The Inconsequential Pipsqueaks

Sell Celeste to Leroy Farnish. And buy Dorcas. The thought came winging in from out of nowhere without warning. I was shaving and through the bathroom wall I could hear my dear Celeste, my sweet Celeste, perhaps even Celeste, my girl of the Limberlost, fixing my breakfast. To keep from cutting my throat out of sheer exuberance, I tossed the thought into nowhere, but it came whistling back with the inevitability of a boomerang. I had to stop shaving and grip the sides of the lavatory. When I had laughed myself out, I finished shaving, the happy tears glistening in the lather.

I dressed and went in to breakfast, pleasantly and powerfully alive. Celeste drank a cup of coffee with me. This is indicative of her stalwart character: her coffee tastes like boiled chinaberries.

"Why are you smiling?" she asked. "What's so funny this morning? I could hear you snorting all the way in here."

"I, Virgil McGaulley, have just invented a new method of sexual intercourse," I said. "This is the first break-through since the early Pleistocene. It involves a piece of string with a loop in it, an idiomatic command of Spanish, a fire hydrant and, of course, a stalk of celery." I paused. "But that's about as much as I can explain with clothes on."

She smiled at me her special smile for s-e-x, an exquisitely blended compound of pity, sorrow, contempt, disgust and homicidal intent. Once that smile had the power to make me blood brother to the cockroach; now, I looked at her bared teeth and was reminded only of the four hundred and eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents she had cost me in dentist's bills.

I drank my coffee and stood up, wondering where she obtained chinaberries in the off season. She made a mouth and I kissed it as I had been kissing it for what seemed a thousand years, without wish or hope or memory of desire. And for the very last time.

"Farewell, Celeste," I said. "I go to hunt, slay, skin and fetch the food for this house. Don't forget that you're my wife."

Because, even then, it was not too late. I had made my bed with her, or I had let her make it for me and, rumpled as it was, I was willing to lie in it. But I was not going to share title to it with Leroy Farnish.

"How could I forget that?" she said. "Will I see you early for a change?"

"You'll see me early," I said. "For a change."

I drove to a drugstore, two blocks down and three blocks over from my house. I parked the can and opened the glove compartment. Dumbly, I registered the fact that the gun was not there. In the middle of a goddamn, I remembered that I had cleaned it, for the twenty-second time in a month, on the previous Sunday, and had left it on the workbench in the garage. I got out of the can and went into the drugstore. I rang up Mr. Ogilvie.

"Mr. Ogilvie," I said, "this is a hell of a thing to say, but I think there's a snake in my house and I am going to be late."

"You think there's a snake?" he said. "I don't know what that means."

"You know what being late means?" I asked. "Just latch your mind onto that, Mr. Ogilvie, and let me worry about the snake."

I let him hang up. Mr. Ogilvie has been office manager and bookkeeper for Farnish & McGaulley since the year one. He is an old man, and a very little one, and such courtesies mean more to him than wages. Then, I rang up Dorcas. As usual, she let it ring five times before she answered.

"Dorcas, I've discovered a brand-new method of hard breathing," I said. And I told her the same nonsense I had told Celeste.

"Now, Virgil, how did you know that I have a command of idiomatic Spanish?" she asked. We both laughed. "Virgil, is that all you called to tell me?"

"Dorcas, I've figured it out," I said. "I am going to sell Celeste to Leroy for five thousand dollars."

She gave a long whistle. "Say, boy," she said, "why do you need five thousand dollars so bad?"

There is Dorcas for you. Never mind the what, just tell her why. I told her why. She was silent for a long while.

"Better ask for ten thousand dollars, then," she said. "For I am rather expensive, Virgil." And she hung up.

I had three cups of coffee in the drugstore, all tasting like boiled chinaberries. The taste brought dear Celeste back to my mind, and I felt that I was the sorriest dog in the sorriest of all possible worlds. It was right on nine-forty-eight when Leroy Farnish drove by the drugstore on the way toward my house.

