Bag of Bones (50 page)

“I understand that things will heal quicker if I keep my eyes down, my mouth shut, and my knees together,” she said, “and I'll do my best to go along,
but diplomacy only stretches so far. That old man was trying to take my daughter away, don't they realize that down at the goddam general store?”

“
I
realize it.”

“I know. That's why I wanted to talk to you.”

“What if we had an early supper on the Castle Rock common? Same place as Friday? Say five-ish?”

“I'd have to bring Ki—”

“Fine,” I said. “Bring her. Tell her I know ‘Hansel and Gretel' by heart and am willing to share. Will you call John in Philly? Give him the details?”

“Yes. I'll wait another hour or so. God, I'm so happy. I know that's wrong, but I'm so happy I could
burst
!”

“That makes two of us.” There was a pause on the other end. I heard a long, watery intake of breath. “Mattie? All right?”

“Yes, but how do you tell a three-year-old her grandfather died?”

Tell her the old fuck slipped and fell headfirst into a Glad Bag,
I thought, then pressed the back of my hand against my mouth to stifle a spate of lunatic cackles.

“I don't know, but you'll have to do it as soon as she comes in.”

“I will? Why?”

“Because she's going to see you. She's going to see your face.”

*   *   *

I lasted exactly two hours in the upstairs study, and then the heat drove me out—the thermometer on the stoop read ninety-five degrees at ten o'clock. I guessed it might be five degrees warmer on the second floor.

Hoping I wasn't making a mistake, I unplugged the IBM and carried it downstairs. I was working without a shirt, and as I crossed the living room, the back of the typewriter slipped in the sweat coating my midriff and I almost dropped the outdated sonofabitch on my toes. That made me think of my ankle, the one I'd hurt when I fell into the lake, and I set the typewriter aside to look at it. It was colorful, black and purple and reddish at the edges, but not terribly inflated. I guessed my immersion in the cool water had helped keep the swelling down.

I put the typewriter on the deck table, rummaged out an extension cord, plugged in beneath Bunter's watchful eye, and sat down facing the hazy blue-gray surface of the lake. I waited for one of my old anxiety attacks to hit—the clenched stomach, the throbbing eyes, and, worst of all, that sensation of invisible steel bands clamped around my chest, making it impossible to breathe. Nothing like that happened. The words flowed as easily down here as they had upstairs, and my naked upper body was loving the little breeze that puffed in off the lake every now and again. I forgot about Max Devore, Mattie Devore, Kyra Devore. I forgot about Jo Noonan and Sara Tidwell. I forgot about myself. For two hours I was back in Florida. John Shackleford's execution was nearing. Andy Drake was racing the clock.

It was the telephone that brought me back, and for once I didn't resent interruption. If undisturbed, I might have gone on writing until I simply melted into a sweaty pile of goo on the deck.

It was my brother. We talked about Mom—in Siddy's opinion she was now short an entire roof
instead of just a few shingles—and her sister, Francine, who had broken her hip in June. Sid wanted to know how I was doing, and I told him I was doing all right, I'd had some problems getting going on a new book but now seemed to be back on track (in my family, the only permissible time to discuss trouble is when it's over). And how was the Sidster? Kickin, he said, which I assumed meant just fine—Siddy has a twelve-year-old, and consequently his slang is always up-to-date. The new accounting business was starting to take hold, although he'd been scared for awhile (first I knew of it, of course). He could never thank me enough for the bridge loan I'd made him last November. I replied that it was the least I could do, which was the absolute truth, especially when I considered how much more time—both in person and on the phone—he spent with our mother than I did.

“Well, I'll let you go,” Siddy told me after a few more pleasantries—he never says goodbye or so long when he's on the phone, it's always
well, I'll let you go,
as if he's been holding you hostage. “You want to keep cool up there, Mike—Weather Channel says it's going to be hotter than hell in New England all weekend.”

“There's always the lake if things get too bad. Hey Sid?”

“Hey what?” Like
I'll let you go, Hey what
went back to childhood. It was sort of comforting; it was also sort of spooky.

