Night Gallery 1 (6 page)

The director turned to Merrill. "I'm sorry, Mr. Merrill,'' he said through his laughter, "the guy's a comic. No matter what he reads—it comes out like a gag."

Merrill nodded and scratched his moustache, wiping the tears off his own cheeks as he did so. "I thought he was what we needed," he said. "Something . . . something about his face—"

"His face!" The director shrieked and laughed again. "His face, gestures, everything—is for laughs." He looked back toward Jackie on the stage and convulsed. "Look at him," he shrieked. "Will you look at him?"

Jackie just stood there, script in hand, his pudgy little face screwed up like a child about to cry. And around him the laughter surged.

Merrill continued to wipe the tears from his cheeks and turned to the director. "I made a mistake," he said. "Shake his hand, pat his back, and get him the hell out of here."

The director nodded, rose, and carried his laughter with him to the aisle and then down to the foot of the stage. "I'm sorry, Mr. Slater," he began.

Jackie glared at him over the footlights, then looked briefly around him. His voice drowned out the laughter. "You wanna know something?" Jackie shouted.

Very gradually the laughter faded into silence.

"I'll tell you something," Jackie said. "You're dirty, rotten people is what you are! You're dirty, rotten, insensitive people! You're the kind . . . you're the kind who would push a kid off a dock—that's what you'd do!"

More silence. Then the director screamed with laughter. "Push him off a dock," he said, the laughter gurgling and bubbling inside of him. "Push him off a dock."

They were all laughing . . . and they couldn't stop as Jackie wrapped his dignity around him like a cloak and stalked off the stage.

Chatterje was out in the alley when Jackie came out the stage-door exit. He was sitting on a garbage can, looking as ratty and poverty-stricken as ever. The cracked red ruby reflected the glint of a dying afternoon sun. He surveyed Jackie sadly.

"As must be obvious, yefendi," he said in his fluty little voice, "miracles are not without risks . . . unforeseen little addenda."

Jackie lumbered over to him. "Unforeseen little addenda," he repeated, his features working, "like spending the rest of my life tickling people. Lemme tell you something, you half-pint guru—I can't say 'Good morning' . . . 'How are you?' . . . 'A glass of orange juice, please,' without people laughing at me."

Chatterje seemed to shrivel. "It was as you wished," he said in a whisper.

"Well, I don't wish it now!" Jackie shouted at him. "I've had it with the boffos. I want another miracle. You understand? You dig, you motheaten Gunga Din, you? I want you to fix it so that nobody ever laughs at me again."

Chatterje unfolded his skinny little toothpick legs and got off the garbage can. He looked stricken. "Yefendi," he said apologetically, "there is an unwritten law. One miracle to a customer. And as must be obvious with me and my miracles—this should be an occasion for you to count your blessings!"

Jackie thrust out a big hambone arm and lifted Chatterje off his feet. "You listen to me, you second-rate swami, you—I want another miracle. I want people to cry when I talk— not laugh. So you make that happen, or they'll be able to wrap up what's left of you in that Ace bandage you wear around your head and deposit you in a quart can." He shook Chatterje. "You hear me? You wilted wizard, you—make another miracle."

Chatterje clawed at Jackie's hands until he removed them. He stood there for a few silent moments, then looked skyward and mumbled some soundless words; then mournfully he turned back to Jackie. "It is done," he said.

"Done?" Jackie asked suspiciously.

"Done," Chatterje answered. "You will never again be laughed at, yefendi. Never ever. Never, never ever!"

Chatterje took a quick step backward as Jackio moved closer to him.

"You sure?" Jackie asked.

Chatterje touched his forehead. "I am as certain of this, yefendi, as I am that my peers are quite correct." The corners of his mouth turned down. "As a guru, I am a dismal, abject, altogether substandard klutz. A failure, yefendi. That is what I am."

Jackie glared at him. "We'll see," he said. "We'll just see."

He took his fat man's walk to the opening of the alley, then looked across the street, where a shriveled old woman sold flowers from a battered kiosk. "Hey," Jackie shouted at her. "Hey, lady! Ever hear the one about the two Arabs who got on the streetcar?"

The old woman looked at him, startled.

Jackie stepped off the curb. "Well, this one Arab

says to the other Arab—"

Chatterje screamed.

