Tony and Susan (27 page)

Bravado then. Give it a test. He picked up the gun. The oak tree was to his left, he would hit it with the gun. Target practice for a blind man, it made him laugh. He cocked the gun, pointed it. Fire. That horrible loud explosion knocking his hand back again. The silence of the violated woods returned after the echoes, the endless midday went on and on.

Then the roll of the earth brought the sunlamp directly on his blindfolded face. It must be afternoon. He was obsessed by the thought that his body was identical in all its formal features to that of Ray Marcus. But when he tried to stretch, his body resisted as if tied to the ground. And his unique wounds were already old and familiar, permanent endurable pains, and he had been a blind man most of his life. Never eaten a meal. Never had to pee. He discovered his pants were chilly wet as if he had peed without realizing it. Another effect of the shock, he told himself. The reason he did not go back down to the road was the steepness of the slope, which his imagination saw. He would wait until the police came and helped him down. They would come when Bobby Andes reported his failure to return. If no one else thought to look on this road, George Remington would see the car on the way
to his house. There was no reason to be alarmed by the long drag of the day. It’s not forever.

Maybe he had been asleep. He heard voices, footsteps on gravel. Words, not loud, he couldn’t distinguish. Then, ‘What’s it doing here?’

‘Are you sure that’s it?’

‘Where’d he go?’

He heard a louder harsh male voice, intoning, numbers, a squawk – police radio. They had come at last. He raised his head, held still, listened.

The police radio squawked on and off, bursts. The live voices stopped.

Suddenly one: ‘Hey Mike,
Jesus Christ.
’

Feet scurrying, gravel loosened. ‘Holy cow!’

They had found Ray Marcus.

He could not hear what they were saying.

‘Look, bloody tracks.’

‘See where they go.’

‘Stay here.’

He heard crashing in the brush below. Blind Tony Hastings as quarry, stretched on the ground not knowing if he was visible or not, took the gun by his side and cocked it as a precaution. The police are your friends, he said.

Someone shouted. ‘It goes on down, I can’t see where.’

The other. ‘Forget it. We’ll wait for the others.’

‘Call it in, will you? Tell Andes.’

And Tony still not knowing what Andes had told them about who killed Lou Bates.

A voice said, ‘Probably bleeding to death in the woods.’

Tony Hastings was lying on his side, head propped on elbow trying to listen, not knowing if they could see him if they looked up. The police radio kept spattering. He couldn’t make
out what it said but guessed the men were reporting their find. Then on the radio distinct: ‘Andes here.’

‘Marcus, not Hastings?’

‘Are you sure of that, god damn it?’

He thought, they will bring dogs to follow his bloody footsteps. Like a fugitive. They will train guns on me, and if I don’t obey swiftly, they will kill me. I killed Ray Marcus, who was unarmed.

Remember the headlights approaching in the woods and hiding in the shadow of a tree so as not to be seen, and the voice trying to find him calling, Mister. I don’t want them to see me when I can’t see them, he said.

You’ll have to come out sometime, they said. I’ll wait for Bobby Andes, he said.

He heard them walking around below, not their voices. Then nothing. Almost silence, a long time. He knew they were there because the radio was going, though the volume had been turned down, he could hardly hear it. Either in the car or in the trailer with the body, if he were they he would prefer to wait outside. Maybe they were outside, sitting on the shoulder smoking cigarettes. He heard bird songs again, the two clear notes, chickadee, pewee. He felt the retreat of the afternoon sun, some cooling breeze. A woodpecker telephoning a tree. The distant ceaseless sound of traffic, the Interstate somewhere bearing families and commerce and thugs through this countryside from all the other countrysides.

The leash tethering his belly to the trees was getting uncomfortably tight. It was silly hiding here like a fugitive. Tony Hastings knew that. He didn’t intend to be a fugitive. If he had any guilt, he had reconciled himself to it. He had not forgotten his plans and his conversation with himself a few hours ago. It’s time, he said. Wake up, you can’t stay here forever.

Still, he waited. Preferring to let the others arrive, if Bobby Andes were among them. If Bobby Andes could find him first and give him the latest news on the death of Lou Bates before someone else should ask. It was not long now. The cars drove up, he heard their feet, their radios, voices, exclamations. He heard Bobby Andes, ‘Where the fuck did he go?’

Here is what happened. He wanted to get up and call, Hey Lieutenant, Bobby Andes, look up here. As he turned he rolled over the gun which he had cocked earlier. He groped for it with his hands, found it, and put it in his left hand so he could push down and raise himself with his right. He had just got one foot under his body and started to push up when the gun went off. The whip slammed into his gut, the sound he hated came later.
Damn!
he said, why did I do that? For a moment he thought he had shot himself.

What a recoil, he’d forgotten how hard it could kick, it knocked him flat. If it was a bullet through his gut, he’d be dead. He was on his back, face up to what should have been sky. The blow of it tightened the rope around his middle, worse than before. He tried to work it loose. He tried to move, but the rope was tightening, holding him down. If it was a bullet, it had missed his vital parts, it wasn’t as if he was dying, but it was pulling through him, it was dragging him on the ground. My God, he said. If that’s what it was. He thought, Why did I do a stupid thing like that? If I’m bleeding to death. The rope was tied through his middle, holding the broncos in the corral so they wouldn’t spill out, but they were bucking pretty hard. Field mice were slipping out under the lower bars.