I waited until exactly ten before I followed. I walked down to Halsey and turned right. In the middle of the next block, I turned up the alley leading to my garage. It was twelve minutes past ten when I shut the garage door behind me. I stood very quietly in the dark and counted to one hundred very slowly before I moved to the workbench.

And the gun was not there. I put my hand where I had left it and it was not there. I struck a match and it was not there. My head smoked with question marks. Had I really left it there? Where was it? Who had it now? Leroy Farnish? Or my dear Celeste? Or some nameless prowler? I answered the first question yes and the last question no and left the others smoking.

For days and days and days I had brightened many a happy hour choosing the time and the place and the spot on their anatomies to shoot Leroy Farnish and my dear Celeste. This morning I had decided shooting was far too good for them, but I wanted the gun to overcome any sales resistance. Did I have to have the gun? I did not have the gun. But I was still Virgil McGaulley and he was still Leroy Farnish – and I stopped thinking.

There were five steps from the end of the workbench to the door leading into the house. Just five lousy, miserable steps and I walked carefully. And because I was so careful, so afraid I might stumble in the dark, stumble I did. I stumbled over the car jack. I hit the concrete floor on my hands and knees, hard. But it was worth it. My hand closed on the jack handle and when I stood up I was at least a foot taller and no longer needed the gun.

When my hand closed on the cold doorknob, I was breathing too fast. I waited until I got it under control before I turned the knob and eased the door open. When I stepped inside I was very calm.

And I heard Celeste's dear voice coming free and easy and clear from the direction of the bedroom. It was the voice of a woman calling for help, but not in a manner to persuade any passerby to go to her rescue. Once, to provoke that sound had been the be-all and end-all of my life, but it meant no more to me now than the Treaty of Ghent, to name another historical event.

And positively, absolutely, unmistakably I heard the voice of Leroy Farnish speaking in low, hoarse tones as he urged, insisted, commanded, directed and steered her into open water.

I stood steady and erect like a little tin soldier and waited for all sounds of mortal combat to cease. On the first second of the big quiet, I charged, waving the jack handle and roaring, like a beestung bull. The coffee table in the living room was suddenly in my path and I jumped it. As I rounded into the narrow hallway, I stepped on a throw rug and, ever true to its name, it threw me. I went into a wild skid and crashed up against the far wall. I lost my balance and fell. The jack handle was knocked out of my hand.

I scooped up the jack handle and scrambled to my feet. My head was busted wide open, my hands and knees were bruised and bleeding, and I didn't care a good goddamn. I could have made those last few steps with a fractured skull and a severed aorta.

"Bitch! Bastard!" I bellowed and galloped on into the bedroom.

My strategy worked. Gun in hand, I would have walked in. But sudden terror served me just as well. I rapped Leroy Farnish across the hand with the jack handle, just as he was taking the gun from Celeste, and with my other hand I sent them both sprawling across the bed. I picked the gun up from the floor, and a seller's market had been established in that room.

"Lie back down, children," I said. "I know you must be tired. And to avoid a chill, I suggest you pull the sheet up."

I really and truly felt sorry for them, lying there with the sheet tucked under their chins, their four big eyes watching, watching, watching. Naturally, Celeste spoke first.

"Virgil, you put that gun away before you do something foolish," she said.

I smiled at her. When I charged in, they were on her side of the bed, and she had just handed Leroy the gun. When she found the gun on the workbench, she knew that I knew. She also knew that Leroy Farnish wouldn't come within a thousand miles of our bed if she told him, so she hadn't told him. From then on, she had listened for me with one ear, and when she heard me coming, she had jumped up and got the gun and tried to give it to Leroy. I admired her, and felt even sorrier for her because this could only mean that she had her doubts about Leroy.

Leroy found his voice. "Virgil, can't we discuss this like three civilized people?" he asked.

