A Time of Predators

Curt parked in front of 1248 16th Avenue and looked it over. The rambling two-story house had white siding which would soon peel, and a lawn that needed mowing. The old-fashioned black iron gate was rusty. He went around in back, and found 1248B underneath the wooden steps leading up to the kitchen of the owner’s flat. It would be an apartment, here on ground level, that wouldn’t get much light during the day.

Not that Harold Rockwell would be worried much about light or darkness any more. The girl who answered his rap was at first glance very pretty; at second glance, almost emaciated. Her baggy cotton dress had been cut to be tight; her hair was mousy, her eyes, large and brown and begging to be lustrous, were as lifeless as her hair.

When Curt said he was looking for Mr. Rockwell, she didn’t react in any way; so he added, almost as a question, “Mr. Harold Rockwell, is he home?”

She finally heaved a long-suffering, where-else-would-he-be sigh. Even the thin gold wedding band was loose enough to slip off her finger. Love winch might be proof against cataclysm is often vulnerable to the slow erosion of a continuing, day-to-day tragedy. “I’m his wife, Katie. He... if you could tell me why you want to see him, he... hasn’t been very well...”

“My name is Curt Halstead. My wife—”

Her face suddenly was animated. She turned, called into the tiny apartment, “Harry, Mrs. Halstead’s husband is here!” Without waiting for his reply, she caught Curt’s arm and almost dragged him inside. “Come in, come in, he’ll be so glad to see you!”

The kitchen had walls daubed bright yellow. As if Katie Rockwell had made a vain attempt to brighten the drab apartment. The fridge was ancient, the gas stove the same, the linoleum curling at the corners. The sort of furnished apartment almost every young couple pass through on their way toward the style of life they will live together; but the Rockwells were frozen here now, rocks in a glacier, without much hope of a thaw.

“Don’t mind the place, Mr. Halstead. These old apartments...”

“I’ve got the same problem.” To Curt, his own voice was falsely and offensively hearty. “My house is very old...”

The living room was more of the same: a portable TV on a corner of the coffee table, a couch, an easy chair like those lugged into dorms by students following a visit to the Salvation Army salesroom. Rockwell, in the easy chair, in slacks and tattered cardigan, might have been remaindered himself. Smoked glasses concealed his ruined eyes but could not disguise the petulance in his pale, sensitive face. He had a great shock of blond hair fringing out thickly above the ears.

“I just dropped around...” Curt began, when Rockwell bleated to cut him off.

The blind man jerked like a moth impaled on a pin. He had a sharp reedy voice like an heirloom hand-crank victrola. “Well? What do you want? Why did you come here?”

The self-pity stifled Curt’s own pity; he had seen too many maimed by battle to sympathize with the self-destructiveness of one who wasn’t coping. He was moved by the man’s plight, but not by the man. “I came after information. My wife is dead. Before she died—”

“We heard,” broke in Katie Rockwell. “We’re both terribly sorry. She... came to see Harry in the hospital the week after he... he...”

“Don’t say I’m sorry!” cried Rockwell shrilly. He pounded his knee in futile rage. “Why me? I’m blind! Blind! At least your wife is dead! At least—”

“Harry!” she cried, aghast. “Harry, don’t you dare say—”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Rockwell,” said Curt. “I understand...”

“Do you?” yelled Rockwell. He jerked and writhed in his chair, fumbled at his glasses, hurled them across the room, where they struck an arm of the sofa and fell on the rug, unbroken. “Do you understand? Look at my face! Get a good look! Get—”

Curt picked up the glasses and handed them to Katie Rockwell. The scarred, sightless, milky eyes did not shock or repulse him; all they did was make him angry. With himself, for coming here. With Rockwell, for destroying himself, his marriage, his wife. But blazingly with the predators, for the destruction they had left behind them. The blind man had slumped down in his chair and, behind the glasses his wife had replaced, had begun to sob.

“I don’t know anything about them. I hadn’t seen them before, they just... came at me...” He raised his sightless face. “Go away. Just... go away...”

As if on cue, the sudden full-bodied cry of an infant just awakened from its sleep came from beyond the closed bedroom door. Rockwell’s bony hands stopped moving in his lap; his face behind the dark glasses became attentive and still. In mid-word he stood up and went across the living room, familiar territory, to the door. He opened it. “Just leave me alone,” he repeated flatly, and went inside. After a moment the crying changed in tone and intensity, then died away to comforted abstract whimpering.