If this was really the big news, he wondered why it didn’t seem more important. He thought, Would a bullet feel like a rope? It would feel like what it feels like. He groaned,
recognizing. So, he said, here comes another life for Tony Hastings. This would be a lifetime of dying. It would stretch from past to future dominated by one fact, a bullet through his belly. Though you get used to everything, he had no interest in anything else.

A long time afterwards he was aware he had long ago heard a voice saying, ‘Jesus, what was that?’ You would expect the police to round up the cattle set loose by the rustlers pretty soon, wouldn’t you? Yet they did not come. It was a long time before they did not come.

If they did not come: a remnant of brain suggested he should be thinking about dying, he should be giving it his full attention. Tony Hastings dying, think of that. He ought to be more surprised. Vaguely he remembered things he had wanted to think about when he died, but he couldn’t remember what they were. At least he ought to figure out why he had died. The kind of question others would ask, how it could have been avoided, what he should have done differently. Must be he got his left and right hands mixed up. If he had meant to lift himself by the right hand against the ground, but had pushed down instead with the left, which was holding the gun in his gut. Pressure of finger against the trigger, in the confusion of groping for the hard ground through his soft belly. A neurological mistake, caused by the shock of being blind, though he should have been used to that, having been blind so long already.

It occurred to him if the police got up here in time they might save him. If having heard the shot they scrambled up through the brush, they could call an ambulance on their radio. It didn’t seem likely. He heard no signs of them.

It occurred to him they would find his body and think he had committed suicide. It seemed like a logical conclusion,
they would not be surprised. He wondered what motives they would attribute to him. Probably (they would say) he did it because he could not tolerate being blinded on top of all he had lost. (They would not know he had reconciled himself to that.) Or perhaps he was so obsessed with the crime committed against him and the need for revenge that when Ray died he had no further need to live. (They did not know about Louise Germane waiting for him – if she would take him blind.) Or else (underestimating his cynicism and his cowardice, those all-important qualities) it was his idealism: his inability to endure the self-knowledge forced on him by Bobby Andes and Ray, whereby he too was revealed with no moral advantage over his enemies except what he retained from the fact that they started it. More likely (not knowing how cheerfully he had reconciled himself to waiting) they would simply attribute it to impatience with pain and dying: having realized not only that he was blind but that he had been shot by Ray and was bleeding to death, he couldn’t take it any longer. It was too much for him and he cracked. It was unlikely the cops would call his death an accident.

He really didn’t want to die, and he wished they would hurry up. Meanwhile the rope through his middle explored him, it mapped his territory. The organs in his middle included, though he did not know exactly which was which or where each one was, the liver, kidney, spleen, appendix, pancreas, gall bladder, and miles of intestines, large and small. He tried to think what else there was and regretted he had not been on more familiar terms with them while he lived.

The only definite thing he knew was this: he was free to continue his trip to Maine. After all this time, more than a year. The police told him this when they arrived at last, standing by the door congratulating him as he got into the driver’s seat
and strapped himself in. The seat belt was tight around his middle. They shook his hand. Wished him well. Told him the route, estimates of how long it would take.

And so he had gone, and now he was driving fast with a little of the cowboy and the baseball player still in him, almost singing for the joy of it, and in no time at all he was there. He saw the summer house at the end of the road, down the slope. It was a big old-fashioned two-story house with gable windows and a porch. All the windows and the porch were screened, it was covered with screens. He drove down the drive and onto the grass, and saw them in the water waiting for him. He walked down the grass to the water’s edge.

‘Come on in,’ Laura said, ‘we’ve been waiting for you.’

‘What took you so long?’ Helen said.

He asked, ‘Is it cold?’

‘Pretty cold,’ Laura said, ‘but you can bear it.’

‘It’s better after you’ve been in a while,’ Helen said.

They were standing up to their necks so he could see only their heads. The water was flickering blue and white like sweet milk in the afternoon light, and the fuzzy pine islands out in the bay shimmered with summer joy.

He stepped into the water, icy around his feet. Laura and Helen laughed. ‘You’ve been away too long,’ Laura said. ‘You’re all out of shape.’

He looked back up the slope to the house standing on the grass, high and spacious and beautiful. The screen door on the screened porch was propped open, and two of the screened windows on the second floor were open, he did not know why. He thought how good it would be to return to the house after his swim, to walk up the grass and go inside and sit in the big empty pine-smelling rooms and enjoy the warming up after the chill. Then they could talk, all he remembered
that he wanted to tell them. He wanted to tell her about her arms swinging as she walked up to the house. He wanted to ask if they had ever quarreled. He couldn’t remember and he hoped not. He wondered if he was ever jealous, he thought probably not, and if she was jealous of him, he hoped not, for he did not think he had ever given her cause. He wanted to tell her he remembered the blueberry field and something after that, he had forgotten.

