John D. MacDonald

The Hands of an Artist

Arthur VanCook Hilson pulled his raincoat collar more tightly against the back of his neck and slowed his pace so he wouldn’t get home too soon. The plan usually took about twenty minutes to think out — twenty minutes to go through every action, every precaution, the police investigation, the funeral and at last the blessed sensation of freedom that glowed far ahead of him like a slow dawn rising behind wooded hills.

It was warm enough so that he felt perspiration glueing his shirt to his lean ribs. It was good to be lean. He took a sideways glance at his tall figure as he passed a shop window and saw his striding figure reflected in the wet glass. Much younger looking than Myra with her sagging stomach and her short-legged waddle, her doughy face.

A young girl came walking briskly out of a doorway. He caught a glimpse of her straight young legs, the free swing of her body. She had dark eyes set wide apart. He stared into them, seeing in their young animal depths a flicker of interest. After she had passed him, he straightened his shoulders and took longer steps. When Myra was gone, there would be a chance to meet young girls like that — to know them well. Young girls with fresh sweet bodies and eyes of the night. After Myra was gone. The phrase beat in his mind like the soft tolling of a hidden bell. Then it changed. After I am free. He glanced down at his hands and saw that they were brown and firm. They swung in the rain, capable and strong. He thought again of the plan. He walked more slowly and the roar of the five o’clock traffic was as the low orchestral accompaniment to the sparkling clarity of his mind.

His car was parked in the driveway and he noticed the shreds of steam blowing across the wet hood, realizing that Myra must have just returned a few minutes before. He walked down the drive and went in the side door. He stripped off his raincoat, got a hanger and placed it neatly on the wall hook on the porch to dry. He shook his soft hat, handling it carefully. He had spent a lot of time in selecting the hat, finding one with the right curl to the brim to bring out the lines he liked in his lean checks.

He walked into the kitchen and stood for a second, a twisted scornful grin on his lean lips. Myra was stooped, peering into the oven. Her heavy broad hips made him think of some kind of ponderous animal. There was no grace in her.

She heard him and straightened up, brushing a wisp of hair off her damp forehead with the back of her hand. Her dark eyes were blank in her broad white face as he stepped over and dutifully pecked at her cheek. She smelled of perfume and dough.

“Everything go allright at the office, Arthur?”

“Same as usual. Did you find a suit for Paul?”

The familiar wrinkles appeared between her eyes and she said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with that boy. He wants to get the most horrible bright things and he won’t look at the clothes I want to get for him. He gets sulky and I hate to have scenes with him in public. I don’t know what to do. I wish you’d say something to him. I can’t do a thing with him and goodness knows he needs a new suit something awful. It seems to me...”

She stopped talking as he turned and walked out of the kitchen. She sighed and stooped to look again into the oven.

Arthur Hilson took the evening paper off the hall table and walked into the living room. Paul was sitting next to the radio, thumping his foot in time to the heavy beat of the music. He nodded and his lips moved. Arthur couldn’t hear him over the thud of the music. He sat in the chair, sighed and looked at Paul over the top of the paper. One by one he picked out the features of Myra in the thick face of the seventeen year old. He wondered vaguely what Paul would have been like if he had been his own son rather than the son of Myra and her first husband. Possibly he would have inherited the lean strength, tall and proud, instead of the heavy sulky body of Myra. He realized that he had always wondered. It was not too late for him to have sons. Sons by some other woman. By the straight slim girl he had seen while walking home.

He shouted, “Turn that thing off! I want to talk to you.”

Paul looked startled and switched it off. The room was full of sudden silence. Paul leaned back in his chair, on his face the look of heavy patience that so infuriated Arthur.

“Your mother tells me that you were difficult about buying a suit.”

“Oh, she wants me to get undertaker clothes. I want to wear what the other guys do. Something sharper.”

“You will go down with her tomorrow and you will get what she wants you to get.”

“Yes, father.” The hidden slur on the word father. The veiled contempt and amusement

“I’m not earning money for you to be a prima donna about spending it on sensible things.”

“Yes, father.”

“As long as I’ve made myself clear, you can turn on that trash again.”

“Yes, father.” The heavy fingers twisted the knob and the music grew back into the long bright room. Arthur turned from habit to the market listings, following the prices of shares which he intended to buy — some day. He glanced over at Paul again, thinking of the day when he could enroll the boy in a private school Myra would not be there to object. It would be like dropping the boy out of his life. He would be free on that score also.

