Meeting Evil (3 page)

It was on such a late Monday morning when, with the two-tone sound of the front-door chimes, the worst day of John’s life began, though he had already been up for hours, feeding the children and running the first of two loads of laundry through the washer/dryer and folding the garments while they were still warm. Joanie, in rumpled pajamas, was breakfasting on sugar-coated cereal at the kitchen table. She wore no makeup, in which state her eyes looked very small, and her hair was tousled. There had been a time, not long before, when in a similar condition she would still have looked like a schoolgirl.

“Why don’t you try one of those blueberry muffins?” John asked her now.

“Aren’t they stale?”

“I just bought them yesterday, at Liebman’s.”

“I don’t know,” Joan said, pushing away at least half a bowlful of sodden cereal. “I’m just not that hungry.” She drank some black coffee from her favorite mug of brown ceramic, with the yellow chipped place at the rim to avoid which she held the vessel in her left hand. “I always thought you were supposed to acquire a tremendous appetite when you quit smoking. It’s just the opposite with me. I always looked forward to eating when I knew I had a cigarette coming.”

John had never smoked his life long, the odor of burning
tobacco having always been nauseating to him. It was not because of him, however, that Joanie had lately given up the habit: she had at last been scared off by a series of antismoking exhortations on television. She really did take seriously her responsibilities as a mother.

“Spaghetti okay for dinner?” He made it every Monday evening. It was one of his specialties. He boiled it up and added the canned white clam sauce.

“Why not?” rhetorically asked his wife, supporting her head with her right hand, between sips of coffee from the mug in her left.

Melanie wandered in and said something her father did not hear distinctly, for it was at this point that the door chimes sounded.

“Be right back,” he told his daughter, touching her button nose ever so lightly with his index finger, but she was not mollified by the gesture and began to complain.

John had inherited his mother’s anxiety with respect to electric summonses: the sound of bell or buzzer was perforce an emergency to which one must give precedence over hemorrhages, flash fires, and all human importunities. Being way back in the kitchen, he now headed for the front entrance at the run, lest the unseen applicant have to undergo the horror of ringing again.

Owing to the same anxiety, he never took time to peer through the little gauze curtain that covered the rectangle of glass set high in the door for that purpose, but, as now, hurled open the portal without regard for the cautions about strangers that one heard so frequently these days. His father-in-law, for example, made all comers state their business to the tiny microphone installed above the bell-push, while they stood for inspection through a closed-circuit TV camera mounted near the ceiling of the porch.

The present caller was a man of about John’s own age, a tall fellow somewhere between thin and sinewy. On the back of his head was the kind of billed cap worn nowadays by more people than just ballplayers. John himself had two: one purchased for the golf course, the other a promotional gift on the opening of the local branch of a hardware chain.

“My car stalled out, right in front of your house.” A clump of dingy fair curls filled the space between the forehead and the bill of the cap.

“You want me to call the auto club?”

The man’s smile displayed only his upper teeth, so that it took an instant to identify it as a smile. “You could just give me a push.” He gestured with his shoulder. “Just to where it starts down.”

The descent so signified began in front of the third house from John’s. Once over the crest of the hill, you could probably coast without power for more than a quarter mile.

John accompanied the stranger to the curb, where he asked him, “You think that will do it?”

The man seemed not to understand the question. “Hey,” he said, “in this baby I can smoke anything on the road.”

John had never been fascinated with cars, but he recognized this one as being powerful, with its air scoop on the hood and its long red snout. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s hot-looking. Where do you want me to go, side or back?”

The man opened the door and got into the driver’s seat. “Right here by the window.” He slammed the door, and John braced himself against the frame and pushed.

The car rolled more easily than he had anticipated. He had the natural strength associated with a stocky build. But he had done little in the way of recreational exercise (playing golf maybe three times a season) since leaving high school,
and he noticed nowadays that physical effort caused him to breathe harder than he had once had to.

Just as John was feeling a certain satisfaction with his current effort, the man behind the wheel complained. “Can’t you give it a little more steam? We’re hardly moving.”

