On the Run (12 page)

“Now I know where to carve those initials.”

She pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “I love you for saying things that make me feel good, and now I have to go way over there and sit up straight and look cool, because we’re coming into town, right over that bridge, dear.”

“You have no family left here, Paula?”

“None here. A married sister in Perth, Australia. Suzanne. And her three boys I’ve never seen. A cousin out in Montana. Frank. There was nobody left here when I came back to take care of Tom. A town this small is sort of like a big family. But they disapprove of me, sort of. There was the early reputation, you see. And becoming a nurse, and being divorced sort of confirmed it all. And now I’m trying to work on that poor
senile old man so he’ll leave me his money. They wouldn’t give me credit for being a damned good nurse, or for being necessary to that old man. Emotionally necessary as well as medically. Here’s the town. Remember it at all?”

“No.”

“Keep on this road. See, we have a few summer tourists roaming around this time of year, but we don’t let them disturb our deep sleep. We were both in this town at the same time once before, Sid. You were a frightened little boy. I was cooing and sucking my toes. No. There’s five years, isn’t there? I guess I was curled in the womb, big as a mouse, but I was here when you were here. A foetus looks so ancient and wise. It knows everything. And then, when it is born, it forgets it all and has to learn it all over again. So I probably knew about you and I was all curled up and dreaming about you, and knew just how it would be. That’s why it doesn’t seem such a surprise now. I’m just learning all over again what I used to know. There’s the house and the iron fence, and that’s the driveway at the far end of the fence. Turn in there, dear.”

Now she sat on the warm stones of the wall and he looked down at her and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to spoil it.”

“You can’t,” she said. “That’s the point I have to make. It wasn’t conditional on anything. I want you close enough to touch for the rest of my life. I have to admit that. You know that. But if last night and this morning in the car and in the field was just … a way to try to trap you and hold you, then it wouldn’t be worth what it was worth. And there will be tonight too, and if you leave tomorrow and I never see you again, I am your woman and I have been your woman, and I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t have to be suspicious. I’m not a coward, Sid. If I hurt for you all the rest of my life, that’s my bargain. I accepted it. Now sit down right here on these old stones and think it over while I go take a look at him.”

He sat and waited for her. It confused him that she should feel as she did. It gave him the feeling that he
was impersonating someone she wanted. When he tried to be objective about her, he could see her only as a willing victim of her own delusions. But when she was close, and his response was subjective, it did indeed seem like something so special it was worth whatever wounds would come to them. Greater than the sum of its parts.

In a little while she came back across the side yard toward him, her skirt swinging bright in the sun. She stopped in front of him and looked at him with a crooked smile. “Here I am with clothes on, and walking toward you, and suddenly I was so damned shy I couldn’t figure out how my arms were supposed to swing, and my knees kept bumping against each other. And by that icy pond I wasn’t shy at all. I love you. Darn it, Sid, when I say that you don’t have to look so anxious and uncertain, as if you didn’t know which fork to use. I’m not trying to make you say it too. Just be smug and relax and be glad to hear it. That’s all you have to do. I love you. See? Just look at your woman and listen to her say it. Come on, now. I gave Tom his shot and he went right back to sleep. Jane is fixing lunch for us. I’ll show you which will be your room.”

“I better get my stuff out of the …”

“Davie lugged it up to your room. Come on, dear. I’ll show you.”

They went up the stairs. He could remember the stairs. They looked smaller to him. Everything looked smaller, more worn and old. And there was a smell of sickness and medicines in the dusty air. She showed him her room. It was in the front west corner. It had been his mother’s room. The master bedroom was in the front east corner, across the wide corridor. The room on the west side of the house, separated from hers by a bath, had been fixed up for him. It was a tall, old-fashioned room with massive dark furniture, a corner fireplace, tall narrow windows, a double bed with high carved posts and an ornate walnut headboard.

“The same as last time,” he whispered.

“I know. When George arrives, we’ll put him right there across the hall from you. The other bath is beyond his room. That door there. We’ll share this bath between us. There are two other bedrooms in the back. Jane has one.
Davie sleeps in a downstairs bedroom off the pantry.”

