Odell the First
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

I got a letter from my mother, the first in five years. She told me she was dying and that I’d better come home. More of a command than a request. I was ready to toss the letter aside and ignore it, but I suppose I still had something in me like a conscience. I loaded all my worldly goods in my old station wagon, vacated my apartment and headed north.

I drove the three hundred and fifty miles over two days, spending the night in a cheap roadside motel where the crickets wouldn’t let me sleep. When I got home it was two in the a.m. I knew the doors would be locked so I let myself in by a window in the hallway off the kitchen, a trick I had learned when I was twelve years old. I hoped my mother wouldn’t shoot me for a burglar as I made me way through the dark house and up the stairs to my old room. I took off my shoes and lay on the bed in my clothes without getting under the covers and soon I was asleep, more tired than I thought.

When I woke up the next morning and saw it was after ten, I started to get up and realized my mother was standing in the doorway looking at me.

“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” she said.

“If you had a telephone,” I said, “I would have called.”

“Don’t want one,” she said.

When I went down to the kitchen, she was cooking eggs and ham. I took my place at the table as if I hadn’t been away for decades. She poured me a cup of tea—we were never coffee drinkers—and set a plate of food in front of me.

“You home to stay?” she asked.

“It depends,” I said as I started to eat.

“On what? On whether there’s anything in it for you?”

“Well, is there?”

“The house is in your name. When I’m gone, it’s yours to do with as you please. You can sell it.”

“Nobody would ever want it. It’s too far from town.”

“You can live here, then, as long as you live or as long as you want, and take care of him.”

 I looked at her as if I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of her mouth.

“That’s no kind of life,” I said. “I think I might get lonely.”

“Get yourself a wife and have some children.”

“Phhft!” I said, almost choking on the tea. “We’ll forget you ever said that!”

“You know why I wanted you here,” she said.

“Maybe you need to remind me.”

“I’ll be dead soon.”

“I don’t believe it. You’ll outlive everybody I know.”

“When the time comes, I have specific instructions. I’ve written them down. Call the funeral home in town. I want a simple service and I want to go into the ground beside your father.”

“Ugh! That’s no kind of talk for the breakfast table.”

“I’ve never asked anything of you in your life,” she said.

“I know.”

“I wouldn’t be asking you now if there was anybody else.”

“That’s so sweet!” I said.

“The main thing is Odell.”

“I know.”

“I want you to take care of him after I’m gone.”

“Mother, I can’t do that!” I said, setting the cup down with a clatter. “I’m not going to devote my whole life to taking care of a person who isn’t my responsibility.”

“I know it’s asking a lot,” she said, “but there’s nobody else.”

“There’s places for people like him,” I said.

“I know there are places,” she said, “but I’ve always kept him with me. This is his home.”

“I won’t promise that I won’t put him in a hospital for the criminally insane the minute your back is turned.”

“Well, we’ll see,” she said mildly, and I knew the subject, for the time being at least, was closed.

After breakfast she took me down to the basement where Odell was kept. It was more like a room in the house now than the dungeon it had been before I went away. The chains were gone and had been replaced by bars on the windows. There was a regular bed with sheets and pillows instead of a mat on the floor, and other comforts, such as a table, a lamp and pictures on the wall, one of a horse standing in a field and another of a sunset over the ocean.

When Odell saw me, a spark in his eyes told me he remembered me.

“Brother?” he said.

“He’s talking now?” I asked.

“Yes, he’s learned a few words,” mother said. “I think he seems less like an animal when he speaks.”

He was sitting in an old upholstered chair by the bed. She went over to him and pulled him to his feet. He opened his mouth wide as if to receive food and she laughed.

“No, it’s not time to eat,” she said. “I want you to stand up and greet your brother.”

Odell looked at me over mother’s shoulder as I stepped closer to him. The sharp, fox-like face was the same, but his look had softened somehow. He was less like an animal now and more human-like. His face was shaved and his hair clipped and combed. The teeth had been filed down.

“You’ve done wonders with him!” I said, genuinely surprised.

“You don’t think they could have done anything for him in one of those places, do you?” she said.

At mealtime she showed me how to prepare his food: one slice of bread and a piece of meat cut up into tiny pieces, served on a large tin plate. That’s all he wanted, she said, three times a day.

When it was time to change the sheets on his bed or straighten up the room or groom Odell, she made me go down to the basement with her and watch how it was done. I knew she was preparing me to take over for her after she was gone, but I still wasn’t ready to assume that responsibility.

“He likes to look at pictures in magazines,” she said. “When you go to town, buy him a couple of new ones with lots of pictures. Or comic books. He loves comic books.”

“Does he read them?”

“No, but he looks at the words and pretends he’s reading.”

“Teach him to read and maybe he can get a job teaching in a university.”

“Read to him when you get the chance. He loves Dickens.”

“Dickens?”

 “Yes, we’re about halfway through The Old Curiosity Shop.”

“He’s more human now than he was before, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but he’s still a wild animal. Be gentle with him or he’ll rip your arm out of its socket.”

“I’ll certainly remember that!” I said.

A week later she died, simply and without fanfare, in her sleep. I think she knew exactly when it was going to happen, down to the minute. I hoped that when my time came, I could go with such grace and ease.

I called the funeral home and they took care of everything, including registering the death certificate. The graveside service was sparsely attended. Besides me, there was the minister to intone a couple of Bible verses, two funeral home men and two old ladies from town who probably never met my mother but who had certainly heard her name. As I left the cemetery, I felt relieved of a terrible burden and I planned, over the next week or so, to find a good place to put Odell, where he would be safe and comfortable and as happy as it was possible for him to be. Then I would move on.

I put the house on the market but I was sure nobody would want to buy it. There were too many rooms and it was too hard to heat in the winter. If nobody wanted to live there, somebody might open a haunted house and charge admission. I was sure I had seen a ghost or two walking the halls.

The day after mother’s funeral I saw that Odell knew something was wrong. I took him his food and he ate it but finally he looked at me with his sad eyes and said, “Mother?”

I knew the moment would come when I would have to tell him. I sat down in the chair beside the bed and put my hands on my thighs—a gesture of trust, I hoped.

“Mother gone away,” I said.

“Where?”

“Remember father?” I asked.

“Father?”

“Yes. Remember when he want away?”

“Father?”

“Well, mother has gone to be with father. One day we’ll see her again.”

“Not come back?”

“No, but you don’t need to worry. I’m here and I’m going to take care of you.”

“Mother!” he said, beginning to cry.

“I know,” I said, “but I’m afraid you’re just going to have to get used to the idea.”

He began scowling at me whenever I went down to the basement, disappointed that I wasn’t mother. He still remained manageable and docile, though. I took him some new magazines with pictures of animals and airplanes and he seemed happy with them. He ate all his food and when I told him he had to take a bath I filled the tub with hot water and he got in and washed himself all over.

Every evening when I took him his supper, he would gesture toward the barred window.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Me,” he said. “Outside.”

“I’m afraid you can’t go outside. It’s dangerous for you out there.”

“No! I walk.”

“You want me to take you for a walk?”

“No! Alone.”

“How do I know you’d come back?” I ask.

“Come back!”

“What if you get into trouble?”

“No!”

His pleas to go outside at night became more emphatic and more-oft repeated. He had been locked up in the basement for I don’t know how many years without respite. He wanted desperately to get out on his own, out of the basement, for just a little while, and who could blame him? It might make him more manageable when the time came for me to uproot him and place him in an institution. I decided we would try it one night and see how it went.

On a Friday evening in October I stayed with him while he ate his supper and when he was finished and pushed the plate aside I pulled him to his feet. When he looked at me questioningly, I put father’s old jacket on him, an old fedora hat and some battle-scarred boots and then I pointed toward the door.

“Where?” he asked.

“You wanted to go for a walk,” I said. “Then go for a walk.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, but I have to tell you if you don’t come back before morning you won’t go out again.”

“Morning,” he said.

“And if you get into any trouble or cause any mischief, I’ll say you got out on your own and I didn’t know about it.”

“My own.”

I took him by the arm and propelled him toward the door. “Remember,” I said. “Come back before daylight. And don’t wake me up. I’ll leave the door unlocked for you.”

That night was the first cold night of autumn and I slept soundly. When I got up the next morning, the first thing I did was to go down to the basement to make sure Odell made it back. He was asleep. The jacket was draped neatly over the chair and the boots were side by side on the floor beside the bed.

He wanted to go out the next night and the night after that and I didn’t object. I wondered where he was going but I knew if I asked him he wouldn’t be able to tell me. I pictured him wandering around in the woods and fields, marveling at the wonders of nature, and running like a scared rabbit if he saw anybody.

On the fourth night, Monday, it was raining and I thought to keep him at home, but after he ate his dinner I knew he was planning on going out again and I hated to disappoint him. As he went out the door, I said, “Remember. You have to be back before the sun comes up.” He nodded his head and I knew he understood what I was saying.

The next morning I woke up early, barely daylight, with a bad headache. I went downstairs to the kitchen to find some aspirin and when I looked out the window I saw Odell coming into the yard from the back pasture. He was carrying something in his arms. I ran out the door in my bathrobe.

“What is that?” I said, but by then it was apparent it was a limp body.

He laid his burden down on the flagstone walk and smiled at me. “Mother,” he said.

“Oh, my god!” I said. “What have you done?”

“Mother!” he said again.

“That’s not mother! You’ve killed somebody!”

It was a stout middle aged woman with gray hair, bearing little or no resemblance to mother. She was considerably mauled and obviously dead. Her eyes were open and also her mouth, as if she had screamed in the middle of dying.

“Where did you find this woman?” I said.

He pointed vaguely over his shoulder and laughed.

“It’s not funny!” I said. “Do you know what they’ll do you when they find out you did this?”

“Hurt,” he said.

“Yes, they’ll hurt you. They’ll do worse than that. They’ll lock you up forever and ever and they won’t let you come home again.”

“No!” he said, his eyes filling with fear.

“Yes! That was a very naughty thing for you to do! People don’t look kindly on that sort of thing!”

“Nobody see!”

“You’d better hope nobody saw or your goose is cooked!”

“Goose?”

“Never mind! Go into the shed and get a shovel and take this deep into the woods and bury it. Bury it deep. If they ever find out what you’ve done, they’ll be very angry with you. Do you understand? Go get the shovel and take it into the woods and bury it where nobody will find it!”

While he ran off to the shed to get the shovel, I took an old horse blanket from the back porch and covered the woman’s face and upper body with it so I wouldn’t have to look at her eyes.

It rained all morning. Odell came home about eleven o’clock, covered with mud. He went to put the shovel away and when he came into the house I was waiting for him.

“Did you do what I said?” I asked.

