ALBERT E. COWDREY

REVENGE

THE RAIN WAS SLOW AND cold and persistent -- really, thought Mrs. Zahl, a Yankee
sort of rain, not like the usual New Orleans gullywasher. In the foyer she
slipped off her transparent rain cape and threw it over the halltree; she kicked
off her wet shoes and padded into the semidark sitting room in her damp stocking
feet, thinking only of bourbon and rest. Really; the Preservation Society -- how
tiresome good works were!

Actually, she went for the human contact. Only...humans were so unsatisfactory,
as a rule. It would almost be better to start going to Mass again, where people
kept their silly opinions to themselves, except, of course, the priest.

Mrs. Zahl turned on a small lamp with painted hunters and bounding prey and
mixed herself a stiff Old Fashioned at Charlie's memorial wetbar. Here that
comfort-seeking man had lived and, with stunning appropriateness, had died in
the very act of raising his glass toward his wife's contemptuous face and
saying, "Cheers, darling."

Fatigued and depressed, Mrs. Zahl felt suddenly that everything in her life was
dying out. This gloomy insight brought thoughts of her son. When dear Sam, her
only child, moved to Cleveland with his wife (Mrs. Zahl never thought of Marian
as her daughter-in-law, or anything else lawful) the remoteness would become --
well --

Unbearable was not in Mrs. Zahl's vocabulary, for she believed that anything can
be borne if one is made of the right stuff, but after some fumbling in her
mental thesaurus, she came up with the word "difficult." Yes. Life would be
difficult without Sam and the grandchildren. Very. Then, as she was laying out a
game of Solitaire next to the drink on a little mahogany table, a new sort of
chill struck her.

Oh dear, she thought, it's just Charlie's sort of weather, isn't it? The
shadows. And of course she was feeling down, too, and that often contributed to
his, if that was the word, apparitions.

Hastily she got up and went to let Shiloh out of the cellar. Should have done it
anyway, the poor creature had been there for hours. And in fact the toy collie
was waiting just inside the cellar door, not barking of course, Mrs. Zahl had
fixed that long ago, but bright-eyed, smiling, and Mrs. Zahl smiled back with
affection and relief. She knelt down and she and her silent dog communed for a
few long wet minutes, and then she got stiffly to her feet and returned to the
living room with Shiloh romping around her.

Another minute, and Mrs. Zahl was filled with a dawning sense of comfort, with
the cards in her hand, another gulp of Old Fashioned spreading warmth into her
toes, and Shiloh's hot little triangular chin resting in her lap. She was just
thinking about turning on the television for the five-thirty news when Charlie
appeared.

There was no sound to catch her attention, yet she turned her head as if someone
had slapped her hard across the face. In the same instant Shiloh raised her head
and then sprang off the sofa with a scrabble of hard claws on the polished
flooring. From the dark hallway where Mrs. Zahl had gone to open the cellar
door, Charlie appeared bluishly, like a gas flame, pottering along in his
well-known weaving walk that had always given him the look of being smashed even
when he wasn't.

Mrs. Zahl was not afraid of Charlie dead any more than she had been of Charlie
living, but she had to admit to herself-- she was a woman who valued truth and
above all self-knowledge -- that the thought of possibly being touched by a man
who had been dead fourteen years filled her with horror. Fortunately, Charlie
had never presumed so far. He came, as usual, just to the edge of the lamplight,
while Shiloh, all a-quiver, approached him at a kind of trembling ramrod point,
one paw raised and nose and tail stretched out, longing to sniff but never quite
daring to touch this flickering blue semblance of a man she had never known in
the flesh.

As usual, he didn't look directly at Mrs. Zahl, but turned obliquely and
pottered into the shadow cast by his old upright sectional desk against the
wall. She waited breathlessly, half expecting him to pull his Newman High School
yearbook out of the glass case that formed the top section of the desk. The book
contained his picture as a young tennis star in blinding whites, a picture so
stunningly unprophetic of the man he became that Mrs. Zahl occasionally took it
down herself, simply to stare in wonder at the gleaming butterfly that had
somehow reversed the usual process of metamorphosis and ended up a large slow
worm.

