Tony and Susan (5 page)

The chapter break, Susan wanting no pause looks up to see where she is. In the next room on the floor, Dorothy with the golden hair flat on her back with arms up, dirty elbow. Breasts. Henry’s friend Mike looks at her with slit eyes. Wish she would move, do something. The rasp in Mike’s voice sounds like Ray in the book. In three years Dorothy goes to college. In New York Arnold in the bamboo lounge with who? Dr. Medstud?

He walked fast on the pavement because he knew if he did not, it would be this road forever. Empty dark and despite the black foliage on the trees, blasted. The road turned, it descended, the woods rose over. He came to a fork, which he could not remember from his ride with Lou. Guessing, he took the turn to the right, down the hill, not familiar. He heard a car laboring up. He saw the approaching light and stepped into the woods until it went by. It was not Lou’s car, nor his own, but it could have been, and he thought it wise not to take more risks. Yet wise seemed like nothing in this ravaged world as he walked along, fugitive, afraid of cars and men, as if he had been exiled from his species.

Looking ahead, though. Where are you going? he said.

Police. What police? Bailey police. How will you find them? Telephone, first house. People. Anywhere with people.

Imagining a telephone booth, he felt in his pocket for coins. Okay. Please connect me with the police office in Bailey. Excuse me, my name is Tony Hastings from Ohio, I have a problem. Help! Whatsat you say? Help!

What telephone booth? It needs no telephone booth, any farm house will do. Excuse me, I wonder if I could use your telephone? Land sakes mister you scared me out of my growth cant you see its the middle of the night.

My name is Tony Hastings, I’m professor of mathematics at a university you never heard of. Sic the dogs on him, no strangers snooping round my place middle of the night.

As Tony Hastings while he walked, he tried to look ahead beyond his temporary problems. If it should be necessary to rent a car for the rest of the trip. A call telling Roger McAllen to wait a day or two before opening up the cottage.

Excuse me police please I’m calling to ask are my wife and daughter there? Whatsat you say?

Three guys, name Ray Turk and Lou. Ray has a hateful sneering face triangular not much chin, teeth too big for his mouth, half bald, smash him one. Consider the charges that can be filed. Kidnapping, harassment. Car theft? Rape?

Whatsat you say, start at the beginning for Chrissake. Excuse me Tony Hastings professor Ohio going to Maine driving at night, we ran into these guys on the Interstate, they took my wife and child, no it’s not just a bump on the road.

Looking beyond this problem, jobs to do when we arrive depend on when we arrive. I might reconsider renting a catboat from Jake Malcolm. Oh foolish blind hope. Excuse me, I didn’t mean to scare you, it’s an emergency, may I?

No problems are temporary until they are over. All problems are potentially permanent.

The road was steep down and winding, he had no memory of having come up it. Sure now he had lost the incoming trail, probably at the fork. No point trying to trace it back, he had come too far, nor could he remember the turns they had made – and even if he did, where would it lead to? No village, any village would do, any police station if you can’t find Bailey. Excuse me, if you could call the other police stations with your teletype computer telephone. Because though we didn’t make a specific arrangement, a police station would be a natural clearing house, especially as that’s where we were supposed to meet.

The road leveled out and the trees stopped on both sides. Black fields. Farm country, a valley floor, he could see the shadow line of a ridge at the other end. A car appeared, its lights approaching from a long way off. Tony Hastings dropped down in the ditch and waited for it to go past. Bangor me. He had passed up a hitchhiker years ago, or tonight, Helen’s mistake, she wanted to pick him up. He never thought she would get such a lesson as this. A moment later another car. He was tired of hiding from cars. He thought all cars with headlights were enemies, but he also remembered he was still Tony Hastings. He was standing near a lane that went through an opening in a fence, prepared to run if the car slowed down, into the field full of what was probably corn as tall as he was. The car zipped by.

The big box shape near the road ahead was turning into a house, but his relief died because it had no lights, and he dared not be a stranger waking a sleeping family in the night. The road ended against another, somewhat wider. He saw lights down to the left. Maybe now, he said, at last.

He walked faster, strengthened by a vision of destination. It was a floodlight standing watch, high at the corner between barn and silo illuminating the yard between barn and house. The house itself was dark like the other.

He saw dim red and blue lights advertising beer in a window on the other side, but the window otherwise was also dark. He asked, might not a man in desperate trouble be excused for waking up a sleeping stranger if the trouble were desperate enough? But he knew people in lonely farmhouses kept shotguns for strangers at night (they might be Ray or Turk or Lou).

