Night Shift (28 page)

In spite of how lousy he felt in the morning, breakfast tasted good. After a moment's hesitation, he followed his customary bowl of cornflakes with scrambled eggs. He was grumpily washing out the pan when Cindy came downstairs in her robe.

“Richard Morrison! You haven't eaten an egg for breakfast since Hector was a pup.”

Morrison grunted. He considered
since Hector was a pup
to be one of Cindy's stupider sayings, on a par with I
should smile and kiss a pig.

“Have you smoked yet?” she asked, pouring orange juice.

“No.”

“You'll be back on them by noon,” she proclaimed airily.

“Lot of goddamn help you are!” he rasped, rounding on her. “You and anyone else who doesn't smoke, you all think . . . ah, never mind.”

He expected her to be angry, but she was looking at him with something like wonder. “You're really serious,” she said. “You really are.”

“You bet I am.”
You'll never know
how
serious. I hope.

“Poor baby,” she said, going to him. “You look like death warmed over. But I'm very proud.”

Morrison held her tightly.

•                           •                           •

Scenes from the life of Richard Morrison, October-November:

Morrison and a crony from Larkin Studios at Jack Dempsey's bar. Crony offers a cigarette. Morrison grips his glass a little more tightly and says:
I'm quitting.
Crony laughs and says:
I give you a week.

Morrison waiting for the morning train, looking over the top of the
Times
at a young man in a blue suit. He sees the young man almost every morning now, and sometimes at other places. At Onde's, where he is meeting a client. Looking at 45s in Sam Goody's, where Morrison is looking for a Sam Cooke album. Once in a foursome behind Morrison's group at the local golf course.

Morrison getting drunk at a party, wanting a cigarette—but not quite drunk enough to take one.

Morrison visiting his son, bringing him a large ball that squeaked when you squeezed it. His son's slobbering, delighted kiss. Somehow not as repulsive as before. Hugging his son tightly, realizing what Donatti and his colleagues had so cynically realized before him: love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.

Morrison losing the physical compulsion to smoke little by little, but never quite losing the psychological craving, or the need to have something in his mouth—cough drops, Life Savers, a toothpick. Poor substitutes, all of them.

And finally, Morrison hung up in a colossal traffic jam in the Midtown Tunnel. Darkness. Horns blaring. Air stinking. Traffic hopelessly snarled. And suddenly, thumbing open the glove compartment and seeing the half-open pack of cigarettes in there. He looked at them for a moment, then snatched one and lit it with the dashboard lighter. If anything happens, it's Cindy's fault, he told himself defiantly. I told her to get rid of all the damn cigarettes.

The first drag made him cough smoke out furiously. The second made his eyes water. The third made him feel lightheaded and swoony. It tastes awful, he thought.

And on the heels of that: My God, what am I doing?

Horns blatted impatiently behind him. Ahead, the traffic had begun to move again. He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, opened both front windows, opened the vents, and then fanned the air helplessly like a kid who has just flushed his first butt down the john.

He joined the traffic flow jerkily and drove home.

“Cindy?” he called. “I'm home.”

No answer.

“Cindy? Where are you, hon?”

The phone rang, and he pounced on it. “Hello? Cindy?”

“Hello, Mr. Morrison,” Donatti said. He sounded pleasantly brisk and businesslike. “It seems we have a small business matter to attend to. Would five o'clock be convenient?”

“Have you got my wife?”

“Yes, indeed.” Donatti chuckled indulgently.

“Look, let her go,” Morrison babbled. “It won't happen again. It was a slip, just a slip, that's all. I only had three drags and for God's sake
it didn't even taste good!”

“That's a shame. I'll count on you for five then, shall I?”

“Please,” Morrison said, close to tears. “Please—”

He was speaking to a dead line.

At 5
P.M.
the reception room was empty except for the secretary, who gave him a twinkly smile that ignored Morrison's pallor and disheveled appearance. “Mr. Donatti?” she said into the intercom. “Mr. Morrison to see you.” She nodded to Morrison. “Go right in.”

Donatti was waiting outside the unmarked room with a man who was wearing a SMILE sweatshirt and carrying a .38. He was built like an ape.

“Listen,” Morrison said to Donatti. “We can work something out, can't we? I'll pay you. I'll—”

“Shaddap,” the man in the SMILE sweatshirt said.

