Beautiful Kate (18 page)

That happened to be my position when Jason wandered in yesterday, wheezing laboriously as he closed the door behind him and shuffled over to sag into one of the leather chairs.

“To what do I owe the honor?” I asked, ever the smartass.

“It’s my house,” he told me. “I go where I want.”

I sat up and lit a cigarette. “So you do.”

The man’s color seemed to be getting worse, seemed more gray now than white. And he continued to breathe as if he had just run a mile.

“Jason—can you hear yourself?” I asked.

As expected, he dismissed the problem with a wave of his hand. “We’ve been through that,” he got out.

“I guess we have.”

“I came to talk about Sarah. What should we do?”

“What
can
we do?”

“Well, we have to do something!”

Not having heard from her for over a week, Jason had me call her motel in Miami yesterday morning, only to discover that she had checked out three days before without leaving a forwarding address. My opinion on the matter had not changed appreciably, and I repeated it for him now.

“She’s a grown woman, Jason. She can take care of herself. Chances are, she and Hector just took off for the Keys for a week—something like that.”

Jason shook his head in sorrow. “She’s got no experience. That man could rob her. He could kill her and rob her.”

“Not likely. They’ve already been together for weeks.”

“It could
still
happen.”

“The most he’ll do is spend her money and then dump her. Which is bad enough, I guess.”

“I don’t know why she just left here like that. One minute she’s here, and the next minute she’s gone.”

“Maybe because Toni and I were here. She knew we could fill in for her.”

“Toni!” he snorted. “What could that tart do? What
does
she do? Only one thing in this world, as far as I can see.”

“She ain’t exactly overjoyed at being here herself,” I told him.

“So why doesn’t she leave? In fact, why don’t you both leave?”

“I’ve already told you, Jason. If you could lend me a thousand or so, we’d be on our way.”

“A thousand
what
?” he scoffed. “What money have I got? Keeping this place going and paying Junior all these years to stay on—what have I got left?
Nothing!
You know I don’t get any social security. I never paid a penny into it.”

“Well, it’s bankrupt now anyway.”

“People still get their checks!”

His anger had left him even more breathless and he went into a prolonged spasm of coughing and choking. I gave him a glass of water and patted him on the back, and he slowly came around.

“I wonder if I’ll make it to the new year,” he said.

“If you feel that way about yourself, you should see a doctor.”

This time he didn’t even bother to dismiss the idea. He just sat there watching me as I sat back on the sofa.

“I’m glad you came home, son,” he told me. “I’m glad I saw you once more in my life.”

“Well, I’m glad I came home too,” I managed.

He continued to look at me, a ghastly smile pulling at his mouth. “What you said to me the other night—all those terrible things—did you mean them?”

“No, Jason. I was drunk.”

“In vino Veritas.”
Unlike my fellow Hollywood illiterates, he pronounced the V’s as W’s.

“Not always.”

His fingers began to drum on the arms of the leather chair. “How could I have had anything to do with Cliff’s death? Why, I never even knew why he did it. How could a boy like that, with everything to live for—”

It was like telling a story to a child, only to have to tell it over and over again. “It was the car crash, Jason. Nothing else. He undoubtedly thought Kate was dead, and he blamed himself.”

“So he punished himself. In that terrible way.”

“Yes.”

The black eyes fixed on me. “And I’m somehow responsible for that—it’s what you said that night. Why, you even said I did it. You said I killed
both
of them.”

I got up and went over to the bay window. “I’ve I already explained that,” I told him. “I was drunk. I could barely stand up.”

He made a snorting sound again. “Just how does it feel to be that drunk? Can you tell me?”

“Liberating.”

“I’ve never been drunk in my whole life. In Paris I got tipsy a few times. But that was all. I never liked the feeling.”

“I seem to.”

“Yes, you always did.”

He was silent for a while and I finally moved away from the window, sitting down at the desk in a hopeful gesture of dismissal. But he ignored it, possibly because the desk was his.

“I never did understand that summer,” he said. “Never understood any of it—the way you started drinking, and then running off to St. Louis like you did. And fighting with Cliff when you got back. Why, you two hadn’t fought since you were kids. I couldn’t figure it out. And then the night of the accident—Kate and Cliff being alone like that. What happened to their dates? Where were they? I never could figure it out.”

When he looked at me for an answer all I gave him was a shrug.

“It was a strange time,” I said. “Things just came undone.”

He was shaking his head again. “And then Kate in the hospital the way she was, so terribly hurt and all covered with bandages. Not a day goes by I don’t see her that way. And I
hear
her too—did you know that? In my mind, I
hear
her. And it’s you she’s asking for. You, and sometimes Cliff. Never me or Mother.” He looked up at me now. “Tell me—do you ever hear her? Do you ever hear her asking for you?”

I was almost to the door by then. “It’s about time for the news,” I said. “Let’s go see who got it today.”

Even before Kate left me there on the bank of the pond, I had begun to feel a wholly new kind of desolation, a despair that I knew a man ultimately would not be able to live with. I lay face-down in the dew-drenched grass like some poor wounded animal too weak to get up and crawl away, and I listened as Kate slipped back into the water to clean herself, softly humming “Wake up, little Susie.” When she came out again she put on her robe and knelt down next to me and kissed me on the head and shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’ll be all right. Just think of me as someone else.”

I did not answer.

“Just think how beautiful it was.”

