My Perfect Murder

It was such an utterly perfect, such an incredibly delightful idea for murder that I was half out of my mind as I crossed America.

The idea had come to me, for some reason, on my 48th birthday. Why it hadn't come to me when I was 30 or 40, I cannot say. Perhaps those were good years and I sailed through them unaware of time and clocks and the gathering of frost at my temples.

Anyway, on my 48th birthday, lying in bed that night beside my wife, with my children sleeping in other quiet moonlit rooms of my house, I thought:

I will arise and go now and kill Ralph Underhill.

Ralph Underhill? Who in God's name is he?

Thirty-six years later, kill him? For what?

Why, I thought, for what he did to me when I was 12.

My wife awoke, an hour later, hearing a noise.

"Doug?" she called. "What are you doing?"

"Packing," I said. "For a journey."

"Oh," she murmured and rolled over and went to sleep.

• • •

" 'Board! All aboard!" the porters' cries went down the train platform. The train (continued on page 126)My Perfect Murder(continued from page 119) shuddered and banged.

"See you!" I cried, leaping up the steps.

"Someday," called my wife, "I wish you'd fly!"

Fly, I thought, and spoil thinking about murder all across the plains? Spoil the pleasures of oiling the pistol and loading it and thinking of Ralph Underhill's face when I show up 36 years late to settle old scores? Fly? Why, I would rather pack across country on foot, pausing by night to build fires, living on bile and my old, mummified antagonisms.

The train moved. My wife was gone.

I rode off into the past.

• • •

Crossing the Great Plains the second night, we hit a beaut of a thunderstorm. I stayed up until four in the morning, listening to the rave of winds and thunder. At the height of the storm, I saw my face, a darkroom negative print on the cold window glass, and thought:

Where is that fool going?

To kill Ralph Underhill!

Why? Because!

Remember how he hit my arm? Bruises. I was covered with bruises, both arms; dark-blue, mottled black, strange yellow bruises. Hit-and-run, that was Ralph, hit-and-run--

And yet ... you loved him?

Yes, as boys bear a kind of love that is all cruelty when they are eight, ten, twelve and the world is innocent and boys are evil beyond evil because they know not what they do. So, on some secret level, I had to be hurt. We dear fine friends needed each other. Me to be hit. Him to strike. My scars were the emblem and symbol of our love.

What else makes you want to murder Ralph so late in time? The train whistle shrieked. Night country rolled by.

I recalled one spring going to school in a new tweed knickers suit and Ralph knocking me down, rolling me in snow and fresh brown mud. And Ralph laughing and me going home, shamefaced, covered with slime, afraid of a beating, to put on fresh dry clothes.

I remember those toy clay statues, advertised on the Tarzan radio show. Statues of Tarzan and Kala the Ape and Numa the Lion, for just 25 cents. Beautiful! Even now, in memory, I hear the sound of the ape man swinging through green jungles far away, ululating! But who had 25 cents in the middle of the Great Depression? Only Ralph Underhill.

And one day Ralph asked if I wanted one of the statues.

"Want!" I cried. "Yes! Yes!"

That was the same week my brother, in a strange seizure of love mixed with contempt, gave me his old, but expensive, baseball catcher's mitt.

"Well," said Ralph, "I'll give you my extra Tarzan statue if you'll give me that catcher's mitt."

Fool! I thought. The statue's worth 25 cents. The glove cost two dollars! No fair! Don't!

But I raced back to Ralph's house with the glove and gave it to him and he, smiling a worse contempt than my brother's, handed me the Tarzan statue. Bursting with joy, I ran home.

My brother didn't find out about his mitt and the statue for two weeks. I told him in the course of a long hike out in farm country, and he promptly ditched me, leaving me lost because I was such a sap. "Tarzan statues! Baseball mitts!" he cried, as he ran away. "That's the last thing I ever give you!"

Somewhere on a country road, I just lay down and wept and wanted to die but didn't know how to give up the final vomit that was my miserable ghost.

The thunder murmured. The rain fell on the cold Pullman-car windows.

Is that the list? No. One final thing, more terrible than everything else.

In all the years I went to Ralph's house to toss small bits of gravel against his window to signal Fourth of July, six in the morning, or to call him forth for the dawn arrival of a circus at the cold railroad station, in all those years, never once did Ralph run to my house.

Never once in all the years did he, nor anyone else, prove his friendship by coming by. The door never sounded to a knock. The window of my bedroom never faintly clattered and belled with a high-tossed confetti of sand and rocks.

I always knew that the day I stopped going to Ralph's house, calling up to his window in the morning air, would be the day our friendship ended. I tested it once. I stayed away for a week. Ralph never called. It was as if I had died and no one came to my funeral.

When I saw Ralph at school, there was no surprise, no query, not even the faintest lint of curiosity to be picked off my coat: "Where were you, Doug? I need someone to beat. Where you been, Doug, I got no one to pinch!"

Add up all the sins. But the most important one is the one about mornings. He never came to my house. He never shouted me awake nor tossed a rice of gravel onto the clear panes to call me down to joy and summer days.

And for this last thing, Ralph Underhill, I thought, sitting in the train at four in the morning, as the storm faded and I found tears in my eyes, for this last and final thing, for that I shall kill you tomorrow night.

Murder, I thought, after 36 years. Why, God, you're madder than Ahab.

The train wailed. We ran across country like a mechanical Greek Fate carried by a black-metal Roman Fury.

• • •

They say you can't go home again. That is a lie. If you are lucky and time it right, you arrive at sunset, when the old town is filled with yellow light.

