Mr. X (62 page)

“It’s a rental,” I said.

“Little thing like that wouldn’t be hard to appropriate.” Sudden inspiration brought her to a halt. She turned to me with a brilliant smile. “Would you like a new car for your birthday?”

“No, thank you, Aunt May. It’s too hard to find a parking space in New York.”

“A parking space is something that cannot be stolen,” she said. “I’ll get you something else. But seeing that car …” She shook her head. “You mentioned Wagon Road? Daddy was
so
mad at me, that day. I knew why, too. He was mad because I was mad. At
him
.”

Joy raised a silhouetted hand, and I waved back. May saw
nothing but Wagon Road. “You mentioned those girls—you know, I remember them! They were
laughing
at us. I wanted to die. So I turned my head, pretending I was too proud to notice, and …” She shook her head. “The upshot was, I did something I didn’t know I
could
do! I had as much Dunstan in me as my sisters, no matter what they thought. You never saw such a hubbub! Glass exploding all over everywhere, wires falling, the poor horses so frightened. And that was
me
! Scared me worse than Daddy’s yelling.”

We reached the other side of the street and moved toward her house. “The girls were laughing at you, and you turned away. That was when you got angry. It wasn’t the girls, was it? You saw something else.”

“A little girl has eyes, too, that’s all I can say.” She tightened her grip on my arm, and we went up the steps to her porch.

“What was it? What did you see?”

May released my arm and opened her door. “Oh, Neddie, you don’t know anything at all.”

87

Joy’s hunched figure toiled down a lightless tunnel and through the entrance to a cave. As the living room took shape around me, the stench increased. Clarence had been teleported elsewhere.

“I want to talk to you! Would you like a glass of sherry?”

“Thank you. Where is Clarence?”

“He’s sleeping in the closet.” Joy moved back and regarded me, her eyes gleaming. “You saw Daddy, didn’t you? He told me you would. I bet my sisters are so jealous they could spit.
They
could never see him. Nettie and May think they know everything, but they don’t, not by a long shot.” She put the tips of her fingers to her mouth, almost dancing in her glee. She waved me toward a chair. “I’ll be back in a second.”

Faint rustles and thuds came from another region of the house. Clarence had awakened, I thought, and he objected to the
closet. Joy returned with two glasses the size of thimbles. I took one of them and said, “Maybe Clarence wants to be let out.”

“He’s sound asleep. That noise is the wind in the attic.” She perched on the other chair and tilted the contents of the thimble into her mouth. I did the same. The sherry, which was not sherry, burned down my throat like kerosene.

“Homemade,” Joy said. “According to my bad, mad daddy’s recipe. I don’t have but a little bit left, but I wanted you to have some.”

“The ambrosia of the Dunstans,” I said. “I guess you’ve seen him, too.”

“So what did my sisters say? That I made it all up? I didn’t, though. My daddy, Howard Dunstan, stood right in front of me, same as he did with you. Wasn’t he
funny
? Wasn’t he all
impressive
and
unhappy
?”

“He didn’t seem to think he had any reason to go on living,” I said.

“According to Daddy, we were washed up a long time ago. He appeared to me because I was a true Dunstan, like him, but he didn’t enjoy the condition. He wanted us all to go away.”

“He told you I would see him, too?”

“Because you were a
vrai
Dunstan, like me. He didn’t like you, though. Daddy didn’t like anybody, especially Dunstans. He didn’t even like his daughters, because they reminded him of his futility. That is the conclusion I have come to.”

“Aunt Joy,” I said, “how could you and I talk to your father? It wasn’t like seeing a ghost, it was like being there with him.”

“My daddy couldn’t be a
ghost
,” Joy said, amused. “Someone like that could never be an ordinary old
fantôme
. Time made that happen.”

“Time?”

“It’s all around us. You can use time, if you’re able. I don’t see why you’re so
stupide
about it. According to my daddy, you keep on bothering him over and over. That’s what he
said
.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean, use it?”

“You saw my daddy, didn’t you? You were in his study, and he was alive, he had to be alive, because he could talk to you.”

I realized what she meant. “Oh.”

“You went into his time, that’s all,” Joy said.
“C’est simple.”

I stared at her for a moment, trying to reconcile the memory
of what I had experienced with my instinct to deny Joy’s version of the simple.

“I had this feeling of …”

“Of what?” Her voice had an impatient edge.

“Falling.”

