Giovanni's Gift (17 page)

The headlights cast their momentary luminescence over myriad forms, glazing everything in flat white, as I drove along the creek road. This water spruce stump naturally took on the fleeting persona of the crouched assassin, that carcass of spindly driftwood assumed the appearance of some fantasy anorectic about to jump to a sudden suicide under the very car I steered, I who was perhaps as wired by the smoke as by the thimbleful of cognac, indeed maybe just
wired
period. The centerline of this rough mountain road consisted of grass, resolute thistles, clusters of brave Shasta daisies that survived the occasional thrashing of the underside of passing cars. An effort was required of me to keep from being mesmerized by the blanched fur of it. The turnoff and bridge across to the Lewis house awakened me from my reverie. I glanced over my shoulder and could see that they were home tonight; yellow light streamed from windows on both floors. A bird, perhaps a pygmy owl, since it seemed smaller than the barn owls I had seen in the past, flew with brilliant dispatch across the lit breadth of vista before me. Soon I reached the main road, and during the trip into town encountered only one other soul on the highway, a pair of headlamps traveling in the opposite direction.

Downtown at night. Some words in neon along the main street. No pedestrians. A truck, a couple of cars. Streetlights on each corner burned a hallucinogenic green-pink, their luminous globes hung from vintage poles which resembled tall cast-iron fiddlehead ferns. The three traffic lights suspended across the main street on span wires were set on timers and simultaneously changed from yellow to red, at which point I braked and ran my eye up and down the deserted rows of storefronts and businesses, saw the drawn shades of second-floor apartments, and couldn't help but marvel at what different compromises we all have to make in this world, what disparate places we each draw comfort from. I drove slowly, and though I did, the business district soon disappeared behind me. Solid rows of pane-glass and block-granite buildings gave way to darkened hedges and, behind them, lawns; at the end of brick sidewalks rose ornate Victorian houses. Porch lights, which drew crazy insects as usual, made a mellow pooling over shrubs and trellises. Beyond this neighborhood of stately older houses was a gas station, the pumps bright under the island fluorescents, and beyond that were bungalows and a trailer park cozied behind a low wall overrun by tendrils of night ivy. Soon I found myself back out into the countryside, where, a mile down the road, I reached the Hotel St. Clair, a carpenter's gothic of clapboard and fire escapes—an old depot which had fallen on hard times since the afternoon my uncle took me there to have my first beer, the summer he deemed I had come of age. Nostalgia overwhelmed me as I pulled into the dirt lot where I parked. Music came from a side door, which stood ajar.

Within the smoky (I inhaled deeply) tavern were perhaps a dozen people. Some sat on stools, others stood or leaned against the long varnished bar; several men were engaged in a game of pool on a three-quarter table in a back room. I recognized, unexpected, the face of Noah Daiches, and considered for one moment quietly turning and leaving, though I would have no reason not to have just the opposite reaction to his presence here, not really—to walk up to him, a familiar face in a crowd of unfamiliar faces, and greet him. Either way, such thoughts were without much value, since Daiches saw and addressed me before I could have fled. “Grant, what brings you down here? Little slow on the hill?”

“A little,” the warm sensation of my nostalgia having faded.

“What are you having?” He offered me the stool next to his.

I sat, and said to the bartender, “Scotch and water, then.”

Noah continued, face grim, at variance with his words. “Nice party other day. Edmé knows how to do things right.”

“She does.”

My drink was delivered and money taken from the crumpled heap that lay, a miniature damp accordian, before Noah Daiches. “Thank you,” I raised my glass and Noah raised his. Those crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes deepening and lips lifted toward though not fully up into a smile, he said, “
Salud.
”

Nodding at his money, the emptied glasses by his hands, I asked, “Your night off?”

He turned his sculpted head to me. “You must miss being—where was it you were? Rome, you said?”

Lighting a cigarette, I translated easily his remark and sensed he was right, of course, and had in fact bought along with my drink a right not to be questioned by the likes of me. I said, a little meekly or apologetically, “I try to never miss wherever I'm not. I'm here, so why miss there?”

