Four Past Midnight (95 page)

“About ... seventy-four,” Dave whispered.

“I'll call the ambulance,” Naomi said, and started to get up. Dave's left hand grasped her wrist before she could.

“No. Not yet.” His eyes shifted to Sam. “Bend down. I need to whisper.”

Sam bent over the old man. Dave put a trembling hand on the back of his neck. His lips tickled the cup of Sam's ear and Sam had to force himself to hold steady—it tickled. “Sam,” he whispered. “She waits. Remember ... she waits.”

“What?” Sam asked. He felt almost totally unstrung. “Dave, what do you mean?”

But Dave's hand had fallen away. He stared up at Sam, through Sam, his chest rising shallowly and rapidly.

“I'm going,” Naomi said, clearly upset. “There's a telephone down there on the cataloguing desk.”

“No,” Sam said.

She turned toward him, eyes glaring, mouth pulled back from neat white teeth in a fury. “What do you mean, no? Are you crazy? His skull is fractured, at the very least! He's—”

“
He
'
s
going, Sarah,” Sam said gently. “Very soon. Stay with him. Be his friend.”

She looked down, and this time she saw what Sam had seen. The pupil of Dave's left eye had drawn down to a pinpoint; the pupil of his right was huge and fixed.

“Dave?” she whispered, frightened. “Dave?”

But Dave was looking at Sam again. “Remember,” he whispered. “She w ...”

His eyes grew still and fixed. His chest rose once more ... dropped ... and did not rise again.

Naomi began to sob. She put his hand against her cheek and closed his eyes. Sam knelt down painfully and put his arm around her waist.

That night and the next were sleepless ones for Sam Peebles. He lay awake in his bed, all the second-floor lights turned on, and thought about Dave Duncan's last words:
She waits
.

Toward dawn of the second night, he began to believe he understood what the old man had been trying to say.

Sam thought that Dave would be buried out of the Baptist Church in Proverbia, and was a little surprised to find that he had converted to Catholicism at some point between 1960 and 1990. The services were held at St. Martin's on April 11th, a blustery day that alternated between clouds and cold early-spring sunshine.

Following the graveside service, there was a reception at Angle Street. There were almost seventy people there, wandering through the downstairs rooms or clustered in little groups, by the time Sam arrived. They had all known Dave, and spoke of him with humor, respect, and unfailing love. They drank ginger ale from Styrofoam cups and ate small finger sandwiches. Sam moved from group to group, passing a word with someone he knew from time to time but not stopping to chat. He rarely took his hand from the pocket of his dark coat. He had made a stop at the Piggly Wiggly store on his way from the church, and now there were half a dozen cellophane packages in there, four of them long and thin, two of them rectangular.

Sarah was not here.

He was about to leave when he spotted Lukey and Rudolph sitting together in a comer. There was a cribbage board between them, but they didn't seem to be playing.

“Hello, you guys,” Sam said, walking over. “I guess you probably don't remember me—”

“Sure we do,” Rudolph said. “Whatcha think we are? Coupla feebs? You're Dave's friend. You came over the day we was making the posters.”

“Right!” Lukey said.

“Did you find those books you were lookin for?” Rudolph asked.

“Yes,” Sam said, smiling. “I did, eventually.”

“Right!” Lukey exclaimed.

Sam brought out the four slender cellophane packages. “I brought you guys something,” he said.

Lukey glanced down, and his eyes lit up. “Slim Jims, Dolph!” he said, grinning delightedly. “Look! Sarah's boyfriend brought us all fuckin Slim Jims! Beautiful!”

“Here, gimme those, you old rummy,” Rudolph said, and snatched them. “Fuckhead'd eat em all at once and then shit the bed tonight, you know,” he told Sam. He stripped one of the Slim Jims and gave it to Lukey. “Here you go, dinkweed. I'll hang onto the rest of em for you.”

“You can have one, Dolph. Go ahead.”

“You know better, Lukey. Those things burn me at both ends.”

