The Hunger and Other Stories Page 8

  The pains in Mr. Aorta’s stomach got progressively worse. Movement increased the pains. He began to feel an overwhelming pressure in his ribs and chest.

  It was at this moment of his discovery that the top of the hole was up beyond his reach that he saw the white plant in full moon-glow. It looked rather like a hand, a big human hand, waxy and stiff and attached to the earth. The wind hit it and it moved slightly, causing a rain of dirt pellets to fall upon Mr. Aorta’s face.

  He thought a moment, judged the whole situation, and began to climb. But the pains were too much and he fell, writhing.

  The wind came again and more dirt was scattered down into the hole: soon the strange plant was being pushed to and fro against the soil, and the dirt fell more and more heavily. More and more, more heavily and more heavily.

  Mr. Aorta, who had never up to this point found occasion to scream, screamed. It was quite successful, despite the fact that no one heard it.

  The dirt came down, and presently Mr. Aorta was to his knees in damp soil. He tried rising, and could not.

  And the dirt came down from that big white plant flip-flopping in the moonlight and the wind.

  After a while Mr. Aorta’s screams took on a muffled quality.

  For a very good reason.

  Then, some time later, the garden was just as still and quiet as it could be.

  Mr. and Mrs. Joseph William Santucci found Mr. Aorta. He was lying on the floor in front of several tables. On the tables were many plates. The plates on the tables were clean and shining.

  Mr. Aorta’s stomach was distended past burst belt buckle, popped buttons and forced zipper. It was not unlike the image of a great white whale rising curiously from placid, forlorn waters.

  “Ate hisself to death,” Mrs. Santucci said in the fashion of the concluding line of a complex joke.

  Mr. Santucci reached down and plucked a tiny ball of soil from the fat man’s dead lips. He studied it. And an idea came to him. . . .

  He tried to get rid of the idea, but when the doctors found Mr. Aorta’s stomach to contain many pounds of dirt—and nothing else, to speak of—Mr. Santucci slept badly, for almost a week.

  They carried Mr. Aorta’s body through the weeded but otherwise empty and desolate back yard, past the mournful dead tree and the rock fence.

  They gave him a decent funeral, out of the goodness of their hearts, since no provision had been made.

  And then they laid him to rest in a place with a moldering green woodboard wall: the wall had a little sign nailed to it.

  And the wind blew absolutely Free.

  Open House

  There was a knock. Only one, but the glass-squared door shook in its poor-fitting jamb and sent sharp sounds trembling throughout the apartment.

  Mr. Pierce froze. His head jerked up like the head of a feeding animal suddenly startled; then he recognized the sound and fear began to rearrange him, draining the blood from his head, stoppering his throat, popping his heart up into his craw. He listened and watched his nerves and his courage and his future all eddy away, like rotted lace in a quick wind.

  The knock rang again, louder this time.

  “Wait!” The word choked loose so softly he could scarcely hear it; it was a prayer. “Wait—just a second. I’ll be there in just a second!” Then there was another sound: the tinny clatter of the carving knife that had slipped slowly from his hands and fallen to the pink tile floor.

  Mr. Pierce rose and looked at the bathtub. At the water that was not water any longer but, instead, bright red ink, burning red against the glistening white porcelain sides. At the pale things floating in the bright red water, the pale soft things, floating, drifting, turning, like pieces of lamb in a simmering stew.

  “Hey, Eddie!” The voice came muffled from behind the knock-ings. “Anybody home?”

  The little man let some air come out of his lungs. He tried to swallow and then started from the bathroom. “Just a minute, will you!” He was almost to the door when he stopped, returned and washed his hands and removed the oilcloth apron that had once been yellow and was now other colors. He dropped the apron to the floor, pulled the shower curtain across the tub—or very nearly across; it had never fit quite snug—inspected himself for stains and went out, closing the door.

  Be logical, he told himself. Be calm. And quiet. And cool. Everything is all right. Nothing has happened. Nothing whatever. Emma is . . . visiting friends. Yes.

  He opened the door.

  “Wie Geht’s!”

  Two grinning men of nearly middle years stood at the threshold. Mr. Pierce eyed them, closely.

  It was Lew Hoover, in soup-and-fish and a new mustache, and someone else whom Mr. Pierce had never seen before.

