Voices in the Dark (18 page)

“It’ll be worth your while,” he said. “And I can call it secretarial service and write you off.”

“No, Paul, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Think it over.”

She took a step, but he presented too much weight and mass. He proliferated, listed. He was a solidity she could not get by. “Now I remember you,” she said, releasing a smile luminous and enchanting. “You disgusted me. Your brat would disgust me more.”

She sidestepped him but did not make it past his chair. The first blow glanced off her face. The second cracked a bone.

• • •

Chief Morgan lived beyond Pearson Grammar School on Winter Street in a small gingerbread Victorian in need of painting, caulking, and reshingling, tasks he thought he might one day do himself, though he had no skills. The time spent in it was minimal, the food in the refrigerator was often spoiled, and the dog next door was a nuisance. Anything started it barking. In the kitchen was an old portable television, uncabled. He had seen at least three times every episode of
Kojak
and
The Rockford Files.
Telly Savalas and James Garner were like family.

In the front room he hit a wall switch, and light bulged from a window lamp, a beacon for Kate Bodine, another one outside on the porch. The room, which he and his wife had inexpertly wallpapered, was one he seldom entered, for he learned only too well that the familiar turns sinister in the agony of loss. The summer after Elizabeth’s death, her garden had mocked him with its overlush bloom, sweet William flickering like fire, lupine blazing on the stalk, bleeding heart dripping its sorrow. The red maple sapling planted nearby had taunted him with a shadow longer than his until he tore it up by the roots.

In the bathroom he splashed his face with cold water, smoothed his hair back with wet hands, and wondered whether Kate Bodine would show up. He did not like waiting around, which consumed too much energy, all of it nervous. Then he heard the slow slam of a car door and the bark of the neighbor’s dog and knew she was out there.

Her snappy little car, a tongue of silver in the moonlight, was parked on the street. Stepping silently out the front door, he saw her pause on the sidewalk as if unsure she had the right house. Then in the small driveway she paused again and scrutinized his old Chevy, public property, eaten at the edges, its official function denoted by the town seal. Looking past him as he descended the porch step, she said, “It’s not what I pictured. Do you live in there alone?”

“When I’m here.” The dog, a mongrel, was still yapping. Shrubbery separating the narrow properties stood jagged against the night air. “Would you like to come in?”

His neighbor, an elderly widow with whom he did not get along, hollered from an unlit window. “That you out there?”

“Yes,” he shouted back.

“Who’s that with you?”

“None of your business, Mrs. Winkler.”

Kate said, “Why don’t we walk?” They moved to the sidewalk and strolled side by side in the direction of the school. The moon seemed bigger and nearer than normal, as if some force had driven it down. Kate dropped her head back. “I want to know who threw all those stars up there.”

“I know I didn’t,” Morgan said. “At least not all of them.”

“No mosquitoes,” she observed.

“The town sprayed. You people from the Heights demanded it. Your taxes paid for it.”

“I won’t mention it to my husband. He says the taxes here are exorbitant.”

Thin clouds caroused the lit sky. A breeze walked the street. Morgan said, “How are you doing with your husband?”

“He’s trying to get me pregnant, but it won’t work. I’m on the pill. I’m telling you too much, of course, most of it none of your business.”

“Where is he tonight?”

“Out. I don’t believe he mentioned where. What do you want to talk to me about?”

“About him. I have certain suspicions.”

“He has many about you.” Mosquitoes attacked her legs, and she slapped herself below the knees. “Damn it.”

“We can’t get ’em all,” Morgan said fatalistically, his eye on the school. Darkness packaged the brick, and moonlight ribboned it. They gazed at it.

“Did you go there?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m a real townie. Except for Vietnam, Bensington’s the only world I know.”

“
What
suspicions?”

Slowing his step, he related them in a quiet and reserved voice, no inflections. He mentioned her dead stepson by name and the drowned Gunner girl by age. To his missing prisoner he assigned a kind of perverse truth. At one point, even to his own ear, the drama verged on the preposterous, which temporarily dismayed him. When he finished, she moved away from him with her eyes lifted.