Sam ignored this byplay. He was looking hard at Lukey. “Sarah's boyfriend? Where did you hear that?”

Lukey snatched down half a Slim Jim in one bite, then looked up. His expression was both good-humored and sly. He laid a finger against the side of his nose and said, “Word gets around when you're in the Program, Sunny Jim. Oh yes indeed, it do.”

“He don't know nothing, mister,” Rudolph said, draining his cup of ginger ale. “He's just beating his gums cause he likes the sound.”

“That ain't nothin but bullshit!” Lukey cried, taking another giant bite of Slim Jim. “I know because Dave told me! Last night! I had a dream, and Dave was in it, and he told me this fella was Sarah's sweetie!”

“Where is Sarah?” Sam asked. “I thought she'd be here.”

“She spoke to me after the benediction,” Rudolph said. “Told me you'd know where to find her later on, if you wanted to see her. She said you'd seen her there once already.”

“She liked Dave awful much,” Lukey said. A sudden tear grew on the rim of one eye and spilled down his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “We all did. Dave always tried so goddam hard. It's too bad, you know. It's really too bad.” And Lukey suddenly burst into tears.

“Well, let me tell you something,” Sam said. He hunkered beside Lukey and handed him his handkerchief. He was near tears himself, and terrified by what he now had to do ... or try to do. “He made it in the end. He died sober. Whatever talk you hear, you hold onto that, because I know it's true. He died sober.”

“Amen,” Rudolph said reverently.

“Amen,” Lukey agreed. He handed Sam his handkerchief. “Thanks.”

“Don't mention it, Lukey.”

“Say—you don't have any more of those fuckin Slim Jims, do you?”

“Nope,” Sam said, and smiled. “You know what they say, Lukey—one's too many and a thousand are never enough.”

Rudolph laughed. Lukey smiled ... then laid the tip of his finger against the side of his nose again.

“How about a quarter ... wouldn't have an extra quarter, wouldja?”

Sam's first thought was that she might have gone back to the Library, but that didn't fit with what Dolph had said ... he had been at the Library with Sarah once, on the terrible night that already seemed a decade ago, but they had been there together; he hadn't “seen” her there, the way you saw someone through a window, or—

Then he remembered when he
had
seen Sarah through a window, right here at Angle Street. She had been part of the group out on the back lawn, doing whatever it was they did to keep themselves sober. He now walked through the kitchen as he had done on that day, saying hello to a few more people. Burt Iverson and Elmer Baskin stood in one of the little groups, drinking ice-cream punch as they listened gravely to an elderly woman Sam didn't know.

He stepped through the kitchen door and out onto the rear porch. The day had turned gray and blustery again. The backyard was deserted, but Sam thought he saw a flash of pastel color beyond the bushes that marked the yard's rear boundary.

He walked down the steps and crossed the back lawn, aware that his heart had begun to thud very hard again. His hand stole back into his pocket, and this time came out with the remaining two cellophane packages. They contained Bull's Eye Red Licorice. He tore them open and began to knead them into a ball, much smaller than the one he'd made in the Datsun on Monday night. The sweet, sugary smell was just as sickening as ever. In the distance he could hear a train coming, and it made him think of his dream—the one where Naomi had turned into Ardelia.

Too late, Sam. It's already too late. The deed is done
.

There was a lot of truth in dreams, sometimes.

How had she survived the years between? All the years between? They had never asked themselves that question, had they? How did she make the transition from one person to another? They had never asked that one, either. Perhaps the thing which looked like a woman named Ardelia Lortz was, beneath its glamours and illusions, like one of those larvae that spin their cocoons in the fork of a tree, cover them with protective webbing, and then fly away to their place of dying. The larvae in the cocoons lie silent, waiting ... changing ...

Sam walked on, still kneading his smelly little ball made of that stuff the Library Policeman—
his
Library Policeman—had stolen and turned into the stuff of nightmares. The stuff he had somehow changed again, with the help of Naomi and Dave, into the stuff of salvation.

