No Way Home (18 page)

“You’re wrong.”

“That’s right, I’m wrong. Florence Lapham fell dead of a mosquito bite, and her husband only fainted. Pretty soon he’s going to dig himself out of the ground. Tell that to the daughter.”

“She doesn’t need me to tell her anything anymore.”

Bakinowski pointed the newspaper at him. “I just want you to think about something. A yokel cop doing hard time. They’ll tear you apart.”

MacGregor drove away, and Bakinowski took a deep breath and felt better than he had all day.

• • •

As Reverend Stottle motored out of Bensington, the sinking sun shot red through the trees and lit every leaf as if burning heretics. He was on a mission of mercy. Mrs. Dugdale, the oldest member of his church, childless, widowed in her prime, lay dying in Lawrence General Hospital. He entered the unkempt little city with foreboding, for he knew failure. Never had he penetrated the inconsolableness of someone who had lost a mate, a child, or a parent. Untrained in marital counseling, he had made messes of several young couples’ lives. But all these years he had tried to do his duty and had never shirked a responsibility. That surely was in his favor but did not prevent a shiver as he parked in the visitors’ lot. Whose cold hand was that around his heart? The Devil’s was hot, he had been taught. These fingers must be God’s.

He did not need to ask directions to the room, though he paused near a nurses’ station to get his bearings. An older nurse was mapping out patients to an aide. Anorexic was gone. Hemorrhoids was in 202 now, and Impaired Kidney was next door. Emphysema was sharing 213 with Diabetes. The nurse looked at him. “Can I help you, sir?”

No help needed, and he strode on, time was precious. The last time he had seen Mrs. Dugdale she had been propped in a wheelchair like a rag doll, and he had had to look twice to assure himself she was breathing. Entering her room, he saw that now she was buried in bed and wired to a glinting monitor whose jagged stream of hieroglyphics looked evil. No hope, he could see that.

“It’s Reverend Stottle,” he said, leaning over her, and she seemed to hear him. “Fear nothing,” he said, aware that lately he feared everything. “You’ve had ninety-three long years, more than most people.”

Her eyelids flickered but did not open. Her voice was feeble. She asked for the time.

“God is the dispenser of time, Mrs. Dugdale. If God ceases believing in Himself, all clocks stop. The whole universe ticks down.”

Toothless, Mrs. Dugdale’s face gathered around her mouth, where the pleats ran deep. Reverend Stottle stared at the intricate network of lines girding her throat. Emotion pressed him forward, putting words into his mouth.

“Nothing is deeper and darker than aloneness,” he said, with thoughts of episodes in his own life. Mrs. Dugdale’s lids shuddered, and he gathered up one of her tiny hands, a mess of bones gloved in loose skin speckled like a tiger lily. Touch was important. Sometimes it was the only way two human beings could connect. “Life, Mrs. Dugdale, is the light leading to the final darkness, where we shall each lie alone.”

Her lids went still. He released her hand and stepped back. In the subdued light her face shone luridly. With another rush of emotion prickling his skin, he pressed a button on a cord and waited. Two minutes that seemed like twenty passed before the nurse who had spoken to him appeared.

“I think she’s gone,” he said.

The nurse pushed past him and bent over the bed. Her bottom was substantial, and the pink of her underwear blossomed through the white nylon of her trousers. He started to look away and then did not.

“No, Reverend, she’s just asleep.”

“Are you certain?”

“Quite.”

He rode the elevator to the ground level and, around the corner in the lobby, went into the public lavatory. At the urinals he stood wedged between a burly security guard and a slender Hispanic and relieved himself with a dash of dignity he found lacking in them. Afterward at the double sink he splashed his hands with much ado when he saw that they were not going to wash theirs. Then, watching them leave, he wondered whether Jesus had always washed his. In those days feet got the greater attention.

He was on his way into the cafeteria when he saw a familiar figure on its way out. It was Lydia Lapham, stark and lovely in her whitest of whites. His eyes played tricks on him because she seemed no more substantial than mist over water. He stepped in her path, startling her.

“Lydia. We must talk. Soon.” He felt in his own head what must be going on in hers, a terrible effort not to succumb to despair. With a moist grip on her slim wrist, he said, “Some things cannot be faced alone.”