“Bury deep,” he said.

“Where?”

“Deep in woods. Nobody go there.”

“Go to your room and get yourself cleaned up,” I said.

For the rest of the day I expected a squad of police officers to show up at the door, but I saw no one. The next day I went into town to buy a newspaper, a carton of milk and a loaf of bread.

“Did you hear about the mayor’s wife?” the cashier asked as I paid for my purchases.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “What about her?”

“She disappeared.”

“Where?”

“She went out for a walk after supper and when she didn’t come home the mayor called the po-lice.”

“As he should have,” I said.

“There’s all kinds of rumors about what happened to her, but I’m not sure I believe any of them. What I do believe is that she had a lover.”

“A lover?”

“Yeah. You know. A man from the city. Everybody knew she had been cheatin’ on the mayor ever since they was married.”

“No!” I said.

“Everybody’s out looking for her now. When they find her, they’ll bring her back and it won’t be pretty. The mayor will probably want a divorce now.”

“I can’t say I blame him.”

I went out to my car and unfolded the newspaper. In a sleepy town where not much ever happens, the disappearance of the wife of an important man is big news. I could tell from the pictures that it was the same woman that Odell had brought home. All I could do now was pretend I knew nothing about it and hope that Odell had done a thorough and complete job of burying the body.

That evening after Odell ate his supper, I knew he was expecting to go out again, but I told him very emphatically that he could not. He became enraged and I knew he could easily break me in half if he had wanted to. I didn’t know how to control him when he was that way, so I locked him in for the night and went back upstairs. I hoped he would be better by the next day.

When I took him his breakfast in the morning, he glared at me with something like hatred because I wasn’t mother.

“Mother?” he said.

“She’s gone,” I said with impatience, “and she’s not coming back.”

“Where?”

“She’s dead, Odell. She’s in heaven with the angels.”

“I find,” he said.

“No, you won’t find her unless you go to Windy Hill Cemetery and dig up her grave.”

“I dig,” he said, reaching for the jacket and boots he had worn when he went out before.

“No, no, no!” I said. “You are in serious trouble! You murdered a woman that you thought was mother and now you have to keep yourself hidden away!”

“Go out!” he said, pointing to the door.

“You can’t go out! All I can do for you now is to keep you hidden away. If they come for you, I’ll have to give you up.”

“Give me up?”

He came at me with his glaring hatred and I got out as fast as I could. Now I was afraid of him. I wanted to keep both my arms in their sockets, as well as my legs and other body parts.

I expected every day for somebody to come and take Odell away, but nobody ever came. At night I could hear him wailing with grief for mother and I covered my head with my pillow. I was glad that nobody else was close enough to hear.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with him, but I believed I owed it to him to protect him as long as I could. I didn’t want to see him face punishment in prison for something he didn’t understand. I also didn’t want to see the ignorant hillbillies in and around town try to take justice into their own hands and lynch him. I had heard of such things happening before.

After two weeks, I figured we were safe. The prevailing belief was that the mayor’s wife had run off with her lover and might never be found. Because I was afraid of Odell, I no longer groomed him properly, bathed him or straightened up his room. I only opened his door wide enough to put his food inside.

One night my mother came to me in a dream. She stood beside my bed and told me to do what needed to be done. I didn’t know what she meant at first and then I remembered she always kept a loaded pistol in the drawer of the table next to her bed. She was telling me to get the pistol and pop a cap into Odell’s head from behind when he wasn’t looking.

The gun was where I thought it would be, and fully loaded. I would only need one bullet, unless, of course, I decided to do away with myself after I did away with Odell. I took The Old Curiosity Shop with me when I took him his supper and had the gun in my pocket where he couldn’t see it.

He seemed calm now and almost glad to see me. I read a few pages out loud while he ate his food and then I stopped reading and moved around behind him. I took the gun out and pointed it at the back of his head as he chewed. When he turned around and looked at me, I slid the gun back into my pocket. I knew I would never have the courage to shoot him. I would sooner be able to shoot myself.

“Mother,” he said.

“You need a haircut,” I said.

“Mother. Bring here.”

“I’m going to teach you to string words together into sentences so we can have a real conversation,” I said.

“Mother.”

I went to bed early and about one o’clock I got out of bed and looked out the window. The yard and trees were beautiful in the moonlight. I got dressed without turning on a light, put on my boots and hat and went down to the basement and woke Odell. I helped him into his clothes and boots and then led him out to my car. We drove out to lonely Windy Hill Cemetery and dug up my mother’s grave. He was much stronger than I was and, after we had dug down so far, he was able to lift the coffin out of the ground and together we carried it to the car. Then we smoothed out what had been her grave to make it seem undisturbed, except by maybe a groundhog or two.

I drove slow with headlights off and the back door partly open. Odell rode in the back to make sure the thing stayed steady. When we got home, we carried it in and set it on sawhorses in the basement where he would be able to look at it whenever he wanted. I opened the lid and he gasped with astonishment, his eyes filling with tears. She looked as if she would wake up any second and speak to us.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Tractor Pulls and Wrestle Mania
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

My mother-in-law’s name is Agnes Hollenfeld. She has pink hair and looks like Edward G. Robinson in the 1931 gangster movie Little Caesar. Any time I see her, I expect her to be wearing a double-breasted suit with a machine gun as a fashion accessory, but instead she’s wearing a horned helmet and an iron breastplate, like a tiny Brunehilde (complete with the German accent). Yes, she’s very small but don’t be fooled by her size. She would cut off your head with her battle-axe and serve it to the neighborhood dogs and then, without missing a beat, go inside and watch today’s episode of General Hospital.

Agnes doesn’t have very high regard for men. She has had four husbands. Two of them died and the other two escaped. Of the two that died, one of them, Julius, had his heart burst (or, as Agnes likes to say, his heart “busted”), and the other one, Hec, committed suicide by hanging himself from a rafter in the attic. Agnes was very put out with Hec because he hadn’t finished his housework. When he was laid out at the funeral home (with a smile on his face), she was there with a big bag of pork rinds in one hand and a pint of malt liquor in the other. When she lit a cigarillo over Hec’s casket with a lighter like a torch, it activated the very sensitive fire sprinklers, and water came pouring down on her and poor dead Hec. She threatened to sue the funeral home because she had spent four hours that day at Mitzie’s House of Beauty getting her hair re-pinked.

Agnes’s best friend is a former lady boxer named Doris Grotnick. Agnes brought Doris along one Thanksgiving to our house for dinner. Doris proudly raised her sleeve and showed us the tattoo of the grim reaper on her upper arm and then she informed us that “Grim Reaper” was her professional name when she was in wrestling. After dinner, Agnes and Doris sat at the kitchen table arm-wrestling and drinking margaritas, while the rest of us ate pumpkin pie and watched Miracle on 34^th Street on television.

More than anything else, Agnes and Doris love sports, but especially wrestling. They go to all the matches and have their favorite wrestlers. Agnes calls them “my boys.” She got arrested at one of the wrestling matches because she had too much to drink and wouldn’t sit down and shut up. When security guards came and tried to make her leave, she hit him one of them in the face and broke his nose. When we went to bail her out of jail the next day, she had the man’s blood all over her clothes and underneath her fingernails.

Next to wrestling, Agnes and Doris, these two paragons of refinement, love tractor pulls. They watch tractor pulls on TV and get so excited they pull down the curtains and bust up the furniture. Agnes screams at the tractor she hopes will win, jumps up and down and flails her fists. One time she accidentally clopped Doris on the side of the head with her doubled-up fist and knocked her out. She waited until the tractor pull was over (her tractor won) and then called for an ambulance. Doris was taken to the hospital and spent two weeks recovering from a concussion.

We found out later that Doris Grotnick was a Satan worshipper and that she persuaded Agnes to join her “church” (or “anti-church” if you prefer). They both dressed in black and went arm-in-arm to all the services. Agnes told us that making Satan her master was the best thing she had ever done and that it had “set her free.” She tried to get the rest of us interested in Satanism. She gave us pamphlets to read, extolling the value of Satan worship, but I refused to look at them and threw them in the trash.

Agnes and Doris became minor celebrities for a time when they appeared on a TV talk show in white makeup as witches and practitioners of black magic. They moaned, frothed at the mouth and rolled around on the floor to invoke the spirit of Satan for the studio audience. My wife was embarrassed and refused to leave the house for a few days. She realized, finally, that her mother was insane. I had known it all along.

For Christmas Agnes bought three cemetery plots, one for herself, one for my wife and one for me. I was to be on one side of her and my wife on the other side. We were her children. Children of Satan. That’s when I decided I was going to be cremated.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Sleep Will Banish Sorrow
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

The time was between ten and eleven and traffic was light. An occasional car went by, slowly, its lights reflected in wavering bars on the wet pavement. A liquor store in the next block went dark. A policeman walked his beat, rousting a drunk from a doorway.

A man stepped out of a dark alley. He took a few slow steps into the glow of a streetlamp and stopped. He heard a siren off in the distance and lifted his head to listen, but gradually the siren faded to nothing. He reached into the pocket of his coat and removed a cigarette and put it between his lips and lit it with the little gold lighter engraved with his initials that he always carried. He took a long drag on the cigarette and turned and walked down the street.

In appearance he was a man like many others: not young and not old, of average height, lean and muscular, broad through the shoulders and narrow in the hips. He wore an expensive, perfectly tailored suit and a hat low on his brow, making his face difficult to distinguish.

He spotted a policeman walking toward him on the opposite side of the street. He knew without looking directly at him that the policeman was watching him. He didn’t want the policeman to think there was anything about him out of the ordinary or that he was, perhaps, planning on breaking into one of the businesses along the street that were closed down for the night. He began walking a little faster, with apparent purpose in his step, so as not to arouse the policeman’s suspicions.

After he had walked another half-block, he glanced over his shoulder to see if the policeman was still looking at him, but he was far down in the next block peering into a darkened window. A taxi went by, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. A woman’s laughter came from inside the taxi, a high-pitched sound that might have been a drunken laugh or even a scream. The tail lights of the taxi were receding into the distance when movement in an upper window across the street drew his attention. A woman came to the window and was silhouetted in the light behind her. She looked down to the street for a moment—she seemed to be looking right at him but he couldn’t be sure—and then reached above her head and drew the curtain closed. Seconds later the window went dark like all the others.

As he kept walking, he passed an all-night bowling alley and several small bars and cafés that were opened, but all the stores and offices and businesses were dark and shut down for the night.

After walking several more blocks he came to a movie theatre that was an island of light in the sea of darkness. The marquee was outlined in flashing bulbs surrounding the title of the movie currently playing. The sidewalk and the street in front of the theatre were bathed in garish white light. Inside the ticket booth at the front of the theatre a fat woman sat behind the smudged glass. She wore round glasses and a black dress with little red flowers. She had no customers at the moment and so appeared bored. She leaned her head on her hand and looked longingly out at the street.

