Black Evening (2 page)

My ignorance about Geoffrey Household revealed another of my limitations. I hadn't read any suspense fiction or popular literature of any kind. As a teenager, I had been motivated to become a writer because of my fascination with Stirling Silliphant's scripts for the 1960-64 television show
Route 66
in which two young men drove across the United States in a Corvette, searching for America and themselves. Silliphant combined action with ideas. But my desire to emulate him had led me more toward ideas than action. After years of studying literature in college, I had become so saturated with Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and other classic authors that my fiction felt stale and imitative, literary in the worst sense of the word. But not anymore. I remembered the thrilling contemporary feel of
Route 66
and why I had wanted to be a writer in the first place. I resolved to read as many current novels,
popular
novels as I could, beginning with Household — because if I was going to write action stories with a difference, then I had better find out what the best action writers had already done so that I wouldn't repeat what they had already accomplished.

At the coffee house, Klass and I discussed these issues and were surprised to discover that three hours had passed. It was now 7 p.m. I was due home for dinner, but Klass asked if I'd be willing to go to his apartment, meet his wife, and continue the discussion. After months spent trying to get Klass's attention, I felt my heart leap at the invitation. Quickly I phoned my wife and explained the situation. Klass and I then went to his apartment, where our discussion became deeper and more intense.

The best fiction, Klass maintained, came from a writer's compulsion to communicate traumatic personal events. Often the writer had so repressed those events that the writer wasn't aware of the source of the compulsion. But whether consciously done or not, this self-psychoanalysis made a writer's work unique — because the psychological effects of trauma are unique to each person. You could tell the bad writers from the good writers because the bad writers were motivated by money and ego, whereas the good writers practiced their craft for the insistent reason that they
had
to be writers, that they had no choice, that something inside them (the ferret) was gnawing at their imaginations and the festering pressure had to be released. Often daydreams were a signal of those pressures, Klass felt, spontaneous messages from the subconscious, subliminal hints about stories that wanted to be told.

What were my own festering pressures? My fiction would reveal them, Klass said, and it has. In retrospect, I'm amazed by the disguised revelations in what I've written: that my father died shortly after I was born, that he was killed in the Second World War, that I grew up with a morbid fear of war, that economic necessity forced my mother to put me in an orphanage for a time, that I could never be sure whether the woman who reclaimed me was the same person who had given me up, that I persistently felt the lack of a father figure, that my fear of violence eventually prompted me to confront my fear by joining a street gang… I could go on, but it isn't wise to face traumas directly. Otherwise, I might lose the compulsion to write about them.

These were the sorts of things that Klass and I kept talking about in his apartment. Again time sped by, and we were surprised to discover that it was now ten at night. Klass's engaging wife, Fruma, had participated in the discussion. Now she invited me to stay for a late dinner. Until midnight, the three of us ate pot roast and talked. Then we cleared the dishes, and Klass spread the pages of my story on the dining room table. He analyzed every sentence for me, explaining why this technique worked but that one didn't, showing me new ways to accomplish a scene, giving me pointers about dialogue, about structure, discussing pace, teaching me how to make description feel like action.

At last, he reached the final sentence on the final page, summed up his remarks, handed me the story, and said, "That's all. That's the limit of what I'm going to teach you." Through the window behind him, the night was turning gray. Birds began to sing. Dawn was approaching. Spellbound by Klass's wisdom, I had lost track of time. Now that the session was over, I felt exhausted. But after thanking him, after starting home, no matter how tired I was, I felt buoyed by an excitement that seemed to lift me off the sidewalk. The memory is vivid to me: the night I became convinced that I would be a writer.

What happened to that story, "The Plinker"? It was never published. The magazines to which I submitted it found it too strong (although it wouldn't be today). I tried for a year. One magazine kept it so long that I had hopes, but one day the story was returned to me — wrinkled, dog-eared, coffee-stained — with a note informing me that the magazine was going out of business and someone had found my manuscript stuffed in a drawer. Undaunted, I eventually put the story away, because my attention had become fixated on another story. A novel, actually. About a Special Forces Vietnam veteran who engages in a deadly duel with a small-town police chief, a Marine Corps veteran from Korea. The plot was about the generation gap, the difference between the fifties and the sixties, about the differences between Korea and Vietnam, about hawks and doves, about mental programming. I called it
First Blood
. It was dedicated to Philip Klass and his pen name, William Tenn, "each in his own way," because the generous teacher and the gifted fiction writer, both the same person, had helped me. I sent the novel to Geoffrey Household. He wrote a kind letter back to me, telling me that the action was too strong.

"The Plinker" doesn't appear in this collection. As important as the story is to me, I find it unsatisfying now — the work of an apprentice. Some readers might even mistakenly conclude that it is derivative of
Deliverance
rather than a predecessor of it. Protective of it, I keep it to myself. But the stories that
are
included here, presented in order of composition, seem to me to wear their age well. Tales of dark suspense, their approach is different from that of my international thrillers. You won't find spies and round-the-globe intrigue here. What you
will
find are the stark emotions behind that intrigue: fear and trembling. The ferret keeps scurrying in my psyche. These are some of its traces.

 

"The Dripping" was my first published story and as such, despite its horrifying content, has great sentimental value for me. I had started
First Blood
at Penn State in 1968, but graduate courses, student teaching, and my Ph.D. dissertation on John Barth slowed the novel's progress. It was slowed even more after I graduated and moved to Iowa City, where most of my time was filled with teaching, course preparation, student conferences, faculty meetings, and my other responsibilities as an assistant professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. Finally, I completed the novel in the summer of 1971. Instead of feeling exhausted, however, I was bursting with energy and immediately began the story you are about to read. It is one of the few that occurred to me complete in a dream. When I wakened, I rushed to a typewriter and wrote it in one sitting.

