ALBERT E. COWDREY

REVENGE

THE RAIN WAS SLOW AND cold and persistent — really, thought Mrs.

Zahl, a Yankee

sort of rain, not like the usual New Orleans gullywasher. In the foyer she

slipped off her transparent rain cape and threw it over the halltree; she kicked

off her

wet shoes and padded into the semidark sitting room in her damp stocking

feet, thinking

only of bourbon and rest. Really; the Preservation Society — how

tiresome good works were!

Actually, she went for the human contact. Only…humans were so unsatisfactory,

as a rule.

It would almost be better to start going to Mass again, where people

kept their silly

opinions to themselves, except, of course, the priest.

Mrs. Zahl turned on a small lamp

with painted hunters and bounding prey and

mixed herself a stiff Old Fashioned at Charlie’s

memorial wetbar. Here that

comfort-seeking man had lived and, with stunning

appropriateness, had died in

the very act of raising his glass toward his wife’s

contemptuous face and

saying, “Cheers, darling.”

Fatigued and depressed, Mrs. Zahl felt

suddenly that everything in her life was

dying out. This gloomy insight brought thoughts of

her son. When dear Sam, her

only child, moved to Cleveland with his wife (Mrs. Zahl never

thought of Marian

as her daughter-in-law, or anything else lawful) the remoteness would

become —

well —

Unbearable was not in Mrs. Zahl’s vocabulary, for she believed that

anything can

be borne if one is made of the right stuff, but after some fumbling in her

mental

thesaurus, she came up with the word “difficult.” Yes. Life would be

difficult without Sam

and the grandchildren. Very. Then, as she was laying out a

game of Solitaire next to the

drink on a little mahogany table, a new sort of

chill struck her.

Oh dear, she thought, it’s

just Charlie’s sort of weather, isn’t it? The

shadows. And of course she was feeling down,

too, and that often contributed to

his, if that was the word, apparitions.

Hastily she got

up and went to let Shiloh out of the cellar. Should have done it

anyway, the poor creature

had been there for hours. And in fact the toy collie

was waiting just inside the cellar

door, not barking of course, Mrs. Zahl had

fixed that long ago, but bright-eyed, smiling,

and Mrs. Zahl smiled back with

affection and relief. She knelt down and she and her silent

dog communed for a

few long wet minutes, and then she got stiffly to her feet and returned

to the

living room with Shiloh romping around her.

Another minute, and Mrs. Zahl was filled

with a dawning sense of comfort, with

the cards in her hand, another gulp of Old Fashioned

spreading warmth into her

toes, and Shiloh’s hot little triangular chin resting in her lap.

She was just

thinking about turning on the television for the five-thirty news when Charlie

appeared.

There was no sound to catch her attention, yet she turned her head as if someone

had slapped her hard across the face. In the same instant Shiloh raised her head

and then

sprang off the sofa with a scrabble of hard claws on the polished

flooring. From the dark

hallway where Mrs. Zahl had gone to open the cellar

door, Charlie appeared bluishly, like a

gas flame, pottering along in his

well-known weaving walk that had always given him the

look of being smashed even

when he wasn’t.

Mrs. Zahl was not afraid of Charlie dead any more

than she had been of Charlie

living, but she had to admit to herself— she was a woman who

valued truth and

above all self-knowledge — that the thought of possibly being touched by

a man

who had been dead fourteen years filled her with horror. Fortunately, Charlie

had

never presumed so far. He came, as usual, just to the edge of the lamplight,

while Shiloh,

all a-quiver, approached him at a kind of trembling ramrod point,

one paw raised and nose

and tail stretched out, longing to sniff but never quite

daring to touch this flickering

blue semblance of a man she had never known in

the flesh.

As usual, he didn’t look directly

at Mrs. Zahl, but turned obliquely and

pottered into the shadow cast by his old upright

sectional desk against the

wall. She waited breathlessly, half expecting him to pull his

Newman High School

yearbook out of the glass case that formed the top section of the desk.

The book

contained his picture as a young tennis star in blinding whites, a picture so

stunningly

unprophetic of the man he became that Mrs. Zahl occasionally took it

down herself, simply

to stare in wonder at the gleaming butterfly that had

somehow reversed the usual process of

metamorphosis and ended up a large slow

worm.

