Bag of Bones (40 page)

The moment I stepped through the door, Bunter's bell began to ring stridently. I stopped in the foyer, my hand frozen on the knob. The house was hot and bright, not a shadow anywhere, but the gooseflesh forming on my arms felt like midnight.

“Who's here?” I called.

The bell stopped ringing. There was a moment of silence, and then a woman shrieked. It came from everywhere, pouring out of the sunny, mote-laden air like sweat out of hot skin. It was a scream of outrage, anger, grief . . . but mostly, I think, of horror. And I screamed in response. I couldn't help it. I had been frightened standing in the dark cellar stairwell, listening to the unseen fist thump on the insulation, but this was far worse.

It never stopped, that scream. It faded, as the child's sobs had faded; faded as if the person screaming was being carried rapidly down a long corridor and away from me.

At last it was gone.

I leaned against the bookcase, my palm pressed against my tee-shirt, my heart galloping beneath it. I was gasping for breath, and my muscles had that queer
exploded
feel they get after you've had a bad scare.

A minute passed. My heartbeat gradually slowed, and my breathing slowed with it. I straightened up, took a tottery step, and when my legs held me, took two more. I stood in the kitchen doorway, looking across to the living room. Above the fireplace, Bunter the moose looked glassily back at me. The bell around his neck hung still and chimeless. A hot sun-point glowed on its side. The only sound was that stupid Felix the Cat clock in the kitchen.

The thought nagging at me, even then, was that the screaming woman had been Jo, that Sara Laughs was being haunted by my wife, and that she was in pain. Dead or not, she was in pain.

“Jo?” I asked quietly. “Jo, are you—”

The sobbing began again—the sound of a terrified child. At the same moment my mouth and nose once more filled with the iron taste of the lake. I put one hand to my throat, gagging and frightened, then leaned over the sink and spat. It was as it had been before—instead of voiding a gush of water, nothing came out but a little spit. The waterlogged feeling was gone as if it had never been there.

I stayed where I was, grasping the counter and bent over the sink, probably looking like a drunk who has finished the party by upchucking most of the night's bottled cheer. I felt like that, too—stunned and bleary, too overloaded to really understand what was going on.

At last I straightened up again, took the towel folded over the dishwasher's handle, and wiped my face with it. There was tea in the fridge, and I wanted a tall, ice-choked glass of it in the worst way. I reached for the doorhandle and froze. The fruit and
vegetable magnets were drawn into a circle again. In the center was this:

help im drown

That's it,
I thought.
I'm getting out of here. Right now. Today.

Yet an hour later I was up in my stifling study with a glass of tea on the desk beside me (the cubes in it long since melted), dressed only in my bathing trunks and lost in the world I was making—the one where a private detective named Andy Drake was trying to prove that John Shackleford was not the serial killer nicknamed Baseball Cap.

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

T
he book was big, okay? The book was major.

I was afraid to change
rooms,
let alone pack up the typewriter and my slim just-begun manuscript and take it back to Derry. That would be as dangerous as taking an infant out in a windstorm. So I stayed, always reserving the right to move out if things got too weird (the way smokers reserve the right to quit if their coughs get too heavy), and a week passed. Things happened during that week, but until I met Max Devore on The Street the following Friday—the seventeenth of July, it would have been—the most important thing was that I continued to work on a novel which would, if finished, be called
My Childhood Friend.
Perhaps we always think what was lost was the best . . . or would have been the best. I don't know for sure. What I
do
know is that my real life that week had mostly to do with Andy Drake, John Shackleford, and a shadowy figure standing in the deep background. Raymond Garraty, John Shackleford's childhood
friend. A man who sometimes wore a baseball cap.

During that week, the manifestations in the house continued, but at a lower level—there was nothing like that bloodcurdling scream. Sometimes Bunter's bell rang, and sometimes the fruit and vegetable magnets would re-form themselves into a circle . . . never with words in the middle, though; not that week. One morning I got up and the sugar cannister was overturned, making me think of Mattie's story about the flour. Nothing was written in the spill, but there was a squiggle—

—as though something had tried to write and failed. If so, I sympathized. I knew what
that
was like.

*   *   *

My depo before the redoubtable Elmer Durgin was on Friday the tenth. On the following Tuesday I took The Street down to Warrington's softball field, hoping for my own peek at Max Devore. It was going on six o'clock when I got within hearing range of the shouts, cheers, and batted balls. A path marked with rustic signs (curlicued
W
's burned into oak arrows) led past an abandoned boathouse, a couple of sheds, and a gazebo half-buried in blackberry creepers. I eventually came out in deep center field. A litter of potato-chip bags, candy-wrappers, and beer cans suggested that others sometimes watched the games from this vantage-point. I couldn't help thinking about Jo and her mysterious friend, the guy in the old brown sportcoat, the burly guy who had slipped an
arm around her waist and led her away from the game, laughing, back toward The Street. Twice over the weekend I'd come close to calling Bonnie Amudson, seeing if maybe I could chase that guy down, put a name on him, and both times I had backed off. Sleeping dogs, I told myself each time. Sleeping dogs, Michael.