He stood on the sidewalk underneath the marquee, put his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the wall. The woman in the ticket booth looked at him and then looked away. If she thought anything about him at all, she would think he was waiting for someone to meet him for the next show. He lit a cigarette and avoided looking at the woman and watched the few cars going by on the street.

A man and a woman walked past on the sidewalk. The woman stood out because she was tall and straight and she wore a red coat and a jaunty red beret with a black feather sticking out of the side. The man was older and shorter; he wore a black hat that seemed too small for his head and was smoking a cigar. They seemed too polite and restrained with each other to be anything other than business associates. They walked past and went to the end of the block and crossed the street and disappeared into the next block.

Suddenly the doors of the theatre opened and people started coming out. At first they came out in twos and threes, and then in dozens. In a couple of minutes there were as many as two hundred people on the sidewalk in front of the theatre. The fat woman in the ticket booth came alive, as dozens of people lined up to buy tickets for the next show.

After the crowd had reached its maximum size and began to dwindle, a lone woman came out of the theatre. She was the only person in the crowd who wasn’t with someone else. She was wearing an ugly tan raincoat like a man’s raincoat and a hat that covered most of her hair, the type of hat worn by women who don’t care how they look when it rains. She walked out to the edge of the sidewalk and looked up and down the street, as though looking for someone. Maybe someone was supposed to meet her or pick her up after the movie and didn’t show up.

From where he was standing under the marquee he watched the woman. She stood at the curb waiting for a couple of minutes and then she began walking down the street. After she was about halfway down in the next block, he began following her, close enough that he could still see her but far enough away that she wouldn’t know he was there.

Something in the woman’s manner indicated that she was not afraid of being alone on a dark street late at night. She looked straight ahead and didn’t seem in any hurry. He knew she didn’t know he was following her. She hadn’t even seen him. He was careful to walk so she wouldn’t hear his footsteps on the sidewalk.

She came to an intersection and stopped, waiting for a couple of cars to pass. When the way was clear, she crossed the street and went through the open door of an all-night drugstore on the corner.

He hesitated for a moment and then went up to the window of the drugstore and stood at the edge and looked in, so that anybody inside would not be able to see him. The inside was brightly lit and cheerful. He could see all the way to the back of the store, rows of display cases and a large rack of magazines and newspapers. Three fans in a triangle hung from the ceiling and turned slowly like airplane propellers in slow motion.

The woman in the tan raincoat went behind a counter and disappeared through a doorway. A man at the magazine rack picked up a magazine and went to the counter to pay for it. An old woman with a little boy standing beside her waited at the prescription counter for the druggist to come back.

Soon the woman in the tan raincoat came out of the doorway at the back of the store. With her was a slightly older woman who resembled her enough that they must have been sisters. The older woman put on a coat and picked up an umbrella and laughed and said goodbye to someone, and then the two of them came out the door. He was standing several feet to the right of the door and, since they turned to the left, they didn’t see him. He stood beside the window and watched them until they turned the corner in the next block and went out of sight.

He turned and began walking again in an easterly direction. There were more people on the sidewalks and more cars in the street than earlier. People were finished with the evening’s activities—the boxing match or club meetings or whatnot—and were heading to bars and nightclubs for some of the nightlife the city was fabled for. A dirty-looking man, a hobo, stepped out of the shadows and blocked his way, asking him for a quarter. He waved the man away and stepped around him to keep from colliding with him.

He came to a bar and stopped and looked at the place. He was tired of walking and needed to sit for a while, have a drink and maybe order some food. He was considering whether or not to go inside, when the door opened and a woman came out. She was wobbly on her feet as though drunk, or nearly drunk. She stumbled and then righted herself and looked up at the sky as though expecting rain. She mumbled something but he didn’t hear what it was.

He saw the red beret and the black feather sticking out of it, and he knew right away it was the same woman he had seen earlier in the evening when he was standing in front of the movie theatre; except now she was alone. He had a fleeting thought that, since it was the second time he had seen her in the same night, they must have been fated to meet. He believed very much that two strangers came together because they were fated beforehand to do so.

He was standing there on the sidewalk in front of the bar, silently, and she didn’t see him until she had almost walked into him. She was startled slightly and confused, but when she looked up at his face and saw he was smiling at her, she relaxed and didn’t regret so much almost bumping into him that way. She apologized profusely and gave a little laugh and stepped around him to continue on her way.

He thought quickly about how he might get her to keep from leaving, how he might engage her in conversation. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and held it between his fingers and asked her for a light. She laughed again and looked grateful that he had asked for anything at all and opened her purse and took out a lighter. She held the flame to the cigarette in his mouth and returned the lighter to her purse.

He took a draw on the cigarette and blew smoke out above her head and smiled at her again and asked if she would like to have a drink. She said she had already had several drinks but she wouldn’t object to a nightcap all the same. She suggested they go to the bar in the hotel where she was staying, which was nearby.

The bar was on the ground floor of the hotel, just off the lobby. They went inside and sat at a small table against the wall. He removed his hat and she took a good look at him. She reached across the table and ran her hand along his arm from his shoulder to his elbow. He looked at her without expression. He didn’t like being touched that way, but he didn’t tell her to stop. The waiter came and took their order and in a couple of minutes their drinks arrived.

She told him the pertinent facts of her life. She came to the city a couple of times a year on business. She always tried to mix in a little fun with the business while she was at it. She had been married once but it didn’t work out and she sent the boy packing back to his mother, where he never should have left in the first place. She liked a man to be a real man and not a grownup baby.

She lived with her sister in a big dreary house in a small town in another state. Her sister was older and a widow. No fun at all. It was a stale kind of existence, so that’s why she liked to kick up her heels whenever she had the chance. She supposed, however, that was as happy as the next person.

She talked only about herself and didn’t try to find out anything about him, not even his name. She leaned across the table and, breathing into his face, told him she found him exceedingly attractive. She was always stimulated by a man’s indifference, she said. She didn’t like the kind of men who were always cloying and falling all over themselves to present themselves well. She liked a man to be a bit of a brute. He grew bored with her talk, but he pretended to be listening to every word, while in fact listening more to the music playing in the background.

After a while the bar was getting ready to close for the night and everybody was going to have to leave. The woman smiled sadly at him and told him she hated to break up their little party, she was having such a good time. She finished her drink, and he put his hat back on and put some money on the table and they both stood up and walked out into the lobby of the hotel.

He was going to ask her if she’d like to go to a place that didn’t close for the night where they could continue their little tête-à-tête, but they saw through the window of the lobby that it was raining furiously outside and he didn’t think she would want to get wet. As he started to leave, she put her hand on his wrist and said she just had a wonderful idea. She had a full bottle of bourbon in her room and she wasn’t sleepy at all. Would he care to come up to her room for a little while?

When they got to her room on the eighth floor, she was too drunk to fit the key into the lock. She laughed and dropped the key on the floor and he picked it up and opened the door and pushed it open for her to go in before him.

She switched on the lights and took off her red hat with the black feather and put it on the dresser and removed her coat and threw it down and stepped out of her shoes. She told him to make himself comfortable and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door. He took off his hat and jacket and sat down on the couch and waited for what was going to happen next.

In a couple of minutes she came out of the bathroom and turned off all the lights except for the small one in front of the window, throwing one side of the room into darkness. She turned on the radio and found some music she liked. After she adjusted the radio to just the right volume, she opened her bottle of bourbon with some difficulty and poured some out into two tiny paper cups, apologizing for not having anything better.

She handed one of the paper cups to him and sat beside him on the couch to his right. She had partially unbuttoned her blouse so that a large portion of the area between her breasts was visible. She remarked how cozy it was sitting there with him, with the sound of the rain and the music and the drinks.

He finished his drink and she offered to pour him another, but he refused, saying he had had enough for one night. He crumpled up the paper cup and slipped it into his pocket.  He put his arm up behind her on the back of the couch and she sat very close to him.

He kissed her lightly on the lips, not because he had any great need to kiss her but because he believed it was what should come next. She kissed him back harder and reached out for his left hand and placed it on her right breast. He squeezed her breast gently and she made little moaning noises.

Suddenly the phone rang shrilly. The woman sighed and stood up and answered it impatiently. He listened carefully to what she was saying; it was the front desk calling to give her a message that was left for her while she was out.

She concluded the call and came back to the couch and sat down beside him again, leaning her body heavily against his. She leaned in for him to kiss her again and he could smell her musky smell and the alcohol on her breath. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing hard.

From his pocket he extracted a two-foot-long silken cord that he always carried, very strong and lightweight. In one deft movement he had the cord around her neck, and before she was aware of what was happening he pulled it very tight. He watched the expression on her face change from surprise to fear and then to pain. He stood up and pulled her sideways on the couch and got behind her and pulled both ends of the cord at the back of her neck.

She made little gurgling noises and tried to get her hands around the cord to pull it loose. She kicked out her feet, propelling her body into his and knocking him off-balance. He pulled the cord tighter and tighter until his arms trembled from the exertion. She gave one violent backward thrust of her body against his and then she began to go limp. When he was sure she was dead, he eased her down onto the floor in front of the couch carefully so as not to make any noise.

He was out of breath and his muscles ached. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his mouth and when he pulled it away he saw her lipstick that had come off onto the handkerchief. He could smell her perfume and he still had the taste of her mouth in his. He shuddered and retched and collapsed onto the floor.

He lay on the floor until he felt that his legs would carry him again and then he stood up and went to the door and put his ear against it to see if he could hear anything from the hallway outside the door. Hearing nothing, he put on a pair of thin kidskin gloves he carried and began methodically going through the woman’s luggage and purse and other belongings. He found two hundred and ten dollars in cash in a pocket of her suitcase. He folded the money and put it inside the breast pocket of his jacket. Then he found a train ticket and put it with the money without even bothering to look and see where she was bound for.

He turned off the lamp but the light from the windows was enough for him to see the body of the woman on the floor in front of the couch. Her face was turned slightly toward him and her eyes were opened; she seemed to be looking right at him. Her skirt was pushed above her thighs and her legs slightly twisted. Her left arm was folded under her and her right arm was underneath the couch. He went over to her and knelt down and removed the silken cord that was still partway around her neck and returned it to his pocket.

The rain gently pelting the windows was lovelier than any music and made the room seem peaceful and inviting. Suddenly he was tired and every muscle in his body ached; he felt an overwhelming desire for rest and sleep. He would stay for a while and then be on his way. He knew he would be safe there until morning.

