Now I have just put out the lights and stand alone in the pavilion looking out at the shining lake where in another century, under another sun, a small boy with an old face was first touched to play tag with me and now, very late, has tagged me back, has kissed my hand and run away, and this time myself, stunned, not following.
Many things I do not know, tonight.
But one thing I’m sure of.
I do not hate Roger Harrison any more.
The Utterly Perfect Murder
It was such an utterly perfect, such an incredibly delightful idea for murder, that I was half out of my mind all across America.
The idea had come to me for some reason on my forty-eighth birthday. Why it hadn’t come to me when I was thirty or forty, I cannot say. Perhaps those were good years and I sailed through them unaware of time and clocks and the gathering of frost at my temples or the look of the lion about my eyes.…
Anyway, on my forty-eighth birthday, lying in bed that night beside my wife, with my children sleeping through all the other quiet moonlit rooms of my house, I thought:
I will arise and go now and kill Ralph Underhill.
Ralph Underhill! I cried, who in God’s name is he?
Thirty-six years later, kill him? For what?
Why, I thought, for what he did to me when I was twelve.
My wife woke, an hour later, hearing a noise.
“Doug?” she called. “What are you doing?”
“Packing,” I said. “For a journey.”
“Oh,” she murmured, and rolled over and went to sleep.
* * *
“’Board! All aboard!” The porter’s cries went down the train platform.
The train shuddered and banged.
“See you!” I cried, leaping up the steps.
“Someday,” called my wife, “I wish you’d fly!”
Fly? I thought, and spoil thinking about murder all across the plains? Spoil oiling the pistol and loading it and thinking of Ralph Underhill’s face when I show up thirty-six years late to settle old scores? Fly? Why, I would rather pack cross-country on foot, pausing by night to build fires and fry my bile and sour spit and eat again my old, mummified but still-living antagonisms and touch those bruises which have never healed. Fly?!
The train moved. My wife was gone.
I rode off into the Past.
Crossing Kansas the second night, we hit a beaut of a thunderstorm. I stayed up until four in the morning, listening to the rave of winds and thunders. At the height of the storm, I saw my face, a darkroom negative-print on the cold window glass, and thought:
Where is that fool going?
To kill Ralph Underhill!
Why? Because!
Remember how he hit my arm? Bruises. I was covered with bruises, both arms; dark blue, mottled black, strange yellow bruises. Hit and run, that was Ralph, hit and run—
And yet…you loved him?