“It's good to see you,” Donatti said. “Sorry it has to be under such adverse circumstances. Will you come with me? We'll make this as brief as possible. I can assure you your wife won't be hurt . . . this time.”

Morrison tensed himself to leap at Donatti.

“Come, come,” Donatti said, looking annoyed. “If you do that, Junk here is going to pistol-whip you and your wife is still going to get it. Now where's the percentage in that?”

“I hope you rot in hell,” he told Donatti.

Donatti sighed. “If I had a nickel for every time someone expressed a similar sentiment, I could retire. Let it be a lesson to you, Mr. Morrison. When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails, they give him a medal. When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell. Shall we go?”

Junk motioned with the pistol.

Morrison preceded them into the room. He felt numb. The small green curtain had been pulled. Junk prodded him with the gun. This is what being a witness at the gas chamber must have been like, he thought.

He looked in. Cindy was there, looking around bewilderedly.

“Cindy!” Morrison called miserably. “Cindy, they—”

“She can't hear or see you,” Donatti said. “One-way glass. Well, let's get it over with. It really was a very small slip. I believe thirty seconds should be enough. Junk?”

Junk pressed the button with one hand and kept the pistol jammed firmly into Morrison's back with the other.

It was the longest thirty seconds of his life.

When it was over, Donatti put a hand on Morrison's shoulder and said, “Are you going to throw up?”

“No,” Morrison said weakly. His forehead was against the glass. His legs were jelly. “I don't think so.” He turned around and saw that Junk was gone.

“Come with me,” Donatti said.

“Where?” Morrison asked apathetically.

“I think you have a few things to explain, don't you?”

“How can I face her? How can I tell her that I . . . I . . .”

“I think you're going to be surprised,” Donatti said.

The room was empty except for a sofa. Cindy was on it, sobbing helplessly.

“Cindy?” he said gently.

She looked up, her eyes magnified by tears. “Dick?” she whispered. “Dick? Oh . . . Oh God . . .” He held her tightly. “Two men,” she said against his chest. “In the house and at first I thought they were burglars and then I thought they were going to rape me and then they took me someplace with a blindfold over my eyes and . . . and . . . oh it was
h-horrible
—”

“Shhh,” he said. “Shhh.”

“But why?” she asked, looking up at him. “Why would they—”

“Because of me,” he said. “I have to tell you a story, Cindy—”

When he had finished he was silent a moment and then said, “I suppose you hate me. I wouldn't blame you.”

He was looking at the floor, and she took his face in both hands and turned it to hers. “No,” she said. “I don't hate you.”

He looked at her in mute surprise.

“It was worth it,” she said. “God bless these people. They've let you out of prison.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes,” she said, and kissed him. “Can we go home now? I feel much better. Ever so much.”

The phone rang one evening a week later, and when Morrison recognized Donatti's voice, he said, “Your boys have got it wrong. I haven't even been near a cigarette.”

“We know that. We have a final matter to talk over. Can you stop by tomorrow afternoon?”

“Is it—”

“No, nothing serious. Bookkeeping really. By the way, congratulations on your promotion.”

“How did you know about that?”

“We're keeping tabs,” Donatti said noncommittally, and hung up.

When they entered the small room, Donatti said, “Don't look so nervous. No one's going to bite you. Step over here, please.”

Morrison saw an ordinary bathroom scale. “Listen, I've gained a little weight, but—”

“Yes, seventy-three percent of our clients do. Step up, please.”

Morrison did, and tipped the scales at one seventy-four.

“Okay, fine. You can step off. How tall are you, Mr. Morrison?”

“Five-eleven.”

“Okay, let's see.” He pulled a small card laminated in plastic from his breast pocket.”Well, that's not too bad. I'm going to write you a prescrip for some highly illegal diet pills. Use them sparingly and according to directions. And I'm going to set your maximum weight at. . . let's see . . .” He consulted the card again. “One eighty-two, how does that sound? And since this is December first, I'll expect you the first of every month for a weigh-in. No problem if you can't make it, as long as you call in advance.”

“And what happens if I go over one-eighty-two?”

Donatti smiled. “We'll send someone out to your house to cut off your wife's little finger,” he said. “You can leave through this door, Mr. Morrison. Have a nice day.”

Eight months later:

Morrison runs into the crony from the Larkin Studios at Dempsey's bar. Morrison is down to what Cindy proudly calls his fighting weight: one sixty-seven. He works out three times a week and looks as fit as whipcord. The crony from Larkin, by comparison, looks like something the cat dragged in.