Dinner, as usual, was silent. They ate in the alcove off the kitchen. The dishes rattling in the cupboards as Myra puffed to her feet between courses and padded back and forth. Arthur enjoyed cutting the meat on his plate, watching it curl back from the sharp knife, placing his fork in the exact middle of the geometric figures and rolling the flavor of it across his tongue. He heard Paul eating beside him and knew that it would be best not to shift his eyes so that he could see the heavy hands bent low over the plate as the boy tore the meat apart with his fork and shoved it into his mouth. He knew that it would be best not to look at Myra, sitting with blank face, chewing each mouthful an interminable fifty times as the doctor had told her years before.

He finished and wiped his mouth carefully and pushed his chair back. He glanced at the two of them as he mumbled an excuse and left the table. They didn’t look up. He walked away, thinking the old fiction that he was a king who had fled his own country — who was forced to live with these two sullen creatures who served him until the day when he could rightfully reclaim his throne.

But the days of such games were past. The plan was slowly beginning to stand out in sharp focus in his mind. He had been over it so many times that when the time arrived to use it, each movement could he gone through as though in a dream. A plan that moved from step to step as inevitable as... as death.

He went upstairs to the small study which adjoined his bedroom. For the fiftieth time he took his account book which listed his small holdings, his savings, his current cash. Then he took her insurance money and added it to his assets. He refigured his retirement income. It would be small, retiring ten years before he reached the proper age, but with her insurance money reinvested and with the savings invested in proper stocks it would be enough. Enough to cover the school costs of Paul and enable him to get away and live in freedom. Some small coast town in the islands. The warm brown flesh of the young girls of Ceylon, of Malaya, of Java. He leaned back in the chair and looked at the mirror he had hung opposite his desk. He smiled carefully at himself, noting with detachment how the lines around hit mouth and eyes deepened.

When he finally went back into his own bedroom, he found that Myra had left the bathroom door ajar. It was open a few inches and he could see her moving around in the bright bathroom light. Her wattled flesh sagged and she moved heavily. He tried to see through the curtains of flesh to the trim body of the girl he had married. He realized that he didn’t hate her — that he felt merely a great sense of revulsion, of distaste. There was no joy in the life she wouldn’t miss — after the plan had worked.

So he worked and walked and thought and ate and slept and the plan grew in his mind until he knew exactly how it would have to be. On the twentieth of June at six-thirty he took the first step in the plan.

He looked across the dinner table at Myra and said, “Hopper told me that he’d like me to take my vacation early this year. The first two weeks in July. I’ve taken a camp for us on Wallace Lake.”

Myra stopped chewing and looked up at him in dull surprise. She started to chew again and he waited until she had finished and swallowed. “That doesn’t give me much time to get ready, Arthur. Clothes and packing and food and all.”

“Ten days. That ought to be plenty.”

“You men never know how much work there is. You can’t just up and go. There’s lots of things to do. Why couldn’t Mr. Hopper have told you sooner?”

Paul tossed his fork onto his dish with a clatter and said, “I’m not going. Little hick lake. Nothing to do. Not me.”

Arthur felt sudden alarm. It was necessary that Paul go. He needed a dull-witted witness. He was so anxious that he nearly made a mistake. He caught himself in time. He almost said, “I’ve seen...” In time he changed it to, “I’ve heard it’s a nice place. I won’t have nonsense. You are going with us anyway, so you may as well accept it gracefully.”

When he was at last alone he felt uncertain of himself. After carefully concealing the trip to Wallace Lake, he had almost given it away in two words. There couldn’t be the slightest basis for suspicion...

It took four hours for the drive to Wallace Lake. He enjoyed driving. He pretended that the heavy woman in the front seat beside him didn’t exist. He felt a sharp catch of excitement in his throat, a chill internal tremble of viscera as he realized that soon she wouldn’t exist. Paul sat in the back seat with the suitcases and grumbled about the idea of going so far away from cities and people.

The camp was small and neat, three bedrooms and a long living-room and kitchen combined. It sat at the end of its own small road, finished in dark stained wood. From the long porch you could see down the mountain slope to the lake shimmering grey in the Adirondack dusk. The surrounding hills seemed to grow taller against the stars as the dusk deepened into night. He sat on the porch and heard Myra working at the unpacking. He smoked cigarets and listened to the loons down on the lake. He had refused Paul permission to take the car down to the village. The boy sat on the other end of the porch — a sullen, rebellious shape in the darkness. The plan had begun and Arthur looked at it and found it good. There would be no need for revision, for changes. It had been born out of a cautious, careful mind. He bit little pieces of skin from the sides of his fingertips and spat them off the porch with little ‘whi-thoo’ sounds. He thought of the flaming sun on the white sand of the islands. It was no longer necessary to think of the plan. It would go along almost of its own volition, like a small and deadly machine which required no operator. He wondered vaguely if he could teach himself to paint. He had often thought that his hands looked like the hands of an artist.

