Unsuspected Read online

  “Oh, me!” said Grandy. “I didn’t see any garbage truck.”

  “Mr. Grandison was watching the house,” Blake explained with his monumental patience, “the entire time, or practically so, between when Miss—er—the young lady says she saw—”

  “Oh, he was!” said Jane with peculiar emphasis.

  Tyl’s pulse was racing. She thought she saw how everything could be reconciled. “No, no. Maybe he didn’t see it!” she cried. “But it could have come along just the same. He might not have seen it People don’t. It’s like a waiter. You don’t see his face.”

  “Like the postman!” said Grandy quickly, almost as if he clutched at a straw. “Oh, my dear, can I be guilty of that stupidity? Chesterton’s Invisible Man! You remember, Tom. You’ve read those things. The invisible people who come and go in the street and are not seen because you are so used to them. Now, I couldn’t say—I really couldn’t say whether I saw a garbage truck—”

  “Suppose the dame in the house saw you, Luther,” Gahagen offered. “She tips off her husband.”

  “Yes,” said Grandy. He drawled out some doubt. “Yees.”

  “He sends a truck around.”

  “But, Tom—”

  “Listen. He’s the guy who knows exactly where those trucks are, all day, every day. They got a map and schedules. You’d be surprised. Say a lady loses her ring or a piece of good silver in the trash. Happens often. Why, he can stop the truck before they dump.”

  “Dump?” said Jane, her hand on her throat. “Dump?”

  “Yeah, they dump down at the incinerator.”

  “Is that a fact?” said Grandy. “They do know, then, exactly where each truck—”

  “Sure, it’s a fact.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the idea here?” said Blake. He slowed them down. He fixed on Jane. “You’re saying, miss, that this man Press sends around a garbage truck to pick up a man?”

  Jane swayed on her feet. “He sent a truck somewhere.”

  “And the man’s gone,” said Mathilda in a clear, bold voice. She stood by Jane. “He was helpless. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t yell. He could have been carted away.” Jane’s shoulder leaned on hers. The girls were side by side. It was a lining up of forces.

  “Now look here,” said Grandy reasonably. Everyone turned to him. “I do understand that Press is in a position to—let us say—summon a garbage truck. I know that. I concede as much. In fact, I remember now that he had spoken of the system with which they run their noisome affairs. It’s truly remarkable—truly—the things that go on in the background of our lives and we reck not of; we are unaware—”

  Jane said, “What are you going to do?”

  She said it to the others. Grandy went on smoothly, as if she had not done the unforgivable again and interrupted him, “I do not understand what it is you—er—imagine, Jane, my dear. How can a man’s body be taken away on a garbage truck? You aren’t saying that the men on the truck are all in cahoots? Now come. What had Francis done, ever, to the Department of Public Works?”

  Jane said, “The incinerator.” She lost all color. “The fires are so very hot!” Her face was dead white.

  Tyl said, “They wouldn’t— No! Where is the incinerator?… Jane, come on!”

  “Wait.”

  “No.”

  “Girls, girls, you can’t—”

  Tyl cried out, “Somebody’s got to—” Jane’s hand was on her arm, gripping tightly. They were allied. They ran toward the taxi. Gahagen leaped after them.

  Chief Blake said, hastily for him, apologetically, “Maybe we better run down there.”

  32

  The taxi driver was delighted to be on official business and go as fast as he could go. Jane and Tyl and Gahagen rocked in the seat, bracing themselves. Jane’s hand and Tyl’s were welded together. There was no use trying to talk. Now and then, Jane made a little moaning sound. She didn’t seem to know she was making a sound at all.

  Tyl thought, She must be in love. Her own heart kept sinking all the time, over and over again. It would seem to swell and then fall, and the fear would come in waves. She thought, Naturally, I don’t want him to be hurt. I wouldn’t want anyone to be hurt so terribly. They rocked around the last corner and raced down a little hill to where the road led over a weighing platform and into the vast wasted-looking spaces around the city incinerator.

  Jane said in Tyl’s ear, “How was it that Grandy was supposed to be watching?”

  Tyl said, “Because when I met him—”

  “You told Grandy!”

