Inside the black Lincoln, the music throbbed; the sheer volume, and the degree to which the bass vibrated the speakers in the car, almost concealed from Mrs. Vaughn that the Lincoln had run out of gas. Had the car not shuddered so violently at that moment, Mrs. Vaughn might have gone on waiting at the steering wheel until her son was brought home from his afternoon tennis lesson.
More import
ant, that the Lincoln finally ran out of gas may have spared Mrs. Vaughn’s gardener a cruel death. The poor man, whose ladder had been knocked from under him, had all this while been trapped in the remorseless privet, where the carbon-monoxide fumes from the Lincoln’s exhaust had at first made him sick and then nearly killed him. He was half asleep, but conscious of the fact that he was half dead, when the car conked out and a fresh sea breeze revived him.
In his earlier effort to climb down from the top of the hedge, the heel of his right foot had become stuck in a twisted notch of the privet. In attempting to free his boot from the notch, the gardener had lost his balance and fallen upside down in the thick hedge—thus wedging his boot heel more snugly than before in the tenacious privet. His ankle was sorely twisted in the fall, and—hanging by his heel in the tangled hedge—he had pulled an abdominal muscle while trying to untie his boot.
A small man of Hispanic descent, with an appropriately small potbelly, Eduardo Gomez was not used to performing upside-down sit-ups in a hedge. His boots were of the above-ankle sort, and although he’d struggled to sit up long enough to untie the laces, he had not been able to bear the pain of the position long enough to loosen the laces. The boot would not slip off.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Vaughn couldn’t hear Eduardo’s calls for help above the volume and the throbbing bass of her car radio. The miserable hanging gardener, aware of the rising fumes from the Lincoln’s exhaust, which were gathering in the dense and seemingly airless hedge, was convinced that the privet would be his final resting place. Eduardo Gomez would be the victim of another man’s lust, and of another man’s proverbial “woman scorned.” Nor did the dying gardener miss the irony that it was the shredded pornographic drawings of his employer that had led him to his position in the murderous privet. Had the Lincoln not run out of gas, the gardener might have become Southampton’s first fatality ever ascribed to pornography—but doubtless not the last, Eduardo was thinking, as he drifted off in the carbonmonoxide fumes. It crossed his poisoned mind that Ted Cole deserved to die this way, but not an innocent gardener.
In Mrs. Vaughn’s view, her gardener was not innocent. Earlier, she’d heard him cry out: “Run!” By warning Ted, Eduardo had betrayed her! If the wretched dangling man had kept his mouth shut, Ted would not have been afforded those valuable extra seconds. As it turned out, Ted broke into a full sprint before the black Lincoln shot onto Gin Lane. Mrs. Vaughn was certain that she would have flattened him as incontrovertibly as she’d flattened the road sign at the corner of South Main Street. It was because of her own disloyal gardener that Ted Cole had got away!
Thus, when the Lincoln ran out of gas and Mrs. Vaughn got out of the car—first slamming the door shut and then opening it again, for she’d forgotten to turn off the infernal radio—she first heard Eduardo’s weakened cries for help and her heart was instantly hardened against him. She tromped on the little crushed stones of the courtyard, nearly tripping on the fallen ladder, and there she beheld her betrayer, who was ridiculously suspended by his foot in the midst of the privet. Mrs. Vaughn was further incensed to see that Eduardo had not yet cleaned up those revealing drawings. In addition, there was a totally illogical aspect to her hatred of the gardener: he had doubtless seen her terrible nakedness in the drawings. (How could he not have seen it?) And so she hated Eduardo Gomez in the manner that she hated Eddie O’Hare, who had also seen her so . . . exposed.
“Please, ma’am,” Eduardo begged her. “If you are able to lift the ladder, if I can just hold on to it, I might be able to get down.”
“You!” Mrs. Vaughn shouted at him. She picked up a handful of the little stones and threw them into the hedge. The gardener shut his eyes, but the privet was so thick that none of the stones hit him. “You warned him! You vile little man!” Mrs. Vaughn screamed. She threw another handful of stones, which were equally harmless. That she couldn’t manage to hit a motionless, upside-down gardener made her even madder. “You betrayed me!” she cried.
“If you’d killed him, you’d have gone to jail,” Eduardo said, trying to reason with her. But she was strutting away from him; even from upside down he could tell that she was returning to her house. Her purposeful little steps . . . her tight little butt. He knew before she got to the door that she was going to slam it behind her. Eduardo had long ago imagined this about her: she was a woman of tantrums, a veteran door-slammer—as if the big bang that the door made offered her consolation for her diminutiveness. The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size. His own wife was large and comfortingly soft; she was a good-natured woman with a generous, forgiving disposition.
“Clean up this mess ! And then leave ! This is your last day!” Mrs. Vaughn was shouting to Eduardo, who hung perfectly still—as if paralyzed by disbelief. “You’re fired !” she added.
“But I can’t get down!” he called softly to her, knowing even before he spoke that the door would slam shut on his words.
Despite the pulled muscle in his abdomen, Eduardo found the strength to surmount his pain; doubtless he was helped by a sense of injustice, for he managed to perform another upside-down sit-up—he held the agonizing position long enough to sufficiently unlace his boot. His trapped foot slipped free. He plummeted headfirst through the heart of the hedge, flailing with both arms and legs, and (to his relief ) landed on all fours among the roots; he crawled into the courtyard, spitting out twigs and leaves.
Eduardo was still nauseated and dizzy and intermittently lethargic from his lengthy exposure to the Lincoln’s exhaust fumes, and his upper lip had been cut by a branch. He tried to walk, but he quickly returned to all fours, and in this animalistic state approached the clogged fountain. He plunged his head into the water, forgetting the squid ink. The water was foul and fishy-smelling, and when the gardener withdrew his head from the fountain and wrung the water out of his hair, his face and hands were sepia-colored. Eduardo felt like throwing up while he climbed the ladder to retrieve his boot.