The old woman shut her eyes.

The cab driver went cold all over as he tried to jam on the brake.

There was the sound of a thud and a squish, and then two funny sounds, like twin balloons being punctured as the wheels rolled over Jackie Slater's body.

Pedestrians stood transfixed, staring at the motionless, twisted body of the fat man in the middle of the street.

Moments later there came the sound of an approaching siren.

There were the shocked murmurings of the onlookers.

But no laughter. No laughter at all.

The flower lady cried. Tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped like little liquid petals onto the bunches of violets.

Chatterje's little black shoe-button eyes took in everything. He let his gaze rest on the sobbing flower lady, then toward Jackie Slater's body. Laughter wasn't enough for you, yefendi, he thought to himself. No, indeed—tears you wanted. He took a deep breath and moved in the opposite direction down the street. "It's a moot question," he said to the pink-and-orange-sunset sky. "An altogether moot question."

The thin little sounds of the flower lady faded off, and in their place came the ear-splitting din of the ambulance's siren.

"Shall I continue the miracle route? Shall I perhaps open up a restaurant featuring curried delicacies, or perhaps a sabbatical while I brush up on the guru art?"

Chatterje took a last look at the body of Jackie Slater being lifted onto a stretcher and smiled sadly. "Poor yefendi," he whispered. "At least you have no more choices to make."

Then he continued down the sidewalk, as once again the ambulance's siren sent out its wailing notice of departure, and the big white vehicle disappeared around the corner carrying two hundred and eighty pounds of a late comedian.

It had been an absolutely smashing day, begun auspiciously with his favorite eggs-Benedict breakfast, which he prepared himself, and then washed down with a dainty, exquisite Pinot. He had tiptoed quietly from the house for a brisk and invigorating walk in the clear April morning and then returned before Pamela had awakened. Then he had strung the piano wire across the third step from the top of the stairway, testing it for strength and tautness. Following that, he'd fixed himself a spot of Irish coffee in the study and sat patiently in his favorite leather chair facing the bay window that offered such a delightful view of the incredibly beautiful morning.

At promptly eleven o'clock the bell from Pamela's bedroom began to jangle furiously. He had smiled, picturing her in her hair net, mud pack, chin strap, and all the other nocturnal devices Pamela used to give battle to encroaching age.

He sipped at his coffee, heating the groaning wheeze of the mattress as she left the bed, and then her heavy footsteps to the door, followed by her shrill voice calling his name as she came out onto the upper landing.

"Jonathan? Jonathan, are you down there? Jonathan, why aren't you answering my—"

From the study he heard first her surprised gasp and then her throttled scream. Close behind was a loud thump, and then more thumps as Pamela had come somersaulting down the stairs, her heavy, body picking up momentum, until she had finished her journey on the hard oak floor at the foot of the stairs.

Jonathan came out of the study, to find her sitting uptight against the wall in a welter of silk bathrobe and hanging hair net directly under the severe-looking portrait of her great-grandfather. Her broken neck, rooster-style, left her shoulderblades at an impossible angle; and when Jonathan gently lifted up her head, her still-open eyes, smudged with mascara, glared at him with silent fury under the arched, plucked eyebrows. He had gazed into the dead horse face of his wife, through the cracks of the mud pack and the various creams, and noted that in death, as in life, Pamela was perhaps the ugliest woman on the face of the earth.

But it was odd, he thought, as he walked to the phone to perform the meaningless ritual of calling a doctor, that even in death her mouth was open. There was that yawning cavern with the big yellow teeth, frozen in its accustomed position—parted and agape. He could imagine what was clogged up by the sudden detour in her windpipe—her daily epithets, criticisms, whinings, and multiple angers, precipitously cut off by Jonathan's piano wire.

