'Danny?'
'Uh
huh?'
'Tell
me,' Father John repeated.
'Get back?'
Nathan asked, as soon as Linny had climbed down off of him. 'Get back from
where?'
He
was laughing, shocked by her reaction, and when she told him that she thought
he'd gone to Vietnam and died, a dark cloud seemed to descend on the room.
I was
still standing by the front door, a little amazed at the speed and enthusiasm
with which she'd hurtled down the hall and enveloped Nathan. As far as I knew
they could never really have had anything to do with each other. Linny
Goldbourne had been distant from anyone but her peers, and with her father's
apparent racial persuasion she would have been forbidden to even speak to
blacks, let alone make lifelong friends.
I
knew Nathan had figured it out even as I closed the front door and joined them
in the kitchen.
Reverend
and Mrs. Verney, reading his note, not believing for a moment that he'd gone
north for work, had told all and sundry he'd gone to Vietnam and died. That had
been their solution. A solution to shame, to reputation, to the Reverend's
credibility and position.
They
had killed their son to save face.
In
that moment I was glad I'd never gone over and seen them, never told them that
Nathan was back in Greenleaf.
We
sat around the kitchen table, the same table where Nathan and I had sat as
kids, and we talked.
'You
gotta understand that you cannot tell anyone I'm here,' he told her.
Linny
smiled. 'Take it easy, Nathan… not a word.'
'I'm
serious,' he said. 'You say something and word'll get around, and before I know
it there'll be State Troopers or the fuckin' National Guard down here.'
Linny
raised her hand in a placatory fashion. 'Nathan, look,' she said. 'I have no
reason to say anything. I wouldn't even consider saying anything. Besides, if I
said something and they slung you in jail I wouldn't get to come down here and
see you guys.'
She
turned to me and I looked at her - the dark hair, the hazel eyes, the full and
passionate mouth. She reached out and closed her hand against the side of my
face.
'I
missed you,' she said softly. 'I missed you so much, Daniel Ford.'
'And
me you,' I said, and raised my hand to cover hers.
She
leaned across the table and kissed me, her lips against mine for what seemed an
age and everything that I'd felt - the loss and betrayal, the heartache I had
worn on my sleeve since the day she'd left - seemed to evaporate.
I
looked at Linny Goldbourne.
Linny
Goldbourne looked at me.
There
was something smooth and electric passing between us.
I
sensed it, could almost reach out and touch it. There was a wavelength that
flowed in slow-motion: psychic molasses.
She
smiled once more, withdrew her hand, and turned to look at Nathan.
'But Christ,
you can't stay inside the whole time… the war might go on for years,' she said.
Nathan
shrugged his shoulders.
There
was silence for a moment.
'Look,'
she said. 'I understand what you're getting at, but hell, Nathan, a prison is a
prison whatever the hell it looks like. You stay here you'll go out of your
mind.'
And
then she turned to look at me again. To look and to smile. And I perceived it:
that thing that was so much Linny, so much whoever she was. Her
magic.
'I'm
not going to argue with you,' she said, and both her expression and her voice
had warmed. 'I'm here, and I can make things a little more interesting for you
guys.'
She
looked at me. 'Okay?'
I
nodded. 'Okay.'
'Let's
have a drink,' she said. 'Fuck it, let's have seven and get completely
shitfaced and puke in the garden, huh?'
Nathan
looked at me and smiled, a genuine smile, and then he started to laugh, a sound
I hadn't heard for as long as I could recall. The tension was broken, and I
thanked her for that, thanked her silently from the bottom of my heart.
'Sure,
let's drink,' Nathan said. 'Let's drink the place dry.'
I
fetched a bottle of Crown Royal, opened it, took glasses from the side.
'So
maybe we could go out some,' Linny suggested.
Nathan
shook his head. 'Going no place,' he replied.
'I
don't mean now, right now, Nathan. I mean sometime soon, maybe when things have
settled down.'
Nathan
shook his head. 'Believe me, things won't settle down 'til this goddam war is
over.'
Goddam.
He said
Goddam.
So unlike Nathan.
'They'll
settle,' she said. 'And I think you'd be surprised how little people really
care about who went to the war and who didn't. The mood has changed… people are
beginning to resent the fact that it ever started, and the ones that jumped the
Draft are being talked about as the ones who really had guts.'
I
watched Linny. I knew what she was doing, knew she always moved towards
opportunities. Here was a girl who could have anything she wanted, had always
had anything she wanted, and to be denied something that piqued her interest
was a violation of her fundamental rights as a human being. I felt like saying
something, even opened my mouth, but nothing came out. She would convince
Nathan that going out was the only real solution to anything he was feeling.
I
poured another drink. I didn't want to talk of the war. I didn't even want to
talk of whether we would ever leave the house. Now Linny was here I would have
been content to be under house arrest for the duration.
