Bullet Park (8 page)

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “I like the four-o’clock show and the six-o’clock show and the seven-o’clock show …”

“You mean you can’t confine yourself to an hour, is that it?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said.

“I guess you’d better make me a drink,” Nellie said. “Scotch and soda.”

Nailles made a drink and returned to Tony. “Well if you can’t decide,” Nailles said, “I’m going to decide for you. First I’m going to make sure that you do your homework before you turn on the set.”

“I don’t get home until half past three,” Tony said, “and sometimes the bus is late and if I do my homework I’ll miss the four-o’clock show.”

“That’s just too bad,” Nailles said, “that’s just too bad.”

“Oh leave him alone,” Nellie said. “Please leave him alone. He’s had enough for tonight.”

“It isn’t tonight we’re talking about, it’s every single
night in the year including Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. Since no one around here seems able to reach any sort of agreement I’m going to make a decision myself. I’m going to throw that damned thing out the back door.”

“Oh no, Daddy, no,” Tony cried. “Please don’t do that. Please, please, please. I’ll try. I’ll try to do better.”

“You’ve been trying for months without any success,” Nailles said. “You keep saying that you’ll try to cut down and all you do is to watch more and more. Your intentions may have been good but there haven’t been any noticeable results. Out it goes.”

“Oh please don’t, Eliot,” Nellie cried. “Please don’t. He loves his television. Can’t you see that he loves it?”

“I know that he loves it,” Nailles said. “That’s why I’m going to throw it out the door. I love my gin and I love my cigarettes but this is the fourteenth cigarette I’ve had today and this is only my fourth drink. If I sat down to drink at half past three and drank steadily until nine I’d expect someone to give me some help.” He unplugged the television set with a yank and picked the box up in his arms. The box was heavy for his strength, and an awkward size, and in order to carry it he had to arch his back a little like a pregnant woman. With the cord trailing behind him he started for the kitchen door.

“Oh, Daddy, Daddy,” Tony cried. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” and he fell to his knees with his hands joined in a conventional, supplicatory position that he might have learned from watching some melodrama on the box.

“Eliot, Eliot,” Nellie screamed. “Don’t, don’t. You’ll be sorry, Eliot. You’ll be sorry.”

Tony ran to his mother and she took him in her arms. They were both crying.

“I’m not doing this because I want to,” Nailles shouted. “After all I like watching football and baseball when I’m home and I paid for the damned thing. I’m not doing this because I want to. I’m doing this because I have to.”

“Don’t look, don’t look,” Nellie said to Tony and she pressed his face into her skirts.

The back door was shut and Nailles had to put the box on the floor to open this. The rain sounded loudly in the yard. Then, straining, he picked up the box again, kicked open the screen door and fired the television out into the dark. It landed on a cement paving and broke with the rich, glassy music of an automobile collision. Nellie led Tony up the stairs to her bedroom, where she threw herself onto the bed, sobbing. Tony joined her. Nailles closed the kitchen door on the noise of the rain and poured another drink. Fifth, he said.

All of this was eight years ago.

T
ony had gone out for football and had made the second squad in his junior year. He had never been a good student—he got mostly C’s—but in French his marks were so low they were scarcely worth recording. One afternoon when he was about to join the squad for practice it was announced over the squawk box that he should report to the principal. He was not afraid of the principal but he was disturbed at the thought of missing any of the routines of football practice. When he stepped into the outer office a secretary asked him to sit down.

“But I’m late,” Tony said, “I’m late for practice already.”

“He’s busy,” the secretary said.

“Couldn’t I come back some other time? Couldn’t I do it tomorrow?”

“You’d be late for practice tomorrow.”

“Couldn’t I see him during class time?”

“No.”

Tony glanced at the office. In spite of the stubborn and obdurate facts of learning, the place had for him a galling sense of unreality. A case of athletic trophies stood against one wall but this seemed to be the only note of permanence. Presently he was let into the principal’s office and given a chair.

“You’ve failed first-year French twice, Tony,” the principal said, “and it looks as if you’re going to fail it again. Your parents expect you to go on to college and you know you have to have a modern-language credit. Your intelligence quotient is very high and neither Miss Hoe nor I can understand why you fail.”

