The Ax (7 page)

For twenty minutes, nothing happens. There’s very little traffic along Berkshire Way, mostly delivery vans and pickup trucks. I see them out ahead, or in my rearview mirror, and they pass, and they’re gone.

And then all at once there’s a vehicle braking to a stop right behind me, abruptly large in my mirror, gray, familiar. I stare at it, afraid, with that awful immediate certainty that I’ve been caught, disaster has struck, exposure, condemnation, Marjorie and the kids staring at me in shock—“We never knew you!”—and a woman in an open gray zippered jacket leaps out of that vehicle and runs toward me.

The woman is the one who glared at me Monday: Mrs. Ricks! What on earth is she doing? Is she a mind reader?

It’s a cool day, cloudy, and the Voyager’s windows are shut. The woman runs up next to me, yelling, gesticulating, hugely angry and upset about something. But what? I can hear her yelling, but I can’t make out the words. I stare at her through the glass, afraid of her, afraid of the whole situation, afraid to open the window.

She shakes her fist at me. She screams in rage. She suddenly cuts away, and runs around the front of the van, and yanks open the passenger door, and thrusts her head in at me, blotchy red face, tear-streaked cheeks, and she yells, “Leave her alone!”

I gape at her. “What?”

“She’s only eighteen! How can you take advan— Don’t you have any
shame
?”

“I’m not—” She’s mistaken me, she’s got me mixed up with somebody, it’s just wrong, but I’m too flustered to correct her: “I’m not, you’ve got the, this isn’t—” Then what am I doing here, if not stalking her daughter?

“
Listen
to me!” she screams, drowning me out. “Don’t you think I could talk to your
wife
, whatever Junie says? Don’t you have any self-respect? Can’t you, can’t you, can’t you just
leave her alone
?”

“I’m not the man you—”

“You’re killing her father!”

Oh, God. Oh, let me out of this, let me away from here.

My silence is a mistake. She’s going to reason with me now, she’s going to convince this married middle-aged swine to stay away from her eighteen-year-old daughter. “There are doctors,” she says, trying to be calm, supportive. “You could talk with—” And now she’s going to sit beside me in the van, and she sweeps the raincoat off the seat, out of her way, and we both stare at the gun.

Now we both experience true horror. She stares at me, and in her eyes I see the entire tabloid scenario. The lust-crazed older lover is here to slaughter his nymphet’s parents.

I lift a hand. “I—” But what can I say?

She
screams
. The sound caroms inside the car, and the force of it seems to drive her backward, out of the vehicle and away. She turns, and runs along the road, toward her house, screaming.

No no no no no. She’s seen me, she knows my face, she saw the Luger, none of this is happening, none of this can happen, everything’s destroyed if this happens. I grab the Luger and jump out of the Voyager (at least, unlike her, I think to slam the door on my way), and I run after her.

I’m a sedentary man, I’ve been a manager for sixteen years, sitting at my desk, walking along the line, riding my car to and from work. Even more sedentary since I was chopped. I’m healthy enough, but I’m no athlete, and running uses me up right away. Long before I get to that yellow aluminum house, I’m gasping for breath.

But so is she. She’s also out of shape, and she’s trying to run and scream at the same time.
And
flail her arms. She had a good lead on me, but I’m catching up, I’m catching up, I’m not so far behind her when we veer to run angling across her unlovely lawn toward the front door of her house, and she’s screaming, “Ed! Ed!” and before she gets to the house I catch up with her, and I hold the Luger directly behind her head, bobbing as we both run, and I fire once, and she drops straight down onto the lawn, like a bundle, like a duffel bag, and the momentum flings her jacket halfway up over her head, covering the hole the bullet made.

Exhausted, spent, I sink to one knee beside her, and look up to see the front door opening, the astonished face of what must be her husband, Ed, EGR, my EGR, his astonished face is in the doorway, staring out, and I raise the gun and shoot, and the bullet punches into the aluminum beside the doorframe with a muted twang.

He slams the door, already turning, running away into the house.

Reeling, almost fainting, I force myself to my feet, I lunge forward to the door, I yank the handle, but it’s locked.

He’ll be in there right now, dialing 911. Oh, God, this is terrible, this is a mess, this is a disaster, how did I ever think I could do these things, that poor woman,
she
wasn’t supposed to—

I can’t let this happen. He can’t telephone, he can’t, I won’t permit it, I have to get to him, I just have to get to him.

The garage door is open. Around that way, through the house, find him,
find
him. I stagger like a drunk as I run along the front of the house and through the gaping open broad doorway. There, to my right, is the closed door to the house.
That
won’t be locked. I hurry to it, the Luger dangling at the end of my right arm, and just as I reach the door it opens and
he runs out
!

What was he doing? What did he have in mind? Was he going to try to drive away from here, was he so rattled he never thought of the telephone? We stare at one another, and I shoot him in the face.

Much sloppier, this one, blood everywhere, face ruined, body a tangled unknotted mess on the garage floor, one arm flung backward through the open doorway into the house.

No one else at home? Daughters all at university? Or with their unacceptable lovers? How I
hate
them for making this confusion, driving that woman to mistake me for someone else, attack me, harangue me, discover the gun. Where’s the neatness this time, the efficiency, the impersonality?

I’m shaking all over. I’m sweating, and I’m cold. I can barely hold on to the Luger, which I now put away in the inside pocket of my windbreaker, then trot along holding it in place with my left forearm.

I don’t know if there’s traffic, I don’t know if a thousand people are watching me or no one. I only know there’s the lawn, with that terrible dead sack on it, and there’s the empty field, and there’s the Plymouth Voyager.

