Night My Friend (8 page)

But as he followed her into the house there was a sort of sadness in his heart.

The following morning a car stopped on the road and a tall young man walked back to the barn where Jason was busy with his daily chores. “Hello there,” he called out. “Got a minute?”

Jason set down his milk pails and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Sure, mister. What can I do for you?”

“We’re investigating yesterday’s plane crash over on the hill. We thought you might have seen something that could help us.” The man had taken out a little notebook. “You’re Jason Lean, correct?”

“That’s me, and I saw it, all right. Plane came in too low. Hit those power lines. Was just at dawn, and I suppose the sun might have blinded the pilot for a minute. It hit the lines and that was the end of it.”

“Did you go over to see the wreckage?”

“I… No, I started to, but then turned back. I was afraid of those fallen power lines.”

“Just as well,” the investigator said, making a brief note in his book. “You couldn’t have done anything. They were all killed instantly.”

“Yes. Horrible.” Jason turned to stare out across the valley, toward the hillside scar which would take many seasons to heal.

“Thanks for your time,” the man said. “I may be back to talk to you again.”

“Certainly. Anything I can do…”

The man nodded a smile and started back to his car. He hadn’t asked about the suitcase, Jason thought. They’d never missed it. Burnt to ashes, they probably supposed.

And that night, in bed next to the cold flesh of his wife, Jason imagined it all again. Opening the suitcase, finding a lifetime’s treasure nestled there waiting. What would it be? Money? A woman’s wardrobe and jewels? A salesman’s sample kit of fine furs? Something for Martha, perhaps. Or himself. Even a fine new suit that could be made to fit him.

The next day, in the late afternoon, while Martha was cleaning in the front of the house, his uncertain footsteps took him once more to the animal graveyard beyond the barn. Perhaps, if he could only dig up the suitcase and look—then bury it again before she ever knew the difference. Yes, that was what he would do. Must do.

He retrieved the old spade from the barn and started to dig. After a moment’s work he could feel the familiar leather hide as he scraped the dirt from it.

“Jason!”

“Martha. What are you…?”

“Jason, you were going to open it! Cover it up this instant! Don’t you realize it will bring us nothing but tragedy? Don’t you realize it belongs to a
dead man
?”

“All right, Martha. I was just…”

“Cover it up, Jason. And don’t do that again.”

He covered it up.

But still, as the days passed and the memory of the crash itself drifted further to the back of his conscious mind, there was still the shape of the sealed suitcase to obsess him. He saw it in his waking and sleeping hours, saw it closed as first he’d met it, and open with all its treasures exposed. It became, in various fantasies, a spy’s hoard of secret plans, an embezzler’s final crime, a businessman’s stock of everyday valuables. He imagined all the hundreds of things that might come tumbling out if only he looked. The things he’d never owned; like an electric razor, or a portable radio, or a fine camera.

No, decided Jason with finality, after a week of torment. Whatever was in that suitcase, it was not going to rot in the ground behind the barn. He found Martha in the kitchen and told her of his decision.

“I’m going to dig it up and open it,” he said.

“Jason…”

“Nothing you can say will stop me, Martha. I have to know what’s inside it.”

“Jason, there’s death in that suitcase. I can feel it in my bones.”

“I have to
know!
” he screamed at her. And when she stepped heavily into his path he brushed her aside as he would some animal in the field.

“Stop, Jason!”

He hit her, only to shut that refusing mouth, only to silence her for a few important moments. She fell heavily, her head catching the edge of the old stove. He sucked in his breath and bent over her, chilled now to the bone. She wasn’t moving and he knew in some fantastic manner that he’d killed her.

But he didn’t stop. He hurried on to the barn, with a speed born now of nameless panic. The spade, digging in the familiar earth, uncovering, revealing.

Yes, the suitcase. Still there like some Pandora’s box awaiting him. His hands fumbled with the straps, teeth biting into lips, forehead sweating a chill moisture.

But it was locked.

Into the barn, carrying it gently now, with clods of earth falling from it. Into the barn, and a few careful blows with the pitchfork, prying the lock apart until it snapped under the pressure. Finally.

He opened the suitcase.

