Neighbors: A Novel Page 4

  There were in fact only some two dozen houses out that way (du côté de chez Keese, as Elaine had named it on her latest vacation), and only two of them, counting the château Keese, were on what was officially called Burt Street, an ugly name rarely used by either the Keeses or their late neighbors the Walkers.

  Keese had now left his property and was traversing the generous side yard of what he had no choice as yet but to call the Walker place, a capriciously designed structure with little corner towers and a roof lined with false battlements. Yet the lower stories were, by contrast, exquisitely humdrum, shingled in poopoo brown and peepee yellow (again Elaine's bon mot: the latter color was actually a smudged sort of cream).

  The house was dark, a condition which would support Harry & Ramona's claim to be the new tenants, because obviously they were elsewhere. But it was only negative evidence, and Keese pressed on. He soon arrived at an angle, with respect to the rear windows, from which he could see not only a light in the kitchen but also a figure moving within it.

  Keese went right up to the glass. The figure was Harry's. He was stirring something in a large pot. The kitchen was stacked with cardboard cartons, some of which were imprinted with the name of a well-known national moving company; but others had obviously been packed by amateur hands and bore the disparate designations of sanitary napkins, fancy chocolates, and a blended whiskey. Harry had apparently opened certain boxes to get what he needed. He held a long-handled wooden spatula of a special sort: from the face of its oval blade rose a cluster of pegs. Keese could associate no function with this peculiar design until he watched Harry plunge the instrument into the pot, draw it up dripping, and display a hank of spaghetti.

  Keese drew back from the window, his face as hot as if it had been slapped. He could not begin to understand the pretext for Harry's hoax. He tried desperately to think of a suitable piece of revenge: best would be locking the door, to go out to dinner with Enid before Harry returned. But Ramona was there. If he threw her out she would go home and tell Harry, ruining the plan to discomfit him. If she remained—but Keese would not leave her alone in his house.

  Also he suddenly remembered that Harry had his car. Well, that could be a beginning: he would quietly take back his own automobile! Even Harry, who was none too sensitive, might be embarrassed to come out with his load of spaghetti and find that the borrowed car had been stolen—explain that to your new neighbor! Keese chuckled into his hand. He made it around the back of the house without mishap. He knew of old where the well cover was situated, and there was just enough light, when one's eyes had become habituated to the evening, to see the silhouette of iron garden furniture that could have disabled the unwary.

  But of course when he reached his car and discreetly sought to open the driver's door he had to abandon the plan altogether. He had been prepared to find that Harry had removed the ignition key. Were this the case, he intended at least to try jumping the ignition wires beneath the dashboard.

  But in point of fact Harry had locked all four doors!

  Keese walked sullenly down the driveway. When he reached the street and turned towards his own house he saw another car, parked at the curb. Obviously this was Harry's own automobile, out of commission because of an ailing fuel pump. Keese in fantasy projected a better revenge than he had originally planned: what a joke to drive Harry's car into the Keese driveway! The only trouble was, if Harry had locked Keese's car, he must surely have secured the doors of his own vehicle, parked out in the street.

  Keese anyway tried the driver's door—and it opened! The ignition, though, was locked, and tampering with the wires on a car not his own was of course out of the question. Yet the slope of the street, if he could once get the vehicle in motion, would probably be sufficient for the rolling of the car to his own curb, and perhaps there would be even enough momentum by then to make the left turn and penetrate the driveway for some distance.

  Chortling sotto voce, he climbed into the seat. The car had a stick shift, but Keese could well remember, despite his years of automatic transmission, where neutral could be found: he had got his first license at sixteen. He released the hand brake. Though parked on a slight declivity Harry had spurned the advice of the Motor Vehicle Bureau (dispensed among other places on late-night TV when the commercials ran out) to turn the wheels towards the curb. And lucky for Keese that he had not so done, because his steering wheel would have locked in that position.

  The car ignored Keese's wishes and the agitation of his body on the seat and refused to move. Nor did the opening of the door and the extending of his left foot to the roadway, there to apply a backwards pressure of the sole, overcome the massive inertia of the vehicle. There was but one answer to his problem: to remove himself altogether from the car, to push with all his strength against the foremost portion of the window frame while keeping the right hand upon the handle of the door, so that when momentum was established he might rip it open and leap in.

  But Keese had not done anything of this sort for two decades. He was not as deft of hand as of old, and he had never been notable for agility of leg. The application of his bulk to the pushing hand forced the car finally to move, and once in motion the wheels were lured by gravity into quickening their revolutions. Even a faster man would have been nearing his limits by the time that Keese attempted to re-enter the vehicle. Worse, he could not find the proper angle of hand at which to trip the latch, which was subtly different from that of his own car, a major difference when rolling.

