All Things Cease to Appear (44 page)

He steps into the small master bathroom and a chemical smell hits his nostrils, bleach maybe. He notes the gleaming sink. None of the usual hairs and toothpaste globs, a hell of a lot cleaner than his own bathroom, in fact, and the toilet seat’s down to boot. Clare has better manners than he thought.

When he gets home Mary’s up waiting, her eyes rimmed in red. I saw the news, she says. Who would do such a thing?

God, I don’t know.

It’s just awful, isn’t it?

Yeah. It is.

Do you want your supper?

I guess I will.

She takes a plate of meatloaf out of the oven and sets it in front of him and gets a fork and knife from the drawer and a beer and ketchup bottle out of the fridge and brings it all to the table. Then she sits in the chair across from him and opens the beer and pours it into two glasses. She drinks some of it, and they look at each other across the old oilcloth, her hair pulled back in a barrette, her skin scrubbed clean, the tiny cross at her throat. Looking exactly like the schoolgirl he married.

How’s Travis? he says.

Sleeping. She lights a Marlboro, blows out the smoke. They had a game today. Lost.

Nothing wrong with being underdogs. It’s good training.

I don’t know what for, she says.

This is good, he says.

It was better a couple hours ago. Poor thing—she didn’t deserve that.

Nobody does.

I just don’t know who would do such a thing.

We’ll find out, won’t we?

I pray you do, Travis.

They look at each other again, a bargain of doubt.

Where’s the husband now?

At a hotel with his folks.

I never liked that man. Not one bit.

It don’t make him a murderer, Mary. You know that.

Yeah. She stamps out her cigarette. Well, I’m no detective.

Under the yellow circle of light her face looks worn. He reaches over and takes her hand. I want this solved just as much as you do.

I know it.

Been a long day, he says. Got another coming tomorrow. He swallows the rest of his beer, then gets up and sets his plate in the sink.

I’ll tell you one thing, she says. That house—it makes its own plans.

Yes, I guess it does.

He watches her light another cigarette. I’m going up. You?

Not just yet.

He leaves her there to finish her beer. He knows she wants something from him, some kind of comfort, but just now he’s all out of tenderness. Come morning, he figures, he’ll find her on the couch, blanketed in newspaper, the ashtray full of butts. Marriage is a curious arrangement, he thinks, climbing the stairs. Even after all these years there are things about his wife that he will never understand. The mystery, he guesses, is what keeps it interesting.

5

EUGENE’S GRANDMOTHER LETS
him stay for dinner and they have fried chicken and mashed potatoes and she’s the best cook around, hands down. After they eat they watch
The Dukes of Hazzard
and he says good night. Walking by Blake’s, going home, he sees her face on the ten o’clock news. People crowding around the bar to watch.

Where you been? Eddy says when he walks in.

Eugene’s.

They’re watching it on TV, him and Rainer and Vida. Sitting there, glued.

At the commercial, Rainer asks, Were you over there today?

Some instinct tells him to lie. He shakes his head.

I didn’t get that, his uncle says.

No, sir.

Cole tries to think if anybody saw him. He doesn’t think so. Only Franny.

Something happened to that woman.

What?

Come over here, Eddy says, reminding him of his father. How he’d question him every time he did something stupid. You just couldn’t lie to him. For some reason his legs go weak and he sinks down into the couch.

Catherine, Eddy says. She’s dead. Murdered.

Cole feels the money against his leg. He concentrates on his hands like he does at school when somebody pisses him off and he has to control himself. The afternoon feels like a dream he can’t remember.

You don’t look right. Did you eat?

At Eugene’s. Call his grandmother if you don’t believe me!

Quiet, now. It’s coming on. They’re doing a report.

They show the coroner’s truck, the same one that took his parents away. They show the yellow streamer pulled across the front door. They show a picture of Catherine with her twinkly eyes and white teeth, then one of Mr. Clare. They show the house, an old picture from before, when it was still a poor people’s house. They watch the flashing pictures one after the other, and their uncle says, Well, I’ll be fucking damned.

They sit there in silence.

What a horror, his uncle says, taking Vida’s hand.

Eddy looks mad. He sits there with his arms crossed over his chest.