  “Of course. I—”

  Jane’s hand began to twist and pull. She was taking it away. She drew herself away. Tyl had the feeling that she’d been rejected. She was not included any more. The rest of this she would have to go through alone.

  The taxi whizzed across the weighing platform. A man there shouted with surprise, came racing after them. They went up the ramp. The brakes screamed. They had come through the great doors and to a stop within the building. They were in a vast room—not really a room at all. The inside of this brick building was all hollow. It was nothing but a great space, enclosed by the high walls, roofed over and crossed with girders high above them, and with high windows, tilted like factory windows, some of them open, many feet up in the walls. This great space, on three sides, was empty. Echoing. Clean. But in the faintly dusty air there hung a sourish, repulsive odor.

  On the fourth side were the pits. Here was where the trucks came to dump the burnable stuff. Here was where they backed up to a wooden curb and shucked off their loads. The refuse fell into huge pits built into the floor. And beyond the pits, on the other side, a great partition went up to within perhaps twenty feet of the high roof. It crossed the whole side of the building like a high parapet, with the pits like a moat in front of it.

  Above it ran a kind of track from which hung a big steel-jawed bucket that was working steadily, with sullen rumblings of sound. It came down, descended into the pit, nibbled and bit at the stuff in the pits and then went up, drooling, carrying its enormous mouthful over the partition, over the wall, to some mysterious fate beyond.

  Tyl looked up. Like a demon tender of the fires of hell, a head, a face with a snout, was looking down with great flat eyes, inhuman and horrible.

  The human man from the weighing platform came running up behind them. They heard the howling of the siren on the police car. Grandy and Blake and the rest.

  Gahagen said, “Which trucks dumped here the last half hour?” He didn’t know how to put the question.

  The man said, “All the trucks been in and dumped for the last time. All through.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yeah. They get through around now. They all been in. What’s wrong?”

  “We don’t know,” Gahagen said.

  Grandy and the rest came puffing up. The man who worked here was surrounded suddenly by all these visitors.

  Jane, looking sick, had edged toward the pits and was looking down over the rim. Her voice pierced the dusty, rumbling emptiness of the great bare place as if it cut through a fog. “There’s a trunk down there!”

  “Trunk?”

  “What trunk?”

  “Where?”

  The line of men advanced cautiously, peered over, each with one foot out, one back, with identical bendings of necks, like a line of the chorus.

  “Yeah.”

  “Trunk, all right.”

  “Well?”

  The employee said, “Yeah, I asked about that. Said it was full of stuff hadn’t been fumigated. Typhoid. People warned them.”

  “When did that come in?”

  “Last truck. Number Five.”

  Above the voices went the rumbling of the crane. Jane looked up in horror. “Stop that thing! You’ve got to stop it!”

  “Wait a minute,” said the man who worked there. “Now, listen. What’s the idea? What goes on here?”

  Chief Blake said, pursuing orderly thought, “Any way of finding out
where they picked up that trunk?”

  “Sure. Call up the yards. Get hold of the men.”

  “There isn’t time!” cried Jane. She ducked under Chief Blake’s elbow and bobbed up in front of him. “You’ve got to stop that thing! Stop it right now! What are you waiting for?” Her fists beat on his big blue chest. “Don’t you see, if he’s down there—” She was losing control.

  Grandy was peering into the pit distastefully. His face was pained. The big bucket went down again, gnawed at the nauseous heap, nuzzled at it, then slowly it rose toward the top of the wall.

  “Listen, they gotta clean up the pits before they can quit,” the man said stubbornly. “They don’t stop just for anybody’s fun, you know. The men down there firing, they wanna get through.”

  The fires, then, must be somewhere below, somewhere below the floor where they were, and beyond that wall, at the top of which still stood the man in the gas mask. His big glassined eyes were turned down and toward them.

  Fire. Very hot fire. Very hot indeed, to burn what was down there in those pits, what went slowly up in the big steel bucket, hunk by hunk, mouthful after steady mouthful.

