Authors: Andrew Coburn
“We all do that.”
Her voice was unthreatening. A smile broke her face into warm, reassuring pieces. “My mother’s dead,” he said.
“We’ve all got sadnesses, Junior. I’ve lost my best friend.”
“Did you know my mother?”
“Not to speak to. She didn’t leave the house that much.”
“Did she look like you?”
“No, she was pretty.”
Her voice nibbled his ear, and he arched his back as though a hand inside his shirt had run a feather down it. “And she was younger,” he said, though he was asking. He wanted reaffirmation.
“Yes, younger. Don’t you have pictures?”
“They were all torn up,” he said. “Papa didn’t want her in the house anymore.”
She began taking clothes from the line. He helped. Another smile crumbled her face. “You’re not very tall, are you?”
“I got a hole in my height,” he said. “That’s what a teacher told me.”
They were standing together, near a full basket of clothes, when Chief Morgan appeared. The chief stopped and stood still, seemingly outside the frame of Junior’s attention. Junior felt safe and protected in the nearness of May Hutchins, especially when she swayed closer and put sweetness in the air. “He didn’t do anything,” she called out. “He just kind of wandered in.”
“Is that right, Junior?” The chief came forward. “Just visiting?”
“That’s all he was doing,” May Hutchins said and shared a look with the chief, an understanding of sorts.
“Anything in your pockets, Junior?”
Nothing but a soiled nugget of cotton, which he produced and let fall. The chief took him gently but firmly by the arm, which did not distress him. Nor did the bark of a neighbor’s dog when they stepped onto the sidewalk. Only when he got into the chief’s car did his throat knot.
“You gonna arrest me?”
The chief started the motor on the first try and pulled onto the street. “No need for that. I’m your friend.”
“You gonna tell my father?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
Junior closed his eyes when they passed Drinkwater’s Funeral Home; he opened them when the chief took a left at the end of the street. With utmost confidence he said, “I don’t have to talk to you. My brother’s home.”
“It’s up to you, Junior, you know that.”
He noticed that the chief, slouched back, drove with a light touch on the wheel, unlike Papa, who threw himself against it and gripped it fiercely near the top. He was not sure where they were going because the chief took turns that did not make sense. Houses took on airs.
“Know where we are, Junior?”
On one of the great lawns a man was practicing his golf swing. “Where the rich people live.”
“I liked it when it was all woods. How about you?”
“It don’t matter to me,” he said and went silent. Listless one moment, he was restless the next. His fingers drummed on the worn knees of his jeans while the chief drove aimlessly, no rush. A crow came out of miles of sky and planed a field. The sun was burning big. Then the chief took a straight course, and his heart tensed. “You drive up to the house, Papa will know.”
“I’ll let you off before we get there.”
There was still a way to go. “Why you drivin’ so slow?”
“The both of us, Junior, we’ve been running uphill all our lives. It’s about time we took a rest.”
He could not remember running up any hills lately, but he liked the sound of the words. He liked the easy way the chief drove with a single finger on the wheel and an elbow out the window. He wanted to say something, but the sentence unraveled on him. The chief was looking at him.
“Sometime, you and I, Junior, we’ll talk about her.”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You did once.”
“You don’t know anything about her.”
“I know something about her. I’m the one who found her.”
He was sweating under the arms and across the chest. His skin poured through his T-shirt. He was glad when the road narrowed and the scent of pines filled the car. His hand was already at the door when the chief pulled over and glided to a stop near the mailbox. He clambered out with a stumble and hesitated in the gnat-tormented air. The chief leaned across the seat.
“What is it, Junior?”
He spoke shyly, almost indistinctly. “Did my mother wear an apron?”
“I imagine she did,” the chief said. “And I bet it was the prettiest one in town.”
“No,” Junior said. “It was plain.”
• • •
Lydia Lapham was back at work. Her white uniform dazzled. Nurses huddled around a desk glimpsed her and swept forward with warmth and kindness, bestowing no more than she could handle. A doctor in a scrub suit started to pass her by and then stopped. In the old days when she was an operating room nurse, surgeons never had revealed hangovers. They knew she would tell.
“Nice to have you back, Lapham.”
