Authors: Andrew Coburn
“Maybe he’s going through a crisis of his own.”
“I have no time for him — and no faith in my own reality, let alone God’s.”
She had a few things in her car that needed to be brought in. The chief helped her. In the kitchen a shaft of sunlight quivered with dust. He raised the window and killed a moth planted on the screen. She lifted a carton of milk from the refrigerator, sniffed it, and poured it into the sink. Crumpling the carton, she looked at him in a way that told him it was time for him to leave. Concern marked his face.
“This is my home,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”
He kissed her cheek. “You need only pick up the phone.”
Alone, she stayed at the sink and once again slapped her face with water to reinforce her anonymity. Then she made herself gaze out at the back lawn and at the dark green of the woodlot. A quick glance at her watch told her it was the same hour of the afternoon that the shot had rung out. In the sunshine two aluminum lawn chairs faced each other, each occupied by a ghost.
• • •
Papa Rayball sent his younger son to his room and stared across the table at his elder son. Clement looked everything like his mother, but Papa saw only himself in him. The dark brown hair had thinned a little but not enough to matter. He was still lean like a hoe handle, and his features were blades. “You must be gettin’ a lot of sun,” Papa said.
Clement stared at the stove. He had a memory of his mother fussing with saucepans, steam lifting the lid off one. The memory hurt him. He said, “I think you’d better tell me more about why I came all the way up here.”
“It ain’t pretty.”
“I’ve already figured that out.”
“Junior’s my burden, you know that. He wasn’t born bright like you. I don’t even know for sure he’s mine.”
“For Christ’s sake, Papa, don’t start that again.”
“Can’t help what I’ve always felt in my bones.” Papa lowered his voice. “We can’t talk here. He’ll listen, he’s got ears like a rabbit.”
They went outside, where the heat felt like a noose around Clement’s neck. It pained him to be back. He had hoped never to return. There was a time he had hoped to send for Junior, but that idea had faded.
Papa, with paternal pride, said, “You look good, Clement. You look like a real man.”
They ambled away from the house, went into weeds, and stood under a swamp pine, which disturbed a squirrel whose chattering rose from a low branch to a high one. “Let’s hear about it,” Clement said.
Papa scuffed the ground, then assumed an air of stiff right-mindedness and began unraveling events in a murderous monotone. He spoke at length, his face alive, incandescent, his heart throbbing. “It don’t matter what Junior done, MacGregor had no right treatin’ him less than human.” A snap came into his voice. “I ain’t condonin’ what Junior done. I’m just explainin’ what worked up to it.”
“Tell me exactly what he did,” Clement said from a dark, deadpan face, and Papa’s voice went low and flat, dry and intense, each word carrying its own charge. Clement peered up at the pine for the squirrel and thought of that moment of mindlessness when a hunter, or an assassin, squeezes the trigger. When Papa finished, he said, “Who showed him how to work the weapon? It’s not easy.”
“He figured it out himself.”
“The weapon was worth thirty-five hundred dollars.”
“You didn’t pay no thirty-five hundred for it. I bet you didn’t pay nothin’ for it.” The air was growing sultry, with mosquitoes on the attack. Papa swatted one and left blood on his cheek. “I did right heavin’ it, didn’t I?”
“I’m just telling you what the thing was worth,” Clement said, feigning a small anger to conceal a great one.
“I got one thing to say,” Papa said with the trace of a scapegrace smile. “The little shit got two for one.”
For moments Clement did not trust himself to speak. He batted the air behind his head and then spoke out of a formal face. “You never should’ve let it happen.”
“I never saw it comin’. He’s always talkin’ about doin’ somethin’ and never doin’ nothin’ ‘cept pick his nose, you know that.”
“This time he fooled you.”
“Don’t blame me. He was little, you brung him up more than I did.”
“Don’t give me that crap, Papa. And don’t tell me anything more about him not being yours, OK?”
Papa’s eyes went small. “You was always my favorite. You gonna blame me for that?”
“I blame you for a lot of stuff, Papa, maybe Junior least of all.”
“You talkin’ ‘bout your mother now? That what you try in’ to hit me with?”
“I’m remembering you didn’t want to pay Drinkwater for a coffin. You wanted me to make one out of scrap wood.”