The Library Policeman, curling Naomi against him. Placing his mouth on the nape of her neck, as if to kiss her. And coughing instead.

The bag hanging under the Ardelia-thing's neck. Limp. Spent. Empty.

He walked into the thin stand of bushes. Naomi Sarah Higgins was standing on the other side of them, her arms clasped over her bosom. She glanced briefly at him and he was shocked by the pallor of her cheeks and the haggard look in her eyes. Then she looked back at the railroad tracks. The train was closer now. Soon they would see it.

“Hello, Sam.”

“Hello, Sarah.”

Sam put an arm around her waist. She let him, but the shape of her body against his was stiff, inflexible, ungiving.
Please don't let it be too late
, he thought again, and found himself thinking of Dave.

They had left him there, at the Library, after propping the door to the loading platform open with a rubber wedge. Sam had used a pay phone two blocks away to report the open door. He hung up when the dispatcher asked for his name. So Dave had been found, and of course the verdict had been accidental death, and those people in town who cared enough to assume anything at all would make the expected assumption: one more old sot had gone to that great ginmill in the sky. They would assume he had gone up the lane with a jug, had seen the open door, wandered in, and had fallen against the fire-extinguisher in the dark. End of story. The postmortem results, showing zero alcohol in Dave's blood, would not change the assumptions one bit—probabty not even for the police.
People just expect a drunk to die like a drunk
, Sam thought,
even when he's not
.

“How have you been, Sarah?” he asked.

She looked at him tiredly. “Not so well, Sam. Not so well at all. I can't sleep ... can't eat ... my mind seems full of the most horrible thoughts ... they don't feel like my thoughts at all ... and I want to drink. That's the worst of it. I want to drink ... and drink ... and drink. The meetings don't help. For the first time in my life, the meetings don't help.”

She closed her eyes and began to cry. The sound was strengthless and dreadfully lost.

“No,” he agreed softly. “They wouldn't. They can't. And I imagine she'd like it if you started drinking again. She's waiting ... but that doesn't mean she isn't hungry.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “What ... Sam, what are you talking about?”

“Persistence, I think,” he said. “The persistence of evil. How it waits. How it can be so cunning and so baffling and so powerful.”

He raised his hand slowly and opened it. “Do you recognize this, Sarah?”

She flinched away from the ball of red licorice which lay on his palm. For a moment her eyes were wide and fully awake. They glinted with hate and fear.

And the glints were silver.

“Throw that away!” she whispered. “Throw that damned thing away!” Her hand jerked protectively toward the back of her neck, where her brownish-red hair hung against her shoulders.

“I'm talking to you,” he said steadily. “Not to her but to you. I love you, Sarah.”

She looked at him again, and that look of terrible weariness was back. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe you do. And maybe you should learn not to.”

“I want you to do something for me, Sarah. I want you to turn your back to me. There's a train coming. I want you to watch that train and not look back at me until I tell you. Can you do that?”

Her upper lip lifted. That expression of hate and fear animated her haggard face again. “No! Leave me alone! Go away!”

“Is that what you want?” he asked. “Is it really? You told Dolph where I could find you, Sarah. Do you really want me to go?”

Her eyes closed again. Her mouth drew down in a trembling bow of anguish. When her eyes opened again, they were full of haunted terror and brimming with tears. “Oh, Sam, help me! Something is wrong and I don't know what it is or what to do!”

“I know what to do,” he told her. “Trust in me, Sarah, and trust in what you said when we were on our way to the Library Monday night. Honesty and belief. Those things are the opposite of fear. Honesty and belief.”

“It's hard, though,” she whispered. “Hard to trust. Hard to believe.”

He looked at her steadily.

Naomi's upper lip lifted suddenly, and her lower lip curled out, turning her mouth momentarily into a shape that was almost like a horn. “
Fuck
yourself!” she said. “Go on and fuck yourself, Sam Peebles!”