If You Could See Me Now (22 page)

A
s I went across the lawn toward the house I could hear the stereo going. Someone was playing the song “I'm Beginning to See the Light” on the Gerry Mulligan record. My anger at Bertilsson's inspiration left me all at once: I felt tired, hot, directionless. The smell of bacon cooking drifted toward me with the sound of Chet Baker's trumpet. I came up onto the screen porch and felt suddenly cooler.

Alison Updahl, chewing on something and dressed in her uniform, appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. Her T-shirt was pale blue. “Where were you, Miles?” I just went past her. When I reached the old bamboo couch I collapsed into it, making its joints creak and sing. “Would you mind if I turned off the music? I don't think I can listen to it now.”

“You don't mind my—” She pointed to the turntable and lifted her shoulders.

“Not enough to actually object,” I said. I leaned over and lifted the tone arm with trembling fingers.

“Hey, you were in church,” she said grinning a little. She had noticed my necktie and striped trousers. “I like you in those clothes. You look sort of classy and old-fashioned. But isn't it early for church to be out?”

“Yes.”

“What did you go there for anyway? I don't think they want you there.”

I nodded.

“They think you tried to kill yourself.”

“That's not all they think.”

“Don't let them bug you. You and old man Hovre are in real good, aren't you? Didn't he invite you to his house?”

The bush telegraph. “How do you know that? Did I tell you?”

“Everybody knows that, Miles.” I sagged back into the couch. “Hey, it doesn't mean anything. Not really. They just talk.” She was trying to lift my mood. “It doesn't mean anything.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the positive thinking. Did you come over just to play the records?”

“You were going to meet me, remember?” She pulled her shoulders back, smiling at me, and put her hands in the small of her back. If the clothing she wore had seams, they were straining. Her blood smell hovered between us, neither increasing nor decreasing. “Come on. We're going on an adventure. Zack wants to talk to you.”

“Women would make great generals,” I said and followed her back outside.

Minutes later I was driving past the church. The sound of singing carried all the way to the road. She looked at the cars in the parking spaces, stared at the church, and then turned to look at me with genuine astonishment. “You left early? You walked out?”

“What does it look like?”

“In front of everybody? Did they see?”

“Every single one of them.” I loosened the knot of my tie.

She laughed out loud. “Miles, you're a real cowboy.” Then she laughed some more. It was a pleasant, human sound.

“Your pastor seems to think I'm a sex murderer. He was shouting for the noose.”

Her high approving good humor suddenly died. “Not you
not you,” she said, almost crooning. She twisted her legs up beneath her. Then she was silent for a long time.

“Where are we going?”

“One of our places.” Her voice was flat. “You shouldn't have gone. It just makes them think you're trying to trick them somehow.”

It was better advice than Polar Bears', but it was too late. She let herself slump over so that her head rested on my shoulder.

I had undergone too many swift alterations and swings of feeling, and this gesture nearly made me weep. Her head stayed on my shoulder as we drove toward Arden through the rising, sun-browned hills. I was looking forward to seeing her march into Freebo's as though beneath her sandaled feet were not wooden boards but a red carpet. This time, I considered, we would both need the mysterious protection of “who Zack was” to get into Freebo's.

Yet it was not Freebo's to which she was taking me. A mile outside of Arden we approached a juncture I had not yet permitted myself to notice, and she straightened up and said “Slow down.”

I glanced at her. Her head was turning, showing her blunt profile beneath the choppy blond fringe of hair. “Left here.”

I slowed the Nash to a crawl. “Why here?”

“Because no one ever comes here. What's wrong with it?”

Everything was wrong with it. It was the worst place in the world.

“I'm not going up there,” I said.

“Why? It's just the old Pohlson quarry. There's nothing wrong with it.” She looked at me, her face concentrated. “Oh. I think I know why. Because it's where my aunt Alison died. The one I was named after.”

I was sweating.

“Those are her pictures in your upstairs room, right? Do you think I look like her?”

