Mermaids on the Golf Course: Stories Read online

  Bertie was carried in, in Jane’s usual manner, held by the waist, face forward, and rather bumped along against her thighs as she walked. Bertie weighed a lot for a five-year-old, though he wasn’t as tall as a normal child of that age.

  “Aaaaagh-wah!” Bertie’s small slant eyes looked the same as they might if he were in his own room, which was to say they showed no interest in or awareness of the change of scene to the living room or of the people in it.

  “There you are!” Jane announced to Bertie, dumping him down on his diapered rump on the living room carpet.

  Bertie wore the top of his pajama suit with its cuffs turned up a couple of times because his arms were so short.

  Roland found himself frowning slightly, averting his eyes in a miserable way from the unsightly—or rather, frightening—flatness of Bertie’s undersized head, just as he had always done, but especially in the presence of other people, as if he wished to illustrate his sympathy with people who might be seeing Bertie for the first time. Then Margerie laughed at something Bertie had done. She had given Bertie one of the cheese stick canapés that were still on the coffee table, and he had crushed it into one ear.

  Margerie glanced at Roland, still smiling, and Roland found himself smiling back, even grinning. Roland took a sip of his brandy. Bertie was a little clown, after all, and maybe he enjoyed these get-togethers in the living room. Bertie did seem to be smiling now. Occasionally he did smile. Little monster! But he’d killed a man in return, Roland thought, and stood a bit taller, feeling all his muscles tense. He, Roland, wasn’t entirely helpless in the situation, wasn’t just a puppet of fate to be pushed around by—everything—a victim of a wildly odd chance, doomed to eternal shame. Far from it.

  Roland found himself joining in a great burst of laughter, not knowing what it was about, till he saw Bertie rolling on his back like a helpless beetle.

  “Trying to stand on his head!” cried Jane. “Ha-ha! Did you see that, Rollie, dear?”

  “Yes,” said Roland. He topped up the brandies for those who wanted it.

  When the Jacksons departed around eleven, Jane asked Roland if he didn’t think it had been a successful evening, because she thought it had been. Jane stood proudly in the living room, and opened her arms, smiling.

  “Yes, my love. It was.” Roland put his arms around her waist, held her close for a moment, without passion, without any sexual pleasure whatsoever, but with the pleasure of companionship. His embrace was like saying, “Thanks for cooking the dinner and making it a nice evening.”

  Bertie was stowed away in his room, in his low bed, Roland was sure, though he hadn’t accompanied Jane when she was trying to settle him for the night. Jane was doing things in the kitchen now. Roland went to a corner of the bedroom where he and Jane stacked old newspapers. Because of Roland’s work, he kept newspapers a long while, in case he had to look for a new tax law, or bond issue, or any of a dozen such bits of news that he or his colleagues might not have cut out. What he was looking for was not old and was rather specific: an item about a man found dead on a sidewalk during the night of April 26–27. In about four minutes, Roland found an item not two inches long in a newspaper one day later than he had thought it might be. man found strangled was the little heading. Francisco Baltar, 46, said the report, had been found strangled on East 47th Street. Robbery had evidently been the motive. Mr. Baltar had been a consulting engineer of Vito, a Spanish agricultural firm, and had been in New York for a short stay on business. Police were questioning suspects, the item concluded.

  Robbery, Roland thought with astonishment. Not the same man, surely, unless someone had robbed the corpse. Roland realized that this was pretty likely, in New York. A robber might suppose the man was drunk or drugged, and seize the opportunity to relieve him of wallet and wristwatch and whatever. The street fitted, Roland thought, and the date. And the man’s age. But Spanish, with that brownish hair? Well, Roland had heard of blond Spaniards.

  But they hadn’t mentioned a missing button.

  On the other hand, why should they mention a missing button in an item as short as this? As clues went, a grayish brown button was infinitesimal. For the police to find the button in Roland’s right-hand pocket (he kept the button in that pocket no matter which trousers he wore) would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And noticing the absence of a button on the man’s jacket, why should the police assume the murderer had taken it?