  “Was ist los mit der gesundheit?”

  “My God, Lew!” How long had it been? A year?

  “Eddie, you old son-of-a-gun!” Hoover turned to his companion and delivered a sharp elbow. “This is him, pal. Greatest guy there is. Eddie Pierce. God damn. Eddie, want you to meet—man, what’s your name?”

  “Vernon,” the other said. “Vernon F. Fein. I’ve told you that seventy-three times.”

  “All right; don’t get smart.” Hoover leaned forward and whispered hoarsely: “Just met him tonight. At the bar. Square.”

  Mr. Pierce said nothing. His throat was calcified. He felt a pressure on his hand.

  “Didn’t get you up or anything, did we?” Hoover asked.

  “Oh, no. No. I was just sort of cleaning up a little.”

  “We come in for a few minutes?”

  “Well . . .” Mr. Pierce dropped his eyes. He thought of the times he had prayed to see the face of Lew Hoover, or Len Brooks, or Jimmy Vandergrift, or any of the old gang. How many times. He thought of all the lonely nights alone, with Emma, here . . . “Well, isn’t it kind of late, fellows?”

  “Shank of the evening! Fein, I want you to look at a guy that didn’t used to even know what late was. Three o’clock, four o’clock, five—God, Eddie, remember?”

  Mr. Pierce smiled and nodded.

  “Then come on—for old time’s sake, what do you say? One drink. Then we’ll blow. All right?”

  “It’s awfully late, Lew.”

  Hoover giggled and belched. His breath smelled strongly of gin. Vernon F. Fein looked pleasantly noncommittal.

  “Eddie, I promised my pal here, George, that we’d all have one short one together. I promised him. Don’t make me out a liar, huh? Or”—Hoover’s voice lowered—“would it disturb the little woman?”

  “No, as a matter of fact that isn’t it at all. Emma’s away, visiting. She’s not here.”

  “Not here!” Hoover pushed past and weaved across the room to the couch. He made a face and said: “Was ist los mit der gesundheit?”

  Mr. Pierce fought down the hysteria. He beckoned the stranger in and closed the door. “Well,” he said; “just a short one, Lew. Got to rise and shine in the morning.”

  “That’s what I was talking about, one short one, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Pierce went into the kitchen and quickly made three Scotch-and-waters. When he returned, his visitors were laughing.

  “Eddie,” Hoover chuckled. “Lordy—I can’t believe it’s been so long.” He stopped chuckling. “Man, what happened?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Lew.”

  “Don’t know what I mean! George, what your bloodshot orbs envisage tonight is a miracle in the flesh. You wouldn’t believe it, George.”

  Vernon F. Fein took a large swallow and shifted uncomfortably.

  “You see that dried-up mess of bones there?” Hoover renewed his giggling. “That, Fred, was once the sweetest bastard that ever walked on two legs. Fun? Oh my God. Just two years ago. Two stinking years. Every night, a ball. Right, Eddie? Am I right or wrong, every night a ball?”

  Mr. Pierce threw down some Scotch.

  “No loot in his pocket, all right. No job, all right. You want to get cheered up, who do you see? Eddie Pierce, that’s who. T
hen—whammo!”

  “Whammo?” Fein finished his drink and hiccoughed.

  “It all goes bust. You know what?” Hoover grabbed the beefy man’s lapels, roughly. “He wanted to be a writer. Like me: I’m a writer. Movies. Anything wrong with movies?”

  “I’ve always liked Claudette Colbert,” Fein said.

  “Yeah. Well, Eddie could have had it all. But he was going to write novels. And—you want to know something, stupid? He was good. I’m telling you.”

  “I wonder,” Fein said, dreamily, “what ever happened to Laird Cregar. There was a real actor.”

  “Shut up, Fred. Are you listening to me or not? Eddie, here, was good is what I’m trying to get through that hog’s head of yours. He would have made it, too. Right on the damn brink. He—what the living hell is this?” Hoover was contorted on the couch. His hand reached up to touch the fringe of a greenly floraled lampshade. “Eddie, how come you let her keep such crap in the house?”

