If You Could See Me Now (23 page)

“No,” I said. “There isn't any.” I had to get away from him, and when Alison shouted to us again, I said, “It's too hot for this. I think I'll swim a little.”

“You gonna skinny-dip?” His mad eyes were taunting me.

“Why not?” I said, irritated, and shucked the rest of my clothing. Infuriatingly, Zack stood when I did, and slithered out of his skimpy black bathing suit. We dove into the water together. I felt more than saw the Woodsman watching us from the center of the pool.

The water hit me like an electric jolt. The memories of the last time I had been in the quarry hit me too, with an even greater force, and I could see her as I had seen her then, her hands and feet flashing. Then I recognized that I was seeing not
my
Alison, but my cousin's daughter, an altogether more
adult female form. Underwater, I frog-kicked away, wanting to experience the rush of emotion away from the other two. It was like a clamp around my chest, and for a moment, fleeing the legs dangling in the water, I thought I would be killed by my own emotion. My heart fluttered, and I kicked away for another second and then surfaced, breathing noisily.

Zack's grinning face was four feet away, looking absurdly young beneath his streaming black hair. His eyes seemed to have no white at all. He said something inaudible, choked by his own pleasure.

Then he repeated it. “This is where it happened, isn't it, Miles?” He was exuding crazy glee.

“What?” I said, my stomach frozen.

“You and Alison's aunt. Hey?” His mouth was lifted in a loose insane smile.

I turned away and began to swim as strongly as I could toward the lip of the quarry. His voice was calling, but not to me.

Water was thrashing behind me. Now he was calling to me. “You don't talk, do you? You don't talk, do you?” His voice was loud and brutal.

Eight feet from safety I felt a hand catch my ankle. When I kicked out with my free leg, another hand grasped my calf, and then I was yanked backward and down. While two hands held my legs, other hands pushed my shoulders, and I felt a heavy body riding my back, beginning to squeeze my chest. The one on top leaned forward to wrap arms around my neck, and cushiony breasts pressed against me. I bucked underwater, but she clamped me with greater force, expelling the rest of the air from my lungs. Games, I thought, and breaststroked, thinking that my breath would outlast hers. Zack still clung to my ankles. I kicked idly, resolved not to give them the satisfaction of a struggle. Then I realized that she was close enough to the
surface to raise her head and breathe, and a spurt of fear made me fight.

I shook violently, but she forced me deeper into the tunnel of water. The hands on my legs let go, and I knew that Zack too was going up to breathe. My chest fought for air. In moments, Zack appeared before me under the water and raised his arms to my shoulders. I swung at him, but the blow was ridiculously slowed by the water. He dug his fingers into my shoulders and held me helpless, prone in the water. Astride me, the Woodsman squeezed and squeezed.

If I had been alone with the Woodsman, I could have thrown or pulled her off, but while Zack held me and pinned my arms, I could do nothing but struggle, making my air problem worse. As I grew weaker, Zack moved in nearer and put his hands on the small of my back, pulling me down even further. I realized with shock and horror that he was erect when a fleshy club bumped my hip.

In the next instant I breathed in a gulp of burning water, and I knew that they were going to kill me.

Then their hands and arms fell away, the weight of Alison rolled off my back, and I was helped to the surface.

I held to the rock edge of the quarry, coughing painfully. Water came up like vomit. Getting out of the quarry was impossible; I clung with my weak arms and my head lolled against my shoulder. After a moment I could lever myself up far enough so that my forearms were flat on the hot stone, and I bent my head to rest on them. Through half-opened eyes, not really recognizing what I saw, I noticed Zack sliding out of the water and up onto rock as easily as an eel. Then he bent down and braced himself to take the arm of the naked girl. That bastard nearly killed me and it turned him on, I thought, and an emotion half fear and half anger gave me the energy to
struggle up onto the edge of stone. I lay in the sun, shivering, my skin burning where it touched the hot smooth rock.

He sat down beside me. I saw only a spidery flank with thin black hairs streaming across white skin. “Hey, Miles. Hey, man. You okay?”

