Summer of Night (29 page)

"Maybe I could go check for the book and you could pick up a bottle of wine or something," Duane said. "You know, have a toast tonight in Uncle Art's memory."

The Old Man glared at him, but slowly relaxed his features. He rarely settled on a compromise himself, but he knew a good one when he heard it. Duane knew that the Old Man had been warring between the necessity to stay sober until the arrangements for Uncle Art were concluded, and the absolute requirement to tie one on.

"OK," said the Old Man. "We'll take a look and I'll pick up something to bring home. You can lift a toast to him too." Duane nodded. The one thing in life that he was terrified of… until now… was liquor. He was afraid that the disease ran in the family and that one drink would send him over the edge, creating the craving in him that had driven the Old Man for thirty some years. But he had nodded and they had left for town after staring at a dinner neither one of them touched.

Ernie's Texaco was closed. It usually shut down at four p.m. on Sunday and today was no exception. There were three wrecks around back, but no Caddy. Duane told the Old Man what the sheriff had said about Congden.

The Old Man turned away but not before Duane heard a muttered 'goddamn thieving capitalist sonofabitch."

Old Central was in shadows as they rolled up Second Avenue past it and turned down Depot Street. Duane saw Dale Stewart's parents sitting on their long porch and saw their posture change as they recognized him. They continued west on Depot past Broad.

Congden's black Chevy wasn't in the yard or parked on the muddy ruts that might have been a driveway around the side of the shabby house. The Old Man pounded at the door but there was no response except for the frenzied barking of what sounded like a very large dog. Duane followed the Old Man around back, across a weedy lot filled with springs, beer cans, an old washing machine, and an assortment of rusted things out behind a small shed.

There were eight cars there. Two were up on blocks and looked as if they might be rebuilt someday; the others were sprawled in the high weeds like metal corpses. Uncle Art's Cadillac was the closest to the shed.

"Don't get into it," said the Old Man. There was something strange about his voice. "If you see the book in there, I'll get it out."

On its wheels again, the damage was even more obvious. The roof was smashed down almost to the level of the doors. Even from the passenger side where they stood, it was obvious that the heavy car had been twisted on its own axis by the collision with the bridge. The hood was gone, and Congden or someone had already spread engine parts across the grass. Duane walked around to the driver's side.

"Dad."

The Old Man came around and stared with him. Both the driver's and left-rear doors were missing.

"They were there when they fished the car out," said Duane. "I pointed the red paint out to the sheriff."

"I remember." The Old Man found a metal tie-rod and started poking through the waist-high weeds as if he would find the doors there.

Duane crouched and peered in, then went around back to look in through the opening where the rear window had been. He pried open a back door on the right side and leaned into what was left of the backseat.

Twisted metal. Torn upholstery. Springs. Fabric and insulation from the roof hanging like stalactites. Broken glass. The smell of blood, gasoline, and transmission fluid. No book.

The Old Man came back through the woods. "No sign of the doors. Find what you were after?"

Duane shook his head. "We've got to go back to the accident site."

"No." Duane heard a tone in his father's voice that said there would be no discussion. "Not tonight."

Duane turned, feeling a deep depression drop on his shoulders, something even heavier than the sharp-edged grief he already felt. He started back around the shed, thinking about the evening ahead with the Old Man and a bottle. The trade had been for nothing.

His hands were in his pockets when he came around the corner of the shed. The dog was on him before he could pull his hands free.

At first Duane didn't know it was a dog. It was just something huge and black and growling with a sound unlike anything Duane had ever heard. Then the thing jumped, teeth gleamed at eye level, and Duane fell back across springs and broken glass, the mass of the dog's body going over him and twisting, growling, lunging to get at him.

In that second, lying on the littered ground, hands free now but scraped and empty, Duane knew again what it meant to face death. Time seemed to freeze and he was frozen in it. Only the huge dog could move-move so fast that it was little more than a black blur-and it moved toward Duane, towering over him, nothing but teeth and flying saliva as it opened its huge mouth to rip at Duane McBride's throat.