Cole can’t look at him. He stares down at his hands again. For some reason he feels guilty, not just because he lied but also he maybe did something wrong, like he was part of it.

He should have opened that door, he thinks. He should’ve done something.

I’d put money on it, Eddy says. That son of a bitch killed her.

—

AT DAWN,
Eddy shakes him awake. Get up, he says.

They tiptoe downstairs and put on their coats, their boots.

The whole world is white with snow.

Eddy has his trumpet. They walk through the neighborhood, behind the sleeping houses, through the empty lot and into the woods. The woods are still. The trees stand there like people waiting to be told the news. All the animals seem to be hiding. They come to the ridge and stand there looking down at their old house. There’s nobody there now. The place looks desolate. You can see the thick tracks their trucks made in the snow.

This is for her, Eddy says, and brings the horn to his lips. It’s a song most people know, the only song to play at a time like this. Taps.

6

THE NEXT MORNING,
George Clare doesn’t show up and Travis isn’t surprised. He probably knows he doesn’t have to—there’s no law. Plus, he has an alibi. Another conversation would have been helpful, though. For one thing, he was the last person who saw his wife alive. That fact alone makes him more than interesting.

Maybe he’s just too broken up to talk, Travis thinks. It’s not every day your wife gets bludgeoned to death with an ax.

And yet after the interview—granted, it was late—Travis overheard him remark to his father that he didn’t see the point in going over it again. He’d given his side and that was all there was to it.

Not quite, Travis thinks now. No, sir, not quite.

He spends the morning fielding telephone calls, mostly townspeople calling to goad him. He tracks down Wiley at the coffeemaker and asks him to load the tape of the interview on the VCR in his office. Compared with Clare’s unmarked face, Travis looks old and bothered. He has to wonder what Mary sees in him. Across the table sits the professor, his arms crossed, as ornery as a street hood. Like a foreigner unscrambling sentences, he takes his time answering questions, offering only brief, elementary statements, as if he lacks the vocabulary to explain himself fully.

Something about this guy rubs me the wrong way, Burke says.

Travis backs up the tape and again watches Clare’s mannerisms. At one point Burke asks him about the Hale boys. Now, which one painted your house—was it Eddy?

Clare nods, his jaw noticeably tight.

He’s a good kid but he’s had it awful rough, Travis says. They all have. It’s made them hard around the edges.

I wouldn’t know.

People say Eddy’s got an attitude—a chip on his shoulder over losing the farm. You notice that?

He shakes his head.

What about your wife? She ever say anything?

About him? No.

He’s got that girlfriend, Burke says. The one from the inn. He gives Clare a knowing smile. You ever seen her? Man, what I wouldn’t do for some of that.

For a minute George says nothing. You can see his jaw tensing up again, like he’s clenching his teeth. I don’t think I know her, he says.

Oh, you’d know if you’d seen her. Black hair, a body like—

What does this have to do with my wife? Clare shouts.

For a minute nobody says anything and the air turns thick as old lard.

Let’s rewind that a minute, Travis says. That part right there, about the girl.

They watch it again. The look that crosses Clare’s face when Burke mentions the girl, an expression, Travis thinks, that distinguishes him as a person with the capacity to go beyond the limits of civility. But maybe he’s got it wrong. Maybe killing comes naturally to people, an instinct nobody likes to admit, a survival reflex inherited from our Neanderthal cousins. So maybe it’s the other stuff, the good manners that supposedly make us human, that are the real aberrations.

Good-looking is a fair description of Clare, he decides. On the surface, this man doesn’t look like he has it in him, but Travis has learned all too often not to draw conclusions based on physical attributes. Ordinary people have demons inside them.

And in that singular moment, Travis Lawton sees the demon inside George Clare.

7

EDDY’S GETTING THE PAPER
off the front porch when he sees her. She wanders up like a nomad, pale and nervous. Says she’s leaving town, has her stuff all packed. She has to go, she tells him. She has to go now.

What’s the big hurry?

I’m done here, she says.

She stands there on his uncle’s porch with her bony shoulders and boy’s haircut, gnawing her swollen lip. I wanted you to know, she says. I wanted to say goodbye.

