The Cavanaugh Quest (33 page)

They wore long gowns, Ma Dierker’s blue gown matching her hair. Helga, in pink, looked horsey enough to win at Santa Anita; she smiled at us and those awful stained teeth took on a nightmare quality.

Helga was leaning down toward Harriet, straining, to whisper in her ear, trying to talk her out of something. Harriet, gray-faced, didn’t seem to hear, her eyes darting from me to Kim and back. She advanced.

“I see you’ve found her, Paul,” she said, high-pitched, quavering. “Aren’t you afraid? You must be so brave …”

“Mrs. Dierker,” I said, “please …”

Kim was suddenly standing apart from me, bracing herself, feet apart as if preparing to ward off a physical attack.

Harriet’s head pecked forward, eyes sparkling behind her blue plastic frames. Helga’s hands fluttered, a hapless magician trying to make it all go away.

“I asked you if you weren’t afraid, Paul.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

Harriet let out a piercing, derisive laugh and a bearded man in a maroon tuxedo turned to look conspicuously. I felt my chest constricting; we were cornered and the two women blocked our escape.

“I told you, Paul, she’s the kiss of death, you know that …” Her smile was deeply ridged, fixed in place like something a thousand years old, long devoid of its original meaning. She hadn’t yet looked at Kim, who stood and waited, eyes straight ahead.

“Please, Mrs. Dierker—”

“’Why, she drove poor Larry to put a bullet in his head … and
he
was her husband. At least until she took up with Ole. Isn’t that true? Aren’t those the facts? Helga, who knows better than you?”

As she raved, a spray of spittle settled before her and I smelled liquor.

“Come with me, Harriet,” Helga said, trying to stay calm, “you don’t want to do this.” Helga looked at me pleadingly. “This is the first time she’s been out since Tim … she’s overwrought, seeing
her
like this …”

“I may be overwrought,” Harriet said distinctly, her voice progressively higher, shriller, “but I am not a murderer!” A girl in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, with deep, heavy breasts, nudged her boyfriend, tugged the fringe on his leather jacket, nodded toward us. “
And
I am not a paid slut! A whore!”

Kim’s head, small and dark, shook in a spasm of fright or anger. She clamped her teeth, her jaw flexed.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Excuse us, please,” and I began to push past but she wouldn’t move, jabbed my chest with a clawed, blue-veined hand. She was disfigured by her hate and grief. Helga looked away.

“No, I will not excuse you. This Woman—” At last she glared at Kim, who was backed against the white wall, the tan draining from her fine, delicate face. “This woman killed my husband … and now she comes out in public, among decent people, and expects to go about freely … A murderer …”

The Guthrie house manager was pushing past the crowd, some of whom snickered at the scene, smiled at their good luck to be so close. “Typical Guthrie opening,” someone said, “all the nuts come out.” The man in the maroon tuxedo curled his lip, a wit.

“Harriet! Leave them alone.” Helga verged on tears.

“Is she
your
whore now, Paul? Is that the way you behave? I send you to learn how she killed her husband, you pretend to be my friend … and then you make her your whore? Can you afford it?” She moved to the side, took aim at Kim, who stared impassively at her. “Did you kill the priest, too? Did you? First Larry, then Tim, then the priest?”

“For God’s sake,” I shouted at her, raising my hand to frighten her into silence. I took Kim’s hand. She shook it loose.

Helga reached for Harriet’s arm but she slapped at her hand. Helga began to cry, eyeliner coursing down her cheeks like black rust on a very old building.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried at me, “don’t you dare raise your hand to me …” Harriet had turned the corner, her mind coming unstuck. “You bitch,” she screamed at Kim, “you whore, slut …” Spittle flecked her thin lips but she was past caring.

The Guthrie man had reached us, red-faced in a too-tight crested blazer, looking both frightened and horrified. “Now just what the hell’s going on here?”

“Better than the show inside,” someone said. Others were drifting away in embarrassment; some were closing in on us.

Harriet made a sudden move, lurching past me toward Kim, and before I even began a reaction, Kim’s open palm flashed up and slapped Harriet’s face, the flat sound of a cleaver’s side on a piece of meat. The blue glasses floated past me, bounced on the floor while Harriet sagged backward, screaming, a line of blood trickling across the bridge of her nose. She reached for Helga, missed, and toppled over, sitting down heavily at the feet of the Mickey Mouse girl, who jumped back to make room for the falling body. Harriet’s head smacked down hard on the girl’s sneaker, thus averting a fractured skull. Suddenly it was quiet in the lobby, the only sound Helga’s sobbing as she leaned over her prostrate friend.

