The End of the Pier (14 page)

Sam's question was taken, too, as serious, calling for a serious reply. Wade put down his coffee mug for a moment, stretched his arms so the large hands clamped onto his knees, and looked past Sam and the porch rail. “I been better, Sam. I been better, as you know.”

Sitting thus, his posture for serious speech, Wade started to talk. The shyness and hesitation in speech disappeared as he progressed, and his progression was along familiar lines. Sam had taken Dodge's place on the swing, was pushing himself back and forth with one foot, arm across the swing's back, head on fisted hand. It was pretty much always the same speech, and Sam wondered if that was what therapy was all about: the same speech over and over, the same events culled from memory, chipped away at in slightly different words, as if the experience were a piece of sculpture turning a many-faceted precious stone, but the heart of it never changing. It was always the same stone.

Was this what Dr. Hooper listened to—over and over again, the same details? Sam looked off, hearing Wade's voice as a kind of muted background music, and thought he'd ask her on one of her passages through La Porte. Maybe even tomorrow, Labor Day. She was staying over at the Stucks' rooming house. He'd seen her earlier, coming out of the Rainbow, and had to stop and stare. Sam hadn't told Maud that he considered Elizabeth Hooper a mysterious and beautiful woman who appeared almost out of nowhere at an appointed time and place and who carried within her the remnants of other people's lives, torn memories, rags of feeling.

“. . . All of four years now, and I
still
just can't work it out in my mind, you know, how someone coulda done such a thing . . .”

Despite his reverie, part of Sam's mind still following Wade's drift—although it was always much the same study in loneliness,
guilt, reprisal—Sam never knew but what the man's words might not offer up a clue, some new way of saying it. So he listened, staring off into darkness towards the barn.

Sitting with his hands locked on his chair arms as if he meant to shove himself out of the chair, Wade was saying what he'd said many times before, that the loss of a child was the most bitter loss to be borne. That it was difficult for Sam to understand, perhaps, he being without.

“Being without.” It sounded as if the barrenness of Sam's marriage were a judgment, and that such aridity prevented compassion.

“What's terrible is, he got away with it. It's not to be borne that someone could do that and get off scot-free. There's times I wondered was it that Chalmers fellow.”

Sam stopped the swing. How many times had he heard Wade say it? Wade just couldn't take in that Boy had an ironclad alibi for the time of Eunice's death. But he supposed it must ease the pain a bit for Wade to think there was someone he could look to. He turned his gaze from the far fields, indistinguishable one from the other in the dark. “I'm sorry we didn't find him, Wade.”

“Hell, I ain't blaming you, Sam, you know that.” Wade's voice was tight, and his jaw was working on a piece of tobacco. The hard way he chewed, it might have been gristle. Then he sat back and picked up his mug, two fingers through the handle, thumb on the rim. “Dodge said you was rooting around—that's his words, ‘rooting around'—and that you had been ever since Eunice . . . well . . .”

Sam studied Wade's profile, the way the flesh beneath the cheekbone, the socket of the eye had hollowed out more over the last year. “When'd Dodge tell you that, Wade?”

The tall man shrugged. “Couple months ago. Round the time that Alonzo woman was killed. Dodge said it'd started you asking questions about the others. That Butts woman, and Eunice.” Slowly, he turned to look at Sam, and his tone was slightly accusing: “You never told me nothing like that, you know.”

No, he hadn't. Sam had said nothing to Wade about his suspicions regarding Boy Chalmers, though it had meant possibly short-circuiting some of Sam's own unofficial investigation. He would himself have liked to get Wade talking more concretely about that day, replaying it over and over again.

“Well, Wade, I wouldn't say I was ‘rooting around.' It's been a long time, after all—although I have been thinking about it, that's true.”

“I'm glad to hear that. I thought the police just closed the case and forgot all about Eunice.” He took another swallow of coffee.

“Hard to forget, Wade . . . a thing like that.” Sam shook his head when Wade raised the pot again from the warmer. “No, thanks.” He drained his cup, rose, and set it on the table. “It's nearly twelve; got to be going.”