“Everybody is pretty far from the old man, aren’t they?”

“Not really. Let me show you.”

She took him back to her room. There was an intercom on the table beside her bed. She turned the volume up slightly, and he heard the slow
Doom
-thup,
doom
-thup,
doom
-thup of the sleeping heart of the old man, an eerie sound in the noon silences.

“The microphone is pinned between his sheet and his blanket,” she explained. “I don’t have to have it this loud. I can go sound asleep, and when there is the slightest change, I find myself going out my bedroom door, putting my robe on and heading for the stairs without even realizing I’m on my feet. Even if it should gradually get faster, that’s enough to awaken me.”

“It … it’s kind of terrible.”

“Not to me, Sid. It’s his heart. It’s a tired, courageous old heart, and it kept beating until he could see you. I love him. Part of the way I love you is the way I love him, and the sound of his heart is a closeness. Listen to it a little while. Please.” She turned it up further. She sat on the bed. He roamed to the window, listening to the relentless sound. In a little while he knew it would be something he could hear without it bothering him. You had to get over your feeling that each beat would be the last. But what if it was? It was the sound of life, and at ninety-two, he’d had more than his share.

He came back and leaned against the footboard and nodded at her. “I see what you mean. It’s all right, isn’t it?”

Her eyes were large and her face looked small as she met his gaze. “I have the most shameless and terrible hunger for you,” she said. “A devouring thing. You’ll be in here with me tonight. I wish it was night now. I can’t come to you. I have to stay where I can hear him.” She reached and turned it back to a place where he could just hear it. “This bed sags in the middle. Your mother’s bed. Your grandfather’s heart. Is it too much for you? Is it too strange?”

“No.”

“Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. That’s all I’ve had of you. Fifty hours? A little more. Tom courted your
grandmother. He visited her for a year. He sat in the parlor with her and they talked together for an hour, every Saturday night. That’s only fifty hours, isn’t it? But he saw her in church.”

“Paula. Please …”

“Help me. I don’t doubt what I feel, but I have to make things sound better. Nothing is cheap, but it has to sound better. Emotions are going by too fast today. I laugh and cry without making a sound. You have a wife. My divorced husband is coming here Thursday so I can tell him I don’t hate him. Some horrible man wants you killed. And I don’t fit into my skin the way I did before. The seams have been taken up. Little scratchy things run up and down me. And somehow, what happened last night and this morning are still happening to me. Get out of here. Please get out and go unpack or something. Don’t touch me. Just walk out quickly. I’ll be all right in a little while. You have to give me a minute.”

He went out and closed her door and went to his room. He looked out his windows. He could look diagonally toward the road in front. There were big maples in the front yard, so dense that he saw a few isolated glitterings of blue as a car went by. They had seen him drive through the village. They would know, somehow, about the old man sending Paula Lettinger to bring the grandson home. Texas plates. One of the grandsons. Sidney or George. She had two boys by that Shanley.

The identification in his pocket said he was Sid Wells. But now, for the first time since Jacksonville, he was Sid Shanley. It gave him a little raw quiver of fear. He felt too exposed. But at the same time he felt a strangely sullen defiance. Maybe Paula had stripped some of the caution away, exposing the second layer of pure damned fool.

He unpacked quickly, and then opened the zipper compartment in the back of his suitcase and took out the package wrapped in yellowed plastic, laced with rubber bands. He took it out of the plastic and unwrapped the oily rag. It was a Japanese 25 calibre automatic, showing the pits of old rust spots. When he had been working a lot in Biloxi, he had found it wedged down behind the rear seat upholstery on a trade-in. He had
cleaned it, bought ammunition for it, checked it out in an isolated place. At thirty feet he could be reasonably certain of hitting a circle eighteen inches in diameter. The clip was designed for ten, but the spring was so tired, it would push but six up into the chamber. He wiped the grease off and slipped it into the side pocket of his trousers, with a full clip, a load in the chamber, and the simplified safety locked on. It took up little more room than a cigarette case.