“It’s where I belong,” she said.
“But you’re not in OR, are you?”
“I’m on the floor.”
“Thank God,” he said with a smile.
She greeted patients, introduced herself to new ones, read their charts, and took their temperatures. When the anorexic woman in Room 202 drooped an arm over the edge of the bed, a ring tumbled from her finger. “Let it lie,” the woman said, but Lydia retrieved it, tightened it with tape, and returned it to the bony finger. Then she cranked the bed up and brushed the woman’s hair.
In the room across the corridor she delighted the eye of an elderly man who had outlived two wives. His roommate, a frail youth suffering multiple maladies, closeted himself in the bathroom. When he came out she helped him back into bed, which proved a struggle, for he had little strength. His face bathed in sweat, he said, “I want to be normal. I want to pee yellow.”
“You will,” she said.
“That a promise?”
She swabbed his face. “A vital hope.”
A few minutes later, somewhat light-headed from eating and sleeping erratically, she helped a lovely elderly lady onto a potty chair, where, undulant and slow, the fragile creature did her business. Back in bed, tethered to a mood, the woman said, “If only you could empty your mind the way you do the other.”
Lydia tucked her in. “I know what you’re saying.”
“Do you?”
“Look at me.”
The eyes were enormous. “Yes, you do.”
She was in the corridor, still light-headed, when a doctor in a business suit swept toward her and reached for her hands. Had nobody been around he might have tried to kiss her. He had thick black hair cracked with gray, an agreeable face, and a gentle voice. “How are you?” he asked. “I mean, really.”
How was she
really
? She didn’t know. She said, “Fine.”
They stepped aside for a male orderly pushing a cart of fresh towels that looked like shoveled snow. He had lost possession of her hands and was eager to get them back. She kept them out of reach. “Would it mean anything to you,” he asked, “if I told you my wife has filed for a divorce?”
Once, ten years ago, it would have meant the world. “I don’t think so,” she said in a tone that did not convince him.
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s too soon.”
“No, Frank. It’s too late.”
He was about to protest, gently, when a sound distracted them. The orderly had rushed out of Room 202 and, spilling towels, was gesturing to them theatrically. They raced along the corridor and into the room, he sprinting to one side of the bed and she to the other. There were mothballs in the anorexic woman’s face. The eyes had rolled back. The body was already going cold, as if there had never been enough blood to warm it. He reached for the wrist but soon tossed it away and pressed an ear to the heart. Seconds later he began to pound. “Christ, she’s my patient!” he said.
The body jolted with each slam. The woman smelled neither of life nor death but merely of the hospital. She smelled of serum shot through a needle, of alcohol rubbed into a sore place, of medication that had come up on her.
“It’s no use, Frank.”
He stepped back, and she lifted the woman’s hand and held it for a moment. The ring, securely in place, seemed the biggest thing about the hand. The woman’s hair, though lacking light, was neatly brushed.
“Well, she’s at peace,” he said.
“She’s nothing now,” Lydia said. “She’s nowhere.”
• • •
With big, tender thumbs Pierre worked the small of Christine Poole’s back. His thumbs picked up pain and kneaded it away, surrounded a quivering ache and dissolved it. In his T-shirt and cotton trousers, he was a blur of baldness and white. His thumbs shifted and pressed deeper. “Right there?” he asked, and closing her eyes, she murmured, “Yes, right there.” Presently his touch traveled to her neck and loosened the knot. His huge hands lifted her head and rocked it from side to side, a baby in a cradle. He worked on her for thirty minutes in all and left her feeling pleasurably altered. When she slipped off the padded table she grappled with the towel, unable to hide everything.
“It’s all right, he’s used to it.” Arlene Bowman, unforgivably beautiful, spoke from a great wicker chair, where her denimed legs protruded. “We don’t turn you on, do we, Dennis?”
“I thought you said his name was Pierre.”
“Professionally it’s Pierre. Right, Dennis?”
“It’s whatever you want,” he said.
Christine vanished behind a screen. He was gone when she reemerged in her dress and white pumps. Some of the ache reasserted itself but nothing like before. Through sunshine pouring in from the great windows Arlene appeared with freshly poured sherry, which they carried out to the immense patio, where they sat on a white stone ledge. They clinked glasses.
