The Autumn Dead (6 page)

"
On your way back to your office, you could stop by my
place and pick up some clean clothes for me."

"In other words, you want to stay all night?"

"
If you wouldn't mind."

"No, that'd be nice. Only I want the window up."

Donna is never so happy as when she's covered with goose
bumps and sleeping soundly.
"
Can't we flip for it?"

"
We flipped for it last time and you cheated.
"

"Oh, yeah."

"
So if you stay, the window's going to be up. Clean fresh
air."

"
Okay. And I appreciate you stopping by my place. I have
the feeling I'm going to be busy."

"Where you going?"

"Up near the Highlands. Little housing development there.
Where Karen Lane claims to be staying."

"Claims?"

"
Right now, I'm not sure I believe anything she tells me."

"
Good.
"
Donna laughed.
"
Stay that way."

T
hey'd built the houses in the mid-fifties, and though they weren't much bigger than garages, the contractors had been smart enough to paint them in pastels—yellow and lime and pink and puce, the colors of impossible flowers, the colors of high hard national hope—and they were where you strived to live in
1956
if you worked in a factory and wanted the good life as promised by the Democrats and practiced by the
Republicans. There were maybe four hundred houses in all, interlocked in Chinese puzzle boxes of streets, thirty to a block, glowing in the sunlight, hickory-smoked with backyard barbecues and driveways filled with installment-plan Ford convertibles and DeSoto sedans. The housing development seemed the quintessence of everything our fathers had fought World War II for. My own father never made it there; we always stayed in the Highlands farther down in the valley. But on Sundays we'd drive in our fifteen-year-old Plymouth with its running boards and mud-flaps through the streets of the development while my parents discussed just which type of house they would buy—there being four basic models—when the money came in.

Now this part of the development was as forgotten as Dwight Eisenhower's golf scores. In the late-afternoon sunlight, the houses looked faded now, and scraped in places and smashed in others, tape running the length of some picture windows, and chain-link fences giving some of the tiny homes the air of fortresses, particularly those with Day-Glow BEWARE OF DOG signs. Blacks and Chicanos were pushing up the valley now, taking the same route as these whites had twenty-five years earlier. But you saw a lot of Dixie-flag decals on the bumper stickers of the scrap-heap cars along the curb, and, you saw in the eyes of the ten- and eleven-year-old kids—already wheezing on cigarettes and walking with their arms possessively around girls every bit as tough as the boys—you saw the sum total of decades of hatred. Meals, at least steady ones, were something you had to fight for up here, and blacks, to feed their own families, meant by one way or another to take your meals. So you had the old lady sew an NRA decal on your work jacket, and you even—just for curiosity's sake—went to the Klan rally held out on an outlying farm. You wouldn't kill a black man personally, but you wouldn't condemn someone who had.

The Roberts home was freshly painted white, and a new white Chevrolet sedan sat in the drive. The place was so clean and neat, it must have made its neighbors want to come over and smear dirt on it out of sheer envy.

I parked behind the Chevrolet and got out. A collie came
up. He was bathed and smelled clean when he put his front paws on my stomach and asked to be petted. From this angle I could see into the backyard. There was a clothesline filled with white sheets and shirts and the kind of pink rayon uniform waitresses wear. Beneath the sheets flapping like schooner masts in the breeze, I saw a pair of jean-clad legs.

I went back to the clothesline, the collie keeping me eager and friendly company, and when I got there I said, "Susan?"

And then I saw the feet go up on tippy-toes and saw her head appear over the sheets.

"My God," she said.

She
was older now but still
pretty. There was only a little gray in the otherwise auburn hair, and as she came around the sheets, I saw that she'd put on just a few pounds—far fewer than I had—and looked trim in her white blouse and blue man's cardigan and pleasantly snug jeans. In high school she'd always been one of my favorite people—she'd had a kind of wisdom that I attributed to the early loss of her father; she knew what mattered and what did not—and just the way her brown eyes watched me now, with humor and curiosity, I knew she was still going to be one of my favorite people.

"I don't believe it," she said. Then she smiled. "It's really nice seeing you."

"It's really nice seeing you." I nodded to the clothes, the pink waitress uniform, the shirts, the sheets. "I didn't know people still hung wash out."

She laughed. "I do because it's the cleanest smell in the world. Here. Grab one of those sheets and smell it."

"You serious?"

"Of course I'm serious."

So I did and it smelled wonderful, clean as she'd promised. "I see you on TV. On commercials. You're a good actor."

"I'm learning."

"It must be exciting."

"Sometimes." I nodded to the house."How's Gary?"

For the first time, her face tightened. "He's in there working."

"He sell anything yet?"

"Stories here and there."

"He'll make it. You can't lose
faith."

"That's the funny thing. I haven't, but he has." She shook her head. "He's been writing stories since we were in high school, right? That's why he went into teaching high school English, so he could stay close to what he loved. Well, he finally got some real interest on a novel a few weeks ago—after nearly twenty years of trying—and he burns it."