“I don't guess Dodge and Mayor Sims is too happy about it. About you rooting around.” Wade gave a slow smile, almost sly.

“No, I don't guess so, Wade. Well, I've got to be going.”

They said good night, and Sam walked off across the hard dirt yard lit only by a cold half-moon.

“I
wonder where they go when the summer's over,” said Maud, trying to stretch two fingers farther into the narrow olive bottle, scissoring them around an olive that kept falling back. Besides the cut-glass olive dish there was a little plate of lemon twists and cocktail onions. And a garlic clove. It was always there, and Sam knew she was waiting for him to ask about it. He didn't.

“Far as I know, Raoul and Ev—”

Her head turned quickly to Sam. “I didn't say I wanted to
know,
did I?” Irritated that he might tell her, still she was glad Sam was back. It was nearly midnight; the party across the lake usually crested around now, and she was getting depressed. Getting? Wasn't she always? No, this was different; it was superficial, even facile depression, a relief from the real thing.

“You said,” said Sam, the fresh beer balanced on the arm of the folding chair, “ ‘I wonder where they go.' ”

“That's
wondering. Wondering
is totally different from wanting to
know.
Like wondering about their names. You told me their names. When I said ‘I
wonder
what their names are,' I didn't actually mean I wanted to
know.
” She would much rather run a few possible names through her mind, pick one, discard it, start the process over again. Knowing the
last
name (which she didn't, but she suspected Sam did) would be entirely too real; last names pinned you right down to a phone book, a street, town, city, country. And, of course, if the name was ordinary, that could be near fatal to her fantasies about the people who owned the house across the lake. “Raoul.” That wasn't the real name, she was sure—pretty sure. Sam had let the first names pop out, and when she'd
reacted with a mild kind of violence (knocking the lamp over), he'd smiled rather slyly and retracted. Or half-retracted: he'd asked her if she really believed “Raoul” and “Evita” could possibly be the real names of the couple over there. Sam was very quick, though; very quick. He could have pretended he'd just made the names up in order to hide the fact he'd revealed them.

The thing was, she rather liked the names, and she imagined they very well
could
be real, given the Hollywood glamour going on over there. She was afraid of their real histories—God only knew she didn't want to find out they lived in Yonkers or even Manhattan. And what if they came from some palsied mid-sized city like Omaha? What if they had a regular house on a regular street in Des Moines? No one named “Raoul” or “Evita” could possibly be a full-blooded American, though, and therefore they would probably drive off a cliff before they'd live in Des Moines. She didn't want to know the real histories of the owners, or even the guests, because she was afraid of their possible mediocrity. Her imagination could really go to town working up ports of call for Raoul and Evita.

A few times there had been complaints, she'd heard, about noisy parties “over there,” but Sam, with his customary delicacy, had refrained from identifying the culprit house. Anyway, it was no more than drunken cavorting in the driveway—which Maud couldn't see and which, consequently, didn't exist for her. God knows she had nothing against drinking, as long as the glasses were perfect, the gestures of raising them elegant.

Sam had said, with that eerie perception he sometimes displayed, that he hadn't intended to give away their names. “You don't even know but what I made them up, do you?” and he'd looked out over the moonstruck lake with that tiny smile . . .

•  •  •

“Sorry,” said Sam, who actually did know where they lived, and did know their names, although he had very little contact with the summer people, the ones who owned the quarter-million spreads
on the other side of the lake. He drove around back there sometimes in the dusk and marveled at these houses, at the way they had tucked themselves, architect-designed and long and low, into the landscape, burrowed there like moles. Big as they were, they had surprised his eye, separating from their camouflage of trees, plants, and shrubs only if he looked closely.

Maud didn't have to worry about reality barging in from over there, jumping off the dock swimming towards her, waving, yelling, singing, drowning. If she ever drove along the old roads on the other side she would find them just as dreamy.

