9cb261f7cd45f33ca37c87fa6590aac1

Mike asked, “Isn’t that a dirty word?” In the same instant, Patti said with faint sarcasm, “I’m glad to hear that. Be terrible if we had a what-you-call-it on our hands.”

From the beginning she had been hurt that anyone would want to psychoanalyze D.C. since it was obvious he was perfectly normal. She had told Zeke, “He isn’t any more neu­rotic than I am, or Ingrid, or Mike.”

“That could be,” Zeke had commented wryly.

Now Dr. Faulkner said, “He has undergone a change in emotional climate that has caused a deep-seated aberration. He is fearful of the quiet that has fallen suddenly on his world, and seeks escape in sleep.”

“You mean I can set off my rocket?” Mike asked.

“If that is normal procedure, yes. I would advise that you restore this household to its customary routine.”

Zeke took another look at Dr. Faulkner and hastily revised his estimate of the psychiatrist. He might have a point there.

24

At eight o’clock, Helen Jenkins sat in the bedroom rocker where she had spent most of the day. Dan and Sammy had moved a card table in and were playing poker. They spoke only in weary monosyllables, and Dan, who faced her, swept her every few seconds with his eyes. Behind the men the air conditioner rumbled and groaned uncertainly, and on an end table by the bed a radio emitted a fairly high volume of talk and music.

Shortly after breakfast they had shoved her into the bed­room, first pulling the shades. She realized then that her earlier threat to scream was futile, what with the radio and air conditioner going. And besides, one of them would be upon her almost before the scream was out.

Twice that day Dan had left the room, at noon to bring in cold cuts, and in midafternoon when he had looked up the landlady. Returning, he told Sammy, “We’re okay. She asked where we were going, and I told her San Jose . She said she was sorry to see us go, after I paid her the extra month’s rent for running out on her. Said we’d been nice, quiet tenants.”

Sammy said to her, “You hear that, Jenkins? She’s sorry to see you go.”

She offered no answer. Her earlier bravado was gone, and a deep despondency had set in. Not that she was quite whipped yet. She still had three hours, perhaps four. She still might think of a way out, although she knew she was deluding herself. She was a condemned woman on Death Row, hoping and praying for a last-minute reprieve, and hear­ing the quiet ticking of time as it ran out on her.

How many times that day she had glanced at the alarm by her bed she would never know. But every few minutes her eyes had been drawn in that direction by a compelling force. Time was something to squander, almost to forget in life ex­cept for the routine of arriving on a job and leaving, going to church, watching a television program. It never bad any deep significance in itself except when one was about to die.

Sammy put down his cards and said, “What’re we waiting for? She gives me the willies sitting over there, rocking, rocking, saying nothing, doing nothing.”

‘Take it easy,” Dan answered. “She’s not hurting you/’

Sammy shouted at her, “Sit still, you hear me? Cut out that rocking.”

She quit. There was no point in antagonizing him and cut­ting short the three hours. Or rather, now, two hours and fifty minutes.

Sammy continued, “I don’t trust you, Jenkins. I’m going to put a gag on you and tie you up. Okay, Dan?”

Dan nodded.

25

The television blared full blast as Ingrid, sprawled on the floor, studied about the scrape Cromwell got into back in 1649. In one corner Mike worked with rapt concentration assembling his Telstar satellite model.

They both swung about as the front door burst open and Patti charged through it, simmering. “I just told Mrs. Macdougall in the kind of language the old hag could understand to train her interceptor ears on somebody else’s bedroom.”

She turned to Mike, “And don’t let me ever hear you call any woman an old hag, not even Mrs. Macdougall. You hear me?”

Stunned, Mike nodded. “What’d I do?” he asked Ingrid. He caught it even when he didn’t do anything. “It’s like pre­ventive medicine,” Ingrid had remarked once. “If you get told off before you do something, it helps you.”

Well, that was the way adults thought. Crazy, crazy.

At exactly nine thirty-seven, D.C. entered the living room and sat down. He pretended to wash an ear but was actually taking reconnaissance. The scene, he noted with satisfaction, was back to bedlam. He never could understand it. People made more racket than any other animal. Yet they would yell if a cat raised his voice during love-making, or if he ex­pressed himself during a fight, although no cat created nearly the ruckus that cars and trucks did, or television sets, planes, or squalling babies, or even the garbage disposal.