The Waiting Room (23 page)

He lifted that mammoth long-handled axe out of the closet, hefted it over his shoulder like a lumberjack, and gave me a big, happy grin. "Joking, Sam?"

"He never jokes," Mrs. Kenney said, looking very serious, her full, bright lips set in a straight and serious line.

"I never joke," said Anton.

The snorting noises were much closer now, as if they were coming from just outside the door to the mudroom. Then I heard something banging against that door, hard, and I whispered, "Oh, Jesus!"

Anton said, "But I'm joking now."

"Huh?" I said.

He called toward the banging and snorting noises, "Okay, Matthew, he's on to us."

The noises continued.

"Matthew," he called louder, starting for the door, axe still on his shoulder, "I said he's on to us."

The banging noises continued. The snorting noises continued. Anton looked miffed. "God Almighty," he whispered..

"God Almighty," whispered Mrs. Kenney, and plopped another potato into the colander by the sink.

"Oh, Jesus!" I whispered.

"Matthew, you can stop that now," Anton called. "Matthew, you can stop that now." He disappeared into the mudroom. Another of his wife's potatoes went
plop!
into the colander. "Matthew, stop it!" I heard above the racket of crashing and snorting. "Stop it, Matthew. Stop it, goddammit."

Then silence.

Plop!
went another potato into the colander by the sink. "That's a dozen," said Mrs. Kenney. "You like potatoes, Sam?"

"Huh?" I whispered, feeling once again the hard knot of fear starting inside me.

Another potato went into the colander. "That's thirteen," she said.

"
Surprise!
" I
heard, and lurched in the chair, found myself toppling backward to the floor, grabbed for the edge of the table, caught it, and straightened myself up. I looked toward the doorway to the mudroom. Three faces were sticking around the edge of the doorway, one on top of the other. There was Anton's grinning, bewhiskered face at the bottom, and above it another male face, also thin, dark, blue-eyed, but with the stub of a chewed cigar sticking out between thin white lips, and, on top, the huge, squinty-eyed, dark pink face of a pig.

"Jesus Christ!" I breathed.

The pig face vanished into the mudroom. Seconds later, it reappeared in the hands of a middle-aged woman dressed in bib overalls and a cream-colored shirt. She stepped out into the kitchen a few feet and I saw that she looked much like Anton and his wife and the man with the cigar—thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed.

Anton and the man with the cigar straightened and stood next to the woman as if they were responding to a curtain call. "Did we scare ya?" Anton asked enthusiastically.

I said, a warble of fear in my voice, "I think I should leave, I really think I should leave."

And Anton said, sounding hurt, "Jus' havin' a little fun, Sam. You oughtn't leave becaus'a that."

Plop!
went another potato into the colander. "That's a hundred," said Mrs. Kenney.

I noticed then that Anton was still carrying the huge, long-handled axe. I noticed, too, that his big hand was rhythmically gripping it hard, loosening, gripping it, loosening, gripping.

Plop! I
heard. "That's a million billion," Mrs. Kenney said.

And I said, that little warble of fear now clearly a tremor of panic, "Who
are
you people?"

"We's country people," said Anton, and his wife and the man with the cigar and the woman carrying the pig's head echoed him—the voice of each overlapping the voice of the other, so it sounded as if they were singing a round, like
Row, row, row your boat
. . . only it was, "We's country people"… " 's country people". . . "untry people."

My chair scraped shrilly against the linoleum as I pushed it back from the table and stood unsteadily. "I'd better leave," I said. "Really, I'd better leave."

"Can't leave," said Anton.

Plop!
went another potato.

" 'Cuz your car's broke," Anton explained.

"I'll walk," I said. "I don't mind walking, I've done a lot of walking."

"You scare't, boy?" said the man with the cigar, with the same kind of hopeful enthusiasm I'd heard from Anton.

I answered, "No, of course not, why would I be scared?" and I backed toward an open doorway a half-dozen feet behind the table. The doorway led, I guessed, into the living room.

Anton said, "Aw, don't go in there, Sam. You don't wanta go in there." He sounded annoyed.

But I did go in there. Into a room that was straight out of a 1945 issue of
Better Homes and Gardens
—here an overstuffed blue velvet armchair, there another, but smaller, for "the lady of the house," there a floor-standing Victrola, there an overstuffed red couch with white doilies on the arms.

And from the kitchen doorway a trio of human shadows was cast long and lean on the living room floor by the blue-green glow of the kitchen's overhead fluorescent light, and I could hear Anton whis
tling "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as he had in his truck, except now it was ragged and dissonant, as if he were trying to whistle through a fistful of mud clogging his mouth.

The other man called, "We make you nervous, boy? You scare't, boy?"

Plop!
I heard. "That's a hundred billion trillion zillion."

The blue-green fluorescent glow died. The shadows vanished.

And the room I was in changed. It aged. The chairs sagged and grew soiled as if through decades of use. The couch collapsed at its center. The musty smell of decay and abandonment grew heavy in the air.

And I laughed. Loudly, shrilly, hysterically. I'd laughed like that only once before, in Nam, after I'd gotten separated from my squad on a jungle patrol and had to spend three hours finding my way back. And when I did get back, I laughed shrilly, hysterically, with relief. But when I was done laughing, you see, I knew where I was. I knew I could reach out and touch things that were real and familiar—my bunk, my little stash of
Playboys,
my cigar box filled with letters from home, my buddies—Stan, Frank, Herbie, several others—who were watching me laugh and knew why I was laughing, that I was no more a fruitcake than anyone else who'd spent time in Nam. But, in the village of Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, in Anton Kenney's boxy white clapboard house, in his vintage 1945 living room, I knew that when I stopped laughing there'd be nothing fa
miliar for me to reach out and touch. No stash of
Playboys
.
No cigar box with letters from home. Only someone else's smelly overstuffed couch and chairs and someone else's walls. And someone else's life gone by.

