The Judas Glass (26 page)

But a few of my pursuers had heard her, too. They slowed, stopped, confused. You could see them eager to stay where they were, safe among the trees, and not return to the graveside, not hurry onward after me.

I won't hurt you, Joe
.

I sent this thought without intending to. Joe stopped running, twitching the flashlight beam into the branches above, and back to the pebbles at his feet.

“Richard?” he rasped.

I intended to be reassuring.
I will do you no harm
.

He put his hand to his hat, tugging the brim. He let the beam of light play slowly, like a man watering a lawn. Had he heard her, too? Was this why he insisted on marching up the hill—so he could pretend reality was not unravelling?

No harm
.

He took another step, straining forward, trying to see where I was. His shaft of light nearly found me. I was about to speak to him, to use my voice.

“Richard, it's wrong!” he called. “What you're doing is wrong!” His light lost itself overhead, in the trees.

I felt a twinge of fellowship. I wanted to ask him how his bonsais were, his dwarf maples and pines. I wanted to ask how his wife was doing, her heart. Already I was streaking across the hillside, dodging trees. I could not stay here a moment longer.

“It's not going to be as easy as you think!” Joe Timm called. “We're going to run you to the ground!”

This last rhetorical flourish was for the benefit of his men. There was something artificial about Joe Timm's behavior. Joe Timm alone would be a more quietly stubborn adversary. As long as he led other men he would feel the need to call out, to be seen.

It was easy to elude Joe and his police academy graduates. The most perceptive of them were baffled, heads together, uncertain. The more dogged, and less alert, were already thrashing the weeds in the undeveloped land. A bird startled by their passage broke from branch to branch, high in the trees.

I slipped into a dry stream bed, and followed the fold in the hillside down, in the opposite direction, back to the asphalt road. Two uniformed officers stood beside a car, and they did not see me as I sailed past. Was I a winged creature, or did I run on two legs, or four? I could not tell, and it no longer mattered.

There, you see, I mocked myself. My mind was teasing me, my hope coining counterfeits. I knelt at the grave. How many times have we heard someone call our name and looked back, only to see a stranger beckoning to another stranger, arms out to him, an embrace. It was one form of wisdom almost every human attains—to expect disappointment, to tolerate it, to sail forth on diminished expectations.

The casket was broken. I began to
see
, not to anticipate. I began to perceive what was before my eyes. The satin of the interior was pale, freckled with mildew and clots of earth. The grave was empty.

She called me again.

Her voice came from far away. I ran hard down the hill, then stretched into wing, soaring over statuary, gravestones and crosses. She was nowhere. There was only the still magic of the dark.

When I saw her at last she was a small white puppet curled into a hollow. I hovered over her, and knelt. I was afraid to look at her.

I reached forth my hand, tentative, disbelieving. She was warm. I touched my lips to hers and she was breathing. I gathered her into my arms.

I soothed back her hair and gazed at her. Already there was color and movement, her lips, her fingers. Gradually I let myself feel the first happiness. The police were lost, thrashing through poison oak, far up the hillside. The whisper of her gown was the only sound, that and my footsteps as I strode through a bed of nasturtiums, the green vines snaking across a sidewalk.

Her voice was a whisper. “Richard!”

“I'm here,” I said. I wanted to add,
Everything's all right
but emotion made it impossible.

Her calls to me had ruined her voice and she could only whisper, “Richard, where are you?” She clung to me, hard.

I wanted to tell her I was holding her. I wanted to tell her we were together again. But I had to hurry. There was that familiar stirring in the air. A window across the street was suddenly a source of light, and a man parted the curtains. The sky was no longer simple dark. A cloud was taking on an outline, rose, egg-yellow, chalk blue.

I tilted a manhole cover, and dragged the big steel dish into the street. I lowered her into the round hole, and climbed down after her. I pulled the lid carefully back into place.

“Where is he?” she said, flinging one arm out into the darkness. She struggled.