The government inspector found them, some time later, when he stopped by the Lean farmhouse to ask some further questions about the airliner crash. He found Martha Lean on the kitchen floor, and she looked so peaceful it was hard to believe she was dead.

And he found Jason Lean in the barn, kneeling in a sort of daze over an open suitcase. It was a salesman’s sample case. It was filled with leather-bound Bibles.

T
HE CAR RADIO THUNDERING
a Sunday afternoon concert into my ear, the sun bleaching out my hair exposed in the topless auto, I wheeled briskly up the familiar park road searching for them. They always came to the same general area, the same hilltop with its vagrant view of distant beach and specks of suited swimmers, just far enough away to untempt husbands with roving eyes and satisfy wives with children to guard. Today, breeze blowing off the lake, rustling leaves at their summer peakness, was surely a day when the picnic people would be out. All of them.

I spied Fred Dutton’s car first, parked with three wheels off the road, sporty and casual like its owner, top up and windows cautiously closed, also like its owner. Surely he could have reached it before any of the less than occasional overhead clouds grouped into a threat of rain, but Fred Dutton was like that. Take no chances. Play it safe. Better safe than sorry. Fred Dutton.

I parked behind him, purposely kissing his bumper a bit harder than necessary, enjoying myself at the thought of the dent I might be leaving in it. Almost I expected him to come running at the sound, but they were just out of sight, down the hill hidden by the willows along the edge of the pond. It was a pleasant place, bringing back half-forgotten memories of days without care and nights when only the happiness mattered. I’d been the one in those days, and I wondered if I still was.

Dora, Fred’s wife, saw me first. She was boiling water on the camp stove for her usual cup of tea and she jerked her hand back with such sudden shock that the pan of water clattered to the ground. “Why—Sam!”

“Hello, Dora. Glad to see you remember me.” The grass seemed suddenly damp through my shoes, and I was vaguely aware that the children had been splashing here.

“Sam!” She turned her head. “Fred, come here! It’s Sam—Sam Waggel.” Her voice almost broke as she said it.

Fred came running, and the rest—except for the children—weren’t far behind. They came cautiously at first, as if viewing a beast newly escaped from the zoo. Then they crowded around, the foolish false grins on their faces, greeting me. “Sam boy, how the heck you been?” This was a real estate broker named Charlie Thames, who’d never really liked me on my best of days. Charlie hadn’t changed much, put on a few pounds maybe, but hadn’t we all. His wife Laura startled me a bit with her graying hair, but the rest of them were pretty much the same.

Fred Dutton had his arm around my shoulder almost at once, as if I’d never been away, pressing a sweating can of beer into my hand. “When’d you get out, Sam? Why didn’t you let us know? How you feelin’?”

“Well enough, Fred,” I said, answering his last question first. “I got out a couple days ago. Called your and Charlie’s homes but when nobody answered I figured you were probably out picnicking at the old place.”

“Hello, Sam.” This was Jean O’Brian—Jean Falconi now, of course—a girl who’d meant a lot to me once. She was wearing white shorts that showed off her legs. She’s always had the best legs in the crowd. Her husband, Joe, came into view then too, carrying the youngest of the children in his arms.

“Hi, Jean. Joe. The kids are really growing up.”

“Have a hot dog, Sam,” Charlie offered. “We got plenty.”

Laura, as if to back up the words, went to get one off the grill. “Here, Sam. Just the way you used to like them.”

“Used to, Laura? I still do. Nothing’s changed that much.”

She flushed slightly and turned away, but Dora Dutton was there to take her place. “Do you want to talk about it, Sam? We don’t want…”

“Sure. What do you want to know? If you’ve finished eating I can give you some wonderful descriptions of the shock treatments and the aftereffects of the drugs they were feeding me.”

“Go play,” Charlie said to one of the children who wandered up. “Go play with your sister.” His face was hard and set. Already he was remembering his old Sam-hatred from the days before the trouble.

“Sam,” Joe Falconi said, speaking with that sort of almost-accent, “what about the charges? Are you going to have to stand trial now that you’re out?” Joe was a contractor, a good guy as guys went.

“No,” I told them, taking my time about lighting a cigarette, letting all damned six of them know I was out for good, here to stay, ready for action. “Remember, the court ruled I was insane at the time I did it. But I’m all right now, all cured. All.”