I had the area beyond deep center to myself that evening, and it felt like the right distance from home plate, considering the man who usually parked his wheelchair behind the backstop had called me a liar and I had invited him to store my telephone number where the sunshine grows dim.

I needn't have worried in any case. Devore wasn't in attendance, nor was the lovely Rogette.

I did spot Mattie behind the casually maintained chickenwire barrier on the first-base line. John Storrow was beside her, wearing jeans and a polo shirt, his red hair mostly corralled by a Mets cap. They stood watching the game and chatting like old friends for two innings before they saw me—more than enough time for me to feel envious of John's position, and a little jealous as well.

Finally someone lofted a long fly to center, where the edge of the woods served as the only fence. The center fielder backed up, but it was going to be far over his head. It was hit to my depth, off to my right. I moved in that direction without thinking, high-footing through the shrubs that formed a zone between the mown outfield and the trees, hoping I wasn't running through poison ivy. I caught the softball in my outstretched left hand, and laughed when some of the spectators cheered. The center fielder
applauded me by tapping his bare right hand into the pocket of his glove. The batter, meanwhile, circled the bases serenely, knowing he had hit a ground-rule home run.

I tossed the ball to the fielder and as I returned to my original post among the candy-wrappers and beer cans, I looked back in and saw Mattie and John looking at me.

If anything confirms the idea that we're just another species of animal, one with a slightly bigger brain and a
much
bigger idea of our own importance in the scheme of things, it's how much we can convey by gesture when we absolutely have to. Mattie clasped her hands to her chest, tilted her head to the left, raised her eyebrows—
My hero.
I held my hands to my shoulders and flipped the palms skyward—
Shucks, ma'am, 't'warn't nothin.
John lowered his head and put his fingers to his brow, as if something there hurt—
You lucky sonofabitch.

With those comments out of the way, I pointed at the backstop and shrugged a question. Both Mattie and John shrugged back. An inning later a little boy who looked like one giant exploding freckle ran out to where I was, his oversized Michael Jordan jersey churning around his shins like a dress.

“Guy down there gimme fifty cent to say you should call im later on at his hotel over in the Rock,” he said, pointing at John. “He say you gimme another fifty cent if there was an answer.”

“Tell him I'll call him around nine-thirty,” I said. “I don't have any change, though. Can you take a buck?”

“Hey, yeah, swank.” He snatched it, turned away,
then turned back. He grinned, revealing a set of teeth caught between Act I and Act II. With the softball players in the background, he looked like a Norman Rockwell archetype. “Guy also say tell you that was a bullshit catch.”

“Tell him people used to say the same thing about Willie Mays all the time.”

“Willie who?”

Ah, youth. Ah, mores. “Just tell him, son. He'll know.”

I stayed another inning, but by then the game was getting drunk, Devore still hadn't shown, and I went back home the way I had come. I met one fisherman standing out on a rock and two young people strolling along The Street toward Warrington's, their hands linked. They said hi and I hi'd them back. I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

Some people check their phone answering machines when they get home; that summer I always checked the front of the fridge. Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, as Bullwinkle Moose used to say, the spirits are about to speak. That night they hadn't, although the fruit and vegetable magnets had re-formed into a sinuous shape like a snake or perhaps the letter
S
taking a nap:

A little later I called John and asked him where Devore had been, and he repeated in words what he had already told me, and much more economically, by gesture. “It's the first game he's missed since he
came back,” he said. “Mattie tried asking a few people if he was okay, and the consensus seemed to be that he was . . . at least as far as anyone knew.”

“What do you mean she
tried
asking a few people?”

“I mean that several wouldn't even talk to her. ‘Cut her dead,' my parents' generation would have said.”
Watch it, buddy,
I thought but didn't say,
that's only half a step from my generation.
“One of her old girlfriends spoke to her finally, but there's a general attitude about Mattie Devore. That man Osgood may be a shitty salesman, but as Devore's Mr. Moneyguy he's doing a wonderful job of separating Mattie from the other folks in the town.
Is
it a town, Mike? I don't quite get that part.”

“It's just the TR,” I said absently. “There's no real way to explain it. Do you actually believe Devore's bribing
everyone
? That doesn't say much for the old Wordsworthian idea of pastoral innocence and goodness, does it?”

“He's spreading money and using Osgood—maybe Footman, too—to spread stories. And the folks around here seem at least as honest as honest politicians.”