“It’s the stars they say that keep the sky pinned in place. Thank God for the stars, James.”

“What does the moon do?” he asked.

“It moves oceans. For a dead thing I’d say that’s damn good.”

He followed her into folds of darkness beneath a tree, where her scent became the heaviest ingredient in the air. He made out only a single line of her face, enough to draw him close. Her white hand came out of nowhere and manacled his bare wrist.

“I don’t buy it.”

“I didn’t think you would,” he said.

She let go. “You said it yourself. You live in a vacuum.”

• • •

In May Hutchins’s backyard the shallow pool of the birdbath trapped the moon and toyed with its shape. May, refilling a bird feeder, listening to the soothing murmurs of the night, felt magical. Breezes lifted her colored hair, airing her scalp. Moonlight moved over grass, awakened phlox, gave life to a moribund shrub, gripped a croquet ball, and enameled the face of a man in the fretwork of the gazebo.

“Who’s there?” she said, and her voice startled a young raccoon that with racketing claws scrabbled halfway up the pear tree. Through the ghostly dim she could see only the creature’s luminous eyes, like fired bullets frozen between two worlds.

She returned to the house.

Her husband spoke to her through the bathroom door. “Who were you talking to out there?”

“Myself,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. Fluorescent lighting could be cruel.

“You shouldn’t roam around in the dark.”

“Lots of things I shouldn’t do,” she said, “and, damn it, I don’t.”

She lingered in the bathroom, ruminating on the state of her hair and the state of herself. Living on memories, she felt undernourished. She thought back to her fortieth birthday, her realization that her youth had vanished, no way to reach it, address unknown. She had had herself a good cry, and later Roland with his flipper arms had tried to please her in bed. Fifty was when she began brooding over mistakes in her life. At sixty, she supposed, she would learn to live with them.

Roland smiled when she came upon him in the kitchen, his face a milky sheen of chubbiness. “What did you mean by that?” he asked, and her mind had to work back.

“I didn’t mean anything. Forget it.”

He was in old moccasins, which he used for house slippers, and he was only a few years from retirement, which frightened her. Her sister Joan’s husband had retired two years ago and turned womanish, usurping Joan’s kitchen, soaking bottles in the sink for the redeemable labels, clipping recipes from Mary’s magazines before she read them. When one of her friends phoned, he got on the extension to join the conversation, then to monopolize it. He was seldom out of
his
slippers.

Roland said, “You’re in a funny mood, May.”

“It’s my mood. Don’t fuck with it.”

His eyes jittered, for the language wasn’t hers, at least not her public one, but his smile stayed unassuming and uncomplaining. He wasn’t one for going deeply into things, but he was, she readily admitted, a good provider, his heyday when the Heights was under development. He had wired most of the grand houses, including the Gunners', the grandest.

Watching him turn away, she softened her feelings. He was shelter, he was groceries on the table, he was the balance in her checkbook, and he was more than that. He had to be. Watching him rub the nape of his neck, she knew he was ready for bedtime television.

In the bedroom, he placed his coin purse on the dresser, and they began readying themselves for bed with their backs turned, though she could see him in the mirror. With his shirt off, he looked like a boiled potato. His pants gone, his body struggled for shape. Yet, she wondered, would Fred Fossey, her would-be lover, look any different in the round? Fred Fossey, she suspected, did not wear pajamas.

Roland switched on the television.
Law & Order.
“Okay?” he asked and padded to the window to raise the shade for air. Moonlight bathed him, breezes blew in.

“I think I’d like to watch Barbara Walters,” she said, propping her pillows. Head bent, he stood tranced looking out the window. She waited. “Did you hear me, Roland?”

He didn’t move. His eyes were cast into the night. “Somebody’s out there.”

She reached across the bed for the clicker and changed channels and raised the volume. Her interest was in Barbara Walters’s hairdo, which her own at times resembled.

Roland’s voice was a rasp. “A man’s in the gazebo.”

Settling back against the propped pillows and curling her legs under the covers, she said, “I know who it is. Let him be.”

