The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever Read Free Book Online

habit of helping yourself to other people’s property?” Coverly was more perplexed than angry.
    “Listen, chicken,” Murphy said. “Where I grew up you either helped yourself or you ate dirt.”
    “But this doesn’t happen to be where you grew up,” said Coverly. It was the wrong tack. He seemed to be footnoting the dispute. Then, confident of his rightness he spoke sternly and in a full voice, marred by some old-fashioned or provincial haughtiness.
    “Would you be good enough to return our garbage pail?” he asked.
    “Listen,” Murphy said. “You’re trespassing. You’re on my land. Get off my land or you’ll go home a cripple for life. I’ll gouge out your eyes. I’ll break your nose. I’ll tear off your ears.”
    Coverly swung a right from the hip, and Murphy, a big man and a coward, it seemed, went down. Coverly stood there, a little bewildered. Then Murphy came forward on his hands and knees and sank his teeth into Coverly’s shin. Coverly roared. Betsey and Mrs. Murphy came running out of their kitchens. Just then a missile left its pad and, in the dusk, shed a light as bright as the light of a midsummer’s day over the valley and the site, throwing the shadows of the combatants, their houses and their ginkgo trees blackly onto the grass, while air waves demarked the earth-shaking roar so that it sounded like the humble click of track joints. The missile ascended, the light faded with it, and the two women took their husbands home.
    Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
    The computation and administration center where Coverly worked appeared from a distance to be a large, one-story building but this single story merely contained the elevator terminals and the security offices. The other offices and the hardware were underground. The one visible story was made of glass, tinted darkly to the color of oily water. The darkened glass did not diminish but it did alter the light of day. Beyond these dim glass walls one could see some flat pasture land and the buildings of an abandoned farm. There was a house, a barn, a clump of trees and a split-rail fence, and the abandoned buildings with the gantries beyond them had a nostalgic charm. They were signs of the past, and whatever the truth may have been, they appeared to be signs of a rich and a natural way of life. The abandoned farm evoked a spate of vulgar and bucolic imagery—open fires, pails of fresh milk and pretty girls swinging in apple trees—but it was nonetheless persuasive. One turned away from this then to the dark, oil-colored glass and moved into another world, buried six stories beneath the cow pasture. It was a new world in every way. Its newness was most apparent in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and usefulness that seems lost to most of us today. To observe that the elevators sometimes broke down, that one of the glass walls had cracked, and that the pretty receptionists in the security office had a primitive and an immemorial appeal was like burdening oneself with the observations of some old man, pushed by time past the boundaries of all usefulness. The crowds that went to and from the computation center had a look of contentment and purpose that you won’t find in the New York or Paris subways, where we seem to regard one another with the horror and dismay of a civilization of caricaturists. Leaving his office late one night Coverly had heard Dr. Cameron, the site director, ending a dispute with one of his lieutenants. The doctor was shouting, “You’ll never get a Goddamned man onto the Goddamned moon, and if you do, it won’t do you any Goddamned good.”
    Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
    Betsey had hoped to be transferred to Canaveral and was disappointed in Talifer. They had been there two months then but no one had come to call. She had made no friends. In the evening she could hear the sounds of talk and laughter but she and Coverly were never included in these gatherings. From her window Betsey could see