Tough Guys Don't Dance (30 page)

We began walking.

“Can I ask another question?”

“Of course.”

“How did you ever get both men all the way out to Hell-Town?”

“I just put them in the trunk of my car and drove them over to the house I'm renting. It's at Beach Point, by the way. There's no one there now. So it was no great trick to transfer the bodies onto my boat. Not in the dark.”

“Weren't they heavy?”

“I'm a little stronger than I look.”

“You didn't used to be.”

“Tim, I work out now.”

“I ought to.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“You took the bodies out by water to Hell-Town and buried them there?”

“Just the men's bodies. Actually, I should have done all the burials from the beginning. If I hadn't delegated that little task, Spider and Stoodie would never have gained such leverage on me.”

“But in any event, after this last burial, you returned in your boat to your house at Beach Point?”

“Yes.”

“And the beeper led you to me?”

“No, you threw my beeper away.” He gave his shy smile once more. “I just wandered into you.”

“That's awesome.”

“I love design,” he said. “That may be what it's all about.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you possess much faculty of
déjà vu?”
he asked. “I live with it all the time. I wonder if we don't inhabit the same situation more than once. Perhaps we're supposed to do better the second time.”

“I don't know,” I said.

We kept walking. “I have to admit I was looking for your car,” he said. “I just drove around until I saw the Porsche.”

“I can't say if that makes me feel better or worse,” I replied. Maybe it was the pain, but I
felt compelled to exhibit the cheerful wit of a patient being wheeled by his surgeon to the hour of his operation.

We walked in silence. Below us was a great deal of phosphorescence in the water, and I pondered the luminous activity of the plankton but cannot say I had a new thought. We had come to the deepest cleft in the walk, and since I could hardly jump across, I had to take a series of lower boulders on the flank of the cut, and thereby got a mean scrape on my hand from barnacles. When I swore, he sympathized. “It's cruel to march you this far,” he said, “but it's essential.”

We continued. It took on at last that rhythm which speaks of movement without beginning or end, and so I hardly noticed when we came to the other shore a mile from where we had begun. Now we left the breakwater and trudged along the last arm of the bay beach. It was icy on one's feet to walk down in the moist sand, but slow going where the strand was dry. In the dark, for the moon was now behind a cloud, one had to watch each step. Old boat timbers, stout as bodies, and as silver as the light of lunacy itself, were at every odd place in the sand. One could hear the ebbing of the tide. Every chirp of a sandpiper stirred by us, every scuttling of crabs and whistle of field mice was audible. Our feet crunched upon oyster shells and razor-clam shells, empty quahogs and mussels and whelks—how many sounds could calcium offer when cracking? All the dry
kelp and sargassum weed scrunched like peanut shells beneath our feet, and the mourning of the harbor buoy came back to us on the slow expiring of the tide.

Maybe we walked for half an hour. By the water's edge, pink jellyfish and moon jellies lolled in the moonlight like fat ladies in the sun, and the seaweed that is spoken of as mermaid's tresses washed ashore. I lived in the wet phosphorescence of the tide's edge as if the last lights of my life might pass into these cold flashes.

We came at last to our destination. It was a strip of sand, no less and no more remarkable than any other, and he pointed me up a shallow dune through long grass to a beach hollow. If you sat down, you could no longer view the bay. I tried to tell myself that I was on the sands of Hell-Town but I doubted if spirits nested here. There was only a pall upon us. The winds must be astringent on this barrier beach. Spirits, I thought, would prefer to cluster by the sheds floated over a century ago to Commercial Street.

“Patty's body is here?” I said at last.

He nodded. “You can't see where I buried them, can you?”

“Not in this light.”

“Not in broad daylight either.”

“How do you know where they are?”

“By their relation to these shrubs,” he said, pointing to a plant or two on the perimeter of the sunken bowl.

“Seems vague.”

“Do you see that horseshoe-crab shell on its back?”

I nodded.