But as usual, he vanished into the shadow and was gone, perhaps passing through
the wall into the wet garden outside where the hangdog flowers awaited the first
freeze and the sundial displayed its possibly threatening message, Time Takes
All But Memories. Shiloh spent several minutes running about and would certainly
have made the welkin ring, whatever a welkin was, with her barking if she had
been able. Thank God I had both ends of her fixed while I was at it, thought
Mrs. Zahl, beginning, with shaking hands, again to lay out her game of
Solitaire.

Eventually Shiloh came back and put her head in her mistress's lap, and all was
calm again until the old Seth Thomas chimed seven. Then Mrs. Zahl called Shiloh
into the kitchen, heated up some storebought gumbo, steamed a cup of rice, and
dividing dinner into two equal parts, gave one to her dog before settling down
to eat the other half herself. Distinctly, she felt she needed something warm
inside. They both did.

The haunting of Mrs. Zahl had developed gradually, somewhat like the process by
which the British Commonwealth had emerged from the British Empire. As her
fleshly companions disappeared, ghostly ones arrived to remind her of them,
though scarcely in a satisfactory or comforting way.

Mrs. Zahl's sister Jodie had been a persistent ghost, mooning around the upper
hall for months and months and months after her death. Alice Watts had been a
surprise, considering that she and Mrs. Zahl had never been close in life, but
she had faded out after three or four weeks of intermittently dwelling in the
hall closet among Sam's retired bats and racquets and the plastic-wrapped
ornaments that Mrs. Zahl no longer bothered to put on a tree since Sam's wife
had stopped the children from coming over for Christmas.

Once a completely strange ghost had wandered in off the street, a ratty-looking
old man in a pea jacket, but had met with so freezing a reception that he never
returned. Oddest of all had been the ghost of her previous dog Casey, drawn,
Mrs. Zahl believed, by the fact that Shiloh was permitted to go into heat once
before she was fixed. In any case, after the vet performed the operation Casey
did not return.

Trying to explain to her therapist once what a ghost looked like, Mrs. Zahl had
said that it looked as if someone had defaced a nice, solid oil painting of a
room with a few hasty thin strokes of water color that left the original scene
perfectly visible behind them. The therapist had told her she was hallucinating
and that it was not uncommon for the bereaved to do so during the "denial" phase
of grieving.

Mrs. Zahl had told him not to be silly. Much as she loved her sister, she had
never been able to forgive Jodie for an incident involving a stolen corsage that
had happened in 1956. In fact, she had skipped the denial phase altogether with
Jodie, going straight from her initial shock to acceptance. She hadn't grieved
for Alice Watts at ail, just sent a wreath and removed her from the Rolodex.
Casey was a dear fellow, but after all he was getting on when the BMW hit him
and Shiloh was such a comfort. As for Charlie, she had accepted his death a long
time ago as God's will or whoever's. Besides, Shiloh saw the ghosts too, and did
the therapist suppose that the dog was in "denial"?

Of all the ghosts only Charlie endured, and it was understandable; after all,
this was his home, too. Mrs. Zahl felt that as long as he wanted to come, she
would have to put up with him -- after all, he had given her Sam. And yet, and
yet. Even more than before his death Charlie represented another dissatisfaction
in a life that was too rich in them. Only her innate strength of character
enabled Mrs. Zahl to let Charlie keep coming back, for she was certain that if
she flatly commanded him to be gone, he would potter a last time through the
wall and go haunt someplace else, such as his locker at the Uptown Lawn Tennis
Club (or more likely his favorite booth at the Members' Bar) where he felt at
home.

Or, she wondered suddenly as she ate her supper, was her kindness a sign of
weakness? During life, she had been perfectly content for him to stay in the
club for days at a time, but now she preferred him even as he was, even with the
feeling of dread that accompanied him, to nothing at all.

She and Shiloh finished the gumbo, which was surprisingly so-so for a product of
Kielmeyer's, known locally as The Rich Folks' Deli. Even before Mrs. Zahl was
done, a bubble of gastric distress switched on like a pilot light, kindling dark
thoughts in her midriff--long ago identified by the Greeks as the dwelling place
of the soul, and certainly the dwelling place of the soul among the natives of
New Orleans.

"Really," said that strong but unhappy lady as she collected Shiloh's
well-licked dish to place beside her own in the dishwasher, "how much am I
supposed to put up with?"