“It’s just that I can’t say French, sir,” Tony said. “I just can’t say any French. My father can’t either. I just can’t say French. It sounds phony.”

The principal switched on the squawk box and said into it: “Could you see Tony now, Miss Hoe?” Her affirmative came through loud and clear. “Certainly.” “You go down and see Miss Hoe now,” said the principal.

“Couldn’t I see her after class tomorrow, sir? I’m missing football practice.”

“I think Miss Hoe will have something to say about that. She’s waiting.”

Miss Hoe was waiting in a room whose bright lights and pure colors did nothing to cheer him. It would soon be getting dark on the playing field and he had already missed passing and tackle. Miss Hoe sat before a large poster showing the walls of Carcassonne. It was the only
traditional surface in the room. The brilliant, fluorescent lights in the ceiling made the place seem to be a cavern of incandescence, authoritative in its independence from the gathering dark of an autumn afternoon; and the power to light the room came from another county, well to the north, where snow had already fallen. The chairs and desks were made of brightly colored plastic. The floor was waxed Vinylite.

“Sit down, Tony,” she said. “Please sit down. It’s time that we had a little talk.”

She might have been a pretty woman—small-featured and slender—but her skin was sallow and in the brightness of the light one saw that she had a few chinwhiskers. Her waist was very slender and she seemed to take some pride in this. She always wore belts, cinctures, chains or ribbons around her middle and she sometimes wore a girlish ribbon in her brown hair. Her mouth, considering the strenuous exercise it got in French vowels, was very small. She wore no perfume and exhaled the faint unfreshness of humanity at the end of the day.

She lived alone, of course, but we will grant her enough privacy not to pry into the clinical facts of her virginity or to catalogue the furniture, souvenirs, etc. with which her one-room apartment was stuffed. As a lonely and defenseless spinster she was prey to the legitimate anxieties of her condition. There were four locks on the door to her apartment and she carried a vial of ammonia in her handbag to throw into the eyes of assailants. She had read somewhere that anxiety was a manifestation
of sexual guilt and she could see, sensibly, that her aloneness and her virginity would expose her to guilt and repression. However, the burden of guilt must, she felt, be somewise divided between her destiny and the news in the evening paper. It was not her guilt that had caused the increase in sexual brutality. She had come to feel that some disorganized conspiracy of psychopaths was developing. Weekly, sometimes daily, women who resembled her were debauched, mutilated and strangled. Alone in the dark she was always afraid. Since she frequently dreamed that she was being debauched by some brute in a gutter she had to include guilt along with terror.

“When were you born, Tony,” she asked.

“May twenty-seventh.”

“Oh, I knew it,” she said. “I knew it. You’re Gemini.”

“What’s that?”

“Gemini is the constellation under which you were born. Gemini determines many of your characteristics and one might say your fate; but Gemini men are invariably good linguists. The fact that you are Gemini proves to me that you can do your work and do it brilliantly. You can’t dispute your stars, can you?”

He looked past her through the window to the playing field. There was still enough light in the air, enough color in the trees to compete with the incandescence of their cavern; but in another ten minutes there would be nothing to see in the window but a reflection of Miss Hoe and himself. He knew nothing about astrology beyond the fact that he thought it to be a sanctuary for fools. He
supposed that she might have read in the stars (and he was right) that it was her manifest destiny to be unloved, unmarried, childless and lonely. She sighed and he was suddenly conscious of her breathing, its faint sibilance and the rise and fall of her meager front. It seemed intimate—sexual—as if they lay in one another’s arms, and he moved his chair back suddenly, scraping the legs on the Vinylite. The noise restored him.

“I’ve talked this over with Mr. Northrup, Tony, and we’ve reached a decision. Since you seem unable to manage your own time with any efficiency we are going to give you a little assistance. We are going to ask you to give up football.”

He had not anticipated this staggering injustice. He would not cry but there was a definite disturbance in his eyeducts. She didn’t know what she was saying. She knew, poor woman, much less about football than he knew about French. He loved football, loved the maneuvers, the grass work, the fatigue, and loved the ball itself—its shape, color, odor and the way it spiraled into the angle of his elbow and ribcage. He loved the time of year, the bus trips to other schools, he loved sitting on the bench. Football came more naturally to him than anything else at his time of life and how could they take this naturalness away from him and fill up the breach with French verbs?

