No Way Home (20 page)

Several minutes later she heard him tramping in the house. She heard her name called and did not answer, but stood very still, waiting for the birds to come. She did not turn around when he came out the back door. She did not want to see his face.

“You and me,” he said, “got something to talk about.”

• • •

After his phone call to Lydia Lapham, Chief Morgan kneaded his brow. His mind remained with her. He agonized over the obscurities of their sudden and impetuous relationship. Too much was up in the air, beyond his range of vision and beyond even his willingness to understand, though he knew he had not meant to sleep with her. Nor had he meant in any way to interfere with the relationship, though broken, between her and MacGregor. His guilt was keen. Yet he also knew that, having been given the opportunity, nothing could have stopped him. Her nearness had inspired feelings long dormant and resurrected formidable memories of another life.

His chair creaked with a shifting of his weight. He was tired. His gray eyes were dust balls, which he barely raised when Meg O’Brien looked in on him and said in a private voice, “Reporter from Lawrence to see you. He wants an update on the investigation.”

“You handle it,” Morgan said.

“I can’t. I don’t know anything about it.”

“Eugene out there? Have him take care of it.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m serious.”

A few moments later Sergeant Avery, who had quietly farted, said, “Fire away.”

The reporter, young and neatly dressed, started to speak and then stepped back disconcertedly and riffled blank pages of a steno pad as if he had forgotten his questions and needed more light to read them. “We’ve heard rumors a Bensington police officer is a prime suspect in the shooting.”

“Pure bullshit!” Sergeant Avery shot back. “You can quote me.”

“No, you can’t,” Meg O’Brien shouted from her desk. “Pure rubbish is what he said.”

“Right,” the reporter said, glad to give her his attention.

Sergeant Avery cleared his throat while letting out more air, hot and disturbing, disturbing because he felt no relief and feared he had soiled himself. “Any more questions?”

The reporter put his pad away, his smile small, and cut the interview short. “I guess I got enough for now.”

The reporter went out the door, and Sergeant Avery disappeared in the direction of the lavatory. Meg O’Brien sat at her desk with an impassive face and waited for him to return. On a notepad she jotted down personal chores to be done, though never enough to keep her outside life busy. She had survived cancer, come to terms with the passing of her only brother, and recognized that her job was her whole life, which did not displease her. She could no longer imagine a better one.

Tired of waiting, she lifted herself up and went into the chief’s office. He was deep in his chair, his eyes closed. “You’re not sleeping, are you?”

He shook his head. Lydia Lapham continued to move in and out of his mind at will. His stomach made sounds like a drumroll. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Everything go all right?”

“Everything went fine,” Meg said. “Eugene shit himself.”

• • •

After a few holes of golf, Calvin Poole lowered his niblick and swabbed his neck with a linen handkerchief. The heat of the morning shimmered. In the distance it glared. Sticking the club back into the bag, he said, “I’m sorry, the sun’s too hot for me. But it was nice of you to ask me.”

“It was a bad idea,” Gerald Bowman said and put away his club. “Come on, we’ll have something cold in the bar.”

In the motorized golf cart, Bowman was the driver, Poole the sunstruck passenger. Each wore raspberry trousers. The cut of their jerseys was the same, only the colors were different. Since receiving Bowman’s early telephone call at home, Poole had been waiting to hear something miraculously encouraging about the outstanding loans.

A boy took the cart from them, and they entered the Bensington Country Club through the large rear entrance. The lounge was cool and deserted. They sat at a small mahogany table, where the bartender brought them orange juice chunky with ice. Poole drank his up almost at once and listened while Bowman spoke obliquely about people popping up on one’s doorstep, faceless debris from the past. He failed to follow until Bowman made an unmistakable allusion to banana republics, and then he remembered that Bowman had once touched him up for a secret contribution, a sizable sum from the coffers of Mercury Savings & Loan to help fund an effort as much political as military, which had seemed right at the time. Now he wondered whether it was coming back to haunt him. Everything else was.

Bowman was now talking about something else, which again perplexed him. It had to do with women, their wiles, their intricacies, their peculiarities, which eventually put him on guard. He raised his glass. He needed a refill. The bartender, arriving promptly, poured from a pitcher, rattled it, and left it there.