“Get a stretcher,” the Guthrie man yelled to a thunder-struck usher.

Harriet was leaning on an elbow, struggling to right herself with Helga’s aid. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” she moaned.

Kim fixed me with a blank look. “Too bad,” she murmured.

“What?” I didn’t know where to look.

“I’m leaving.” Kim pushed past me, very nearly stepping on Harriet’s hand. I picked up Harriet’s blue glasses and handed them to Helga. She dropped them again.

I caught up with Kim on the steps outside. She was standing quietly, taking a deep breath, arms folded. Through the glass windows I could see the glowing lobby, white like a surgery room, the two old women being attended to by more Guthrie ushers. We were forgotten, the observers filing back inside for the second act.

“Just not our night,” I said lamely. “Are you all right?”

“Of course,” she said, moving off along the sidewalk, toward the steep hill with the parking lot at the top. “There’s very little I can’t handle at this point in my life. But, my God, what a deranged woman … I can understand her, though, I know what she’s thinking.”

“She’s gone off the edge—”

“Not really, not so far as you’d think. She’s acting on the evidence of her eyes. She’s misled, but to herself she makes sense … She’s a little obvious, I’m afraid.” She stopped and looked at her right hand, holding it open before her. “It stings but I suppose it’s all right. Nothing broken.”

“I suppose Harriet’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry it had to happen.”

“Sometimes things happen to me. You’ll get used—”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She unlocked the Mark IV and we sat for a moment smelling the leather. “I’d better go home and take a bath and get rid of this feeling. What will you do about your review of the play?”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Let’s get a drink or something. I don’t want you going home, being alone right now—it’s better to unwind with somebody after a shock like that.”

She nodded and slid the Lincoln down the hill, past the theater with its empty lobby, across Hennepin, alongside Loring Park, which I look down on from my tower. She braked abruptly at the curb. She took a deep breath and passed the back of her hand across her forehead.

“I feel a little strange,” she said softly. “Disoriented.” She looked at the globes glowing dimly in the park. “Maybe we could walk for a moment.”

The little lake was flat, a mirrored reflecting pool, and there was no one in sight. I took her hand, said, “It’s not really a good idea to walk here at night, freaks and creeps wandering around.”

She shook her head; her hand was limp, she was breathing deeply, regularly, getting her equilibrium reinstated. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t feel right myself, adrenaline overloading my system. We walked across the damp, thick grass, past a bench, to a path at the lake. We walked slowly, quietly, and didn’t see the man on the bike until it was too late to escape. He came whirring out of the dark like a phantom, one moment indistinguishable from the faint breeze, on top of us the next, skidding to a stop in front of us. I yanked Kim back, out of the way, and the voice, high and clear, like a choirboy’s, cut across the quiet darkness.

“Why don’t you get her out of the park, buddy? I know why guys like you bring them down here at night … I know, I’ve seen you in the bushes … Why don’t you do it at home and keep it out of the park?” He remained on the bike, not more than an arm’s reach away, in Levi’s and a windbreaker, his voice high and expressionless as if he weren’t involved with what he was saying, like a guide in a museum which bored him. Kim’s hand tightened on my arm and she moved against me.

“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked, my anger blurred by surprise.

“You and your whore, who else? Did you pay her yet? Ten bucks? Twenty-five? Look, I don’t give a shit what you do with her—just get it out of the park, okay? My job is keeping the park clean, keeping creeps like you and your goddamn whores out of it—”

“You’re insane. She’s a friend of mine.” Anger was welling up in me. The boy wasn’t threatening us, and he was obviously insane, riding around in the park insulting people, one of the freaks and creeps.

“Don’t bullshit me, okay? You paid her, she’ll do whatever you make her do.” He was grinning behind the monotone and I could hear a bat squeaking in trees. It was the grin that did it. I pulled away from Kim toward him and he dropped his bike, took a step back, and braced himself, fists clenched. “You want to make something out of it? It’s okay with me … just remember you started it. I didn’t do a damn thing to you.” There was an edge of taunting laughter in his voice and I felt as if I’d stepped into a dream sprung directly from ptomaine poisoning.