I tried to tell her that we were safe.

“The house is burning!” she said.

“No one can hurt us here,” I said.

“Richard, there's a fire,” she said, controlling her fear.

“No,” I said soothingly. “We're in no danger—”

“Save yourself!” she cried.

“The fire is out, Rebecca,” I said. I laughed tenderly. “It's been out for a long time. The man who wanted to hurt you is dead.”

I almost said:
the man who killed you
.

She touched my face. She touched my tears. She tried to kiss them away, but I turned my head. She was innocent of everything I had done. As joyous as I was, I knew the truth.

“Richard,” she whispered. “I thought I would never see you again.”

She wore a long, flowing gown, the fabric stiff with moisture, foxing. It was the sort of dress she would have worn for a recital, and even stained and soiled it was elegant. She became strengthless in my arms again, and I kissed her eyelids, hoping she could not sense my doubt.

I recognized the sleep that claimed her, the solemn torpor. “My God,” I breathed, the words sing-song in my wonderment, my happiness, my fear. “What have I done?”

But she was here with me, now, and I would not lose her again. I carried her gently. The drain was corrugated metal, and I eased her along through the tunnel until we reached another chamber, this one smaller and crowded with pipejoints and metal housing for what I guessed was electronic equipment.

We slept there, among the rust and slowly dripping water. Sometimes a
clang
would reach my consciousness, a car running over the manhole cover. In my haste, I had replaced the cover imperfectly. It was loose, and every time a car ran over it the iron disk rang, an ugly, sour bell.

At some point during the day the manhole cover was pried free. Steps descended the ladder, splashed in the trickle of water. Voices echoed. I had the vague sense that a beam of light was stretching out along the drainpipe, the beam weak by the time it reached our hiding place.

I heard it, a voice in a dream. Joe Timm's voice, exhausted. “They could be anywhere.”

40

She was still asleep, but I could feel her slow breathing.

I tried to sense what was taking place above us, in the world of streets and houses. So much of our lives is like this: trying to be where we are not, imagining what others are doing. Occasionally a car passed on the street above, but there was no hint of any danger.

It was painful to leave her, but I had to hurry. I lifted the manhole cover gently, slid it, letting it settle as soundlessly as possible. Two figures stood at the end of the street. A streetlight gleamed off the plastic visor of a helmet.

Joy made the porchlights, the parked cars, full of promise. I swept through the early evening. I had a new purpose, a new courage. I took only what life I needed, from a man working on a brilliant red sports car, from a woman bathing, from another woman pacing, peering out from between curtains until I took her in my arms.

How many times had I paused before a painting in an art book and thought: I'll have to sit down and take a long look at this some day. How many times had I heard a favorite piece of music on the radio and thought: some day I'll have to really listen to that. I had always been called away, frog-marched from insight and pleasure by my own hectic nature.

Once again I let the blood spill from my veins into Rebecca. I had the chilling suspicion that this time it would not work. I kissed her, and she stirred, but did not wake.

I told her I loved her. I said it like a man saying his last words, in a rush, just before vanishing from the earth. It was not even my own voice speaking, but something deeper, the humanity that remained in me.

At last she woke. Her fingers searched my eyebrows, my lips. “He was someone I knew,” she said, her voice broken. “Someone who loved me, a long time ago.”

“Eric,” I said. “Don't worry about him.”

If she was surprised that I knew his name she made no sign. “Where are we?” she asked at last.

The damp dripped. There was a far-off splashing, four legs breaking the water. I said, “We're in a special place,” happiness in my voice.

She smiled. Her hand found the wall, the pocked concrete, a seam glued with algae. She recoiled slightly, and I could see her curiosity shift into concern. She turned her head to listen to the pattering of a small animal in the distance.

“No one can harm us here,” I said.

She touched my lips with her fingers. “Your voice sounds so strange.”

I laughed quietly.

She said, “There's something wrong.”