There were more houses now, after passing one he would see another, all dark except for their floodlit yards. He heard a dog barking behind an illuminated pig trough. He saw dark shapes like rocks in a field and realized they were cows. He noticed the improvement in his eyes. In a cluster of trees a bird started to sing, robin, and he realized the black sky was fading.

This weakening of dark meant dawn, the night was ending. It brought despair, the coming of light catching his nightmare like a photographer and making it real. It brought relief. The pacification of common sense.

Common sense, he said. Think how often you have feared tragedy because Helen was late coming home or Laura did not call on time. Remember the hurricane. Yet none of those disasters occurred, his father and mother lived out their lives, the family still consisted of Tony, his wife Laura, his daughter Helen.

Common sense, however. They banged my car and forced me off the road. They separated me from my family and drove off with them. They dumped me in a lonely place in the woods. They tried to run me down, which would have killed me.

He listened to the terrible news spoken in his head. They are dead, it said. You know they are dead. Repeated: Laura and Helen are dead. Those men have killed them. Common sense tells you that. You know it, you have known it all along, you knew it when you saw them drive off. The only question was whether they have been killed yet or that is still to come. If there was a delay, if there were still a chance to save them.

He looked at it deliberately, his memory, Laura in her traveling slacks and dark sweater standing by the car, Helen with the red kerchief around her head sitting on a rock down the road, both faces looking out the window at him as the car rushed away.

Now though the sky was still dark you could see distinctly the fields, the clumps of trees, the ridges around the valley, the houses and barns. The robins were singing in the clumps of trees. He saw a car approaching. Lights, people awake. No more hiding from cars, it seemed crazy now. Excuse me mister, the nearest village, police. There was a ritual for it, a proper gesture. He held out his thumb, and the car zipped by.

Another car in the other direction, he crossed over and held out his thumb again. No good. Then more cars. People up in the earliest dawn. The ritual gesture didn’t work. When the next car came, a van a few minutes later, he waved his hands above his head: help, help. The van tooted its horn.

His head whistled, his ears noisy, the unslept night dredged holes in his skull. The cold lit yard was like the others he had seen, but in this house there was a light upstairs and another on the ground floor in the back. He stood there, heart pounding.

He stepped up to the little front porch. The door had a window, he could see through the curtain to a corner of the lighted kitchen in the back. He turned the knob to ring the bell, jangly loud. Started up dog barking just inside. A gaunt
woman in an apron appeared in the kitchen, squinting. Stayed where she was. A man in a plaid shirt appeared beside her, white hair. He approached. He pulled the curtain back and peeked out. Said something through the glass. Tony Hastings could not hear through the barking of the dog.

Tony shouted, the words he had memorized. ‘Excuse me sir.’

The wife was behind the man, she bent down, and the dog stopped. The man opened the door a couple of inches.

‘Excuse me sir, I wonder could I use your telephone.’

‘What for?’

‘I’ve had an accident.’

The man was examining his face.

‘Anybody hurt?’

‘No. Well. I don’t know. I need help.’

‘Anybody with you out there?’

‘No just me.’

‘Well okay, come in I guess.’

They turned on the light in the vestibule. The telephone was on a table inside the front door. The dog was black and white and sniffed at him and wagged its tail while the woman held it by the collar.

‘You do look kind of scratched up,’ the man said. ‘Where was this here accident?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tony Hastings said.

‘You don’t?’

‘I’ve been walking half the night.’

‘Got lost, eh?’

‘I’m a stranger here.’

‘Well set down there. Get a load off. What happen, traveling alone, fall asleep at the wheel?’

‘No no, my wife and child.’

‘Wife and child,’ the woman said. ‘They hurt?’

‘He left them at the car,’ the man said. ‘What you want an ambulance?’

‘Not that,’ Tony Hastings said. ‘It’s not that.’ He groped for believable words to bring his nightmare into the world.

‘Maybe you’d like to use the bathroom wash off,’ the wife said.

‘Maybe he’d like to use the telephone first,’ the man said. ‘They’re waiting for him at the car.’

‘Worse than that,’ Tony Hastings said. ‘I can’t explain. It wasn’t an accident. Not exactly. We met these guys. My wife and child.’ Come on, mathematician, explain. ‘They took them. I mean I’ve lost them.’

The man and his wife looked at him.

‘Lost what?’

‘My wife and child.’

‘What do you mean, lost your wife and child?’

‘We ran into these guys on the road. Thugs. Hoodlums. They forced us off the road.’

‘Son of a bitch, these god damn kids,’ the man said.

‘It’s hard to explain. They took my wife and kid. In my car. They took me into the woods. I’ve been walking half the night. I don’t know where they are.’ He felt the tears coming. ‘I don’t know how to find them.’

