We Are What We Pretend to Be Read online

  “Welcome, brother,” said the young man at the end of the hymn. Mr. Banghart stood up, proud and poised, and bowed to the young man and then to the congregation. “I would now like to sing ‘Throw Out the Lifeline,’” he said.

  “Excellent,” said the young man happily. “Let’s all turn to number 29.”

  A short, stocky youth, wearing the threadbare remnants of an Army uniform, turned around in his seat on the bench in front of Haley and said in a loud hiss to Mr. Banghart, “Shut up, Buster, and sit down, or we’ll never get anything to eat.”

  Mr. Banghart stopped his singing abruptly in mid-chorus, leaving only the reedy tenor of the leader and the apathetic murmur of the others to carry on. “I would appreciate an apology,” he said coldly.

  “Go to hell,” said the youth, giving him an ugly grin. His two companions turned to sneer menacingly. The singing stopped completely.

  Haley saw a look of fear pass over Mr. Banghart’s features and then heard him shout wildly, “It’s a trap! They’re out to get us!” Mr. Banghart smashed his hard, massive fist into the youth’s insolent face, catapulting him over the bench and onto the floor.

  “Stop it!” cried the young man behind the pulpit.

  The youth rose from the floor, and he and his two companions started toward Haley and Mr. Banghart. Haley raised his frail hands in a gesture of defense as one of them singled him out and charged. The blow of a fist on his temple spun him around. He sank to his knees and looked up, stunned and frightened. He blinked dully at the flash of light from Mr. Banghart’s knife, heard a scream, and was knocked senseless by another blow from behind.

  The scuffling and shouts dropped away from him as the din of a city drops away from a soaring balloon. The glint of the knife became the beam of a flashlight, playing on the buff walls of the secret room hollowed in hay bales in the loft. The beam lighted the round face of the General, reflecting from the lenses of his glasses so that his eyes could not be seen. “Haley,” intoned the General’s image, “you have been nothing but a burden since I took you into my home. You are without character, without character.”

  The light moved to Annie’s placid features. “The General is right,” she said firmly.

  The beam picked Hope’s angelic face from the still-aired darkness. She giggled derisively, heartlessly, lovelessly.

  Haley moaned, and he heard another voice, coarse and unfamiliar. “Well, when this youngster comes around, he’ll tell us who it was. He came in with him, didn’t he?”

  Haley opened his eyes to see the blue jacket and silver shield of a policeman who was leaning over him. He was still in the Mission, lying flat on his back. A splitting headache made him want to tumble into oblivion once more.

  The policeman shook him gently. “Feel O.K., kid?” Haley sat up slowly and looked about the chapel. He saw that it was almost empty. There were only the policeman, the young man who had been directing the singing, and the still form of the youth who had enraged Mr. Banghart. The youth was bowed over a toppled bench with Mr. Banghart’s precious knife buried in his chest.

  “Your buddy killed a man,” said the policeman. “What’s his name and where’s he from?”

  “I don’t know,” said Haley thickly.

  “Ask him if he knows who ‘the General’ is,” said the hymn leader.

  “What about the General?” asked Haley, startled that they should know so much about him.

  “Your buddy yelled something about settling up with the General next,” said the policeman. “Then he took off through the back door and down the alley. Come on, better tell us who he is.”

  Haley shrugged wearily. “His name’s Banghart. He’s crazy, I guess.” He told of running away from the farm, with more pathos than pertinent detail, describing at length the whole of his dismal history and impressions leading up to his present condition. “That’s all I know,” he said. “The farm’s the only home I’ve got, but I don’t imagine they’ll want me back there.”

  “That’s the way criminals get their start—in loveless homes,” said the hymn leader, shaking his head from side to side.

  The policeman laughed and looked down at Haley. “This beanpole could be a crook just like I could be the Queen of England.” He lifted Haley to his feet. “Come on, stranger. Can you walk to the station house?”