Shiloh tried to answer, but of course couldn't.

THE PHONE RANG about eleven, when Mrs. Zahl was already in bed with the lamp on
and a New York Times crossword puzzle book propped on her knees. It was Sam,
sounding -- as was customary for him these days --distressed and more than a
little drunk. After perfunctory greetings he began to whine, as usual.

"They say you turn into your father as you get older. God, do you think so,
Mama?"

"I don't think you could ever be a great deal like Charlie, dear. Except your
nose, of course -- that's very definitely from your Dad."

"I just don't seem to -- "

He hesitated, and Mrs. Zahl effortlessly supplied the words that he was
thinking: Be able to cope. Be able to make decisions. That remark about turning
into his father gave her a little cold chill.

"Don't seem to what, dear?" she asked a little unsteadily.

"Oh, I don't know. Stay sober, for one thing. I just keep having the feeling
this move isn't a good idea, I shouldn't be doing it, and yet I'm committed now
and the process just rolls along."

"I know you hate to leave New Orleans."

"Well, I do, and yet it's a big opportunity as Marian keeps telling me. Get into
the corporate headquarters and forge ahead and so on and so on. I keep thinking,
is forging ahead what I really want to do? Besides, it's cold up there in
Cleveland, you know? Really cold."

He sounded like a child and she let him babble on. Tomorrow he'd be ashamed of
crying on his mother's shoulder. Meanwhile a second track in her mind thought
about Sam as Charlie and Charlie as Sam. Could it be that Charlie had once been
a decent, hapless Sam, and that he had sunk into booze and acquiescence as his
spouse first took charge of his life and then despised him for allowing her to
do so?

This living alone, she thought -- introspection is the very devil!

"Where are you calling from?" she asked, more or less at random.

"From home. I'm in the den."

"Oh? Where's Marian?"

Shiloh, catching her mistress's tone, raised her chin from the bed where she had
settled down in her accustomed spot.

"Damn, didn't I tell you? She's in Cleveland seeing about the new house we're
buying. I've got so much stuff to clean up here I couldn't go, and we've got
Mrs. Annunciata to take care of the kids while she's gone."

Mrs. Annunciata, thought Mrs. Zahl, not me. The withdrawal of her grandchildren
had been slow, a kind of Chinese water torture, with no break, no quarrel to
explain it. When she realized what was happening, Mrs. Zahl had humiliated
herself, almost groveling to Marian in hopes of stopping the process. And Marian
had smiled, accepted the groveling, demanded more, and squeezed her steadily out
of the children's lives.

At that recollection, all of Mrs. Zahl's vague unhappiness seemed to condense
into an emotion that was no less dark but considerably harder.

"And she's flying back tomorrow.?"

"Oh, you know Marian. Everything planned to the split second. She'll be leaving
Cleveland about four-thirty or five tomorrow morning, pick up her car here when
she gets in at seven-five, and drive herself home. I'll have gone to the office
when she arrives and we may get to see each other tomorrow night if we're
lucky."

"Goodness," said Mrs. Zahl. "That means she'll be driving in the morning rush,
and they're predicting more rain and a freeze by dawn."

"She's a very good driver, Mama."

"But very fast."

Eventually he ran down and Mrs. Zahl urged him to sleep well and rang off. She
remained thoughtful and the crossword puzzle book lay on her knees unworked,
even though as a rule she was too conscientious ever to start a puzzle without
finishing it.

After a while Mrs. Zahl laid aside the book and got up so quietly that Shiloh,
sleeping peacefully at the foot of the bed in a hillock of mauve quilt, at first
didn't register the fact. The dog only woke and came skittering after her when
she extracted her winter robe from the closet with a jangle of wire coathangers.

Mrs. Zahl padded in soft mules through the bedroom door to the head of the
stairs and began to descend slowly, without putting on a light. The stairs
creaked, and when she was halfway down, a huge gust of wind buffeted the house
as the predicted cold front arrived.

Mrs. Zahl muttered to herself, or perhaps to Shiloh, "It's just his kind of
weather."