“Our folks all came from Prout's Neck, right? I mean on Daddy's side.” Mom came from another world entirely—one where the men wear Lacoste
polo shirts, the women always wear full slips under their dresses, and everyone knows the second verse of “Dixie” by heart. She had met my dad in Portland while competing in a college cheerleading event. Materfamilias came from Memphis quality, darlin, and didn't let you forget it.

“I guess so,” he said. “Yeah. But don't go asking me a lot of family-tree questions, Mike—I'm still not sure what the difference is between a nephew and a cousin, and I told Jo the same thing.”

“Did you?” Everything inside me had gone very still . . . but I can't say I was surprised. Not by then.

“Uh-huh, you bet.”

“What did she want to know?”

“Everything I knew. Which isn't much. I could have told her all about Ma's great-great-grandfather, the one who got killed by the Indians, but Jo didn't seem to care about any of Ma's folks.”

“When would this have been?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might.”

“Okay, let's see. I think it was around the time Patrick had his appendectomy. Yeah, I'm sure it was. February of '94. It might have been March, but I'm pretty sure it was February.”

Six months from the Rite Aid parking lot. Jo moving into the shadow of her own death like a woman stepping beneath the shade of an awning. Not pregnant, though, not yet. Jo making day-trips to the TR. Jo asking questions, some of the sort that made people feel bad, according to Bill Dean . . . but she'd gone on asking just the same. Yeah. Because once she got onto something, Jo was like a terrier with a rag in
its jaws. Had she been asking questions of the man in the brown sportcoat? Who
was
the man in the brown sportcoat?

“Pat was in the hospital, sure. Dr. Alpert said he was doing fine, but when the phone rang I jumped for it—I half-expected it to be him, Alpert, saying Pat had had a relapse or something.”

“Where in God's name did you get this sense of impending doom, Sid?”

“I dunno, buddy, but it's there. Anyway, it's not Alpert, it's Johanna. She wants to know if we had any ancestors—three, maybe even four generations back—who lived there where you are, or in one of the surrounding towns. I told her I didn't know, but you might. Know, I mean. She said she didn't want to ask you because it was a surprise. Was it a surprise?”

“A big one,” I said. “Daddy was a lobsterman—”

“Bite your tongue, he was an
artist
—‘a seacoast primitive.' Ma still calls him that.” Siddy wasn't quite laughing.

“Shit, he sold lobster-pot coffee-tables and lawn-puffins to the tourists when he got too rheumatic to go out on the bay and haul traps.”

“
I
know that, but Ma's got her marriage edited like a movie for television.”

How true. Our own version of Blanche Du Bois. “Dad was a lobsterman in Prout's Neck. He—”

Siddy interrupted, singing the first verse of “Papa Was a Rollin' Stone” in a horrible offkey tenor.

“Come on, this is serious. He had his first boat from his father, right?”

“That's the story,” Sid agreed. “Jack Noonan's
Lazy Betty,
original owner Paul Noonan. Also of
Prout's. Boat took a hell of a pasting in Hurricane Donna, back in 1960. I think it was Donna.”

Two years after I was born. “And Daddy put it up for sale in '63.”

“Yep. I don't know whatever became of it, but it was Grampy Paul's to begin with, all right. Do you remember all the lobster stew we ate when we were kids, Mikey?”

“Seacoast meatloaf,” I said, hardly thinking about it. Like most kids raised on the coast of Maine, I can't imagine ordering lobster in a restaurant—that's for flatlanders. I was thinking about Grampy Paul, who had been born in the 1890s. Paul Noonan begat Jack Noonan, Jack Noonan begat Mike and Sid Noonan, and that was really all I knew, except the Noonans had all grown up a long way from where I now stood sweating my brains out.

They shit in the same pit.

Devore had gotten it wrong, that was all—when we Noonans weren't wearing polo shirts and being Memphis quality, we were Prout's Neckers. It was unlikely that Devore's great-grandfather and my own would have had anything to do with each other in any case; the old rip had been twice my age, and that meant the generations didn't match up.

But if he had been
totally
wrong, what had Jo been on about?

“Mike?” Sid asked. “Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay? You don't sound so great, I have to tell you.”