But as usual, he vanished into the shadow and

was gone, perhaps passing through

the wall into the wet garden outside where the hangdog

flowers awaited the first

freeze and the sundial displayed its possibly threatening

message, Time Takes

All But Memories. Shiloh spent several minutes running about and would

certainly

have made the welkin ring, whatever a welkin was, with her barking if she had

been

able. Thank God I had both ends of her fixed while I was at it, thought

Mrs. Zahl,

beginning, with shaking hands, again to lay out her game of

Solitaire.

Eventually Shiloh

came back and put her head in her mistress’s lap, and all was

calm again until the old Seth

Thomas chimed seven. Then Mrs. Zahl called Shiloh

into the kitchen, heated up some

storebought gumbo, steamed a cup of rice, and

dividing dinner into two equal parts, gave

one to her dog before settling down

to eat the other half herself. Distinctly, she felt she

needed something warm

inside. They both did.

The haunting of Mrs. Zahl had developed

gradually, somewhat like the process by

which the British Commonwealth had emerged from the

British Empire. As her

fleshly companions disappeared, ghostly ones arrived to remind her

of them,

though scarcely in a satisfactory or comforting way.

Mrs. Zahl’s sister Jodie had

been a persistent ghost, mooning around the upper

hall for months and months and months

after her death. Alice Watts had been a

surprise, considering that she and Mrs. Zahl had

never been close in life, but

she had faded out after three or four weeks of intermittently

dwelling in the

hall closet among Sam’s retired bats and racquets and the plastic-wrapped

ornaments that Mrs. Zahl no longer bothered to put on a tree since Sam’s wife

had stopped

the children from coming over for Christmas.

Once a completely strange ghost had wandered

in off the street, a ratty-looking

old man in a pea jacket, but had met with so freezing a

reception that he never

returned. Oddest of all had been the ghost of her previous dog

Casey, drawn,

Mrs. Zahl believed, by the fact that Shiloh was permitted to go into heat

once

before she was fixed. In any case, after the vet performed the operation Casey

did not

return.

Trying to explain to her therapist once what a ghost looked like, Mrs. Zahl had

said

that it looked as if someone had defaced a nice, solid oil painting of a

room with a few

hasty thin strokes of water color that left the original scene

perfectly visible behind

them. The therapist had told her she was hallucinating

and that it was not uncommon for the

bereaved to do so during the “denial” phase

of grieving.

Mrs. Zahl had told him not to be

silly. Much as she loved her sister, she had

never been able to forgive Jodie for an

incident involving a stolen corsage that

had happened in 1956. In fact, she had skipped the

denial phase altogether with

Jodie, going straight from her initial shock to acceptance.

She hadn’t grieved

for Alice Watts at ail, just sent a wreath and removed her from the

Rolodex.

Casey was a dear fellow, but after all he was getting on when the BMW hit him

and

Shiloh was such a comfort. As for Charlie, she had accepted his death a long

time ago as

God’s will or whoever’s. Besides, Shiloh saw the ghosts too, and did

the therapist suppose

that the dog was in “denial”?

Of all the ghosts only Charlie endured, and it was

understandable; after all,

this was his home, too. Mrs. Zahl felt that as long as he wanted

to come, she

would have to put up with him — after all, he had given her Sam. And yet, and

yet. Even more than before his death Charlie represented another dissatisfaction

in a life

that was too rich in them. Only her innate strength of character

enabled Mrs. Zahl to let

Charlie keep coming back, for she was certain that if

she flatly commanded him to be gone,

he would potter a last time through the

wall and go haunt someplace else, such as his

locker at the Uptown Lawn Tennis

Club (or more likely his favorite booth at the Members’

Bar) where he felt at

home.

Or, she wondered suddenly as she ate her supper, was her

kindness a sign of

weakness? During life, she had been perfectly content for him to stay in

the

club for days at a time, but now she preferred him even as he was, even with the

feeling

of dread that accompanied him, to nothing at all.

She and Shiloh finished the gumbo, which

was surprisingly so-so for a product of

Kielmeyer’s, known locally as The Rich Folks’ Deli.

Even before Mrs. Zahl was

done, a bubble of gastric distress switched on like a pilot

light, kindling dark

thoughts in her midriff—long ago identified by the Greeks as the

dwelling place

of the soul, and certainly the dwelling place of the soul among the natives

of

New Orleans.

“Really,” said that strong but unhappy lady as she collected Shiloh’s

well-licked

dish to place beside her own in the dishwasher, “how much am I

supposed to put up with?”

