The Autumn Dead (9 page)

"Take it from me," the drunk said, "spike your own punch. It's too weak otherwise."

"Georgie has his own bottle," explained one of the women in a loud proud voice.

The other woman giggled. "He also has his own wife. But we lost her a while back."

So they staggered on to the car and I went inside and the first thing I noticed was, that they still used the same kind of floor wax they had for the past uncountable decades, the smell of it making me feel like I was imprisoned in a time capsule: a ten-year-old on an autumn day sitting in a desk at the back ostensibly reading my history book with a Ray Bradbury paperback carefully tucked inside.

"Jack Dwyer."

She sat at one of the two long tables where you checked in and got your name tag.

I had to glimpse at hers quickly so I'd remember who she was.
"
Hi, Kathy.
"
Kathy Malloy.

"You didn't answer our RSVP. We didn't expect you. Looks like you might have made up your mind at the last
minute.
"
She tried to put a laugh on the line but it didn't work. The way her eyes scanned my rumpled tweed jacket and white tieless button-down shirt and Levi's and five-o'clock shadow, I could see that she hadn't changed any. She was one of those people born to be a hall monitor, to watch very closely what you did and to disapprove the hell out of it. She had gray hair now, worn in one of those frothing things that seem to be white women's version of an Afro, and she wore a red silk dress that despite its festive color was redolent of nothing so much as blood. She said,
"
Helen Manner is supposed to be helping out at the table here." She leaned forward. "Between you and me, I think Helen's developed a drinking problem over the years. She runs inside to the punch bowl every chance she gets. Don't say anything to anybody, though, all right?"

Kathy Malloy had probably done everything but rent a sound truck to broadcast Helen Manner's drinking problem and here she was telling me not to tell anybody. Right.

I got through the rest of it as quickly as I could, signing some things, accepting my name tag, hearing some more gossip, and then I went into the gym, which was like a vast dark cave festooned with low-hanging crepe of green and white, with a stage at front prowled by chunky guys my own age in gold-lamé outfits who, despite their lack of talent, seemed to be having one hell of a good time. Above the stage was a banner that said WELCOME CLASS OF '63, and I realized then how '63 looked as ancient as '23 or '17. I recalled a time when I couldn't believe it was ever going to be 1970. Now we were facing down the gun barrel of 1990. What was going on here?

For the first twenty minutes, I mingled. I was looking for Karen Lane and not finding her and in the process I renewed a lot of acquaintances, some reluctantly, some gladly, learning all those things that somehow measure lifetimes these days—the one who was married three times, the one who was wealthy at least with money, the one who was battling cancer, the one who had turned out gay, the skinny one who had turned fat or the fat one who was now a beauty, the one who was a florid-faced alcoholic, the one who was the cuckold,
the one who was the menopausal male with the woman half his age. The ones you'd envied and wished in your petty heart the worst for—they'd all seemed to do pretty well, Buick-comfortable and suburban-smug. And the ones you'd feared for—the ones with limps and lisps and those little spasms of intolerable anxiety or even madness—they stood now in a cluster of the twisted and forsaken, accepting the smiles and salutations of their betters with the same kind of sad gratitude they'd long ago gotten used to.

And I still didn't see Karen Lane, though, according to various people I asked, I was drawing close—she'd just been seen on the dance floor, or at the bar, or out the back door, where a few people stood by the garage where the monsignor had parked his infamous black
'57
Dodge (the primo fantasy of the time having been making out with your girl in its back seat). Joints and wine were being passed around among people who seemed almost fanatical in their laughter and who seemed to remember details of twenty-five years ago that I'd forgotten entirely.

I asked a man I recognized as a lawyer if he'd seen Karen Lane. He said, "Seen her? Hell, man, she's so gorgeous, I fell in love with her." Then he nodded to the alley behind. "I think she went out there with Larry Price."

I stood there and stared at him and time was a trap of spider-webbing I couldn't escape. Even after a quarter century, her being with Larry Price had the power to enrage me.

I pushed past the partiers and on out to the alley where a block-long of sagging garages, probably new about the time Henry Ford was rolling his first Model T off the assembly line, stood like wooden gravestones in the moonlight. They smelled of old wood and car oil and moist earth.

I looked up and down the long shadows and saw nothing. I was about to turn around and go back to the party when I heard the unmistakable moan.

Two garages away.

My stomach became fiery with pain and I felt the blind, unreasoning impulse of jealousy.

I wanted to turn around and go back to the school, and as I started to move toward the monsignor's garage again, I heard the slap, sharp as a gunshot.

Then in the soft night I heard Karen say, "Leave, Larry. Please."

"I'm not finished.
"

"But I'm finished, Larry, and I have been for a long time."

"I'm sick of that goddamn tale of yours, Karen. You know that? It goddamn happened and it's goddamn over and nothing can goddamn be done about it."

"Please, Larry."

"Bitch."

Then he slapped her a clean slap, probably more harmful emotionally than physically. "Bitch."