At length she stood in the dark sitting room where she had sipped her drink and
eaten dinner, listening to the rain and wind hit the windows together and make
the old wooden sashes leap against the frames. The house leaked like a sieve,
always had, and little snakes of cold slithered over her ankles and poked
exploring tongues up her calves under the nightgown and the robe. After fifteen
minutes she was thoroughly chilled and discouraged.

"Oh, I should have known he wouldn't come the one time I wanted him," she told
Shiloh.

And then stiffened. She was feeling a kind of cold that had nothing to do with
weather fronts or warped sashes. Shiloh too was rising slowly from the place on
the sofa where she liked to curl up and was pointing her sharp nose at the
really profound, disturbing darkness that filled the end of the room and the
hallway beyond like a cave.

Darkness visible, thought Mrs. Zahl distractedly, and then the blue flicker
appeared and Charlie was, once again, pottering toward her on his inevitable
round.

Her heart was thudding dangerously and she would have given anything not to have
to move, but in fact she stepped forward into his way and blocked him from his
route to the wall behind the sectional desk. She felt a great horror at the idea
that he might pass entirely through her, as ghosts were supposed to be able to
do. She did not think she could stand it if that blue flicker touched her heart;
she thought she would die on the spot. But in fact he came to a halt just in
front of her, his rather shapeless face raised and turned a quarter to the left.

He had no eyes, and Mrs. Zahl, trying to look into what wasn't there, found
herself staring through the holes at a corner of the divan and at Shiloh's
trembling pale furry face. She could estimate where Charlie's eyes ought to be
because the familiar pouchy iridescence lingered beneath them and the bald brow
gleamed above -- all in blue, of course, not the mottled red of alcoholic life.

She tried to speak once and failed. She tried again and this time her voice came
out, so hoarse that she might have been incubating some horrible disease of the
larynx.

"Charlie," she croaked. "Charlie."

The thing flickered, as if she had spoken into a candle flame and her breath had
caused it to shiver and warp. Afraid that he might disappear, she lowered her
voice and whispered urgently:

"They're your grandchildren as well as mine. Oh, I know I wasn't a very loving
wife and I'm sorry, but I was always faithful. Sam is yours and his children are
yours, too, Charlie, and we're losing them.

"Charlie, listen to me. I can't stop her but you can. She'll be driving over icy
roads tomorrow about seven, driving like a bat out of hell, and she'll be tired.
It'll be dark in the car. All you have to do is appear to her there, at the
right time, maybe at the I-10 overpass. And Charlie, listen. Touch her. Put
your--put your hand into her chest. Touch her heart. Put your fingers around it.
Can you do that? Charlie!"

By way of answer he did a strange thing. He raised one pudgy flickering hand to
touch her face and put his fingers through her cheek into her mouth. She felt in
her teeth a strange little electric shock that was somehow horrifying. She felt
his fingers drawn along her tongue and her face twisted as if she had bitten
into a terribly sour fruit.

This was worse, much worse than she had imagined. Her heart paused, gave a
bound, and began to pound so loudly that she could hear it. At the same time she
felt an irresistible cold pressure. She stepped back, caught herself against the
divan, and Charlie pottered past her and disappeared into the shadow by the
desk.

Mrs. Zahl needed a very stiff drink after that experience. She had sensed some
kind of malignant force in her dead husband that surely he had never possessed
in life. Surely not? The overweight ex-jock, the hard-drinking clubman, the
successful peddler of oil-field equipment? But then, since she had lost interest
in him so early, how much had she ever really cared to know about him?

Shiloh was distracted, rushing about and trying to bark.

Eventually they found their way back upstairs to the bedroom, where Mrs. Zahl
and her dog huddled under the covers until dawn and the empty glass stood on the
bedside table, exhaling the smell of whiskey. And the dawn, as it will, however
reluctantly, came at last.

TRUST HIM to get it wrong, she thought bitterly, watching the early news on
WWL-TV. Trust Charlie. All he had had to do was appear to Marian at the right
time and touch her. That was all. Not to the pilot, when he was trying to land
his plane in an early morning soup of rain, fog and ice.

Sitting on the sofa, staring at the television set, her eyes sunken and dark,
her robe clutched to her throat, she watched the red flashes cycling, the
floodlights illuminating the downrush of sleety rain, the smouldering wreckage
of what the announcer kept calling Flight 911.