“Well, of course.
C’est normal
. I don’t know why I should have to
explain
it to you. When you go
backwards
, it feels like you’re
falling
. How else could it feel? I hope you know how lucky you are. Hardly anybody can ever do that. Some can do it once but never again. Queenie couldn’t, and Nettie can’t do it, and for sure
May
never could. There was Daddy, and then me, when I had the strength, and now there’s you. You know what Daddy used to say?”

I shook my head.

“He used to say he
ate
time. He didn’t like it, but he ate it anyhow, because an ability like that has a reason behind it, and if you have the ability, you have to find the reason. He said once he saw Omar and Sylvan Dunstan robbing dead soldiers on a battlefield, and he thought maybe that was the reason he had the ability.”

“What’s the reason you had it?”

“Maybe so Howard Dunstan could make me unhappy. Maybe so I could talk to you. I hope your reason is better than mine.”

“Howard made your mother unhappy,” I said.

“Yes.” Joy nodded. “In a great many ways.”

“He had other women.”

“Didn’t he, though! Up and down, and hither and yon, and there’s the car, I’ll be going, don’t wait up.”

“Did he have children by any of his other women?”

She looked at me with a show of interest. “Would you care to hear a funny story?”

I nodded.

“One day, I finished my lesson with our French tutor, which I had alone because I was gifted in French, and Queenie and Nettie, who were not, came in for their lesson. May was sick in bed. She wouldn’t
eat
, you see, my sister May hardly ate a speck all through her childhood. I was all alone with nothing to do. Well, I got up the courage to slip into my father’s study, which was a room I loved but was not supposed to enter
sans permission
. Can you guess what especially fascinated me in that room?”

“The fox,” I said.

Joy clapped her hands. “I loved that fox! I thought if I looked at him long enough, old Reynard would forget I was there and finish that step he was taking. I wanted to see him move
une fois seulement
. I was kneeling in front of the fireplace, and the telephone rang. Oh! I nearly fainted. Daddy came walking to the study door, boom, boom, boom. I ran around the back of his couch. In he marched, boom, boom. Slammed the door. I saw the bottom of his legs going toward his desk. He picked up the receiver and did not speak for quite a while. Then it was ‘Ellie. Please calm down.’ I
knew
he was talking to
une autre femme
. He said, ‘All will be well. He will think it’s his.’ When he hung up, he said, ‘An excess of cannon smoke.’ Then he walked out, not stamping at all.”

“You never knew who Ellie was?”

“We never met any Ellies,” Joy said. “We never met anybody.”

She peered at the dark hallway. “I should be attending to my duties.” Joy showed me out with more dispatch than I would have thought her capable.

88

A metal brick pushed into the small of my back when I got behind the wheel. I unclipped the holster and put Toby’s pistol on the passenger seat. It was about 9:30 on a Monday night in June. The lamps cast yellow circles like spotlights on the sidewalk. Cherry Street looked improbably beautiful, and the world seemed motionless. All I had to do was get to the Brazen Head and catch up on my sleep. This schedule felt almost sinfully luxurious. I decided to drive along the streets I had walked after my first visit with Joy, to erase the impressions made when I had seen them through a veil of grief and rage.

I turned left at the end of the block, and a pair of headlights sped toward me from down the street. The cab of a pickup flew past in a gray blur. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the truck swerve into Cherry Street.

I took the next right and saw green light shining above the intersection of Pine Street and Cordwainer Avenue, three blocks ahead. I didn’t care if I got there before it changed; I was enjoying the journey. Frame houses like Nettie’s rolled past my windows. As I coasted down another block, the light stayed green, and I nudged the foot pedal. A white dazzle of light burst in my mirror. I looked up and saw, half a block away, the gray pickup speeding toward me with its beams on high.

My stomach jumped into my throat. Mountry had come again to Cherry Street. I flattened the accelerator. The pickup’s lights doubled in size while my little car swam forward. With a clank that shook the chassis like a wet dog, it dropped into a lower gear and shot ahead.

The light changed to yellow when I was about thirty feet from the intersection. It was still on yellow as I blasted my horn and barreled out into Cordwainer Avenue. In my rearview mirror, the headlights of the pickup kept coming.

On the far side of the median, two cars jolted to a halt a moment before I flew past them. In the mirror, I saw the pickup run the red light. It slammed into an oncoming car and sent it skidding across the road. The dazzle in my mirror wobbled and swung back.

Ahead lay the chain-link fences and one-story brick buildings of Pine Street. I glanced into the mirror and saw the pickup fly out of the intersection.