I drive away, gripping the wheel hard because my hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking. I force myself to drive for ten minutes away from there, away from that neighborhood, staying within the speed limit, obeying all the traffic rules. Then at last I allow myself to pull off onto a dirt road and there, out of view, let the shaking have me. The shaking and the fear.

The sight of that woman’s face. The memory of her running, and my hand holding up the gun, and then she falls. Her husband, goggle-eyed, made stupid by terror and grief.

This is horrible. Horrible. But what could I have done? From the instant she pulled away that raincoat, what could I have done differently?

What have I started here? What road am I on?

Once I knew what I had to do, after that sleepless and despairing night, I went back through the resumés three times more, and each time I was increasingly cold and critical and realistic.
This
person? Competition for
me
? Education excellent, work record outstanding, but not in my field. A real find for some employer, but not for Arcadia Processing. Not for
my
job.

And so gradually I whittled the people down to six. Six resumés from people who, because of their work history and their education and their geographical location, were my true competition. I had to count location because I knew most employers would. They don’t like to pay moving expenses unless they absolutely cannot find a qualified individual who already lives within commuting distance. So the bright stars in Indiana and Tennessee I decided not to worry about. Their competition was closer to home.

I realized from the beginning the irony in what I planned to do. These people, these six management experts, Herbert Coleman Everly and Edward George Ricks and the others, were not my enemy. Even Upton “Ralph” Fallon was not my enemy, I knew that. The enemy is the corporate bosses. The enemy is the stockholders.

These are all publicly held corporations, and it is the stockholders’ drive for return on investment that pushes every one of them. Not the product, not the expertise, certainly not the reputation of the company. The stockholders care about nothing but return on investment, and that leads to their supporting executives who are formed in their image, men (and women, too, lately) who run companies they care nothing about, lead work forces whose human reality never enters their minds, make decisions not on the basis of what’s good for the company or the staff or the product or (hah!) the customer, or even the greater good of the society, but only on the basis of stockholders’ return on investment.

Democracy at its most base, supporting leaders only in return for their sating of greed. The ever-present nipple. That’s why healthy companies, firmly in the black, lush in dividends to stockholders, nevertheless lay off workers in their thousands; to squeeze out just a little more, look just a little better for that thousand-mouthed beast out there that keeps the executives in power, with their million-dollar, ten-million-dollar, twenty-million-dollar compensation package.

Oh, I knew all that when I started, I knew who the enemy was. But what good does that do me? If I were to kill a thousand stockholders and get away with it clean, what would I gain? What’s in it for me? If I were to kill seven chief executives, each of whom had ordered the firing of at least two thousand good workers in healthy industries, what would
I
get out of it?

Nothing.

What it comes down to is, the CEOs, and the stockholders who put them there, are the enemy, but they are not the problem. They are society’s problem, but they are not my personal problem.

These six resumés. These are my personal problem.

The murders of the Rickses make the TV news, of course, being so much more dramatic than the death of Herbert Everly. Nine hours after I killed them, I sit in my living room with Marjorie, and we watch my crimes described by a solemnly excited blonde woman in a good green suit. Betsy and Billy are not with us. They never watch the news, not being interested in anything much beyond their immediate lives. At this moment, before dinner, I believe Betsy is on the phone, as she often is, and Billy is on the computer, as
he
usually is, while Marjorie and I watch my murders on the news, and Marjorie says, “Oh, Burke, that’s horrible.”

“Horrible,” I agree.

It’s strange, but someway or other I don’t entirely recognize my actions from the blonde woman’s recountal. The facts are essentially right; I did chase the wife across the lawn and shoot her there, and I did in- tercept the husband in the garage and shoot him there, and I did leave without a trace, without witnesses, without clues in my wake.

But somehow the tone is all wrong, the sense of it, the feeling of it. These words she uses—“brutal” “savage” “cold-hearted”—give completely the wrong impression. They leave out the error that caused it all. They leave out the panic and confusion. They leave out the trembling, the sweating, the icy fear.

But there’s more to the story, all at once. They have a suspect! The police are questioning him, even now, at this very minute.

He’s seen being led from an office building on a community college campus. He’s a tweedy slope-shouldered middle-aged man with a gray widow’s peak and large bifocals. He isn’t handcuffed, but he’s closely surrounded by beefy state troopers, one of whom puts his hand atop the suspect’s head as he’s urged into the backseat of a white state police car.

His name is Lewis Ringer, and he’s a professor of literature at that community college. He is also the unacceptable lover of June Ricks, eighteen-year-old youngest child of the murdered couple. He is the man her mother thought I was, and I look more closely at that quick glimpse of him from building to police car, the second and third times they show it. I too wear large bifocals, and I too have a gray widow’s peak, but other than that I don’t see the similarity at all. Mrs. Ricks was a very stupid woman. I try not to think that she got what she deserved, but that thought does hover around the boundaries of my brain.

We also see the daughter, and what a piece of work
she
is. Not at all like our Betsy. June—or Junie, as her mother had called her when yelling mistakenly at me—is a sly, sullen, secretive girl, pretty in a foxlike way, full of sidelong glances and flickering smiles. Clearly, she’s delighted to have caused such emotional upheaval in a man as to lead him to murder her parents, though just as clearly she can’t admit to either the delight or the belief that in fact Ringer did it. The camera leaves her as fast as it decently can.

And then we see Lew Ringer’s wife, tear-stained and stunned, briefly in the doorway of a modest house on a modest town street. She stares at the media on her lawn, and slams the door, and that’s the end of the item. We move on to northern Ireland, where the murders are much more frequent, with far less reason.

After the news, and before dinner, while Marjorie goes to the kitchen, I retire as usual to my office. It is time to decide which of my resumés is next. I have four to go, and then Mr. Fallon.