Poorhouse Fair (7 page)

THE ONLY GUN within a mile was in fact in Buddy's hands. A .22 purchased by a gardener many years before, when foxes and groundhogs could still be seen in the countryside, the gun was kept, with a few cartridges, on a shelf of a locked closet on the second floor.

The wand of the barrel drifted pleasantly at Buddy's side as he passed between buildings and trees the many colors of which were all, under the stress of the lowering clouds, tending toward the tint of the metal. The color of the barrel seemed the base color of all things. With the lethal weapon balanced on the hooked fingers of one hand Buddy became the center of the universe. In Conner's entrusting him with this task he saw proof of the man's affection, not dreaming how much Conner would have hated to do it himself.

He stalked beneath the windows of the west wing, tall windows designed for a ballroom. He scanned stumps, overturned boxes, corded wood, and half-collapsed sheds leaning sideways, with rhomboidal doors. The thrillers he used to read for recreation began to infest his head. His stealth became exaggerated. At a corner--there was something dramatic and treacherous about a wall changing direction--he paused, fingering the bolt and testing the clip, that it was secure. The springs of the mechanism had grown stiff with rust. The clip probably wouldn't feed the next bullet into the bolt, if he missed with one shot. Buddy stepped around the corner, and there was the cat, not twenty feet away, in the center of an open area strewn with chopping chips. It astonished him how close things looked in this foreboding atmosphere. The cat's face--he could see every whisker and wet streak on it--loomed like a china plate in a shooting gallery.

Holding one leg off the earth, the cat, while staring at Buddy, didn't act as if it noticed him. Just as Buddy had the broad forehead steadied in his sights the animal looked casually away, giving him a piece of neck.

"Meow," Buddy crooned, "mm-row-w-w."

The cat looked. Its working eye was a perfect circle, rimmed opal. Suddenly suspicion dawned in the cat; not a strand of fur moved, but a cold clarity, as if from without, stiffened the forms in the vicinity of the rifle sight; the flat nose and clumsy asymmetric cheeks crystallized in the air of Buddy's vision. With a sensation of prolonged growing sweetness Buddy squeezed the trigger. The report disappointed him, a mere slap, it seemed in his ears, and very local.

If his target had been a bottle, liquid wouldn't have spilled more quickly from it than life from the cat. The animal dropped without a shudder. Buddy snapped back the bolt; the dainty gold cartridge spun away, and the gun exhaled a faint acrid perfume. Buddy thought, If he had made the river, the secret would be in enemy hands. Going up to the slack body he insolently toed it over, annoyed not to see a bullet-hole in the skull. Chips of wood adhered to the pale fluff of the long belly. The bullet had entered the chin and passed through to the heart. Buddy couldn't imagine how he had missed by so much. Defective weapons, sabotage.

THE SOUND so small to Buddy echoed around the grounds, its loudness varying from place to place, causing curiosity where it was heard. Ted, who had backed around and aimed his truck the best he could toward the narrow gap in the east wall, wondered about it but didn't ask any of the old people for an explanation. The less he had to do with them, the better. The crowd they made menaced him. A few were outside the wall, near his front tires; the rest had bunched inside, leaving a lane between them for his truck. As soon as he had started up the motor they had fallen into position respectfully, as if what they were about to see was a great feat, a modern miracle. Dirt-face hovered near the cab, whisking back and forth with the maneuvers of the truck, flirting with the giant wheels that could crush him.

The gunshot suggested to Ted that he should hurry. The pack of Mexican cigarettes squaring out his shut pocket and the graceful look of his own hand on the wheel were reassuring reminders of the world waiting for him. His truck was still at a slight angle to the opening, but if he went forward in first once more they would get the idea he couldn't drive at all. On the left side he had enough room: six inches. On the other side there was a thin mirror, but the sleek shape of these new GM trucks left a percentage of guesswork in estimating clearance. Ted had found, in driving, though, that you always had a little more room than you thought you did. "Plenty of room," Dirt-face said, "what's the matter? Foot freeze? Shall I climb the f. in there and do it for you?"