John was chastened. Could that be true? Maybe he should look at the ground. He lowered his head, staring at the asphalt under them, and put all his strength against the door-jamb. The vehicle certainly moved: there could be no doubt of that. But the driver was apparently one of those people who go public only with negative observations.

Now he shouted, “Hey! Will you stop!”

John looked up. It was quite true that they had gained the crest and there was no further need for exterior force. But the implication of emergency was unwarranted. This was the man who had lately chided him for doing too little.

“Just step on the brake.”

The man snarled, “I don’t have any brakes, jerk.”

There was no call for nastiness, and though usually an amiable sort, John would have stepped back and replied in kind—had he not now discovered that the tail of his old work shirt, which, casually, as befitted his day off, he was wearing outside his old paint-stained chinos, had been caught in the door of the car when the other man slammed it shut at the outset.

Luckily the car was moving slowly as yet. Trotting, John seized the door handle. It was locked. He reached inside to pull up the button, but there was only an empty hole. He shouted through the open window, right into the driver’s ear, but the man was preoccupied. John reached farther inside and tried to find and work the mechanism by touch, but he was unfamiliar with it, and now the car had begun to roll
faster. He had to pick up the pace. Near panic, tethered to the mass of steel as it gathered momentum for the long downward slope, he gave up on the lock and struck the driver on the shoulder cap, and then, when the man made no response whatever—John was running now—he put both hands around the driver’s skinny neck and would have throttled him had the car not quickly come to a shuddering stop.

Relieved of fear but even angrier than before, John took the hand from the man’s throat but kept in place the one at the nape.

“Open the goddamn door!”

The driver obeyed the order, twisting away from the grasp.

John should simply have turned and walked away at this point, but he stayed, incredulous. “This was a joke? You had brakes all the while? What’s wrong with you?”

The driver frowned. “I
don’t
have any brakes. I stopped by putting it in gear.”

“You didn’t know my shirt was caught in the door?”

“I was busy! Wasn’t that
your
business?”

Now that he had calmed down somewhat, John could see a certain justice in the other’s argument, but he had invested too much of himself to admit it.

“Look,” the other man said, “I can coast down from here. But where’s the nearest gas station?”

“Turn at Randolph,” John said. “That’ll be at the bottom of the hill. Take a right on Walton, to Church. There’s a station on the northeast corner. But how are you going to stop if you have to? Keep putting it in gear? That can’t be good for your car. For that matter, it’s level ground down there. Once you’re stopped, you won’t be able to get going again.”

“Well, it’s my problem, isn’t it,” the man said genially. “Thanks for this. Sorry about your shirt.”

John reflected that only a moment earlier he had been trying to choke this fellow. The memory was embarrassing to him, though his victim seemed not to bear a grudge. On a guilty impulse, he said, “I better come along, just in case.”

“If you want.” The man worked the gear selector, and the car began to move. “Hop in. I can’t stop again.”

This seemed rude, in view of the charitable offer. By the time John got around to the other side, the vehicle was rolling at such speed that it was all he could do to reach the passenger door, open it, and hurl himself within, painfully bruising his knee on some projection.

Despite the speed, however, the driver was in no hurry to engage the gears. Which failure, by the time they were halfway down the slope, was inexplicable to John.

“Why don’t you kick it in?”

The young man in the cap was steering now with one hand on a loose wrist—the left one, at that. He did not seem at all concerned about the state of the car. At last he lazily turned his head.

“You want some juice, is that it?” Still looking at John, he worked the shifter with his free fist. The car came to life with a thunderous noise. They had already reached a fast roll; with the new thrust the car plunged downhill like a rocket. Inertia held John against the back of the seat, though there was not much he could have done anyway but what he did: shout in indignation.

He fell silent when he saw, not half a block beyond them, the rear end of a commercial van, backing into the street from a private driveway. He was not wearing a seat belt, and his fantasies of instinctively knowing the right thing to do in an emergency proved useless. He was sure only that the imminent collision would be lethal for himself, and that certainty was paralyzing.

