Orrie's Story (21 page)

“You don't want me to say
anything
, do you?” He leaned over to the bottle on the coffee table and poured himself more Scotch. His hand was steady enough. “I got news for you: I'm going to say it anyway. You broke Augie's balls all those years. I don't know how he could take it, but he always felt a responsibility for his family. Even when he finally left, he still sent back those support payments.”

“They came from the Army, not
him,”
Esther pointed out. “I didn't owe him anything at all. The truth is, he
didn't
support us. But you know that. Why are you defending him, all of a sudden?”

E.G. reared back in indignation. “For Christ's sake, isn't there a decent bone in your body? We just picked up his ashes. I'm trying to speak well of the dead.”

She forgot herself for an instant to ask, “After what we did?”

His eyes were hollow. “That's exactly why I want to tell the boy who I am. It might not make it right, but —”

“Then why don't you just go and do it?” she asked. “Don't keep whimpering to me. Why not try to prove for once you're not the gutless wonder you seem?”

He had lately replenished his glass without drinking from it, and he now threw the contents into her face. The alcohol made her eyes smart. It was a moment before she could shake off the effects and find the bottle. Her purpose was to brain him, kill him if possible, and she swung the bottle as violently as she was able, but she was a woman, unused to this type of effort and without sufficient strength to move the heavy weapon (he had not drunk more than a third of its contents) with a force that matched her rage. Also, in their relative positions she could not establish good leverage. Therefore the blow he received was glancing, but struck the sensitive temple.

He dropped the glass and clasped his face, moaning at first but soon going into a full-throated howl of fury.

He leaped to his feet and pulled her up. He threw a punch that could have destroyed her nose, but she was swinging the bottle again at that moment, and his fist was deflected somewhat but still caught her in the right eye.

She missed him entirely with her second swing. He was still making vocal noise, but she was utterly silent, and his next punch crushed her mouth.

With her good eye she saw Orrie in the doorway to the foyer. He carried that gun of Augie's that she always hated. He screamed at E.G. and when the man turned, shot him with a great blast of fire and sound. E.G. buckled but remained on his feet. It was obvious that Orrie would shoot him with the other barrel as well, perhaps killing him, making incredible any argument that it was accidental or in self-defense. It was concern for the son she adored and not her quondam lover that moved her now to hurl her body between the two.

She took the second charge between her breasts.

The attic had not been sufficiently secluded to meet all of Ellie's requirements for privacy, and therefore during the preceding summer she had found, in the patch of woods behind the house, a little hollow walled by bushes and with a big slab of stone to lean one's back against. In dry weather she could sit there and think in peace. Should this refuge be found by a wandering tramp, she carried along, concealed in a ring notebook, the knife of Orrie's which she had told him she kept as defense against a sexually importunate Uncle Erie. She had no regrets about so lying about Erie when he was alive: he had been a wicked man, an adulterer and finally a murderer, and any measure that would bring him to punishment was justified, though she had had nothing specific in mind as to the form such vengeance might take. Certainly she never envisioned his being shotgunned point-blank in the living room, and by her brother, who she could have sworn had not taken her seriously. “My God,” she had screamed when she reached the living room and saw what was there.
“You did it.”

Ellie had looked once at her mother's body and then never again: it was too awful and not at all what she had had in mind. If she allowed herself to think about such matters she could not survive, and therefore she avoided the subject by exerting what she had always considered her superhuman will, which was like bringing down a steel shutter of the kind she had seen protecting closed shops on her only trip to the city.

Orrie just stood there, holding the gun. The shots had been so loud that they seemed to continue to echo throughout the house. She expected people would come bursting through the front door at any moment, and not to help but rather to arrest her brother and perhaps herself as well.

She told him to put the gun down.

He dumbly did as ordered, going to some pains to find the rare place on the floor that was not soaking with blood.

He raised his hand and tried to speak, but Ellie quickly anticipated him. “Nothing can be done for them,” she said. “We have to get out of here.”

He protested incoherently and tried to go to their mother's body. But he had become so weak that Ellie was able virtually to strong-arm him into the hallway.

“I know it was justified,” she said. “But who else will believe that?”

Suddenly he spoke clearly. “She ran right into it.”

“It's done now,” Ellie said. “I know why it happened, but —”

“No, you don't!” Orrie cried with a strength he could not transfer to his body, for she was still able to keep him moving towards the kitchen. “I didn't do it because of
you!
He was beating her to a pulp, the dirty son of a bitch. I'd do it all over again to
him
. But she
ran right in the way.”

They could not leave the house, with him all but screaming now. “Will you be quiet?” she said. “I've got to call the ambulance.”

He tried to pull away, crying, “I've got to go back to her.”

“No,” Ellie said conclusively. “You'll only make things worse.” She could not, if challenged, have explained just what she meant by the phrase, but it had its effect on Orrie. He sank to his knees and clasped his hands at the level of his chest, and asked God to forgive him. Despite her great regard for her brother, Ellie had always believed him wrong in becoming agnostic at the age of sixteen. Her own faith, which had little to do with the organized creeds, had never wavered, and had God not now decisively proved He would bring down retribution on criminals whom human beings refused to punish?

All the same, in the midst of this moral smugness, she could sense that a tremble had begun to develop down in the arches of her feet. Unarrested, it would climb upward to claim her entire body, and if that happened Orrie would have no one to protect him in his own delicate state. Whatever his protests, he had honored his promise to her to avenge her father's murder and she was therefore responsible for him.

“We have to get out of here,” she told him. “They're not going to believe us. The police chief wouldn't listen to me before any of this happened. It could have been prevented. I wanted them to go on trial for their crimes, but
no.”
She found a flashlight in a drawer of the kitchen cabinet and pressed its switch. The batteries were weak.

