Tony and Susan (14 page)

The next page has a notice: PART THREE. Good. A change, Susan Morrow’s had enough of this. She wonders if Edward expects a compliment on the internal organs oozing through the beard. Perhaps the pariah with the turban and the castaway goat was something he forgot to revise.

How far can she read tonight? She looks ahead to calculate. Right now we’re about midway, should finish tomorrow. Take a break.

‘Rosie, bed!’

Tiny voice upstairs. ‘I yam in bed, Mama.’

Jeffrey wants to go out. She opens the door, lets him go. Not supposed to, but it’s late, no one will know. Keep out of trouble, mister. She goes to the kitchen. Snack, a Coke? The kitchen is cold, temperature dropping outside. In the study she hears the voices of a television sitcom, nobody watching, someone left it on all evening.

She feels bruised by her reading and by life too. She wonders, does she always fight her books before yielding to them? She rides back and forth between sympathy for Tony and exasperation. If only she didn’t have to talk to Edward afterwards. If you say Tony is going mad – or turning into a jerk – you need to be sure Tony is not really Edward.

Now he’s Tony the artificial man. She wonders about that. Generally Susan is skeptical about words like hollow and superficial. Is
she
hollow or full? Damned if she knows, but she
doesn’t want someone else deciding for her. If Edward is condemning Tony through Tony’s own voice, that’s old judgmental Edward again. When he judges she resist. But she also has a notion of a fairer second reading, later when the soreness has eased and everything is past.

In any case, Part Three. Something has ended. Is it Three of Three or Three of Four? If three, a sonata: A B A. What would that mean, back to the woods? If four, a symphony? Statement, funeral march, scherzo, finale. We have a crime, a victim, a reaction, and a so far unsuccessful search for the killers. She thinks, she thinks: will Tony Hastings be destroyed or redeemed? A bad happy ending would ruin everything, but it’s hard to imagine what a good one would be.

When Bobby Andes did not answer his letter, he sent another.

In his car driving home late on a flowered May day, he lectured to himself. Other drivers thought he was cussing the traffic. He said, It’s not the clotty rush hour nor drivers tailgating. Not boys throwing softballs at cars. Not the evil editorials of
the morning papers, nor greedy students trying to get away with something, nor disgusting Frank Hawthorne. Not even greenhouse or nuclear war. There’s but one crime, one evil, one grievance. It was you who did it to me, no criminals or devils but you. Everything else is distraction.

He thought, if Bobby Andes finds the letter provocative that’s all right. If it annoys him, so much the better. Two weeks passed, and he realized again there would be no answer. Tony Hastings in pain, waiting for word from a detective in Pennsylvania who had the care of his health and hope of rescue in the month of May. The green of his yard was bright and full of yellow, the green weeds invaded the old brown. There were bright sky days, lawns mowing, gardens digging, but not Tony Hastings, resisting with last summer’s business. He preferred the night, when you couldn’t be seen looking out the darkened windows.

Since he knew what he wanted, he could wait. Be less disagreeable to innocent people. He pointed it out to Francesca Hooton at lunch. ‘I have been blaming a lot of wrong people. I know whose fault it is now.’

‘You’ve finally decided to be angry?’

Alone in his big house he talked on, perfecting a rage. He said, You think it’s easy to become Tony Hastings? It takes forty years. It needs loving mother and intellectual father, a summer place, lessons on the back porch. Sister and brother to fence temper and create sensitivity to others’ distress. Years of reading and study and wife and daughter to force pain into habit and make a man.

But it’s even harder to become Laura Hastings. Assembled in the long accumulating day by day as Laura Turner, by Meyer Street and Dr. Handelman, with Donna and Jean, the lake in the mist and the death of Bobo and the studio, Laura
Hastings is not completed but just begun in her forty years of life. Laura Hastings is (was) not the life she lived but the forty years yet to be lived, as promised.

Beasts, do you think it easier to replace Helen Hastings? Hers is the longest lifetime of all, fifty to sixty years just begun, extracted from the outgrown child by the growing world, from the original Laura-Tony germ to sleepy song and Little Golden Book, momdad and doggie love with notebooked poems to the unbreakable contract of a grownup Helen-in-the-world.