  Nevertheless, the finding of the corpse—or a corpse—gave the button a greater significance. The button became more dangerous. Roland thought of putting it in Jane’s little tin box which held an assortment of buttons, but when he opened the box and saw the hundred or more innocent buttons of all sizes there, Roland simply could not.

  Throw it away, Roland thought. Down the garbage chute in the hall. Better yet and easier, straight into the big plastic bag in the kitchen. Who’d ever notice or find it? Roland realized that he wanted to keep the button.

  And as the weeks went by, the button took on varying meanings to Roland. Sometimes it seemed a token of guilt, proof of what he had done, and he felt frightened. Or on days when Roland happened to be in a cheery mood, the button became a joke, a prop in a story that he had told to himself: that he had strangled a stranger and snatched a button off the stranger’s jacket to prove it.

  “Absurd,” Roland murmured to himself one sunny day in his office as he stood by his window, turning the button over in his fingers, scrutinizing its grayish brown horn, its four empty holes. “Just a nutty fantasy!” Well, no need ever to tell anyone about it, he thought, and chuckled. He dropped the button into his right-hand pocket and returned to his desk.

  He and Jane were going to a resort hotel in the Adirondacks for the last two weeks of June, Roland’s vacation time, and of course they were taking Bertie with them. Bertie was walking better lately, but oddly this achievement came and went: he’d been walking better at three, for instance, than he was at the moment. One never knew. Jane had bought a suit of pale blue cotton—jacket and short trousers—and had patiently let out the waist by sewing in extra material, and had shortened the sleeves, “So he’ll look nice at the dinner table at the St. Marcy Lodge,” Jane said.

  Roland had winced, then rapidly recovered. He had always hated taking Bertie out in public, even for walks in Central Park on Sundays, and the Lodge was going to be worse, he thought, because they’d be stuck with the same people, other guests, or under their eyes, for almost two weeks. He would have to pass through that period of curious and darting glances, unheard murmurs as people confirmed to one another, “Mongoloid idiot,” then the period of studied eyes-averted-no-staring that such a group always progressed to.

  The St. Marcy Lodge was a handsomely proportioned colonial mansion set on a vast lawn, backgrounded by thick forests of pine and fir. The lobby had a homey atmosphere, the brass items were polished, the carpet thick. There was croquet on the lawn, tennis courts, horses could be rented, and there was a golf course half a mile away to which a Lodge car could take guests at any hour of the day. The dining room had about twenty tables of varying sizes, so that couples or parties could dine alone if they preferred, or join larger tables. The manager had told the Markows that the guests were never assigned tables, but had freedom of choice.

  Roland and Jane preferred to take a smaller table meant for four when the dinner hour came. A pillow was brought for Bertie by a pleasant waitress, who at once changed her mind and suggested a high chair. It was easy, she said, bustling off somewhere. Roland had not protested: a high chair was safer for Bertie, because the tray part pinned him in, whereas he could topple off a cushion before anyone could right him. Bertie wore his blue suit. His ridged tongue hung out, and his eyes, though open, showed no interest in his new surroundings, which he did not even turn his head to look at.

  “Isn’t it nice,” Jane said, resting her chin on her folded fingers, “that the
Lodge put that crib in the room this afternoon? Just the right thing for Bertie, isn’t it?”

  Roland nodded, and studied the menu. He was enduring those moments he had foreseen, when the eyes of several people in the dining room had fixed on Bertie, and for a few seconds it was worse as the waitress returned with the high chair. Roland sprang up to lift Bertie into it. Slap! The tray part was swung over Bertie’s head to rest on the arms of the chair. Roland tugged Bertie’s broad hands up and plopped them on the wooden tray where his food would be set, but the hands slid back and dropped again at Bertie’s sides.

  Jane wiped some drool from Bertie’s chin with her napkin.

  The food was delicious. The eyes around them now looked at other things. Jane had edged her chair closer to Bertie’s, and she patiently fed him his mashed potatoes and tiny bits of tender roast beef. The lemon meringue pie arrived hot with beautifully browned egg white on top. Bertie brought his heavy little hand down on the right side of his plate, and his half-portion of lemon pie catapulted towards Roland. Roland caught it adroitly with his left hand and laughed, dumped it back on to Bertie’s plate, and soaked an end of his napkin in his glass of water to wash the stickiness off his palm and fingers.