He went to the bed that had been carefully made up and lay on his back with his head on the pillow. He had never known a more comfortable bed in his life. Soon he drifted into a sleep as deep as any sleep could be.

He awoke in the morning feeling replenished. He looked at the clock and saw it was not quite seven. He sat up and put on his shoes and went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face and combed his hair, looking at himself in the mirror the whole time.

Suddenly he was eager to be gone, to be on his way again. He straightened the wrinkles out of the bed and put on his jacket. He took a quick look around the room and made sure he was leaving no trace of himself behind. He took one tiny sentimental souvenir of the woman to remember her by.

He put on his hat and went to the door and opened it and stepped out quietly into the hallway and walked up the hallway to the elevator. When the elevator arrived and the door opened, he was relieved to see he was its only passenger.

He took the elevator down to the lobby, crossed the lobby to the front door and went out the revolving door onto the street into the gloomy morning unnoticed. He found a cab and took it to the train station and paid the driver out of the bills he had folded in the pocket of his jacket.

He hadn’t decided yet where he was going, but he planned on taking the earliest available train out. First, though, he would have some breakfast. He bought a newspaper and went into the train station coffee shop.

He sat down in a booth toward the back and a pretty blonde waitress came and brought him a glass of ice water, smiling the whole time. He ordered enough food for two people and while he was waiting for it he lit a cigarette and looked the newspaper over without much interest.

Setting the newspaper aside, he remembered the train ticket he had taken from the woman’s luggage and took it out of his pocket. It was for a train that left at nine o’clock for a city he had never visited before. He would use the ticket and not bother with buying another one. He marveled at how everything had gone so well for him, as if it had all been planned in advance—all the pieces had come together in a most pleasing and beneficial way. He would keep traveling around from one place to another until the time came that he decided he had seen enough, experienced enough. When that time came, he would buy a small farm somewhere and live out the rest of his days.

He took the black feather out of his pocket from the woman’s hat and brushed it over his mouth and held it under his nose. It smelled the way the woman had smelled. Ever since he was a small boy, he had kept a little souvenir of the significant events of his life. He had a whole box of them. From time to time he would open the box and take out each item and relive fond memories of the person or event it represented. He would add the black feather to the collection and it would help him to recollect the woman and her face and the sound of her voice and the time he had spent with her. Of course he would remember her fondly. He remembered all of them fondly, being the sentimental man that he was.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Ring the Night Bell
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in the online publication Short-Story.Me with a different title.)

I knew Mrs. Beaufort on sight. She was a faded, middle-aged woman who had probably been pretty in her day, except that her day was past. I was surprised when she called me on the telephone and asked me to come out to her house. Strictly business, she said. I knew there would be money involved—quite a lot of money, I hoped—so I told her I’d be there at the time she indicated. I had experienced several reversals—failures, if you know what I mean—so I had been praying for just the kind of opportunity I hoped this would be: one that would pay me a maximum amount of money with a minimum amount of involvement and risk.

I had been doing some investigative work for years that allowed me to remain on the sidelines of the criminal underworld. I could go either way—I could tip off the police or I could perjure myself in court; I could provide a hiding place for somebody on the lam or help a murderer get across the border if there was enough in it for me. I had done some work for Mrs. Beaufort’s husband. Work he called “under the table” because it was work he didn’t want anybody to know about. That’s how Mrs. Beaufort knew about me and my reputation.

I had a feeling it would not be a good idea for people to see my car parked at Mrs. Beaufort’s house, so I took the bus out there and when I got off the bus I walked about four blocks to her place. It was raining but I was prepared for it; I was wearing a raincoat and a hat and carrying an umbrella. I looked as nondescript as I could.

The Beauforts lived in the biggest, fanciest house I had ever seen. It was like a house out of a dream, the kind of house that rich people in movies live in. There must have been thirty or forty rooms. When I rang the bell, I expected a butler to open the door, but Mrs. Beaufort opened it herself. She smiled at me and waved me in with the gracious air of a hostess. She took my coat and hat and ushered me into the most beautiful sitting room I had ever seen and pointed to a white sofa where she wanted me to sit. When I was comfortable, she offered me a glass of champagne. I had tasted champagne once or twice before in my life. She gave me the impression she had it every day of her life.

While sipping champagne—she made sure my glass stayed nearly full—we talked idly of this and that: the weather and the stock market, music and movies. I found her a smart and witty woman—a good companion on a rainy night when all you want is somebody to talk to. Pretty soon we were swapping stories of our childhoods and telling each other things we ordinarily would never tell anybody. She had been a tomboy who hated music lessons and briefly, in her youth, entertained the notion of becoming a nun. I told her the sad tale of my disadvantaged youth and how I had run away from home and lied about my age to get a job as a longshoreman. What I told her was mostly true but I wasn’t above adding a few embellishments.

After I had been sitting on the white sofa for an hour or so and the big grandfather clock chimed, reminding me of the passage of time, I suddenly remembered I was there for a reason other than reminiscing about my past. I asked Mrs. Beaufort what it was she had wanted to see me about.

She became serious and sat down beside me. She said she liked me and trusted me. She told me her husband had spoken well of me on several occasions and had found me reliable and amenable. I thanked her for the compliment and set my glass on the side table.

She and her husband had been married nearly twenty-five years, she said. They had had two daughters, one of whom died in an automobile accident at the age of seventeen. They owned six food processing plants and were about to open two more. Business had never been better. Money was pouring in every second of the day.

“That’s fine,” I said, “but what does it have to do with me?”

Her husband, she continued, had told her he wanted a divorce. He had started seeing a younger woman and had found that, even at his advanced age (he was fifty-two) he was still capable of feeling emotion.

“Isn’t that ridiculous?” Mrs. Beaufort asked, looking me steadily in the eye. “Feeling emotion? It sounds like an impressionable schoolgirl.”

“It takes all kinds,” I said.

“I don’t want to divorce my husband,” Mrs. Beaufort said. “A divorce would be ruinous to my business that I’ve built up over all these years and also ruinous to my family. I have to consider my only surviving daughter and her future happiness. I don’t want her to have the stigma of divorced parents hanging over her head.”

“Yes, I can see that,” I said.

“Since you are a reliable and a discreet man and you have a reputation for getting a job done, I was hoping you would be able to put me onto someone who could put my husband out of the way.”

“What do you mean ‘put out of the way’?”

“I mean exactly what you think I mean, Mr. Tyler.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, suddenly on my feet. “That’s way out of my line. I may be willing to bend the law one way or another to suit the situation but I don’t go in for that sort of thing. Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life in prison?”

“Of course not, Mr. Tyler. Nobody wants that. If a thing were to be done properly, there would be no fear of going to prison.”

“I really think I ought to be going,” I said. “It’s been, uh, interesting, but when you start talking about something as serious as—”

Mrs. Beaufort laughed. “You should hear yourself,” she said. “You sound like a silly naïf.”

“Like a what?”

“Here, have another glass of champagne and we’ll talk over my proposition.”

Mrs. Beaufort was willing to pay upwards of fifty thousand dollars to have her husband and his mistress killed. Ideally, she wanted it to look like a murder-suicide. The jealous older man discovers his paramour has been maintaining an open-door policy where old boyfriends are concerned. He flies into a rage and shoots said paramour in the head while she is sleeping and then turns the gun on himself—as simple as that. There would be no one to blame because both parties involved would be dead; no one snooping around asking questions.

If I could connect Mrs. Beaufort with someone who would do the job, she would pay me ten thousand dollars; forty thousand would go to the trigger man. If, on the other hand, I decided I was capable of doing the job myself, the entire fifty thousand would be mine. She hoped I would do the job myself, because, well, it just seemed better not to involve another party if we didn’t have to.

I told her I would think over the proposition. Fifty thousand was certainly an attractive sum and would give me the chance to get away and start afresh in a new locale, but I had to admit I didn’t relish the idea of killing two innocent people in cold blood.

“Not innocent,” she said. “And think of it as just another job, a job for which you will be handsomely rewarded.”

After a couple more glasses of champagne, I said that, yes, of course, I would be happy to do the job myself. I didn’t see how I could turn down fifty thousand dollars.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” she said, clasping her hands together like a schoolgirl. She poured her own glass full and proposed a toast. “To the success of our little venture,” she said. We clicked glasses and laughed.

When I left Mrs. Beaufort’s house that night, we were both happy and giddy. She was about to be relieved of a philandering husband who was all too willing to wreck her business and her life—also her daughter’s life—and I was about to make the biggest score of my life. I saw dollar signs before my eyes.

She told me to do nothing until I heard from her; she would know when the time was right to proceed. I waited almost two weeks and was starting to think the deal was off when she called me up late one night and woke me out of a sound sleep. She asked me if I could meet her the next evening at the Embassy Club at eight o’clock. I told her I’d be there at whatever time she said and then I rang off and went back to sleep.

The reason we were meeting at the Embassy Club, I discovered that next night, was because that’s where Mrs. Beaufort’s husband’s paramour (or mistress, whatever you want to call her) worked as a singer. Her name was Adele Kluge. Mrs. Beaufort wanted me to get a good look at her.

At the Embassy Club we were all smiles. We sat at a cozy little booth and made small talk and drank martinis like they were going out of style. We had dinner and then the floorshow began. The small orchestra came out and warmed up with a couple of mellow numbers and then the lights went down and the featured singer came out onto the little stage and waited for her musical intro.

When the lights came up enough for me to get a good look at Adele Kluge, I had to admit that Mr. Beaufort had good taste in dames. She was smart and elegant-looking, not cheap or flashy. She was maybe thirty-eight or forty years old, a mature woman and not a flighty young girl. She had chestnut-colored hair and looked stunning in a tasteful black-and-white gown. Her voice was polished and mellow and the orchestra was good too.

During Adele’s act Mrs. Beaufort was ill at ease; she wouldn’t look directly at Adele. She stared hard at the table or looked off to the side where the waiters came and went. When Adele was finished and left the stage to politely enthusiastic applause, Mrs. Beaufort was her old smiling self again.

“She’s good,” I said. I couldn’t resist.

“Do you think you’ll know her when you see her again?” Mrs. Beaufort asked me.

“Of course,” I said.

When we left the Embassy Club, Mrs. Beaufort asked me to drive her home. I pulled into her driveway and stopped at the front door, expecting her to get out, but she put her hand on the door handle and looked over at me and smiled sweetly.

“Would you mind coming in?” she asked. “I don’t feel like being alone.”

As we went up the steps in the dark to her front door, she held on to my arm a little more than was necessary. I could tell right away that she was putting on the helpless female act. I was determined to maintain my professional demeanor. She was just a person I was doing some work for; I wasn’t interested in more than that.