Crony: Lord, how'd you ever stop? I'm locked into this damn habit tighter than Tillie. The crony stubs his cigarette out with real revulsion and drains his scotch.

Morrison looks at him speculatively and then takes a small white business card out of his wallet. He puts it on the bar between them. You know, he says, these guys changed my life.

Twelve months later:

Morrison receives a bill in the mail. The bill says:

QUITTERS, INC.
237 East 46th Street
New York, N.Y. 10017

Those sons of bitches! he explodes. They charged me for the electricity they used to . . . to . . .

Just pay it. she says, and kisses him.

Twenty months later:

Quite by accident, Morrison and his wife meet the Jimmy McCanns at the Helen Hayes Theatre. Introductions are made all around. Jimmy looks as good, if not better than he did on that day in the airport terminal so long ago. Morrison has never met his wife. She is pretty in the radiant way plain girls sometimes have when they are very, very happy.

She offers her hand and Morrison shakes it. There is something odd about her grip, and halfway through the second act, he realizes what it was. The little finger on her right hand is missing.

I KNOW WHAT
YOU NEED

“I know what you need.”

Elizabeth looked up from her sociology text, startled, and saw a rather nondescript young man in a green fatigue jacket. For a moment she thought he looked familiar, as if she had known him before; the feeling was close to déjà vu. Then it was gone. He was about her height, skinny, and . . . twitchy. That was the word. He wasn't moving, but he seemed to be twitching inside his skin, just out of sight. His hair was black and unkempt. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his dark brown eyes, and the lenses looked dirty. No, she was quite sure she had never seen him before.

“You know,” she said, “I doubt that.”

“You need a strawberry double-dip cone. Right?”

She blinked at him, frankly startled. Somewhere in the back of her mind she
had
been thinking about breaking for an ice cream. She was studying for finals in one of the third-floor carrels of the Student Union, and there was still a woefully long way to go.

“Right?” he persisted, and smiled. It transformed his face from something over-intense and nearly ugly into something else that was oddly appealing. The word “cute” occurred to her, and that wasn't a good word to afflict a boy with, but this one was when he smiled. She smiled back before she could road block it behind her lips. This she didn't need, to have to waste time brushing off some weirdo who had decided to pick the worst time of the year to try to make an impression. She still had sixteen chapters
of Introduction to Sociology
to wade through.

“No thanks,” she said.

“Come on, if you hit them any harder you'll give yourself a headache. You've been at it two hours without a break.”

“How would you know that?”

“I've been watching you,” he said promptly, but this time his gamin grin was lost on her. She already had a headache.

“Well, you can stop,” she said, more sharply than she had intended. “I don't like people staring at me.”

“I'm sorry.” She felt a little sorry for him, the way she sometimes felt sorry for stray dogs. He seemed to float in the green fatigue jacket and . . . yes, he had on mismatched socks. One black, one brown. She felt herself getting ready to smile again and held it back.

“I've got these finals,” she said gently.

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

She looked after him for a moment pensively. Then she lowered her gaze to her book, but an afterimage of the encounter remained:
strawberry double-dip.

When she got back to the dorm it was 11:15
P.M.
and Alice was stretched out on her bed, listening to Neil Diamond and reading
The Story of O.

“I didn't know they assigned that in Eh-17,” Elizabeth said.

Alice sat up. “Broadening my horizons, darling. Spreading my intellectual wings. Raising my . . . Liz?”

“Hmmm?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“No, sorry, I—”

“You look like somebody conked you one, kid.”

“I met a guy tonight. Sort of a funny guy, at that.”

“Oh? He must be something if he can separate the great Rogan from her beloved texts.”

“His name is Edward Jackson Hamner, Junior, no less. Short. Skinny. Looks like he washed his hair last around Washington's birthday. Oh, and mismatched socks. One black, one brown.”

“I thought you were more the fraternity type.”

“It's nothing like that, Alice. I was studying at the Union on the third floor—the Think Tank—and he invited me down to the Grinder for an ice-cream cone. I told him no and he sort of slunk off. But once he started me thinking about ice cream, I couldn't stop. I'd just decided to give up and take a break and there he was, holding a big, drippy strawberry double-dip in each hand.”

“I tremble to hear the denouement.”

