Searching for Caleb (40 page)

   But even Duncan looked doubtful when he heard that. "Well, look," he said. "I wouldn't want to discourage you, but age might stand in your way, don't you think?"

   "Never mind my age," said Caleb. "Oh, for the quality places, yes. But there is always some little cafe by the tracks or the water where they don't give a hang, and that's where I'll ask."

   "Well, at least why don't you wait a little. If we move or anything, you don't want to go through a whole new job application."

   "But we're not moving," said Justine.

   "Oh, no hurry," Caleb said. "I play it by ear. I wait to see what falls out and who is going in what direction. I always have." He smiled. "It's funny," he said, "I'd forgotten the taste of garlic. Can you beat that?

   It's peculiar how you associate some foods with people. Or times you used to have, or places . . . Bess always liked garlic-buttered popcorn. The two of us must have eaten bushels of it. Now you could bring me some and I don't know, it would taste so unfamiliar somehow. I suppose everybody's like that. Best friend I ever had liked Blue Peter sardines on saltine crackers, but maybe if I were to track him down today I'd find he doesn't even remember them any more."

   Duncan listened so hard he forgot to eat. Justine slid a salt shaker back and forth. Why did Caleb have to talk about food all the time? No one else in the family did. All they asked was that their meals be nourishing, and not too unusual in taste. They tended to like white things, foods baked in cream sauce. They would have been horrified by the peppery shrimp casserole that Caleb had served tonight. "Listen!" Justine said suddenly. "How can we be sure you're Caleb Peck?"

   Both men stared.

   "How do we know you're not some impostor?"

   "Justine," said Duncan.

   She ignored him. She was watching Caleb. "But who else would bother?"

   Caleb asked her.

   "You're not like them in any way."

   Caleb shrugged. (A foreign gesture.) "For that matter," he said, "how do I know you're a Peck?"

   "We're not even sure that Eli's honest," Justine said. "Maybe he just picked up some stranger and coached him. Maybe the two of you framed this whole story together. After all, there must be money involved. Caleb's share of the will must have been drawing interest for sixty years."

   "Caleb didn't have any share of the will," Duncan told her. "Justine, I wish you would-"

   But Caleb only nodded, sober and proud somehow, as if he were receiving compliments.

   In the night there was a pounding on the door, and shouting and the beam of headlights across the bedroom ceiling. Justine, wide awake as usual, crawled over Duncan and threw a bathrobe around her shoulders. "Just a minute," she called. Duncan stirred and then sat up. From Caleb's room came the rustle of bedclothes. Justine ran through the hallway, breathless and shivering. Someone had died. Something was wrong with Meg.

   She had never realized how many possibilities there were for disaster, or how calm and joyous her life had been until this moment.

   But it was only Tucker Dawcett, whose wife had her fortune told weekly to see if he were faithful and never believed it when the answer was yes.

   Tucker was just a sweet skinny man with buck teeth. He jogged in a sweatsuit every morning and worked as a, let's seePoliceman.

   Her teeth started chattering again.

   Tucker coughed, and then showed her his identification in a plastic envelope. (Why on earth?) For all she knew it was his YMCA card. "Oh.

   Tucker," she said.

   "Could I speak with you a moment, Justine?"

   From the hall doorway, Duncan said, "Do you know what time it is?"

   "Police business," said Tucker.

   Duncan came up behind Justine without a sound.

   "Now I have to ask you folks this question," Tucker said. "Are you all related to a Mr. Caleb Peck?"

   "You get us up at one a.m. to ask us that?" Duncan said.

   "Now I know, I know how trying this must be," Tucker told him. Through the screen his face looked grainy; out of tiredness or embarrassment he kept his eyes down. "Fact is I was sacked out at home myself. Doug Tilghman called from the station asking me to run this little errand. I wanted to wait till morning but he said we would look pretty silly if Louisiana called back in a couple hours and we hadn't done a thing."

   "Louisiana?" said Duncan.

   "See they got this lady down there claiming a Mr. Caleb Peck has been kidnapped."

   Duncan looked at Justine.

   "Seems like he was in a home of some sort. This lady, Mrs. Luray Pickett, went to visit him last Sunday and found he'd disappeared. Home hadn't noticed. Seems somebody at the office remembered a

   Justine Peck come from Caro Mill to visit him, and he was never seen again."