“That's a good philosophy, I guess. Easier to say than live by, I'd expect.”

“You're probably right. I'm sure I fail more than succeed, but I try, anyway.”

“Good, good. So, how
are
things up at Ash Creek, then?”

The question was not offered casually, or as mere pleasantry, but rather with swift, unsettlingly direct nuancing, which is to say it seemed to me a specific inquiry about the continuing siege there. I offered him the bland “Fine,” while thinking perhaps the St. Clair hadn't been such a great idea.

“When I didn't hear from Henry yesterday about following up on that fire, well, I was a little surprised. He decided it was some kind of accident, did he?”

“It was too bad, that fire,” I said, and looked over into Noah's blue eyes and then back down at my hands, cupped as if in prayer around my Scotch.

“Could have been worse. Your uncle was lucky there were so many people there at the time to help out.” He paused. The country music on the jukebox had stopped, and the television suspended over the bar down at the end by the front door softly burbled above the voices of the laughing men and the prattle of ivory on the table beyond the alcove festooned with bags of nuts, chips, pretzels. Some game was being broadcast. I glimpsed the blinding green of the playing field, and the small figures that chased one another around, now and then abruptly enlarged to fill the screen with huge misshapen shoulders and radiant helmets that resembled scarabs dancing some surreal fandango.

“Football,” I said to Noah.

“Very good,” and for once a smile broke on his lips.

I thought to say, Isn't football played during the winter? but reconsidered, wisely enough, and simply said, “I hate sports,” as if it needed any further explaining.

“Myself, I like lacrosse. Nobody around here but me likes lacrosse. They all say it's a game for foreigners, but I like it.”

“That's the one they do on the beach?”

Noah said, “Well, if you say so. Sure, why not.”

“Whatever. I really do hate sports.”

“What do you like, Grant? You strike me as the kind of person who likes—let me guess—books, museums, culture.”

“Do you think it was an accident?” ignoring his question.

“The fire? No, I don't see it as an accident. Even if there hadn't been any of these problems up on the hill, I'd have a hard time seeing how that fire could've got itself going.”

Here was territory I both wanted badly to enter and feared embarking into with Noah. Perhaps the Scotch weighed into my choice of pursuing it, perhaps not, but I did fare forward. “Somebody might just have carelessly flicked a cigarette, or look, there were a lot of kids at the party. I was thinking maybe some kids had gone down there to sneak a butt. God knows, I used to do that when I was younger. Edmé still frowns a little on my smoking, I think, though now I don't bother to hide it anymore.”

Noah Daiches himself was rolling a cigarette even as I spoke, and I watched him with haphazard attentiveness, as you can always tell a lot about someone who rolls by the
way
he rolls his smoke—the degree of deftness, whether he has to lend all his concentration to the exercise or no, if a leaf of tobacco is spilled by a wayward forefinger or heavy tongue. Noah'd done this many times before, I noted; he was dexterous and paid little mind to what he was about, rolled himself a perfect cigarette, lit it, drew the strings of his pouch, and tucked the red packet of rolling papers in one of the pockets of his leather flight jacket.
Papiers Mais,
I saw—the same brand Giovanni Trentas used to use, I recalled from my earlier quarrying in his box. Printed on the cover was a stalk of golden corn bound with a red ribbon. One ear was partly shucked, laying bare its rows of kernels and threads of silk.

“
Très elegante.
”

Noah pulled the packet back out and said, “This paper's the best. Friend of mind up in Vancouver gets them for me. You must know how to roll. Everybody in your generation knows how to roll
something.
Here …” and I took one of the papers, stubbed out my own, and clumsily rolled another with Noah's tobacco. That this man and Giovanni Trentas used the same unusual paper begged a question, I might have thought, which would have to be asked—but asked of someone else. Before I could think about it further, Noah spoke. “Edmé tells me you and Helen never met before.”