The Old Man stepped between the dog and his fallen son and swung. The tie rod caught the Doberman in the ribs and flung it ten feet back toward the house. The animal let out a screech that sounded like stripped gears.

"Get up," panted the Old Man, crouching between Duane and the dog, which already had scrambled to its feet. Duane didn't know whether his father was talking to him or the Doberman.

Duane was on his knees when the animal lunged again. This time the thing had to go through the Old Man to get to the boy and it showed every intention of doing so, leaping with a growl that made Duane's bowels go loose.

The Old Man pirouetted, gripped the tie rod in both hands, let the dog fly by him, and swung the metal bar upward. Duane thought he looked like a batter hitting pop flies to a distant outfield.

The bar caught the Doberman under the jaw, snapped his head back in an impossible position, and caused the animal's body to do a perfect backflip before it crashed into the shed wall and slid down.

He got to his feet and staggered away from the animal, but the Doberman wasn't getting up this time. The Old Man walked over and kicked the beast under the jaw and the thing's head bobbled like something attached by loose string. Its eyes were wide and already clouding with death.

"Gosh," said Duane, feeling that if he didn't try to make a joke he'd just lie down again and start bawling, "Mr. Congden's' going to be surprised."

"Fuck Congden," said the Old Man, but there was no passion in his voice. He sounded almost relaxed for the first time since the sheriff's car had pulled up the drive eight hours earlier. "Stay close."

Still holding the tie rod, the Old Man led the way around the house on blocks and went up to pound on the front door. It was still locked. No one answered the knocking.

"Hear that?" The Old Man stood tapping the metal rod.

Duane shook his head.

"Neither do I."

Duane understood then. Either the dog inside was suddenly deaf or it was the same one lying dead in the backyard. Someone had let it out.

The Old Man walked to the curb and looked up and down Depot Street. It was almost dark under the trees. A rumble from the east promised a storm. "Come on, Duanie," said the Old Man. "We'll find your book tomorrow."

They were almost to the water tower and Duane had almost stopped shaking when he remembered. "Your bottle," he said, hating himself for reminding the Old Man but figuring that he deserved it.

"Fuck the bottle." The Old Man looked at Duane and smiled very slightly. "We'll toast Art with Pepsi. That's what you and he used to drink all the time, isn't it? We'll toast him and tell tales about him and hold a real wake. Then we'll get to bed early so we can get going tomorrow and fix some things that need fixing. OK?"

Duane nodded.

Jim Harlen came home from the hospital on Sunday, exactly one week after he'd been hospitalized. His left arm was in a clumsy cast, his head and ribs were still bandaged, he had raccoon eyes where the blood had drained, and he was still on medication for the pain. But his doctor and mother decided that it was time for him to go home.

Harlen did not want to go home.

He did not quite remember the accident. He remembered more than he admitted: sneaking off to the Free Show that Saturday, following Old Double-Butt, even deciding to climb the school to get a peek inside. But of the actual fall-or what caused it-Harlen could not remember. Each night in the hospital he awoke from nightmares, panting, heart and head pounding, grasping the metal rail of the bed for support. Those first nights his mother had been there; after a while he learned to ring for the nurse, just to have a grown-up in the room. The nurses-especially Mrs. Carpenter, the old one-humored him and stayed in the room, sometimes stroking his short hair, until he fell asleep again.

Harlen didn't remember the dreams that sent him screaming up from sleep, but he remembered the feeling that they gave him, and that was enough to make him sick and goosefleshy. He had the same feeling about going home.

A friend of his mother's whom Harlen had never met drove them home, Harlen stretched out in the rear of the man's station wagon. He felt foolish and awkward in the cast, and had to lift his head from the pillows just to see the landscape go by. Each mile of the fifteen-minute trip from Oak Hill to Elm Haven seemed to absorb light, as if the car were moving into a zone of darkness.