Once we were cozily inside with all the lights on, Mrs. Beaufort made some coffee and showed me a picture of her daughter that had been taken two years earlier. Stephanie was a pretty girl in an ordinary way. She had dark hair and a pleasing face with a hint of sadness around the eyes that told me she was something more than just a rich man’s spoiled daughter. I could tell that all Mrs. Beaufort’s hopes were riding on Stephanie.

After that, our conversation took a more serious tone. Mrs. Beaufort had decided that a week from Friday, the twenty-first, was when she wanted the murders to take place. That was only a week and a half away. Friday night was Mr. Beaufort’s night for recreation away from business. He would play poker with his poker club until midnight or so, and then he would go to Adele Kluge’s apartment on the eighteenth floor of the Marquand apartment building.

This was the way Mrs. Beaufort had it planned: I was to go to Adele Kluge’s apartment at around eleven-thirty and shoot her in the head while she slept in her bed. Then I would wait in the dark until Mr. Beaufort arrived and when he did I would kill him before he discovered Adele’s body. The best part of the plan, according to Mrs. Beaufort, was that I would kill them both with Mr. Beaufort’s own gun, which would be certain to be covered with his own fingerprints because it was his favorite gun and he was known to carry it with him on business trips for protection. When I asked Mrs. Beaufort how I was to acquire this gun, she went into another room and came back carrying a leather holster with the gun in it. I unfastened the holster to get a look at the gun; she warned me against touching it with my bare hands.

I was starting to get a sick feeling about killing Mr. Beaufort and Adele Kluge. When Mrs. Beaufort and I had talked about it earlier, it didn’t seem real to me, but now, since we had settled on a date, it was too real for comfort and I was thinking that I was probably too squeamish to pull that kind of a job—fifty thousand dollars notwithstanding. I kept my I-don’t-think-I-can-do-it thoughts to myself, though, and after a while I was comforted by the thought of the money I was going to get.

I didn’t know how I was going to break into Adele Kluge’s apartment without being seen or heard, but Mrs. Beaufort told me not to worry; she had a key to Adele’s door. When I looked at her with wonder and asked her how she came to have a key, she just laughed and told me it was one of her secrets that she didn’t care to divulge.

I told Mrs. Beaufort I was going to need some money in advance for a job that difficult and she didn’t give me any argument. She said she would have twenty-five thousand dollars in cash delivered to me before the twenty-first, and she would pay me the rest of the money after the job was done. She didn’t say how she would have the money delivered, but she seemed to have thought of everything so I let it go at that.

That night I spent a nearly sleepless night. I kept seeing Adele Kluge on that stage singing her songs; I hated to be the one to bring down the final curtain on her act.

True to her word, Mrs. Beaufort had twenty-five thousand dollars delivered to me on Thursday the twentieth in a neatly wrapped parcel. I knew the delivery boy didn’t have any idea what was in the package. I took it from him and ran into the bedroom and closed the door, even though I was alone, and pulled down the curtain and ripped the package open. I had never seen that much green before. It was the most beautiful salad I had ever laid my eyes on. And it was only half of what I was going to get.

The next day I was calmer than I thought I would be. I slept away half the morning and when I got up I walked to a café down the street and had eggs and ham. When I left the café, I knew I would be restless if I went back home, so I went to an early matinee and sat in the balcony and completely lost myself in the picture.

After that I went to a quiet little bar and had a couple of beers. The beers made me sleepy, so I went home and went to sleep on the couch. When I woke up, it was after dark and raining again and I had the jitters. I felt the way an actor must feel before he goes on the stage for the first time. I hoped I could keep from getting rattled and remember what I was supposed to do.

About ten o’clock I started getting ready. I dressed all in black, including black sneakers. I put the gun in the holster in my pants pocket and the key to Adele’s apartment in my other pocket. I rolled my gloves together with my ski mask and put them in the pocket of my raincoat. I put on my hat and looked all around my apartment—I don’t know what I was looking for—and turned off the lights and went out the door.

I walked down the street a couple of blocks to a cab stand where I got a cab and took it to the neighborhood of the Marquand apartments. I knew better than to have the driver let me out right in front of the building, so I got off at a drugstore a couple of streets over. I cut through a connecting alley and approached the Marquand building from the rear.

I went into the lobby breezily as if I belonged there. As I walked past the sleepy night watchman sitting behind a desk, he gave me a glance but I was careful not to look directly at him. I went to the elevator and up to the eighteenth floor.

At this point I told myself I could still cancel the operation if things didn’t look good; for example, if somebody was standing waiting for the elevator and got a good look at my face. I saw no one, though, and as I padded down the carpeted hallway looking for apartment 1806, I didn’t hear a sound.

When I found the door to Adele’s apartment, I stood there for a moment breathing deeply, trying to slow down the beating of my heart. I slipped on the gloves, took off my hat and pulled the ski mask over my face, put my hat back on, and pulled the gun out of its holster. Before I put the key into the lock to open the door, I glanced at my watch—it was exactly eleven-thirty.

The door opened effortlessly and I stepped out of the half-light of the hallway into the darkness of Adele’s apartment. I closed the door silently and returned the key to my pocket before I lost track of it and dropped it. I waited a couple of minutes for my eyes to adjust before I proceeded down the hallway to the right.

I came to a door that was partway closed—obviously the bedroom where Adele lay sleeping—and pushed the door opened with my left hand, holding on to the gun in my right hand.

There was just enough light in the room for me to be able to see the bed and Adele lying in it. She lay on her back with her arms outstretched; it was so quiet in the room I could hear the sound of her breathing, almost like a dainty little snore. I approached the bed from the left. She was lying toward the right side, with her head canted slightly toward the wall. I leaned over the side of the bed and put the gun within two inches of her head and pulled the trigger; she was dead instantly as the bullet entered her brain. I knew from the expression on her face that she felt nothing and knew nothing. That knowledge would comfort me in the days to come.

As I looked around the room for a place to hide, I told myself I was halfway home and this would soon be over. I was afraid that a neighbor might have heard the gunshot and would come running or, worse, call the police, but nothing happened; everything was as quiet as before.

On the other side of the room opposite the bed I saw a door that was obviously a closet. I crossed the room and opened the door and stepped inside and pulled the door closed, but still opened enough that I could see out into the bedroom. I felt oddly secure inside the closet, as if this was all in the past and I was only remembering it.

I waited inside the closet for maybe a half-hour, with only the sound of my own breathing, when I heard the door to the apartment open and close softly. I knew it was Mr. Beaufort and he was exactly at the time I expected. When he came into the bedroom, he didn’t turn on a light—another lucky break for me—and I could tell he was trying to keep from waking Adele.

He went into the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the bathroom light. I could hear the toilet flush and water running in the sink. In a minute he came out of the bathroom and stood beside the bed looking down at Adele. I thought he must know that something was amiss with her, but he turned his back to the bed and began unbuttoning his shirt. He removed his shirt first and then his shoes and pants and then he moved to the bureau and opened the drawer and took out a pair of pajamas. He was partway bent over from the waist when I moved up behind him like a disembodied spirit and shot him in the right temple. I knew he was dead right away, probably before he hit the floor.

With Mr. Beaufort dead at my feet and Adele Kluge dead in the bed, I let out my breath, not realizing until that moment that I had been holding it in. I took off my hat just long enough to take the ski mask off, put my hat back on, rolled up the ski mask and put it in my pocket. I bent over Mr. Beaufort’s body and pressed the gun into his right hand, molding his fingers around it.

“It’s nothing personal,” I whispered into his right ear.

I took a quick look around the room to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and then I moved through the dark apartment back to the door. I listened at the door for a moment and, hearing nothing, opened it and moved out into the hallway. As I closed the door, I made sure it locked.

Walking back up the hallway to the elevator, I took off the gloves and stuffed them into the pocket of my coat and ran my fingers through my hair. If I met anybody, I didn’t want to look disheveled. I didn’t want anybody to be taking a second look at me for any reason.

When I got off the elevator in the lobby, the night watchman was asleep in his chair and didn’t see me. I went out the door, took a deep breath of the night air, and began walking down the street. I had the sensation of being alive and that there was nothing better. I walked for several blocks through the deserted streets. I just wanted to keep moving. I didn’t feel like being still.

When I came to a phone booth at an intersection, I called Mrs. Beaufort, as we had planned. She answered the phone on the first ring.

“Hello,” she said in her quiet voice.

“The day is done,” I said.

She said nothing. All I heard was the click as she hung up the phone.

I was feeling hungry—I felt like I hadn’t eaten in days—so I stopped at a greasy-spoon diner and wolfed down a couple of hamburgers. After I left the diner, I walked and walked through unfamiliar streets until about two-thirty in the morning. When I spotted a cab, I flagged it down and went back to my apartment.

The next day I was asleep when the morning editions of the newspapers came out, but there was plenty of coverage in the afternoon editions. Millionaire businessman Everett Beaufort was found slain, along with a female companion, in a luxury apartment belonging to the female companion. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. Nothing was stolen from the apartment. Police were investigating the crime but so far had no leads and no suspects. One police detective at the scene, when interviewed, said it appeared the male victim had shot the female victim in the head and then killed himself. It was too early in the investigation, however, to know for sure exactly what happened.

About six in the evening when I was dressing to go out, there was a knock at my door. It was the same delivery boy as before with a parcel identical to the one he had delivered two days earlier. It was the other half of my fifty thousand dollars. I was happy to be able to mark the account “paid in full” and to be finished with Mrs. Beaufort forever.

Mrs. Beaufort wasn’t finished with me, though. She called me every day for two weeks, sometimes two or three times a day. She had taken to calling me in the middle of the night. She was distraught and said she couldn’t live with what she had done. She was going to go to the police and tell them everything. She was gong to commit suicide.

I tried to be patient with her, but I had to admit my patience was running thin. I tried to give her the old pep talk. I told her to think of her daughter’s future happiness. I told her the news reports of the incident looked good, very much in our favor, and she had nothing to worry about. And, anyway, I said, we shouldn’t be talking about this on the phone. We shouldn’t even be talking at all. We didn’t want the police to connect the two of us in any way. It was safer for both of us if we just went our separate ways.

One Sunday evening when I was planning on staying at home and going to bed early, she called me and told me she had to see me, she had to talk to me. I could tell from the sound of her voice that she had been drinking heavily. I drove out to her place and parked on the street a couple of blocks over and walked the rest of the way.

She was in a terrible state when I got there, crying and very drunk. I told her she was staying at home too much alone; she needed to get out and have some fun. She had most of the money in the world and she could do whatever she wanted, go anyplace, buy anything. She had every reason to be happy.

She said she was going to the police the next day; she planned on telling them everything. It was the only way out. They would come and pick me up unless I left town; she wanted to warn me.

