PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN
A long silver thread of drool hung from Bertrand Rupp’s lips. There was just enough of it to pool on the desk, but most of it was soaked up on the cuff of his argyle sweater.
“Hey Bert . . . hey Bert . . .” he would have heard if he was of hearing then. Tony, a classmate beside him, was calling. He had seen the seizure before, known him for years, though the teacher had not. Yet.
“What . . . what has happened to Bertrand?” she said, far off through a cloud, behind a haze, and somewhere beyond that.
It had been Bertrand’s turn to take a stab at the Shakespeare sonnet. The teacher, a young, well meaning red-haired woman named Ms. McCleary, picked him because it looked like he was paying attention. He was already deep into the seizure when she called.
“Hey Bert . . . hey Bert . . .”
“It’s his seizure . . .” Julie, a girl who had known him since kindergarten said to Ms. McCleary.
“No one told me anything about this,” she said, and rushed over to him. Bert’s eyes, behind thick glasses, were vacant like no one was home, and they were slightly crossed. “What . . . what do we do?”
“He’ll come out of it,” Tony said. “Sooner or later.”
Autumn
CHAPTER ONE
Kate McCleary looked down at the Formica kitchen table at the Sunday edition of the New Biggsburg Press and Sun.
She rubbed her temples hard until her eyes watered.
The headline pained her.
“Meter Reader Strangled and Severed.”
It was not so much the gruesomeness, or sympathy for the poor woman. Or the trashy New York Post style headline, even. For Kate, it was the dark, nauseating feeling that she knew the psycho who did it.
He lived across the street.
Bertrand Rupp was one of her 12th grade English students a couple of years ago. Bert spoke with a stammer, and he was an unusual epileptic who was prone to going into zombie-like petit mal seizures when it was his turn to read. Luckily, Bert’s style of seizures weren’t dangerous. He never was in any danger of swallowing his tongue, or flailing about on the floor, which could have been the case. He didn’t fall out of his chair, usually. But during his episode it was like his whole being went somewhere else, leaving a body behind to fend for himself, and then, in a few minutes, coming back to himself as if nothing had happened.
Bert wasn’t a bad kid, either. Solid B student. Almost a man, at least six foot two. Kind of hunched over. Very shy. Wore glasses with super thick lenses. Smiled every once in a while, more of a smirk. His body was kind of lumpy, like he was stuffed with pillows . . .
But he did it.
The Rupps white vinyl-sided Colonial with a meticulously manicured yard was right across street from Kate’s rented Victorian duplex.
From her window from time to time she was treated to a fine vignette of their domestic dysfunction. Kate often viewed the Rupp threesome, and she watched because it was fascinating . . . father Judge, homemaker mother, and giant, bumbling son . . . in a mode she suspected just not meant to be public at all. The father barked orders, the mother whined, and Bert, disturbingly, for he hadn’t shown it in class or at school ever, would violently lash out against inanimate objects around the house and yard when no one was looking. A rake whacked repeatedly against a bucket of recyclables, again . . . again . . . An old maple kicked repeatedly, kick . . . kick . . . in a rhythmic sequence lasting minutes. And all the while Bert yelled up a storm of obscenities. It just wasn’t right at all.
And . . . there had been a murder before, during the summer. A waitress from the Fire House Thirteen restaurant had been strangled . . . the murderer was never found.
Strangled and severed.
Kate sipped her coffee. It was cold. This was where her life was at, she chided herself, watching the Bert Rupps, and cooking up conspiracies making him a murderer. Oh Kate. She tugged at the knots in her frazzled red hair. Then she lit her second cigarette. Time to get a real life, Kate, she thought. In reality, it probably wasn’t him . . .
She looked back up from the paper out her front bay window. Ol’ Bert was out there now, stumbling up the sidewalk toward his house. He swayed and pitched up to his front door, long arms dangling, dropping his father’s New York Times and scattering its sections all over the slate steps. Sometimes, Kate caught herself feeling pity for him, as one would an animal whose existence wasn’t under its control.
Bert stooped to pick up what he could manage, then disappeared inside the house, leaving part of the Times drifting across the yard and clinging onto the Rupp’s ornamental wrought iron fence.
“Amazing,” Kate muttered.
She got up from the kitchen table and headed upstairs. The wooden steps creaked and echoed in her much to quiet house.
“Oh, get it together, Kate,” she said standing at the bathroom sink. She took some cold cream and wiped away yesterday’s black mascara that had smudged beneath her green and bloodshot eyes. Too much gin, really. That was it. She felt irresponsible about her life, but at the same time . . . like she had finally sunken into a life of a complete, bona-fide adult. She drank cocktails now; at thirty-two it seemed like the right thing to do. Cocktails and Xanax had replaced the pot and cheap wine, and that was just “right.”