Whether I’m cowardly or rational I don’t know, but my little orgasm of anger passed and I felt foolish, staring into his eyes. He was a real person, grin fixed, a little quaver in his voice, raspberry jello for a brain.

“Let’s just leave,” Kim said tightly, eyes fixed on him. “He might have a knife, Paul. Come on.” She was pulling me away.

He laughed nastily. “Remember, this is my job, keeping guys like you and cunts like her out of the park. Keep the park clean for the rest of us.”

“You’re insane,” I yelled. “Sick, nut …”

“Sure”—he laughed—“just get her out of here.”

I was panting by the time we reached the car. Kim hadn’t said a word. I looked back; he was sitting under one of the lamps, staring at us. When she pulled away from the curb I looked again and he was gone.

“Do you still want a drink?” I said. My heart was pounding and my head felt as if tiny men were pounding my eyeballs with ball peen hammers.

“Sure,” she said. She swung around the edge of the park and was cruising along its eastern perimeter when the boy materialized across the street on her side, straddling his bike, watching us. There was an absolutely fearless kind of insolence in his stance, as if he thrived on confrontation and wasn’t satisfied with our encounter.

Before I could point him out, I heard Kim suck her breath in, felt the Mark IV swerve across the deserted street. The boy grinned malevolently, his face clown-white beneath a streetlamp, teeth bared, and he pushed off into the street, dared her. It was instantaneous and I felt dumbstruck, a spectator. He went too far. It was too late: She spun the steering wheel at the last millisecond; the heavy car sunk sideways and shimmied back across the street. The left front fender caught the bike’s front tire, exploded it sideways and upward, knocking the boy like a doll against a parking meter, bouncing him off the street-lamp, dropping him in the gutter. She mashed the power brakes and I braced myself against the dashboard. The engine died. Kim draped herself forward across the steering wheel, shaking.

I got out and went over to the boy. He had pulled himself into a sitting position, hunkered over, head down.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He looked up at me, half grinning, lip split, glassy-eyed. He waved me away, croaked something short and indecipherable. I backed off. He shook his head and slowly, gripping the parking meter for support, pulled himself upright. He sagged, turned away from me. His bicycle was twisted beyond repair, like a dead animal. He moved off into the darkness of the park.

Kim was leaning back, tears on her cheeks. I closed the door and leaned back, wishing my heart would calm down.

“You know,” I said, “we could have killed that kid.”

“You had nothing to do with it … Oh, God, this whole evening has been too much for me.” She wiped at the tears and sniffed. “He just kept on coming … I couldn’t turn back in time …” She sighed heavily and started the car. “I don’t know what to say, Paul. I’m terribly sorry, but this isn’t one of my usual evenings … I really do want to go home.” She tried a tentative smile. “Don’t worry.”

“I guess I am worried … . . . about you, I mean,” I said. “It comes down to that. What a god-awful evening—”

“Memorable, though.” I could hear the irony in her voice; she was totally composed now. “The terrible irony of it,” she said, “is the slurs being cast on my moral character. Everyone—the crazies, I guess—seems to think I’m some sort of whore,
your
whore, specifically.” She laughed softly. “And you know how true that is. Only you, Paul. And Ole.”

“Well,” I said, “it just goes to show you, doesn’t it?”

“Good night, Paul.” She leaned across and gave me a dry, sisterly little peck, then a softer one and my tongue hit a wall of her teeth.

It took awhile to get to sleep. A second-rater named Jack Brohammer, who played second for Cleveland, was tattoing the Twins’ ace, Bert Blyleven, when I finally drifted off, troubled, turning.

T
HE MORNING’S TELEPHONE CALLS BEGAN
early. Don Magruder from the Guthrie called to ask me what the hell I knew about the rumble in the lobby the night before. I blamed it on a couple of drunken elderly ladies who had insulted a friend of mine—presumably a case of mistaken identity—and tried to grapple with her and had been slapped. I said that my friend was not going to sue the little old ladies or the Guthrie for harboring offensive tipplers and that had him thinking for a moment. I told him he needn’t worry, then asked him what the little old ladies had to say and he said not much, that one of them had somehow fallen down and spent the night in a hospital under observation but was being released this morning. “From what I hear,” he added, “your friend’s got a pretty good right hand.”