  “Mr. Pierce,” Fein interrupted, cordially. “May I inquire as respects the sort of work you do? I mean your line of business. Do you—”

  Hoover howled. “I’ll tell you, Jim. He’s a goddam butcher. Yah! That’s right, all right. His wife’s uncle got him a real nice spot in a meat market. Ham hocks and sides of beef—the greatest writer, the sweetest son of a—oh, hell.”

  Mr. Pierce felt suddenly ill. He could hear the ice cubes rattling in his glass.

  “Maybe we ought to leave,” Fein said. “Maybe we’re keeping people up.”

  “Then he got married,” Hoover went on, his words slurred and indistinct. “A Suth’n belle: very nice, oh my. Course, you can’t expect him to spend so much time with the old gang now he’s married, right? And, what the hell, you can’t expect a wife to get out and work and support her husband while he’s slaving over a hot typewriter trying to get ahead, now can you?”

  “I understand,” Fein said.

  “The hell you do, George, the hell you do.”

  “Lew . . .” Mr. Pierce stepped forward.

  “Eddie, listen, remember the party over at Len’s where you and me went to sleep in the bathtub? And what’s-her-name, Dotty, came in and turned on the water. God damn, we almost drowned!” Hoover chuckled; he was sinking farther down in the couch. “And that trip to Tijuana—huh? How long were we drunk? Was it really a week? Hey, and how about the ball we tossed when you sold your first story—”

  “I wonder,” Vernon F. Fein said, “if I could please have another drink.”

  “Damn right,” Hoover said. He rose and stumbled into the kitchen.

  Mr. Pierce sat remembering it all. His wonderful little bachelor apartment and all his things, just so; the parties; and, most important, his friends. Lew and Jimmy and Len and Paul and Ron . . . the best, the loyalest, closest gang of buddies that ever was.

  And then, as Lew had said, Emma. Sweet Emma, who’d caught him when the novel wasn’t going right and he was feeling low for no reason, low and—at this he smiled—lonely.

  What had made him do it, finally? he wondered for perhaps the first time. Exactly how had it happened? he asked himself. . . .

  Things had been strange, that’s all he’d known right at the moment.

  There had been a wind and it blew city-breath into the branches of the outside elms and made them groan like broken flutes; it plucked up tumbleweeds from empty lots and sent them rolling ponderously down the night-darkened streets like fat brown ghosts; it made the windows and screens of every house quiver together with its small fury—

  But it wasn’t the wind alone that had made things strange.

  Work, perhaps? It hadn’t been a heavy day, especially. Oh, sure, he’d caught the tip of his finger in the grinder, but that wasn’t anything new. He’d cut and sawed and weighed the meat and hated it no more and no less than ever before.

  The apartment? That clump of dust beneath the record cabinet and that half-nibbled melting block of chocolate on the couch arm—

  No. Not the wind, not the job, not the apartment. Not singly, anyway.

  Then what?

  Mr. Pierce got up and picked a cigarette from the coffee-table humidor and eased back into the dust-heavy chair, carefully, uncertainly, as if he half expected someone to strap him in, attach electrodes to his wrists and ankles and throw a switch.

  He remembered.

  How he had sat just so some hours earlier, and listened to the nasal voice . . .

  “Eddie. Sweetheart!”

  He had felt his heart come to life, his head begin to throb.

  “Eddie, be a lamb and come sit with me.”

  And he had let the held-in breath rush away, realizing then that the strangeness was not so strange.

  “Just a second, honey!” he had called back.

  The stubbed-out cigarette uncoiled in the brass ashtray like a dying animal. Mr. Pierce watched it and yielded, while Hoover talked on and on, to the memories . . .

  “Eddieeee, baby!”

  “Okay; coming.”

  He had stood up and listened to the splashing sounds. And then walked quickly across the naked living-room floor, past the spit-shine whiteness of ceramic ducks and ceramic geese afloat on the varnished tops of his bookcases; past the tinted Buddha—a gift from Emma’s mother—grinning with the ignorance of the ages hidden in that bare white bursting belly, past Emma’s gold-framed “Floral Group” and his Matisse “Odalisque,” past and through all the freakish unbalance, the mixture of cheap and expensive, her things, and his things, he walked, and into the bathroom.

  She was reading.

  “Hi.”

