Bag of Bones (42 page)

He confirmed that a child had died of blood-poisoning caused by a traphold wound, a story which
sounded like Brenda Meserve's . . . but why wouldn't it? Osteen had likely heard it from Mrs. M.'s father or grandfather. He also said that the boy was Son Tidwell's only child, and that the guitar-player's real name was Reginald. The Tidwells had supposedly drifted north from the whorehouse district of New Orleans—the fabled crib-and-club streets which had been known around the turn of the century as Storyville.

There was no mention of Sara and the Red-Tops in the more formal history of Castle County, and no mention of Kenny Auster's drownded little brother in either book. Not long before Mattie came over to speak to me, I'd had a wild idea: that Son Tidwell and Sara Tidwell were man and wife, and that the little boy (not named by Osteen) had been their son. I found the picture Lindy had mentioned and studied it closely. It showed at least a dozen black people standing in a stiff group in front of what looked like a cattle exhibition. There was an old-fashioned Ferris wheel in the background. It could well have been taken at the Fryeburg Fair, and as old and faded as it was, it had a simple, elemental power that all Osteen's own photos put together could not match. You have seen photographs of western and Depression-era bandidos that have that same look of eerie truth—stern faces above tight ties and collars, eyes not quite lost in the shadows of antique hatbrims.

Sara stood front and center, wearing a black dress and her guitar. She was not outright smiling in this picture, but there seemed to be a smile in her eyes, and I thought they were like the eyes in some paintings, the ones that seem to follow you wherever you
move in the room. I studied the photo and thought of her almost spiteful voice in my dream:
What do you want to know, sugar?
I suppose I wanted to know about her and the others—who they had been, what they were to each other when they weren't singing and playing, why they'd left, where they'd gone.

Both of her hands were clearly visible, one posed on the strings of her guitar, the other on the frets, where she had been making a G-chord on an October Fair-day in the year 1900. Her fingers were long, artistic, bare of rings. That didn't necessarily mean that she and Son Tidwell weren't married, of course, and even if they hadn't been, the little boy who'd been caught in the trap could have been born on the wrong side of the blanket. Except the same ghost of a smile lurked in Son Tidwell's eyes. The resemblance was remarkable. I had an idea that the two of them had been brother and sister, not man and wife.

I thought about these things on my way home, and I thought about cables that were felt rather than seen . . . but mostly I found myself thinking about Lindy Briggs—the way she had smiled at me, the way, a little later on, she had not smiled at her bright young librarian with the high-school certification. That worried me.

Then I got back to the house, and all I worried about was my story and the people in it—bags of bones which were putting on flesh daily.

*   *   *

Michael Noonan, Max Devore, and Rogette Whitmore played out their horrible little comedy scene Friday evening. Two other things which bear narrating happened before that.

The first was a call from John Storrow on Thursday night. I was sitting in front of the TV with a baseball game running soundlessly in front of me (the
MUTE
button with which most remote controls come equipped may be the twentieth century's finest invention). I was thinking about Sara Tidwell and Son Tidwell and Son Tidwell's little boy. I was thinking about Storyville, a name any writer just had to love. And in the back of my mind I was thinking about my wife, who had died pregnant.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mike, I have some wonderful news,” John said. He sounded near to bursting. “Romeo Bissonette may be a weird name, but there's nothing weird about the detective-guy he found for me. His name is George Kennedy, like the actor. He's good, and he's
fast.
This guy could work in New York.”

“If that's the highest compliment you can think of, you need to get out of the city more.”

He went on as if he hadn't heard. “Kennedy's real job is with a security firm—the other stuff is strictly in the moonlight. Which is a great loss, believe me. He got most of this on the phone. I can't believe it.”

“What specifically can't you believe?”