  He fell out of the race before reaching his own house. Harry's car continued on, jumped the unpaved curb at the end of the street, easily flattened the guard rail and the DEAD END sign it bore (the posts being rotten), and vanished with rather less noise than one would have thought, but in point of fact there were no trees there and but a soft undergrowth, and the slope was such that a wheeled thing would continue rolling to the low bank of the creek and slip into the water with ease.

  Keese assumed that it was now too dark to see much down there. In any event, he didn't try. His joke had failed: that was evident and good enough for him. He strolled up his walk and sidled into his house. His persistent conviction that he had been mocked by Harry relieved him from the claims of decency.

  CHAPTER 3

  OF course hardly had he got inside when he was struck violently with the understanding that he had destroyed Harry's car. While participating in the incident itself he had seen it as a kind of dream. What terrified him especially was that Enid would be disdainful: he still had no great sympathy with Harry. No doubt the car was insured. In his brief experience of it, the vehicle had not seemed in any way special. It had surely been a standard model, partaking of few "options," e.g., not even an automatic clutch.

  Keese's own car was something of a gas-guzzler, with power-assisted brakes and steering, white-striped tires, and a special kind of wheel cover which the manufacturer had pretended to be of extra value—all of this included in the one-of-a-kind deal. Keese was never taken in by such near-charlatanism: it had simply been the model desired by Enid. Actually, it was now four years old and what had seemed fairly luxurious in the first few months (though never approaching the degree of the advertisements) now was probably a bit tackier in tone than a more modest automobile would have been at a similar age.

  He had given up smoking three years before, but he knew where an old pack of cigarettes was hidden, in an end-table drawer, behind a box of poker chips, some lacquered coasters, and a miniature parasol from a mixed drink served at a Polynesian restaurant: each of these souvenirs could tell a story, but their only value to Keese at the moment was in impeding his discovery of the little paper tubes stuffed with dried weed—he had kicked the habit after reading, in some self-help article, the advice to think of cigarettes as cylinders of smoldering filth. He was living proof that the theory worked. Should he discredit it by lighting up now?

  He slammed the drawer shut. He remembered the wolf-hound. He was not without weapons. So a joke had got out of
hand? No person had been damaged, and the insurance would cover Harry's loss. But none of this would have happened had Enid not given a piece of meat, large enough to have fed them all, to that dog.

  On the route to the kitchen this argument seemed feebler with every step, and by the time he reached that room he had decided to say nothing of either car or wolfhound.

  His decision proved beside the point: Enid was not there. While he had been on his disastrous mission next door she had probably gone upstairs, found Ramona in bed, stabbed her to death with a pair of shears, and was waiting for him to return so that she could murder him by like means. Therefore he was in none too great a hurry to encounter her.

  He returned to the front hallway and, having looked upstairs dubiously, went into the living room. There sat Enid under a lamp, leafing through a tabloid newspaper. For reading only, she employed a pair of half-glasses.

  "You've brought the food?" she asked brightly.

  "Unfortunately I haven't," said Keese. "But it won't be long now. Say, do you mind my asking? Have you been upstairs recently?" He had decided he must force the issue.

  "Of course I have," she replied vaguely, returning to her reading.

  But her air of indifference might well be a ruse. Keese decided on another approach. "I've given this some thought. Now that Elaine's away at school, maybe you should have a pet to give you some company during the day."

  "Earl," said Enid, though still staring into her paper, "Elaine has been away at school four years."

  "But isn't the point still valid?"

  "The biggest obstacle to owning a pet, as I see it," said Enid, closing the paper and rising to deposit it on the coffee table, "is what to do with it when you travel." She removed her half-glasses.

  "Board it," said Keese.

  Enid made a face. "Kennels have a terrible reputation. I wouldn't want a dog of mine—"

  "Do you have a dog?"

  Enid persisted in completing her sentence: "—to go to a kennel. If I had a dog."

  "Uh-huh," said Keese. "Well, I think I'll go and change my clothes. You don't mind? Don't need the bathroom for anything?" He caught sight of the newspaper on the coffee table: it was one of those scandalmongering, UFO-reporting tabloids sold near the check-out in supermarkets. "Ha," said he, going near it with extended forefinger, "a new phase in your reading?"

  "Mine?" asked Enid. "You brought it home."

  He drew in a sufficiently large breath with which to protest ardently, but released it without a sound. Undoubtedly this was more work of their new neighbors, though he had seen neither Ramona nor Harry with the paper.

  He slunk from the room and made each stair a separate effort. Having called into active service all his reserve of energy, he stepped briskly over the threshold of the master bedroom. In the darkness he found the switch of the lamp on Enid's dressing table.

  Ramona was gone. He ascertained that the bedspread had been smoothed to remove her impress. He hastened into the bathroom through the private entrance from the bedroom. The bathroom also communicated with the hall through another door. In fantasy he saw how the two women could have eluded one another; it was farfetched, like some sequence in a farce, but possible: Ramona going into bathroom just before Enid enters bedroom; next Enid goes to bathroom by inside door as Ramona leaves bathroom by hallway portal. Noise of faucet obscures such little sound as Ramona would produce on hallway runner or carpeted stairs.