He wants her to come inside, to take her up to his bed, but he can see her mind’s made up. Where you going?

California.

He watches her nervous little dance and how her eyes shift around, her pupils big as peas.

You coming?

Is that an invitation?

She smiles, a jagged little grin that leaks so much sadness. Yes, she says. I want you to.

He touches her cheek and her eyes get watery and when he kisses her he can taste the sad story on her tongue.

All right. I guess I could go.

Her eyes go as bright as a little kid’s.

Just give me a second to get my stuff.

He goes upstairs, taking care not to wake his brother. Cole rustles under the covers and Eddy stands still, waiting for his sleeping face to go calm again, the new little hairs cropping up on his chin, a boy deep in dreams. He pushes his things into a knapsack he once used on a camping trip. In the doorway he looks once more at his brother, deciding in that instant that he’s grown up enough to leave behind and knowing, too, it’ll be a good while before he sees him again.

—

THEY TAKE
Rainer’s hearse, just walk right in there and take it. He leaves his uncle a note:
Going out west to find my fame and fortune. Borrowing your car. Promise to return it.

It’s a decent set of wheels, if a little creepy. While he drives, she holds his free hand. Hers is sweaty and cold and he can feel her trembling. It’s like they have some kind of secret, one she hasn’t told him yet. She leans up against the window, looking out, not talking, pale and trembling like she’s sick. What’s wrong with you?

Nothing.

He has a painful love inside of him. Don’t worry so much, okay?

She nods and pulls up the hood of her sweatshirt. Her eyes, rimmed in black, remind him of their old cows, how they sometimes looked after they were milked, like they’d given so much.

After a couple hours he pulls into a motel. They’re somewhere in Pennsylvania, out in the country, just this roadside place with a sign that says
Vacancy
and a small café where you can maybe get a beer. They hurry through the sleet into the little office, where this old lady comes out and hands them a key.

They lose two days getting drunk and eating onion rings from the café and she shows him her thin naked body, her tiny wrists, her hungry sad eyes, her toes like mushrooms. I knew him, she says. I knew George Clare.

How? What happened?

I just did, that’s all.

You were friends?

No. Not friends.

Well, then, what?

You don’t want to know.

The way she says it, he thinks she might be right.

What, did he try to pick you up?

Yeah. He tried kind of hard.

He waits for her to say more, but she won’t and he’s not so sure he wants her to.

I’m afraid of him, she tells him later, after they make love. I just want to get as far away as I can.

He does all the driving. She’s a city girl, there’s no point trusting her behind the wheel. He has a little money, not much. All across the country they stay in one cruddy motel after another. They sleep on a blanket under the stars in South Dakota and wake the next morning to a stampede of cattle. They see some of the sights, the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore. Bryce Canyon. Near the Utah border one morning, an old gray coyote crosses the interstate right in front of their car. There’s nobody else on the road but them, and Eddy sees it as a sign. The wild dog grinning. On his way into the hills.

She says she knows someone in San Francisco who’s in a band. So that’s where they go. He ends up selling the hearse for cash to an outfit that does haunted cemetery rides; he figures his uncle will understand. For a while they stay in this old motel near the bus station, cats crying all night in the dumpsters, and he comes to know her way. She is a quiet girl, mysterious. Sometimes she murmurs in her sleep. He’ll watch her when they are sitting around doing nothing, just the way she looks in the sorry gray light through the window, the curtains billowing. How the shadows always find her.

He likes it there, the city on water. The wind funneling through the streets. The wharf with its noise and fish smells and stragglers with lazy eyes. It makes him want to play his horn, to play for her. When he does, her eyes slow down like the fog in this city, how it comes in sneaky and wet and like magic can make you disappear.

—

THEY FIND
a place to rent on Hyde Street, over a Chinese restaurant. The apartment, if you can call it that, is the size of an eighteen-wheeler, with a little porch off the back that overlooks the parking lot of a church. You see brides in their netting and lace, their cars trailing soda cans, or sometimes big white limos or black ones and hearses and now and again the spooky gleam of a coffin, its pallbearers holding it like a battering ram to break open the gates of heaven. You see them adjusting their corsages or tugging at their sleeves.