Ted pushed the reverse switch and delicately pressed the accelerator. "Straighten the wheels, kid. Straighten up and you're in." Ted had learned on an old hand-shift truck; automatic transmissions had the one defect of maintaining a certain minimum speed or stalling. It would make him a fool to stall in front of this mob. "More," Dirt-face called, "more." Halfway through, a faint rumbling developed on the right side, where Ted couldn't see. Just grazing. Ted corrected the direction of the front wheels, while the murmuring motor maintained a creeping backwards direction. The scraping sound intensified, but a foot or two further and the body of the truck would be safely through. With a perceptible pang of release the body eased through, and a rock clattered on the running board of the cab.

As those watching on the right side could see, the slow pressure of the metal wall had caused cracks to race through the old brown mortar, mostly water and sand, and a coherent wedge-shaped section, perhaps eight feet long, collapsed, spilling stones over the grass. "Jesus Christ, kid," Gregg screamed, "you better give up. You're nuts!" The destruction was principally on the inner side. For the wall, so thick and substantial, was really two shells: what surprised the people standing in silence was that the old masons had filled the center with uncemented rubble, slivers of rock and smooth fieldstones that now tumbled out resistlessly.

THE TRUCK had pulled up while Conner was climbing the stairs; the subsequent quick clatter and soft rumble of the collapse did not reach the cupola. Buddy's rifle shot had sounded in here like a twig snapping. Conner had no regrets about ordering the animal killed. He wanted things clean; the world needed renewal, and this was a time of history when there were no cleansing wars or sweeping purges, when reform was slow, and decayed things were allowed to stand and rot themselves away. It was a vegetable world. It's theory was organic: perhaps old institutions in their dying could make fertile the chemical earth. So the gunshot ringing out, though a discord, pleased the rebel in Conner, the idealist, anxious to make space for the crystalline erections that in his heart he felt certain would arise, once his old people were gone. For the individual cat itself he felt nothing but sorrow.

Given his post, he had accepted it. Irishly, he had hoped for something dramatic, but the administration of order had few dramatic departments. The modem world afforded few opportunities for zeal anywhere. In the beginning there had been Mendelssohn's mess to set right: the west whig was converted into a decent hospital; Dr. Angelo was begged from Health and Medicine; there had been painting and building and bustle the first summer, and into the whiter. But over two years had passed; this was his third fair. Many of those who had greeted him here (how assiduously he had attempted to learn the names of that first batch!) were gone now, but the population of the place had grown and was growing. There were rational causes: lengthened lives, smaller domiciles, the break-up, with traditional religion, of the family. The pamphlets and pronunciamentos he daily received in the mail, from official, semi-official, and unofficial bureaus, made it clear and reasonable. Swelling poorhouses had a necessary place in the grand process of Settling--an increasingly common term that covered the international stalemate, the general economic equality, the population shifts to the "vacuum states," and the well-publicized physical theory of entropia, the tendency of the universe toward eventual homogeneity, each fleck of energy settled in seventy cubic miles of otherwise vacant space. This end was inevitable, no new cause for heterogeneity being, without supernaturalism conceivable.

Despite these assurances, however, the limits of being a poorhouse prefect chafed a man dedicated to a dynamic vision: that of Man living healthy and unafraid beneath blank skies, "integrated," as the accepted phrase had it, "with his fulfilled possibilities." Conner was bored. He yearned for some chance to be proven; he envied the first rationalists their martyrdoms and the first reformers their dragons of reaction and selfishness. Two years remained before automatic promotion. The chief trouble with the job was the idleness; not merely that there was so little to do, and that he had to make work, concocting schemes like tagging chairs, but that idleness became his way of life. He was infected with the repose that was only suitable to inmates waiting out their days.

The very way, for instance, he had rather enjoyed the balm of standing by Hook's side for those moments this morning. Or the way he stood by this window content to gaze at nothing, or what amounted to nothing--the red-tin roof of the west wing, the sheds and pig buildings below, segments of west wall showing in the intervals between trees, and the little gate to Andrews, unlocked today for the fair. Someone was passing through, tacking from wall to bush: Lucas. He was sure it was Lucas, even from this distance. He was carrying something in a small paper bag, too big for candy, too small for food. While Conner was trying to make it out Lucas passed from sight beneath the guttered edge of the red roof.