The burnished mahogany casket reflected the four tall candles as well as the tiers of flowers and wreaths placed around it. And Jonathan, his spare, trim little frame housed impeccably in a silk smoking jacket, sat in his leather chair across the room looking at it. He placed a long cigarette in a holder, lit it, started to put the match into an ashtray, and then, as if reminded by the casket, flipped the match onto the carpet. He then tapped the ashes off his cigarette to land at his feet and leaned back luxuriously. Among the myriad things that Pamela had disapproved of, smoking was near the top of the list. And dropping ashes on the carpet, she had placed in the same category as child beating and infidelity. But there were many things, Jonathan reflected, that Pamela had disapproved of. The candles, Jonathan noted, made the Victorian room brighter than it ever had been. Pamela had lectured him incessantly about wasting electricity. She would walk from room to room, turning off light switches. "When not in use—turn off the juice," she would say. And then she would move into whatever room Jonathan was in and sniff the air. "Have you been smoking, Jonathan?" she would always ask. "Tobacco is one of the most miserable poisons extant. Quite apart from what it does to the body—it fouls the air permanently."

Jonathan smiled as he reflected. Pamela had never known what "permanently" meant until she'd been placed in the box across the room. Pamela had really not known much of anything except how to rage, persecute, complain, and vilify. Jonathan had wished for her death for the first five years, desperately prayed for it for the next five, and actively planned it for the last five. Fifteen years, he thought to himself, fifteen years with Pamela's mouth—that working, smacking, perpetually moving noise box that kept opening and shutting as if on an oiled hinge, giving him no peace, no silence, no escape.

He rose from the chair, dusted some ashes off the lapel of his smoking jacket, and walked over to a small cabinet. From it he took out a bottle of wine tlrat he had formerly hidden in the cellar. He squinted at its label. A light-bodied claret from 1923, which, Jonathan reflected again, had been a fair year. He carried the bottle back over to the chair, and in the process passed Pamela sitting on the sofa. He nodded affably toward her, then stopped in his tracks as a glacier rose from his feet and took a freezing journey up to his brain. Pamela! Pamela sitting on the sofa. He blinked, swallowed, then turned very slowly to look again toward the sofa.

Pamela sat there, slightly transparent and very ghostlike. But she sat there. And there was nothing ephemeral in the voice. It was Pamela's—shrill, grating, enveloping. "Nothing better to do tonight, Jonathan? Just stand there like a bump on a log?"

Jonathan blinked again and stared.

"Look hard enough, and you'll see me. You're blind as a bat, Jonathan."

Jonathan checked the bottle in his hand to see if perhaps he had already drunk from it. It was still corked and full. He took a deep breath. "Pamela? Is that your voice?"

The specter on the sofa seemed to grow more solid. "Whose voice were you expecting, you idiot? Who else's voice could it possibly be? And don't stand there gaping like an owl."

Jonathan sat down in his favorite chair. Of course, it was Pamela. No one else could fire off that many tired metaphors per minute. And no one's voice could sound like a fingernail across a blackboard like Pamela's.

He carefully put the bottle aside, then forced himself to look directly at Pamela. Yes, it was definitely Pamela. The severe, hating eyes the long tallow-colored face—the gaping open mouth.

"Surprised?" Pamela asked.

"At what?"

The figure on the sofa shrugged. "At my being here."

Jonathan leaned back in the chair. He felt no fear at all. Pamela, the dead apparition, seemed infinitely less menacing than Pamela—that shrewish, pianolegged bane of fifteen endless years.

"Hardly surprised," he said mildly. "In life, my dear Pamela, you arrived every place uninvited. You and that hyena-mating voice of yours."

She seemed totally materialized now, and sat as she had always sat—hunched forward, hands clenched into fists, an open mouth twisted like the bent mouthpiece of a bugle.

"Tell me, Pamela," he said, "how
are
things up there? Keeping you occupied, are they? Keeping you contented? Are there lives—or rather,
after
lives—you can destroy with gossip? Reputations you can filthy up with your dark little suspicions and that kitchen-knife tongue of yours?" He laughed. "Incredible. Really incredible. It never occurred to me, Pamela." He pointed at her. "You're probably not even up there. Most likely you're—" He stopped, pointing a finger at the floor.

"Crazy as a loon," Pamela said. "I'm neither, Jonathan. I'm right here. I've not left, though you did your level best to get me out of the way."

Jonathan looked over at the casket and smiled. "Pamela," he said, "you
are
out of the way. Resilient, you were. But altogether mortal. And being mortal, my dear, a broken neck did you in nicely." He leaned forward in the chair. "Was it painful? I mean, when you landed at the foot of the stairs—hurt much, did it?"