The Road to Wellville (71 page)

Ah: he had a weapon, though, and it could defeat them all—Bloethals, Fletchers, Linnimans and Kelloggs alike. A train ticket. His means of egress and passage, the sword of his liberation. And he’d use it, use it today, but for one thing, and that thing sat on his chest like the great wheel of rock they had used to crush transgressors in the Middle Ages,
peine forte et dure:
the ticket was no good to him. Not now. Not anymore. Not since Goguac Lake. He wasn’t going anywhere unless Eleanor was going with him. And what was the likelihood of that?

“All right then, Mr. Lightbody, there’s a good fellow, if you’ll just step in here a moment,” Nurse Bloethal was saying, standing in the doorway to the bath like some beast transposed from the bottom of a bog, the enema bottle clutched in one meaty hand, the other idly scratching at some unmentionable portion of her anatomy. That was the situation, Nurse Bloethal beckoning and Will supine on the bed, crushed under the weight of his depression, when the telephone rang. Sharp and peremptory, the signal propelled Will from his bed to warn off the nurse with a yelp of admonition: “Don’t touch it—I’m expecting a call!”

And he was. Though he didn’t like it and it went against his grain
and he felt ashamed to have arranged it this way, he was expecting a call. From the driver of the Sanitarium car that had taken Eleanor and Virginia “bird-watching.” “Hello?” he gasped into the mouthpiece.

The voice on the other end came back to him with a clarity and volume that made it more immediate than Nurse Bloethal’s—and she was standing right there, waiting, an impatient frown on her face. “The party you inquired about?”

Will was breathless. He turned his back on the nurse and crouched low over the receiver. “Yes?”

“Well, it was the two ladies we originally discussed, and they was joined by a man right out on the Sanitarium steps, a ginger-haired gentleman that never give his voice a rest the whole way out there—”

“Where? Where did they go?”

“Well, let me tell you, that wasn’t the whole party—there was one more.”

One more
. Will felt the thrust of those two curt syllables in the place where it hurt him most, and he unconsciously stroked the scar on his abdomen. He knew what was coming, knew it as surely as if he were turning the pages of a book.

“Another gentleman, some kind of foreigner. Wore a monocle and walked like he had a stick up his ass, if you’ll excuse the expression. Picked him up at a private residence on Jordan.”

Will could feel the nurse’s eyes on him and he clutched at the back of his neck as if to ward them off—”Mr. Lightbody, it’s ready,” she droned—and he turned partially to her and felt the words erupt from him: “Just a minute! Just a damn minute!”

“Where are they?” he snapped at the telephone.

“You know the Kalamazoo road? About five miles out of town heading west? They had me drop them off there by the milepost and I watched ‘em making out across the fields—that’ll be the Onderdonk place—heading down to the river, I guess. They had a picnic basket and all like that, so I guess that’s what they’re up to—and a lovely fine day for it.”

Will broke the connection without responding. The Onderdonk place, yes, all right. He was up from the chair, the blood beating in his
ears, checking his pockets, reaching for his hat and jacket, when Nurse Bloethal hove back into sight. He was frantic, desperate, eaten up with urgency, and she was there on the horizon, big as a ship, a movable mountain, one hundred and eighty pounds of physiologic impedimenta. “I said it’s ready,” she repeated.

“Not now,” Will cried, shrugging into his jacket, “it’s an emergency,” and he made for the door.

Nurse Bloethal wasn’t having any of it. She stood in the doorway, blocking his way, arms folded across her chest, an adamant, there-will-be-no-exceptions-to-the-rules look ironed into her face.

Will drew himself up. He was rushing with adrenaline, trembling, outraged. “Out of my way!” he boomed.

Her fingers tightened round the neck of the enema bag. Her eyes were flat, blunt, without sheen or sympathy. “I’m sorry,” she said.

She was a woman, all appearances to the contrary, frail vessel, a representative of that weaker sex which any gentleman was bound to serve and protect as a matter of course, but for all that, there was no civility or restraint in what came next. “And so am I!” Will suddenly roared, putting all his weight into the stiff extended arm that burst the enema sack in an explosion of hot paraffin, water and whey, and sent her teetering into the corner like a bowling pin struck right on the mark. He wasn’t there to witness her bottom-heavy collapse, but he heard the thump and rattle of it, heard the rending and the splintering and the sudden sharp crunch of the ceramic vase on the bureau as he ducked off down the hall, flaying his shins and his shanks into a loping stoop-shouldered run, dodging wheelchairs and tycoons in carpet slippers, and it was all he could do to keep from shouting out Eleanor’s name.

