Meeks (13 page)

And the police?

Well, I am a policeman, I said. Therefore: et cetera, et cetera.

And the man in the black jacket?

The man in the black jacket?

Yes. I'm just wondering if you might've mistaken this young man whom you found in a black jacket—or, in order to fulfill a fantasy, perhaps placed in a black jacket—for the man in the black jacket?

The man in the black jacket?

The rookie sighed a deep policeman's sigh and continued, It's just my observation that the serious nature of the man's wounds, even setting aside for a moment his death, suggests a wild attack, something animal and personal. Did you kill the young man believing in the heat of the moment that you had encountered your nemesis?

No, no, no. We were playing a game, and then he slept.

What kind of a game?

That we were brothers, I said, my face hot with childish shame.

So you struck him with pleasure, as if playing a game, and then he seemed to fall asleep.

He wouldn't fit into the little grave, I said earnestly.

Hmmm . . . but is that the kind of game you would play with a brother, pretending to bury him?

He was dead, and then he was alive, and only then did we play a game—we were hiding together in the park.

Aha, said the young officer. I think I understand now. Jealousy between brothers is an old and difficult game—possibly the oldest. Don't be too hard on yourself.

Thank you, I said, now can I please speak to Bedge? He knows that I am my mother's only son and a dedicated policeman. I would never harm anyone, except perhaps one, I said, laughing politely at the extension of our little joke.

The rookie raised his eyebrows: And who in particular would that be?

The man in the black jacket, I said a little incredulously. You're the one who brought him up!

The rookie was studying my hand with concern. What happened here? he asked.

There was a misunderstanding, I said vaguely. I cut my hand. Then my brother gave me his sock since I was bleeding.

Why don't you go over to the freezer there and get some ice for your hand. That looks like a nasty cut.

Thank you, I said, relaxing again into the familiar atmosphere of the old station.

I opened the station icebox and stared into the ice fog swarming the bottled drinks and cherry pops. I'd already forgotten what I was doing there—I was worried about the gun. What Bedge would do if he discovered that I had shown criminally wild disregard for the forms he loved.
Ah, but there's the Chief of the Police, and then there's the Universe . . .

Meeks!

I jumped. Bedge was waving me over to the table. I was happy that my face was numb with cold so it could betray none of my feelings. Several rookies were still crowded around the table, on which were laid, with forensic neatness, the satchel, a military cap (We can't trace this, said Bedge, it's a fake), and six squares of canvas, painted on both sides.

Bedge said, A great deal about an individual's criminality can be discerned through a study of his things. What do you make of these canvases, Meeks?

They look ruined, I said.

I can't even tell what some of these things are, said a rookie.

Paintings, I said.

No shit. I can't tell what they're
of.

I believe those are lemons, said another rookie, pointing to a cluster of yellow circles.

Or oranges?

Maybe these things aren't his, I said, remembering the antifanciful way in which the victim had played (or not played) our game. Maybe they belong to the man who attacked him.

Bedge shook his head. Meeks, they're telling me that you attacked him.

I didn't!

I believe you, but there has to be an investigation, an
internal
investigation. Once everything is cleared up, you can return to being a police officer, of course. I'll need your hat.

It won't come off.

Meeks, no more games.

I bowed, offering any of the rookies the opportunity to wrestle with my head.

Ben

Ben boarded the last northbound train with innocent calm, strolled into the first car, and yawned, his mind a nest of panic and disproportion. He took his seat, surveyed the car: it seemed to be populated exclusively by old women. He was surrounded by old women. Too late to move. He was in the women's car, disaster. Women in cloth coats with fur collars. These were
old
women. The wind cut in through a faulty window and ruffled the fur collar of an elderly lady, who smiled at him. He smiled back drowsily and smoothed the lapels of his new suit and was immediately comforted by it, by the renewed, even extreme, degree of his relative youth. Ben had smiled, but he reconsidered; these are the very people rolling steadily away from the center of life, out toward the Sheds.
Why am I with them?