In fact, no crash occurred. Still steering only with a casual left hand and disdaining the use of the horn, the driver effortlessly swung wide, so wide his wheels must have been in the far gutter, and continued to blast downhill at an ever greater velocity.

John recovered his anger. “Are you crazy? If there had been any oncoming traffic—”

“But there wasn’t any,” the man crowed, slapping the wheel and hee-hawing.

John intended to get out when they gained level ground, where the car could be brought to a stop by using the gears. If the fool ignored the order, the use of physical force would again be justified.

But on reaching the bottom of the hill, the other man performed a conservative turn, at a speed that had somehow subtly been brought to a moderate rate, and drove the block to the gas station before there was a reasonable opportunity to demand that the vehicle be stopped en route.

On stepping from the car, faced with a substantial walk back home, most of which was uphill, John discovered that his knee still ached from the blow it had sustained in his leap into the rolling vehicle.

“Wait a minute,” said the driver, hopping out. “I’ll give you a lift soon as I get the tank filled.”

John turned his back on the man. He had limped to the edge of the concrete apron before he was struck by the implication of what the guy had said. He stopped and turned around.

The driver, who had been watching his departure, smiled and said, “Can’t you take a joke?”

“You mean the brakes?” John asked angrily. “Your brakes are okay. You just used them now to stop, didn’t you?” The car, furthermore, was at the pumps, not positioned for entrance
to the garage, where it would have had to go for work on the supposedly ailing engine and the allegedly missing brakes. “And nothing’s wrong with the motor.”

“You’re wrong there,” said the man, tugging at the bill of his cap. “It really needs a tune-up, and the brakes tend to fade.” The attendant had arrived. She was a gaunt young woman, hair tucked up in her cap, no makeup. “Premium. Fill it.” He walked toward John, a bony hand extended. “Come on, I haven’t killed anybody, have I?”

John had always found it difficult to maintain a negative attitude toward any human being in the flesh. It was a kind of fear. He was anything but a coward in the routine sense of the word. He had once plunged into a flood-swollen stream to rescue a child, though never having been an outstanding swimmer. But he had no reason to think kindly of this idiot, and he ignored the outstretched hand. “Tell me this: why did you ring my doorbell?”

The man lowered his arm at last and said reproachfully, “I was just about out of gas. The needle was on Empty.”

“Why couldn’t you just say so?”

“I was afraid you’d think I’d want to siphon some out of
your
car.” The man put his thin jaw forward, but in a display of earnestness, not aggression. “Nobody trusts anybody nowadays.”

True enough, and in another situation John might very well have been the first to agree, but in the present case the sentiment was being voiced by the wrong man. “You’re still lying!” he said, with a sense of outrage. “You had enough gas to speed downhill.”

The other shook his head. “If you decide to think the worst of somebody, then there’s absolutely nothing that will change your mind. But there’s always some gas left in an empty tank, and going downhill at an angle, it sloshes forward
and can be burned. But don’t believe me—just ask that guy.” He pointed over his shoulder at the attendant. “Look, I didn’t handle the whole thing right, I guess. I might not know how to deal with people, but I’m not a bad person. I’m willing to apologize.” He raised his hand again. “How about it?”

This was the sort of appeal that John could not have rejected without being an altogether different kind of person from what he was. “All right,” he said, and even added the lie (for his knee was sore), “No harm done, I guess.” He did not like the feel of the other’s fingers, which, though appearing bony, were somewhat soft and yielding to the touch, as if the bones were gelatinous. “She’s female.”

“Huh?”

“The attendant.”

The man looked back. Then he smirked and said, loudly enough for the woman to hear, “She’s a dog.”

A needlessly nasty thing to say, but at least the attendant did not show that she had heard it, and it was quickly followed by what seemed a sincere concern for John’s welfare. “Let me run you back up the hill after I take care of this.” He went toward the attendant, who was hanging up the hose. After exchanging a word or two, they both walked to the station office and went inside.