There was the lobby, the sunstruck steps, the circular drive, the cab. “The Kalamazoo road!” he thundered at the cabbie, slamming the door so hard the carriage shuddered on its springs, and he was wrought up, frenzied, murderous. The cab ride didn’t soothe him any. The horse seemed to be having trouble standing upright, let alone moving forward, and the driver—the same obstinate little gnome he’d had the last time he’d spied on his wife—was unmoved and unhurried, no matter how much money Will thrust at him. “We’ll get there when we get
there,” he said, hawking up a ball of phlegm for emphasis. “Keep your shirt on.”

Will did manage to keep his shirt on, though he sweated through it and into the lining of his tweed jacket and repeatedly dabbed at his brow beneath the crown of his trilby with a handkerchief that was wet through by the time they reached their destination—he always kept his shirt on, and his jacket, collar, tie and waistcoat, too. He was a gentleman, after all, even in extremis.

When finally the cab did roll to a halt, the fact didn’t register on Will right away, what with the heat and his anxiety. The driver never said a word. At some seemingly random point in the interminable ride, the little man checked the horse, and they were no longer moving—if they could be said to have been moving to begin with. Will sat there a moment, stunned—he didn’t know what he meant to do, but he was rushing headlong toward it, seething, goaded on by the image of Badger and that monocled faceless quack of a womb-manipulating wife-massaging doctor—until the driver finally spoke up. “You gonna sit there all day, friend?” he asked, spitting with great care and precision into the dust between the horse’s hind legs. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but ain’t you the one that was in such a hurry?”

Will ignored him. He stepped down from the cab and into the soft dark earth on the shoulder of the road, straightened his collar and tie, and paid the fare. He saw open fields, a line of trees, rolling hills raked with a wild pelage of dark motionless vegetation—there was nothing to distinguish this place from any other along the road. “This it?” he asked, and his eyes were feverish and he felt a sneeze coming on.

The driver pointed to the side of the road, a little man on a high perch. At first Will saw nothing in the tangle of tall grass and wildflowers that rose up out of the dirt nearly to his knees, but there it was, the milestone, a flat face of rock all but obscured by the vegetation:

KALAMAZOO, 20 / BATTLE CREEK, 5

“You’ll wait for me?” Will asked, looking out over the fields and then squinting back up into the driver’s eyes.

“Sure I will,” the little man said out of a face compressed like a lemon in a squeezer, “sure I will, friend.”

Will gave him a halfhearted wave, mounted the fence and started off across the field, annoyed by the way the weeds tugged at his trousers and filled his cuffs with dander and duff. He sneezed four times in quick succession, but he fished out the damp handkerchief, blew his nose stealthily and kept going. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he was startled by a noise behind him and turned to see the hack swing round with a rattle of harness and start slowly up the road for Battle Creek. He looked at it stupidly for a long moment, as if he’d never seen a hack before, listening to the protest of the springs, watching it sway gracefully over a rut, and then he felt a surge of hatred so violent he could gladly have pulled that half-formed runt of a driver from his seat and choked him till the tongue swelled in his throat and his face went black—if only he could get his hands on him. He wanted to shout out, but he forced down the urge for fear of giving himself away—for all he knew, Eleanor and the others could be lounging on a blanket just beyond the line of trees. Helpless, he just stood there and watched the hack recede in the distance.

All right, what did he care how he got back—or even if he got back at all? What did it matter? Eleanor was all that mattered—and she was out there somewhere in the bushes with Badger and the womb manipulator. Mouth dry, heart racing, the next sneeze pricking at his sinuses, Will forged on. Grasshoppers took wing before him, butterflies scattered. A meadowlark rushed him and then folded away into the sky. Head down, trying to control his breathing and ward off the effects of the sun and the miasma of pollen that hung over the place like an arresting cloud, he scanned the clover and timothy for any sign that he was on the right track—and what if this wasn’t the field at all? What if they’d crossed the road on the other side? He stopped to wipe the sweat from his face, looking round him in a daze, his ears attuned to the smallest sounds. All was silence.