Wouldn’t do, she mused, the kids’ English teacher getting caught with a couple of joints. But an unnecessary prescription refill, okay then. Unfortunately, all she had to do was look at her colleague Willard Endinburg’s Martian landscape of exploded capillaries on his nose, and take in the tremors in his lips as he drowned his V8 in the teachers lounge to build a picture of what could come twenty years down the line with her a career in teaching at New Biggsburg High.
“Uhhhhhhgg,” she said at the thoughts. They made her feel horrible and lost. She started up the double spigots of the claw foot tub, brushed her teeth, put in some eye drops, and when the water reached capacity, she removed her robe and slid in.
Too hot, just the way she liked it.
Kate let her arms float, and hid under the water so it was just up to her chin.
She had been avoiding the scale. Her lifestyle and general state of mind had given her a contribution of about nine pounds. Not horrible, but a lot on her small frame. She could still hear her ex-mother in law saying “well, you’ve always been one of those big-boned gals.” Haaaaag, Kate thought. That wasn’t true at all. There was no such nonsense as “big boned.” In fact, occasionally, she felt a little more powerful being just that much larger. Stronger. Precisely not submissive. Maybe a little sexy . . . voluptuous!
But there was no one in her life to nurture any of those ideas. Gin helped. A vicious cycle, she admitted.
Plus, it hadn’t been too too bad, so far.
“Well Kate, you can be a slave to it all, or a master of it,” she said out loud to her pink nipples breaking through the water. “Or really, what you’re saying . . . is I can just be a master of what I choose to be a slave to.” She paused. “What do you think of that?”
A dog barked outside, muffled through the bathroom window. The toilet on the other side of the duplex flushed.
“Okay then.”
Kate got dressed in her usual weekend fare, black jeans and a Syracuse University sweatshirt. Just as she went to the phone to call her friend Jordan, he rang her.
It often happened that way with Jordan.
“Kate, did you read the paper?” was the first thing he said.
“About the murdered utility-reader woman! I was just going to call you.” She cradled the phone and sat down at the kitchen table with the paper spread out before her.
“Really. Mmm mm. I knew it, then,” Jordan said, then “Honey . . . look out for you ex-student Bert.” His usually smooth voice had an edge to it now. “We’ll be handling the arrangements for the poor woman. Today! Of all the Homes, this again . . .” Jordan did sound down about it. Not that his job was all that peppy. He and his father were undertakers. “Ohhh . . . the family wanted to know if they needed to provide shoes,” he said, quietly. “I just couldn’t remind them that the deceased didn’t come with feet.”
Kate moaned. “She didn’t have feet?”
“They haven’t found them. Nobody can see down that way in the casket. I mean, I just couldn’t say “no shoes ‘cause there’s no feet.” Jordan made quite an undertaker.
“What else did you find out?” Kate said.
“Well Kate, guess who found the body?”
“Who, the groundskeeper? It was at the golf course, right?”
“Right right. No. Who plays golf all the time?”
“Doctors, a doctor found her?”
It sounded like the line went dead. Jordan came back. “No. Are you sitting down?”
“Yes Jordan, I’m at the kitchen table.”
“Good, then you can’t look outside.”
“I can still see . . . across the street. What is it?”
“Kate, ready . . . Ol’ Judge Rupp found the body!”
“Go on! That sure wasn’t in the paper. Where did you hear that?”
“Parlor talk. He was out playing a few rounds, just happened to knock his clean, snow white ball into the edge of the woods and found the, er . . . woman.”
Kate didn’t know what to think. “That’s too much, Jordan. Too much. Now that’s a coincidence.” A stupefying coincidence.
“Ooops,” Jordan said. “Busy day, I’m afraid. Got to go help them all meet their makers. I’ll call again later.”
“Okay. Stop by later.”
“I will, bye.”
Kate hung up. She thought of Bertrand fumbling with the paper, and headed into the living room and looked out across to the maison Rupp. Just what Jordan said not to do. She just had to.
The newspaper was still clinging to the wrought iron fence. There was color to it. That’s all she could see. The big block of color matched the paper on her kitchen table. Not the New York Times at all. It looked like no one in the Rupp house would be getting the front page of the New Biggsburg Press & Sun today.
“Ah ha!” she said to her front window. But Kate really wasn’t quite sure what she meant by it. It wasn’t good. She knew that.
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