I slipped a bottle of pills out of my pocket that I had brought with me. I hadn’t been sure if I was going to use them, but I brought them with me anyway. It was a powerful sedative; there was a warning on the bottle not to take them while drinking alcohol.

I gave her the bottle of pills and told her they would make her feel better, much better than alcohol. They would help her to sleep and make her forget all her troubles. She was grateful; she took two or three of the pills at first and washed them down with her vodka martini.

I stayed with her for several more hours. She talked and swilled liquor; I remained sober and listened. Occasionally she took a couple more of the pills, as if she didn’t know what she was doing or had forgotten how many she had already taken. By four in the morning she had taken almost all the pills and was unconscious. I figured that with the pills and the alcohol she would be dead by the time the sun was up.

The next day the story was all over the papers. The bereaved widow of Everett Beaufort had been found unconscious by her maid at around eight o’clock in the morning. By the time a doctor was summoned, Mrs. Beaufort was dead. All indications were that she had committed suicide. A daughter, Stephanie Beaufort, age nineteen, was the only surviving member of the Beaufort family.

I had my fifty thousand dollars and could take it easy for a while. I planned on going out West—possibly to San Francisco—and starting my own private detective agency, but I decided for the time being I would stay put. Stephanie Beaufort interested me. She was one of the richest girls in the country and was all alone. I watched the newspapers for any news of her. I had even spotted her a few times. She looked better in person than she did in her pictures. One day soon I planned on approaching her on the street and introducing myself. She would be hostile at first, thinking I was a reporter, but I would tell her I knew her parents; I would extend my condolences and offer my services. She was sure to warm up to me in time.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

 

Pay Phone
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

(This short story has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

While Charles was in the doctor’s office, his sister Vivienne insisted on waiting for him in the car on the parking lot, even though she might have easily waited inside.

“I hate doctors’ offices,” she said. “They’re full of sick people.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

Charles was fourteen, too young to drive himself for his quarterly checkups. His mother usually drove him, but today she had to go a funeral out of town, so his sister Vivienne was pressed into service.

He had to wait in the doctor’s office much longer than usual. When he was finished and finally ready to go, Vivienne was standing by the front fender of the car smoking a cigarette.

“I thought maybe you died in there,” she said, flipping her butt away. “I was about ready to leave without you.”

“I could have walked home,” Charles  said. “It’s only about ten miles.”

“What is it with doctors?” she said. “They think their time is so precious, but your time means nothing at all.”

“I don’t think they ever think about it,” Charles  said.

“They’re all jerks, if you ask me!”

Vivienne was seven years older than Charles. She had always resented his existence. She always thought of him as unnecessary and something of an embarrassment. If she could have flipped a switch and snuffed out his life, she would gladly have done so.

“Mother shouldn’t ask me to do errands for her when I’m so busy,” Vivienne said. “I have a wedding gift to shop for and I still have to get my hair done. You’re her child, not mine!”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I don’t ever want any children!”

“Fine by me.”

“They’re always wanting something and they make you old before your time. Ask any person who has children. If they had it to do all over again, they all say they would have remained childless.”

“Sounds like a wise decision,” Charles  said. “Say, I missed lunch today and I’m hungry. Let’s stop somewhere and get a hamburger.”

“No! There isn’t time. I’m late as it is.”

“Late for what?”

“Kenny is picking me up at six. We’re going to have supper at that new bistro and then we’re going to the theatre.”

“You mean a movie?”

“No, dumbbell. A movie is a movie. When you say, ‘the theatre’, you mean a play with living people acting on a stage.”

“Oh, right. I’ve seen plays before.”

“Where.”

“At school.”

“I’m not talking about that junk they put on at school. I’m talking about a professional play with professional actors in it. People who have trained for years to be able to do what they do.”

“I’m still hungry.”

“When mother practically begged me to take you for your doctor’s appointment, I didn’t imagine it would take all afternoon! I thought there’d be plenty of time.”

“Oh, try not to get your panties all in a bunch.”

She looked at him with disbelief. “What did you just say to me?”

“I said, ‘don’t get your panties all in a bunch’.”

She slapped at his shoulder with her right hand. “Where do you hear that kind of language?”

“I don’t know!” he said. “I hear it all the time!”

“I’m going to tell mother what you said.”

“I don’t care.”

“You know she doesn’t tolerate vulgar language.”

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“She’ll know soon enough because I’m going to tell her.”

“I believe I said earlier I don’t care.”

“It’s time you started acting your age.”

“Why don’t you act your age?”

“You have a very smart mouth, you know that? If you were my child, I’d smack you in the mouth every time you made a snotty remark.”

He mimed being smacked in the mouth and being knocked out.

“That’s not funny!” Vivienne said. “You still act like kindergarten.”

“Well, I know I don’t ever want to act the way you act! You’re a big phony and nobody likes you.”

“That’s not true! Lots of people like me!”

“Who?”

“Kenny likes me. He’s asked me to marry him.”

“Oh, boy! He doesn’t know what he’s in for if you ever say yes.”

“I’m very seriously considering marrying him!”

“Go ahead and marry him, then, so I can have your room.”

“I don’t think so, mister! That room is mine!”

“If you marry Kenny, you won’t need it anymore. You’ll be living someplace else.”

“We’ve going to live with my folks after we’re married so we can save enough money to buy a house. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

“Hah-hah! I don’t think so! I don’t think mother would ever go along with that.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, she doesn’t like Kenny.”

“She does so like Kenny. She loves Kenny. She told me so.”

“That’s not what she says when you’re not around.”

“What does she say?”

“She says, ‘I hope Vivienne never gets it into her head to marry ‘that Kenny’. That’s what calls him: that Kenny!”

“She doesn’t!”

“She doesn’t like his hairdo. She says it makes him look like a woman. I don’t like his hairdo, either.”

“Well, isn’t that just too bad! I’m sure Kenny will be absolutely crushed to hear you don’t like his hair.”

“Do you really want to be married to a man who looks like a woman? If you ever have any kids, they’ll be mutants!”

“Do you mean like you? You’re the mutant! As soon as I laid eyes on you when mother brought you home from the hospital, I knew there was something terribly wrong with you. I think aliens from outer space dropped you off at the hospital and mother was just unlucky enough to get stuck with you!”

“I hope that’s true,” Charles  said. “Because if it is, it means I’m not related to you in any way!”

“If you insult me one more time, I’m going to stop the car and you’re going to walk the rest of the way home.”

“Oh, what do I care?”

In another mile, the traffic slowed and then came to a standstill.

“That’s the thing about being out this time of the day,” Vivienne said. “Traffic is just too heavy!”

“What am I supposed to do?” Charles  said. “Bust into tears?”

“I hear sirens. That means there’s a wreck up there somewhere.”

“We might be stuck here for hours.”

“Go find a phone and call Kenny!”

“Are you crazy? I won’t do it!”

“Call him and tell him I’m stuck in traffic and I’ll be a little late.”

“I said no!”

“You might need me to do something for you some time.”

“I doubt it.”

“If you want my room, you can have it when I marry Kenny and move out of the house.”

“If you move out of the house, you won’t have anything to say about your room.”

“There’s a police officer over there! Go ask him what’s causing the delay!”

“Are you crazy? Do you think I want to get hit by a car?”

“Cars aren’t moving. We’re all just sitting here. Oh, this is maddening! This is the last time I will ever take you to the doctor!”

“Oh, you make me sick!”

Finally the police officer came closer to the car and Vivienne motioned him to her window.

“What’s the problem, officer?” she asked.

“Multi-car pileup about a mile ahead.”

“I’m in a hurry terrible!”

“Everybody’s in a hurry, ma’am! I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait it out. Nothing to be done until the wreck’s cleared away.”

After the officer was gone, Vivienne covered her face with her hands and began crying.

“Is your date with Kenny really that important?” Charles asked.

She reached into her purse and handed Charles her change purse.

“Here, take this!” she said. “Go and find a pay phone and call Kenny and after you’ve done that, have yourself a hamburger. On me.”

“And then what? I’m supposed to walk home?”

“Call yourself a cab. Pay for it out of my money. Mother can pay me back later.”

“Oh, all right! But you are a lunatic! You know that, don’t you?”

He put the change purse in his pocket and walked four or five blocks in the direction away from the logjam of stopped cars and angry drivers.

He didn’t see a pay phone, but he did see a restaurant and was instantly captivated by its smells of cooking food. He went inside, sat at a booth, and ordered from the elderly waiter a deluxe cheeseburger with everything on it and a chocolate milkshake.

When his food arrived, he ate quickly, not because he was in a hurry but because he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The cheeseburger was the best he had ever tasted and he wanted another one, but he didn’t want to press his luck. He was supposed to call somebody, wasn’t he? Oh, yes, he was supposed to call Kenny and deliver a message from his sister, who might still be stuck in traffic.

While he was paying his check, he asked the cashier the whereabouts of the nearest pay phone.

“There’s a booth up the street about three blocks on the corner,” she said. “You can’t miss it.”

He thanked the woman and went back outside into the cool evening air.

He was walking along, thinking how carefree he felt and how grown up he must look to the casual observer, when a boy not much older than he was approached him from an alleyway.

“Hey buddy, can you give me a dollah?” the boy asked.

Before he had a chance to respond, the boy put out his hands and pushed him over backwards with unexpected force. He lost his balance and fell easily.

While he was on his back on the sidewalk, too stunned to move, two other boys rifled his pockets and took Vivienne’s change purse with her money in it. After they had what they wanted, they ran off laughing.

“That was too easy!” one of them yelled.

He groaned and tried to stand up, finding that his head hurt terribly and his elbow might be broken.

“I want to go home!” he said piteously, but only to himself, because nobody else was around.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Hazel McCreary
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in Dew on the Kudzu: A Journal of Southern Writing.)

We were lost again. We had a map but didn’t know how to use it. I had been driving earlier but now Drusus was driving. His wife, Alma, sat between us, and I sat next to the window. Mama and Chickie were in the back.

The seat wasn’t long enough for mama to stretch out all the way so when she needed to lie down she used Chickie’s lap as a pillow. We were all a little worried about mama. She was so thin and now a little stoop-shouldered as if she didn’t have the strength to stand up straight anymore. We had to stop every now and then for her to get out of the car and walk around. She was car sick and sometimes she vomited. I couldn’t help but notice one time that there was some blood coming up.

“Sing to me, honey,” mama said.

“Oh, mama, I don’t want to sing now,” Chickie said. “I’m supposed to be resting my voice anyhow.”

“Are you nervous about the radio contest?” Alma asked.

“A little jittery,” Chickie said. “I’m trying not to think too much about it.”

“I just know you’re going to win with your lovely voice.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Drusus said. “There’s thirty or forty other people think they’re going to win, too.”