‘Boy,’ the man said. ‘How could you let them do that to you?’

He shook his head, fought them back. The man and his wife looked at each other.

‘Who should he call?’ the man said.

‘Hamilton?’ the wife said.

‘He aint gonna be up yet.’

‘Rouse him out?’

‘You wanta rouse him outa bed for this?’

‘Who’s Hamilton?’

‘Sheriff.’

‘Someone should be up at Grant Center,’ the wife said.

‘Think so? Don’t do no business until eight.’

‘Jail,’ the wife said. ‘Jail stays open all night.’

‘Only the night guard. He can’t do nothing.’

‘Wake Hamilton then. What good’s a sheriff sleeps all night?’

‘State troopers,’ the man said. ‘They’re open all night.’

‘Why yes of course,’ the wife said.

‘State troopers. That’s who I’d call if you was me.’

‘Okay,’ Tony Hastings said. ‘How do I reach them?’

‘Look up Pennsylvania,’ the wife said.

‘State troopers. Fine men, professionals. They’ll help you. They’re the best.’

‘You make your call and then wash up,’ the wife said. ‘I’ll get you something to eat. You must be worn out.’

‘Sheriff don’t do nothing anyhow. State troopers, they’re the ones. The elite. The finest.’

It wasn’t friendly, it was watchful and dutiful. She went into the kitchen. The man continued to stare at Tony.

‘I want to hear what you tell them cops. I can’t understand, you said they put your wife and kid in the car and drove off with them. What were they, threatening you with a gun?’

‘No gun,’ Tony said.

‘Well damned if I can understand how you let em get away with it.’

‘Damned if I can either.’

Yet he understood well enough, for it had happened to him. The hard thing would be how to make anyone else understand.

Susan Morrow, following Tony Hastings along the country road in the murdering dawn, wonders if she can stand what’s coming. Like Tony she assesses the possibilities. She knows what Tony does not, that there’s another compulsion in these events, the hand of Edward creating destinies. What happens to Laura and Helen depends on the kind of story it is. So while Tony struggles for hope, the reading Susan considers Edward, preparing some unbearable thing. Yet even as she fears, she encourages him, saying, Good work, Edward, you’re doing fine. She’s on edge not only for Tony’s sake but for Edward’s, wondering how he can avoid anticlimax without disaster.

Tony Hastings indoors. He sat in the rickety chair by the telephone inside the door, while the old farmer looked up the state police number. Thinking what to say, he had been thinking half the night. He thought: I must remember Tony Hastings. Mathematician, professor, organizing lectures and making everything clear. Emulate Tony Hastings. Afraid the police wouldn’t listen, if they didn’t understand, crackpot, joker, bum. Nameless, abject, a speck of survival out of the woods. Yet already it was better, indoors, the chair, the burr of the telephone bell in his ear, the old farmer and his wife looking on.

The dark voice said, ‘State Police, Morgan speaking.’

Shock of having to speak, yet Tony Hastings was coming to life, organizing, who when where what why.

‘Excuse me, my name is Tony Hastings. I’m a university professor from Ohio traveling through. I’m trying to find my wife and child. Mrs. Tony Hastings. Has she called in?’

Silence on the other end, Morgan trying to figure out, a bad start. ‘What’s your problem, professor?’

Come back to civilization, Tony. Who where when what why? Try what.

‘We ran into trouble on the Interstate. I think my wife and daughter have been abducted.’

Another definite silence. ‘You need an ambulance?’

‘No, I need help, I need help.’

The silence was conspicuous. Start with what your audience knows, state police: ‘We were traveling on the Interstate –’

‘Hold on a moment.’ He sank into the silence, not yet indoors, though excused for a second chance. He realized it was not necessary to say what he was afraid to say, though. Another man came on. ‘This is Sergeant Miles. Can I help you?’

‘Yes, my name is Tony Hastings.’

‘Yes, Tony. What seems to be the problem?’

‘We ran into trouble on the Interstate. I think my wife and daughter have been kidnapped.’

Again the silence, enough for Tony to notice.

‘Okay Tony, relax. Let me have your name and address.’

Then, ‘Your wife’s name?’

‘And where you are calling from?’

He looked at the old farmer. ‘I’m at Jack Combs’s house in Bear Valley.’

‘Okay Tony, take it easy and tell me exactly what you think happened.’

Never mind the skeptical silences, the patronizing Tonies, the interjected you think, at last Tony Hastings felt safe, back in a world he knew, with organization and machinery and civilized hearts to take care and protect him from horrors. The curious old farmer and his wife, listening, were no longer not kindly, the house was warm, the growing light outside was already adding pale green to the spread of the field across the road.