"
He burned the novel?"

"
Yes. Said it wasn't good enough."

She shrugged, glanced down at her hands. She had always been pretty rather than beautiful, with an almost mournful grace. It was a grace that had only deepened as she got older. Then she smiled and I wanted to hold her, she gave me that much sense of tenderness. "I'll bet I know why you're here."

"She here?"

"No. But she called. Said she'd see us at the reunion dance tonight. You going?"

"I hadn't planned on it. But if it's the only way I can see her, I will."

She said,
"
You're not starting up with her again, are you?"

"Do I look crazy?"

"I shouldn't have said that. She's my friend."

"She can still be your friend and you can still tell the truth."

"She's pretty messed up. All those husbands." She reached out and took an edge of the sheet and brought it to her nose. "I always associate this smell with my mother. 1 always helped her hang out the wash and I loved to put my face against wet clothes and let them freeze my cheeks till my skin got numb." She inhaled the aroma. "Unfortunately, I can't convince either of my kids to help me. It's a different age." She put the sheet back down. "But I was talking about Karen, wasn't I? She's kind of a basket case."

"She also may be in some serious trouble."

"Why?"

I started to tell her, but then the back door opened and a
small, slight man with thinning brown hair caught back in a ponytail and rimless eyeglasses came up. Gary.

"God," he said and put out his slender hand. We shook. He looked much older than Susan, and much wearier. He was still thin, but it was a beaten thin, and his clothes were redolent of the sixties, faded tie-dye shirt and bell-bottoms, like a hobo looking for the ghost of Jim Morrison. Gary and I had lived two blocks away from each other in the Highlands, and sometimes I'd gone to his parents' apartment, where we smoked Luckies and drank Pepsis all afternoon and listened to Elvis and Carl Perkins and Little Richard, dreaming of owning custom cars and having as our own the women Robert Mitchum always ended up with. But that was just one side of Gary. He'd had a battered bookcase filled with paperbacks reverently filed alphabetically, everything from Arthur
C.
Clarke to John O'Hara, from Allen Ginsburg to e.e.
cummings
(he'd gotten me into Jack Kerouac, an affection I've never lost), and the only time I'd ever seen him hit somebody was one afternoon when a kid drunk on 3.2 beer tripped into Gary's bookcase, knocking a brand-new Peter Rabe to the floor. Gary, not big, not known for his temper, slapped the kid across the face with the precision of a fabled pachuco opening up somebody's gullet with a shiv. Now we stood on either side of twenty-five years and he said, "God, look at you."

"Look at you."

"I mean, you look great, Jack. I look like a sixty-year-old man."

And I heard then what had always been in him—some generalized bitterness, half self-pity, half frustration with a world that had passed your old man by and was intent on doing the same thing to you—and I glanced over at Susan, who watched her husband with the same concern she'd always had for him. In ninth grade she'd simply adopted him in some curious way, part maternal and part sexual, and she had never let go of that impulse or of him down all these long years.

Gary said,
"
We see you on TV."

"Yeah.
"
Then, "How about letting me read some of your stories?"

"Oh, they're not much. You know that."

"Really, I'd like to read some." And I wanted to, too. He had the early knack for telling stories, very good ones when he wrote in the vein of the magazines we both liked,
Manhunt
and
Ellery Queen,
less so when he affected the styles he
found in the
New Yorker
and the
Atlantic.

"Hubris," he said.

"Why?"

Gently, she said,
"
He wrote a perfectly good detective story three months ago but wouldn't send it off."

"Why not send it out?"

"I don't want to be a detective writer. I want to be a real writer."

And then I remembered how he'd shifted somewhere in college, telling me about it one night behind a couple of joints and some wine, how popular fiction had started to bore him, how it was
"
genius"
 
or nothing. So now he had a tract home and graying hair in a ponytail and he took the efforts of his heart and mind and burned them. Much as I liked him, and felt sentimental watching him now, he seemed alien to me somehow, aggrieved in a way that he wanted to be literary but which came off as merely pathological.

One of those awkward silences fell between us, until Susan said,
"
Jack thinks Karen's in some trouble."

His head snapped up. His blue eyes looked agitated behind his rimless glasses. "What kind
of
trouble?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "Something to do with a missing suitcase. Do you know anything about it?"

"Nothing about a suitcase," Susan said.

"Gary?"

"No. Nothing,
"
But his air of anxiety continued. He reminded me of how Glendon Evans had acted earlier that afternoon.

"Kids," Susan said.

"What?"

"That's her trouble. No children."

Gary said, "That
isn't her
trouble."

"No?" I asked.

"No. Her trouble is that people think she's one thing when
she's another."

"What is she, then?"

He flushed, seeing how seriously I'd taken his statement.

Then he put on a big party smile. "You shouldn't pay any
attention to a forty-two-year-old man who's gotten more than
two hundred rejections in his time."

I wasn't going to let him go so easily—I wanted to press
him on his remark—but Susan said, "I'm afraid you drove
out here for nothing."