I rolled away, onto my back. The hot stone seared me. I closed my eyes, still coughing. When I opened my eyes, they were blocking the sun, standing above me. They were black against the flat blue sky. Alison knelt to cradle my head. “Let me alone,” I said. I wriggled away. “Did you plan that?”

“It was just fun, Miles,” he said. “We were playing.”

“Poor old Miles, he 'most drowned,” crooned Alison, and came toward me again and pushed herself against me. I was engulfed in cool wet skin. Involuntarily, I looked at Zack. “I'm sorry, man,” he said, unself-consciously manipulating his testicles. I turned my eyes away and found myself staring at Alison's soft heavy breasts and firm belly. “Give me a towel,” I ordered. Zack stepped away toward the pile of clothing.

Alison brought her face closer to mine. “This is where it happened, isn't it? You can tell Zack. You could tell him anything. That's why he wanted to meet you here. He heard about it at Freebo's. That's why he knows you understand him. He wants you to be brothers. Didn't you hear what he was saying before?”

I fought to stand up, and after a moment she released me. Zack was coming toward me, a pink towel in one hand. The other hand held an open switchblade. I stepped backward.

When Zack saw what must have been in my face, he tossed me the towel and said, “Hey, man. I want to help you take off the bandage. It's not doing you any good anymore.”

After knotting the towel around my waist, I looked at my left hand. It was caught in a soggy limp mass of gauze, a webby useless thing already half off my palm. Zack took my hand in
his and before I had time to push him away, neatly sliced the mess of gauze away from my palm. Then he ripped away the tape in one quick motion.

Above the base of my thumb was a reddish triangle of new skin, defined by a thin red line on all three sides. I gingerly touched the spot with incurling fingers. It was delicate, but it had healed. Zack threw the drowned package of tape and gauze up into the bushes. I looked at him and his eyes were crazy and gleeful. His face was very young, framed by long smooth Indian's hair.

“You're my best friend,” he said. He held out his left palm, and the image of him as a thin dead-white Indian lurched into stronger focus in my mind. He stood there, skinny, his ribs thrusting beneath his skin, dripping, dangling, armored in loony radiance. His dog's eyes filled with shining light. “I'll prove it to you, Miles. We can be brothers.” He raised the switchblade like a scalpel and deliberately sliced his left palm. Then he dropped the blade and continued to hold his palm out toward me, inviting me to press mine against it. Alison screamed when she looked up at the sound of the knife clattering and saw blood dripping onto the flat rock.

“Miles!” she screeched. “Go to the truck! Get the bandages! Go!”

Zack's face did not alter by a millimeter: he was still encased in the armor of crazy light. “You did it,” I said, still grasping the dimensions of what I had seen. “It's you.”

“Miles,” Alison sobbed, “run, run, please run.”

Zack stood shining at me with dog's eyes and loose smile. To escape the light of the smile I ran around him, around the Tin Woodsman who was rushing toward Zack, and sprinted in bare feet and flapping towel up to the black van.

When I yanked down on the handle of the rear doors and
pushed them open, something that had been wedged against one of them fell out into the dust. I looked down and saw a familiar shape just ceasing to roll. It was one of the old wide-hipped eight-ounce Coke bottles.

“What did you do that for?” she asked, still naked, the water dried by the sun from all but her darkened hair, as the paperback of
She
began to sink into the water of the quarry. I was conscious of Zack behind us, standing near his dropped knife on the hot stone, and I was aware of having too many reasons to be able to roll them up into a single answer. I was sending a chip of Alison into the place where she had died; I was furious with them both and with myself for not knowing how to reckon with what I suspected, the sight of the Coke bottle having brought back clearly what Polar Bears Hovre had told me; I was simply overcome with anger and disgust and throwing away something I valued was the simplest way to express that I had looked into the face of damnation. When I had crawled into the back of the van, I had seen, glittering amid the rubble of spare parts, one of the thousand-faceted doorknobs I had removed from my desk.

“Get away from him,” Zack said. “Ally, get your ass over here.”

“Why?”

“Alison,” I said softly, “Zack is in trouble. I think you should keep away from him.”

“You don't understand him. Nobody does.”

“Just take my advice,” I said, “please,” very aware in spite of everything of the Maillol-like body of the naked girl I was bending toward.

