The Judas Glass (33 page)

“Go see him,” Rebecca urged.

A few low clouds drifted across the sky. Was it my imagination, or was Orion beginning to dim? I said, “Joe Timm is not going to be one of our benefactors.”

She leaned against me, her breath at my ear. “What harm is there in trying?”

Even then one of my mental flashcards spoke for me. “Don't ask a question when you don't know the answer.”

“You're afraid.”

It sounded like a quip, a bit of mental tennis. “I'm afraid I'll kill him.”

Something clattered among the military vehicles. A helmeted figure lay down, deliberately, yawning. The sound had been his gun, failing. The uniformed men in the shadows slumped, drowsing against the trees, lolling in the trucks.

I drifted, finding the crack in the door a passageway, folding between the door and its jamb with a surprising pleasure, straining my body through a slit.

The cabin had a pine desk, and a lamp with a green shade. The entire place was small, a small stone fireplace, and a bed with a firm, diminutive mattress. Joe Timm sat at a telephone. “I've been out with them most of the night. They've got the National Guard out of Camp Roberts,” he was saying. “Tearing up the woods. The Sierra Club is furious because a helicopter startled a nest of red-tailed hawks.”

You can't see me
.

He turned, looking vaguely in my direction. The hand that held the receiver to his ear was pink, two or three hairs on each knuckle.

He turned back to the desk, idly fingering the beaded metal chain of the lamp. The voice on the phone was faint, short of breath.

“I feel sorry for the birds, too. I feel sorry for all of us.” His eyes darted from one point to another in the room, and then he gazed hard at the knotty pine wall, as though trying to visualize his wife so clearly she actually appeared before him. “I even feel sorry for the two of
them.”

The far-off voice spoke again, reassuring, soothing.

“No, I can't sleep,” he replied. “I tried, but I just lie there thinking. How is that new night nurse working out?” He listened, the metal chain swinging when he released it. “Have her read you one of those E.F. Benson stories, Georgie and Lucia. Miss Mapp. I'll be home in another couple of days. It won't be long now.” There was a silence, the mosquito voice of the phone the only sound in the room. Then he said, “I love you, too.”

He hung up the phone but sat quietly, gazing at nothing with a gentle smile.

He heard my step and stiffened, his hand going to his hip. I expected a handgun, but he produced a radio, antenna wiggling.

“Put it away, Joe,” I said.

He put the radio down. It stayed at his elbow. “This is just what I deserve. A personal visit.”

“What happened to your wife?” I said.

“She's stable. Weak, but in no danger.”

“Her heart?”

His eyes went hard. He didn't want to talk about her, not with me. “She's recovering from pneumonia.”

“You shouldn't be here.”

“I should have stopped you that first night, at the cemetery.”

“You take on too much of a burden,” I said. I liked the way I sounded.

“Do you have any idea what you have done to my career? I was on
This Week in Northern California
talking about how law enforcement isn't a matter of force, it's a matter of knowledge. I was great. It happens—you have a good day, all the words falling into place. I was casing office space for my campaign for state senator. Two days later I'm telling reporters I can't help them with their questions.”

“I'm not going to hurt you.”

“I know you're not.” He reached into the desk drawer and withdrew a huge handgun, the biggest revolver I'd ever seen. When he put it on the desk the lamp shade trembled. “I understand that you're impervious to bullets. I'd like to see what you can do with your head blown off.” It was only then I realized how scared he was.

“I'm impressed the way everyone keeps producing newer and bigger guns.” All these Popeyes with their various cans of spinach. “All of this has really done wonders for your spirits.”

Joe smiled like someone who'd just had facial surgery, not sure his mouth would stay in place. He had lost even more weight than I thought.

I straightened a framed reproduction on the wall, a Monet, a woman with a parasol. “Ever get those cracks in your patio fixed?

He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and blinked. He shifted the radio to one corner of the desk, the pistol to the other. “I got some sealant,” he said at last. “Rubber-based, used that on the cracks.”

“It didn't work very well, did it?”

