On the Loose (2 page)

Mrs. Bullard's white hair was wild. A free spirit all
her life, she wore a bra top and skimpy shorts and
stood on stiletto heels amid her late husband's rose
bushes. She was probably the tallest woman the
boy had ever seen. More than six feet in her prime,
Mrs. Bullard had shrunk scarcely an inch in old
age. Bones jutting sharply at uncommon angles
made her body look feral. Despite her eighty years,
she considered herself a woman to be reckoned
with and a match for any man. The boy was an intruder in her garden.

"Bobby," he said when she asked his name. She
didn't need to be told he was a Sawhill. Sawhills
had been in the town when the flag had thirteen
stars. His grandfather, whom she might have married had she not chosen a Bullard, had once told
her she had the warmest backside of any woman
he knew.

"How old are you, Bobby?"

"Twelve," he said, which would have been hard to guess. He was big for his age and had a crew cut
that squared his head and extended the fullness of
his face, which remained a baby's.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, and he
claimed the gate had been left open, a fib she let
pass. "You're a long way from your neighborhood.
Don't you have friends to play with?"

"I don't have any."

"That's hard to believe," she said kindly and
falsely. She suspected he was vulnerable and knew
he was motherless, his father an alcoholic for
whom sobriety was a strain after a week and an
impossibility after two. She said, "I knew your
grandfather."

He gazed off at a finch feeding on thistle. His
grandfather, dead before he was born, obviously
did not interest him. Abruptly his voice sprang at
her. "Did you know my mother?"

She conjured up an image of a woman with eyes
bluer than most blues, the only visible link to the
boy, who in other respects was a Sawhill, from the
smooth swell of his brow to the tight set of his
feet. "Not really, Bobby. Your mother wasn't from
Bensington."

"She was young," he said aggressively.

"Yes. Your father, like your grandfather, married
late but chose young."

"You're old."

"No getting around that," Mrs. Bullard said with
a wistfulness that almost amused her. "Would you
like to help me weed?"

Without warning, shocking her, he plucked a rose and scattered the petals. Her husband had
nursed the roses from season to season, feeding
them in autumn, protecting them in winter.

"If you want to be welcome here, you won't do
that again," she said, trembling. Her husband had
died nearly seven years ago, but in her mind it
could have been yesterday. In her dreams the dead
mingled with the living and carried on in a world
beyond death, proof enough of an articulation between this life and the next. "Did you hear me?"

He nodded absently while watching the finch fly
away. He was a Sawhill, but he lacked his grandfather's manners and charm.

"When I talk to someone," she said sharply, "I
expect to see the front of a face, not the side."

Suddenly facing her, he mocked her with his
eyes, in the blue of which his childhood seemed
compressed, squeezed of its essence. For an unsettling moment she felt they were on equal footing.

"You'd better go now," she said.

" ?"
y•

"Because I say so," she said, her patience gone.
She had never had a child of her own, only a niece.
A daughter would have pleased her, but she'd always had doubts about a son.

"Can I come back?" he asked.

She didn't want the bother. Besides, much about
him looked untrue, unreasonable, as if like his father he were a Sawhill in weak ways. "There's no
point."

He turned without argument, shuffled beyond
the roses and paused near the pink radiance of phlox. Looking back, he said, "I just saw a snake."

"Good," she said. "Snakes eat bugs. Bugs bother
flowers."

Alone, wearing garden gloves, she weeded for only
a few minutes. Crouching disturbed her spine and
cramped her long legs. The sun cooked her. She
craved the cool of her house. The house was gingerbread, more or less Victorian, painted pale
blue. In slight disrepair, over the front door, was a
small cantilevered balcony from which potted
plants trailed vines.

Inside, she took a needed breath, her age sometimes a burden, her memories an added weight.
She moved slowly through a sitting room and past
a cabinet, where photograph albums embalmed
her girlhood and her long married life. Occasionally she thumbed through them, fascinated and
dismayed by the way the camera had recorded
with such exactitude the fading of her beauty and
the decline of her husband's health.

In the kitchen she dropped her gloves on the
bare table and savored breezes from the ceiling fan.
After slaking her thirst with tap water, she slipped
off her hot tennis shoes and left humid prints on
the parquet. In the bathroom she counted her toes
and came up short. Her eyes were not focusing
well. She recounted and came up over, aggravating
for someone who had spent the greater part of her
life teaching high school math.

A shower only half refreshed her. In need of a
nap, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom and stretched out on the bed, where she and her husband had enjoyed reading together, she with her
mysteries, he with his Dickens. Or his Fielding.
He had loved the old masters. She adored
Agatha.

Sleep came easily. A vivid dream reunited her
with her husband, though shortness of sight kept
her from recognizing him until they drew close.
They were on a hill, where daytime suddenly transmuted into night. She gazed at stars while he, his
back to her, took an urgent leak. "Where have you
been?" she asked, and he replied, "Nowhere in
particular."

She was unsure how long she had napped, perhaps an hour at the most. Wearing a robe, her feet
still bare, she descended the stairs and felt a draft
from the cellar door, which stood wide open. From
the tail of her eye she glimpsed roses on the
kitchen table, a great bouquet of the brightest red
from the garden, the thorns enormous on the
slashed stems. Behind her came a voice.

"They're for you."

She pivoted. "What are you doing in my house,
Bobby?"

Head bent, Trish Becker mounted a bathroom
scale as if it were a plinth. Numbers shot crazily
from side to side and finally settled. Hands on her
bare hips, she gave a backward look into the dim
bedroom, where shades were pulled against the
late afternoon heat. She said, "You'd tell me if I
was too fat, wouldn't you?"