  But where was the younger woman now? That she had left the house altogether seemed too good to be believed. Losing a towel was a small price to pay—he could not find the one, rose-colored, in which she had been wrapped. He realized that to be on the safe side the other rooms on the floor must be searched. It would be insupportable if he found her in Elaine's. The thought made him tremble in fury.

  He was moving along the hall, fists knotted, when he heard the sound of the doorbell downstairs. Undoubtedly that would be Harry, bringing the food. Keese believed that, having destroyed his car, the least he could do was to give him a hand now. He started down the stairs, but when he had descended only halfway Enid came out and opened the door.

  "Don't tell me!" she said. "You're our new neighbor. Please come in, and won't you stay for dinner? We're expecting a delivery of Italian food at any moment. Antipasto and chicken cacciatore!"

  She stepped aside, and Keese, reaching the bottom of the stairs, watched the entrance of Ramona, who either did not see or positively ignored him.

  "I'm sorry to bother you," said Ramona to Enid, "but someone has stolen our car, and I wanted to phone the police. Our service hasn't been connected up yet."

  "How terrible," said Enid, and she led the new neighbor to the telephone niche under the stairs, passing Keese en route.

  Ramona still had not looked at him. Was this some sort of bluff, or was she really so distracted by the loss of the car?

  She seized the handpiece of the phone. "It is really worse than just the car theft," said she. "Baby was in the back seat of that automobile."

  Keese felt as if kicked simultaneously behind each knee. He really teetered for a moment before whirling, hurling himself at the door, and plunging into the night.

  On the walk outside he nearly collided with Harry, whose long arms embraced several paper bags.

  "Earl!" cried Harry. "Here, take one of these off my hands." He thrust a stuffed bag at Keese and let it go: Keese therefore was compelled to accept it or watch it fall to the concrete.

  "Please," he said, trying in vain to return it, "a terrible thing has—" He detested himself for being unable simply to hurl the bag away without explanation, but he could not. He was paralyzed by his social obligation.

  "C'mon," said Harry, "while it's still hot." He headed for the door.

  Gathering his powers, Keese finally managed to produce what seemed to him a hideous scream. What emerged must have been much vitiated, however, for it had little effect on Harry. Harry did stop before the door, for even though he had got rid of one bag his burdens were still too cumbersome to permit him to turn with impunity.

  "C'mon, Earl," he shouted, "do your duty," nodding his blond poll at the knob.

  Keese came up the walk, managing to gasp: "Your baby may be drowning."

  "Huh?" Harry's expression could not be seen, though the two door-flanking carriage lamps had suddenly come on. But he sounded none too concerned. "Why don't we talk about that later," he said. "Meanwhile, let's get this grub inside."

  Keese could not believe he would allow Harry to lure him into opening the door, but he found himself doing as much. Once they were both inside, however, he rested his bag upon the little table under the mirror, where junk mail sometimes remained for many days. (There was an envelope there at the moment, labeled Free Gift in red printing.) The women had gone from the hallway.

  But before Keese could speak Harry said: "Oh, you mean the dog? Why should he be drowning? He's a great swimmer."

  "Child?" Keese produced this one-word query.

  "No child," said Harry, leaning towards him between the paper bags and speaking with exceptional clarity and at raised volume, as if to a foreigner or imbecile. "She calls the dog Baby. Nothing's wrong with him: he's out somewhere with her in the car."

  Keese was blacking out in relief, sagging against the table. He remembered that the driver's window had been open: the dog would not have been trapped inside. Moreover, the creek was only two feet deep at that point. Even a helpless baby would probably not have been in mortal trouble, on a seat above the water-level—unless of course it rolled off. Even so, it was a narrow escape in an emotional sense.

  Harry let his bags sag for a moment and then, breathing in, gave them a squeeze and a boost and headed for the rear of the house. Keese, recovering, came along behind. When they arrived in the kitchen only Enid was there.

  Keese put his bag on the nearest section of the counter and introduced his wife. "Enid Keese," he said pompously, not having quite recovered from his terror, "Harry uh—" He laughed in dra
matized embarrassment. "Do you know, I don't yet know your last name?"

  Nor did Harry furnish it now. He deposited his bags on the counter, waved his large hand, and said: "Hi again, Enid."

  Keese looked questioningly at his wife.

  "We met hours ago," said Enid, and perhaps it was a hallucination, but Keese thought he saw her peer fixedly, rudely, at Harry's crotch as if his fly were undone. Harry seemed to be her junior by a dozen years, whereas he, Keese, was about two decades older than Ramona.

  "Where's Ramona?" Keese asked quickly now.

  "She went out to try and find Baby," said Enid.

  "You see?" Harry pointed a finger at the level of Keese's belly button.

  He explained to Enid: "Earl was worried about Baby too."