 

 

That autumn, we lived in a house in the country, my mother's house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. I feel as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man. It is so strange a doubling, so intense, so unsettling, that I am moved to work again, to try to paint it, studying the hardware store, the grain barrels in front, the twin square pillars holding up the drooping balcony onto which seared, wax-faced men and women from the old people's hotel above come to sit and rock and watch. They look the same aging people I saw as a boy, the wood of the pillars and balcony as splintered.

Forgetful of the hours while I work, I do not begin the long walk home until late, at dusk. The day has been warm, but now in my shirt I am cold, and a half mile along I am caught in a sudden shower, forced to leave the gravel road for the shelter of a tree, its leaves already brown and yellow. The rain becomes a storm, streaking at me sideways, drenching me. I cinch the neck of my canvas bag to protect my painting and equipment and decide to run. My socks are spongy in my shoes, repulsive, when at last I reach the lane down to the house and barn.

The house and barn. They and my mother alone have changed, as if as one, warping, weathering, their joints twisted and strained, their gray so unlike the brightness I recall as a boy. The place is weakening her. She is in tune with it. She matches its decay. That is why we have come here to live. To revive. Once I thought I could convince her to move away. But of her sixty-five years she has spent forty here, and she insists that she will spend the rest, what is left to her.

The rain falls stronger as I hurry past the side of the house, the light on in the kitchen, suppertime and I am late. The house is connected to the barn the way the small base of an L is connected to its stem. The entrance I have always used is directly at the joining, and when I enter, out of breath, my clothes cling to me cold and wet. The door to the barn is to my left, the door to the kitchen straight ahead, I hear the dripping in the basement down the stairs to my right.

"Meg. Sorry I'm late," I call to my wife, setting down my water-beaded canvas sack, opening the kitchen door. There is no one. No settings on the table. Nothing on the stove. Only the yellow light from the sixty-watt bulb in the ceiling, the kind my mother prefers to the brightness of a one-hundred watt. It reminds her of candlelight, she says.

"Meg," I call again, and still no one answers. They're asleep, I think. With dusk coming on, the dark clouds of the storm have lulled them, and they have lain down for a nap, expecting to wake before I return.

Still the dripping. Although the house is very old, the barn long disused, the roofs crumbling, I have not thought it all so ill-maintained, the storm so strong that water can be seeping past the cellar windows, trickling, pattering on the old, stone floor. I switch on the light to the basement, descend the wooden stairs to the right, worn and squeaking, reach where the stairs turn to the left the rest of the way down to the floor, and see not water dripping, but milk. Milk everywhere. On the rafters, on the walls, dripping on the film of milk on the stones, gathering speckled with dirt in the channels between them. From side to side and everywhere.

Sarah, my child, has done this, I think. She has been fascinated by the big, wooden dollhouse that my father made for me when I was young, its blue paint chipped and peeling now. She has pulled it from the far corner to the middle of the basement. There are games and toy soldiers and blocks that have been taken from the wicker storage chest and played with on the floor, all covered with milk, the dollhouse, the chest, the scattered toys, milk dripping on them from the rafters, milk trickling on them.

Why has she done this? I think. Where can she have gotten so much milk? What was in her mind to do this thing?

"Sarah," I call. "Meg." Angry now, I mount the stairs to the quiet kitchen. "Sarah," I shout. She will clean the mess and stay indoors the remainder of the week.

I cross the kitchen, turn through the sitting room past the padded, flower-patterned chairs and sofa that have faded since I knew them as a boy, past several of my paintings that my mother has hung on the wall, brightly colored old ones of pastures and woods from when I was in grade school, brown-shaded new ones of the town, tinted as if old photographs. Two stairs at a time up to the bedrooms, my wet shoes on the soft, worn carpet on the stairs, my hand streaking on the smooth, polished, maple banister.

At the top, I swing down the hall. The door to Sarah's room is open. It is dark in there. I switch on the light. She is not on the bed, nor has she been. The satin spread is unrumpled, the rain pelting in through the open window, the wind fresh and cool. I have a bad feeling then and go uneasily into our bedroom. It is dark as well, empty. My stomach has become hollow. Where are they? All in my mother's room?

No. As I stand at the open door to my mother's room, I see from the yellow light that I turned on in the hall that only she is in there, her small torso stretched across the bed.

"Mother," I say, intending to add "Where are Meg and Sarah?" But I stop before I do. One of my mother's shoes is off, the other askew on her foot. There is mud on her shoes. There is blood on her cotton dress. It is torn, her brittle hair disrupted, blood on her face. Her bruised lips are swollen.

For several moments, I am silent with shock. "My God, Mother," I finally manage to say, and as if the words are a spring releasing me to action, I touch her to wake her. But I see that her eyes are open, staring toward the ceiling, unseeing although alive, and each breath is a sudden full gasp, then a slow exhalation.

"Mother, what has happened? Who did this to you? Where are Meg and Sarah?"

But she does not look at me, only toward the ceiling.

"For God's sake, Mother, answer me! Look at me! What has happened?"

Nothing. Her eyes are sightless. Between gasps she is like a statue.

What I think is hysterical. Disjointed, contradictory. I must find Meg and Sarah. They must be somewhere, beaten like my mother.

Or worse. Find them. Where? But I cannot leave my mother. When she becomes alert again, she too will be hysterical, frightened, in great pain. How did she end up on the bed?

In her room, there is no sign of the struggle she must have put up against her attacker. It must have happened somewhere else. She crawled from there to here. Then I see the blood on the floor, the swath of blood down the hall from the stairs. Who did this? Where is he? Who would beat a gray, wrinkled, arthritic old woman? Why in God's name would he do it? I imagine the pain of the arthritis as she struggled with him.