“Why put somethin’ bad into somethin’ good — that was my thinkin’. ‘Sides, you know what she was.”
“Let her rest, Papa.” His face softened. He did not want to argue. Some memories hurt his skull, those of his mother the most. He said, “How’s it stand with Junior?”
“It ain’t as bad as you think. Only one botherin’ him is Morgan, and he’s only goin’ on guess. You remember Morgan, don’t you? He’s chief now.”
“I remember him.”
“I know his game. He’s gonna work on Junior, play it cozy with him. You know how he does it, he tried to work on you ‘bout your mother. Tried to make it seem I done somethin’ to her she done to herself.” Abruptly Papa slapped his leg and looked triumphantly at his hand. “Every skeeter I kill is full of blood. They’re livin’ good here.”
Monarchs busied themselves on milkweed. Clement remembered catching one and giving it to his mother, who told him to let it go. “What do you expect me to do?”
Papa rose up on his toes. “You can fix him. You can fix him good.”
“How am I going to do that?”
“He’s got a weakness. Women.”
• • •
“Remember the time you took me to the hospital, Clement? Time I ate the rotten meat?” Junior spoke from his pillow in the dark of the little room they had shared as children. A scrap of moonlight clung to the screen in the window, through which came the ringing of peepers. “You saved my life.”
“The doctor did, not me. All I did was take you.”
“I’d’ve died, you didn’t.”
“Maybe.” Clement sat on a stool with his back against the wall. The luminous hands of his Swiss watch told him the time. He had promised to stay in the room until Junior fell asleep, which he feared would be a long time coming. Junior’s voice was full of raw energy.
“I had a whore.”
“That’s nice, Junior.”
“Papa took me. She was black. His was too.” Clement sighed inwardly. “How was it?”
“Papa rushed me.”
Clement rose from the stool and stood at the window, where he breathed in the scent of the pines and smells from the swamp. When he detected murmurs from his childhood he felt trapped inside his mind. “Next time,” he said, “go alone.”
“It was all the way to Boston.”
“Can’t you drive?”
“Sure I can, but I ain’t got a license.”
He looked at his watch again as night air bathed the quiet of his face. An owl hooted high in the pines. Gently he said, “Did you really shoot that woman?”
There was an immediate creaking of springs as Junior shifted about as if something were being exacted from him. The pitch of his voice rose. “Papa don’t want me to talk about it.”
Clement did not push. He suspected a sickness welling in his brother’s stomach and, worse, the possibility of a fit. The silence that grew between them seemed feminine. It floated. It held secrets. Clement turned from the window. “Papa’s right,” he said. “You shouldn’t talk about it.”
Reassured, Junior said, “I still got the picture of you in the jeep. Did you see it on the wall?”
“I did.”
“It don’t have the same colors anymore. I have to look hard to tell it’s you.”
“It’s me,” Clement said and moved toward the door. “I ain’t sleepy yet!”
“You’re not ever going to fall asleep long as I’m here.”
“Why do you have to go to that motel? Ain’t this better?”
“I’ve got a room. It’s paid for.”
“Papa says you ain’t like us anymore.”
The darkness had faded a little, and contours were returning to the sparse room. Clement discerned the glitter of his brother’s face, which was probably feverish. “I have my own life now, Junior.”
“When am I gonna have mine?”
“Aren’t you happy?”
“I was happy when you was here.”
“Aren’t you happy with Papa?”
“It ain’t the same.”
Clement felt a hand squeeze his heart, and he moved closer to the door with a heavy foot, his body a stiff line. He remembered his brother as a baby burdened with an overplus of affection and bestowing droolly kisses. Anybody could make him laugh except Papa, who never took to him. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Early?”
“Probably.”
“Best time of day is when the dew’s on the grass. Remember you used to say that?”
He was remembering too much, which irritated him. He did not want to be dragged back into a life best forgotten, best left in a box with all the pieces that could cut him. He was outside the room now. “Go to sleep.”
“Clement.” The voice was tentative. “Do you still think of her?”
He was stealing away, angry with himself, angry over dredging up images he felt were no longer a part of him. Outside the house, away from the ruined step, he rose up on his toes, drank the dark air, and killed a mosquito on his arm. Junior’s voice wheedled through a screen.