• • •

“Let me out here,” Regina Smith said when they made the turn into the gateway of the drive. The headlights, supernovas, cast fogbows. Harley Bodine’s foot was on the brake.

“We’re not hiding anything,” he said in the tone of a younger man. “We’re not children.”

“I would hope not, Harley.”

“Friends can’t have dinner?”

“It was a fine dinner,” she said, opening her door. “Thank you.”

“No,” he said. “Thank
you.
“

She accepted a kiss on the cheek, climbed out, and stepped aside, her mind elsewhere when the car gave a leap back, righted itself on the road, and fled into the night. She began the long walk up the drive at a smart pace. The moon seemed too much stone for the sky, in danger of tearing from its setting. Only a few lights in the large house beckoned.

Inside the front door, mirrors recording her entrance, she slipped her pumps off. Her purse she deposited on a table where a plume of ferns gave off the scent of cinnamon. She clicked on no extra lights. Her ascent up the grand stairway was silent and attended with a kind of unalterable dignity usually seen in older women, dowagers of the first rank.

Her daughter’s room was lit but vacant, the television tuned to a music video of Prince or Michael Jackson (she could not tell them apart) rolling epicene eyes, rubbing an androgynous crotch, and gyrating an ebony ass buggered, she supposed, by the wild fancies of adolescent millions. She moved far down the dim passage, well beyond the sound of the video, carrying with her the badge of high purpose and a perverse thrill of anticipation.

The door to her stepson’s room was half open, and the air pumping out was potent, the scent stronger than what she had drawn from the ferns. The sounds she heard loosed a pulsing vein at her temple, and after fighting through a moment of paralysis in her legs, she looked in. There were clothes on the floor and a rumpus on the bed, the sight at once a grotesque comedy of abuse and an exquisite conspiracy against her. Defiant muscles in her stepson’s taut legs raced into his buttocks, which were banged together like cobblestones. The soles of his feet were dirty, the knees of her daughter rosy. Outrage struck her with the force of a tidal wave.

She reeled away and retreated, for she did not want to witness the mockery of a crescendo. Passing a guest room, she nearly gave out an hysterical horse laugh that would have brought down the roof on her head. As silently as she had climbed the stairs she descended them.

• • •

Harley Bodine returned home and, though he heard his wife at work at her typewriter, knew she had gone out and come back not much before he. This he knew because he had laid a hand on the hood of her car. In a room of her own, her back to him, she sat at a sturdy table in a small chrome and leather swivel chair. “How’s it going?” he asked in a forceful voice, and her fingers slid off the keys.

“Not well,” she said, turning in the chair.

“I didn’t think so.” He idly thumbed the wheel of his lighter, not hard enough to scratch up a flame for the cigarette that hung from his mouth. “Why bother?”

“I want to make my own money again.”

“I give you enough.”

“You make it seem painful.”

“It’s not about the money, is it? It’s something else.” He produced a flame and lit a cigarette. “Tell me what it is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. It’s in your face.”

She said, “How much did you love your son?”

• • •

Dudley stood outside the gazebo on bare feet, his toes gnawing the grass, and gazed up at the calm calamity of stars, some burning beyond their existence, emitting flames no longer there. He was aware of the figure advancing toward him but chose to ignore it until, bearing a burden, it was upon him.

“My wife says you might need these.”

His arms accepted a puffy pillow and a folded blanket, which assured his comfort on the cushioned bench in the gazebo. His gaze returned to the night sky, which he saw as a battle in which many shots are fired at an enemy never seen. “This is too kind.”

“She wants to know if you’ve eaten.”

“I could use a bite.”

“We’ll leave something for you on the back step.”

His gaze focused on a protuberance of stars strung up like the cocked hind leg of a dog. He had never had a dog, never wanted one. A cat had been his love. “That will be wonderful.”

“Then I’ll say good night.”

“And I won’t let the bogeyman get me.”

In the glassy light of the moon Roland Hutchins’s departure was a shuffle. His footsteps were leavings on the grass, his shadow his skeleton. A stunted tree that had not borne leaves in years gave out posthumous rustlings in the breeze. From the dark of a window came May Hutchins’s voice.

“Sleep tight.”