“Here, hold this.” She handed the flashlight to him, with an idea that it might give him a chore on which to focus while she called the ambulance. But at that moment someone began to pound loudly on the front door and shout in a kind of voice that sounded official. So the shots had been heard, and the police were at hand.

Ellie pushed her brother out the back door and caught the screen that would have banged behind them. At the bottom of the yard she looked back and could see above the house the police car's red light against the high foliage on the opposite side of the street. She went in front of Orrie and, seizing his hand, led him off their property and into what, after a favorite childhood book, one in fact that Orrie had given her, she privately called the Wildwood. Though it might be short on trees and overabundant in weeds, it was as close as she could come locally to an enchanted forest. The flashlight grew even weaker with use, and they wandered for a while, making too much noise in the brush, before she found her hideout, the depression in the ground behind the glacial boulder.

She pulled her brother down. They sat side by side, backs against the rock. Fortunately the night was warm. But she wished she had had time to bring along the remainder of the loaf of bread and the rest of the baloney. He would be hungry by morning. Maybe she could sneak back to the house, once
they
were done there.

“I
killed
her,” Orrie said pitifully.

She put her arms around him, partly to suppress any tendency he would have to raise his voice, but also to arrest her own trembling, which had begun again.

“She ran right in the way,” said Orrie. “Why did she do that?
Why?”

Ellie knew it was to protect Erie, but this was not the place to make that point.

“He was punching her,” Orrie said. “God knows how long he had been doing it before I heard the screaming.”

Closer to the scene and ever alert to what went on when Erie and her mother were together in the house, Ellie had of course heard it too and felt vindicated: the murderers were at each other's throats. She said, not untruthfully, “I didn't think it was that serious.”

“You should have seen him,” said Orrie. “The way he was hitting her. I don't know why I brought the shotgun along. It was just the way she sounded, I guess. I really didn't know Erie was still there. It could have been one of those Rivertown people who broke in…”

“You don't have to explain it to me,” Ellie said, hugging him fiercely. But he kept repeating the same thing, all night long. All she could do was to hold him.

Paul Leeds had just returned to the dorm from Spanish 101 when a fellow from a neighboring room shouted through the door that there was a phone call for him.

The telephone was at the end of the hall, near the firehose that hung coiled behind a glass window.

Paul assumed his father had called to complain about some forwarded bill, and he answered sullenly.

But it was a girl's voice. “My name is Ellen Mencken. I'm Orrie Mencken's sister. I saw you outside school the other day with my brother…?”

“Oh, sure,” said Paul. “Hi. Has something happened to him?”

“Not exactly,” Ellie said, “but he sort of does have a problem.”

“How much does he need?”

“It's not exactly money. What he needs most is someplace to stay and somebody to calm him down for a while until the problem is solved.”

“You can count on me,” Paul said. He had wished Orrie would introduce them, the other day, for he liked the way she looked: nothing cheap about her. She looked smart, and her conversation now, clear and straightforward, not the devious kind of thing he believed characteristic of young girls, confirmed him in his first impression.

“I guess I better leave it to Orrie to tell you about the problem,” Ellie said.

“Sure,” he said. “I still am hanging on to the car I rented the other day. I thought it might come in handy before long. If I start now, I should get there between seven and eight.”

“That will be really nice of you.”

The compliment pleased him. “All right then, I'll see you soon.”

Ellie told him where to meet them. At first he thought it odd that he would not be coming to the house, but no doubt Orrie's problem had something to do with that. “Okay. I can remember it without writing it down. I'm pretty good with directions. ‘Just pull up by the fence of the quarry': you'll be there?”

“Just wait a minute,” Ellie said. “We'll come out.” The operator came on the line, saying the three minutes were up, and Ellie rang off. He wondered whether the cloak-and-dagger stuff was justified, though Ellie seemed much too sensible to go in for make-believe, unless of course she was humoring her brother.

Eager to be of some use, Paul made even better time than he had predicted, perhaps because after having just made the round trip only a few days earlier, he knew the route so well, and he stopped only for gas and fed, while rolling, on candy bars and peanuts. Therefore he was early in reaching the quarry road, which he found easily, and had to wait awhile in the car before the two of them showed up.

Orrie looked almost comatose and said nothing. Ellie was furtive. She kept looking around as if for pursuers. Paul felt it would be out of order to ask questions, but was disappointed that she avoided his eyes. He had after all in response to her plea come a considerable distance and gone without real food for most of the day.

Ellie bent the passenger's seat down so that Orrie could climb into the back. It pleased Paul that she herself chose to sit next to the driver. But from what she said, he gathered she would not be going very far.

“There's some people named Terwillen,” she said. “They offered to take us in when my father was killed. You can get the number from Information and leave messages with them. I'm asking you to hide Orrie out for a while. I leave the details up to you.” Finally she looked directly at him. She was haggard and her clothes were rumpled, with bits of twigs and dead grass on them, but he still thought she had a sweet face. He liked the feminine fragility that eyeglasses gave a girl. “You're Orrie's friend and I trust you.”

“Well,” Paul said, “I hope you consider me your friend too.”

She frowned. “It wasn't his fault. He was only doing his duty and isn't guilty of any crime, but
they
won't believe that. I don't trust the police, so meanwhile if you'd keep Orrie under wraps somewhere where he won't be seen?”

“I can do that,” said Paul. He turned and looked back at Orrie and asked him, “Are you sick or anything?”

Ellie said quickly, “Would you mind starting up? The sooner this is done, the better.”

“Wait,” Orrie suddenly cried, with clarity. “I didn't know she called you. But now you're here, you should know what it was I did.” He took a gasp of breath and related the terrible story.