Then the stunned man limped aimlessly about the courtyard—since he’d already been fired, what point was there in his completing the task of gathering the scraps of pornography (as Mrs. Vaughn had demanded)? He could see no wisdom in performing any task for a woman who had not only fired him but had also left him for dead; yet when he decided that he would leave, he realized that the out-of-gas Lincoln was obstructing the driveway. Eduardo’s truck, which was always parked out of sight (behind the toolhouse and the garage and the potting shed), could not slip past the privet while the Lincoln was blocking the way. The gardener had to syphon gas from the lawn mower in order to start the Lincoln and return the abandoned car to the garage. Alas, this activity did not go unnoticed by Mrs. Vaughn.
She confronted Eduardo in the courtyard, where only the fountain separated them. The stained pool was now as unsightly as a shallow birdbath in which a hundred bats had drowned. Mrs. Vaughn held something in her hand—it was a check—and the wrecked gardener eyed her warily; he limped sideways, keeping the fountain between them, as Mrs. Vaughn began to circle the blackened water in his direction.
“Don’t you want this? It’s your last paycheck!” the evil little woman said.
Eduardo halted. If she was going to pay him, perhaps he would stay and clean up the last of the ripped-to-shreds pornography. After all, the maintenance of the Vaughn estate had been his principal source of income for many years. The gardener was a proud man, and the miniature bitch had humiliated him; yet he thought that even if the check she was offering him was the last paycheck he would ever receive from her, it would be sizable.
With his hand held out in front of him, Eduardo cautiously inched around the spoiled fountain in Mrs. Vaughn’s direction. She allowed him to approach her. She was almost within his reach when she made several hasty folds in the check, and—when it was crudely shaped like a boat—she launched it into the murky water. The check sailed into the middle of the funereal pool. It was necessary for Eduardo to wade into the fountain, which he did with trepidation.
“Go fish !” Mrs. Vaughn shrieked at him.
Even as he plucked the check out of the water, Eduardo was aware that the ink had run; he couldn’t read what the amount had been or Mrs. Vaughn’s cramped signature. And before he could step out of the fishy-smelling fountain, he knew (without once looking at her haughty, retreating figure) that the door would slam again. The fired gardener dried the worthless check against his pants and preserved it in his wallet; he didn’t know why he bothered.
Dutifully, Eduardo returned the ladder to its usual place alongside the potting shed. He saw a rake that he’d meant to repair and briefly wondered what he should do with it; he left it on the worktable in the toolhouse. He would have gone home then—he was already limping slowly toward his truck—but he suddenly saw the three large leaf bags that he’d already filled with the scraps of the shredded drawings; he had calculated that the remaining mess, when it was all cleaned up, might fill another two bags.
Eduardo Gomez picked up the first of the three full bags and emptied it onto the lawn. The wind quickly blew some of the paper all around, but the gardener was dissatisfied with the results; he ran limping through the pile of paper, kicking his feet like a child in a heap of leaves. The long tatters flew through the garden and draped the birdbath. The beach roses at the back of the yard, where the footpath led to the beach, were a magnet to the scraps and shreds of paper; the torn paper clung to everything it touched, like tinsel to a Christmas tree.
The gardener limped into the courtyard with the remaining two full bags. The first of these he upended in the fountain, where the mass of ripped drawings soaked up the blackened water like a giant, immovable sponge. The last full bag, which by coincidence included some of the best (albeit largely destroyed) views of Mrs. Vaughn’s crotch, was no challenge to Eduardo’s remaining creativity. The inspired man limped in circles around the courtyard, holding the open bag above his head. It was like a kite that refused to fly, but the countless snippets of pornography did indeed take flight; they rose
into the privet, from which the heroic gardener had earlier plucked them, and they rose above the privet, too. As if to reward Eduardo Gomez for his courage, a strong sea breeze blew partial views of Mrs. Vaughn’s breasts and vagina to both ends of Gin Lane.
It was later reported to the Southampton police that two boys on bicycles were treated to a questionable glimpse of Mrs. Vaughn’s anatomy, which the boys found as far away as First Neck Lane—a testimony to the strength of the wind, which had blown this particular close-up of Mrs. Vaughn’s nipple, and her irregularly enlarged areola, across Agawam Lake. (The boys, who were brothers, brought the scrap of the pornographic drawing home, where their parents discovered the obscenity and called the cops.)
Agawam Lake, which was no larger than a pond, separated Gin Lane from First Neck Lane, where—at the very moment Eduardo released the remains of Ted Cole’s drawings—the artist himself was pursuing his seduction of a slightly overweight eighteen-year-old girl. Glorie had brought Ted home to meet her mother, largely because the girl had no car of her own and needed her mother’s permission in order to borrow the family vehicle.
It had not been too long a walk from the bookstore to Glorie’s house on First Neck Lane, but Ted’s subtle courtship of the college girl had several times been interrupted by insulting questions from Glorie’s pathetic pear-shaped friend. Effie was far less a fan of The Door in the Floor than Glorie was; the tragically unattractive girl had not written her term paper on the perceived atavism in Ted Cole’s symbols of fear. Though she was intensely ugly, Effie was a lot less full of shit than Glorie was.
Effie was a lot less full of shit than Ted, too. In fact, the fat girl was insightful: she wisely grew to dislike the famous author in the course of their short walk; Effie also saw the efforts of Ted’s seduction-in-progress for what it was. Glorie, if she saw what was progressing, offered little resistance.