It made him feel ridiculous. Hero makes stand in Bolton, armed with deadly weapon. If the two possible decisions were to fight or to run, this little gun fell somewhere in between. It was a symbol of equivocation. This was a ticket to Mitty land, the hero snarl, and pocketa-pocketa while dastards reeled and fell on every side, begging mercy.

Jane Weese served lunch and ate with them on the small glassed-in porch on the east side of the house, on the side opposite the study where Tom Brower lay on his hospital bed. Jane was in her late sixties, a woman with a small head, a large cushiony body, a sweet vague manner, and a large, primitive-looking hearing aid.

“I would never know you were in the house,” she said. “Such a quiet little boy I never saw. And toward the end you took to following me. I’d look around and you’d be there, and you’d smile just a little bit. My land, we had a time getting you to smile. Once I reached too quick to pat your head, and you scroonched right down into a little ball with your arms around your head. It made me cry to see a little child like that.”

Sid looked over to Paula and saw the tears in her eyes. “Cut it out!” he said.

“I can’t help it. You should be a terrible person now, according to all the books.”

“Books!” Jane Weese said with a sniff. “I had an aunt crippled up all her life from a stepmother lambasting her with stove wood when she was a little thing, and a sweeter dear person her whole life long you never saw.”

“I wouldn’t say my childhood did me much good,” Sid said.

“Do you mind if I watch you carefully and see what it did to you?” Paula asked.

“Be my guest.”

“I’ll watch you for a limited time. About forty years.”

“What’s going on around here?” Jane asked.

“Aren’t these little hot rolls delicious?” Paula said. “Jane makes them three times a week.”

“Very very good,” Sid said.

Paula tilted her head. She got up quickly. “Dr. Marriner. Don’t save anything for me, Jane. I’ve had enough, really.” She hurried off. He looked out and saw a portly man getting out of a red sports car in the driveway.

Jane Weese peered amiably at him and said, “That girl has been more like a granddaughter to Tom. In this year—more than a year—that she’s been here, she’s sat in there jabbering with him for hours on end. When he was up to it.” She sighed wistfully. “I was never that kind of company for Tom. They talk about deep things. You know?”

“She’s very intelligent.”

“You didn’t grow up to look like I guessed you would, Sid. You had a sweet little face. The most terrible thing in the world is when you were all alone, you couldn’t find your way back to us. I think of that a lot. It would have made all the difference to Tom. Years went by without a laugh out loud in this house, except maybe me and somebody bringing something to the door. Did you have enough to eat?”

“Yes, thank you.”

She cleared the table. He looked out and saw Paula talking to the doctor as he got into the car. When the doctor drove away, Sid met Paula at the front door as she came in. She said that Tom wanted to talk to both of them. They went in. He sat on the window seat, Paula on the straight chair beside the foot of the bed.

Tom worked the control buttons and elevated the upper half of his body a few inches. “I find it oddly distasteful to talk melodrama,” he said with a withered grin. “As if it were a kind of vulgarity. As I told you before, my boy, I realize that you have come to see me at some risk to your life. Mr. Fergasson has patiently educated me about such risks in our culture, and conquered my disbelief. We had discussed it. The hoodlum empire wishes you dead, for trivial reasons. They did not find you in Houston, so we can say they could not and did not trace you from there to here. And there has been
no flaw in our security. Aside from the three of us and Fergasson, no one in Bolton knows of your lurid situation. There is an intrinsic interest in the long lost grandson rushing to the death bed. But no paper will cover it. We have no town newspaper or radio station. Somehow everyone gets to know everything anyway. If you act furtive, my boy, it will excite speculation. I think you should be a very plausible unremarkable fellow from Texas. Nobody in Bolton knows that you ever married, and nobody knows that you ever lived in Florida. So I rather think you would be safe right here indefinitely. Do you agree?”

“It makes sense. If they could have traced me back to you, they would have come looking here two and a half years ago. How do we know they didn’t though?”

“Because nobody could come into this town and find out anything without sticking out like a sore thumb. Gossip is this town’s industry, hobby and recreation. It always has been.”