That night and the next I dreamed of being back in the drifting blue horror, suspended, dead, guilty beyond the possibility of
help or forgiveness. It was the quarry, the deep pitiless water of the quarry, and it was where I had let her die, the greatest sin of my life, the one before which I had been most helpless, and the greatest crime I knew. The crime for which she could not forgive me. Even in sleep I believe I wept and ground my teeth. They had been up there, and I had not been able to send them away, those murderers of both her life and mine. It was a bottomless guilt. I would be freed of it only by her return. I had twice immersed myself in the cold water of the quarry, twice I had breathed it in, and both times I had emerged alive: that too was a crime, when she had not.

Sunday night I came miserably awake near two o'clock, smelled the air like a forest animal, and got downstairs in time to turn off the gas cocks on the stove. The recurrence seemed to prove that the cause was a simple mechanical failure, if one that could have had fatal results. What had awakened me, and therefore saved me, was the ringing of the telephone. I had once told Alison that if I got one of “those” calls at night, I would not answer it. But after twisting the handles on the stove and shoving open a window to admit the cool meadow air, I was in the perfect mood for handling Onion Breath. “Stinking skulking creeping weasel,” I pronounced into the phone, “crawling cowardly weak crippled ugly snake.” Incapable of syntax but with a good stock of adjectives, I went on until he (she) hung up. I could not then return to bed and that dominating nightmare. The kitchen was very cold; I waved newspapers to dispel the gas, and closed the window. After wrapping a blanket from the downstairs bedroom around my shoulders, I returned to the kitchen, lit a kerosene lamp and a cigarette, and combined some further elements of the Alison-environment, gin, vermouth, twist of lemon peel, ice. Her drink, with which I had been dosing myself nightly. Wrapped in the blanket, I sipped
the martini and sat in one of the kitchen chairs near the telephone. I
wanted
another call.

Half an hour later, when the person might have judged me to have returned to sleep (I thought), the telephone rang again. I let it trill three, then four times, then twice more, hearing the noise of the bell spread through the cold farmhouse. Finally I raised my arm and detached the receiver and rose to speak into the horn. But instead of breathing I heard what I had heard once before, a whuffling, beating noise, inhuman, like wings thrashing in the air, and the receiver was as cold as the sweating glass of my martini and I was unable to utter a word, my tongue would not move. I dropped the icy receiver and wrapped the blanket tightly around myself and went upstairs to lie on the bed. The next night, as I have said, following the day which was the first turning point, I entered the same drifting guilt-ridden dream, but I had no anonymous calls, from either living or dead.

On the day—Monday—which marked my slide into knowledge and was the interregnum between these two awful nights, I came down from my work for lunch and asked a stony-faced Tuta Sunderson how to turn off the gas before it reached the stove. She became even more disapproving, and gruntingly bent over the range and pointed an obese finger down at the pipe descending from the wall. “It's on this pipe. What for?”

“So I can turn it off at night.”

“Ain't fooling me,” she muttered, or I thought she did, while she turned away to jam her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. More audibly, she said, “Made a big stir in church yesterday.”

“I wasn't there to notice. I trust things went well without me.” I bit into a hamburger and discovered that I had no appetite. My relationship with Tuta Sunderson had degenerated into a parody of my marriage.

“You afraid of what the pastor was saying?”

“As I recall he made a very sweet comment about my suit,” I said.

As she began to lump herself toward the door, I said, “Wait. What do you know about a boy named Zack? He lives somewhere in Arden, I think. Tall and skinny, with an Elvis Presley hairdo. Alison's boyfriend. He calls her ‘Ally.' ”

“I don't know that boy. If you're going to waste good food, get out of the kitchen so I can do my work.”

“Good God,” I said, and left the table to stand on the porch. That cold breath of spirit which could only be felt on these twenty square yards was strongly present, and I knew with a certainty for once filled not with joy but resignation that Alison would appear on the date she had set twenty years before. Her release would be mine, I told myself. Only later did I recognize that when Tuta Sunderson said that she did not know that boy, she meant not that the boy was a stranger to her, but that she knew him well and detested him.