“No.”

“I could ask Stella. A little legal coercion; we'll have a new slab poured by the end of the month.”

Joe shook his head, laughing despite himself, putting one hand on his radio transmitter.

I said, “We don't want to hurt anyone.”

“That's nice of you.”

This mild sarcasm surprised me. I had considered Joe to be one of those people who didn't need irony, saying one thing and meaning quite another, to make a point. He had been so manly, hard-hewn.

“They're going to finish the two of you,” Joe was saying. He did not say
we
. He stood with a gasp. He fished in a pocket and brought out a roll of antacids.

He did not look at me when he said, “They have those dogs they use after plane crashes, hunting for bodies. The State Forestry people made an arrangement with the FAA. These hounds can find remains in trees, anywhere. I realized we were going about it all wrong, scanning for metabolic activity from the air. You'd be surprised how many big animals there are, bears, cougars. We took quite a census. But we forgot that you two aren't really alive.”

I waited.

He chewed the antacids, and said, “I get these back spasms. Right here, right above my butt.” He turned back to the desk, the bright circle of light. “One or two more nights, that's all you have.”

“This is absurd.” I said this with my best conference manner, flippant, disbelieving. You act this way when the opposition proves your expert witness got his geology degree from secretarial school.

He winced. “They shipped up a truck load of Ziegler coffins, those steel containers they use when bodies might be toxic. They brought up a dozen or so. They'll take you apart, put you in these metal boxes—”

I laughed.

He sat again. It was an effort. “You look great, Richard, except when you do that.”

I recognized that new quality in his stare, that tremor in his hands.

“If I were you I wouldn't laugh. It destroys the illusion that you're human.” He considered for a moment, his eyes cutting down to the gun on the desk. “They'll study you for years to come, little bits of you on microscope slides.”

His tone disturbed me. He was afraid, but he was determined, or putting on a good act. “You sound so confident.” I was suddenly weak. My mouth was dry.

“Maybe you can alter my mood, Richard. Is that what you're doing? Playing with my mind?”

These hands, these arms
. While we sleep, the chain saws, men in protective suits, oxygen masks, visors. Cutting through my ribs. Gouging out this rhythmic champion, this heart.

“You have children,” I said.

He hesitated before answering. “Two daughters, both married.”

“You see the world as a place to protect. You want to keep it safe. For your children, your grandchildren. And other people's children. You're still paying off the mortgage on your house.”

“If nothing else works we'll burn you. The army still stocks flame throwers, napalm.”

“But you won't hurt Rebecca, will you?”

His fingers twitched, one of those unconscious gestures that show how unhappy a person is,
No, I'm not really saying this.
“Both of you,” he said.

The air was maple sugar, dissolving on my tongue, painfully sweet.

Cars had streaked the yellow acacia pollen across the parking lot. Like chalk dust, there was so much of it, ordinary life in such abundant promise. A stepping-stone was stained with the crisscross of leaves, leaf-dye remaining long after the twigs were swept away.

I waited for a car to pass, headlights and brakelights and a booming radio. I jogged across the highway, into the trees.

The generator started up. The machine rumbled, and I kept well away from the noise, bounding up a trail to the place where she waited, a pale smudge high above the road.

“They don't know about the mirror,” I said.
We can go back and find it. And keep it for ourselves
.

She could look at me and tell. I shrugged and laughed, the
bon vivant
back from a party, that pleasant champagne glow down to my fingertips.

Her voice was low. “Tell me you didn't.”

A plaster deer stood beside a birdbath, almost the exact size of a real doe. A stone fawn waited beneath a tree, a nick of paint missing from one of its eyes.

“Tell me you didn't touch him!”

I took her hand, ready to lie. Words don't have to reflect reality. Only the mirror, in its straightforward deception, is perpetually truthful.
No, of course I didn't
.

But I did not speak.

“Richard, you're frightening me.”

Let me show you what we can do
.

She wanted to hurry back to the motel. I took both of her hands. “I promise you I didn't touch him.”