“It's the heat,” I said. “Not to mention your sense of impending doom. Thanks for calling, Siddy.”

“Thanks for being there, brother.”

“Kickin,” I said.

*   *   *

I went out to the kitchen to get a glass of cold water. As I was filling it, I heard the magnets on the fridge begin sliding around. I whirled, spilling some of the water on my bare feet and hardly noticing. I was as excited as a kid who thinks he may glimpse Santa Claus before he shoots back up the chimney.

I was barely in time to see nine plastic letters drawn into the circle from all points of the compass.
CARLADEAN
, they spelled . . . but only for a second. Some presence, tremendous but unseen, shot past me. Not a hair on my head stirred, but there was still a strong sense of being buffeted, the way you're buffeted by the air of a passing express train if you're standing near the platform yellow-line when the train bolts through. I cried out in surprise and groped my glass of water back onto the counter, spilling it. I no longer felt in need of cold water, because the temperature in the kitchen of Sara Laughs had dropped off the table.

I blew out my breath and saw vapor, as you do on a cold day in January. One puff, maybe two, and it was gone—but it had been there, all right, and for perhaps five seconds the film of sweat on my body turned to what felt like a slime of ice.

CARLADEAN
exploded outward in all directions—it was like watching an atom being smashed in a cartoon. Magnetized letters, fruits, and vegetables flew off the front of the refrigerator and scattered across the kitchen. For a moment the fury which fuelled that scattering was something I could almost taste, like gunpowder.

And something gave way before it, going with a sighing, rueful whisper I had heard before: “
Oh Mike. Oh Mike.
” It was the voice I'd caught on the Memo-Scriber tape, and although I hadn't been sure then, I was now—it was Jo's voice.

But who was the other one? Why had it scattered the letters?

Carla Dean. Not Bill's wife; that was Yvette. His mother? His grandmother?

I walked slowly through the kitchen, collecting fridge-magnets like prizes in a scavenger hunt and sticking them back on the Kenmore by the handful. Nothing snatched them out of my hands; nothing froze the sweat on the back of my neck; Bunter's bell didn't ring. Still, I wasn't alone, and I knew it.

CARLADEAN
: Jo had wanted me to know.

Something else hadn't. Something else had shot past me like the Wabash Cannonball, trying to scatter the letters before I could read them.

Jo was here; a boy who wept in the night was here, too.

And what else?

What else was sharing my house with me?

I
didn't see them at first, which wasn't surprising; it seemed that half of Castle Rock was on the town common as that sultry Saturday afternoon edged on toward evening. The air was bright with hazy midsummer light, and in it kids swarmed over the playground equipment, a number of old men in bright red vests—some sort of club, I assumed—played chess, and a group of young people lay on the grass listening to a teenager in a headband playing the guitar and singing one I remembered from an old Ian and Sylvia record, a cheery tune that went

“Ella Speed was havin her lovin fun,

John Martin shot Ella with a Colt forty-one . . .”

I saw no joggers, and no dogs chasing Frisbees. It was just too goddam hot.

I was turning to look at the bandshell, where an
eight-man combo called The Castle Rockers was setting up (I had an idea “In the Mood” was about as close as they got to rock and roll), when a small person hit me from behind, grabbing me just above the knees and almost dumping me on the grass.

“Gotcha!” the small person cried gleefully.

“Kyra Devore!” Mattie called, sounding both amused and irritated. “You'll knock him down!”

I turned, dropped the grease-spotted McDonald's bag I had been carrying, and lifted the kid up. It felt natural, and it felt wonderful. You don't realize the weight of a healthy child until you hold one, nor do you fully comprehend the life that runs through them like a bright wire. I didn't get choked up (“Don't go all corny on me, Mike,” Siddy would sometimes whisper when we were kids at the movies and I got wet-eyed at a sad part), but I thought of Jo, yes. And the child she had been carrying when she fell down in that stupid parking lot, yes to that, too.

Ki was squealing and laughing, her arms outspread and her hair hanging down in two amusing clumps accented by Raggedy Ann and Andy barrettes.