“Jackpot, baby.” Again he spoke in that tone of greedy satisfaction which I found both troubling and reassuring. “Elmer Durgin has done the following things since late May: paid off his car; paid off his camp in Rangely Lakes; caught up on about ninety years of child support—”

“Nobody pays child support for ninety years,” I said, but I was just running my mouth to hear it go
. . . to let off some of my own building excitement, in truth. “ 'T'ain't possible, McGee.”

“It is if you have seven kids,” John said, and began howling with laughter.

I thought of the pudgy self-satisfied face, the cupid-bow mouth, the nails that looked polished and prissy. “
He don't,”
I said.

“He
do,”
John said, still laughing. He sounded like a complete lunatic—manic, hold the depressive. “He really do! Ranging in ages from f-fourteen to th-th-
three!
What a b-busy p-p-potent little prick he must have!” More helpless howls. And by now I was howling right along with him—I'd caught it like the mumps. “Kennedy is going to f-f-fax me p-pictures of the whole . . . fam' . . . damily!” We broke up completely, laughing together long-distance. I could picture John Storrow sitting alone in his Park Avenue office, bellowing like a lunatic and scaring the cleaning ladies.

“That doesn't matter, though,” he said when he could talk coherently again. “You see what matters, don't you?”

“Yes,” I said. “How could he be so stupid?” Meaning Durgin, but also meaning Devore. John understood, I think, that we were talking about both he's at the same time.

“Elmer Durgin's a little lawyer from a little township tucked away in the big woods of western Maine, that's all. How could he know that some guardian angel would come along with the resources to smoke him out? He also bought a boat, by the way. Two weeks ago. It's a twin outboard. A big 'un. It's over, Mike. The home team scores nine runs in
the bottom of the ninth and the fucking pennant is
ours.
”

“If you say so.” But my hand went off on its own expedition, made a loose fist, and knocked on the good solid wood of the coffee-table.

“And hey, the softball game wasn't a total loss.” John was still talking between little giggling outbursts like helium balloons.

“No?”

“I'm taken with her.”

“Her?”

“Mattie,” he said patiently. “Mattie Devore.” A pause, then: “Mike? Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Phone slipped. Sorry.” The phone hadn't slipped as much as an inch, but it came out sounding natural enough, I thought. And if it hadn't, so what? When it came to Mattie, I would be—in John's mind, at least—below suspicion. Like the country-house staff in an Agatha Christie. He was twenty-eight, maybe thirty. The idea that a man twelve years older might be sexually attracted to Mattie had probably never crossed his mind . . . or maybe just for a second or two there on the common, before he dismissed it as ludicrous. The way Mattie herself had dismissed the idea of Jo and the man in the brown sportcoat.

“I can't do my courtship dance while I'm representing her,” he said, “wouldn't be ethical. Wouldn't be safe, either. Later, though . . . you can never tell.”

“No,” I said, hearing my voice as you sometimes do in moments when you are caught completely flat-footed, hearing it as though it were coming from someone else. Someone on the radio or the recordplayer,
maybe. Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone? I thought of his hands, the fingers long and slender and without a ring on any of them. Like Sara's hands in that old photo. “No, you can never tell.”

We said goodbye, and I sat watching the muted baseball game. I thought about getting up to get a beer, but it seemed too far to the refrigerator—a safari, in fact. What I felt was a kind of dull hurt, followed by a better emotion: rueful relief, I guess you'd call it. Was he too old for her? No, I didn't think so. Just about right. Prince Charming No. 2, this time in a three-piece suit. Mattie's luck with men might finally be changing, and if so I should be glad. I
would
be glad. And relieved. Because I had a book to write, and never mind the look of white sneakers flashing below a red sundress in the deepening gloom, or the ember of her cigarette dancing in the dark.

Still, I felt really lonely for the first time since I saw Kyra marching up the white line of Route 68 in her bathing suit and flip-flops.

