Grim Tales (2 page)

Because he had died under mysterious circumstances, an autopsy was performed. The coroner removed a bullet from the right ventricle; however, neither entrance nor exit wound could be found. The bullet was of a type used by snipers in the World War, during which the man's father had been lost and presumed dead. The man had never known his father, whom the man's mother hated still with a passion equal to her love for her son. The wound – the coroner observed – was perfect, as if the bullet had been “introduced into the heart by means other than a weapon.”

At midnight, a man received a call from someone who assured him he would not see the sun rise; that he – the caller – was even now getting ready to come and murder him. Escape was impossible: the house was watched by confederates, impervious to bribes or entreaties. Shortly after putting down the phone, the man died of fear. He could not know that the caller had dialed the wrong number and that it was another man, in another part of the city, who did not see morning.

Each morning he woke to find in his bed an instrument of destruction: knife, noose, capsule, an ice-cold gun that felt in his hand like the breast of a dead bird. At breakfast, he would watch his wife pour coffee, butter toast, carry the remains of toast to the sink – look at her closely, his face a question. But hers gave no hint in answer, of an intent to do away with him by moving him to thoughts of suicide. They lived together: there was no one else in the apartment but them. If not she, then who? he wondered. This morning he found a black silk band on his wife's pillow and remembered how, during the night, he had dreamed of waking to find a black silk band on the pillow, had tied it round his eyes, and then, opening the window, had jumped. He woke, terrified and breathless, before reaching the street. Awake now, he takes the black silk and ties it round his eyes, jumps, and does not cease to scream until he hits the pavement. Later, searching the apartment, the police find (hidden behind his books) a straight razor, matches soaked in paraffin, an envelope of powder tasting like arsenic.

He brought a door with him and placed it against the hillside. Then he went in and closed it. What happened to him next is not known, because the door was for him alone. Later when they heard him scream, there was nothing anyone could do.

The trees now grew without any longer observing the limits assigned them by nature. They reached into the sky until they looked out over “the floor of heaven.” Recalling the old story, boys climbed them. Not only boys but men and even some old men who wished for gold. One by one they fell – the old men and the young boys, too – not one of them having reached the top branches let alone the floor of heaven. Instead, they fell, all of them, earning for themselves neither wealth nor fame, only death at the foot of the unruly trees. Still the trees continued to grow without regard for the limitations of their kind until the roots tore from the ground and the earth was broken into pieces and destroyed.

There, where the grass was allowed to grow without let or hindrance, children liked to hide from those who might call them home to their lessons. This evening when their mothers went into the towering grass to bring home the fugitives, they found entrances to what appeared to be underground tunnels. Putting their ears to them, they could hear a distant sound like the gnashing of teeth.

It was the man who hit him over the head with a gaff. But she bound her husband's ankles and wrists with cord; and together, they dropped him over the side. They had met at the summer home of a mutual friend. A man “connected to the theater.” Almost immediately, they had become lovers. Their affair was torrid, shameless, indiscreet. Her husband, however, knew nothing. Plotting to kill him had become, for the lovers, a game. The more they played it, the less impossible it seemed. Soon they thought of nothing else: the desire to kill him “perfectly” replaced their desire for each other. The night they disposed of the body, she dreamed of a crab scuttling across the ocean floor. The second night, of a door on the bottom. On the third night, she dreamed of a whale. It spoke to her in a way she understood. It told her to drive – now, before night was ended – to the sea; to take off her clothes and swim out as far as she could swim. The moon lay among the black waves like broken plates. She swam until she could swim no more. Then she sank beneath the waves. Her husband was waiting for her the moment she woke.

He happened to look down, idly, at a book lying open on the table and read in it his own death, which instantly came to pass. What he might have seen or thought he had seen in this book – his wife's cookbook – will never be known. Perhaps at that moment his mind was bent on self-destruction, as a mind will be from time to time. Or perhaps this: he saw there a recipe for a meal that, long ago, someone had predicted would be his last.

When he was struck down by his wife's lover, the scythe moaned in the wheat. In the kitchen, cutting open a loaf, she dropped her knife as the blood spilled out the bread's fresh wounds.

They had thought her drowned and her body, after so long a search, was never to be recovered. During the memorial service, when she stood in the vestry doorway in a wet dress, her hair wet and threaded with bits of green and orange weed – they panicked (feeling as if they were drowning) and ran outside “to stand under God's own sky and to breathe fresh air!” Their terror assuaged, they went inside again, ashamed. But she was for a second time gone – leaving nothing to mark her sudden, brief presence but dampness on the carpet and a bit of green and orange weed. This, too: the odor of river bottom as it is dredged up on the blades of oars into sunlight.