A hundred and twenty-three people! Mrs. Zahl knew that if she lived for
centuries, she would never, never be free of the guilt of causing this massacre.
But who could have believed that Charlie, Charlie, would destroy a whole
planeful of people? And why had he done it? Just clumsily, stupidly, as he had
done so many things in life?

Or, she thought suddenly, was it simply a coincidence? Somehow that was more
believable, and some of the weight pressing on her chest seemed to lift. After
all, the plane might have crashed for a dozen different reasons while Charlie
was innocently flitting through the terminal parking garage, looking for
Marian's red Honda. Gradually Mrs. Zahl began to relax. Charlie getting lost
seemed so much more in character than Charlie dealing death and destruction.

"It was just Fate, Shiloh. That's all."

Mrs. Zahl sat back on the sofa, trembling. The announcer went on about something
else, she was never to remember what. Gambling on riverboats or some such
nonsense. Of course the crash must have been the work of Fate, not of Charlie.
Fate so often untied knots that seemed absolutely tight. You worried and stewed
and cudgeled your brain and then the thing you feared just didn't happen, for
some unimaginable reason.

Anyway, thought Mrs. Zahl, both she and Charlie had been saved from the guilt of
killing someone. She retained enough religion to be glad of that, although --
she added to herself firmly -- they still shared the guilt of wanting Marian
dead. Something else to he confessed, assuming that she ever went to confession
again. But they had wanted to kill only Marian, not a crowd of innocent
strangers, and they had not actually done the deed. It remained only a wish.

She reached out a still-trembling hand to turn on the light, for the morning was
excessively dark and dreary as well as cold and wet and slippery outside. And
then, for the third time in twenty-four hours, that other feeling came over her.

Oh, dear, she thought, the resident ghost again. Well, now at any rate she could
ask Charlie straight out (even though he never spoke, so how could he tell her?)
about what had actually happened at Moisant International Airport this dark
morning the 25th of January.

She got unsteadily to her feet and turned. The blue flickering was brighter than
ever before, and for good reason. Out of the darkness a crowd of ghosts began to
trail across her floor, giving her looks that were either bewildered, fierce, or
mournful according to their natures.

First came a fat woman holding a little girl by the hand, then a businessman who
was clutching the transparent outline of his laptop computer as he shuffled by.
Then a terribly young couple, still holding tight to each other and not even
looking at Mrs. Zahl. A boy about twelve followed, snivelling into his sleeve;
an elderly couple with a tremendous air of indignation about them; a black man
shaking his head who paused to point an accusing finger at her; a pretty, pouty
girl wearing the misty outline of a pale fur and a mini...

Mrs. Zahl staggered and caught herself against the divan, her mouth moving
silently like Shiloh's as she watched them pass. Then, with hands shaking like a
victim of Parkinson's, she fetched a bottle from Charlie's memorial wetbar and
mixed herself a drink. It seemed heartless, but she needed the liquor
desperately. And then she stood and watched them pass, for the first of what she
assumed would be many, many eternities.

She had misjudged Charlie entirely. He must be in Hell, and he had done this to
damn her, too. How could he! After all, she had merely not loved him; how could
he have hated her?

Still she did not despair. Silently she vowed to defeat him by a life of
suffering and repentance. A hundred and twenty-three people had to file past and
she forced herself, as the beginning of her penance, to look each and every one
of them in the face. She was beginning to formulate a prayer acknowledging
everything and asking forgiveness when Marian appeared.

Oh, she was unmistakable. Here she came, her bluish form distinctive with padded
shoulders and long bob, like a refugee from the Andrews Sisters, with a dim
gleam about the mouth as a memorial to her large horsey teeth. She was clenching
her little fists in baffled rage, positively trembling with fury that all her
plans had gone to pieces, that she would never be the wife of a CEO, that Sam
would call off the move, that her children would be raised by their grandmother!

At the sight of her Mrs. Zahl lost every particle of her sense of guilt. While
Shiloh gave a silent snarl, she raised her half-empty glass and smiled straight
into what had been Marian's face. She said, smiling, "Cheers, darling."

She did not have a single moment to disavow that malignant joy when Marian
stepped forward and thrust a small, cold, flickering hand into her chest and
grasped her heart.