“Take a better look. There's a stone I put in it so it wouldn't shift.”

I could not really see the stone in this light, but pretended I did.

“Patty Lareine,” said Wardley, “is buried beneath that shell, Jessica is four feet to the right, and Spider four feet to the left. Stoodie is still another four feet to the left.”

“Do you have a place picked for me?” was what I wished to say—the élan of the brave patient demanded no less—but I did not trust my voice. I was feeling some huskiness of throat. It is absurd, but now, at such proximity to my death, I felt no more terror than before the kickoff of my first high school football game. Certainly I felt less than before my one and only bout in the Golden Gloves. Had life ground my heart down to the manageable emotions? Or was I still on the alert to snatch his pistol?

“Why did you kill Patty Lareine?” I asked.

“Don't be certain it was I,” he replied.

“What about Jessica?”

“Oh, no. Laurel had some serious flaws in her character, but I wouldn't kill her.” With the hand that did not hold the pistol, he passed sand through his fingers, as if debating the run of his next remarks. “There,” he said, “I think I'm going to tell you.”

“I wish you would.”

“What difference does it make?”

“As I say, I think it does.”

“How interesting if your instinct is well-founded.”

“Please tell me,” I said, as though speaking to an older relative.

He liked this. I don't believe he had heard such a tone in my voice before. “Do you know what a hog you are?” Wardley answered.

“We don't always see that in ourselves,” I told him.

“Well, you're a fearfully covetous person.”

“I have to admit I don't know why you say that.”

“My friend Leonard Pangborn was a silly man in a lot of ways. He claimed to gallivant through many a gay world that in fact he never went near. He was a creature of the closet. How he suffered his homosexuality! It was agonizing for him. He wanted so much to be hetero. He was incredibly pleased that Laurel Oakwode had that affair with him. Did you think of any of that? No. You had to have sex with her right in front of him.”

“How do you know all that?”

“Because Jessica, as you call her, told me.”

“What are you saying?”

“Yes, darling, she phoned me late that night, Friday night—six nights ago.”

“Were you already in Provincetown?”

“Of course.”

“What did Jessica say?”

“She was in a total state. After putting them both through all that show business—they're simple people!—you had the gall to drop them back at their own car. ‘Get lost,' you snarled at them, ‘you're pigs.' How's that for bartender's rectitude, Madden? Scratch one of your kind and out comes a lout. What could they do to answer? They went off by themselves and had a terrible fight. Lonnie reverted. Just like a little boy in a tantrum. I mean, they had this godawful end-of-the-earth fight. He told her that she was a slut. She called him an old aunty. That's got to be the worst word. Poor Lonnie. He gets out of the car, slams the trunk lid and walks away. So she thinks. She waits. She doesn't even hear the pop until it comes through to her that she did hear something. There has definitely been a pop. Like a champagne bottle. She's sitting by herself in the car out near the beach parking lot at Race Point totally deserted and has just been called a slut, and she hears someone opening a champagne bottle. Is Lonnie making a conciliatory gesture? She waits, then she gets out and looks. No Lonnie in sight. Boy, oh boy. On impulse, she lifts the trunk. There he is, dead, the gun in his mouth. The perfect death for one of my ilk. ‘Dear friend,' he might as well have said, ‘I'd rather have a cock in my mouth, but if one must go out cold tit, then cold tit it will be.' ”

All the while that Wardley was telling me this,
he kept the gun barrel pointed in my direction like a forefinger.

“Where did he get the .22 with the silencer?” I asked.

“He always carried one. Years ago I bought a rare set of three—I don't believe there are a hundred such sets in the world—and I gave one to Patty Lareine and another to Lonnie. But that's another story. There was a time, believe it or not, when I was very much in love with Lonnie.”

“I don't understand why he was carrying a gun on Friday night.”

“He always carried that gun. It made him feel like a man, Tim.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Never occurred to you?”

“If he was so bothered by what I was doing with Jessica, why didn't he plug me?”