“I feel wonderfully weary,” Christine said. “Dennis is a lovely man.”
“Doesn’t he ever smile?”
“It would give him lines.”
Christine looked over the ledge, where the flower garden was a marvelous confusion of colors clumping into one another. The blue bells of campanula smothered their foliage, primrose of pink and yellow appeared pampered and sulky, madonna lilies radiated purity, but theatrical red roses, lurid in the wings, hogged the show. She said, “Did you ever buy Morgan a present?”
“I don’t recall ever buying any man a present.”
“A little one. Quite personal.”
Something clicked. “How did he look in them?”
“Ridiculous.”
“I thought rather cute.” Arlene’s smile turned mildly curious. “How did you know?”
“I knew he didn’t get them himself. Not his style.”
“I was having fun with him. Poor man didn’t know how to take me. I’m his mystery.”
Furrows in Christine’s brow deepened as she stared over her glass of sherry. The biggest butterfly she had ever seen alighted on a lily and shut its wings. “When you met, who made the first move?”
“He wouldn’t have dared,” Arlene said.
The butterfly’s wings were straight up, chafing, meshing as gears with the sunny air. “Why did he bother with me when he had you?”
“He could never believe his good luck.” Arlene spoke easily, comfortably, with some joy. “I wasn’t real. You were.”
“Yes, that makes sense.” She spoke from a dry mouth and wet it with sherry. “You’re beautiful, and I’m all over the place.”
“We’re fixing that.”
“Thing is, he was good for me. I needed him, he knew it.”
“Don’t make him into a saint.”
The butterfly flew away in the direction of the glittering swimming pool. Christine leaned sideways on the ledge, sniffed a rose, and pulled back, inebriated by the scent.
Arlene said, “Are you sure you won’t see him again?”
“I may. I have something to return to him.”
Arlene reached into a pocket of her jeans. “Then you might give him this.”
“What is it?”
“A key to his house.”
It dropped into her hand, more of a weight than she had expected. She clenched it. “I have the feeling you want to hurt him.”
Arlene smiled. “Only till he says uncle.”
• • •
Bertha Skagg, who had relieved Meg O’Brien, was a floral shape at the telephone. Lieutenant Bakinowski ignored her and strode into Chief Morgan’s office, where he propped a buttock on the corner of the desk. “MacGregor took the polygraph,” he said.
“And?”
“It was inconclusive.”
“The mere fact he took it goes a long way,” Morgan said. “He was hyper, like he was on something.”
“He wasn’t in the best of moods is more like it.”
“Still pulling for him, huh, Chief?”
“And you’re still shoving.”
“Police work is like poker, same strategies,” Bakinowski said, tightening the knot of his necktie. “If you don’t play aggressively you’ll lose every time. When you’re defensive the cards go cold on you. You’ll squeeze every one and catch nothing except those times another player’s sitting on a full house while you’re overfeeding the pot. Cards have a will of their own and admire an aggressive player, show no respect for a timid one. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, you’re telling me you’re going to push MacGregor to the limit.”
“Without hard evidence, I don’t have a choice.”
“You’re reaching,” Morgan said. ”
Grasping
is a better word.”
“You see him up close, Chief. I stand back.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
Bakinowski slipped off the desk, his smile magnanimous. “I’ll be the first to admit it.”
• • •
Papa Rayball said he was worried about Junior and did not want Clement to go back to the motel. “Won’t hurt you to stay one night here,” Papa said. “You’ll help settle him.”
“What’s the matter with him now?”
“You never know,” Papa said. “Could be any thin’. I’ve had my hands full.”
They were drinking coffee out of chipped mugs at the kitchen table, Clement with his shoulders hunched. In ten years he had acquired a false self that had all but buried the old one. He did not want it back. He did not want Papa’s eyes boring in on him, practically reading his mind.
Papa said, “I’ve already set up your cot in the room. That’ll please him, you bunkin’ in with him.”
Clement did not respond to him, holding in an anger undefined and undirected. Papa was too easy a target, like the mustached faces he had aimed a fast-fire rifle at in tropical places where the heat could drive you crazy and the insects could eat you at will.