  Leaning on the policeman, Haley stumbled from the Mission to the police station. They laid him down on a wicker couch in the Lieutenant’s anteroom. A few minutes later a doctor came in to prod and knead and pronounce him sound, save for a pair of important-looking welts.

  “He’s pretty fragile to be on the bum, isn’t he?” asked the doctor.

  “He’s been on the bum for less than twelve hours,” laughed the Lieutenant. “There’s already a call out for him on the teletype. The state police will be over after him in an hour or so to take him back.”

  “They want me back?” said Haley incredulously.

  “Had quite a time, eh, Sonny?” said the Lieutenant. “Got your brains kicked out and got tied up in a murder to boot. Lucky you didn’t get knocked off for your shoes here on Skid Row. You’d rather be back on the farm than here, wouldn’t you?”

  “People get killed for their shoes?” asked Haley, in a mood to consider the Lieutenant’s question seriously.

  “Shoes, gold fillings, cigarettes, anything,” said the Lieutenant.

  Haley ran his tongue-tip over the gold caps of two of his back teeth and tried, at the same time, to imagine the General at his angriest. “Guess I better go back to the farm,” he said.

  VII.

  It was Annie who answered when Haley’s state trooper escort knocked on the farmhouse door two hours before sunrise. “Here’s another one back to roost,” said the trooper dryly. “Anybody else missing?”

  “Nope. Two was all we wanted back—this one and Kitty.” Annie yawned and rubbed her eyes. Haley saw that there was a light on in the sunroom.

  “Any sign of Banghart?” asked the trooper.

  “Nope, but we’re ready for him, I guess. The General’s got enough guns for a regiment—all loaded.”

  “O.K.,” laughed the trooper. “Just don’t go potshotting everything that moves. Remember, we’ve got a man posted out front. We’d hate to lose our boy Dave. Keep your eyes open,” he added seriously. “A switchman in town said he thought he saw someone drop off a slow freight on its way through.”

  “If he does show up, he’ll look like a piece of Swiss cheese before he gets within five hundred yards of the front door,” said Annie, unimpressed. She thanked the trooper for his trouble and marched the sullen Haley into the sunroom. Haley was repeating to himself the speech he had prepared during the long trip back from Chicago.

  The General did not look up when Haley walked into his presence. He was wearing an oily undershirt and khaki trousers and was swabbing the cavernous bore of a single-barreled duck gun. Haley looked about the room and saw that every surface was cluttered with firearms and ammunition. “Sir,” Haley began, “I guess we’ve both been pretty childish, and I, for one, am willing to—”

  The General looked up from his shotgun as though he were surprised to see Haley standing before him. “Well, sir,” he interrupted, “and what sunshine are you going to bring into our lives today? Shall we poison the well or burn the house down?”

  Haley swallowed hard, turned, and shuffled upstairs to his room, past the darkened, closed door of Kitty’s room, where Kitty was mumbling in her sleep, and the open door of the room of the beloved Hope. He paused for a moment to listen to her breathing.

  Pinned to his bedsheet was a typewritten note signed by Annie. There was a certain sweetness in his slumber, for before he closed his eyes, he concluded that insofar as disciplinary measures went, the General must have reached the limits of his imagination. He even managed a soft chuckle as he bunched his shirt under his head. “No pillow for three months,” the note had said.

  Haley’s conclusion was an accurate one, apparently, for nothing new i
n the way of punishments was forthcoming during the next two weeks. True, Haley was reminded again that his defections had killed his opportunities in the world of music; Hope was ordered to fill out application papers for a Miss Dingman’s School for Ladies, located on an inaccessible ridge in the White Mountains; and Haley’s, Hope’s, and Kitty’s pillows remained under padlock in the basement fruit locker—but no more devastation seemed likely.

  Kitty flounced and pined about the house, but without conviction. She hadn’t the wit to camouflage the fact that her twenty hours with Roy and his motorcycle had been something less than a string of pearls. This was disturbing to Hope and Haley, for the General took it as a demonstration of his infallible judgment. “Whatever became of that nice Flemming boy and his gasoline bicycle?” he would chortle at mealtimes. “Never seems to show his intelligent face around here anymore.” Kitty offered no rebuttal.