Shiloh tried to answer, but of course couldn’t.

THE PHONE RANG about eleven, when Mrs. Zahl

was already in bed with the lamp on

and a New York Times crossword puzzle book propped on

her knees. It was Sam,

sounding — as was customary for him these days —distressed and

more than a

little drunk. After perfunctory greetings he began to whine, as usual.

“They say

you turn into your father as you get older. God, do you think so,

Mama?”

“I don’t think you

could ever be a great deal like Charlie, dear. Except your

nose, of course — that’s very

definitely from your Dad.”

“I just don’t seem to — “

He hesitated, and Mrs. Zahl

effortlessly supplied the words that he was

thinking: Be able to cope. Be able to make

decisions. That remark about turning

into his father gave her a little cold chill.

“Don’t

seem to what, dear?” she asked a little unsteadily.

“Oh, I don’t know. Stay sober, for one

thing. I just keep having the feeling

this move isn’t a good idea, I shouldn’t be doing it,

and yet I’m committed now

and the process just rolls along.”

“I know you hate to leave New

Orleans.”

“Well, I do, and yet it’s a big opportunity as Marian keeps telling me. Get into

the corporate headquarters and forge ahead and so on and so on. I keep thinking,

is forging

ahead what I really want to do? Besides, it’s cold up there in

Cleveland, you know? Really

cold.”

He sounded like a child and she let him babble on. Tomorrow he’d be ashamed of

crying

on his mother’s shoulder. Meanwhile a second track in her mind thought

about Sam as Charlie

and Charlie as Sam. Could it be that Charlie had once been

a decent, hapless Sam, and that

he had sunk into booze and acquiescence as his

spouse first took charge of his life and

then despised him for allowing her to

do so?

This living alone, she thought — introspection

is the very devil!

“Where are you calling from?” she asked, more or less at random.

“From

home. I’m in the den.”

“Oh? Where’s Marian?”

Shiloh, catching her mistress’s tone, raised

her chin from the bed where she had

settled down in her accustomed spot.

“Damn, didn’t I

tell you? She’s in Cleveland seeing about the new house we’re

buying. I’ve got so much

stuff to clean up here I couldn’t go, and we’ve got

Mrs. Annunciata to take care of the

kids while she’s gone.”

Mrs. Annunciata, thought Mrs. Zahl, not me. The withdrawal of her

grandchildren

had been slow, a kind of Chinese water torture, with no break, no quarrel to

explain it. When she realized what was happening, Mrs. Zahl had humiliated

herself, almost

groveling to Marian in hopes of stopping the process. And Marian

had smiled, accepted the

groveling, demanded more, and squeezed her steadily out

of the children’s lives.

At that

recollection, all of Mrs. Zahl’s vague unhappiness seemed to condense

into an emotion that

was no less dark but considerably harder.

“And she’s flying back tomorrow.?”

“Oh, you know

Marian. Everything planned to the split second. She’ll be leaving

Cleveland about

four-thirty or five tomorrow morning, pick up her car here when

she gets in at seven-five,

and drive herself home. I’ll have gone to the office

when she arrives and we may get to see

each other tomorrow night if we’re

lucky.”

“Goodness,” said Mrs. Zahl. “That means she’ll be

driving in the morning rush,

and they’re predicting more rain and a freeze by dawn.”

“She’s

a very good driver, Mama.”

“But very fast.”

Eventually he ran down and Mrs. Zahl urged him

to sleep well and rang off. She

remained thoughtful and the crossword puzzle book lay on

her knees unworked,

even though as a rule she was too conscientious ever to start a puzzle

without

finishing it.

After a while Mrs. Zahl laid aside the book and got up so quietly that

Shiloh,

sleeping peacefully at the foot of the bed in a hillock of mauve quilt, at first

didn’t register the fact. The dog only woke and came skittering after her when

she

extracted her winter robe from the closet with a jangle of wire coathangers.

Mrs. Zahl

padded in soft mules through the bedroom door to the head of the

stairs and began to

descend slowly, without putting on a light. The stairs

creaked, and when she was halfway

down, a huge gust of wind buffeted the house

as the predicted cold front arrived.

Mrs. Zahl

muttered to herself, or perhaps to Shiloh, “It’s just his kind of

weather.”