And when I stopped laughing it was only because my throat hurt and my sides ached and I had begun to feel dizzy. Then I sat on that big overstuffed couch, right in the middle of it, where the broken frame rested on the floor—so my knees jutted high above my stomach—and I let my head fall back and my arms rest on my thighs. It was a comfortable position. It felt good. And after a few moments I began to make quick, weary sighing noises, the kind of noises a sleeping dog makes when, we say, it's having bad dreams. I whispered, "Oh, Jesus, Jesus," again and again. And I thought that being there, in that house, in what passed for Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, was like being in a closet filled with hornets. The only thing to do was sit tight. Move slowly. If they attacked, you ran for the exit. If there was an exit.

Plop!
I heard. I didn't jump up and run for the exit. I waited. I was being rational.

Plop!
I heard again.
Plop!
. . .
Plop!

"That's just water dripping," I told myself.
Plop!
. . .
Plop!

"That's just water dripping," I said.

Plop!

"Only water dripping."

Plop!
...

"Dammit!"

Plop! Plop! Plop!

I bolted from the couch, across the living room to the front door, hesitated only an instant, and pulled the door open.

Dusk had fallen. A line of flat, wispy clouds—cirrostratus is the correct name for them, I think—painted the sky a bright red-orange. At the house directly across the street, a house much like the one I was in, a boy of five or six was climbing up and down the porch steps; with each step he sang a part of the alphabet: "
A-B-C-D-
" . . . he was at the top of the steps. "
E-F-G-H-
" . . . he was at the bottom. I watched him do this for a minute or so, until he'd gotten through the alphabet once and had started it again. Now and then he glanced at me and smiled. He was a good-looking boy, with a mop of dark curls and what looked, from across the street at dusk, like huge dark eyes in a round, cherubic face.

I saw, too, that in a few of the other houses lights were burning. From one of the houses I could hear some kind of classical violin music (and since I don't know Mozart from mozzarella, I can't say what composer it was). From one of the other houses, I heard two voices raised in anger, each trying to subdue the other with sheer volume.

I said to myself, "This is no hornet's nest. This is only a side street in a tiny village in southern Massachusetts . "

And there was one really great moment, a moment that came and went as quickly as a heartbeat, like the moment when something really tasty first passes over the tongue, that I actually believed it.

Then the boy changed, you see.

First his knees buckled, and he fell. Hard. Face forward down the bottom two porch steps. And I said to myself, "Well, kids fall all the time. And they bounce back. Kids are tough." But when that boy fell, he banged his chin very hard on the cement walkway, and a quick, loud "Uhh!" of pain and surprise escaped him. Then he lay still. And silent.

Until he hitched backward on his belly, with his arms straight out in front of him and his spread legs pointing toward the house, his bones crunching and snapping audibly as his body conformed to the shape of the porch steps, as if he were some sort of huge, misshapen, jellylike crab dressed in corduroys and a red plaid shirt.

And while this was happening, he relentlessly recited his ABCs: "
A
"—hitch—"
B
"—hitch—"
C
"— hitch, until he had hitched backward all the way to the top of the porch steps. And there, very slowly, one vertebra at a time, like someone doing a weird kind of aerobic exercise, he straightened. And as he straightened, his body made a sound like paper being crumpled, and I realized that his bones were snapping back into place.

Then he began climbing up and down the steps all over again, just like a real boy, reciting his ABCs and glancing over at me occasionally and smiling.
He's enjoying himself now
, I thought.
He's being a kid
.

And there was no way in hell I was going to wait around for him to fall again, no way in hell I wanted to hear again that small grunt of pain and surprise. What I was going to do was get into the Malibu, fire it up, and drive out of this bizarre little village that was masquerading as Ashley Falls, Massachusetts. Even if the Malibu wouldn't top fifteen miles an hour, it was still faster than walking. And besides, I'd grown strangely attached to it—it was mechanical, it was predictable, it was ordinary; it was real, for God's sake.

I ran down the front porch steps, turned right, rounded the edge of Anton's house. And found that there was no white cement block building called "Anton's Garage." There was an old Dodge Power Wagon half rusted to oblivion, beside it Abner's Malibu, and around them a quarter acre of mud where Anton's Garage should have been.

I fished in my pockets for the keys to the Malibu. I came up with my wallet, a Philharmonic ticket, a couple of quarters. But no keys. I went around to the driver's door, bent over, peered in. The keys were in the ignition. I tried the door. It was locked. "Shit!" I breathed. I glanced about. The dusk had turned rapidly to early evening darkness. Across the street, in the row of white clapboard houses, I could see half a dozen lighted windows; I could see the boy in corduroy hitching backward up his porch steps,
"A-B-C-D";
I could hear the classical music; I could hear the argument intensifying, curses shrieked, doors slammed. And as I took it all in, I saw a human form appear at one of the lighted windows. It was a good sixty or seventy-five yards off, and it was backlit, but it was clearly the form of a young woman, and its head appeared to turn in my direction. "Shit!" I breathed again. Another human form appeared, at another window, in another house. The form of a child. And it, too, turned its head in my direction.

I peered frantically through the Malibu's driver's window at the passenger door. It, too, was locked. I tried the driver's door again. Nothing. I pulled hard. "Shit, goddammit!" I shrieked.

Across the way, the loud argument stopped abruptly. I looked up from the Malibu. The boy in corduroy
"D-E-F''—
was
at the top of the porch steps. He straightened, glanced my way, smiled. Continued smiling.