The Music of Chance (24 page)

Things happened quickly after that. Murks arrived at seven, tramping up the steps of the trailer and giving his customary knock on the door, and when Nashe called for him to come in, his first response on seeing Pozzi was to laugh. “What’s the matter with him?” he said, gesturing at the sofa with his thumb. “Did he tie one on again last night?” But once he stepped into the room and was close enough to see Pozzi’s face, his amusement turned to alarm. “Christ almighty,” he said. “This boy’s in trouble.” “You’re damn right he’s in trouble,” Nashe said. “If we don’t get him to a hospital in the next hour, he’s not going to make it.”

So Murks ran back to the house to fetch the jeep, and in the meantime Nashe dragged out the mattress from Pozzi’s bed and leaned it against the wall of the trailer, keeping it there to be used for their makeshift ambulance. The ride was going to be hard enough anyway, but perhaps the cushion would prevent the kid from being jolted around too much. When Murks finally returned, there was another man sitting with him in the front of the jeep. “This here is Floyd,” he said. “He can help us carry the kid.” Floyd was Murks’s son-in-law, and he looked to be somewhere in his mid to late twenties—a large, solidly built young man who stood at least six four or six five, with a smooth reddish face and
a woolen hunting cap on his head. He seemed no more than moderately intelligent, however, and when Murks introduced him to Nashe he extended his hand with a clumsy, earnest cheerfulness that was entirely inappropriate for the situation. Nashe was so disgusted that he refused to offer his hand in return, merely staring at Floyd until the big man dropped his arm to his side.

Nashe maneuvered the mattress into the back of the jeep, and then the three of them went into the trailer and lifted Pozzi off the sofa, carrying him outside with the blankets still wrapped around his body. Nashe tucked him in, trying to make him as comfortable as possible, but every time he looked down at the kid’s face, he knew there was no hope. Pozzi didn’t have a chance anymore. By the time they got him to the hospital, he would already be dead.

But worse was still to come. Murks clapped his hand on Nashe’s shoulder at that point and said, “We’ll be back as soon as we can,” and when it finally dawned on Nashe that they weren’t planning to take him along, something in him snapped, and he turned on Murks in a sudden fit of rage. “Sorry,” Murks said. “I can’t let you do that. There’s been enough commotion around here for one day, and I don’t want things getting out of hand. You don’t have to worry, Nashe. Floyd and me can manage on our own.”

But Nashe was beside himself, and instead of backing off, he lunged at Murks and grabbed hold of his jacket, calling him a liar and a goddamn son of a bitch. Before he could bring his fist into Calvin’s face, however, Floyd was all over him, wrapping his arms around him from behind and yanking him off the ground. Murks took two or three steps back, pulled his gun out of the holster, and pointed it at Nashe. But not even that was enough to put an end to it, and Nashe went on yelling and kicking in Floyd’s arms. “Shoot me, you son of a bitch!” he said to Murks. “Come on, go ahead and shoot me!”

“He don’t know what he’s saying anymore,” Murks said calmly, glancing over at his son-in-law. “The poor bugger’s lost it.”

Without warning, Floyd threw Nashe violently to the ground, and before Nashe could get up to resume the assault, a foot came crashing into his stomach. It knocked the wind out of him, and as he lay there gasping for breath, the two men broke for the jeep and climbed in. Nashe heard the engine kick over, and by the time he was able to stand up again, they were already driving off, disappearing with Pozzi into the woods.

He did not hesitate after that. He went inside, put on his jacket, stuffed the pockets with as much food as they would hold, and immediately left the trailer again. His only thought was to get out of there. He would never have a better chance to escape, and he wasn’t going to squander the opportunity. He would crawl through the hole he had dug with Pozzi the night before, and that would be the end of it.