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Miss Hoe.”

“I’m afraid I do, Tony. I’ve not only talked with Mr. Northrup. I’ve talked with Coach.”

“With Coach?”

“Yes, with Coach. Coach thinks it will be better for you, better for our school, better perhaps for our football team if you spent more time at your studies.”

“Coach said this?”

“Coach said that you were enthusiastic but he doesn’t think that in any way you’re indispensable. He thinks perhaps that you’re wasting your time.”

He stood. “You know what, Miss Hoe?” he asked.

“What, Tony,” she said. “What, dear?”

“You know I could kill you,” he said. “I could kill you. I could strangle you.”

She stood, hurling her chair against the walls of Carcassonne, and began to scream. Her screaming brought Mr. Graham, the Latin teacher, and Mr. Clark (science) running. She stood at her desk, her arm outflung, pointing at Tony. “He tried to kill me,” she screamed. “He threatened to kill me.”

“There, there, Mildred,” said Mr. Graham. “There, there.”

“I want a policeman,” she screamed. “Call the police.” Mr. Clark called the office through the squawk box and asked for the secretary to call the police. Mr. Clark picked up Miss Hoe’s chair and she sat in it, trembling and breathing heavily but sternly as if she were about to upbraid an unruly class. Tony simply stared at his hands. Then in the distance they heard the sound of a police siren that seemed, excited and grieving, not to come from the autumn twilight but from some television drama in which they were the actors or combatants, playing out
nothing so simple as poor French marks and a mistaken threat. Tony was Miss Hoe’s long-lost brother who had just returned from his travels with the news that their beautiful mother was a well-known communist spy. The science teacher would have been Miss Hoe’s husband—a dreary failure whose business misadventures and drinking bouts had brought her to the brink of a nervous breakdown—and Mr. Clark came from the FBI. Thus, juxtaposed for a moment by the sound of the siren, they seemed about to have their dilemma interrupted by an advertisement for painkillers or detergents, until the police came in, asking, “What’s up, what’s going on here?” Vandalism had been their guess, although it was the wrong time of day—but vandalism was the usual complaint. Why did kids want to rip the lids off desks and break windows. Miss Hoe raised her head. Her poor face, shining with tears, was ugly. “He tried to kill me,” she said. “He tried to kill me.”

“Now Mildred,” said Mr. Clark. “Now Mildred.”

“Don’t I have any protection at all,” she cried angrily. “Are you all going to stand around and defend this murderer until I’m found some night with a broken neck? How do you know he doesn’t have a knife. Has anyone searched him? Has anyone even asked him a question?”

“You got a knife, Sonny,” one of the police asked.

“No,” said Tony.

“You try to kill this lady?”

“No, sir,” said Tony.

“You try to kill this lady?”

“No, sir. I got angry at her and said that I’d like to but I didn’t touch her. I wouldn’t ever touch her.”

“I want something done about this,” Miss Hoe said. “I am entitled to some protection.”

“You want to file charges against him lady? Felonious assault, I guess.”

“I do,” Miss Hoe said.

“All right. I’ll take him down to the station and book him. Come on, Sonny.”

The corridor was crowded by this time with teachers, secretaries and janitors, none of whom knew what had happened and all of whom were asking one another what it was. Tony and the police had gotten to the end of the corridor and were about to turn out of sight when Miss Hoe cried: “Officer, Officer.” It was a frightened voice and they turned quickly.

“Could you take me home, will you drive me home?”

“Where do you live?”

“Warwick Gardens.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

She got her coat, turned off the lights and locked the door to her classroom. She came swiftly down the hall, through the crowd, to where they waited. She got into the back seat of the car and Tony sat in front between the two police. “It’s very kind of you to take me home,” Miss Hoe said. “I do appreciate it, but I’m terribly afraid of the dark. When I go into the cafetorium for my lunch the first thing I think of is that it will get dark in four hours. Oh, I wish it would never get dark—never. I
suppose you know all about that lady who was mistreated and strangled on Maple Street last month. She was my age and we had the same first name. We had the same horoscope and they never found the murderer …”