“Rebecca, you'll have to be very patient.”

“Tell me where we are.”

“You'll only want to know how we got here,” I said.

“It's a secret,” she said with a tentative smile.

“You could say that.” It hurt me. She could not begin to understand.

She thought I was being playful, coy. She felt the hard concrete wall again, the joint of pipes above her head. She said, “If you give me enough time I can figure it out.”

“Try to stand up,” I said.

She stayed where she was. “What am I wearing?”

“It's very pretty.”

“What is it? Something my mother picked out. She always wanted me to look like the woman on a wedding cake. Did the studio call?”

Conversation like this was so sweet and so foreign to me that I had trouble following her meaning.

She sensed my confusion. “The Arch Street studio. I can hardly move my fingers! I won't be able to play like this.”

I helped her to her feet. “You'll be able to do anything you want.”

“They'll reschedule me,” she said, as though it was a simple fact. She moved her arms, a mannequin come to life.

“Of course they will. If that's what you want.”

“What color is it?” She pulled at the gown, trying to make sense of the way it felt, falling in hard folds.

“Sky blue, I think. Azure. Can you walk?”

“This place smells so damp.” Her voice was soft, but it echoed. “We're undergound!” she said. “But—where are the doctors?”

“Try not to be so loud,” I said, making it sound like a game we were playing.

“Richard—are you in trouble?”

I wrenched open a car door and stretched her on the backseat Before now I had the impression that I could start a vehicle by my will alone, empower it with a thought. Now was the time to find out. I sat behind the steering wheel, slipped the transmission from
park
to
neutral
.

Ripe, generous—that's how cars had so often impressed me, pages of glossy magazines with a woman leaning against a fender. This vehicle was a thing of cold iron, grease and slag. I knew this hulk, down to the rust already beginning on the underside of the hood.
Fire
. It was stone that fire had melted, and now it needed fire again.

A spark. A cylinder jerked upward, and there was the pungent perfume, gasoline. The engine twitched again, a grinding, whining, choking sound, the starter failing.

The engine caught.

“I have a terrible feeling,” she said from where she lay in the backseat. I steered clumsily, as before, almost clipping a parked car.

“I have a very bad feeling that you did something wrong,” she said.

What is it that makes some cats feel they can do anything they want? I almost hit one that darted across the street, not even in a great hurry, running stiff-legged, its paws a blur.

“Tell me you didn't do it, Richard.”

“Do what?” I tried to sound lighthearted, but I was having a surprising amount of trouble driving. My skill with automobiles was as bad as before, or worse. I searched for the brake with my foot and found it.

Rebecca sat up. She touched my hair, ran her fingers along the back of my neck.

“Richard, promise you'll tell me the truth.”

“I'll try.”

She didn't want to ask. But at last the question came. “Did you do something you shouldn't do?”

I gave a forced laugh. “Like what—murder Connie?”

“You're acting so strange, Richard. I can tell you're some sort of fugitive.”

She said this without irony or exaggeration, offering the statement without a trace of self-consciousness. This had always amazed me about her, her grasp on the essentials that I had always been happy to overlook.

“What would we be running from?” I asked.

“You tell me.” She sank back. “What kind of car is this?”

“I don't know. Something Detroit decided America needed to drive.” I didn't want to tell her that I had picked it among the others parked along the street because it didn't have an alarm.

“It's not yours?”

“I stole it.” This happens to me. I try to make a joke, and end up telling the truth.

“Richard, I'm afraid.”

“Don't let a little grand theft bother you,” I said.

“It's not that. If you feel you have to steal cars, steal cars. That's not what bothers me. I can tell something terrible has happened.”

“Like what?” I steered, braked, lurching from lane to lane. The glow of freeway lights was ahead, an ugly destination I could not avoid.

Her gown rustled. “I don't feel right.”

“I told you you would have to be patient,” I said. “I won't keep any secrets from you. But you have to wait.”