“Yes, soon,” she said sharply and pulled away. “Not now.”

• • •

Clement Rayball drove to the residence of Gerald Bowman, a great, fancy house but no grander than others in Oakcrest Heights, which surprised him until he remembered his reading of the man: self-righteous and self-denying, stiff in his thinking and dedicated to his causes. A tight ass. He rang the bell.

The housekeeper, who was on her way out, a pocketbook hanging from the crook of her arm, answered the door, and he smiled at her in a way that might have charmed a less haggard woman who had not been on her feet all day. He asked for Bowman, admitted he was not expected, gave no name, and argued, “I’m sure he’ll see me.”

“You’ll have to wait here,” the woman said and closed the door in his face. He waited, it didn’t matter, he wasn’t insulted. He turned around in the dying sunlight and breathed in the spiced air, which raised a memory of a squad tent with wooden sides and a concrete floor. His long-ago military training had been in Georgia.

Finally the door reopened, and the woman brushed past him, her pocketbook bumping him. In the doorway was Gerald Bowman, whose stare had the effect of an ice pick.

“What is it?”

“You don’t know me, Mr. Bowman, but your name rings a bell with me. I used to do work for the government.”

“So?”

“We had patrons. I thought you might’ve been one.”

“I doubt it.”

“I could be wrong.”

“I guarantee it. What’s your name?”

“Chico.”

“You’re right, I never heard of you.”

Bowman started to close the door, and Clement spoke fast. “I’ve got something to tell you, confidential. You don’t want to hear it, it’s no skin off my ass.”

Bowman’s ice-pick stare went deeper. Then he let the door hang loose and stepped back. “You’ve got five minutes. Come in.”

Clement was directed into a large room and told to sit. Bowman sat well away from him in a more comfortable chair. Drapes of heavy brocade both dimmed and cooled the room. Clement stared at a table whose cabriole legs tapered to elegant hooves.

Bowman said, “What are you doing in this town?”

“I have family here.”

“I always figured guys like you didn’t have any. All right, what do you want to tell me?”

“It’s tender,” Clement said. “It could be something you don’t want to hear.”

“Don’t play games with me.”

“It concerns the police chief in town, name of Morgan, maybe you know him.”

“I know we have one. Go on.”

Clement’s eyes shifted to the doorway and his head nodded as a woman stepped into the room. So this was the wife. Striking. Skin color was bone china, hair glossy black. He had expected nothing less. Her voice, wonderfully low, had body, strength, and insinuation.

“Yes, go on,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t stop now,” she said with huskiness.

His eyes were on Bowman. “The chief has a habit of stepping out of line with other men’s wives. He’s the fox in the chicken coop.”

“My husband, I’m quite certain, has heard of the chief’s recklessness.”

“Yes, ma’am. I just wanted to be sure.”

Bowman spoke from the confines of a frozen face. “Get out.”

He rose with grace and a slight squeak from his alligator shoes. His bearing was military. “Don’t feel too bad, Mr. Bowman. You’re not the only one.”

• • •

She was in her bedroom, where she had finished brushing her hair. Still sitting at her dressing table, where jewelry lay on velvet, she removed her earrings, golden teardrops with delicate engraving. When she rose, her body shimmered through her frail gown like light penetrating glass. Her stride into the adjoining bathroom highlighted the indisputable aristocracy of her legs. When she came out, he was standing there with a blue-steel .38-caliber revolver. His face had thawed. In his brow were lines drawn as if in hell.

“You know what I’m going to do,” he said.

“No, Gerald, what are you going to do?”

He pointed the revolver at her, and she did not budge. He squeezed the trigger. In its own way the click resounded as loud as a shot would have.

“I knew it wasn’t loaded,” she said.

He lowered his arm. “One day it could be.”

She approached him slowly, smiled into his face, kissed his cheek. Looking into his eyes, she pressed her hand to the front of his trousers, shaping her fingers to the outline of his penis as if it were a roll of bills. “Do you want to?”

“Yes,” he said.

Much later he switched on the light and wrote out a check with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. The ink was sepia, which gave a timelessness to her name. This was a game they had not played in years. She looked at him from her pillow.

He said, “Why, Arlene? Tell me why.”