  As the time for Hope’s incarceration in the New Hampshire highlands drew near, she abandoned her stoicism to plead with the General to relent. It was after dinner one night, and Haley listened with excitement, for if Hope could win leniency, then so might he.

  The General gave her his thoughtful attention, nodding now and then at her more salient arguments. “Are you through?” he asked.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Uh huh, very moving,” he said. He looked seriously from Hope to Haley and back again. “I once knew a man, grew up with him, in fact,” said the General. “When he was a boy, his parents would threaten to take away his bicycle if he did something bad. Well, sir, he’d go right ahead and do whatever bad thing it was, and they’d let him keep his bicycle anyway. They didn’t have the heart to take it away. Instead, they’d tell him if he did it again, they wouldn’t let him have any ice cream for a year. He’d do it again, and they wouldn’t have the heart to keep him from eating ice cream. And so it went; his parents would make terrible threats, but they never carried them out, not one.”

  “So what happened to him finally?” asked the indispensable Annie.

  “He was shot while robbing a bank,” said the General. “And I’ll always say it was his parents who killed him.”

  “I don’t believe it really happened,” Hope objected.

  “Makes no difference whether it really did or not,” said the General, “just as long as it’s logical. So . . .”

  Haley’s hopes for a reprieve twitched and died. The omens had seemed good. The menace of Mr. Banghart had made the General almost genial at times. Hope had suggested that it was the only type of problem that permitted him to use to the fullest his stock solution to every problem. “Worships firepower,” she said.

  However, weeks had passed, and Mr. Banghart had not sailed into the General’s sights like a clay pigeon. Neither was he apprehended by the police. Law-enforcement officers in the town near Ardennes Farm took to crediting him with unsolved purse-snatchings and burglaries, but his face was seen in police circulars and nowhere else. The situation spelled moments of depression for the General, who would surmise gloomily that Banghart had fled the country or had been among the dozens of unidentified bums killed every month while hopping freight trains.

  Under the General’s urging, the State Police withdrew their sentinel. A visiting neighbor laughed himself hoarse over the jungle of weapons in the sunroom, and on the following morning the bulletin board informed Haley that he was to put a light coat of oil on all of the guns and return them, save two, to their racks. The General kept out the single-shot duck gun, which he leaned against the frame of the back door, and he carried a .45-caliber service revolver slung on his belt whenever he left the farmhouse.

  “You people keep away from this shotgun unless you absolutely have to use it,” he ordered. “Leave Banghart to me. I’d feel safer locked in a phone booth with him than I would knowing one of you was on the prowl with this cannon. Guns and women can make an atom bombing look like an ice-cream social,” he declared. “Only this morning I read a story in the paper about a woman who shot her husband, the cat, and the water-softener because she thought she heard suspicious noises downstairs.” Haley searched the paper for this fascinating item, but he was unable to find anything like it.

  On the afternoon of the same day, Haley came upon the General unexpectedly to find him standing before the closed door of the corncrib. He had his pistol in hand, cocked and pointed at the door. “All right, Banghart,” he was saying, “I’ll give you three to come out. One—”

  “I’ll get the shotgun,” cried Haley.

  The General looked at him quickly, with a trifle of embarrassment, Haley thought. With a gesture that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, the General motioned for Haley to be deathly still. “All right, Banghart, come out or it’s curtains,” he said. “Two.” He paused a long while. Haley covered his ears. The General kicked open the crib door and stood poised, ready to shoot.

  Haley inched closer to the General until he was by his side. Sunlight streaming in through the barn door illuminated the crib, which he saw, with a sigh, was vacant.

  “Did you hear something, sir?” Haley asked respectfully.

  The General slipped his pistol back into its holster and grinned foolishly. “Don’t go telling the girls about this, will you now?” he said confidentially. “It wouldn’t do to frighten them.”

  “Nossir.”

  “It’s just that I want to make sure he isn’t hiding on the farm. He might be, you know—a very remote chance, of course. Just checking to be on the safe side.”