I got off the train and walked up through Green Town and looked at the courthouse, burning with sunset glow. Every tree was hung with gold doubloons of color. Every roof and coping and bit of gingerbread was purest brass.

I sat in the courthouse square with dogs and old men until the sun had set and Green Town was dark. I wanted to savor Ralph Underhill's death.

No one in history had ever done a crime like this. I would stay, kill, depart, a stranger among strangers.

How would anyone dare say, finding Ralph Underhill's body on his doorstep, that a boy aged 12, arriving on a kind of time-machine train, had gunned down the past? It was beyond all reason. I was safe in my pure insanity.

Finally, at 8:30 on this cool October night, I crossed town, past the ravine.

People, after all, do move away; but I felt certain he would still be there.

I turned down Park Street and walked 200 yards to a single street lamp and looked across. Ralph Underhill's white two-story Victorian house waited for me.

And I could feel him in it.

He was there, 48 years old, even as I felt myself here, 48 and full of an old, tired and self-devouring spirit.

I stepped out of the light, opened my suitcase, put the pistol in my right-hand coat pocket, shut the case and hid it in the bushes, where, later, I would grab it and walk down into the ravine and across town to the train.

I stood before his house and it was the same house I had stood before 36 years ago. There were the windows upon which I had hurled those spring bouquets of rocks in love and total giving. There were the sidewalks, spotted with firecracker burn marks from ancient July Fourths when Ralph and I had just blown up the whole damned world in shrieking celebrations.

I walked up onto the porch and saw on the mailbox in small letters: Underhill

What if his wife answers?

No, I thought, he himself, with absolute Greek tragic perfection, will open the door and take the wound and almost gladly die for old crimes and minor sins somehow grown to crimes.

I rang the bell.

Will he know me, I wondered, after all this time? In the instant before the first shot, tell him your name. He must know who it is.

Silence. I rang the bell again. The doorknob rattled. I touched the pistol in my pocket, my heart hammering.

The door opened. Ralph Underhill (concluded on page 165)My Perfect Murder(continued from page 126) stood there. He blinked, gazing out at me.

"Ralph?" I said.

"Yes ...?" he said.

We stood there, rooted, for what could not have been more than five seconds. But, O Christ, many things happened in those five swift seconds.

I saw Ralph Underhill. I saw him clearly. And I had not seen him since I was 12.

Then he had towered over me with pummel and beat and scream. Now he was a little old man.

I am five feet, eleven. But Ralph Underhill had not grown much from his 12th year on. The man who stood before me was no more than five feet, two inches tall. I towered over him.

I gasped. I stared. I saw more.

I was 48 years old. But Ralph Underhill, at 48, had lost most of his hair, and what remained was threadbare gray, black and white. He looked 60 or 65.

I was in good health. Ralph Underhill was waxen pale. There was a knowledge of sickness in his face. He had traveled in some sunless land. His was a ravaged and sunken look. His breath smelled of funeral flowers.

All this, perceived, was like the storm of the night before, gathering all its lightning and thunder into one bright concussion. We stood in the explosion.

So this is what I came for? I thought. This, then, is the truth. This dreadful instant in time. Not to pull out the weapon. Not to kill. No, no. But simply--

To see Ralph Underhill as he is in this hour. That's all. Just to be here, stand here and look at him as he has become.

Ralph Underhill lifted one hand in a kind of gesturing wonder. His lips trembled. His eyes flew up and down my body, his mind measured this giant who shadowed his door. At last his voice, so small, so frail, blurted out: "Doug ...?"

I recoiled.

"Doug," he gasped, "is that you?"

I hadn't expected that. People don't remember! They can't! Across the years? Why would he know, summon up, recognize, recall?

I had a wild thought that what had happened to Ralph Underhill was that after I left town, half of his life had collapsed. I had been the center of his world, someone to attack, beat, pummel, bruise. His whole life had cracked by my simple act of walking away 36 years ago.

Nonsense! Yet some small crazed mouse of wisdom in my brain screeched what it knew: You needed Ralph, but--more!--he needed you! And you did the only unforgivable, the wounding thing. You vanished.

"Doug?" he said again, for I was silent there on the porch, with my hands at my sides. "Is that you?"

This was the moment I had come for.

At some secret blood level, I had always known I would not use the weapon. I had brought it with me, yes, but time had got here before me, and age and smaller, more terrible deaths....

Bang.

Six shots through the heart.

But I didn't use the pistol. I only whispered the sound of the shots. With each whisper, Ralph Underhill's face aged ten years. By the time I reached the last shot, he was 108 years old.

"Bang," I whispered. "Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang."

His body shook with the impact.

"You're dead. Oh, God, Ralph, you're dead."

I turned and walked down the steps and reached the street before he called:

"Doug, is that you!?"

I did not answer, walking.

"Answer me?" he cried, weakly. "Doug! Doug Spaulding, is that you? Who is that? Who are you?"

I got my suitcase and walked down into the cricket night and darkness of the ravine and across the bridge and up the stairs, going away.

"Who is that?" I heard his voice wail a last time.

A long way off, I looked back. All the lights were on in Ralph Underhill's house. It was as if he had gone around and put them on after I left.

On the other side of the ravine, I stopped on the lawn in front of the house where I had been born. Then I picked up a few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, never in my life.

I tossed the few bits of gravel up to tap that window where I had lain every morning of my first 12 years. I called my own name. I called me down in friendship to play in some long summer that no longer was.

I stood waiting just long enough for my young self to come down to join me.

Then swiftly, fleeing ahead of the dawn, we ran out of Green Town and back, thank you, dear Christ, back toward now and today for the rest of my life.