  “What a place!” said Grandy. “What a scene! What a place!” His nostrils trembled. He peered over. His hand was on Mathilda’s shoulder. She shrank away from the rim, and yet something drew her irresistibly. To lean closer. To look down. She could see the top of the trunk. It was a big, old-fashioned turtleback, a big box with a humped cover. It was half buried in the debris, tilted, top upward. She tried to imagine Francis, down there in the pit, bound and imprisoned, shut in a dark box, waiting to be destroyed. She knew that was what Jane thought and imagined. But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be real. Such a thing could not happen, could not be happening.

  The big, empty, smelly place, the rumbling crane feeding the hidden fires, the efficiency of destruction that was going on here—the whole thing made her want to close her senses against it, not to believe, not to watch; to turn and go; to run away and go to a clean sweet place and bathe and forget.

  Jane was sobbing, “Oh, please, please, listen to me! You can’t take the chance! You’ve got to be sure!”

  Grandy swayed a little. “Jane,” he said, “you think he’s down there!” The thought seemed to make him ill. Tyl felt him going.

  She screamed. Somebody grabbed at her and held her back. She screamed again and again. The demon on the wall threw up his hands and disappeared. Men milled around her and shouted. The fumbling faltered and stopped. The bucket hung half raised, and from its iron lips the gobs of garbage fell.

  Down in the pit was Grandy. He lay on his back in the ruck, his thin arms and legs spread out, his face up. Was he dead? Had he fainted? She would have gone on screaming, but the man who was holding her put his hand roughly over her mouth to stop the noise.

  Jane had crouched down, was almost kneeling, right at the edge. Her eyes had a glitter. She was watching hard. Gahagen was shouting hard. Somebody came running with a rope. Gahagen was making as if to loop it around his own waist.

  But Grandy wasn’t dead or even unconscious. As they watched in the new silence, he struggled up. He got part way out of the ruck. Then, on his knees, he began to move, slowly, with difficulty, crawling across the pit, wallowing in the refuse because he had to, to move at all.

  They heard him say, “Wait. Not yet.” He was wallowing toward the trunk. He was curiously like someone swimming. He reached the trunk and hung to it a moment as if he might otherwise sink and disappear. They saw him strain to lift the lid, lift it a trifle. Saw his white head bend to bring his eyes to a position to see within. They saw him let the lid fall, fumble a moment more as if to look again. Then he raised his arm.

  They heard his voice come out of the pit, drawn out like a signal cry, humming and droning in the echoing silence, “Let … the ro-ope … do-own!”

  The rope went down with a loop at the end of it Gahagen lay on the floor, looking over, calling encouragement and instruction.

  Jane was a frozen bundle huddled at the brink. Her hand was flat on the dirty floor. Tyl thought, How can she bear to get her hand so dirty?

  Somebody called out from the big entranceway, and Oliver came running across the floor. He wound up, panting, “Cop told me! Where’s Grandy? Tyl, what happened?”

  Tyl thought, No time for gossip.

  “He fell.”

  Oliver’s eyes bulged with horror.

  Grandy was dangling now. They were pulling him out. He was rising from the pit on the end of the rope. They hauled him over the edge and he crumpled into a heap on the floor. His lids went down wearily.

  “Fainted.”

  “No wonder.”

  “Oh, by the way, gentlemen,” said Grandy’s velvet voice calmly, “there’s nothing in the trunk but some pieces of plaster, I think, and some old rags.”

  “My God, Luther, you’re game!” cried Gahagen. “Good man!”

  “After all,” said Grandy wryly, “I was in the neighborhood.” He turned his head, eyes closed, a tired old man.

  Somebody laughed. Somebody swore. Somebody must have given a signal then, because the rumbling whispered out of silence, began and grew.

  Oliver was kneeling at Grandy’s side. He was the image of devotion. “Get a doctor,” he demanded. “Get an ambulance.”

  “Nonsense, my dear boy,” said Grandy, but his lids were trembling. He looked very sick. He was filthy and contaminated—fastidious Grandy! An old man, after all He lay on the dirty floor.