“Happiness is other times, Gerald, never now.”

He left the check in the light of the lamp and got to his feet. The ghost of his body lay damp on the sheet. He found his robe, colorful like a boxer’s, and put it on. “How many others?”

“No others. Morgan used me. The way you use your secretary.”

He let that slide and stared at her, his mouth a straight line. She lay uncovered. Her face was as fresh as soap stripped of its wrapper. Her skin was lucent between the ribs. He said, “So the chief’s had himself a good time.”

“You could say that. Before me it was the ball player’s wife. Now it’s Christine Poole, if you can imagine that.”

“The man knows his business, does he?”

“I call him Chief Cock.”

“You’re pushing me.”

“No, dear. You’re asking. But you needn’t worry. He may have more oomph, but you have your tricks.”

Reaching down, he wrapped his hands around her narrow feet and squeezed. Her painted toenails glared as if he had drawn blood. “I don’t want to hear.”

“Then get even.”

“With you?”

“With
him
, you fool!” She kicked free. “Take away his job. Get him fired. Leave him naked.”

• • •

Lydia Lapham got home from the hospital at eleven-forty and resolved to drink no more coffee, but soon she had a pot perking. It had been a stressful evening. The brief encounter with Reverend Stottle was upsetting, but the later arrival of a woman with razored wrists was unnerving, as if with mutilation the poor creature were defeminized, altered, checked. At eleven on the dot, as she was quitting her shift, she heard that Mrs. Dugdale had died, a blessing, but it unsettled her anyway.

In the living room she put on lights and drew the shades. On the coffee table was a slim volume of poetry she would never read. Most poems touched on things she did not want to think about. At the kitchen table, a window open to the noises of the night, she sat rigidly with her coffee until a muscle loosened in her back. On the table were the two pages of her father’s unfinished letter to his wartime friend in Michigan. With his fountain pen she wrote a postscript. The words were black threads rising, dipping, curling, and looping.
He died with her
, she ended it.

Upstairs, trembling a little for no obvious reason, she began running a hot bath. In her bedroom was a pot of shasta daisies for replanting, a gift of sympathy from the hospital administrator. Undressing, she threw her uniform into a corner and then the rest of her things. Naked, she was frozen milk. Her nipples were wintry points. The sinister part of tragedy was the aftermath, the scouring of feelings, the trivializing of thought, for which her nurse’s training had not prepared her. One could tear the head off a perfectly healthy flower and not feel bad about it.

She tilted the large dresser mirror, aiming it at the bed, which was tightly made. Lying atop the powder blue chenille spread, she regarded the shape of her legs, the size of her feet. With her eyes in the mirror, she lifted her knees and viewed herself as a lover might. The sight did not seem appetizing, but Matt, and Frank before him, had always found it so.

She took her bath and went to bed. An hour later, she was still awake. Clad in a sweater and dark trousers, she slipped out into the night. Trees were moon-washed. The night air pushed at her. She knew the car would be there. His head was tipped back. Chief Morgan was asleep. Some watchdog! She reached through the open window and touched his shoulder. He came awake instantly, his eyes full of false light.

“Come in,” she said.

8

At the cemetery a large maple quivered with life. Leaves quaked. Birds flew in and out. And Fred Fossey stood with bowed head at the graves of Flo and Earl Lapham, no stone in place yet, only two markers, with a toy flag behind Earl’s. “Bless you both,” he said aloud, feeling the sun on his neck. The morning was hot, the sky as blue as the grass was green. The grass sent up its spiciest scents.

His gaze dwelled on Flo’s marker. All these years in love with her, so much in love, with fantasy inherent in every thought he’d ever had of her. “You never knew, did you, Flo? Never for a moment. Or maybe you did. I bet you did. I hope so.” He wiped the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Earl. That wasn’t for your ears.”

“You talking to yourself, Fred?”

May Hutchins, with flowers in her hand, had come up behind him. He was not embarrassed, not in the least — why shouldn’t the world know? “I was talking to them both,” he said.

May nodded with understanding. “They say the dead don’t hear, but I wonder.”

“They hear, but they don’t answer.”

The cut flowers in her hand were from her garden. She crouched, ladylike, and lay them between the markers. The sun added fire to the curly red ends of her hair.