Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

in the gesture of a storekeeper pleased to be of use, though perhaps, for all that, ill at ease. When his wife came in from the stockroom in back—a small, pretty woman, lightly moustached—Denham said at once, with a careful nobility that made Craine smile, “It’s all right, you won’t be needed, Margie.” She pursed her lips, looked startled, then instantly withdrew. Elaine Glass was at the window, full of panic, staring in. Royce was not in sight.

Craine bent down as if to look more carefully at one of Denham’s pipes. “D’you mind if I use your back exit?” he said, and reached up and tipped his hat.

“Do I mind—” Denham said, straightening a little. He was in a momentary quandary. Craine’s request—Craine’s very existence, in fact—was by no means due and regular. But Denham’s habitual good manners resolved the question. “Be my guest,” he said. His smile was, under the circumstances, hearty. He seemed, even now, only mildly surprised and, though helpless in the face of this affront to regularity, not alarmed. For all his gentility, for all the comfortable dimness of his shop—the dark glowing wood of pipes and shelves, the civilized smell of Virginia, Turkish, and Latakia, the quiet so deep you could hear Denham’s wife humming “You Wore a Tulip” in the stockroom, Denham was not out of touch with the world. He’d seen movies; he read the papers. He perhaps even had, in his shaded, high-gabled house on Springer, a television set.

There was still no sign of Royce. Craine made his way to the door of the back room, looked past his shoulder one more time, then stepped through into the gloom of carefully stacked boxes, tobacco canisters, shelves of tea. Mrs. Denham was nowhere to be seen, at first; but when he’d gotten further in, he saw that she stood over by the workbench, under the hanging light, wielding tin snips. Neatly stacked around her on the floor she had wired-up parcels, their latest shipment. “Can I help you?” she said. Her eyebrows lifted. Craine silently raised his finger to his mouth and she pursed her lips, puffed her cheeks out, and said no more. He lurched awkwardly between the floor-to-ceiling storage shelves that darkened the right-hand side of the room—blocks of shadow in which stood faintly glowing tobacco cans—and stumbled around behind the last of the stacks out of sight. A window loomed behind him, high on the wall, and Craine had a sharp, unsettling impression that under the window, among carefully stacked cans and packing crates, stood a large black bird. Fighting down fear, he bent to look more closely. It vanished, became a stain on the wall. Craine pursed his lips and tapped the white plastic Bible cover.

When half a minute had passed, the girl in the beard and loose, beltless trench coat came blundering through the door, head craned forward, eyes rolled back to make certain Mr. Denham hadn’t seen her. She groped six feet into the room as if blind, then saw Mrs. Denham and gave a yelp. “Excuse me,” she said. Mrs. Denham said, “What on earth!” and looked over at Craine. “What next!” she said. Now she seemed alarmed. Craine stepped out of hiding, and Elaine Glass, hands flying to her mouth, turned to run out, but there stood Royce, obscenely grinning, his legs far apart and hips thrown forward, the pistol in his right hand, braced on his heavy left forearm.

Mrs. Denham jumped back, lifted willy-nilly off her feet like a puppet, and Elaine Glass screamed and came leaping, more agile than a gibbon, toward Craine, reaching for him wildly, like a woman who runs after a baby carriage, and Craine, before she hit, had a fleeting impression of her beard swinging sideways, her trench coat flaring, her bra-less boobs like two buoys rising slowly, then falling again, first one, then the other when the tide comes rolling in on the California coast. When she hit him, straight on, exactly like a truck for all the slightness of her frame, he had an impression of her mouth as a bottomless chasm smelling thickly of chocolate malt, and then the room fell upward, or rather Craine crashed floorward, slammed down by speed and intransigeant bone, landing so solidly on the bottle in the coat that it was amazing, as he later told Meakins, that he didn’t break his ass.

The wind was knocked out of him and her hair was in his face. The muscles of his stomach automatically tightened, locked around his belly and chest like a cramp, and however he might labor, eyes bulging, fingers clawing, feet jerking, he could suck in no air. From all around him, as it seemed to Craine, came the shrieks of the girl and a clatter of falling boxes and some secondary confusion that he gradually identified as the shouts of Mr. and Mrs. Denham. Royce was bending over Elaine Glass, struggling to pick her up off Craine, pulling her toward him as if mounting from behind, his square hands closed around her bosom. She twisted her head around, wild with terror, and screamed still louder. Royce roared back. At last, quite suddenly, Craine got his breath. It rushed in like a stinging wind, a nearly blinding flood of light. Mrs. Denham, lips pursed, held a heavy glass canister of tobacco in both hands, high above her head, and in the doorway Earl Denham stood shaking a mop, bellowing like a bull, with his pipe between his teeth. At each side of Denham stood Hannah Johnson and Tom Meakins, wide-eyed, jittering, banging their knees like a dance team. “No!” Hannah screamed, and her hands flew wildly. “No, Craine!”

Incredibly, Craine had his pistol out and was pointing it at Royce’s head.

He could not remember, later, getting back to the office. He remembered standing there, heart beating wildly, in the Denhams’ store, then sitting, at Mrs. Denham’s insistence—she came to him with a chair, telling him, “Sit down now, just sit down,