   "So?" said Duncan.

   "Well, I believe that would be kidnapping, or stealing at least. See, the man was institutionalized. He didn't have no right to be leaving on his own free will. Or would it be aiding and abetting? Well, look. I don't care about it. Let an old fellow go where he wants, I always say. But Doug Tilghman said I had to just ask, because some lady somewhere is fit to be tied. Mrs. Luray Pickett. I said, 'Look, Doug, can't this wait till morning? I mean what will the Pecks think of us for this?' I said, and he said, 'Tell them I'm just as sorry as I can be but these policemen in Louisiana have this lady name of Mrs. Luray Pickett who is kicking up a storm, calling them and visiting, asking why they're not doing more. She says she put the man in a Home herself and saw to his every need, never let a month go by without . . . and here he has been removed and not so much as a by-your-leave. She says if anybody thought she wasn't taking proper care they could just come to her in person, there was no need to steal the man, and she will thank the police to get him replaced or she'll know the reason why. And also-' Well, and it's true there's not many Justine Pecks. I mean the name is odd. And especially from Caro Mill. Of course you do have that old man staying with you now . . ."

   "Tucker," said Duncan, "don't you know that all our family is from Baltimore?"

   "That's true, they are."

   "And have you ever heard either one of us mention a relative in Louisiana?"

   "Well, not directly," said Tucker.

   "So," said Duncan.

   "Well, I knew there was nothing to it," Tucker told him. "Sorry to have woken you folks up." And for the first time he raised his eyes to meet theirs. "I'll tell the wife I saw you," he said. "Night, now."

   "Night," said Duncan.

   He turned on the porch light and shut the door. Justine waited, but he didn't say a word. Maybe he was angry. She should have told him from the beginning. Only at the beginning he had been so odd, and after that it was never the proper moment. Now what? Would he make her send Caleb back again? Then it occurred to her that all this time Caleb must have been listening, bolt upright in bed, terrified they would give him away. "That poor old man!" she said, and slid past Duncan to open Caleb's door.

   He was gone.

   His bed was unmade, and his pajamas lay at the foot. His rubberized raincoat no longer hung from the closet door. Duncan's harmonica was missing from the bureau. And the window was wide open, empty and black, the paper shade lisping in the wind. "Duncan!" Justine called.

   "Hurry, we have to find him!"

   She already had one leg over the windowsill before he stopped her. He took hold of her arm and said, "Let him get a little head start again first, Justine."

   20

   Duncan sat on the floor with a twelve-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle, "Sunset in the Rockies." He had found all the straight edges and constructed the frame; but now he was simply moving pieces around, picking one up and tapping it against his teeth while he stared into space, setting it down, picking up another, turning several over to expose their gray cardboard backs. He considered turning the whole puzzle over and doing it all in gray.

   He considered moving Justine back to Baltimore.

   "Is that what you want?" he asked her when she came through wearing her hat.

   She looked startled. "What?"

   "I asked if you wanted to move to Baltimore."

   "Baltimore?"

   "Baltimore, Maryland, Justine."

   She stared at him.

   "We'll live in Great-Grandma's house. Your house," he told her. "I'll find some kind of busywork with Peck and Sons. You know Dad's always said I could."

   "You mean, stay forever?"

   "No reason not to."

   "Never again move?"

   "Not unless you liked."

   She thought a while, biting her lip.

   "But you might not be happy there," she told him finally.

   Which was her way of saying yes. He felt the answer settling on him by degrees, like a large heavy blanket drifting down. He was done for. Yet at the same time he had a sense of relief, almost. What else would you call this sudden giddiness? The other shoe had fallen. He nearly laughed.

   Underneath, he must have known all through their marriage that this was where they were headed.