  “This’ll be the end of him!” cried Oliver in despair. “Call a doctor, one of you! Hurry, can’t you see? Tyl, snap out of it”

  Tyl stood looking on. She had not fallen on her knees. She felt unable to bend or to move at all. She contemplated the image of devotion. She saw the puppet working to swing attention and concern. She saw Grandy lying filthy on the floor and the people all beginning to swing, to center him.

  The scene had nothing to do with her. She was alone, outside the circle and alone, suspended, lost. A puppet without strings would be as limp and lost. The bucket descended, to fall again at its work. She noticed that it had a weakness. She felt it was curiously repulsive that the great wicked thing with its greedy mouth was so weak at the neck. It had no neck, only cables. It fell weakly, and then it would nibble and chew and scrabble about, and gape and close and rise sternly, with the cable taut, to carry its load over the wall. Mathilda’s eyes followed it.

  Jane wasn’t in the circle, either. That circle around Grandy, where invisible bands drew like elastic, where he was pulling them with the magnet of himself, and they were responding like iron filings.

  Jane screamed. Jane got up from the crouching position and fastened on Blake’s arm. “No, stop it! Don’t let it start! You’ve got to look!”

  “Look where, Miss?”

  “In the trunk! In the trunk!”

  “Mr. Grandison looked.” The big arm rejected her.

  “No, no, not Mr. Grandison! You can’t trust him!”

  “What do you mean, you can’t trust—”

  Oliver got up. “What the devil’s the matter with you, Jane?” he asked severely.

  “Francis is in that trunk! In a minute that thing is going to take it! Where does it take things? Where does it go?”

  “The chutes. To the fires,” somebody said.

  “No!” Jane was nearly hysterical. “I tell you, you can’t take his word! Any one man’s word! You’ve got to stop that thing! Open the trunk! Let me see! Let me see inside!”

  “Now, just a minute, miss. After all—”

  “It’s your duty!” she cried. Tears ran down her face. She was frantic.

  Oliver said, “Slap her, somebody. Slap her in the face.” His voice got shrill. “We’ve got to get Grandy out of here! He’s a mess! Tyl!”

  “Seems to me we’ve done our duty,” Blake was answering. “Mr. Grandison saw what was inside the trunk. Now, miss—er—you don’t know the trunk came from Press’s house, do you? It
could have come from anywhere in town. It’s full of typhoid germs.”

  Tyl thought dully, Grandy’ll catch typhoid. She was watching the bucket, on its way up now. It seemed to be working a little faster. The men who tended the fires wanted to get through and get home.

  Jane said, “I know I can’t make you believe he’s lying. But he could be mistaken. You can’t afford to take even that chance. Suppose he’s mistaken? It’s a man’s life! Mathilda knows he was there in that house.”

  Tyl stirred. “Yes,” she said dully. She thought, If I can trust my own senses.

  The bucket was dropping down. Its cables were slack. It fell with that disgusting weakness at the neck. It fell, it nibbled, it crept quite near. Quite near the old turtleback trunk that lay half buried. The bucket’s jaws were big enough to take it up—just about big enough. Perhaps next time.

  “… nobody in the cellar.”

  “… girl musta made a mistake.”

  Blake said impatiently, “Now, look, miss. If I thought there was any danger—”

  “I don’t care what you think! I know there’s danger!”

  Oliver said, “What’s this about, anyhow? I wish somebody would—”

  Jane said, “Don’t take the time to tell him.”

  Maddeningly, Blake began, “This young lady—”

  “Stop that thing, I tell you!” Jane’s voice was ugly with her terror. “Stop it!” She tore her throat with the cry.

  Gahagen said, “Aren’t you a little bit hysterical?”

  Oliver said, “For God’s sake, with Grandy maybe dying—”

  Grandy was just lying there, pale and wan, filthy, done in, so weary and ill and pathetic.

  Jane’s eyes turned in her head to catch sight of the bucket going up. Not yet had it got the trunk into its jaws.

  Mathilda was alone. She knew they were all gathered around Grandy, who lay so dramatically exhausted at their feet. She could hear voices talking, talking, and Jane arguing, reasoning, pleading. And the bucket was coming down again.

  She heard Jane cry, “Somebody help me!… Mathilda, help me!”

  One would have to answer such a cry.