He walked across the meadow at a quick pace, not even bothering to look at the wall, and when he reached the woods on the other side, he suddenly started to run, charging down the dirt path as if his life depended on it. He came to the fence a few minutes later, breathing hard from the exertion, staring out at the road before him with his arms pressed against the barrier for support. For a moment or two, it didn’t even occur to him that the hole had vanished. But once he began to recover his breath, he looked down at his feet and saw that he was standing on level ground. The hole had been filled in, the shovel was gone, and what with the leaves and twigs scattered around him, it was almost impossible to know that a hole had ever been there.

Nashe gripped the fence with all ten fingers and squeezed as hard as he could. He held on like that for close to a minute, and then, opening his hands again, he brought them to his face and began to sob.

F
or several nights after that, he had the same recurring dream. He would imagine that he was waking up in the darkness of his own room, and once he understood that he was no longer asleep, he would put on his clothes, leave the trailer, and start walking across the meadow. When he came to the tool shed at the other end, he would kick down the door, grab a shovel, and continue on into the woods, running down the dirt path that led to the fence. The dream was always vivid and exact, less a distortion of the real than a simulacrum, an illusion so rich in the details of waking life that Nashe never suspected that he was dreaming. He would hear the faint crackling of the earth underfoot, he would feel the chill of the night air against his skin, he would smell the pungent autumn decay wafting through the woods. But every time he came to the fence with the shovel in his hand, the dream would suddenly stop, and he would wake up to discover that he was still lying in his own bed.

The question was: Why didn’t he get up at that point and do what he had just done in the dream? There was nothing to prevent him from trying to escape, and yet he continued to balk at it, refused even to consider it as a possibility. At first, he attributed this reluctance to fear. He was convinced that Murks was responsible for what had happened to Pozzi (with a helping hand from Floyd, no doubt), and there was every reason to believe that something similar would be in store for him if he tried to run out on the contract. It was true that Murks had looked upset when he saw Pozzi that morning in the trailer, but who was to say he hadn’t been putting on an act? Nashe had seen Pozzi running down the road, and how could he have wound up in the meadow again if Murks hadn’t put him there? If the kid had been beaten by someone else, his attacker would have left him on the road and run away. And even if Pozzi had still been conscious then, he wouldn’t have had the strength to crawl back through the hole, let alone cross the entire meadow by himself. No, Murks had put him there as a warning, to show Nashe what happened to people who tried to escape. His story was that he had driven Pozzi to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Doylestown, but why couldn’t he have been lying about that as well? They could just as easily have dumped the kid in the woods somewhere and buried him. What difference would it make if he had still been alive? Cover a man’s face with dirt, and he’ll smother to death before you can count to a hundred. Murks was a master at filling in holes, after all. Once he got through with one of them, you couldn’t even tell if it had been there or not.

Little by little, however, Nashe understood that fear had nothing to do with it. Every time he imagined himself running away from the meadow, he saw Murks pointing a gun at his back and slowly pulling the trigger—but the thought of the bullet ripping through his flesh and rupturing his heart did not frighten him so much as make him angry. He deserved to die, perhaps, but he did not want to give Murks the satisfaction of killing him. That would be too
easy, too predictable a way for things to end. He had already caused Pozzi’s death by forcing him to escape, but even if he let himself die as well (and there were times when this thought became almost irresistible to him), it wasn’t going to undo the wrong he had done. That was why he continued working on the wall—not because he was afraid, not because he felt obliged to pay off the debt anymore, but because he wanted revenge. He would finish out his time there, and once he was free to go, he would call in the cops and have Murks arrested. That was the least he could do for the kid now, he felt. He had to keep himself alive long enough to see that the son of a bitch got what was coming to him.

He sat down and wrote a letter to Donna, explaining that his construction job was taking longer than expected. He had thought they would be finished by now, but it looked like the work was going to last another six to eight weeks. He felt certain that Murks would open the letter and read it before sending it off, and so he made sure not to mention anything about what had happened to Pozzi. He tried to keep the tone light and cheerful, adding a separate page for Juliette with a drawing of a castle and several riddles he thought would amuse her, and when Donna wrote back a week later, she said that she was happy to hear him sounding so well. It didn’t matter what kind of work he was doing, she added. As long as he was enjoying it, that was reward enough in itself. But she did hope he would think about settling down after the job was over. They all missed him terribly, and Juliette couldn’t wait to see him again.