  So did Jane laugh, as if they were alone at home.

  They finished a bottle of wine between them.

  As they were walking towards the stairway in the lobby, with an idea of getting Bertie to bed, because it was nearly ten, Roland heard voices behind him.

  “. . . a pity, you know? Young couple like that.”

  “. . . could frighten other kids too. Did you notice that dog today, mom? That poodle?” This voice was young, female, with a giggle in it.

  Roland remembered the dog, a black miniature poodle on a leash. The dog had stiffened and backed away from Bertie, growling, when Roland and Jane had been signing the register. Roland’s hand reached into his right side pocket and squeezed the button, felt its reassuring reality, its hardness. He turned by the stairway to the two women behind him, one young and one older.

  “Yes, Bertie,” he said to them. “He’s not much trouble, you know. Quite harmless. Sorry if he bothers you. He’s quite a clown really. Gives us a lot of fun.” Smiling, Roland nodded for emphasis.

  Jane was smiling too. “Good evening,” she said in a friendly tone to the two women.

  Both the older and younger woman nodded with awkward politeness, plainly embarrassed that they had been overheard. “’Evening,” said the older.

  Roland and Jane held Bertie by the hands in their usual manner, hoisting him up one step at a time, sometimes two steps. They performed this chore without thinking about it. Bertie sometimes moved his blunt little feet in their blunt shoes to touch a step, but mostly he dragged them, and his legs went limp. Roland’s right hand was still in his trousers pocket.

  A pretty girl moved at a faster pace up the stairs on Roland’s right. His eyes were drawn to her. She had soft, light brown hair, a lovely profile which instantly vanished, but she glanced back at him at the landing, and their eyes met: bluish eyes, then she disappeared. Roland had been aware of a sudden attraction towards her, like a leap within him, the first such feeling he had had in years. Funny. He was not going to approach the girl, he knew. Maybe best if he avoided looking at her if he saw her again, as he probably would. Still, it was nice to know he was capable of such an emotion, even if the emotion had completely gone in regard to Jane. He squeezed the button harder than ever as they heaved Bertie up the last step to the floor level. He had killed a man in revenge for Bertie. He had superiority, in a sense, one-upmanship. He must never forget that. He could face the years ahead with that.

  Where the Action Is

  Here it was, some action finally—an armed holdup of a town bus—and Craig Rollins was in urgent need of a toilet! Nevertheless, Craig raised his camera once again and snapped, just as a scared-looking man was hopping down the steps of the halted bus. Then Craig ran, heading for Eats and Take-Away, where he knew there was a men’s room by the telephones.

  Craig was back in something under a minute, but by then the action seemed to be over. He hadn’t heard any gunshots. A cop was blowing a whistle. An ambulance had pulled up, but Craig didn’t see anybody who was wounded.

  “Take it easy, folks!” yelled a cop whose face Craig knew. “We’ve got everything in hand!”

  “I haven’t! They got my handbag!” cried a woman’s voice, shrill and clear.

  A June sun boiled down. It was midmorning.

  “There were three of ’em!” yelled a man in an assertive way. “You just got two here!”

  Craig saw some shirtsleeved police hustling two young men towards a Black Maria. Click!

  The passengers from the bus, thirty or more, milled about the street as if dazed, chatting with one another.

  “Hi, Craig! Get anything good?” It was Tom Buckley, another freelance photographer a couple of years older than Craig, and friendly, though Craig considered him competition.

  Craig didn’t want to ask if Tom had got a shot of the guy with the gun, because Craig had missed this shot, which might have been possible at exactly the time he had had to dash to a men’s room. “Dunno till they come out!” Craig replied cheerfully. He moved closer to the police wagon, and took a picture of the two young men, who looked about twenty, as they were urged into the back of the wagon. Tom Buckley was also snapping. One or maybe even two of Tom’s photos would make it in the afternoon edition of the Evening Star, Craig was thinking. Craig shot up the rest of his roll, aiming at any place—at a cop reassuring an elderly woman, at a girl rushing from a narrow passageway into Main Street where the bus was, and being greeted by a man and woman who might have been her parents.