“No,” I breathed. “Not really.”

“She was bad, wasn't she?” I could sense her heating up again, pumping out that odor. I stopped the car. Alison said, “She was like you. She was too freaky for the people around here.”

“I suppose.” My mind was working.

“You in a trance or something?” She biffed my shoulder. “Get out of it. Turn up. Turn up the path.”

“I want to try something. An experiment.” I told her what I wanted her to do.

“You promise you'll come up afterward? You won't just drive away? It's not a trick?”

“I promise to come up afterward,” I said. “I'll give you five minutes.” I leaned across and opened her door. She crossed the deserted road and began to march stiffly up the track to the quarry.

For two or three minutes I waited in the heat of the car, looking unseeing down the highway. A wasp flew in, all business, and bumped his head against the windshield several times before losing his temper and zooming by accident out the window on the other side. A long way down the highway a broiler farm occupied the fields to the left, and specks of white which were chickens moved jerkily over the green in the sunlight. I looked up toward a flat blue sky. I heard nothing but the mindless twitter of a bird.

When I got out of the car and stood on the sticky tar of the highway I thought I could hear a faint voice calling; if it was a voice, it seemed indistinguishable from the landscape, coming from nowhere in particular; it could have been a breeze. I got back in the car and drove up the track to the quarry.

The day I had returned to the Updahl farm I had expected a surge of feeling, but experienced only flatness and disappointment; the act of stepping out into the terrific heat of the flat grassy area near the quarry hit me with an only half-anticipated force. I anchored myself in the present by placing the palm of my right hand on the baking metal of the top of the Nash. It all looked very much the same. The grass was browner, because of the summer's dry heat, and the outcroppings of speckled rock appeared more jagged and prominent. I saw the same flat gray space where the workmen's sheds had stood. The screen of bushes above the quarry itself had grown spindly, the small leaves like brushstrokes, dry and brown, papery. Drawn up nearer to them than my car was a dusty black van. I pulled my hand off the hot metal of the car and walked on the path through the bushes to the rocky steps down to the lip of the quarry.

They were both there. Alison sat with her feet in the water, looking up at me with expectant curiosity. Zack, a bisected white exclamation point in his black bathing suit, was grinning, snapping his fingers. “It's the man,” he said. “It's my main man.”

“Did you shout?”

Zack giggled. “Wowee.”
Snap-snap
of his fingers.

“Did I shout? I screamed my head off!”

“How long?”

“A couple of minutes. Couldn't you hear?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “You screamed as loud as you could?”

“I'm practically hoarse,” she answered. “If I yelled any longer, I would have ripped something.”

Zack bent his legs and sat down on the black pile of his clothing. “It's the truth, man. She really hollered. What's it about, anyhow? What's your stunt?”

“No stunt,” I said. “Just finding out about an old lie.”

“You're too hung up on the past, Miles.” His grin grew more intense. “Jesus, man, look at those clothes. What kind of clothes are those for a swim?”

“I didn't know I was going swimming.”

“What else do you do at a quarry?”

I sat down with my legs before me on the smooth hot lip of rock. I looked up at the bushes overhead. They would have been hidden up there, waiting to jump down. That was where they had been. I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. I could smell the water; it was Alison's smell.

“I haven't been here for twenty years,” I said. “I don't know what you do here.”

“It's a great place to groove on ideas,” Zack said, stretched out whitely in the sun. His ribs showed under the skin like sticks and his arms and legs were skinny and covered with thin black hair. His body looked obscene, spidery. Beneath the black strip of bathing suit lay a prominent sexual bulge. “I thought it was time we saw each other again.” He spoke like a general summoning his adjutant. “I had to thank you for the books.”

“That's okay,” I said. I removed my tie and dropped it and the jacket I had been carrying by my side. Then I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and unbuttoned it halfway down to let air enter.

“Miles went to church,” Alison said from the quarry's edge. “Old Bertilsson preached about him again.”