She
laughed suddenly, loudly, a little drunkenly perhaps. 'It's so great to be here
with people that have lived some kind of life… I mean, for Christ's sake,
everyone here is so narrow-minded and predictable, don'tcha think? Get up, go
to work, mow the lawn, read the paper… Jesus, could you imagine having a life
like that?'
She
reached out once again and touched my hand. 'So rare to collide with someone on
the same wavelength, eh?'
Someone.
That's
what she said.
And
again she looked at me, and for the first time since leaving Greenleaf I felt
that something right was happening. Just for a moment I felt that the past had
all disappeared behind me and meant nothing at all.
A
little later we smoked some weed that Linny had brought, and despite everything
she seemed to lift the mood and atmosphere for a while. Nathan and I had become
introverted, spending too much time thinking about what had happened, what was
happening, what might happen if this or that occurred.
Linny
Goldbourne had arrived, and with her arrival the seriousness of our situation
was eased briefly. I think both of us - regardless of those things that were
never really voiced - were grateful for that.
When
she left she held me close, pulled me tight towards her and kissed me again. 'I
would stay,' she said, 'but I can't. It's good to see you.'
'And
you,' I said, and buried my face in her hair, smelled the rich and heady scent
of her perfume, the whisky, everything that she was.
She
promised to return the following day, to bring some provisions, to make some
dinner for us.
Nathan
had again asked for her discretion, to say nothing, to come and go quietly.
She
had smiled, reached up her hand and held it there against his cheek. She said she
would be quiet, like a ghost, and she hugged him.
I
watched her go from the door, and when I closed it I felt the light had gone
out.
I was
drunk, but I did not sleep.
She had
held me the same way she'd held me in a diner in Atlanta on the day Martin
Luther King was buried. Held me slowly and closely - a little too long to be
simply the pleasure of a chance meeting, a reunion, an acquaintance missed and
reconnected.
I hadn't
asked her why she had suddenly disappeared back then, that afternoon in June of
the previous year. So sudden. So unexpected and unexplained.
And
Linny Goldbourne hadn't offered up any explanation herself.
If
I'd realized then that she was the messenger, the carrier of our destiny, I
would have locked the doors, bolted the windows, and convinced Nathan we should
both hide in the basement until she lost interest.
But I
did not. I was still enchanted by her.
Nathan
Verney - a man possessed of his own loneliness and longing - was, I think,
enchanted too.
How
much, I didn't know, and how far this thing would eventually travel I had no
idea. And so I watched her leave, even walked to the front window and saw her
make her way down to the sidewalk and turn away. She glanced back, and I was
glad of that, for it told me that this was not the same departure as before.
Perhaps
I'd felt I'd lost too much already: my folks, Caroline Lanafeuille, Eve
Chantry. Like life had been a chain of losses with some vague and forgettable
interruptions in between.
Hell
of a way to think of your life, but I felt that Linny Goldbourne's return had
served to begin a redress of wrongs, a correction of the universal balance that
had so precariously tipped away from me.
And
Nathan was excited too, he spoke of her endlessly after her departure. He asked
me for every detail of the time she and I had spent together that summer.
Seemed
Linny Goldbourne was the last important thing that had occurred prior to our
departure, and the first on our return.
How
important we would soon
know.
For
now, I was content to lose myself in some vague and drunken bliss of
remembering, and Nathan was content to listen.
She would
come the following day, she would come every day, and the more she came the
more I seemed to lose myself. We slept together, we laughed and got drunk, we
smoked weed, and then we fucked again. Nathan seemed oblivious to any degree of
exclusion, and I suppose I saw myself as the one who deserved this association.
I had been the follower, the one who had compromised what I wanted, what I
believed, and now it was my turn to have something exclusively for myself.
Or so
I believed.
'You
believed?' Father John asked. 'What d'you mean?'
'I
sensed that she started to lose interest in me.'
Father
John raised his eyebrows.
'Little
things. At first I didn't notice… but they were there.'
'Like
what?'
'The
way she said his name. The way she would look at him a little too long… things
like that.'
'And
it wasn't your imagination?'
I
smiled and shook my head. 'No, it wasn't my imagination.'
'You
felt you were losing her?'
'Yes,
I felt I was losing her… she'd been with us a week, perhaps ten days, and
already she was fading.'
'What
did Nathan say to you about her… about her father?'
'Nathan
said he didn't care who her father was or what he might do. I let him think whatever
he wanted. It was his life, not mine, and he didn't owe me anything.'
'And
you felt that he was taking her away from you?'
I
shook my head. 'Not at first. I felt like she was taking him away from me… and
then I felt that she'd used me, and then that she was using both of us. I got
confused. All I knew was that she'd come down almost every day, and when she
came it was to see me and me alone… and then she started spending time with
Nathan, telling me she felt bad because he was on his own downstairs.'