She put her head against my chest. “Why didn't you say so?”

“Let me show you,” I said, “where we belong.”

51

Perhaps when we keep a journal we are claiming a future, pretending it already exists, the smoggy summer day, the bright late winter morning, our children grown. We let the fiction carry us forward,
tomorrow
, a causeway across what we know is true, the floodplain of hope, the days that have not yet happened.

Early the next evening we reached Carmel, following the highway at times, and then following the coastline, the ragged margin of white sand. My mother had loved this town, and we had once owned a cottage here, a peak-roofed hideaway with a climbing rose and a huge blue-stone fireplace.

The sand was so fine it squeaked under our shoes. Rebecca hesitated on the beach, but I led her along, and we walked hand in hand up Ocean Avenue. The look of pleasure in her eyes warmed me. There was a quality of “let's pretend” about our stroll up the street. We acted like ordinary people, ordinary in the way love affairs are ordinary, life in flower, but normal, rooted life.

“We shouldn't do this,” she said.

“This is where we should have come,” I laughed, “all this time.”

We could both smell them, taste them in the air, so many lives. She said, “But they can all look at us and tell.”

Restaurant doors swung open, and inside were dozens of faces, the voices lifted in laughter, lowered in conversation. Even a gas station was a marvel, a man rubbing a spot on the windshield of a Jaguar, first with a squeegee, then with a paper towel, then with his forefinger and spit. In a candle shop a woman used a long brass implement to snuff out candles one by one, and the scent of bees' wax reached us between the glass, honey and paraffin.

“It's dangerous,” she said, but there was no conviction in her voice.

We could not help window shopping, knowing all the while that the glass we gazed into did not reflect our images. We pretended it was otherwise, arm in arm, nodding mock-approval at the window displays, expensive leather suitcases, gold-edged china. A display of bridal accessories stopped us, the mannequin's face behind the stiff fireworks of lace.

It was true that a man walking a dog stopped in mid-crosswalk to watch us, ignoring the understated beeping of horns. And sometimes someone across the street took a long look, not sure what he was seeing. A newspaper vending machine caught my eye with its black headlines. A photograph was half lost beneath the fold, but I could make out the top of my head, my eyes.

I could imagine Connie. or even Matilda, complying happily,
sure I have a photo. Take your pick
. I had never liked the black-and-white glossy that had been selected, hating the close-cropped haircut, the
let's party!
grin on my face.

I drew her along, past floral displays and a real esate office. “I didn't know hats looked like that,” she said. “Those floppy ones—”

“Berets,” I suggested. “Cashmere.”

The berets were displayed on Styrofoam heads, featureless, each egg-like head with a dainty prominence and a faint suggestion in place of nose and eyebrows. “I didn't know hats came in so many colors—”

She protested, but I tugged her arm. Once inside a clerk put his head around a curtain and said, “I'm sorry—”

We're closed
he meant to say. The door had been locked, and I had forced it. I apologized for our mistake, but led Rebecca to a counter of scarfs, berets, gloves, so many colors. And purses, a scarlet patent leather clutch so vivid it hurt to look at it.

Drawers were pulled, and samples of silks and fine wool were poured out on the glass counter, the man eager now, delighted that we could stop in. “This one will look wonderful on you,” said the clerk, the owner, I realized, hungry, tired, forgetting everything but the two of us. “Take a look,” he said, tilting a mirror on the counter in Rebecca's direction.

I was surprised at Rebecca's presence of mind. She pretended, artfully, giving her empty reflection her best fashion model pout. The she turned the mirror aside. “Lovely,” she said. I could hear how she felt, what a painful, pointless charade this suddenly was.

“We'll take it,” I said with a smile.

“No,” she said.

All of this is yours
.

She gave me a steady look. “No, thank you,” she said.

Outside again, we enjoyed this game, this opportunity to imagine what it would be like to be another couple, that man and women speaking German, or this man in the tweed jacket, leather patches on the elbows, waiting for his bride—surely they were on a honeymoon—to adjust the strap on one of her shoes.