The Running Man

MINUS 051 AND COUNTING

She did not recognize him until she had led him into the kitchen to brew tea.

The house was old and crumbling and dark, furnished in a decor he recognized immediately from his own environment: Modern junkshop.

“Elton isn’t here now,” she said, brooding over the battered aluminum teapot on the gas ring. The light was stronger here, revealing the brown waterstains that blotched the wallpaper, the dead flies, souvenirs of summer past, on the windowsills, the old linoleum creased with black lines, the pile of wet wrapping paper under the leaking drain pipe. There was an odor of disinfectant that made Richards think of last nights in sickrooms.

She crossed the room, and her swollen fingers made a painful search through the heaped junk on the countertop until they found two tea bags, one of them previously used. Richards got the used one. He was not surprised.

“He works,” she said, faintly accentuating the first word and making the statement an accusation. “You’re from that fellow in Boston, the one Eltie writes to about pollution, aintcha?”

“Yes, Mrs. Parrakis.”

“They met in Boston. My Elton services automatic vending machines.” She preened for a moment and then began her slow trek back across the dunes of linoleum to the stove. “I told Eltie that what that Bradley was doing was against the law. I told him it would mean prison or even worse. He doesn’t listen to me. Not to his old mom, he doesn’t.” She smiled with dark sweetness at this calumny. “Elton was always building things, you know… He built a treehouse with four rooms out back when he was a boy. That was before they cut the elm down, you know. But it was that darky’s idea that he should build a pollution station in Portland.”

She popped the bags into cups and stood with her back to Richards, slowly warming her hands over the gas ring. “They write each other. I told him the mails aren’t safe. You’ll go to prison or even worse, I said. He said but Mom, we do it in code. He asks for a dozen apples, I tell him my uncle is a little worse. I said: Eltie, do you think they can’t figure that Secret Spy stuff out? He doesn’t listen. Oh, he used to. I used to be his best friend. But things have changed. Since he got to pooberty, things have changed. Dirty magazines under his bed and all that business. Now this darky. I suppose they caught you testing smogs or carcinogens or something and now you’re on the run.”

“I-”

“It don’t matter!” She said fiercely at the window. It looked out on a backyard filled with rusting pieces of junk and tire rims and some little boy’s sandbox that now, many years later, was filled with scruffy October woods.

“It don’t matter!” she repeated. “It’s the darkies.” She turned to Richards and her eyes were hooded and furious and bewildered. “I’m sixty-five, but I was only a fresh young girl of nineteen when it began to happen. It was nineteen seventy-nine and the darkies were everywhere! Everywhere! Yes they were!” she nearly screamed, as if Richards had taken issue with her. “Everywhere! They sent those darkies to school with the whites. They set em high in the government. Radicals, rabble-rousing, and rebellion. I ain’t so-”

She broke off as if the words had been splintered from her mouth. She stared at Richards, seeing him for the first time.

“OhGodhavemercy,” she whispered.

“Mrs. Parrakis-”

“Nope!” she said in a fear-hoarsened voice. “Nope! Nope! Oh, nope!” She began advancing on him, pausing at the counter to pick up a long, gleaming butcher knife out of the general clutter. “Out! Out! Out!” He got up and began to back away slowly, first through the short hall between the kitchen and shadowy living room, then through the living room itself.

He noticed that an ancient pay telephone hung on the wall from the days when this had been a bona fide inn. The Blue Door, Guests. When was that? Richards wondered Twenty years ago? Forty? Before the darkies had gotten out of hand, or after?

He was just beginning to back down the hall between the living room and the front door when a key rattled in the lock. They both froze as if some celestial hand had stopped the film while deciding what to do next.

The door opened, and Elton Parrakis walked in. He was immensely fat, and his lackluster blond hair was combed back in preposterous waves from his forehead to show a round baby face that held an element of perpetual puzzlement. He was wearing the blue and gold uniform of the Vendo-Spendo Company. He looked thoughtfully at Virginia Parrakis.

“Put that knife down, Mom.”

“Nope!” she cried, but already the crumbling of defeat had begun to putty her face.

Parrakis closed the door and began walking toward her. He jiggled.

She shrank away. “You have to make him go, son. He’s that badman. That Richards. It’ll mean prison or worse. I don’t want you to go!” She began to wail, dropped the knife, and collapsed into his arms.

He enfolded her and began to rock her gently as she wept. “I’m not going to jail,” he said. “Come on, Mom, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” He smiled at Richards over one of her hunched and shaking shoulders, an embarrassed awfully-sorry-about-this smile. Richards waited.

“Now,” Parrakis said, when the sobs had died to sniffles. “Mr. Richards is Bradley Throckmorton’s good friend, and he is going to be with us for a couple of days, Mom.”

She began to shriek, and he clapped a hand over her mouth, wincing as he did so.

“Yes, Mom. Yes he is. I’m going to drive his car into the park and wire it. And you’ll go out tomorrow morning with a package to mail to Cleveland.”

“Boston,” Richards said automatically. “The tapes go to Boston.”

“They go to Cleveland now,” Elton Parrakis said, with a patient smile. “Bradley’s on the run.”

“Oh. Jesus.”

“You’ll be on the run, too!” Mrs. Parrakis howled at her son. “And they’ll catch you, too! You’re too fat!”

“I’m going to take Mr. Richards upstairs and show him his room, Mom.”

“Mr. Richards? Mr. Richards? Why don’t you call him by his right name? Poison!”

He disengaged her with great gentleness, and Richards followed him obediently up the shadowy staircase. “There are a great many rooms up here,” he said, panting slightly as his huge buttocks flexed and clenched. “This used to be a rooming house many years ago-when I was a baby. You’ll be able to watch the street.”

“Maybe I better go,” Richards said. “If Bradley’s blown, your mother may be right.”

“This is your room,” he said, and threw open a door on a dusty damp room that held the weight of years. He did not seem to have heard Richards’s comment. “It’s not much of an accommodation. I’m afraid, but-” He turned to face Richards with his patient I-want-to-please smile. “You may stay as long as you want. Bradley Throckmorton is the best friend I’ve ever had.” The smile faltered a bit. “The only friend I’ve ever had. I’ll watch after my Mom. Don’t worry.”

Richards only repeated: “I better go.”

“You can’t, you know. That head bandage didn’t even fool Mom for long. I’m going to drive your car to a safe place, Mr. Richards. We’ll talk later.”

He left quickly, lumberingly. Richards noted that the seat of his uniform pants was shiny. He seemed to leave a faint odor of apologia in the room.

Pulling the ancient green shade aside a little, Richards saw him emerge on the cracked front walk below and get into the car. Then he got out again. He hurried back toward the house, and Richards felt a stab of fear.

Ponderously climbing tread on the stairs. The door opened, and Elton smiled at Richards. “Mom’s right,” he said. “I don’t make a very good secret agent. I forgot the keys.”

Richards gave them to him and then essayed a joke: “Half a secret agent is better than none.”

It struck a sour chord or no chord at all; Elton Parrakis carried his torments with him too clearly, and Richards could almost hear the phantom, jeering voices of the children that would follow him forever, like small tugs behind a big liner.

“Thank you,” Richards said softly.

Parrakis left, and the little car that Richards had come from New Hampshire in was driven away toward the park.

Richards pulled the dust cover from the bed and lay down slowly, breathing shallowly and looking at nothing but the ceiling. The bed seemed to clutch him in a perversly damp embrace, even through the coverlet and his clothes. An odor of mildew drifted through the channels of his nose like a senseless rhyme.

Downstairs, Elton’s mother was weeping.