At length she

stood in the dark sitting room where she had sipped her drink and

eaten dinner, listening

to the rain and wind hit the windows together and make

the old wooden sashes leap against

the frames. The house leaked like a sieve,

always had, and little snakes of cold slithered

over her ankles and poked

exploring tongues up her calves under the nightgown and the robe.

After fifteen

minutes she was thoroughly chilled and discouraged.

“Oh, I should have known

he wouldn’t come the one time I wanted him,” she told

Shiloh.

And then stiffened. She was

feeling a kind of cold that had nothing to do with

weather fronts or warped sashes. Shiloh

too was rising slowly from the place on

the sofa where she liked to curl up and was

pointing her sharp nose at the

really profound, disturbing darkness that filled the end of

the room and the

hallway beyond like a cave.

Darkness visible, thought Mrs. Zahl

distractedly, and then the blue flicker

appeared and Charlie was, once again, pottering

toward her on his inevitable

round.

Her heart was thudding dangerously and she would have

given anything not to have

to move, but in fact she stepped forward into his way and

blocked him from his

route to the wall behind the sectional desk. She felt a great horror

at the idea

that he might pass entirely through her, as ghosts were supposed to be able to

do. She did not think she could stand it if that blue flicker touched her heart;

she

thought she would die on the spot. But in fact he came to a halt just in

front of her, his

rather shapeless face raised and turned a quarter to the left.

He had no eyes, and Mrs.

Zahl, trying to look into what wasn’t there, found

herself staring through the holes at a

corner of the divan and at Shiloh’s

trembling pale furry face. She could estimate where

Charlie’s eyes ought to be

because the familiar pouchy iridescence lingered beneath them

and the bald brow

gleamed above — all in blue, of course, not the mottled red of alcoholic

life.

She tried to speak once and failed. She tried again and this time her voice came

out,

so hoarse that she might have been incubating some horrible disease of the

larynx.

“Charlie,”

she croaked. “Charlie.”

The thing flickered, as if she had spoken into a candle flame and

her breath had

caused it to shiver and warp. Afraid that he might disappear, she lowered

her

voice and whispered urgently:

“They’re your grandchildren as well as mine. Oh, I know I

wasn’t a very loving

wife and I’m sorry, but I was always faithful. Sam is yours and his

children are

yours, too, Charlie, and we’re losing them.

“Charlie, listen to me. I can’t

stop her but you can. She’ll be driving over icy

roads tomorrow about seven, driving like a

bat out of hell, and she’ll be tired.

It’ll be dark in the car. All you have to do is

appear to her there, at the

right time, maybe at the I-10 overpass. And Charlie, listen.

Touch her. Put

your—put your hand into her chest. Touch her heart. Put your fingers around

it.

Can you do that? Charlie!”

By way of answer he did a strange thing. He raised one pudgy

flickering hand to

touch her face and put his fingers through her cheek into her mouth. She

felt in

her teeth a strange little electric shock that was somehow horrifying. She felt

his

fingers drawn along her tongue and her face twisted as if she had bitten

into a terribly

sour fruit.

This was worse, much worse than she had imagined. Her heart paused, gave a

bound,

and began to pound so loudly that she could hear it. At the same time she

felt an

irresistible cold pressure. She stepped back, caught herself against the

divan, and Charlie

pottered past her and disappeared into the shadow by the

desk.

Mrs. Zahl needed a very stiff

drink after that experience. She had sensed some

kind of malignant force in her dead

husband that surely he had never possessed

in life. Surely not? The overweight ex-jock, the

hard-drinking clubman, the

successful peddler of oil-field equipment? But then, since she

had lost interest

in him so early, how much had she ever really cared to know about him?

Shiloh was distracted, rushing about and trying to bark.

Eventually they found their way

back upstairs to the bedroom, where Mrs. Zahl

and her dog huddled under the covers until

dawn and the empty glass stood on the

bedside table, exhaling the smell of whiskey. And the

dawn, as it will, however

reluctantly, came at last.

TRUST HIM to get it wrong, she thought

bitterly, watching the early news on

WWL-TV. Trust Charlie. All he had had to do was appear

to Marian at the right

time and touch her. That was all. Not to the pilot, when he was

trying to land

his plane in an early morning soup of rain, fog and ice.

Sitting on the sofa,

staring at the television set, her eyes sunken and dark,

her robe clutched to her throat,

she watched the red flashes cycling, the

floodlights illuminating the downrush of sleety

rain, the smouldering wreckage

of what the announcer kept calling Flight 911.

