The Plague of Doves (13 page)

“You leave me no choice,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you to dry-swallow these.”

“What are they?” asked Neve.

“Sleeping pills,” said Billy. Then he spoke to Wildstrand. “Leave the money in a garbage bag next to the Flickertail Club highway sign. No marked bills. No police. Or I’ll kill your wife. You’re being watched.”

Wildstrand was surprised that Neve took the pills, but then for some reason she always had been like that about taking pills, even asking the doctor to paint her throat when it was hardly pink—she’d always been a willing patient. Now she turned out to be a willing hostage, and Billy had no more trouble with her. He undid the rope on her legs and put a hobble on her ankle. She walked out dreamily, her coat draped over her shoulders, and John Wildstrand was left alone. It took him about half an hour of patient wiggling to release himself from the rope, which he left looped around the chair. Now what? He wanted desperately to call Maggie, to talk to her, hear the slow music
of her voice. But for some hours, he sat on the couch with his head in his hands, replaying the whole scenario. Then he started thinking ahead. Tomorrow he would go in early. He would withdraw cash out of their joint accounts. Then he would take the cash and get in the car. He would drive out to the highway sign and make the drop. It would all be done before eleven
A.M.
and Billy Peace would free Neve west of town, where she could walk home or find a ride. There would be police. Investigation. Newspapers. But no insurance was involved. He’d have used all of their retirement money, but Neve still had the bank. It would all blow over.

Helpless

A BLIZZARD CAME
up and Neve got lost and might have frozen to death had not a farmer pulled her from a ditch. Because Billy had actually scooped up her snowboots as they left, and her coat was a big long woolen one that ended past her knees, she suffered no frostbite. She ran a fever for six days, but she did not develop pneumonia. Wildstrand nursed her with care, waited on her hand and foot, took a leave from the bank. He was shocked by how the kidnapping had affected her. Over the next weeks she lost a great deal of weight and spoke irrationally. To the police she described her abductor as quite large, muscular, with hard hands, a big nose, and a deep voice. Her kidnapper was stunningly handsome, she said, a god! It was all so bizarre that Wildstrand almost felt like correcting her. Though he was delighted, on the one hand, that she had the description so wrong, her embroidery disturbed him. And when he brought her home she was so restless. In the evenings, she wanted to talk instead of watch television or read the magazines she subscribed to. She had questions.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you.”

“Do you really, really love me, I mean, would you have died for me if the attacker had made you make a choice—it’s her or you—say he said that. Would you have stepped forward?”

“I was tied to the chair,” said John Wildstrand.

“Metaphorically.”

“Of course, metaphorically. I would have.”

“I wonder.”

She began to look at him skeptically. Her eyes measured him. At night, now, she wanted lots of reassurance. She seduced him and scared him, saying things like, “Make me helpless.”

“He made me helpless,” she said one morning. “But he was kind. Very kind to me.”

Wildstrand took her to the doctor, who said it was hysteria and prescribed cold baths and enemas, which seemed only to make her worse. “Hold me, tighter, squeeze the breath out of me.” “Look at me. Don’t close your eyes.” “Don’t say something meaningless. I want the truth.” It was terrifying, how she’d opened up. What had Billy done?

Nothing, Billy insisted on the phone. Wildstrand was ashamed to be repelled by his wife’s awkward need—it was no different from his own need. If she’d been this way earlier on, he recognized that maybe he would have responded. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned to Maggie. Maybe he would have been amazed, grateful. But when Neve threw herself over him at night he felt despair, and she could sense his distance. She grew bony and let her hair go gray, long, out of control, beautiful. She was strange, she was sinking. She continually looked at him with the eyes of a drowning person.

Murdo Harp

JOHN WILDSTRAND WENT
to visit his father-in-law in the retirement home which his money had endowed. The Pluto Nursing Home. This place did not depress him, though he could see the reasons why it might. Murdo Harp was resting on his single bed, on top of a yellow chenille coverlet. He’d pulled an afghan over himself, one that Neve had knitted, intricate rainbow stripes. He was listening to the radio.

“It’s me. It’s John.”

“Ah.”

Wildstrand took his father-in-law’s hand in his. The skin was dry and very soft, almost translucent. His face was thin, bloodless, almost
saintly looking, even though Murdo Harp had been ruthless, a cutthroat banker, a survivor.