“Clement.”
“
What?
”
“I love you.”
• • •
Stretched out on the sofa, James Morgan read until his eyes gave out. Too lazy to kill the lamplight, he placed the open magazine over his face and fell asleep breathing in the shiny scent of the printed page. When the telephone shrilled, he came awake as if someone had flung water in his face. He stumbled to answer it, first over his shoes and then over himself.
“Hello!”
There was no immediate response, and he waited, expecting the worst. It came. “Is this Chief Cock?”
He cringed. “Don’t do this, Arlene.”
“Do I have the wrong number?” Her throaty voice had strength, body, and insinuation. “I wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”
“What purpose does it serve?”
“Perhaps I have the right number but the wrong man.”
He regretted the relationship, good only at the beginning, different, dangerous, and ever after hectic, demanding, frivolous. He had hoped it was over, cleanly done with, all wishful thinking. “Tell me what you want.”
She said, “Are you the formidable police chief of Bensington, protector of the common good?”
Her voice was unnerving, part of her weaponry, as effective as her beauty. Once, in the ruffles of silken sheets, she had woken him with a harsh whisper in the shell of his ear:
Don’t say a word. My husband’s home.
A lie he believed. Her husband was in Europe on business. She had simply wanted to see whether his reaction would be worthy or cowardly. It was an uncertain mix of each.
“Look,” he said, “if you want, we’ll meet. We’ll talk sensibly.”
She was no longer on the line.
• • •
Clement Rayball drove his rented car to a house three streets from the heart of town and parked on the sidewalk, the front bumper nudging a hydrant. The street was heavy with shadows from a density of trees on each side of the street. Slowly he walked over moist grass in need of a cut, approached a lit window with a half-drawn shade, and peered in. Light from a lamp sluiced the solemn face of James Morgan, who seemed just a little older than Clement remembered him. Sharp eyes and an extra sense heightened by military training told him that Morgan was alone. He moved around to the front door and rang the bell.
The door opened on the second ring. Always he had felt a sense of inferiority in Morgan’s presence, and he felt it now, faintly. Some things are never lost — all rooted, he reckoned, in childhood. Nasty business, childhood. He said, “Remember me?”
“Sure I remember you,” Morgan replied in his stocking feet. “You haven’t changed that much. Do you want to come in? If you don’t, the mosquitoes will.”
He stepped just inside the door and planted himself. The light showed up wear in Morgan’s face, which at another time he might have considered an advantage. For a physical moment their eyes locked.
“Stories about you have drifted back, Clement. One is you deal in drugs.”
“In Miami everybody deals in drugs.”
“Then I heard you deal in women.”
“Could be a little of both.”
“How about guns?”
“Wherever there’s a buck.”
Morgan had an easy smile. “You must be doing well.”
“I have good years, bad years. Yours must be all the same.”
“This one’s an exception.” The smile remained. “When you went away I figured you’d never come back. ‘Course, you never had reason till now.”
“My father called me,” Clement said with a hardness creeping into his voice, which could not be helped. His entire boyhood impinged on him.
“Papa’s a short length of fuse that lights up.”
“I know what my father is. It’s my brother I’m concerned with.”
“You have cause.”
Clement had the answer he did not want but would have been surprised had it been otherwise. Fatalistically he accepted it, as he had accepted a lot of other things in life, and drew up his shoulders to leave. “I don’t want to hurt you. You understand that?”
“And I don’t want to hurt you, Clement, but I can’t let another Rayball get away with murder.”
“We’ve got nothing more to say.”
He opened the door and stepped outside. The darkness offered anonymity but not safety — basic knowledge derived from his military training and later exploits in the warmer regions of the Americas. He felt Morgan’s eyes on him as he headed toward his car. When he reached it, Morgan called out to him.
“I wish it were different.”
He did not bother to reply.
6
At the waterline of sleep, where reality and dreams vie for attention, Lydia Lapham heard a car pause on the street and then creep on. That was at midnight. At three she woke short of breath, her heart racing, and was convinced she was dying. The silliest thought consumed her. Never again would she wash out her pantyhose and droop them over the shower rod to dry. Then her breath returned, and her heart caught hold of itself.