"Where's this train headed?” he asked the old woman beside him.

"Oh,
please,
” she said, her tone incredulous and hurt and stern (motherly). She turned to gaze out the window. Ben pulled the paper ticket from his breast pocket. Rows of numbers and letters. . . . He became unaccountably afraid. He glanced at the old woman, wished she would say something soothing. He wanted her to tell him the story of where they were going and what would happen when they got there. The conductor entered the car, punched the tickets. Two young men among so many old women. Ben felt he could ask him anything. He had learned that anything could be a pretense for conversation, especially between men. “Friend, when do you think we'll get in?"

"Get in where?” The conductor tipped his plastic-lined hat back from his forehead; he clicked together the metal teeth of the ticket-puncher impatiently. Ben looked to the conductor and to the old woman for guidance, and they gazed back, as if upon the face of their own weak and unpromising son.

"Your ticket!"

Ben handed it over unsteadily. The conductor punched it. He moved on, punching the tickets of the old women.

"I'm on my way to a Listening Party,” said Ben, looking out at the blurred, green-gray world that ringed the city center. He twisted the buttons on his jacket.

"How wonderful for you,” said the old woman. “I met my husband at a Listening Party. He is now deceased."

"My parents met at a Listening Party."

"And are
they
deceased?"

"They are."

"Thought so. Things tend to head that way. But I wish you the best of luck."

The world slid by as the train sped up, past the muddy suck of the river's widening edge, the buckling balconies and shallow back porches, the haggard light posts and chipped hollow wooden stairs, the blunt, blind fire hydrants, the barrel-vaulted worlds beneath the footbridges, worlds of sooty paint and swallows’ nests.

The train passed the oldest Sheds, fields of green huts beside the tracks. Hefty chains were snaked through the metal door handles and padlocked. That seems excessive, thought Ben, who had never actually visited the Sheds. On each shed was stenciled a name . . .
Lucia, Nancy, Henrietta . . .
the names flew by. The old woman covered her face with her hands; tense silence overtook the car. Ben's heart seized him—he thought of his mother, consigned to a life of
serene contemplation
in one of the named but numberless rooms. He imagined peering through the Shed doors and seeing his mother upright at a little writing desk, thinking or reading . . . or what? Why hadn't he found her Shed his first day back and torn the chain from the handle and carried her out into the sunlight and cared for her for the rest of her life? (Because it was forbidden.) The train slowed. The old woman leaned close and whispered to Ben, “I believe this is you."

He seemed to be the only one at the weathered little station. He surveyed the countryside with the sentimental eye of an urban dweller faced at last with the real rolling hills, with the smoke from anonymous and modest chimneys in the distance—all precisely as it should be.

He followed the only road leading from the train station and saw no one and heard no one until dusk, when he passed a middle-aged woman sweeping the porch of her farmhouse. She pointed farther down the road before Ben could shout a greeting. His heart expanded—he was a young man in a pale suit on his way to a Listening Party, and even the flint-eyed wariness of these suburbanites was a pleasure, a pleasure precisely to the degree that it confirmed, for better or worse, the fact of what he had become. It was evening, and the countryside was falling into an eerie rural quiet, and he turned up the collar of his fine pale jacket against the chill.

At last, Ben saw the warm yellow windows of a country estate at the end of a gravel path, holy-seeming beneath an archway of white poplar branches. He took the path reverently, listened to his boots crunching through the gravel. He went to an open door at the side of the house and found a dozen men and women seated around a wooden table, eating dinner in a desultory and determined way. The woman nearest the door started when she saw him.

"Are you lost?"

"I hope not,” said Ben and grinned pleasantly.

The diners put down their forks at once and stared.

"Everyone's out,” said the woman.

"Out?"

"Out for the night."

"Well, I'll turn in early then,” said Ben agreeably—he was a man on top of his own affairs but not
pompously
so. The group stared at him dimly. He tried to speak more clearly. “Where. Should. I. Sleep?"