Nothing, beasts, is harder to build or more impossible to replace than the unlived years of these three. Not your cars, your cocks, your sleazy girlfriends, your own ratty little souls. Tony Hastings imagined those cars, cocks, girlfriends and souls. He lived among them, looking for words to make his hatred overwhelming. A story, an account sufficiently degrading. Of stupid grown men who got this notion from movies or television and school bullies of how to be a man by pushing people around. Let’s go out on the road and scare the squares. No more teachers’ dirty looks, let’s get the prissy girls and the tight-assed schoolmoms, give em a taste. If you get in trouble, knock them off. Tony Hastings looked for words adequate to his rage. Vile, wretched, cowardly. Low, vicious, despicable. Not evil: that word gave them too much dignity. The words he sought were lower and worse than evil. With such rhetoric he tried to replace the soul he thought he had lost.

The telephone in the afternoon: as he went to it he already knew what it was. He heard the harsh distant voice materializing his thought, ‘I’m calling Tony Hastings, is this Tony Hastings?’ He was right, they were both right. ‘Andes, here.’ He heard. ‘You want to identify somebody else?’

‘Who is it?’

‘I ain’t telling. I ask if you want to tell
me
who it is?’

‘When? Where?’

‘Soon as you can come. Here. It’s Grant Center this time.’

So he prepared for another trip. Not to fail this time. This time I’ll see and know who it is, Ray or Lou or again Turk. Going overnight, he packed his bag wild with excitement, took one plane and stepped off another, a little commuting one, at a small airport in a valley. Bobby Andes was waiting behind a fence. He got into the car and they drove past fields and woods and under the edges of hills. Return to the land of terror.

‘That was a couple insistent letters you wrote,’ Andes said. ‘You really want them guys?’

‘What happened?’

‘You tell me first. You going to mouse out on me again like before?’

‘I meant what I said in my letters.’

‘How come the change?’

‘It’s no change. I want those guys caught.’

‘You don’t want to give no false identifications, you know. I’ll tell you what we got. We got an attempted holdup of a supermarket in Bear Valley Mall just before closing time. We got one guy caught and one killed. We got one guy got away, just like the other time.’

‘How did that happen?’

‘I’ll tell you. There was three guys, dumb jerks, two in the store, one in the car outside. They don’t see the manager in the back. The cashier puts her hands up like they say, the manager comes down the aisle with his gun, yells, “Drop that gun!” The idiot turns and shoots without looking, hits the Wheaties boxes, Wheaties shower. The manager shoots back.

The manager’s a good shot. Got the guy in the chest, knocked him down, out of contention. They operated on him in the hospital. Twelve hours later he died.’

Tony Hastings quiet, wondering who died, not sure if good news or bad. ‘What about the others?’

‘Wait. The other guy in the store, he runs. The manager runs after him. He tries to get into the car, but a cop comes tearing around the corner. Manager calls, cop shouts warning, guy in the car starts up, other guy never does get in. The cop shoots out the tire, the driver of the car surrenders, but the running guy gets away.’

‘How did he manage that?’

‘Disappeared. Took off running when the cop started to shoot, ducked behind a car somewhere, I don’t know. Not enough manpower to follow, don’t know where he went.’

Tony asked, ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘See if you recognize the guy we caught.’

‘You want to tell me why I might recognize him?’

‘Later, later.’

They were coming back to where it began, the fields and hillsides, still in early green infiltrating the brown and gray winter that had fallen between. He recognized nothing until they drove into the police lot with the motel across the way.

‘You might take a look at the corpse too, though it’s not strictly necessary,’ Andes said. ‘We know who he is.’

‘Who?’

‘Steve Adams. The one you called Turk.’

‘Turk? Dead?’

‘Know him by the fingerprints.’

‘I thought he was in jail in Ajax.’

‘He jumped bail. So I’m told.’

Tony Hastings was trying to figure out the difference in
Bobby Andes’s appearance. It was his loss of weight, grooves around his mouth and nose and under his eyes where it had been greasy smooth before.

