Meeting Evil Read Free Page B

vessel in her left hand. “I always thought you were supposed to acquire a tremendous appetite when you quit smoking. It’s just the opposite with me. I always looked forward to eating when I knew I had a cigarette coming.”
    John had never smoked his life long, the odor of burningtobacco having always been nauseating to him. It was not because of him, however, that Joanie had lately given up the habit: she had at last been scared off by a series of antismoking exhortations on television. She really did take seriously her responsibilities as a mother.
    “Spaghetti okay for dinner?” He made it every Monday evening. It was one of his specialties. He boiled it up and added the canned white clam sauce.
    “Why not?” rhetorically asked his wife, supporting her head with her right hand, between sips of coffee from the mug in her left.
    Melanie wandered in and said something her father did not hear distinctly, for it was at this point that the door chimes sounded.
    “Be right back,” he told his daughter, touching her button nose ever so lightly with his index finger, but she was not mollified by the gesture and began to complain.
    John had inherited his mother’s anxiety with respect to electric summonses: the sound of bell or buzzer was perforce an emergency to which one must give precedence over hemorrhages, flash fires, and all human importunities. Being way back in the kitchen, he now headed for the front entrance at the run, lest the unseen applicant have to undergo the horror of ringing again.
    Owing to the same anxiety, he never took time to peer through the little gauze curtain that covered the rectangle of glass set high in the door for that purpose, but, as now, hurled open the portal without regard for the cautions about strangers that one heard so frequently these days. His father-in-law, for example, made all comers state their business to the tiny microphone installed above the bell-push, while they stood for inspection through a closed-circuit TV camera mounted near the ceiling of the porch.
    The present caller was a man of about John’s own age, a tall fellow somewhere between thin and sinewy. On the back of his head was the kind of billed cap worn nowadays by more people than just ballplayers. John himself had two: one purchased for the golf course, the other a promotional gift on the opening of the local branch of a hardware chain.
    “My car stalled out, right in front of your house.” A clump of dingy fair curls filled the space between the forehead and the bill of the cap.
    “You want me to call the auto club?”
    The man’s smile displayed only his upper teeth, so that it took an instant to identify it as a smile. “You could just give me a push.” He gestured with his shoulder. “Just to where it starts down.”
    The descent so signified began in front of the third house from John’s. Once over the crest of the hill, you could probably coast without power for more than a quarter mile.
    John accompanied the stranger to the curb, where he asked him, “You think that will do it?”
    The man seemed not to understand the question. “Hey,” he said, “in this baby I can smoke anything on the road.”
    John had never been fascinated with cars, but he recognized this one as being powerful, with its air scoop on the hood and its long red snout. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s hot-looking. Where do you want me to go, side or back?”
    The man opened the door and got into the driver’s seat. “Right here by the window.” He slammed the door, and John braced himself against the frame and pushed.
    The car rolled more easily than he had anticipated. He had the natural strength associated with a stocky build. But he had done little in the way of recreational exercise (playing golf maybe three times a season) since leaving high school,and he noticed nowadays that physical effort caused him to breathe harder than he had once had to.
    Just as John was feeling a certain satisfaction with his current