“I’ll do my best,” Chickie said. “That’s all I can do.”

The old woman giving Chickie singing lessons had taught her some opera from a piece called Madame Butterfly, but she was best at singing popular tunes like “Pennies from Heaven” and “Ten Cents a Dance.” She could sing anything, though, even church music; that’s the kind of voice she had.

“And I just know that doctor at the clinic is going to make you well again, Mrs. McCreary,” Alma said.

“I’m not sure he’ll even see me,” mama said. “We leave it in the hands of the Lord.”

“We’re praying for you and Chickie both.”

“He’ll see you, mama!” Drusus said. “We’ll make him see you.”

“How you gonna do that, son?”

“I don’t know. We’ll think of something. Rough him up a little bit, if we have to.”

We all laughed but mama groaned. “He’ll think you’re a bunch of ruffians,” she said.

“We are a bunch of ruffians.”

We came to a tiny town with a cutoff to a different highway. Drusus took the cutoff a little too fast. Mama almost fell to the floor and gave a little yelp. Alma fell over against me and pulled herself away as if I was poison to the touch.

“We’re not in no race, honey!” she said to Drusus.

“Well, this is it!” Drusus said. “This is the right way now. I just know it. We are officially not lost anymore. We are found!”

“Happy days are here again,” sang Chickie. “The skies above are clear again. So let us sing a song of cheer again. Happy days are here again!”

We passed a sign then that told how far it was to the city. “Only two hundred and thirty-seven more miles,” I said.

“I don’t know if I can last that long,” Chickie said. “Seems like we’ve already gone about a thousand miles.

“We’re doing it all for you,” Drusus said.

“I know,” Chickie said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“How about you, Wynn?” Drusus asked me. “Do you want to drive for a while?”

“No thanks,” I said. “You’re doing fine.”

I went to sleep with my head against the door and woke up when we had a blowout and Drusus pulled off the highway to change the tire.

We all got out of the car, including mama. She took a few steps and smoked a cigarette and said she was feeling a little better. She wanted to know what state we were in. When I told her I wasn’t sure, she laughed.

We took advantage of the unscheduled stop to have a drink of water and a bite to eat. We still had some bread left over, Vienna sausages, fruit, cookies and other stuff. Mama didn’t want anything to eat but she drank a little water. Alma spread a blanket on the ground for her and Chickie to sit on. Mama sat for a while and then lay down and looked up into the trees.

“This is nice,” she said, “laying on the ground and not having no tires turning underneath me.”

“I think mama’s sicker than she lets on,” I said to Drusus when we were changing the tire.

“The doctor in the city will fix her up,” he said.

“She’s trying to put a good face on it for Chickie’s sake. She doesn’t want to spoil her chance of singing on the radio.”

“Everything will be all right,” he said. “Don’t worry so much.”

Mama went to sleep on the blanket and we had to wake her up to get her back in the car. I took over driving from there, even though I liked it better when Drusus drove and I could just sit and watch the scenery and think.

We were all tired and we knew we were going to have to stop someplace for the night. We hadn’t made very good time, what with our getting lost and mama being sick and all.

At dusk we stopped at an auto court where, according to the sign, the cabins were clean and cheap. I went into the little office in the front and engaged our room and then we drove around to our cabin, number twelve in the back. With the shade trees, the two rows of trim white cabins, and the azalea bushes everywhere, it was a pretty place and plenty inviting.

We tried to get mama to eat some supper, but she just wanted to go to bed. Alma and Chickie helped to get her out of her clothes and into bed while Drusus and I sat on the front step and smoked.

“If Chickie wins the prize money,” Drusus said, “we can pay back Uncle Beezer the money he advanced us for this trip.”

“We can’t expect her to give up the prize money for that,” I said. “If she wins, I hope she’ll use it to advance her singin’.”

“Advance her singin’ how?”

“Go to the city and live there and meet the right people in the music business, agents and promoters and people like that. She could get a real singing career going for herself.”

“Do you really think she has a chance?”

“You’ve heard her sing,” I said. “Isn’t she as good as anybody you’ve ever heard?”

“Yeah, she’s good,” he said.

“If she wins the money, it’s hers. We can’t touch it.”

“Okay, but maybe she’ll offer part of it to help pay for this little trip.”

“We wouldn’t take it,” I said.

After a couple of minutes in which neither of us spoke, Drusus said, “Alma thinks she’s going to have a baby.”

“A baby!” I said. “You’ve only been married a month!”

“The curse of the married man,” he said.

“What do you mean? Don’t you want it?”

“We’re poor,” he said. “We don’t have anything. Even the car I’m driving belongs to somebody else. If we start off married life havin’ babies left and right, we’ll always be poor. Just like mama and papa.”

“There’s things even poor people can do, I guess, to keep from havin’ so many.”

“I’m not ready to be anybody’s daddy yet. I’m still young.”

I laughed at that line of reasoning. “People are gonna have babies, I guess, no matter what.”

“That’s a lot of comfort.”

“You’re not sorry you married Alma, are you?” I asked.

“Well, no. Not exactly. I probably wouldn’t do it again, though, if I had it to do over.”

“I’ll be sure and tell Alma you said that.”

“Don’t tell anybody about this,” he said. “She doesn’t want anybody to know about the baby just yet, because it makes it look like we had a shotgun wedding. I swear the baby wasn’t on the way yet when we got married.”

“You don’t have to convince me of anything,” I said.

“Not a word to mama or Chickie yet. Alma wants to make sure about the baby before she tells anybody.”

“I won’t breathe a word of it,” I said.

The women took the beds, so Drusus and I had to sleep on the floor of the cabin but I didn’t mind. I was just glad to be able to stretch out and rest my weary bones. I laid down near the screen door where I could feel a cool breeze and hear the trees rustling. After being on the dusty road all day, it felt like heaven.

As I drifted off to sleep, I could hear Chickie softly singing to mama her favorite song: “Deep night, stars in the sky above. Moonlight, lighting our place of love. Night winds seem to have gone to rest. Two eyes, brightly with love are gleaming. Come to my arms, my darling, my sweetheart, my own. Vow that you’ll love me always, be mine alone. Deep night, whispering trees above. Kind night, bringing you nearer, dearer and dearer. Deep night, deep in the arms of love...”

I slept all night long without waking up a single time and woke up at seven in the morning to the sound of the birds singing. I stood up from my makeshift bed on the floor to slip into my shirt and pants and that’s when I saw Chickie and Alma sitting quietly at the foot of the bed where mama lay. Alma was smoking a cigarette and I could tell Chickie had been crying, I knew her so well.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“We can’t wake mama,” Chickie said.

“Is she breathing?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’d better get a doctor,” I said.

Alma looked at me and shook her head and that’s when I knew mama was dead.

I shook Drusus by the shoulder to wake him up. When I told him what had happened, he had to see for himself. He went over to the bed and put his ear to mama’s chest and then he took Alma’s makeup mirror and held it to mama’s nose. He looked at the mirror and threw it down on the bed like a child with a toy that no longer works.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“I don’t want to go another mile from home,” Chickie said.

“We’d better call somebody and tell them what happened,” Alma said.

“No!” Drusus said. “We’re not calling nobody! They’ll ask us a lot of nosy questions. They won’t believe the truth about what really happened, that mama was sick a long time and we were on our way to the city to take her to a clinic. They’ll keep us here and make Chickie miss her chance to sing on the radio.”

“I think he’s right,” I said.

“We can’t go off and leave mama here,” Chickie said.

“Of course not,” Drusus said. “We’re taking her with us.”

After Chickie and Alma got mama dressed, Drusus carried her out to the car across his arms. I opened the door for him and he slid mama into the corner of the back seat with her head resting against the seat back. He then took a length of rope and tied it around mama’s chest so she would stay upright and not fall over from the movement of the car. Chickie gave mama’s dark glasses to Drusus to put on her and we found a straw hat that belonged to Uncle Beezer in the trunk and put it on her head. With the hat and the glasses and in her regular clothes, she didn’t look like a dead person.

We all got into the car and Drusus started her up. As we were pulling out of the place, the manager stopped us and leaned in at the window and said he was glad to have had us stay in his establishment and he hoped we had a pleasant journey, wherever we were going. He never noticed or suspected anything unusual about mama.

“I’m glad she died in a pretty place like this instead of on the road,” I said.

“She went quick and peaceful,” Drusus said. “That’s about as much as anybody can expect.

“We have a lot to be thankful for,” Alma said.

Drusus turned around in the seat and said to Chickie, “You’ve got to win the radio contest now. Not for fame or fortune, but for mama’s sake.

When we were on the highway again, going at full speed, Chickie began singing mama’s favorite hymn: “O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the works Thy hand hath made, I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed. When through the woods and forest glades I wander I hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze, then sings my soul, my savior God, to Thee, how great Thou art! How great Thou art! Then sings my soul, my savior God, to Thee, how great Thou art! How great Thou art!”

“I felt the baby stir in my womb just then,” Alma said.

Drusus groaned. “I could sure use some ham and eggs,” he said, turning and looking at some cows standing alongside the road.

Nobody said anything after that. Nobody needed to. We all felt good, though, even though everything didn’t work out as planned. We had the feeling, or at least I did, that nothing was going to stop us now. That old car of ours was sure burning up the miles.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

A Clown First and a Doctor Second
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

I was born in a hospital. My parents didn’t want me. They told the hospital people to drop me off at the nearest orphanage—or smother me with a pillow, whichever was most convenient. I was a healthy, sturdy, good-looking boy, but unwanted. I didn’t even have a name. With my profusion of white-blond hair and prominent baby nose, somebody on the hospital staff suggested I looked like the schoolroom pictures of George Washington, so my first name became George. A nurse who was eating her lunch was given thirty seconds to come up with a last name for me, so she said Pickles. From that moment on my name became George Pickles.

The question for the hospital people was what should be done with me since I didn’t have a home or a family. The nurses in the baby ward took care of me the same as they took care of the other newborns, but that couldn’t go on forever. I would grow and soon it would become apparent that I was a reject left behind.

The hospital people thought I might make an excellent janitor when I was old enough to use a mop or a broom, or, failing that, my organs might be used for a dying patient who needed a new liver, lung, kidney or heart right away. Of course, if my organs were used in this way, my own life would come to any end. This is undoubtedly one of the hazards of being unwanted.

At the age of three, I remained at the hospital and still nobody had decided what was to be done with me. Some of the doctors and nurses took a real liking to me; I became a sort of mascot. I was good-natured, easy to please, and not temperamental or fussy. Why somebody hadn’t taken me home and adopted me, I cannot imagine.