He came out of one of the garages down in the shadows and looked around as if an assassin might be waiting for him. He had changed very little—six feet, blond, attentive to his tan and his teeth. He sold BMW's and Volvos, mostly during long lunches at the Reynolds Country Club.

He was drunk enough that he leaned perilously forward as he moved. He almost bumped into me before he saw me. "Hey—"

And I dropped him. For a variety of reasons, only one even remotely noble—because he'd slapped her. The second was because he'd beaten me in high school, and the third because I was frustrated with the lies Karen had been telling me and I'd had just enough vodka-laced punch to work up a mean floating edge.

"God," he said, feeling his jaw and shaking his head.

By now, she was out in the moon shadows, staring down at him. "What happened?"

"
He slapped you, didn't he?"

She glanced sharply at me. "What are you doing here, Jack?"

"Looking for you."

"Did you get the suitcase?"

"We need to talk about that, Karen. We need to talk very long and very hard about that."

If she hadn't screamed, I might not have seen him lunge at me.

I got him a hard clean shot in the stomach and then clubbed
his temple with the side
of
my fist. He dropped to his knees and started vomiting.

"I can't watch this," she said, starting to pace in hysterical little circles. In her blue jersey jumper and white beads, she resembled a society woman who has just been informed that the entire family fortune has been embezzled.

Then, gathering herself, she went over to him and said, "Are you all right, Larry?"

"What the hell you doing with him?"

"
He's helping me find something."

"What?"

"It needn't concern you." She sounded as prim as a schoolmarm. "I merely asked if you were all right."

But now he didn't pay any attention to her. He struggled to his feet, leaning back a bit from the booze. He was more sober now. Losing some blood and throwing up can occasionally work wonders.

"You think you're going to get away with this, Dwyer, you're really crazy. Really crazy." Then he turned on her and said, "You too, bitch. You too."

He left.

He walked bowlegged the way Oliver Hardy had in
Way
Out West
. He wanted to walk mean because he was a basically mean guy and booze only enhanced his anger. But right now all he could do was look like Oliver Hardy and it didn't scare me and it didn't impress me and I'd already decided that if he came back, I was going to put a few more fists into him.

"That wasn't necessary."

"Sure it was," I said.

"You don't understand the situation here."

"I understand that Larry Price is a jerk and always has been."

"But that's all you understand."

"I met Dr. Evans."

Her eyes narrowed. "He was there when you went into the apartment?"

"
He was there all right. Unconscious."

"What?"

"And bleeding."

She sighed. Shook her head. "So he did try?"

"Try what?"

"Suicide."

"Sorry."

"What?"

"Somebody hit him across the back of the head. Very
hard. And several times. Guess what they were looking for."

"His money, probably. Some junkie or something."

"God, you're just going to keep it up, aren't you?"

"Keep what up? What are you talking about?"

"Keep up this guise that there's something very innocent in the suitcase and that you just kind of want it back for old times' sake. Are you dealing drugs?"

"My God, what kind of person do you think I am?"

"Did you do some jewelry salesman out of his ruby collection?"

"
I don't want to hear any more."

"Somebody wants whatever's in that suitcase badly enough to risk B and E and assault with a deadly weapon. Those are heavy raps. “I grabbed her by the shoulder—thinking that Glendon Evans had told me he'd hit her—and I dug my thumb and forefinger into her gentle and wonderful flesh. “You owe it to me, Karen."

"What?"

"The truth."

She laughed without seeming at all amused.
"
Oh, I wish I knew the truth, Jack. How I wish I knew the truth."

But I was in no mood for philosophy. "What's in the suitcase?"

"
Would you make me a promise?"

"What?"

"If we went back into the gym and danced the slow dance medley, would you promise not to step on my feet?"

"Don't try to buy me off, Karen. I want to know what the hell's going on. You're in trouble, whether you know it or not."

"You used to be a terrible dancer, Jack, and for some reason I suspect you still are.
"
She leaned up and kissed my cheek and I felt blessed and cursed at the same time.
"
But then you're cute and you're sincere, and sometimes those things are even more important than the social graces."

"Have you always been this superficial?"

"No," she said, and there was an almost startling melancholy in her voice.
"
No, Jack, I've had to work at it. I really have."

Then she took my arm and led me back inside the gym where in tenth grade she'd given me a lingering public kiss right there on the dance floor. Robert Mitchum had nothing on me.

So we started dancing, a little formally at first, as the band went through some Connie Francis numbers and then some
Johnny Mathis numbers and then some Teddy Bear numbers, and I started looking around the shadows of the gym at the joke being played out before me.

Here were the kids I'd made my First Communion with and played baseball with and walked home from school with
along the railroad tracks that smelled of grease and swapped
comics with (Batman was always worth two of anything else) and watched change from little girls into big girls with powers
both wonderful and terrible over me and little boys into
half-men with a hatred that could only come from growing up in the Highlands—but whatever else we'd been, we'd been
young and it had all been ahead of us—the great promise of money and achievement and sex, God yes, sex. But these people were trying to trick me now, they'd gone to some
theatrical costume shop and gotten gray for their hair and
padding for their bellies and rubber to create jowls, these very
same people in my First Communion photo.