She kissed me on the head again and said that we were truly lovers now and then she got up and ran towards home, humming again, a lover leaving her tryst. For a time, I still did not move, could not find the will or the energy for such a travail. And when I finally stirred, it was only to slip back into the water, a pathetic inverse of that creature purported to have crawled out of the primeval slime. I stretched out my arms and floated for a while, knowing that it would do no good to try to wash myself, that the mark was on me for good now, a scar for life. I could almost understand what had happened in the water with her and carrying her to the bank as I had. I had been without will then, really no more than an extension of her, an appendage. But that had ended with orgasm, in a brief cold hiatus of reality that I was only too willing to ignore there in the cradle of her thighs, ignore it over and over as it died in the mindless surge of our passion. I had, in short, known what we I were doing, what
I
was doing. But I had done it anyway. I had done it over and over again.

So all I could do now was hang there in the dark water like a drowned man, a dead animal. And I have no idea how long I stayed in that position, whether it was only minutes or hours before I climbed onto the dock and got back into my clothes. I walked up the lane to the farmyard and went on into the house and up to my room, where I packed a toothbrush and razor and a few changes of clothes into an army surplus duffelbag. I kept expecting Cliff to wake up and start asking questions, but all he did was stir and hug his pillow.

In the kitchen, I left a note for my mother, saying that I had left for parts unknown and would probably be back in a few weeks. I told her not to worry about me and closed the note:
Love, Greg
. I got a paper bag and stuffed it with cold meat and bread and apples. And then I left, walking the three miles to the Route Sixty-six cloverleaf, where I had to thumb for only a few minutes before getting a ride with a sleepy cattle-truck driver who kept eyeing my duffelbag as if he suspected that it contained booty of one sort or another. He went only as far as Bloomington, though, so I had to get out there, alighting on the gravel shoulder of the road just as dawn began to spread above the flat fields of corn on the other side. But again I scored fairly quickly, this time picking up a ride with a heavy balding thirtyish salesman who was already nipping—or more likely,
still
nipping—at a fifth of P.M. bourbon as he pushed his late-model Cadillac along the freeway at a steady ninety miles an hour. In truth, it seemed an almost conservative speed, given the ease and comfort with which the huge car handled it. The salesman in any case thought it safe enough as he lounged back in the capacious front seat, driving with one hand and sometimes none as he lit one cigarette after another or punched in a new station on the car radio, all the while looking over at me with considerably more interest than he showed in the road.

His name was Comfort, he said, Dolan A. Comfort, and his game was restaurant supplies—“everything from Tums to toilet paper.” It was a dog-eat-dog business and the bastards he dealt with would switch suppliers at the drop of a dime. But he was doing just fine, thank you, and when the boys at the warehouse in St. Louis saw his latest stack of orders they were gonna know once and for all just who
numero uno
was—not Mister College-Educated Watson after all, but rough old Dolan Comfort, that’s who.

“How come you’re so quiet, boy?” he asked finally.

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

“Didn’t sleep last night?”

“Not a wink.”

“How come?”

“I’ve been on the road.”

“How come?”

“I had a fight at home,” I said. “My old man tried to stab me, so I broke his arm with a baseball bat. Felt I’d better leave after that.”

Dolan Comfort surveyed me again, grinning now. He took another pull on the bottle.

“You’re bullshittin’ me, boy,” he said.

“Could be.”

“Come on, admit it.”

I shrugged in defeat. “Okay. Actually it was one of those toy bats. And it was his wrist that broke, not his arm. His wrist—and a couple of ribs.”

Comfort laughed uneasily, apparently not quite sure what to make of his new rider. “Well, you sure got some tall tales to tell,” he said.

But they were not tall enough, for he quickly veered the conversation back onto his favorite subject. Did I think I’d own a Cadillac by the time I was twenty-eight, I he wanted to know. Well, that was how old he was when he bought his first Caddie four years before. This was his second, and he planned to go on buying new ones every two or three years for the rest of his life, and what did I think of that? The secret, he said, was simple. You just had to want the damned car so bad you’d go out and do
anything
to get it, which in his case meant selling the balls off the competition.

“You got to live to sell,” he said. “You got to eat sell and breathe sell and sleep sell. So when you come marchin’ in with your order book, them poor bastards know they ain’t got no more chance than a snowball in hell of not givin’ you an order. A
big
order. And you know why? ’Cause you drove up in a Cadillac, that’s why. With a Caddie, you got ’em beat down and ass-whipped before the game even starts. Yessir. And what do you think of that?”

I was thinking that I wanted to sleep and Dolan A. Comfort’s big voice was keeping me from it. “I don’t know,” I mumbled finally. “It seems to me that if you sold less, then you couldn’t afford a Cadillac. And without a Cadillac, you wouldn’t have any reason to sell anything. You could quit. You could retire.”

My tale of arm-breaking may not have impressed him, but this observation definitely did. He made a sound of total disgust, a kind of bark that sprayed P.M. all over the dashboard. And immediately brakes were squealing and tires were smoking as the big car fishtailed to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

“Get out, asshole,” I was told. “Get out or I throw you out.”

My next ride was with a quiet old trucker who was content to let me sleep the rest of the way to St. Louis. When he let me out, on the riverfront, he asked me who Kate was and I told him that I didn’t know anyone by that name.

“Is that a fact?” he said. “You could’ve fooled me.”

I thanked him for the ride and pushed the door shut, wondering what I had said in my sleep. But it was a concern that the riverfront, with its air of violent bustle, quickly swallowed up. I had never been in St. Louis before and have never gone there since, so my memory of it is a vague jumble of street scenes and interiors of hotel and bar rooms that I can’t place in any meaningful framework. I do remember that on getting out of the truck I found myself in an area of warehouses and working-stiff bars that held little attraction for me despite my thirst. So I shouldered my duffelbag and kept walking until I found an area that could boast a few run-down hotels as well as a string of strip joints in addition to the usual bars and warehouses.