He was back in the world with a story to tell, an invisible listener taking it down, and two others standing in the hall because there was no place to sit.

He began. ‘Last night, sometime after eleven. Traveling on the Interstate on our way to Maine. We were attacked by another car and forced off the road.’

He told it all, it took him several minutes. He told about the bumping of the cars and how they had to stop. How the guys changed the tire and drove off with Laura and Helen in his car, leaving him to go with Lou in theirs. He told how Lou led him along many roads before taking him finally up the grassy track into the woods where he was put out. How he walked out alone in the dark and met the other car coming in but hid from it and how when it came out again they tried to run him down. And how he had walked miles to find a house, Jack Combs’s, with a light on.

It was as if telling the story made him safe. The police had it, the danger was dispelled, he had come back from the wilderness to five thousand years of progress in a warm house linked by telephone to computer, radio, and a trained specialist. Nothing bad could happen now. In the warm farmer’s house with its breakfast smell, despite the crazy thought that wouldn’t go away saying, you haven’t found them yet.

Sergeant Miles asked questions. What exit did you leave the Interstate? Tony could not say. Describe the three guys. He did
that eagerly. Describe their car. That was harder. License plate? Do you remember any landmarks while you were riding with Lou? (He remembered the small white church. He remembered the trailer above the bend in the mountain road with the light in the window.) Are you sure they were trying to run you down? Could you find your way back to the woods road from where you are now? Oh it was good to be asked questions, he didn’t know how much life he had lost until it was restored by them.

Finally the sergeant said, ‘Thank you Tony. We’ll look into it and call you back.’

‘Wait!’

‘What?’

‘I can’t stay here.’

‘Oh. Hold on a minute.’ The phone went dead.

He glanced at his hosts, who looked away. Strangers at the edge of a village in the early morning, good enough to let him make a phone call, can’t stay here – but where can he stay, with his wife and daughter missing and his car gone and nothing but the clothes he wore and his wallet?

The phone clicked back to life. ‘Tony? Tell you what. We’ll send a man over, pick you up. You can wait here.’

‘Okay.’

‘Man will be over about a half hour.’

So they were coming for him, they would take care of him, the good police, comforting and fatherly. He wanted to rejoice, but the farmer and his wife were looking at him.

‘I’ll give you a bite to eat,’ Mrs. Combs said.

She fed him well at the checkered kitchen table in the harsh light of the hanging bulb, while the husband went out to do the early morning barn work that had roused him to turn on the lights Tony had spotted. Her look was cautious, she did not respond to his thanks, and he ate in silence.

‘Never went in for traveling, myself,’ she said. ‘People is different in foreign parts. Never know what kind you run into.’

He nodded, his mouth was full. Criticism disguised as sympathy, yes maam, he thought, but this happens to be your country where I ran into these people you never know what kind. Nevertheless, be grateful for the good police and the kind if cautious hosts.

By the time the police car came for him it was full daylight though the morning sun was still behind a hill. The car had an official shield on its side and a rack of lights on top. The lights were off. The policeman was a large young man with a small fuzzy brown mustache and a broad front. He looked like a childlike student who kept coming to the office last year to ask for help, Tony couldn’t remember his name.

He said, ‘I am Officer Talbot. Sergeant Miles told me to tell you there has been no report on your wife and child.’

The disappointment in that, he realized he was expecting to be notified any minute that Laura and Helen had called in. He thought, it’s still not eight, most stores and offices are not yet open.

The big young student in uniform idled his engine and spoke into his microphone. The radio snapped in dark male machine voices. Officer Talbot looked serious, grim. He said, ‘You sure you didn’t have no prearranged meeting place?’

‘Yes we did, the police station in Bailey. Only they took me and dumped me in the woods instead.’

‘What’s Bailey?’

‘They said it was the nearest town. We were supposed to go to the Bailey police.’

‘Ain’t no Bailey I ever heard of. Ain’t no Bailey police, that’s sure.’

Bad, bad – although not really new, this news.

‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

They started up, the police car going in the opposite direction from where Tony had come. He felt unexpectedly afraid, as of leaving something behind. He lost track of this new journey immediately, he could not remember the turns nor the frequent villages they passed through. As if riding in this sealed protective car left the nightmare behind but at the same time destroyed the path back to it and therefore the way back to life. He remembered Miles asking if he could find his way back to where he had been from the Combs house and thought, should I have asked Talbot to help me retrace my steps? But he had not made the suggestion, lest there be something obscene about it.