There are two hundred odd pounds of Leroy Farnish, bunched and muscled on six feet plus. This is not something to be despised, and it had done a great deal for him, perhaps too much. It had earned him three letters a year in high school and college, it had earned him a wife, and it had earned him a partnership with me. He was hardly to be blamed if Celeste's roving eye and round heels had extended the partnership to my bed.

But I was not sorry for him because (continued on page 110) Pipsqueaks (continued from page 54) he now lay buck naked under a sheet at the point of my gun. I was sorry for him because underneath all those muscles there beat the trembling heart of an outhouse mouse and he should have known better than to poach on a field rat like me.

"We are going to be damned civilized, Leroy," I said. "But don't provoke me or I'll lapse back into my aboriginal self."

"Virgil, if you shoot us, they'll hang you," the ever-practical Celeste said. "Or you'll get life and go crazy inside a year."

"Virgil, all I can ask is that you imagine yourself in my position," Leroy said. "I ask only for justice."

"No, it's me that wants justice," I said. "You want mercy. And, as long as we're civilized, I don't think we'll have any problem. I think we can handle this as a civil rather than as a criminal case."

"What does that mean?" my levelheaded Celeste said. I think the idea of my swinging from a rope or gibbering away my life in a cell had appealed to her and only the high cost made her abandon it.

I ignored her. I had straddled a chair on Leroy's side of the bed. I waited until the pistol in my hand filled the room.

"Now, Leroy, here is the way I see it," I said. "It's a mistake to think of Celeste as a woman, a wife, a person. We must think of her as she thinks of her, as a thing, an object, a device, which anybody can have if he can afford the price. Now, I won't ask you if you want this particular item, because you already have it. Think of her as a gadget which you've taken on a thirty-day trial, and I am the salesman who has come to close the deal."

Celeste sat up but I waved the gun and sent her back under the sheet. Leroy studied me; I wore my most civilized expression.

"You might ask how much I want for her," I pointed out.

He asked me. I told him. He sat up. "Ten thousand dollars?" he asked. "Ten thousand dollars?"

"I know what you're thinking," I said, "and I agree. She's just not worth that much. But there's something I want that costs ten thousand dollars, and I have this gun, and we have a seller's market operating here."

He laughed, nervously, really more of a giggle. "Ten thousand dollars," he said, and laughed again. "You said you wouldn't shoot us."

"No, I didn't," I said. "Look, I don't want this woman. She's fly-specked and gone in the teeth. If you had come to me, or if she had, and told me that you loved each other, then I would have stepped aside or I'd have fought you for her, fair. It's not the adultery that bothers me, it's the sheer, inconsequential pipsqueakery that's costing you ten thousand dollars."

"That's all the money I've got in the world," he said.

"That's all the money you have in the world," I agreed. I steadied the pistol barrel on my left forearm. "But, as I said, this is a seller's market." I released the safety catch.

"My checkbook is in my inner coat pocket," he said. "Will you get it for me?"

I got it for him. He wrote the check. He had to write five checks before he made out a decent one. He was, as I say, an outhouse mouse. I had never felt more urbane in my life. Afterward, he gathered his clothes and went in the bathroom to dress. I was alone with my dear Celeste.

"You are despicable," she said. She and Katie Hepburn are the only women I've ever heard who could pronounce the word despicable with the accent on the first syllable. Try it before you dismiss it as a trifling accomplishment.

"You had better get dressed," I said, kindly. "If you let Leroy Farnish out of your sight, you'll never see him again."

I left her and went into the living room. I sat down on the sofa and held the gun with the muzzle buried deep in a cushion. I didn't look up when they came out of the bedroom together. When they reached the door I fired. The noise wasn't loud enough to bother my next-door neighbor, but it was loud enough to stop them. I held up the cushion so they could see the size of the hole.

"I shall be at the bank within the hour," I said. "I expect to be expected. See to it that you see to it. Shun the temptation to void the check. Spend to save."

They were yacking and yipping like chihuahuas in extremis before he had backed his car out of my driveway. I was tempted to empty the pistol into the ceiling. Instead, I called Dorcas. The phone rang five times.