Harry Sawhill, sipping a vodka tonic, smiled
from the propped pillows of the bed. "Of course."

She rejoined him on the bed with a drink of her
own. She was a close friend and a frequent visitor.
Comfortable with her company, he dropped a
hand on the marked moon of her abdomen. She
was blond, buxom, and jolly. Much in life had become a joke to her, even orgasms. Some women
cried after the throes. She laughed.

"Are you going to marry me, Harry?"

"Ask me when I've had a couple more drinks.
I'll probably say yes."

Neither was serious. Neither wanted the fulltime responsibility of the other. Each had the air of
a convalescent. His hand traced over ridges from a
caesarean, an appendectomy, a gall bladder removal. Her map of Massachusetts, she had once
quipped.

She said, "Let's go to Montreal this weekend."

"Why?" he asked without interest. The thought
of travel tired him. At fifty-two, he had a gray look,
like late November.

"For the hell of it, Harry. We can do what we
want, can't we?"

Each had financial freedom. Trish lived off a
generous divorce settlement, and he shared family
money with his brother, who, though younger, was
his adviser, his mentor, occasionally his savior.

He said, "Get me another drink."

"Take mine, I've had enough." He was the
drunk, she was the sport. A sound from downstairs startled her. "What's that?"

"Bobby's home."

"Damn," she said.

"He won't come up. He knows you're here."

Unconvinced, she tossed her legs over the bed's
edge and sought her clothing. Dressed, she took
out her lipstick and drew a new mouth without
looking in a mirror. Her voice had a fullness.

"Why doesn't he like me, Harry?"

"You're not his mother."

His mother had dressed him in yellow and called
him a butterball. He was blue eyes squirting out of
a face good enough to eat, that was what she told
him. Her kisses were nibbles.

He was four years old when she went into the
hospital for tests. Though she was gone only three
days, her absence tore at him. Her second stay in
the hospital stretched to a week, which he saw as a
betrayal, for she had promised never to leave him
again. The third time she went away she did not
return. His father said she had gone to a better
place and took him to a large white house, into the
cloying scent of cut flowers, where he saw her lying in what seemed a huge basket. He thought she
was alive and, overjoyed, tried to climb in. The
hands grappling with him belonged to his father
and his uncle. His strength surprised them.

"You never should have brought him," his uncle said.

He went to stay with his uncle, whose wife carried the smell of babies. She had twin girls who,
despite the help of a nanny, consumed much of her time, leaving little for him. He ate sweets on the
sly, which rounded his face. Occasionally he
watched the babies being changed. With their legs
open, they looked broken, an observation that
went uncorrected by the young nanny, who spoke
with an accent and may not have understood him.

For his birthday his uncle gave him a singing canary, white with a gray crest, and hung the cage
from a kitchen rafter where the cat couldn't get at
it. Had he been taller and braver, he'd have freed
the bird. Evenings, his uncle usually took him
places, to Wenson's Ice Cream Stand, to Burger
King, once to a band concert on the green, where
he was introduced to the police chief, who was
dressed like everyone else, wore no badge, and
carried no gun. Patting his head, the chief said,
"Anybody gives you trouble, you call me."

"My uncle won't let me go home," he said.

He went home at the end of the month with the
caged canary and the full expectation of seeing his
mother. He thought he heard her footsteps, but
they came from an elderly woman brought in to
look after him during the day. His father, liquor on
his breath and grief in his eyes, said, "Welcome
back."

The woman said, "I like the little birdie. What's
his name?"

He placed the cage on a table. "He doesn't have
a name. He wants to be free." Then he asked when
his mother was coming home, whether she was
back at the hospital or still in that big white house.

The woman looked at his father for guidance. His father, who had been staring into space, suddenly stepped to the cage, opened the little wire
door, and reached inside.

"Do you know what dead is, Bobby?" He caught
the fluttering canary and crushed it in his hand.
"That's what dead is."

Mrs. Bullard was dead. Her body, long limbs
askew, lay at the foot of the cellar stairs like a toy
to be spun. A single rose lay in the spill of blood.
Sergeant Eugene Avery, a veteran of the Bennington Police Department, had a problem staying
calm. The sight of unnatural death invariably unsettled his stomach.

"She was a nice lady," he said.

Chief James Morgan, careful of where he
stepped, was at the bottom of the stairs. Sergeant
Avery remained at the top. Years ago he and the
chief had been students of Mrs. Bullard's at the regional high school, where she had been a hard
marker but had done her best to pass everyone,
though she nearly excluded him. He pricked an ear.

"Did you say something, Chief?"

"Talking to myself." Chief Morgan was a lean
shadow in the light of a bare bulb. "What's one
rose doing down here? The rest are on the table."

Sergeant Avery thought for a moment. "Maybe
she was wearing it in her hair."

"I'm thinking out loud, Eugene."

"I know, but I feel I should-answer.-

"Looks as if she came down headfirst. With
force. Almost as if she were pushed."

Sergeant Avery stared down in disbelief. "No
signs of a burglary or anything, Chief. You don't
think Amy White ... ?"

"No, that doesn't fly."

Amy White, a friend of Sergeant Avery's sister,
looked in on her aunt each evening. Her call to the
station had been hysterical. The ambulance that
came for her aunt took her away instead.

The chief, who had a woman waiting for him,
glanced at his watch. "You got your camera with
you? We at least ought to take some pictures."

Dreading the moment, Sergeant Avery descended the stairs with care. Poised over the remains of his former teacher, he felt an inner jolt.
Something coming up. He held it back. The chief
gave him a quick look and asked if he was all right.
Voiceless, tasting himself, he nodded and began
working the camera.