“You don't carry a gun,” said Wardley, “because you would use it. He couldn't. Oh, I know Lonnie. His fury wished to reach cataclysmic proportions. Kill you, kill Laurel—but, of course, he could do neither. He was queer, dear.”

“So he killed himself?”

“I want to be truthful. It isn't all your fault. He was also in terrible financial trouble. Facing a stiff sentence. He threw himself on my mercy just a month ago. Begged me to help. I told him I would try. But, do you know, as much money as I have, it would have made too big
a dent. He sensed I wasn't going to come through.”

I was beginning to shiver once more. It was as much from fatigue as anything else, but my shoes and the bottoms of my trousers were wet.

“Would you like to make a fire?”

“Yes,” I said.

He debated it. “No,” he said at last, “I'm afraid it would be too hard to start. Everything is damp.”

“Yes.”

“I hate smoke.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

My hands were playing with the sand. Suddenly he fired a shot. Like that. Pop. It dug in one inch below the heel of my shoe.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Don't try to blind me with a handful of dust.”

“You're a good shot.”

“I've practiced.”

“I can see.”

“It didn't come naturally. Nothing graceful has ever come naturally to me. Do you think that's unfair?”

“Maybe.”

“It's enough to solicit the devil.”

We were silent. I tried not to shiver. It seemed to me that such shivering might irritate him, and then what would he do?

“You didn't tell me the rest,” I said. “What did you do when Jessica called?”

“I tried to calm her down. I wasn't so calm myself. Lonnie dead! Finally I told her to wait in the car. I'd pick her up.”

“What were you planning?”

“I hadn't begun to think. At times like that, all you tell yourself is, ‘What a mess.' I didn't have a clue how to handle it, but all the same, I set out for Race Point. However, the directions given me were treacherous. I found myself in North Truro and all turned around. By the time I located Race Point, Laurel was gone and so was the car. I went back to Beach Point to tell Patty Lareine what I thought of her directions, and she, too, was gone. She didn't come back all night. And I never saw Jessica's face again.”

“Patty Lareine was living with you?”

“We'll get to that.”

“I'd like to.”

“First tell me: Did Patty go to your house?” Wardley asked.

“I don't think so.”

“You can't remember?”

“I was too drunk. It's possible she passed through the house.”

“Do you know,” asked Wardley, “what Patty Lareine used to say about your forgetful spells?”

“No.”

“She'd say, ‘There's the asshole flying up his asshole again.' ”

“She would say that.”

“She always spoke of you as an asshole,” said Wardley. “When you were our chauffeur in
Tampa, she used to refer to you that way when she was alone with me. Last month, she still spoke of you that way. Asshole. Why would she call you that?”

“Maybe it was her word for jerk.”

“Patty hated you intensely.”

“I don't know why,” I said.

“I think I do,” said Wardley. “Certain men indulge the female component in themselves by encouraging their women to practice special oral sex.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said.

“Did you and Patty ever have anything of the sort?”

“Wardley, I don't care to talk about it.”

“Heteros are uptight about such matters.” He sighed. He rolled his eyes. “I wish we did have a fire. It would be sexier.”

“It would certainly be cozier.”

“Well, we can't.” To my amazement, he yawned. Then I realized he did it like a cat. He was casting off tension. “Patty Lareine used to do it for me,” he said. “In fact, that's how she got me to marry her. I'd never had it practiced so well before. Then, after we were married, she stopped. Cold turkey. When I indicated that I'd like our little practice to continue, she said, ‘Wardley, I can't. Every time I see your face now, it reminds me of your rear end.' That's why I didn't like it at all when she called you ‘asshole.' Tim, did she ever do it with you?”

“I'm not going to reply,” I said.

He fired the pistol. From where he sat. He didn't aim. Just pointed it, and pressed the trigger. Only the best shots can do that. I was wearing baggy pants and the bullet went through a billow in the trousers above the knee.