Elizabeth snorted. “Well, I couldn't really say no. So he sat down, and it turns out he had sociology with Professor Branner last year.”

“Will wonders never cease, lawd a mercy. Goshen to Christmas—”

“Listen, this is really amazing. You know the way I've been sweating that course?”

“Yes. You talk about it in your sleep, practically.”

“I've got a seventy-eight average. I've got to have an eighty to keep my scholarship, and that means I need at least an eighty-four on the final. Well, this Ed Hamner says Branner uses almost the same final every year. And Ed's eidetic.”

“You mean he's got a whatzit . . . photographic memory?”

“Yes. Look at this.” She opened her sociology book and took out three sheets of notebook paper covered with writing.

Alice took them. “This looks like multiple-choice stuff.”

“It is. Ed says it's Branner's last year's final
word for word.”

Alice said flatly, “I don't believe it.”

“But it covers all the material!”

“Still don't believe it.” She handed the sheets back. “Just because this spook—”

“He isn't a spook. Don't call him that.”

“Okay. This little
guy
hasn't got you bamboozled into just memorizing this and not studying at all, has he?”

“Of course not,” she said uneasily.

“And even if this is like the exam, do you think it's exactly ethical?”

Anger surprised her and ran away with her tongue before she could hold it. “That's great for you, sure. Dean's List every semester and your folks paying your way. You aren't . . . Hey, I'm sorry. There was no call for that.”

Alice shrugged and opened
0
again, her face carefully neutral. “No, you're right. Not my business. But why don't you study the book, too . . . just to be safe?”

“Of course I will.”

But mostly she studied the exam notes provided by Edward Jackson Hamner, Jr.

When she came out of the lecture hall after the exam he was sitting in the lobby, floating in his green army fatigue coat. He smiled tentatively at her and stood up. “How'd it go?”

Impulsively, she kissed his cheek. She could not remember such a blessed feeling of relief. “I think I aced it.”

“Really? That's great. Like a burger?”

“Love one,” she said absently. Her mind was still on the exam. It was the one Ed had given her, almost word for word, and she had sailed through.

Over hamburgers, she asked him how his own finals were going.

“Don't have any. I'm in Honors, and you don't take them unless you want to. I was doing okay, so I didn't.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“I had to see how you did, didn't I?”

“Ed, you didn't. That's sweet, but—” The naked look in his eyes troubled her. She had seen it before. She was a pretty girl.

“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, I did.”

“Ed, I'm grateful. I think you saved my scholarship. I really do. But I have a boyfriend, you know.”

“Serious?” he asked, with a poor attempt to speak lightly.

“Very,” she said, matching his tone. “Almost engaged.”

“Does he know he's lucky? Does he know how lucky?”

“I'm lucky, too,” she said, thinking of Tony Lombard.

“Beth,” he said suddenly.

“What?” she asked, startled.

“Nobody calls you that, do they?”

“Why . . . no. No, they don't.”

“Not even this guy?”

“No—” Tony called her Liz. Sometimes Lizzie, which was even worse.

He leaned forward. “But Beth is what you like best, isn't it?”

She laughed to cover her confusion. “Whatever in the world—”

“Never mind.” He grinned his gamin grin. “I'll call you Beth. That's better. Now eat your hamburger.”

Then her junior year was over, and she was saying goodbye to Alice. They were a little stiff together, and Elizabeth was sorry. She supposed it was her own fault; she
had
crowed a little loudly about her sociology final when grades were posted. She had scored a ninety-seven—highest in the division.

Well, she told herself as she waited at the airport for her flight to be called, it wasn't any more unethical than the cramming she had been resigned to in that third-floor carrel. Cramming wasn't real studying at all; just rote memorization that faded away to nothing as soon as the exam was over.

She fingered the envelope that poked out of her purse. Notice of her scholarship-loan package for her senior year—two thousand dollars. She and Tony would be working together in Boothbay, Maine, this summer, and the money she would earn there would put her over the top. And thanks to Ed Hamner, it was going to be a beautiful summer. Clear sailing all the way.

But it was the most miserable summer of her life.

June was rainy, the gas shortage depressed the tourist trade, and her tips at the Boothbay Inn were mediocre. Even worse, Tony was pressing her on the subject of marriage. He could get a job on or near campus, he said, and with her Student Aid grant, she could get her degree in style. She was surprised to find that the idea scared rather than pleased her.