It was on the second day that he drove them to the lookout point on the mountain road. The car had strained and roared to get up the steep curves. He saw the familiar spot ahead, its every aspect sharp in his mind. He fitted his mental picture of the actual scene and they fitted like the two pictures of a stereoscope, lending each other dimension.

The white concrete posts seemed to stand out sharp and clear against the far blue of distant hills. They were like the regular markers for geometric graves. He liked the symmetry. He slowed and turned off the asphalt, through a wide space between the white posts. He stopped the car, the hood tilted gently down a graveled slope. Ahead the hare in the valley had drifted half-way up the opposite slope of the hills. Distant bird-calls sounded sweet and clear in the heat.

He turned and saw Myra’s questioning stare. “Thought I better let it cool off for a while. Plenty of steep road to come.” He yanked on the hand brake, remembering the stench it had made when he had burned it out. He set the gears in low and took his foot off the brake. He knew that only the low gear held the car on the slope.

With studied casualness he looked to the left and right. He was parked at right angles to the road. To the left he could see a mile of the road winding up the hill until it disappeared around a rocky cliff face. To the right he could see the road over which they had come, winding down toward the valley.

He looked straight ahead and felt sudden dizziness as he realized that just beyond the gently sloping brink was the drop off. He remembered how deep it had looked when he had cautiously clung to the bank and peered down. Now he wondered if it was quite deep enough.

He heard the back door of the car open. He had planned on that. Paul would be restless, would want to walk around in the sun. The boy mumbled something that he didn’t quite hear. The back door slammed.

He waited a few more seconds, feeling hard and hot against his chest the heavy thumping of his heart. He caught a small piece of the inside of his lower lip between his teeth and bit through it. The blood tasted flat and salty.

He forced himself to yawn and said, “Guess I’ll stretch my legs.” He opened the car door and stepped out onto the gravel He looked at Paul. The boy stood about twelve feet to the left of the car, kicking bits of stone toward the brink of the place where the hill dropped steeply away. He slammed the door, his eyes on Paul. The boy was looking off toward the far hills.

He reached quickly through the window and hit the gear lever smartly upward with the palm of his right hand. It knocked it out of low gear, and for the smallest part of a second, just as the rolling car struck his elbow, he gazed deep into the growing knowledge and fear in the dark dull eyes of his wife.

He shouted hoarsely and grabbed at the door handle, trotting beside the car, getting the door open and throwing himself at the seat. He turned slightly, making his hip strike the edge of the seat, letting himself bound back out onto the gravel. On his hands and knees as the back wheel rolled by him, he shouted again, hearing above his shout the growing crackle of the gravel compressed by the hard tires, hearing the odd throaty bubble in his wife’s throat as she called his name — just once, extending it out over a second’s infinity. He felt the bite of the gravel into his palms as he saw the nose drop, the back of the car seem to rise, and caught the yellow flash of his license number, the sparkle of sun on chrome before the car disappeared.

He scrambled in the silence toward the edge, scuttling on his hands and knees, getting almost to the edge as upward came the surprisingly dim crash. He clung and saw the four wheels, the mechanical-toy underside rolling up and over in an odd slow motion that was more than half a dream. Then the second noise of crashing metal and the slow rolling as it went down into the thick woods near the stream. The world was silent and he clung at the edge and saw the brownish dust rising slowly from near the foot of the slope.

Now that it was done, he felt odd and sick and weak. He turned his head quickly and looked up and down the road and saw that it was still empty. He started to work his way cautiously backward and felt the sudden unbelievable thrust against his hip — the sudden thrust that sent him forward, and he turned clinging with fingers that tore, with sudden drench of sweat that was like ice. The gravel rolled under his bleeding fingers and he slipped an inch at a time backward toward the edge.

He saw, sitting on safer ground, one leg still outstretched after the push against his hip, the boy Paul who was somehow not a boy — staring down at him as he slipped. He heard his lips say hoarsely, “Help me!” knowing as he said it that there was no help in the sullen face, the blank eyes.

Then he felt the ground drop away from under his knees and he slid back over the edge, feeling a strange floating, a turning, with the roar of wind in his ears and a spinning disc of blue sky and green hills, and stray things blowing through his mind like bits of paper down an alley — the islands, the insurance, the brown firm flesh of the young girls, the mirror on his office wall, the strong slim hands with which he was going to paint...

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Hands of an Artist