“Hah hah hah!”
Zack exploded with laughter. “That old fart. He oughta be making shitty little doilies, hey? He's a feeb. I hate that sucker, man. So he thinks you're the Masked Marauder, huh?”

Alison asked, “Did you bring towels?”

“Hey? Sure I brought towels. Can't go swimming without
towels. Brought three of them.” Zack rolled over on his belly and examined me. “Is that right? Am I right about him, my main man?”

“More or less.” It was too hot for my heavy shoes, and I unlaced them and pulled them off.

The Woodsman said, “Well, if you brought towels, I'm sure going to swim. My throat hurts from all that yelling.” She looked over her shoulder at Zack, who indulgently flipped his hand in a do-what-you-want gesture.

“I'm gonna go skinny,” she said, and glanced at me. She still had not got over her desire to shock.

“You can't scare him, he's the Masked Marauder,” said Zack.

She stood up, displeased, leaving dark high-arched footprints on the stone, and pulled the blue shirt over her head. Her breasts lolled large and pink against her chest. She pushed her jeans down unceremoniously, revealing all of her stocky well-shaped little body.

“If you're the Masked Marauder, haven't you been busy lately?” asked Zack.

I watched Alison go padding to the edge of the quarry and stand, judging the water for a moment. She wanted to get away from us.

“That's not actually funny,” I said.

She raised her arms and then used her leg muscles to spring out into the water in a clean dive. When her head broke water, she began to breaststroke across the quarry.

“Well, what about that guy, anyhow?”

“What guy?” For a moment my mind blurred and I thought he meant Alison Updahl.

“The killer.” He was lying on his side, gleeful. He seemed to be supercharged with sly, flinty enthusiasm, as if secrets were bubbling inside him. His eyes, very large now, appeared to be
chiefly pupil. “He kinda turns me on. He's done something else, you know, something most people don't know about yet.”

“Oh?” If that were widely known, Polar Bears' strategy was a failure.

“Don't you see the beauty of that? Man, that D. H. Lawrence would have. The guy who wrote those books. I been reading those books. There's a lot in them.”

“I don't think Lawrence ever sympathized with sex killers.”

“Are you sure? Are you really sure? What if a killer was on the side of life? Hey? See, I looked at that
Women in Love
book—I didn't read all of it, I just read the parts you underlined. I wanted to get inside you, man.”

“Oh, yes.” It was an appalling notion.

“Doesn't he talk about beetles? That some people are beetles? Who should be killed? You gotta live according to your ideas, don't you? Take the idea of pain. Pain is a tool. Pain is a tool for release.”

“Why don't you stop talking and come in and swim?” Alison called from the center of the quarry. Sweat poured down my face.

Zack's intense black eyes focused unblinkingly on me. “Take your shirt off,” he said.

“I guess I will,” I said, and unbuttoned it the rest of the way and dropped it on top of my jacket.

“Don't you think the people who are just stupid beetles should be killed? That's why I dig this guy. He just goes out and does it.”

We had left Lawrence a long way behind, but I wanted only to let him rant, so that he would be done earlier. “Has there been another one? Another murder?”

“I don't know, man, but answer me this. Why would he fuckin' stop?”

I nodded. Suddenly all I wanted was to be in the water, to feel the quarry's cold water about me again.

“Maybe my favorite part of the book was about blood brotherhood,” Zack said. “I dug that nude wrestling part between two men. You underlined almost all of that.”

“I suppose I might have,” I said, but he had switched gears again.

“He's free, you see, whoever this guy is, he's free as hell. Nobody's gonna stop him. He's thrown out all of the old shit holding him back. And if he thought anybody was gonna stand in his way, bang, he'd get rid of him.”

This conversation was reminding me uneasily of my afternoon with Paul Kant; it was even worse. Where Paul Kant had been low-voiced and depressed, this skinny boy was simply shivering with conviction.

“Like Hitler did to Roehm. Roehm was in his way, and he just smashed him with his foot. The Night of the Long Knives. Bang. Another beetle dead. You see the beauty in that?”