I could no longer stay in the baby ward for obvious reasons, so some of the doctors cleared out an unused room in the basement for me to stay in. They put me in a sort of baby bed on wheels that I liked because it was high and, out the tiny window over my head, I could see the sky. When I saw a bird fly past, I cooed in excitement. The nurses took turns taking care of me, feeding me and doing what else needed to be done, throughout the day and night. Some of the doctors would stop by just to pick me up and tickle me in the ribs so they could hear me laugh. Even though I didn’t have a real home or a mother and father, I lacked for nothing.

When I became a little older, the baby bed on wheels was swapped out for a regular bed. The nurses dressed me up in clothes from the charity box and fed me food from the hospital kitchen. They fixed up my room the way a little boy’s room would be in a real home, with stuffed animals, building blocks, tiny cars to roll around on the floor, and pictures on the wall of clowns and horses.

At five years old, I began to learn to read. At first one of the doctors would sit with me and patiently teach me the letters of the alphabet, but in no time I was reading on my own with little effort. Soon everybody started bringing me books because books were the things I liked best: colorful books with pictures of animals and simple texts and, later, young adult fiction. A couple years after that I was reading at an eighth or ninth grade level and, from there, I graduated to Mark Twain and the less-tedious classics of American literature.

As I was reading so well, somebody suggested that I should be in school with other children my own age. “It’s no need,” I told them. “I can learn everything I need to know right here on my own and learn it much more efficiently than I would in a public school.” The hospital psychiatrist was asked to give me an intelligence and reading comprehension test, whereupon he decided that my education was in no way lacking and was, in fact, far superior to what I would have received in the real world.

Besides the books people brought me, I had access to all the books in the hospital library, as well as the doctors’ closed-to-the-public medical library. I was reading novels and short stories, books on history, paleontology, archeology, ornithology, clowns, anatomy, physics, sociology…whatever the subject, I was reading it.

You’ll notice that in the preceding paragraph, I stated that one of my interests was clowns. I first became fascinated by clowns from the pictures on the wall in my room in the basement of the hospital. When I evinced an interest in knowing more about them, a particular friend of mine, Dr. Moorehead, brought me a book called The Big Book of Clowns, which contained many fascinating, colorful pictures and stories about real-life and fictional clowns.

After I read Dr. Moorehead’s book from cover to cover, I told him I wanted to be a clown; the next day he brought me a clown suit with clown shoes, clown makeup and a large red clown nose. The next time I saw Dr. Moorehead I was a clown. After that, I wanted to be a clown all the time, but the head nurse, a woman named Vera Ralston, told me it just wasn’t practical in the real world unless I joined a circus and she didn’t think I would ever want to do that.

Wearing my very own clown clothes, nose and makeup, I taught myself such clown tricks as juggling oranges, pie throwing and seltzer-water squirting; also some “physical” tricks like crumpling up when I got hit on top of the head with a rubber chicken, tightrope walking. and sliding on the floor without getting floor burns.

When people asked me why I was so interested in clowndom and in everything having to do with clowns, I told them I didn’t know, but that I believed somehow clowning was my destiny, that it played some role in who and what I was. One boy is interested in dinosaurs, one in racing cars and another in being the best at throwing a ball. My interest was clowns. How can we know where these things come from?

Somebody who felt sorry for me gave me some professional clowning attire with floppy shoes, wig, and a one-piece suit with plenty of padding, ruffled collar and cuffs. In this get-up I entertained at hospital staff parties. Sometimes I would go to the children’s ward and, despite my innate shyness, entertain the small patients there until I was exhausted. They especially liked me because they knew I was a child just like them.

As I got older, I knew I couldn’t be a clown forever. I needed to cultivate some additional interests. Dr. Moorehead, Nurse Ralston, and other people on the hospital staff asked me if I had any interest in becoming a doctor. When I told them I thought I might make as good a doctor as anybody else, they began bringing me books they thought might interest me—books on simple anatomy, the circulatory, respiratory and reproductive systems, and a book just about blood.

I had what’s known as a photographic memory. I could read one page and then put the book down and recite the page verbatim without any trouble at all. I absorbed medical knowledge like a sponge. I began working with some of the doctors as they went on their rounds. (I wasn’t allowed to see patients as a clown, though. I was instructed to wear a white coat so I looked like all the other doctors, which meant no rubber chickens, no red wig and no pies in the face.) In a couple of years I was ready to take my exams to qualify as a fully certified doctor.

Something was still bothering me, though. I wanted to know about my real parents: what they were like, where they lived, and why they didn’t want me when I was born. It’s natural for a person to want to know these things.

When I learned that the name and identify of my parents were in a confidential file in the hospital, I began trying to figure out how I might see this file, which, of course, was supposed to be strictly off limits. Nurse Ralston, Dr. Moorehead, and everybody else told me I was better off not knowing what was in the file. Still, they provided me with information that allowed me to find the file and read it at two in the morning when the hospital was sleeping.

There wasn’t much information in it other than the names of my real parents—Otto and Minnie Gruenwald—and their address, which I knew to be in a dreaded neighborhood downtown, a place people referred to as Skid Row. Telling Nurse Ralston I was going to an afternoon movie, I took a cab to the address and discovered it was a stricken residential hotel, midway along a boulevard of broken dreams.

The handful of people didn’t look at me as I entered the lobby. It occurred to me for the first time that a lot of years had gone by and my parents probably no longer lived there. Living in this place had probably killed them.

A desk clerk sitting behind a grubby pain of glass looked at me disinterestedly and expelled smoke from his nostrils. I told him who I was looking for and the corners of his mouth turned down into a reverse smile.

“What do you want to see them for?” he asked.

“It’s private,” I said.

“Are you a process server?”

“No.”

“Bill collector?”

“No.”

“A police officer sworn to uphold and protect the law?”

“No. I think I might be related to them.”

“You have my sympathy. The elevator don’t work. Take the stairs up to the fourth floor, if you’ve got the wind. They’re in room four thirty-one.”

As I knocked on the door of room four thirty-one, my mouth was dry. I realized I hadn’t thought beforehand what I was going to say.

A tiny woman, a midget, opened the door and looked up at me. Her face was covered with wrinkles and she had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Her reddish hair looked burned, bitten off.

“Are you Mrs. Minnie Gruenwald?” I asked.

“Whatever you’re selling I don’t want it!” she said.

“I’m not selling anything. I’d like to have a word with you and your husband if it’s convenient.”

“If this is about his gambling debts,” she said, “you’re out of luck. He died a month ago.”

“He’s dead?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

“Is it all right if I come in?”

“If you’re selling insurance or cemetery plots, I can tell you right now I don’t want any.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“You’re not going to knock me in the head and take all my money, are you?”

“No.”

“All right, then,” she said with a sigh, “but make it quick.”

She let me into her tiny suite of three rooms. I looked around quickly, seeing piles of clutter, clothes, papers, and magazines on every surface. She pushed a stack of newspapers off a wooden chair and gestured I might sit down if I was so inclined.

I sat down and I knew she was looking at my clothes and shoes, my haircut. “You don’t belong here,” she said. “I hope you make it out of the neighborhood alive.”

I thought she was making a joke, but when I looked at her and smiled I knew she was in earnest.

“This is an interesting old hotel,” I said, trying to find an opening to what I wanted to say.

“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s a rat hole. The city is about to condemn it.”

“I’m sorry. I suppose that means you’ll have to move.”

“Cut the palaver and tell me why you’re here.”

“You said your husband died?”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“His name was Otto Gruenwald?”

“It was, unless he had some other name that I didn’t know about.”

“Do you mind telling me how he died?”

“He had alcoholics’ disease, his liver was shot, he had diabetes, emphysema from too many cigarettes and he was insane. Are those good enough reasons to die?”

“Did you and your husband have any children?” I asked, trying to keep from sounding nervous.

“I’m not answering any more of your questions until you tell me who you are and what you want!”

“My name is George Pickles,” I said. “I’m a doctor or soon will be.”

“Did county welfare send you?”

“Nobody sent me.”

“If you don’t tell me what you’re doing here, I’m going to call that little punk at the desk downstairs and have him send up a couple of goons to eject you!”

“You were in the circus?” I asked, pointing at a faded poster on the wall.

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Were you and your husband by any chance clowns?”

“My husband was a clown. People loved midget clowns. He was like me, only a couple of inches shorter. I was a bareback rider and acrobat. I could do all kinds of shit while standing on the back of a moving horse. But why am I telling you all this? It’s none of your business. You still haven’t told me what your business is.”

“Was he always a clown?”

“He was a clown until he broke his back and had to quit. He was a clown, his father was a clown and his grandfather, going all the way back to the beginning of time.”

“So that’s where it comes from!” I said, excitedly.

“Where what comes from?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

“I’m going to have to cut this little tête-à-tête short,” she said. “I’m a very busy woman and I’ve got things to do.”

 “Do you mind telling me if you and your husband had any children?” I asked.

“What do you want to know that for? I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

“I want to know for my own information. I’m interested in knowing about clown life.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m writing a book.”

“About clowns?”

“Yes.”

“You won’t use my name, will you?”

“Of course not.”

She was silent while she got a cigarette going. “Well, it’s like this,” she said, letting a stream of smoke escape from her mouth. “I did have a baby once, but I had to give it up for adoption.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never talked about this before with anybody.”

“Strictly entre-nous, I promise.”

“The circus was no place for a baby. The life was hard.”

“I’m sure other people managed it.”

“They did, but they weren’t freaks like us. I only saw the baby one time but I knew he wasn’t a freak and that he wouldn’t have any kind of a life with us. My husband was always a heavy drinker and unreliable. No kind of a father. He even went around with other women, if you can believe that. He didn’t want the kid from the very beginning.”

“But you wanted him?”

“I knew I made the right decision for all of us, but especially for the baby.”

“Don’t you ever wonder about him? How he fared in the world?”

“Sure, I wonder about it all the time. I always hoped he was adopted into a nice family and grew up into a happy, successful, good-looking man.”

“If you knew how to find him, would you ever like to meet him?”

“Oh, no! I wouldn’t want him to see the trash he came from! He’s better off not knowing.”

“Maybe he’d like meeting you.”

“No, I want to keep things the way they are, with him not knowing anything about me and his father. And, anyway, I’m going away and I don’t know yet where I’ll end up. I don’t have any family or friends anymore. I might just get on a plane and fly around the world and choose a spot where freaks are welcome.”

“You shouldn’t think of yourself as a freak,” I said, standing up.

“It’s what I am,” she said. “Like it or not.”

After I took my exams and passed them to become a full-fledged doctor, I packed my bags and left the hospital. The people there were my family and, of course, they wanted to know where I was going. I told them I’d be back one day, but first I had something I had to do. I was a clown first and a doctor second.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp