The Horses of the Night (39 page)

Bring Stuart back, I thought. Bring him back to life and health.

But I turned away. When we mature we climb to higher ground, leaving the quicker, lower years behind. The view is greater. The tower of our own making enters the sky. We see more of the landscape around us. We press brick upon brick and stand ever taller in the countryside of our lives. And if all that happens is our flowering ignorance, what have we accomplished?

Perhaps something. Something small. Perhaps we have exchanged one sort of ignorance for another, finer kind, a fabric old and human.

“Bring Stuart back,” I said.

There was no response.

The light had vanished.

61

My mother had a wonderful singing voice. It was, however, a secret voice. She sang only when she thought no one was listening, and she would sing music that I had assumed were obscure snippets of madrigals or arias, tunes that I had not yet run across in Covent Garden or the Arena di Verona.

I would never find these songs in any library, although I tried. I came to realize that these songs were her own creation. She composed them, these private fragments of opera. They were hers, perhaps one of the gifts the spirits had given her, a corollary to her insanity.

If only I could recall any of the lyrics to her music. Or perhaps what had sounded like words might have been a language of her own invention. As so many times before, I found myself wondering what it was like to be my mother. Did she feel, sometimes, as I felt now?

The night of my good fortune was at an end. The consequence of my contract was about to unfold. If it had all been in my mind—as I now believed—then it was my sanity that I was about to see lifted away from me, that caul of thought that was about to be stripped.

What I was facing was the possibility of my madness returning, now, tonight. My shadow slipped down the hall ahead of me.

I descended the stairs. I called my brother's name, but there was no answer.

Each room was empty. Until I found him at last.

It was an out-of-the-way room, one I did not enter except on rare occasions, like this, when something—or someone—was lost. “You took so long,” said Rick. He had picked up a book somewhere and had busied himself with it, but tossed it down with an expression of relief.

It was one of Father's favorite books, his well-thumbed Plato. I lifted my packed bag as proof that I had been busy.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“How do I look?”

“You know what they say about appearances.”

“So I must look all right.”

I realized that Rick had found some of his old clothes somewhere in the house. He had dressed this well once during a trial for drunk driving. He had been acquitted, the jury persuaded, many people felt, by his appearance. He had found his way into the pages of
Esquire
over the caption, “Sway the jury with hang of your tie.”

The heavy old Plato did not belong here. Rick stood in what my mother would have called the sun parlor. I had redesigned this room as a memorial to my mother's taste, the way a concert pianist might include, in his repertoire, a Liszt or Schubert that his family had always enjoyed but which he himself did not especially like.

The room was decorated in the manner she most admired, the style of Louis Phillippe, big vases with cherubs, and straight-legged chairs upholstered with pink, romantic figures. I dismissed this period as precious and overly pretty, but the furniture in this room was authentic and well-constructed, and there was something about this evening that made this the right room for what might be my last moments in my own house.

“You can't run away,” he said.

I found a place just outside the doorway in the hall shelf for the big old volume. When I returned I said, “I wouldn't dream of it. Where would I go? Montreux?”

“You could go anywhere.”

I considered his tone. “You're serious.”

“You don't have to come with me tonight.”

“Dr. Ahn is expecting us.” The final pronoun was a deliberate choice.

He made his familiar pistol-finger gesture, meaning: You're right.

My brother and I had often engaged in fraternal combat, of the happy sort. He and I were well matched, dissimilar, similar, and my father had called us “two thorns in a pod.”

I was reluctant to begin. “Tell me, Rick—why is Nona afraid of you?”

We had walked down the hall before he made any response. He turned at the front door. He gave an incredulous laugh. “She can't be.”

“Forgive me for asking. My thoughts are hard to control. Perhaps I'm speaking so much word salad. Why does she think that you tried to kill her?”

His head shook, just slightly, as though he were ordering himself to say nothing. “I'm not going to talk about this sort of thing until we meet with Dr. Ahn.”

“You think what I am saying is the raving of a diseased mind.” This was not a question. I let the nearly classical phrasing of the remark settle between us. Our talk would be direct but formal.

But he said exactly the wrong thing. It was his flippant, unfeeling manner that stung me. “If I tried to kill someone, they'd be dead.”

“Unless you were interrupted before you finished by a nurse or an aide, or maybe just changed your mind at the last moment.”

Rick did not bother to respond. He tucked my leather bag into what my family had always insisted on calling the “boot” of the car, in this case a very small storage compartment.

We sat in the car, shutting doors, busying ourselves with our own thoughts.

“My son the playboy” my mother called him. The phrase smacked of smoking jackets, martinis, party girls, an obsolete set of images. My mother had stopped paying attention to the world at some point in her young adulthood.

I did not plan my words. I did not know, really, from what part of me they originated. But I spoke clearly. “You resented Father for the pain he caused. You helped Mother kill him. Was it oleander, or did you use something else? You must have quadrupled Dad's tranquilizers. Must have taken a lot of it. Or some other medicine—poison,” I corrected myself. “Something one of your starlet friends took for fun. I remember belladonna being all the rage at a party or two.”

I stopped myself, aghast at my words. You can't say this sort of thing. You're talking to your brother about patricide. Think what you're saying. Look at your hands now. You're shaking. Don't say another word.

There was a light mist on the windshield. We sat silently in the car, the engine idling, my brother hunched at the steering wheel, staring ahead.

Then I broke the silence. The thought of anyone hurting Nona goaded me. “Maybe you resented me, too. Maybe you wanted me to succeed and at the same time destroy myself. Maybe you hired people to attack me. Maybe it wasn't the work of DeVere's friends at all. Maybe you told your gambling associates that if I died you'd inherit what little money I had—this house, for example. Or maybe you knew enough commissions were coming in to make the calf just fat enough to suit your purposes.”

He nearly spoke but stopped himself. He looked away, through the small side window of the sportscar.

He's angry, I told myself. Of course he's angry. Or maybe he's afraid. Wouldn't you be afraid of a brother who sat right next to you in a car talking about such things?

But I would not stop. “Besides, you always felt that I was the good brother, the brother destined for something great. You tried to kill Nona because you knew that I was on the edge of complete mental collapse. You wanted me hospitalized. I think you like the thought of it even now. I can tell what you must have been thinking: Strater cracks up. I look good.”

Rick broke his silence. “Mom's just like that. Under that genteel surface she's all venom.”

“And how about you, Rick? Under your surface, what are you?”

He wrenched the car into first, the gears whining, then pulled away from the curb. The velocity forced me back into the seat.

I let Rick drive in silence for awhile. I knew that he was one of those people who find outlet, even expression, in driving. His way of cornering, tires squealing, his way of barely slowing at a stop sign—these were all silent counterarguments.

An intersection approached. Rick sped up.

In movies there is usually a chance for a stunt driver to swerve, skid, and avoid a lumbering vehicle or two. This was like nothing so much as Russian roulette. A light turned red.

And before the cars could start up and enter the intersection we were through it.

After the event I closed my eyes for a moment. “You're going too fast,” I said.

Rick forced the engine to a higher pitch. I tensed, my hand stretched out to the dash. It had taken less than a minute to go from sporty momentum to lethal speed, but now we were racing down Nineteenth Street, cars and buses a blur.

We were going the wrong way.

We should have been heading north, but we were heading south. I struggled in my seat, twisting to look one way, turning to speak to Rick. “This is wrong!”

The speed forced me back into my seat.

I steadied myself. “Maybe I've been talking about things I don't understand,” I said, trying to placate him. “What I'm saying can't be true.”

We were on 280, the sportscar fishtailing across the lanes of freeway traffic. We shot around a truck in the fast lane, and whipped from lane to lane, avoiding cars on the mist-dampened freeway.

We were going too fast.

I glanced at the speedometer and the needle was jammed to the right. The cars, the lanes, the shrubbery and the overpasses, were indistinct, erased by our speed.

The highway twitched, straightened. We were on Highway 1, the reflectors in the middle of the road a steady streak. At one time I had enjoyed danger, I told myself with thin humor. My voice was steady. “Slow down, Rick. Slow down and let me out.”

The car went faster.

“I want out!” I shouted. I even thought of grabbing the steering wheel, but then cringed away at the recognition of the disaster that would result. “Slow down!”

Then he spoke. The feeling his voice was not anger, and it was not fear. “You're right,” he said.

As soon as he said this I knew.

My God, he's going to kill us.

The hulking shape of a gasoline truck loomed ahead, outlined by pinpricks of red.

I turned to him, sure that I had not heard him correctly. Surely not. Or maybe he's joking.

He doesn't see the truck.

62

The truck was yellow.

It had black mudguards with golden reflectors, and each rubber flap was emblazoned with the shiny silhouette of a female form. A red sign on the truck said, in tall letters:
FLAMMABLE
.

The Alfa shrugged to one side as Rick stepped on the brakes. The force flung us from side to side. Rick let us slide all the way behind the truck, and then he jerked the wheel, driving with one hand, the other hand supporting his head, running through his hair, his posture casual, appearing to take only slight interest in what was happening.

The Alfa slid sideways. There was the smell of rubber, and the taste of diesel in the air.

I braced myself. I could hit Rick, I thought. I reasoned it through. I could take this fist and stun him. Maybe I could grab the gearshift and—or pull on the parking brake.

Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. Rick can drive. Look at him there, looking perfectly calm. He probably drives like this all the time when he's alone. He's always surviving accidents. This is just another—I stopped my thoughts.

I was about to think: another accident.

When the course of the car was steady Rick forced it even faster, slipping from lane to lane around cars, managing to pick up speed.

As he spoke his eyes were straight ahead, watching the road. “I ran across Anna Wick in L.A. at a party. She told me that Blake and DeVere planned to keep you from winning the Pacific International prize. I knew exactly what I should do. There was never any question. You know what the real irony is? Blake was getting ready to shoot himself. I basically stayed around and made sure he did it.”

I tried to tell myself I wasn't really hearing any of this.

“DeVere was not at all ready to die,” said Rick. “He tried to fight back. Threw a punch or two, tough-guy punches that missed by a mile. I'm like you, Strater. I'm in shape. He never had a chance.”

Another joke, I tried to think. Another one of Rick's bad jokes.

He knew what I was thinking. “Can you really blame me? I was sick of the way those small people have their way. Little, ambitious people, and the rest of us are helpless. I did it because I wanted to help you.”

Just a few minutes before I had accused him of helping to murder my father. That was somehow different. That was hypothetical, so archetypal as to be beyond emotion, plausible only because of the confusion I had been feeling.

Rick couldn't kill anyone. Surely he was lying.

Tears glistened on his cheek in the light from the headlights flashing by.

But his voice was steady. “The police were about to figure it out. Childress is so afraid of doing anything at all. But he knows by now. You were so easy to deceive. You deserved a break, but I was afraid that once you got what you wanted you would feel that your world was disintegrating. Because that's what happens. You win and you lose all at the same time.”

“You don't have to drive like this.”

“I tried to help, but I knew what you were like. How did I know? How did I know what it was like to be you, Strater?”

I considered wrenching the door open. My hand was on the door handle. We had to be going well over one hundred miles per hour, the store fronts of Pacifica past us, the restaurants of Rockaway Beach past us, too, the distant lights of buildings multicolored streaks.

“It's in the blood,” said Rick. “We're a family of mutations, creatures that really shouldn't be allowed to live.”