When he reached the line of trees—pines, planted as a windbreak—he found what he’d been looking for. Someone had passed this way recently, no doubt about it. There was a distinct path—or two paths—where the long grass had been flattened, and the gate at the juncture
of the rough timber fences had been left open. Here was the evidence, physical and real, deceit in a swath of grass—bird-watching, sure—and it exhilarated and depressed him at the same time. She’d lied to him. Eleanor had lied to him, and he didn’t know what it meant or what he was going to do about it. But as he crept cautiously through the gate, he knew he was going to do something, something decisive and final, something dramatic, and there was no turning back now.

The sun bore down on him. Insects flitted through the air. He rubbed his eyes and stifled a sneeze. Then he was moving again, stealthy, wary, all his senses on alert. Fifty feet on he caught his first glimpse of the river, a bright liquid reflection trapped amongst the branches of the next irregular line of trees. He held his breath, studied his feet, stalked the open ground like a red Indian with a tomahawk clenched between his teeth. But there: what was that? Off to his left, through a stand of birch, wasn’t that something moving? Or moving in place?

He dropped to a crouch, clung to the papery bark of the trees, inched forward. Step by step, closer and closer, drawn to that flash of movement that was now obscured, now revealed through the screen of leaves. And then all at once the object of that movement came into focus, and he saw that it was a man, a man with his back turned, a naked man, and that his right arm and shoulder were moving rhythmically over the center of him, as if, as if … Will wasn’t prepared for what he saw next, could never have been, not in his fiercest imaginings, and it froze him where he stood.

He saw that there were two men there by the riverside and two women and that they were naked, all of them—completely, entirely, utterly naked, right down to their toes. The women were lolling on their backs, propped up on two logs at waist level, and one of the men stood between them, the stark white bunch of his buttocks facing the spot where Will stood concealed. The man’s arms were extended on each side of him, his hands working between the women’s legs. The other man—it was Badger—stood just behind them, masturbating himself. And the women? One of them, the one on the right, was Virginia Cranehill, her great tanned slippery dugs splayed out across her chest, her eyes closed and face transported in ecstasy. The other woman was Eleanor.

Eleanor. His Eleanor. His wife. His love. The moving hand was
clamped to her, her nipples stood erect, her eyes were hammered shut and she was moaning—moaning. Like some animal. It was an image he couldn’t contain. Something fell loose inside him, something primitive and ugly, and his hands scrabbled in the leaves for a weapon, the weapon of the Neanderthal, a club, a stick, the stark grainy leverage of murder. The stick was there, oak, walnut, beech, fit to the hand and tapered like a baseball bat, and in the next instant Will was on them.

Two pairs of startled eyes—Eleanor’s, Virginia’s—and then he was swinging at Badger from the side, his aim focused on that hateful swollen lump of bloated flesh between the man’s legs, a snatch of rusty pubic hair, warts, pimples and
crack!
, a home run. And now the performance had music, piglike squeals, sorrow and woe and hurt, and the bat was slapping at the Teutonic buttocks suddenly, fencing with them, paddling, and the man turned his face abruptly to take the next rising blow across the bridge of the nose, the silvery disc of the monocle sailing out into the river in a sun-spangled arc. Virginia Cranehill screamed and he wanted to hit her, too, wanted to pound her flesh till it bled and shut the hole of her mouth, but he caught hold of himself.

Badger was on the ground, writhing, a flower of blood blooming between the knuckles pressed to his groin. The womb manipulator was on his haunches, holding his face. Virginia Cranehill, heavy in her suit of flesh, couldn’t stop screaming. Will hadn’t uttered a word. He stood there, chest heaving, the club dangling from his fingertips, and looked at Eleanor. She didn’t scream, didn’t whimper, didn’t move. But he saw something in her eyes he’d never seen there before: fear. She was afraid of him. Afraid of the look on his face and the stick in his hand, afraid of the way the world had suddenly shifted beneath her. Her eyes darted to Badger, to the quack and to Virginia, and then back to him again. There was shame and guilt in the look she gave him, a plea, a promise, but most of all there was that new emotion, fear. Will dropped the stick in the dirt. “Get your clothes,” he said, but he didn’t wait for a response, his mind moving too quickly for that, and he had her by the wrist, her clothing—bloomers, dress, stockings, shoes, hat—bunched against his chest, and he was leading her, barefoot and naked, back up the path through the stand of birch, and away.