“I’m glad you’re here. It’s very peaceful and quiet, but I woke up at four
A.M.
before the rest of them this morning. I thought to myself, I hope someone will come. I want to go somewhere. And you came. It’s good to see you, John. Where are we going?”

John ignored the question, and the old man nodded.

“How’s my little girl?”

“She’s just fine.” No one had told Neve’s father, of course, what had happened. “She has a cold,” Wildstrand lied. “She’s staying in bed today. She’s probably curled up around her hot water bottle, sleeping.”

“The poor kid.”

Wildstrand resisted telling Neve’s father, as he always did, “I’ll take good care of her.” How wrong, and how ironic, would that be? The hand relaxed and Wildstrand realized that his father-in-law had fallen asleep. Still, he continued to sit beside the bed holding the old man’s slender and quite elegant hand. With someone this old a little wisdom might leak out into the room. There was, at least, a pleasant sensation of rest. To have given up. Nothing else was expected. The old man had done what he could do. Life was now the afghan and the radio. John Wildstrand sat there for a long time; it was a good place to consider things. The baby would be born in four months and Billy and Maggie were living in a sturdy little bungalow not far from Island Park. Billy was just about to start technical college classes. The last time Wildstrand had visited, Billy was just walking out the door. He shook hands but said nothing. He was wearing his old enfolding topcoat, a long, striped beatnik scarf, and soft, rumpled-looking boots.

As for Maggie, she was often alone. Wildstrand couldn’t get away much because of Neve. Maggie understood. She was radiant. Her hair was long, a lustrous brown. They went into her bedroom in the middle of the day and made love in the stark light. It was very solemn. He’d gone dizzy with the depth of it. When he lay against her, his perceptions had shifted and he saw the secret souls of the objects and plants in the room. Everything had consciousness and meaning. Maggie was measureless, but she was ordinary, too. He stepped out of
time and into the nothingness of touch. Afterward, Wildstrand had driven back to Pluto and arrived just in time for dinner.

Leaving the old man, Wildstrand usually patted his arm or made some other vague gesture of apology. This time Wildstrand was still thinking of his time with Maggie, and he bent dreamily over Neve’s father. He kissed the dry forehead, stroked back the old man’s hair and thoughtlessly smiled. The old man jerked away suddenly and eyed Wildstrand like a mad hawk.

“You bastard!” he cried.

The Gesture

ONE DAY NEVE
was sitting in her bathrobe at lunch, tapping a knife against the side of a boiled egg. Suddenly she said, “I know who he was. I saw him in a play. Shakespeare. The play had two sets of twins who don’t meet until the end.”

John Wildstrand’s guts went ice-cold and he phoned Billy as soon as he returned to the bank. Sure enough, Billy had been in the previous summer’s production put on by the town drama club. He’d been one of the Dromios in
The Comedy of Errors
. Wildstrand put the phone down and stared at it. Neve was at the town library at that very moment looking through archived town newspapers. This was how it happened all of a sudden that instead of taking college courses, Billy bolted and joined the army, after all. Wildstrand hadn’t thought that they would take him because he was underweight, but the army didn’t care. Now he was terrified that Maggie’s grief would affect the baby, for she was heartbroken and cried day and night when Billy was shipped off for basic training. She said that she couldn’t feel things anymore, and turned away from Wildstrand when he visited and would not let him touch her. After six weeks, Billy sent a photograph of himself in military gear. He didn’t look to have bulked up much. The helmet seemed to balance on his head, shadowing his unreadable eyes. His neck was still skinny and graceful. He looked about twelve years old.

One afternoon, Wildstrand drove home after having visited Maggie, and all the way down the highway the little face beneath the hel
met was in his mind. When he entered his house he saw that Neve was working on another afghan. She raised her clear, blue eyes to his.

“I am leaving now,” said Wildstrand. He put the car keys on the coffee table. “You keep everything. I have clothes. I have shoes. I’ll make myself a sandwich and be going now.”