"I'm sorry. There's been some mistake,” she said, leaning forward into the candlelight and speaking to Ben as if he were a child. “All rooms are taken. But there's a little room upstairs, which you can use tonight, and we'll sort things out in the morning."

"A little room will be just fine, thank you."

Again, stillness overtook the diners.

"And the little room,” said Ben, “is . . . ?"

One of the men stood abruptly, knocking his chair back. “Fine. Your
luggage
?"

"I have none,” said Ben.

The women gave him an appraising look. He ignored it. His heart felt light—he was free of guilt. If the universe was not constructed (as it clearly was not) so that his happiness was a product of the same natural order that forged foals, flowers, thunderstorms, then he must fight with everything he had to make it his.

Meeks

I sat at the feet of Captain Meeks and watched the phantom masses preparing for Independence Day—perfect strangers sharing the air in deep, satisfying breaths, the people filling up with affection for the past. Every few minutes, I would peer into my coat to see that the gun was still there, shining like a deadly viper I had trained to sleep in peace against my heart.

I detected the smell of old sugar being burned off the industrial mixers. I tuned my ear to the sounds of construction, invisible within the fog. The hammering seemed to be coming from overhead, as if the workmen were hammering on the pale hardtops of low-lying clouds. Married men were showing off their autumn sweaters, light and clean, newly unfolded from beds of tissue paper. In every household, a man kneels beside the old cedar-lined chest and gazes upon his autumn sweater: a reunion! The excitement of the new season, the pleasure of this gentle reinvention. When people burst unexpectedly into the little clearing where I was sitting, every detail of their faces painfully sharp in the dilute white light of the afternoon, and seeing me materialize, as it were, out of the fog, they faltered in speech and stride, tightened their grips on their objects unconsciously, and continued down the fog-locked park path. Look at those cake boxes! Those fine, folded corners, that comical striped string. I watched as neighbors overcame the wariness that kept them quiet the rest of the year and shouted out to one another in the park—Hey there! and How
are
you? Impending festivities make city dwellers reckless.

Mother and I used to spend hours together watching this procession, listening for the construction of the Independence Day platform, admiring the parade of autumn sweaters. The man in the black jacket sometimes idled nearby in a stand of tall, thin trees, until my mother went to him, and I pretended not to mind. I decided this unspoken agreement between my mother and the man in the black jacket was a special form of adult nonchalance, which, however conspicuous, should be respectfully allowed to remain unacknowledged or at least unaltered by me—a mere boy—who might have changed it by speaking. Or, I sensed that my mother required my silence, and so I was silent.

Ben

In the room above the kitchen, Ben found a narrow bed, a wooden chair missing several slats, a man's sock, and a collection of empty bottles under a tiny porcelain sink in the corner. The room was possibly smaller than his room at the Bachelor House.

He undressed, arranging his suit carefully on the broken chair, and rinsed his underwear and socks with ice-cold water in the sink. He draped them over the radiator and crawled into the sour-smelling bed. He watched his long black socks drip water onto the filthy floor.

There was no top sheet on the bed. The coarse blanket irritated his skin, and he was often startled awake by the sensation of the rough blanket having coiled itself around his ankles while he shivered, naked and cold in the open air. He hadn't been able to find the light switch and folded the rancid pillow over his face to block out the dull, persistent light of the overhead bulb. He tried to lie very still; he stared into the foul blackness of the pillow. The narrow bed shook over the hulking machines in the kitchen. In the middle of the night, he flipped through some old society magazines that lay on the floor beside the bed. Bachelor House 902 was not listed. So what? There were other lists, better lists.

Just as he drifted into sleep, dogs started yelping at the early morning fog. The house staff ground coffee, chattered, crunched across the gravel courtyard noisily. Then he was oppressed by the stage whispers of people outside his door. “Is he awake? Should we wake him? Are you awake in there?"

"In a minute!” Ben shouted as cheerfully as he could, and the voices disappeared.