Something was
wrong.

She didn't know what, but something was missing, out of whack, out of kilter. One night late in July she frightened herself by going on a hysterical crying jag in her apartment. The only good thing about it was that her roommate, a mousy little girl named Sandra Ackerman, was out on a date.

The nightmare came in early August. She was lying in the bottom of an open grave, unable to move. Rain fell from a white sky onto her upturned face. Then Tony was standing over her, wearing his yellow high-impact construction helmet.

“Marry me, Liz,” he said, looking down at her expressionlessly. “Marry me or else.”

She tried to speak, to agree; she would do anything if only he would take her out of this dreadful muddy hole. But she was paralyzed.

“All right,” he said. “It's or else, then.”

He went away. She struggled to break out of her paralysis and couldn't.

Then she heard the bulldozer.

A moment later she saw it, a high yellow monster, pushing a mound of wet earth in front of the blade. Tony's merciless face looked down from the open cab.

He was going to bury her alive.

Trapped in her motionless, voiceless body, she could only watch in dumb horror. Trickles of dirt began to run down the sides of the hole—

A familiar voice cried, “Go! Leave her now! Go!”

Tony stumbled down from the bulldozer and ran.

Huge relief swept her. She would have cried had she been able. And her savior appeared, standing at the foot of the open grave like a sexton. It was Ed Hamner, floating in his green fatigue jacket, his hair awry, his horn-rims slipped down to the small bulge at the end of his nose. He held his hand out to her.

“Get up,” he said gently. “I know what you need. Get up, Beth.”

And she could get up. She sobbed with relief. She tried to thank him; her words spilled out on top of each other. And Ed only smiled gently and nodded. She took his hand and looked down to see her footing. And when she looked up again, she was holding the paw of a huge, slavering timber wolf with red hurricane-lantern eyes and thick, spiked teeth open to bite.

She woke up sitting bolt upright in bed, her nightgown drenched with sweat. Her body was shaking uncontrollably. And even after a warm shower and a glass of milk, she could not reconcile herself to the dark. She slept with the light on.

A week later Tony was dead.

She opened the door in her robe, expecting to see Tony, but it was Danny Kilmer, one of the fellows he worked with. Danny was a fun guy; she and Tony had doubled with him and his girl a couple of times. But standing in the doorway of her second-floor apartment, Danny looked not only serious but ill.

“Danny?” she said. “What—”

“Liz,” he said. “Liz, you've got to hold onto yourself. You've . . .
ah, God!”
He pounded the jamb of the door with one big-knuckled, dirty hand, and she saw he was crying.

“Danny, is it Tony? Is something—”

“Tony's dead,” Danny said. “He was—” But he was talking to air. She had fainted.

The next week passed in a kind of dream. The story pieced itself together from the woefully brief newspaper account and from what Danny told her over a beer in the Harbor Inn.

They had been repairing drainage culverts on Route 16. Part of the road was torn up, and Tony was flagging traffic. A kid driving a red Fiat had been coming down the hill. Tony had flagged him, but the kid never even slowed. Tony had been standing next to a dump truck, and there was no place to jump back. The kid in the Fiat had sustained head lacerations and a broken arm; he was hysterical and also cold sober. The police found several holes in his brake lines, as if they had overheated and then melted through. His driving record was A-1; he had simply been unable to stop. Her Tony had been a victim of that rarest of automobile mishaps: an honest accident.

Her shock and depression were increased by guilt. The fates had taken out of her hands the decision on what to do about Tony. And a sick, secret part of her was glad it was so. Because she hadn't wanted to marry Tony . . . not since the night of her dream.

She broke down the day before she went home.

She was sitting on a rock outcropping by herself, and after an hour or so the tears came. They surprised her with their fury. She cried until her stomach hurt and her head ached, and when the tears passed she felt not better but at least drained and empty.

And that was when Ed Hamner said, “Beth?”

She jerked around, her mouth filled with the copper taste of fear, half expecting to see the snarling wolf of her dream. But it was only Ed Hamner, looking sunburned and strangely defenseless without his fatigue jacket and blue jeans. He was wearing red shorts that stopped just ahead of his bony knees, a white T-shirt that billowed on his thin chest like a loose sail in the ocean breeze, and rubber thongs. He wasn't smiling and the fierce sun glitter on his glasses made it impossible to see his eyes.