On the glossy varnish of the window sill the canted pane of glass installed to minimize drafts laid a peculiar patina, a hard pale color neither brown nor blue.

Conner had chosen to stand by the west window because the spectacle of preparation on the east lawn scratched his eyes; he didn't wish to be made to feel that he should go down and play shepherd. Buddy was with them; little could go wrong. It was futile anyway; the coming rain cancelled everything. The western sector of the sky was as yet unclouded. Between the tops of the trees and the upper edge of his window oblivious blue held the firmament. Then a cumbersome tumble and crash resounded, and Conner witnessed an appearance of the phenomenon which two millenia before had convinced the poet Horace that gods do exist: thunder from a clear sky.

DOWN FRONT Buddy was arranging with Ted that Pepsi-Cola would pay for repairing the wall--there was no cause for tears. Everybody had insurance. As he could see, the wall was rotten anyway. Buddy, dropping the shovel with which he had not yet begun to dig, had rushed to the accident and found its perpetrator oddly child-like. In a voice husky with apprehension the boy insisted that it had not been his fault and that he had to get to Newark in a matter of minutes or lose his job. The driver was rather handsome, in the rococo lower-class style, and Buddy instantly began to mother his innocence. The two young men were about the same height and complexion. An old man coming late to the confusion imagined at a distance that here was Buddy's twin, visiting. Buddy in fact was more highly colored, five years older, and educated. Consciously superior but distinctly tender--still elated with his outwitting the cat--Buddy helped the driver guide his truck backwards along the walk. Then the two rapidly unloaded the consignment of soft drink, rapidly because a few drops were falling, speckling the turquoise tailgate. At the thunderclap the old people scattered, gathering quilts and preserves and crude toys and canes and pieces of patient embroidery. As they hastened toward the porch, under strings of colored bulbs now swung in the air, the fourth noise of the half-hour summoned them, encouraging their flight, the ringing of the lunch signal, a tall hammered triangle used in the days of the Andrews estate to bring in the hands from the fields.

II

THEY ATE in groups of four at small square tables of synthetic white marble purchased cheaply from a cafeteria that was discarding them. The rain falling across the high windows, high from the floor, had the effect of sealing in light and noise, so the tabletops shone garishly and the voices of the old people shrilly mixed with the clash of china and steel. Mrs. Lucas was saying of her parakeet, calling really, though her companions at the table were only noses away, "Poor thing has to have some exercise, you can't ask it to sit there like a stuffed ornament, in my daughter's house it had great freedom. It can't have that freedom here, but it has to have some; its cage is too small for it, poor bird, its tail feathers stick out and it can't turn around. In my daughter's house the cat caught it and took off its tail feathers--that's the final result of all the freedom they gave it--and when they grew in, nobody thought they would, they grew too long, so the feathers stick between the bars and it can't even turn around. It can't have the freedom here it had in my daughter's house, but that's too much, not being able even to turn around. So out of simple mercy I let it out at least once in the day, in the forenoon usually. Oh she's cunning. I think it's a she, because the coloring is dull, and a male, you know, has all this brilliant plumage. I keep thinking I could clip the tail feathers with the sewing scissors but they say no, it's like taking a foot or hand off a human being, they lose their balance and don't feed and grow listless. So when I come back from baking the buns--and wasn't that futile, now that the fair's washed out?--I let her out to do her tricks on the window catch and the picture frames. She even swings on the geraniums, doing her little acrobatic tricks. Oh, she's clever. If you let her out when the faucet's running she'll try to fly through it like a waterfall. Who was I to know he'd"--she snapped her head toward her husband, who munched slowly, because each unmeditated bite accented the soreness in his ear--"barge in right when she was on the knob with a bottle of nasty stuff in a paper bag and let the pretty little thing flutter out the door into the hall?"

"It won't go far," Lucas said.

"And then he won't even chase it. How can I chase it, with my legs?"