It pained Nashe to read this letter, and for many days afterward he cringed whenever he thought of how thoroughly he had deceived his sister. He was more cut off from the world now than ever before, and there were times when he could feel something collapsing inside him, as if the ground he stood on were gradually giving way, crumbling under the pressure of his loneliness. The work continued, but that was a solitary business as well, and he avoided Murks
as much as possible, refusing to speak to him except when it was absolutely necessary. Murks maintained the same placid demeanor as before, but Nashe would not be lulled by it, and he resisted the foreman’s apparent friendliness with barely hidden contempt. At least once a day he went through an elaborate scene in which he imagined himself turning on Murks in a sudden outburst of violence—jumping on top of him and wrestling him to the ground, then freeing the gun from its holster and pointing it straight between his eyes. Work was the only escape from this tumult, the mindless labor of lifting and carting stones, and he threw himself into it with a grim and relentless passion, doing more on his own each day than he and Pozzi had ever managed together. He finished the second row of the wall in less than a week, loading up the wagon with three or four stones at once, and every time he made another journey across the meadow, he would inexplicably find himself thinking about Stone’s miniature world in the main house, as if the act of touching a real stone had called forth a memory of the man who bore that name. Sooner or later, Nashe thought, there would be a new section to represent where he was now, a scale model of the wall and the meadow and the trailer, and once those things were finished, two tiny figures would be set down in the middle of the field: one for Pozzi and one for himself. The idea of such extravagant smallness began to exert an almost unbearable fascination over Nashe. Sometimes, powerless to stop himself, he even went so far as to imagine that he was already living inside the model. Flower and Stone would look down on him then, and he would suddenly be able to see himself through their eyes—as if he were no larger than a thumb, a little gray mouse darting back and forth in his cage.

It was worst at night, however, after the work had ended and he went back to the trailer alone. That was when he missed Pozzi the most, and in the beginning there were times when his sorrow
and nostalgia were so acute that he could barely muster the strength to cook a proper meal for himself. Once or twice, he did not eat anything at all, but sat down in the living room with a bottle of bourbon and spent the hours until bedtime listening to requiem masses by Mozart and Verdi with the volume at full blast, literally weeping as he sat there amid the uproar of the music, remembering the kid through the onrushing wind of human voices as though he were no more than a piece of earth, a brittle clot of earth scattering into the dust he was made of. It soothed him to indulge in these histrionics of grief, to sink to the depths of a lurid, imponderable sadness, but even after he caught hold of himself and began to adjust to his solitude, he never fully recovered from Pozzi’s absence, and he went on mourning the kid as though a part of himself had been lost forever. His domestic routines became dry and meaningless, a mechanical drudgery of preparing food and shoveling it into his mouth, of making things dirty and cleaning them up, the clockwork of animal functions. He tried to fill the emptiness by reading books, remembering how much pleasure they had given him on the road, but he found it difficult to concentrate now, and no sooner would he begin to read the words on the page than his head would swarm with images from his past: an afternoon he had spent in Minnesota five months ago, blowing bubbles with Juliette in the backyard; watching his friend Bobby Turnbull fall through a burning floor in Boston; the precise words he had spoken to Thérèse when he asked her to marry him; his mother’s face when he walked into the hospital room in Florida for the first time after her stroke; Donna jumping up and down as a cheerleader in high school. He didn’t want to remember any of these things, but without the stories in the books to take him away from himself, the memories kept pouring through him whether he liked it or not. He endured these assaults every night for close to a week, and then, not knowing what else to do, he broke down one morning and asked Murks if
he could have a piano. No, it didn’t have to be a real piano, he said, he just needed something to keep himself busy, a distraction to steady his nerves.