“Hard to live without them,” he said lightly.

“Almost as hard as living with them,” Bowman said. “Your own wife, Poole, how well do you know her? I’m talking,
really.
”

The orange juice was no longer vital. He had drunk too much too fast and put his glass aside after one weary sip. Through the window that ran the length of the far wall he glimpsed golfers motoring in from the green.

Bowman said, “You know, don’t you?”

He recognized one of the golfers, Randolph Jackson, who had once asked him to serve on a town board. Commitments on his time had prevented it, a pity because he would have brought professionalism to bear.

Bowman said, “Do you know his name?”

With no mask of toughness to hide his feelings, he looked away and remembered a childhood in which comportment and restraint had been among the things that mattered. A high reward for dignified behavior was a brisk pat on his head from his father, shrewd, staid, and proper, an old-fashioned Yankee banker, perhaps the last of the lot, though he, the son, had striven to fill the shoes.

“It’s our rinky-dink police chief,” Bowman said. “James Morgan. The kind of man who leaves his pawprints on a woman.”

He remembered intruding into his mother’s dressing room, he could not have been more than six or seven. Even in only her underwear she managed to look prim. A gentleman, she told him, always knocks first.

“It doesn’t bother you, Poole, a guy screwing your wife?”

“It bothers me,” he said. “It bothers me most that you should know.”

• • •

Calvin Poole left soon after, and Gerald Bowman motioned to a familiar figure in the bar. Randolph Jackson, florid in golfing colors, patted down his hair and lumbered forth with a huge smile. Bowman was the force that had turned Jackson’s woodland into Oakcrest Heights and in large measure changed the character of the town. They shook hands.

“Always good to see you, Mr. Bowman.”

“Sit down,” Bowman said.

Jackson sat with a thump and smiled broadly, some gold in his back teeth. “I thought that was you out there. You quit early.”

“I didn’t. Poole did.”

“Was that Calvin Poole with you? I thought it was, the white hair. A fine gentleman.”

Bowman said, “Your police chief’s fucking his wife.”

A number of seconds passed before Jackson responded. “My God, I didn’t know that. If you want, I’ll talk to Jim, tell him to stop.”

“Your chief’s a joke.”

“I’ve known him for a long — ”

“You’ve had a shooting, two people dead. You’ve got a clown in charge. What are you going to do about it?”

Flustered, Jackson said, “He’s only technically in charge. The state police are really handling the investigation, and I’ve been somewhat involved myself.”

“Get rid of him.” Bowman finished off his orange juice and got to his feet. “You’d be doing yourself a favor — and me.”

• • •

Matt MacGregor was home. Unshaved, wearing cutoff jeans, he was sitting on the front porch with a can of beer and his feet propped against the rail. His eyes were closed. In his lap was a pocket transistor tuned to old songs his mother might have been listening to were she home. Julie London had cried him a river, and now Peggy Lee, who could suckle lyrics, was singing a love song he had not heard before. It made him want to die. His eyes shuddered open when a voice said, “Could you use my help, Matthew?”

Out of a wash of sunshine Reverend Stottle emerged the mysterious way a photograph comes to life, from faint to clear. MacGregor killed the music and lowered his feet. “I don’t need your help.”

“Could you use God’s? I’m his deputy.”

MacGregor swigged beer. “Tell God to get the state cops off my back. They take turns driving by the house.”

Reverend Stottle was also unshaved. His rumpled hair was gray and his stubble white. Otherwise he was neat. “I’ve heard the vicious stories, Matthew. I believe none of them.”

“And tell God I want my girl back. Other than that, I don’t give a shit about anything.” He took another swig. “You want a beer?”

“No, Matthew. Oil to anoint my feet, yes, but we’ll skip that. Do you want me to edit your message?”

“Do what you want.”

Reverend Stottle leaned his backside against the porch rail. His eyes were packed with goodness. “You need care. Is your mother still away?”

“I talk to her on the phone. I don’t tell her anything. Don’t you.”

“One should talk. This is a trying time for you and Miss Lapham.”

