, then stood rigid. She thought she saw two rounded ears, a mouth that was neither animal nor bird, simply grim and cruel.