Tony Hastings checked in across the street. When he came back, Andes said, ‘I guess you’d like a lineup like the other time.’

‘I thought that’s what I was here for.’

‘I could take you to see him and ask you who the hell he is, but I guess you’d prefer the lineup, more up and up.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘Go get some coffee. If we’re going to have a lineup I need to round up some guys.’

There was something not wholly serious about the lineup when they finally got to it. They had it in the office with the desks. They put Tony at one of the desks. Six people came in from the side door and stood in a row in front of the counter. It was a moment before Tony realized this was the lineup. The first of the six was a woman in brown who had been sitting a few minutes before at the desk where Tony sat now. She was giggling. The second was a policeman in uniform, trying not to grin. He looked familiar, and Tony wondered if they were trying to trick him by disguising the suspect. Later he realized this was the policeman named George who had brought him back from the crime in the woods on that day. The third and fourth people were handcuffed to each other. One was a heavy man with yellow hair, dressed like a garage mechanic, the other was an old man in a dirty open-collar shirt. The fifth and sixth were also handcuffed. Both wore beards and plaid shirts. The beard of one was brown and full. He looked independent and intelligent. The other’s beard was black and clumsily trimmed. His eyes groped around the room in confusion, and Tony
Hastings watched in amazement as the unknown face turned like merging binocular images into a face he knew.

He knew by the eyes which had looked at him differently in the night, and the mouth in the beard also different then. He watched the man looking around the room, not knowing why he was there, who had not yet located Tony at the desk, whose eyes then passed over Tony without recognition, not noticing how intently Tony was staring trying to be sure. Testing him now against the woods and the car, superimposing him upon the stored memory, seeing him by the tire with Ray and Turk, in the car beside him as he tried to slow down at the trailer, and in the woods, his distinct words, Out! You’ll get killed if you don’t watch it!

At last the man noticed Tony staring at him but still did not recognize him. Blank, puzzled. But Tony knew him. Not sure how glad he was, afraid of what being glad could lead to, he whispered to Bobby Andes, ‘Yes.’

Andes loud. ‘Yes? Yes what? You know somebody?’

‘The one with the beard.’

‘Which beard? They’re two beards there.’

‘The one on the end.’

‘The man with the beard on the end. The red plaid shirt. The blue jeans? You’ve seen him before?’

The man with the beard, shirt and jeans was looking at him now, perplexed.

‘That’s Lou.’

‘Lou who? Who’s Lou?’

‘Lou’s the one who drove me, who made me drive his car when the others went off in mine, who made me drive into the woods and left me there.’

‘This guy? He don’t seem to understand. Lou. Hey, you! Is your name Lou?’

‘You know my name. I told you. What’s going on?’

‘You ever see this man before, Lou? Think carefully. You ever see him?’

Lou staring at Tony. Tony unable to tell if some slow recognition was appearing in the stare. ‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘I don’t know him. Who is he?’

‘Tell him, Tony. Tell him who he is.’

‘Last summer, you – he –’

‘This man?’

‘This man and his friends forced us off the road on the Interstate. Then two of them forced their way into my car with my wife and daughter, and this man –’

‘This man here? Lou?’

‘Yes, Lou, made me drive his car and took me into the woods where he made me get out. Later my wife and daughter were found dead at the same place.’

‘What say to that, Lou?’

It was all fear on Lou’s face, obscuring whatever recognition there might be. He said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘What do you know about this man’s wife and daughter?’

‘I never saw him in my life.’

‘What do you know about Ray and Turk?’

‘Never heard of them.’

To Tony: ‘Just one thing now. Are you sure this is the man?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Would you swear to it in court under penalty of perjury?’

Tony’s breath. ‘Yes.’

They took him to the morgue, where they uncovered a waxy gray face with stubble. Eyes closed, no glasses, the nose like a beak, mouth in a grimace, it could have been anybody.

Tony could not imagine this person awake. He had no memory of Turk to mesh with him. He could not even recall the faces of Turk he had been unable to identify in Ajax and in the picture.