  “Emma, I—”

  But—she was reading. How he loved that! No matter what, Donald Duck, Henry Miller, she became hypnotized.

  “I hate you,” he said.

  Her expression remained serene. She turned a page, smiling.

  “I think,” he said, “of all the females in the world as a vast regatta—full sails, trim white hulls, sleek, frail, swift. Thousands—millions! And there, in the midst of them all, you, my darling, my dearest: a great untidy barge, filled with rotting fruit and the ghosts of fled rats, chugging, straining, sinking; a gross smudge on the clear water . . .”

  Emma waved one of her hands. “In a minute, dear,” she said. “Just a couple more pages.”

  “Read on, until you putrefy and have to be gotten up with a vacuum cleaner,” Mr. Pierce said in a soft, reedy voice.

  “I love you,” Emma said.

  But even “the game” did no good. Mr. Pierce laid his hornrims on the medicine cabinet and hoisted his trousers and rubbed his eyes. The steam floated like layers of mold in the room. He began to perspire. Coldly.

  He watched his wife. In the gray water parts of her rose like little pink islands. She studied the pages of her magazine intensely as always, as a rabbit stares in paralyzed fascination at a cobra.

  Then, suddenly, without thinking or questioning or wondering, Mr. Pierce snatched the magazine, hurled it across the small room and stood up.

  “Why . . . Eddie!”

  He then leaned over, took ahold of Emma’s legs and pulled hard. Her massive body shot forward in the tub. Mr. Pierce put one foot on her throat and pushed her head beneath the soapy water: she thrashed and squirmed and bubbled, and splashed, but soon it was quiet.

  Then Mr. Pierce shook and trembled for almost half an hour. A full hour had passed before he returned from the kitchen with certain utensils—

  “I’m going to clear the air now!” Hoover was weaving uncertainly: his face seemed utterly like warm plastic. “Never had the guts to say it all. But I’ve got a little under my belt now, and I don’t care. Get sore! Get tee’d off! Fein—we were all for him when he married this chick. Really. Hell, she had us all snowed. Pretended to be understanding—see, she loved him just the way he was, no changes. His friends? Her friends. And that’s the way it went—for the first two months. Then it starts. And like magic, kid, like magic, this sweet-talking chubby li’l gal turns into a
goddam—I don’t know what. Shrew, fishwife, harridan: you name it. Any of us, the minute we found out she was what she was, we’d of booted her out on her ear. But that’s not Eddie. No-o-o! He wants to do the right thing. So instead, we get booted out. And it’s all over. His buddies aren’t welcome any more. He gives up his ambitions, his friends, and every other goddam thing. Kaput. Schluss.”

  Listening, Mr. Pierce relived the transformation of his life; all of it, over two years. He relived it in those minutes. How his unconsciously ordered existence had been slowly uprooted and destroyed. How Emma had changed into a new person, one he’d never known. A fat candy-eating movie-magazine-reading dirty-bathrobe-wearing wife, with a million nauseating habits. She squeezed his pimples. She made patterns with her feet. She fixed breakfast eggs that glistened with mucus. She threatened to leave—and never did. Refused to, stood adamant. And then, just yesterday, how she had crept up and put her viselike thumbs upon a tender neck-boil and pressed and cooed (her very words!): “Honey, what would you think about having a little stranger in the house?” Oh, how she had murdered him, by inches, centimeters, by days and nights, each time with a new weapon. . . .

  Well, it was all right now. He had made it all right. He’d say she ran off with a Turk or an Italian—no one else knew how he had hated her, he’d always been so polite. And if it were done a little at a time, just a little: parts in the freezer, put through the grinder, distributed to a hundred customers over a hundred days . . . who would notice? Who would guess? And without a corpus delicti, of course . . .

  Hoover had poured new drinks. He was standing now, weaving like a movie comic. “I’m sorry, Eddie,” he said. “Didn’t mean to run off at the mouth like that, honest. She’d drive me crazy, personally, but she’s your baby. I—well, sorry.”

  “That’s okay, Lew,” Mr. Pierce said, graciously.

  “Mosey along now. I was a jerk to think we could get it back, I guess.”

  “No, Lew—” Mr. Pierce hesitated. “It’ll come back, some day. You wait and see.”