He had thought up “Raoul” one night after he and Florence had been to La Porte's single movie house to see
Kiss of the Spider Woman.
The name “Raul Julia,” Sam thought, had got to be about the best in the book if a person wanted to conjure up exotic, mysterious people and settings. What a name! It was definitely a Mother Grizzell name. Ma Gris would absolutely make a meal of that name. He wondered if the two of them were still in that trailer, sitting as they'd sat a year ago. Perhaps she'd died. For all of her wiry aggressiveness, she hadn't looked all that strong to him.

The “Evita” he'd stumbled on when he'd been flipping through the chrome jukebox menu of numbers in the Rainbow Café and found “Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.” Evita Perón. He'd thought “Evita” went extremely well with “Raoul.” It was a marriage made in heaven.

God knows it was better than their real names, ordinary as La Porte names. Maud would have fits.

•  •  •

“It's all right,” Maud said, giving her attention to the olive jar and finally loosening up the one that was wedged in, so that all the olives rolled out into the olive dish. From across the lake came the jumpy sounds of “Anything Goes.” There was a little stirring of the guests. Some had come out to the patio, and she loved the daubs of color the gowns of the women made, even though the distance
and the lantern light muted them, blueing the greens, or the greens yellowing the blues.
In other words,
she admitted to herself,
you can't really tell.
It was too dark to see such mutations; the patio was like a little chartreuse island.

They sat in silence, Sam humming a few bars of the music, smoke drifting up from his cigarette.

She was glad he'd come back before going home. Often, she wondered about his wife, Florence, who occasionally came into the Rainbow to buy pastry or order a cake for a special occasion. Maud had never talked to her; Shirl always waited on her up there by the cash register. Florence was quite good-looking, she thought, in a smoldering, Italian way. Sam had smiled and said she was second-generation Greek.

She also wondered where he went on these nightly excursions (“just to check on things”) around La Porte. Did he circle the lake and drive past the backs of those houses over there? Probably not. But he could be gone for two, three hours, and although he'd said he was going to Wade Hayden's, she couldn't really imagine sitting around with Wade Hayden for over two hours.

This was not because she disliked Wade. She didn't even know him except to see him behind the counter in the post office, where he would always say, “ 'Lo, Maud” and “ 'Bye, Maud,” with nothing much happening in between. His smile would be reserved as he'd stamp a package “Priority Mail” that she'd be sending to Chad. He was very remote. Reserved and remote. Maud wanted to laugh. Beside her, Wade Hayden was probably Times Square. They should have got on like a house afire, standing there together on opposite sides of the counter.

She'd forgotten about that poor girl of his, Eunice, and the sudden memory brought the rocking chair down with a small thud.

Sam turned and looked at her. “Something wrong?”

“I just remembered Eunice Hayden. I swear, but I just can't put that together. It doesn't make sense.”

“Does murder ever?” Sam picked up the binoculars and fiddled with them.

“Well, of
course.
Take Detroit or Chicago or New York City. There it makes sense. The very senselessness of it makes sense.”

“You've lost me.” Sam turned the binoculars over. “Zeiss. These are good. Where'd you get these?”

“In the attic. But listen: that's what those places—I mean Detroit and New York, for instance—are
like.
Killings are part of the puzzle. But not here. It's like someone took a piece from the wrong puzzle, a piece of blue sky, maybe, and forced it into a black pavement. Thumped it right in, I mean. And spoiled the whole design.”

“Maud, for lord's sake, what's the difference? You can't force a piece of sky into a New York street, either.” He adjusted the focus.

Her fist curled and her eyes squeezed shut. He recognized the signs of a snit coming on.

“The sky's always falling in the gutters of New York. And don't be so damn
literal.”
The eyes opened and the fingers mauled around in the jar of olives. “I hate it when the pimento gets out.” She tossed the bruised olive into her glass and pulled the bottle from the ice. “Now
this
”—and Maud made a sweeping motion with the Popov bottle—“makes sense. There's the lake, the moon over it, and the little boats; there's us on the end of the pier; and there's the party across the water. The arrangement is perfect.” She made a circle with her thumb and index finger.