But not yet, first there was this. Only their heads were above the surface, laughing and encouraging him, as he moved gingerly in the bitter cold water step by step toward them. It was hard to move, while they waited with such generosity and welcome he could hardly bear his happiness. With all his strength he pushed on, while the ice kept rising. It rose from his ankles to his knees, from his knees to his groin and groin to hips. It seized him freezing around his belly. It crept up to his chest, it covered his heart, it clutched his neck. Then still rising still freezing it reached his mouth and filled his nose and closed his burning eyes.

The book ends. Susan has watched it dwindle before her eyes, down through final chapter, page, paragraph, word. Nothing remains and it dies. She is free now to reread or look back at parts, but the book is dead and will never be the same again. In its place, whistling through the gap it left, a blast of wind like liberty. Real life, coming back to get her.

She needs a silence before returning to herself. Absolute stillness, no thought, no interpretation or criticism, just a memorial silence for the reading life that has ended. Later she’ll think about it. She’ll put things together, make sense of her reading, and decide what to say to Edward. Not yet.

There’s a shock of terror in the return of real life, concealed by her reading, waiting to swoop down on her like a predator in the trees. She dodges it – not yet for that, either. The kids upstairs, who came back in the middle of the last chapter: it’s their time now. She hears them laughing and squealing. She puts the cover on the box, the box on the shelf, checks the rooms, the front and back doors, turns off the lights, starts up.

They are all three on the floor in Rosie’s room, Rosie in her pajamas. Dorothy’s and Henry’s faces are unnaturally red.

‘Hi, Mama,’ Dorothy says. ‘Guess what?’

‘Henry’s in love,’ Rosie says.

He is grinning, triumph overruling embarrassment.

‘How exciting,’ she says. ‘Who with?’

‘Elaine Fowler,’ Dorothy says.

‘That’s news? Why, Henry’s been in love with Elaine Fowler for the last year.’

Rosie looks disappointed. Henry mumbles. ‘This is different.’

Dorothy says, ‘It’s moved into a new phase.’

‘A new phase. How wonderful.’

‘What did you do this evening, Mama?’ Dorothy says.

Susan Morrow is startled. ‘Me? Why, nothing. I finished my book.’

‘How was it? Good?’

She’s not ready for that question. But she’s back in the real world, where it’s time to discriminate and be responsible. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘It’s good enough.’

Later, her mind loosens and the book liquefies. It’s impossible to say when. Maybe when she’s in bed, the house dark. More likely earlier, subliminally when she closed the house or while talking to the children. It’s impossible to pin her thought to a time or unfold it in a sequence.

Still conscious that some frightening reality has been planted in her mind, she postpones it still, to dwell longer in the book. She remembers her pang for Tony in the last sentences like a stab of personal grief. The sharpness fades when she thinks about it, as such things do. The water scene at the end reminds her of something. But does she understand why Tony has to die? She looks back, sees the path leading to death, its shape through the woods. He was on the way to Maine, he gets there in the end. She likes the ending better than she expected to, but has no idea if it’s right, or whether it resolves the questions raised. That requires recollection and thought she’s not ready for, if she’ll ever be, for now she’s not even sure it matters. If she asks Edward, he’ll think her dumb.

Forgetfulness follows the trail of her reading like birds eating the Hansel and Gretel crumbs. The path from the beginning is obliterated with weeds. It has buried the bodies of Tony Hastings’s wife and child and will bury Tony too. She tries to remember things. Helen on the rock fifty feet down the road, poor kid. Helen as Dorothy, as Henry too. Ray the weasel, where did he come from? Remember Tony miserable looking up the slope to Husserl’s: what made you name the neighbor that? Tony, man of postures, she’s ashamed of her superiority as she sees him flip from one stance to another, looking to clothe a burning body when it was the icing water he needed. Susan as Tony.

She knows that mountain road as if she had been there herself. Sees it with the same clarity blind Tony saw the tree he shot. The clearing, the mannequins, the trailer by the curve in the road. And Tony staggering over the bulky body of Ray. But around such spots as these the acid burns, the pages crumple.

There’s a feeling of loose ends hanging, but she finds it hard to remember. She wonders what happened outside the story. Back at the camp: what tale did Bobby finally tell his men? Did they buy it? Would it matter? Louise Germane, left behind and forgotten, it’s just as well for her.

The house in Maine with its porch and screens looks like her house, which Edward visited at fifteen and again when they were married. All those screens. She sees Tony looking at it in his dim archetypal blindness, and she feels meanings around her which she cannot see. She wonders if they are real or only her imagination and how long it will take her, if ever, to know.

She wants to talk, she doesn’t want to talk. What can she say? She’s ashamed to tell Edward how blind she feels. If
readers could simply applaud and writers bow. She can do that. She can applaud, she can honestly tell Edward she liked his book, and that’s a relief. Postpone the critique. She had fun and felt regret when it ended. That will please him. Would you recommend it to your friends? Depends on the friend. Would you recommend it to Arnold? Sure she would. It would serve him right.

The secret fright she keeps dodging in her mind somewhere: that’s her private problem. It has nothing to do with the book.