John Wildstrand walked into the kitchen and made the sandwich and wrapped it in waxed paper. He walked out into the living room and stood in the center of the carpet. Neve just looked at him. Light blazed white across her face. She raised her hand, swept it to the side, then dropped it. The gesture seemed to hang in the air, as if her arm left a trail. Wildstrand turned and walked out the door, across town, and started hitchhiking back to Maggie along the highway. There was only a slight wind and the temperature was about sixty-five degrees. The fields were full of standing water and ducks and geese swam in the ditches. All through the afternoon, as he walked along, the horizon appeared and disappeared. He didn’t take a ride until the sky darkened.

The Lions

SHORTLY AFTER JOHN
Wildstrand moved into the house with Maggie, the baby boy was born. In those dazzling moments after the birth, he had a vision. The baby looked like Billy. Stage Billy, tall Billy with no ass to speak of, Billy with big feet, who looked like he could hardly lift a water canteen. Billy’s heart was pierced by thorns. Was there anyone more magnificent than Billy? John Wildstrand saw that Billy Peace was a kind of Christ figure, or a martyr like those in the New Testament. Only he was thrown to the lions in the cause of their happiness. Wildstrand had thought that, in his new life, Billy might grow in strength and valor and be exactly the person who Neve believed had abducted her. Now he saw that Billy already was that person and Neve had known. He also saw that Billy had told his sister about the kidnapping. All of this was depicted in the face of the tiny new infant. Wildstrand looked closer, and tried to see whether Billy would live or die. But before that picture came clear, the baby opened up its mouth and bawled. Wildstrand put the baby to Maggie’s breast and when it latched
on, he tried to touch the baby’s hair. Maggie pushed away his hand with the same gesture that his wife had used to say good-bye, and he sank back into the hospital chair. He was dizzy with spent adrenaline. For a long time, he watched them from across the room.

The Garage

ONLY TWICE DID
John Wildstrand visit Pluto. The first time, he brought a trailer and loaded into it all that Neve had not disposed of—she’d thrown a lot of things away. But physical objects had ceased to matter to Wildstrand. He was sleeping out in Maggie’s garage, by then, in a sleeping bag spread out on a little camp cot. He cuddled up next to the used car he’d bought. Maggie argued with him every day about going to the police, turning him in for the kidnapping.

“You’ll lose everything”—Wildstrand waved his arm—“this house. And Billy will go to jail. Would you like that? You’ll be out on the street. And what about little Corwin?”

Maggie had named the baby after her brother’s best buddy in boot camp. He was now in Korea, stationed close to the DMZ. Billy was in danger and wrote weekly letters about his visions. Apparently, he was being contacted by powerful spirits who saved him time after time, and who promised to direct his life.

“He’s never been religious,” Maggie wept, “in his whole life. Now look at this! Look at what you did!”

Wildstrand despaired. There was no getting away from Billy; he would always control the situation, no matter where he was. Billy, with his bristle-headed army cut and unknown eyes, with his army boots and rifle. Now that he was a soldier and visited by angels, there was no hope. Even if nothing happened to him. In the months after his son’s birth, Wildstrand had come to understand that he would never be forgiven for engineering the kidnap scheme, and he had lost Maggie’s love. She was icy-angry—she implied that he was just like his Indian-hating grandfather and now spent all day caring for the baby and cleaning the house. Every so often, she would thrust a shopping list at Wildstrand, or make him help with heavy lifting. Beyond
that, she didn’t like him to get close to either her or the baby. He moved around the small house like a ghost, never knowing where to settle, never comfortable. He made a sorry den for himself in the basement, where he would go whenever it was too cold to sleep in the garage. Otherwise he stayed out there, listening to music, reading the newspaper. He’d found a job at the same insurance agency he’d always used, a low-level job assisting others in processing claims.

The Entryway

ONE DAY, A
homeowner’s claim from his old address crossed his desk. Neve had filed a claim on everything that he had taken from the house, his own things, which she had pressured him to come and clear out. There were his expensive hand tools, each engraved with his name and an identification code, and records with their expensive record-playing equipment, even a brand-new television. Looking at the list, Wildstrand felt a glimmer of heat rise in his throat. His ears burned. He took his coat from the back of the office door, went back to the house that his and Neve’s retirement money had bought, and packed up everything he’d kept in the garage. He drove back to Pluto with a full car and parked in the driveway of his former house.