  “I see.”

  “Last night, about 3, I thought I saw a cigarette burning out here. Now I find this on the barn floor.” He held up an empty packet of cigarette papers. “This is the kind he used.”

  “He could have dropped them there anytime since he came to work for you. They’re all over the place,” suggested Haley.

  “Maybe so. One thing’s for sure: He isn’t in this barn. I’ve checked every nook and cranny.”

  Haley was not at all dismayed by the menace of Mr. Banghart. For one thing, he felt a personal immunity to that threat, since Mr. Banghart avowedly considered him one of his few friends in all humanity. For another, he was confident that the General would blow the poor devil to bits if he dared appear. But certainly most distracting was the exotic mixture of despondency and elation that simmered in his young soul. He was despondent over his smashed dreams of a musical career, but elation was born of Hope’s subtle but unmistakably affectionate mien. He found himself in the emotional dilemma of a hurt child who has been presented with an ice-cream cone.

  He was realist enough to know that the ice-cream cone was a small one, but hungry enough to make a great deal of it in his fancy. Honing his scythe in the cool dampness of the tool shed, he savored again the moments when Hope had seemed to look at him warmly. His expedition to Chicago had made him more of a man in her melodrama-loving eyes, he thought. If he had made a mess of his flight, it had at least been an adventuresome mess, not in a boy’s world but in a man’s. With the clean music of the blade against the stone mingling with his thoughts, Haley promised himself that he was indeed man enough to win the love of Hope.

  During supper, Annie monopolized the conversation with a new complaint. “If you don’t get enough to eat, for Heaven’s sake say so,” she said. “But don’t let me catch anybody nosing around the icebox between meals. It’s getting so bad that I never know when I’m going to have enough on hand for a meal, with everybody helping himself or herself whenever he or she feels like it.” She shrugged disconsolately. “These potatoes were supposed to have cheese on top of them, but somebody walked off with all the cheese last night, and some leftover wieners, too.”

  “Well, which one of you did it?” asked the General, looking from Kitty to Hope to Haley, all of whom shook their heads and showed the long countenances of hurt innocence. “The trouble with you is that you all eat like farmhands, but not one of you’ll work like one.”

  “You certainly hit the nail on the head that
time,” said Annie.

  The General rose, walked over to the kitchen window, and peered out at the barn, which was receding into nightfall. He picked up the shotgun from its place by the doorframe. “Attaboy, Haley,” he said at last. “Keep her spotless. Get Annie to give you a toothpick sometime, so you can clean up some of the fancy work around the trigger guard.” He rested the gun against the doorframe once more and left the kitchen.

  “He’s telephoning somebody,” said Kitty. “Who do you suppose it is?”

  “Can’t tell,” said Hope. “He’s talking softly for the first time in his life.”

  “It’s none of our business, or he would have seen fit to tell us about it,” said Annie primly.

  “Whoever it is,” said Hope, straining her ears, “he told them not to hurry.”

  Haley heard the click of the receiver, and the General called from the hall, “Remember, the rules are still in force. Nobody leaves the house after sunset under any condition.”

  After supper, Haley invited Hope to play checkers with him. They set up the board in the sewing room, a small chamber that opened onto the hallway in the rear of the house, next to the kitchen. Haley closed the door of the room, insulating it from the noise of the General’s favorite news commentator, and of Annie stacking the dishes in the sink.

  As they played, their conversation centered upon the game, which Haley was winning. He adored Hope’s every word and gesture; and Hope, apparently aware of his loving stare, and unprotesting, smiled whenever their eyes met.

  “Goody!” she exclaimed. “Now I’ve got a king at last. I’ll give you a hard time now.” She reached across the board to cap the piece that had made its way to the last row on Haley’s side. Haley dropped his hand over hers and gave it a fervent squeeze.

  Hope’s eyes widened, more with a look of surprise than with the ecstasy Haley had daydreamed himself into expecting. “How nice,” she said vaguely. “How very nice. Now can I have my hand back?”