“Well,” Fred Dutton said, “well, that’s damned good. All cured, huh?”

“All cured.”

But Jean wasn’t quite so convinced. “It’s only been two years, Sam. Are you sure? I mean…”

I just sort of laughed at her. She did look funny standing there under the willow, thinking about how this guy she once necked with over in West Park might now be a homicidal maniac and what the hell was he doing walking around loose just two years after it happened.

Charlie and Laura sort of drifted off, pretending to hike after the kids, and Dora started the water for her tea again. After all the excitement of my arrival they were acting now as if I’d never been away. Or were they acting as if I’d never come back?

Joe Falconi brought me a beer to go with the hot dog. “It’s good to see you again, boy. Come on, let’s walk down by the water.”

We strolled away from the others, kicking at stones, watching them skip and finally splash in the sparkling pond, stirring here and there an eddy of mud in the tranquil waters. “Your kids are growing.” I said. “You and Jean just have the two?”

“No,” he answered, a bit embarrassed. “We had another boy last year. I guess you didn’t hear.”

“Communications weren’t too good in there. Especially when none of my old friends ever came to see me.”

“Sam…”

“What?” I kicked at a loose stone.

“Sam, I don’t blame you for being a bit bitter, but you’ve got to look at it from our point of view.”

“Sure,” I told him with a smile. “You figured I was locked up in the nut house for the rest of my natural life, so why the hell should anybody bother about me. Right? It was just as if I was dead too, along with her.”

“Sam. You don’t know what you do to me when you talk like that. Hell, they wouldn’t even let anyone see you at first, you know that. We didn’t know how bad you were or anything about it. You know the way the newspapers treat a story like that.”

“Sure. Frankly, I was surprised they didn’t have a gang of reporters waiting for me the other day.”

“Look, Sam… I know the construction business isn’t your line, but if you need a job to tide you over for a while, I could probably fix you up.”

“Thanks, Joe. About the only thing I’ve done for the past two years is make baskets. They have some weird ideas of mental therapy in those places. Maybe I’ll take you up on it.”

From somewhere behind us we heard Jean calling to him. “I have to get back. She has quite a time with those kids.”

I followed him part of the way, but paused a bit by one of the playing children. It was a little girl, unmistakably one of Charlie and Laura’s children. “How are you?” I asked her.

“Fine,” she answered a bit uncertainly at the question from a stranger.

“You don’t remember me. You were just born when I went away.” I pulled at a few willow leaves and tickled her nose with them. “What’s your name? I forgot it.”

But before the child could answer, Laura Thames had appeared from somewhere. “Sam, please leave Katie alone.”

“What?” I hadn’t quite understood her unexpected words.

“I’m sorry, Sam. Really I am. But I don’t want you to get near the children.”

“Sure.” I stood up and walked back to where the others stood too casually around the charcoal stove. Dora was drinking her tea, while Fred played with a rumpled deck of cards.

“Sam,” Charlie Thames said, “what do you plan to do with yourself? Plan to stay around town long?”

“Why not? It’s my home.” I was conscious of the sun a bit lower in the afternoon sky, the birds not quite as chirping as before.

“Sure. I was just thinking that you might want to go away to some place where people didn’t know about the… trouble. You know.” Charlie was smiling. Keeping it friendly. The smiler with the knife. Chaucer. Charlie Damned Chaucer Thames.

“Thanks for the advice, Charlie.”

“New York or someplace. You know, big city. Hell, I was reading the other day that most of the people in Manhattan are nuts anyway.”

“Charlie!” This from Laura, warning, rebuking. Charlie glanced at her and heeded the warning. He shut up suddenly and walked over to inspect the dying embers of the charcoal fire.

“Guess I’d better be going,” I told them, all of them, not one in particular, because all of them thought alike. Even good old Joe with his offers of a job until I could find something better. Maybe they thought I was going to work on their wives next. Maybe they thought their children weren’t safe around a homicidal maniac—even a certified cured homicidal maniac. Maybe, hell.

“It looks a little like rain,” Jean was agreeing. “Maybe we’d all better start packing up.” I followed her gaze toward the single small black cloud moving fast in the eastern sky and almost laughed in her pretty face. They were all damned scared of old Sam.