A hundred and

twenty-three people! Mrs. Zahl knew that if she lived for

centuries, she would never, never

be free of the guilt of causing this massacre.

But who could have believed that Charlie,

Charlie, would destroy a whole

planeful of people? And why had he done it? Just clumsily,

stupidly, as he had

done so many things in life?

Or, she thought suddenly, was it simply a

coincidence? Somehow that was more

believable, and some of the weight pressing on her chest

seemed to lift. After

all, the plane might have crashed for a dozen different reasons while

Charlie

was innocently flitting through the terminal parking garage, looking for

Marian’s

red Honda. Gradually Mrs. Zahl began to relax. Charlie getting lost

seemed so much more in

character than Charlie dealing death and destruction.

“It was just Fate, Shiloh. That’s

all.”

Mrs. Zahl sat back on the sofa, trembling. The announcer went on about something

else,

she was never to remember what. Gambling on riverboats or some such

nonsense. Of course the

crash must have been the work of Fate, not of Charlie.

Fate so often untied knots that

seemed absolutely tight. You worried and stewed

and cudgeled your brain and then the thing

you feared just didn’t happen, for

some unimaginable reason.

Anyway, thought Mrs. Zahl, both

she and Charlie had been saved from the guilt of

killing someone. She retained enough

religion to be glad of that, although —

she added to herself firmly — they still shared

the guilt of wanting Marian

dead. Something else to he confessed, assuming that she ever

went to confession

again. But they had wanted to kill only Marian, not a crowd of innocent

strangers, and they had not actually done the deed. It remained only a wish.

She reached

out a still-trembling hand to turn on the light, for the morning was

excessively dark and

dreary as well as cold and wet and slippery outside. And

then, for the third time in

twenty-four hours, that other feeling came over her.

Oh, dear, she thought, the resident

ghost again. Well, now at any rate she could

ask Charlie straight out (even though he never

spoke, so how could he tell her?)

about what had actually happened at Moisant International

Airport this dark

morning the 25th of January.

She got unsteadily to her feet and turned.

The blue flickering was brighter than

ever before, and for good reason. Out of the darkness

a crowd of ghosts began to

trail across her floor, giving her looks that were either

bewildered, fierce, or

mournful according to their natures.

First came a fat woman holding a

little girl by the hand, then a businessman who

was clutching the transparent outline of

his laptop computer as he shuffled by.

Then a terribly young couple, still holding tight to

each other and not even

looking at Mrs. Zahl. A boy about twelve followed, snivelling into

his sleeve;

an elderly couple with a tremendous air of indignation about them; a black man

shaking his head who paused to point an accusing finger at her; a pretty, pouty

girl

wearing the misty outline of a pale fur and a mini…

Mrs. Zahl staggered and caught

herself against the divan, her mouth moving

silently like Shiloh’s as she watched them

pass. Then, with hands shaking like a

victim of Parkinson’s, she fetched a bottle from

Charlie’s memorial wetbar and

mixed herself a drink. It seemed heartless, but she needed

the liquor

desperately. And then she stood and watched them pass, for the first of what she

assumed would be many, many eternities.

She had misjudged Charlie entirely. He must be in

Hell, and he had done this to

damn her, too. How could he! After all, she had merely not

loved him; how could

he have hated her?

Still she did not despair. Silently she vowed to

defeat him by a life of

suffering and repentance. A hundred and twenty-three people had to

file past and

she forced herself, as the beginning of her penance, to look each and every

one

of them in the face. She was beginning to formulate a prayer acknowledging

everything

and asking forgiveness when Marian appeared.

Oh, she was unmistakable. Here she came, her

bluish form distinctive with padded

shoulders and long bob, like a refugee from the Andrews

Sisters, with a dim

gleam about the mouth as a memorial to her large horsey teeth. She was

clenching

her little fists in baffled rage, positively trembling with fury that all her

plans

had gone to pieces, that she would never be the wife of a CEO, that Sam

would call off the

move, that her children would be raised by their grandmother!

At the sight of her Mrs. Zahl

lost every particle of her sense of guilt. While

Shiloh gave a silent snarl, she raised her

half-empty glass and smiled straight

into what had been Marian’s face. She said, smiling,

“Cheers, darling.”

She did not have a single moment to disavow that malignant joy when

Marian

stepped forward and thrust a small, cold, flickering hand into her chest and

grasped

her heart.