  Then Craig went home to develop his roll. He lived with his parents in the home where he had been born, a two-story frame house in a modest residential area. Craig had turned his bathroom—itself an adjunct to the house when he had been fifteen—into his darkroom. All his pictures looked dull as could be, worse than he had expected. No action in them, apart from a cluttered street scene of people looking bewildered. Still, Craig presented them at the office of Kyanduck’s Evening Star about half past noon, imagining that Tom Buckley had got there a few minutes earlier and with better photos.

  Ed Simmons bent his balding head over Craig’s ten photographs. The big messy room held seven people at their desks, and there was the usual clatter of typewriters.

  “Got there a little late,” Craig murmured apologetically, not caring if Ed heard him or not.

  “Hey! You got Lizzie Davis? With her folks!—Hey, Craig, this one is great!” Ed Simmons looked up at Craig through horn-rimmed glasses. “We’ll use this one. Just the moment after—running out of that alley! Beautiful!”

  “Didn’t know her name,” Craig said, and wondered why Ed was so excited.

  Ed showed the photo to a man at another desk. Others gathered to look at the picture, which was of a girl of twenty or younger, with long dark hair, her white blouse partly pulled out of her skirt top, looking anxious as she rushed forward towards a man and woman approaching her from Main Street.

  “This is the girl who was nearly raped. Or maybe she even was,” Ed Simmons said to Craig. “Didn’t you know that?”

  Craig certainly hadn’t heard. Raped by whom, he wondered, then the snatches of conversation that he heard enlightened him. The third holdup boy, who was still at large, had dragged Lizzie Davis off the bus and into an alley and threatened to stick a knife in her throat, or to rape her, unless she kept her mouth shut when the police came up the alley. The police hadn’t come up that alley. In the picture, Lizzie’s father, in a pale business suit and straw hat, was just about to touch his daughter’s shoulder, while her mother on the right in the picture rushed towards the girl with both arms spread.

  Now he saw, in the upside-down photo on Ed’s desk, that th
e girl’s eyes were squeezed shut with horror or fear, and her mouth open as if she were crying or gasping for breath.

  “Was she raped?” Craig asked.

  The reply he got was vague, the implication being that the girl wasn’t telling. So Craig’s photo appeared on page two of the Kyanduck Evening Star that day, and one by Tom Buckley of a local cop with two of the holdup boys on the front page. Both photographs had a two-column spread.

  Craig pointed out the photo to his parents that night at the supper table. Craig didn’t make it every day, or even every week, a photo in the Evening Star or the Kyanduck Morning News. His father knew Ernest Davis, the girl’s father, who was an old customer at Dullop’s Hardware, where Craig’s father was manager.

  Craig received thirty dollars for his picture, which was the going rate for local photographs, no matter what they were, and Craig mentioned this, with modest pride, to his girlfriend Constance O’Leary, who was called Clancy. Craig, twenty-two and ruggedly handsome, had three or four girlfriends, but Clancy was his current favorite. She had curly reddish blonde hair, a marvelous figure, a sense of humor, and she loved to dance.

  “You’re the greatest,” Clancy said, at that moment diving into her first hamburger at the Plainsman Café, just outside of town, where the jukebox boomed.

  Craig smiled, pleased, “Human interest. That’s what Ed Simmons said my photo had.”

  And Craig didn’t think any more about that picture of Lizzie Davis until ten days later, when on one of his visits to the Evening Star office with a batch of new photographs, Ed Simmons told Craig that the New York Times had telexed, wanting to use Craig’s photograph in a series of articles about crime in America.

  “You’d better be pleased, Craig.”

  “With a credit?” Craig was nearly speechless with surprise.

  “Well, natch.—Now let’s see what you’ve got here.” Ed looked over Craig’s offerings: three photos of the Kyanduck Boy Scouts’ annual picnic at Kyanduck Park, and three of current weddings. Ed showed no visible interest. Tom Buckley had probably topped him on these events, Craig was thinking. “I’ll look ’em over again. Thanks, Craig.”