“You funny little man, said Strickland,” I told the empty room. It came out before I knew I was going to say anything, and when it did, the channel on the TV changed. It went from baseball to a rerun of
All in the Family
and then to
Ren & Stimpy.
I glanced down at the remote control. It was still on the coffee-table where I'd left it. The TV channel changed again, and this time I was looking at Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. There was an airplane in the background, and I didn't need to pick up the remote and turn on the sound to know that Humphrey was telling Ingrid that she was getting on that plane. My
wife's all-time favorite movie. She bawled at the end without fail.

“Jo?” I asked. “Are you here?”

Bunter's bell rang once. Very faintly. There had been several presences in the house, I was sure of it . . . but tonight, for the first time, I was positive it was Jo who was with me.

“Who was he, hon?” I asked. “The guy at the softball field, who was he?”

Bunter's bell hung still and quiet. She was in the room, though. I sensed her, something like a held breath.

I remembered the ugly, gibing little message on the refrigerator after my dinner with Mattie and Ki:
blue rose liar ha ha.

“Who was he?” My voice was unsteady, sounding on the verge of tears. “What were you doing down here with some guy? Were you . . .” But I couldn't bring myself to ask if she had been lying to me, cheating on me. I couldn't ask even though the presence I felt might be, let's face it, only in my own head.

The TV switched away from
Casablanca
and here was everybody's favorite lawyer, Perry Mason, on Nick at Nite. Perry's nemesis, Hamilton Burger, was questioning a distraught-looking woman, and all at once the sound blared on, making me jump.

“I am
not
a liar!” some long-ago TV actress cried. For a moment she looked right out at me, and I was stunned breathless to see Jo's eyes in that black-and-white fifties face. “I
never
lied, Mr. Burger, never!”

“I submit that you did!” Burger responded. He moved in on her, leering like a vampire. “I submit that you—”

The TV suddenly went off. Bunter's bell gave a single brisk shake, and then whatever had been here was gone. But I felt better.
I am
not
a liar . . . I
never
lied, never.

I could believe that if I chose to.

If I chose.

I went to bed, and there were no dreams.

*   *   *

I had taken to starting work early, before the heat could really get a hold on the study. I'd drink some juice, gobble some toast, then sit behind the IBM until almost noon, watching the Courier ball dance and twirl as the pages floated through the machine and came out with writing on them. That old magic, so strange and wonderful. It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile.

At noon I'd break, drive down to Buddy Jellison's greaseatorium for something nasty, then return and work for another hour or so. After that I would swim and take a long dreamless nap in the north bedroom. I had barely poked my head into the master bedroom at the south end of the house, and if Mrs. M. thought this was odd, she kept it to herself.

On Friday the seventeenth, I stopped at the Lake-view General on my way back to the house to gas up my Chevrolet. There are pumps at the All-Purpose Garage, and the go-juice was a penny or two cheaper, but I didn't like the vibe. Today, as I stood in front of the store with the pump on automatic feed, looking off toward the mountains, Bill Dean's
Dodge Ram pulled in on the other side of the island. He climbed down and gave me a smile. “How's it going, Mike?”

“Pretty fair.”

“Brenda says you're writin up a storm.”

“I am,” I said, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask for an update on the broken second-floor air conditioner. The tip of my tongue was where it stayed. I was still too nervous about my rediscovered ability to want to change anything about the environment in which I was doing it. Stupid, maybe, but sometimes things work just because you think they work. It's as good a definition of faith as any.

“Well, I'm glad to hear it. Very glad.” I thought he was sincere enough, but he somehow didn't sound like Bill. Not the one who had greeted me back, anyway.

“I've been looking up some old stuff about my side of the lake,” I said.

“Sara and the Red-Tops? You always were sort of int'rested in them, I remember.”

“Them, yes, but not just them. Lots of history. I was talking to Mrs. M., and she told me about Normal Auster. Kenny's father.”

Bill's smile stayed on, and he only paused a moment in the act of unscrewing the cap on his gas tank, but I still had a sense, quite clear, that he had frozen inside. “You wouldn't write about a thing like that, would you, Mike? Because there's a lot of people around here that'd feel it bad and take it wrong. I told Jo the same thing.”