   Justine fit books into cardboard boxes. Then machine parts. Duncan let his jigsaw puzzle dissolve and scatter while he took up a new kind of solitaire. Lately he had become talkative and fanciful, almost silly; he was emerging from his silence. But the bourbon and the solitaire remained, because he had lost his job by now and if he didn't look occupied in some way Justine would ask him to help her. That was one thing he could not do. He would feel like a child repacking his pathetic provisions-blanket, alarm clock, teddy bear-after half a night of running away. Or like some sea animal, declawed and deformed by battle, scuttling back to his shell with whatever scraps of himself he could salvage. He remained on the floor, pretending to be deep in his game. Meanwhile his mind had sprung awake again and was playing games of its own. He composed a list of all his favorite words, aloud. "Luncheon. Reality. Silver salver. Ippolitov-Ivanov." Justine sat back and wiped her hair off her forehead.

   "Sometimes I wonder why we travel with so much stuff," she told him.

   One of the puzzling things about Justine was that she always seemed to be shaking lately, and it hadn't stopped when he decided to move her to Baltimore. The streamers of her hat trembled gently, and whenever she drank coffee (which was the only thing she would touch) she spilled it.

   She reminded him of a fragile tree full of birds. But what could he do that he hadn't already done? He tried diverting her thoughts. "Justine," he said. "You know? In twenty years I firmly believe we will be traveling instantaneously by transposition of matter. You get in this glass box, see, if you want to go to, say, Omaha, and someone in Omaha gets in another glass box-"

   "I travel fast enough as it is," said Justine, "and way too far."

   "You haven't traveled so far," Duncan said. "Then bulletin boards would spring up everywhere: 'Gentleman from Detroit wishes to go to Pittsburgh; does anyone in Pittsburgh wish to go to Detroit?' There would be new hope for the unemployed. Bums could make money being transposed to Cincinnati when someone in Cincinnati wanted to get out. You go to a park bench.

   'Look, fellow,' you say-"

   "But it would always be me who ended up accepting," said Justine. She rose, and for no apparent reason examined her face in the speckled metal switchplate on the wall. "I can turn into anyone. That's my curse,"

   Her curse was her ability to see all sides of every question, but that wasn't something Duncan wanted changed and so he didn't mention it.

   Finally Justine turned away and bent to pack another box.

   She was fitting some things of Meg's in now. Each object she handled very gently and lovingly, taking much longer than necessary. She rolled a stray belt meant for a dress Meg might not even be wearing any more, and she tucked it in beside a mildewed high school almanac.

   She took the lid off a tin of pebbles that Meg had collected on a Virginia beach in the summer of 1965, and she held each pebble up to the light and smoothed it with her fingers before replacing it.

   At mealtimes, if he remembered, Duncan made sandwiches and poured two glasses of milk. But Justine seemed to have given up on eating. She didn't even go to the diner; she didn't go anywhere. When he urged her she would take one bite of her sandwich and then set it down. "Come on.

   Eat," he told her. Though he could see that it wasn't possible. He could tell from the way she chewed; her mouth was too dry, or too small, or something. Never mind, she would eat when she got to Baltimore. Aunts would take her in hand. He thought of the aunts for the first time with gratitude, imagining how they would relieve him of Justine's dull white face and her limpness. Then he caught himself and looked away from her eyes, which were fixed on him too steadily.

   He could always leave her, of course. He could settle her in Baltimore and then go off again on his own. But he knew that he wouldn't. If he didn't have Justine he wouldn't even know how to see things, what to look at; nothing would exist for him if he couldn't tell Justine about it. The first flat-brimmed hat in a department store window would break him. He would be unable to last the night without her rustling, burning wakefulness guarding his sleep. So he put away all thoughts of leaving, and he wrote the letter to Peck & Sons asking for work. But when the answer came, he didn't want to open it. He stuffed it in his pocket, angry already at the phrases he knew it would contain. Finally Justine found it, and opened it for him. "Well? What does it say?" he asked.

   "Oh . . . they'll get you something."

   "But what does it say?" Are they glad I'm finally listening to reason? Do they say they always knew we would end up coming home?"

   "No, they don't mention it," Justine said.

   He snatched the letter away from her-his Uncle Mark's signature beneath a secretary's crisp black typing. Probably, his uncle said, there would be some employment for him although it was hard to say what, on such short notice. And no, the firm had no need of a fix-it man, what kind of a question was that? And of course it was true that Great-Grandma's house was legally Justine's, although really the family had been the ones to see to its maintenance all these years and Esther and the twins were so accustomed to living there . . .