“I wouldn’t make good listening.” He crumpled the can. “What the hell kind of life is this, Reverend? I’m a pariah in my own town.”

“I believe in other lives, Matthew. This one, I’m sure, is only a first draft.”

“Yeah? I got your word on that?”

“I could be wrong.”

“Then you’re giving me guff.” He turned his head away. “What am I listening for?”

“I’m older than you, Matthew. I belong to an age when milk arrived in a bottle, the cream at the top. I know that men climb mountains so they can walk along the edge of the world.” Reverend Stottle paused for a moment because he had too much spittle in his mouth. He spoke in worn words. How many times had he said them before? Sometimes he felt he were deep in the stuff of someone else’s dream, playing a part not of his own making. “When the Enola Gay dropped its bomb, before you were born, Matthew, we became the first people in history to know with certainty that continuity is not a given, the world could end tomorrow.”

“Let it,” MacGregor said.

Reverend Stottle watched MacGregor rise from his chair and totter on legs as muscular as a football player’s. He would have been proud to have him as a son. He and Mrs. Stottle had daughters grown and gone, married and settled, not here, other places. California was where youth went. He said, “You’re not morbid, are you? Don’t be morbid, Matthew.”

“I’m sorry, Reverend, I can’t listen to you anymore. My head hurts.”

He was losing him. The boy was slipping into the house. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

“Then find me a woman,” MacGregor said.

“What happened to your mouth?” Clement asked and sought a closer look, but Junior pulled away. The lower lip was cut and swollen, as if a tooth had gone through it.

“I fell.”

“Is that what happened? You fell?”

Junior nodded. He pointed. “Over there on the stump. I was talkin’ back, Papa hit me.”

“He hit you that hard?”

Junior shrugged as if surprised Clement were making something of it. “He always does when I don’t do right.”

“Damn him!”

“It don’t matter, Clement.”

“It matters to me.”

Clement went on into the house, where Papa was eating crackers from a box and sardines from a can. He ate ruthlessly, as if punishing the food. Clement looked away and waited until he finished before sitting down. Papa said, “You done anything about the chief yet?”

“Don’t ask questions,” Clement said. “I’m taking care of it.”

“What’s the matter with you? You got a hair across your ass?”

He folded his hands together on the table. He was not going to speak, but then he did. “Why did you hit him?”

“Who you talkin’ about?”

“You know who I’m talking about.”

“You talkin’ about Junior?”

“I’m talking about Junior. You hit him.”

“Someone’s gotta do it.”

Clement spoke from the dusk of his feelings. “Don’t do it again.”

“Don’t tell me how to bring up the boy.” Papa’s damaging little eyes bored in. They insinuated. Like insects they laid their little eggs beneath the skin. “Don’t you try to get between us.”

“I’m not trying to do that.”

“I’m the one does for him.”

Clement did not trust himself to speak again. He went into the cubbyhole of a bathroom, which was never clean and had lost its wallpaper. He used the toilet quickly. When he came out, Papa was not in the kitchen. Through the window he saw Junior and heard Papa.

“Don’t you never
never
go against me, you hear?”

He saw the look on Junior’s face, doglike obedience, and stepped back from the window, from a relationship in which he had only a peripheral place.

• • •

Clement returned to the motor inn, bought a pair of swimming trunks in the gift shop, and used the pool. Back and forth, three times, he swam the length of it and then sat in a chaise in the burn of the sun and watched the women. The young ones in string bikinis were striking, but the older ones, showing less, impressed him more. None, however, seemed approachable or readily available. He returned to his room and changed back into his street clothes. A few minutes later he entered the bar.

“Miller, right?”

“Right,” said Clement.

The bartender served up a bottle and said, “Milly told me how you stood up for her. That was nice of you.”

“Who’s Milly?”

“The kid who waits on tables in the dining room.”

Clement shrugged. “I figured she was somebody’s sister.”

The bartender went away and came back with that day’s edition of the Lawrence paper, which he opened up and folded back. “By the way, remember that woman you were chummy with here?” Clement nodded, and the bartender turned the paper around and pointed, “That’s her.”