“Helen Trentas? No, yes it's true, we hadn't.”

“I wouldn't have believed it if she didn't say so. You looked like old friends the other day.”

“She seems like a nice person,” once more as blandly put as I could manage—again from the suspicion I was being subtly quizzed, though I could give no rational reason why Noah Daiches would want to glean anything from me. “Very beautiful,” I added.

Noah said, “I suppose.”

We sat unspeaking for a few moments and I weighed whether one did such a thing, plunged ahead with questions whose legal meanings were beyond one's competence to fathom, and the substantial significance of whose answers would probably also remain unclear. Blind to the hubris of gypsying ahead into places where I didn't really belong, there to solicit responses from people I did not know, to try to find the answers to questions I wasn't sure about—good Lord!—yet what did I do but stumble forward, with the arrogance of a true Pandora.

“Her father, Giovanni,” was what I said, “I remember him from my days up at Ash Creek. He's the last person I would ever expect to wind up like that.”

“Like what? We're all going to wind up like that someday.”

“Murdered? I don't think so.”

There,
I thought. For better or worse it was on the table. Not that I expected much back for my effort. Daiches signaled the bartender, who refilled his glass.

“I meant deceased. Whoever said he was murdered? Did Helen tell you that?”

“You mean he wasn't?”

“We weren't able to substantiate any such thing. He died of some kind of trauma, if I remember. Coroner concluded he fell to his death.”

“What about his foot missing?”

“You're up in the woods and you die, and when I go up there to recover you, chances are better than even you'll have more than a foot missing. You've put in some time up at Ash Creek. You ought to know how many animals live in the wild.”

“I know—”

“Well, where's all their cadavers? You think every time some mule deer goes and dies, his friends get together and bury him nice and neat? Only reason the woods aren't piled with rotting carcass is because out there they eat each other. And what the scavengers don't want, the maggots'll take. And when the maggots are done, then the microbes set to it. Fact is, if your uncle hadn't found him so soon after he passed—what was it, just a couple days—we would have found a strew of bones and hair, nothing more.” All this notification was offered to me with the flat, assured vocal hues of one who wasn't to be messed with. My sense of Noah's superiority in the matter of forensics and such—I mean, other than at a funeral, I had never even seen a dead body—did prevent me from debating him. It did not, however, inspire a shyness that would forbid my asking another question.

“You think his death has anything to do with these new problems up at the place, these night visits?”

“Why would it?”

“I don't know. I just think—”

“What did you say you do for a living, Grant?”

“I didn't say.”

“If you'll pardon me, you sound an awful lot like some private investigator who hasn't got his license yet.”

Silence from me.

“Look. That was a shame, what happened to Trentas. Must have been kind of an awful ending. Coroner's report suggested his heart wasn't that good. The body was quite scarified, at the base of a slant where it looked to have taken the fall, etcetera. He didn't have too many friends, kept pretty much to himself, serious fellow. Nobody I know had a thing against him, though, either. We didn't need some long-drawn-out investigation to conclude it wasn't a wrongful death. That's what's in the report if I recollect, and beyond that it was case closed. I am aware his daughter thinks otherwise. Which is again not uncommon, but even Henry didn't think there was any foul play involved. So far as these night intrusions go, your uncle only lets me know what's going on when it suits his fancy. None of my business unless he wants to file a complaint. I don't suppose he told you that last time he called me up there, all we found was an old shoe—Milland … Tate … look who's here—”

I turned, saw them both, the latter with jacket and bola tie, looking rather more formal than any of the others here, and said hello. Milland actually clapped me on the back, offered me a sooty smile, and asked me how goes it. Tate was sullen, I thought. Or else contemptuous. Or maybe indifferent. Either way, these men had a lifetime of commonality that made me feel more than ever my being both out of place and out of my league. These were not mere country boys, I recognized, with the possible exception of Milland. They might not have had the upbringing or education I did, but Noah and Tate were, I knew, astute, manipulative, complex, rough men. Around them, I couldn't help but feel like some inept boy.