The countryside was green and yellow, rolling and fresh in the morning light. The roads shone black in the sun. They sped suspended high on the sides of hills overlooking broad valleys full of fields and patches of woods, and they descended into woody groves and rode up curves and climbed long straight slopes and slowed for villages and passed clusters of farmhouses and sheds and fields of corn and other fields with cows and yards with pigs and sheep on the opposite slope and dark patches of trees on the tops of the hills. He thought, how beautiful this country if he had Laura to say it to.

The police station was a new one-story brick building surrounded by a chain link fence at the edge of a town. There were cows beyond the fence and a motel across the street. Tony Hastings followed Officer Talbot through a corridor and past a bulletin board and through an office with a counter into another office with two desks. The man at the desk in the farthest corner got up. ‘I’m Lieutenant Graves. Sergeant Miles went home.’

Lieutenant Graves was a small man with round cheekbones
and a small chin like a cartoon squirrel and a black mustache that descended below his mouth on each side. His eyes or the shape of his face made him look a little like Ray in the night. I must not look at him, Tony said. He was afraid the lieutenant’s face would obliterate the memory of Ray’s. While Tony sat in the chair by the desk, Lieutenant Graves read the handwritten document on his desk. He was a slow reader and it took a long time. Then he asked Tony to repeat his story. He took it down on a pad of yellow lined paper, though Tony did not understand how he could compress it into so few laborious words. When the story was finished, he repeated the questions Sergeant Miles had asked. He sat a long time with his chin in his hand.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve already put out an alert for the two cars. That ought to turn up something. Don’t know what else we can do except wait.’

He looked at Tony. ‘Meanwhile, you ain’t got no car. You got a place to stay?’

‘No.’

‘There’s a motel across the street.’ He wrote something on a card. ‘Here’s the taxi number, you want that. Money?’

‘I have credit cards. My checkbook is in my suitcase. That’s in the car. All my clothes.’

‘There’s a bank on Hallicot Street. Opens at nine.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s still early yet. Quite likely they went to sleep somewhere.’

‘Where?’ Tony said.

The lieutenant thought. Nodded. ‘Must say it don’t look too good, with nobody calling in. But you know what I’m thinking. Maybe they left them some place like they left you and it take them a while to walk out. Fixing to take your car no doubt.’

‘That’s what I’ve been thinking, too,’ Tony said, meaning that’s what he was hoping, not saying what he was thinking. The lieutenant was tapping his forehead with his pencil, as if he were thinking other things as well.

‘You want to stay at that motel?’

‘I guess so.’

‘We’ll call you if we get anything.’

Tony Hastings walked across the street to the motel. ‘No car?’ the fat woman said.

‘It’s stolen.’

‘Well, no kidding! So that’s what you were doing at the police. What can you give me for security?’

‘Credit card.’

The motel smelled of plastic and air conditioning, the closed thick brown drapes made an unreal darkness in the room. He lay on the bed in his clothes and instantly the night was back with wind and a swirl of galactic clouds. Ray sitting on the radiator, laughing and saying, Don’t take it so serious, man, we was only kidding. But that was a dream, for now he was awake and crossing the yard to the police station where he saw, newly washed and sparkling in the sun, his car, safely returned. His heart leaped and he went inside. Laura and Helen were on a bench in the hall, there they were, and they jumped up and ran to him, smiling with relief, hugging and kissing and saying, ‘We’re all right, they only wanted us to meet their friends in the trailer,’ and Tony Hastings held them, saying, ‘It’s not a dream, is it? It can’t be a dream because it’s too real for a dream.’

The horrible loud telephone on the table next to his ear. He grabbed it to stop it, heart crashing.

‘Tony Hastings? Lieutenant Graves. Bad news.’

He saw a broad net spread under the trees hung from several treetrunks to catch whatever might fall from the high branches.

‘They found your car in the river over at Topping. Looks like they was trying to get rid of it.’

The strands of the net were gathered in white nodes, spots, dots, pulses, at wide intervals all across the field. ‘What about my wife, my daughter?’

‘Still no word.’

Catching fruit, bodies. ‘They weren’t in the car?’

‘The car was empty. They’re pulling it out now.’

He looked at his watch. He had been asleep a half hour, it was only quarter past nine. If that was Lieutenant Graves’s idea of the worst in bad news.

‘What do you make of it?’ Tony said.

‘Don’t know what to make of it.’

A silence while they pulled up the net, rolled it in.

‘Sir, we’re turning this case over to Lieutenant Andes. He wants to look around. Can he pick you up in a few minutes?’

Tony Hastings’s body full of sandbags. ‘I’m ready now,’ he said.