"The deed is done," I said. "My two inconsequential pipsqueaks are beginning to suffer the inconsequentiality of their pipsqueakery. Shed a tear with me."

"Virgil McGaulley, has anyone ever told you that you're a bastard of purest ray serene?" she asked me when I finished telling her. "And one other question. Do you really and truly love me? I think I have a right to know."

"To the first question, many times," I said. "A man should strive for excellence in whatever he turns his hand to. As for the second, I must – I'm paying ten thousand bucks for you."

I walked back to the drugstore thinking happy thoughts of Leroy and Celeste. I gave them an hour to get checked into a hotel or a tourist court, and another hour for Leroy to get away from her. Celeste would see through his first five or six excuses. Then he would run for home, lie as much money as he could out of his wife, and light out of town like a scalded dog.

I passed two old ladies who frowned at me, oddly. Much later, I realized I had been stepping to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk. I hadn't done this since the third grade.

At the bank there were difficulties, but Leroy Farnish was not one of them. In less than thirty minutes I walked out with ten bills, all bearing the fat-jowled, bug-eyed, mustached features of one Grover Cleveland, twenty-second and twenty-fourth President of the United States, and reputed to have fathered at least one bastard. He was a fine-looking old bird and I would have voted for him, any time.

I parked my car two blocks from Dorcas' house and walked the rest of the way. She met me at the door. I did not kiss her then, nor did I do so when I was inside the house. Dorcas has this very sharp, very skillful elbow which comes up and stabs you in the Adam's apple, brutally discouraging such notions. She had made the tactical situation clear when the subject first came up.

"I know you, Virgil McGaulley," she had said. "You're mean and moral and you play by rules. So do I. I kiss only my own husbands, actual or potential. Think it over."

We had met, like all such companions in misery, in one of those grottoes equipped with many small dark corners in which you can sit, drink and feel sorry for yourself. That first night we were two nameless, faceless ghosts whispering in the dim light. We had the same sorry tale to tell of how love had become just one more four-letter word and the pity of it all. I forget which one of us slipped away in the gloom first, and we made no appointment to meet again.

But we met in the same dark corner on the next night and told our tale again. The following evening I went to another bar in another part of town, and in another dark corner a hand was placed quietly on mine. We didn't talk at all that night. We sat holding hands like high school kids, and later we left together, moving into the light for the first time.

Now, inside her house for my first time, we had no need for speech. As soon as I entered the door she turned and we walked into the bedroom together. We undressed like two swimmers getting ready for an imprompturace across a mill pond. She spoke then, looking calmly and steadily across the bed.

"You like my looks?" she said.

Now, I'll say one thing about Dorcas. I have no use for blonde women, and of all the varieties of blonde, the kind I don't want any of is the hot-butter type. Dorcas is a hot-butter blonde. I spoke truly.

"I like your looks," I said.

It was cool under the crisp sheet, waiting quietly with Dorcas on the pillow beside me, just breathing. She was a splendid breather. I spent my time making airplanes out of the nice crisp thousand-dollar pictures of old Grover and sailing them through the bedroom door and down the hall.

Lying there, we lost all count of time. When the car pulled up in the driveway, she gave a start but I didn't move. The car door slammed, but it was hell's own time before the footsteps sounded on the walkway and across the threshold of the front door, and then stopped dead at the entrance of the short hallway.

I had already made up my mind that even if one occurred to me (and none did), I would make no witty remark. But I had to make sure that a sharp, clear picture of the future, everybody's future, was established.

"That's my top price for your wife Dorcas," I said. "And I wouldn't keep Celeste waiting."

Dorcas suddenly began laughing, high pitched and shaky at first, but gradually gathering strength and confidence and high good humor. Outside in the hallway, there was a rustling sound like an outhouse mouse foraging as Leroy Farnish went down on his hands and knees and began picking up the Grover Clevelands from the floor.