"Looks like it might rain," said his mother's boyfriend. "Heaven knows the crops need it."

Harlen grunted. Whoever this dipshit was-Harlen had already forgotten the name his mother twittered at him during the introduction, so carefree and casual, as if this guy was an old family friend whom Harlen should know and love- whoever he was, he was no farmer. The clean and waxed station wagon, a Woody, and the man's soft hands and tweedy, citified suit proved that. This bozo probably didn't know or care whether the crops needed rain or manure.

They arrived home about six-his mother was supposed to pick him up at two but was hours late-and Bozo made a big production of helping Harlen up to his room, as if it had been his legs broken rather than his arm. Harlen had to admit that the exercise of climbing the stairs made him dizzy. He sat in his own bed, looking around at his room-seeming very strange and alien-and tried to blink away his headache while his mother ran downstairs for the medication. Harlen could hear hushed conversation and then a long silence. He imagined the kiss, imagined Bozo getting the old tongue in there and his mother bending her right leg up and back, long-heeled shoe dangling the way it always did when she gave her bozos their goodnight kiss while Harlen watched from the window in his room.

A sick yellow light coming through the window filled the room with a sulfurous tint. He realized suddenly why his room seemed so weird: his mother had cleaned it up. Cleaned up the piles of clothes, the heaps of comics, the toy soldiers and broken models, the dusty junk under his bed, even the heap of old Boy's Life that had sat stacked in the corner for years. With a rush of warm guilt, Harlen wondered whether she'd cleaned deep enough in his closet to find the nudie magazines. He started to get up to check, but the dizziness and headache pulled him back to the pillow. Fuck it. To add to the chorus of pain, his arm kicked in with its evening bone-deep ache. They had put a steel pin in it for Chrissakes. Harlen closed his eyes and tried to imagine a steel nail the size of a railroad spike driven through his splintered humerus.

Nothin' humorous about my humerus, thought Jim Harlen and realized that he was perilously close to tears. Where the fuck is she? Or maybe, where is she fucking?

His mother came into the room, all atwitter with good spirits and pleasure at having her little Jimmy home. Harlen saw how thick the makeup was on her cheeks. And her perfume wasn't the soft flowery scent of the nurses who checked on him at night; she smelled like some musky night-burrowing animal. A mink maybe, or a weasel in heat.

"Now take your pills and I'll get busy making dinner," she chirped.

She gave him the bottle of pills rather than the little cup the nurses used to dole out prescribed doses. Harlen swallowed three of the codeine pills rather than the one he was supposed to take. Fuck this pain stuff. His mother was too busy flitting around the room, fluffing pillows and unpacking his hospital suitcase, to notice. If she was going to make a big deal out of the dirty magazines, Harlen realized, she was saving it for another day.

That was fine with him. She could go down and burn whatever dinner she was planning-she cooked about twice a year and it was always a disaster-Harlen already felt the numbing buzz of the medication and was ready to drift into that nice, warm, wall-less space where he'd spent so much time the first few days in the hospital, when they'd given him the stronger stuff for the pain.

He asked his mother something.

"What, dear?" She paused in hanging up his robe and Harlen realized that his voice had sounded pretty slurry. He tried again: "My friends come over?"

"Your friends? Why yes, dear, they're very worried and said to wish you their best."

"Who?"

"Pardon, dear?"

"Who?" snapped Harlen, and then worked to control his voice. "Who came over?"

"Why, you said that nice farm boy… whatshisname, Donald, came to the hospital last week…"

"Duane," said Harlen. "And he's not a friend. He's some farm kid with straw behind his ears. I mean, who came over to the house?"

His mother frowned and fluttered her fingers the way she did when she was flustered. Harlen thought that the bright-red nail polish made her white fingers look like they ended in bloody stumps. The idea amused him somehow. "Who?" he said. "O'Rourke? Stewart? Daysinger? Grumbacher?"