Uncivil Seasons (23 page)

I left Cuddy in there arguing with him about me. Passing under the wry, yellow, lidded eyes of Briggs Monmouth Cadmean varnished in oil, and clattering across the black and white floor of the rotunda, I walked out. I stood at six in the morning at the top of the steps looking over the still, blanched facade of downtown Hillston, where I had lived all my life, and, shaking, I pulled on my gloves and wrapped my scarf tighter. Across the street, my car was as white as a cairn of heaped stones.

Up the sidewalk through the slant of thick, blossomy snow came a black umbrella. Beneath it a man’s ratty overcoat fluttered out as if there were no one in it; the bottom dragged stiff and wet in the drifts. Sister Resurrection was marching from her home in the church to her post by the hall of government. I walked down to meet her, my legs unsteady enough to keep me close to the balustrade.

“Good morning, Mrs. Webster,” I told her, and touched my cap. My voice startled me by coming out a hoarse whisper. “Like a fairyland out here, isn’t it? Mighty cold for a walk, though.”

Although she didn’t speak, she did stop, and I bent down to look at her under the umbrella. She wore a child’s red toboggan cap and red mittens with white stars over the knuckles. The wizened folds of her neck were open to the gusty snowfall.

I said, “Well, things are bad. That silver-haired man we were talking about; I believe he’s killed somebody else now. She was actually, now I come to think of it, a little in your forecasting line of work.”

Sister Resurrection walked around me, and began a march as precise as a sentinel’s, up and down, at the base of the steps. A hum rose out of her throat, and then a chant. “The King of Babylon,” she said, “he wox angry. He got the iron walls. He got the fire burning. He throwing God’s childrens into the fiery furnace. But God Almighty don’t mess with Babylon. He makes His people for to walk through the valley of the shadow. God Almighty He taken that fire and He wet it with the tears from His eyes. He snatch that fire and He
squeeze
it.” Umbrella high, she balled tight the red mitten of her free hand. “And squeeze it. And making a chain to hold the Devil just a little while longer. Just a little while longer. Just a little, my Lord, just a little. And then we laying down our heads and sleep.”

I said quietly, “Amen.”

And “Amen,” she replied, and looked into my eyes and through them and beyond.

I said, “Here, if you’re going to stay out, here, Mrs. Webster, do you mind?” and undid my long wool scarf and wound it high around her thin neck and tucked it in. Unmoving, she stared beyond me, then turned back to the march of her weariless warning.

But as I was brushing snow from my car, I felt all of a sudden her scratchy hand pluck at my arm, and when I looked around, she began to tug at my sleeve, her grasp oddly strong. Pointing the black umbrella ahead, she pulled me with her into the street. She let go, hurried a few steps ahead, whirled back, motioning with her fluttery arm for me to come; rushed on, turned back, called me with her arm again. Down the empty streets I followed the small dark figure, no one but the two of us in the white ghost town. The unplowed road billowed around us soft as sheets. On we floated, like sleepers silent, until abruptly she darted off to the left.

Lurching after her into the side street, I saw her stop and rattle her umbrella at the painted glass front of the Tucson Lounge. Gaudy at night with noise and rows of red electric bulbs topped by a red neon cactus, it was in daylight just a dull, raw wall. In its gutter, snow was falling on black plastic bags and soggy boxes of drinkers’ debris, bottles and cans and stench. Sister Resurrection wheeled around and pressed against me, her eyes rheumy clouds that suddenly sharpened to jet. Her hand flew up and grabbed at my coat arm and, the fingers wriggling inside the mitten, she pulled me down with her to a crouch at the curb. The hand flew out again and pinched hard at my earlobe. “Trash,” she said, and pointed down, twisting her head and pointing back at the window of the bar behind us.

I nodded. “Yes, you’re right.”

“The harlot sitting on the dragon’s back, she wearing the crimson and purple robes, she wearing gold and wearing jewels.” Her red-mittened fist jerked away from my face, yanked up her hat, and squeezed the ear beneath. She breathed out slowly, “Wearing
jewels
.” And for a wink of a moment only, I saw a self come into her eyes, saw her be there seeing me. Then she was gone again; murk clouded the pupils and they lifted skyward.

I touched my ear, burning still where she had grabbed it. “Ear jewels?” I whispered. “Is this where you found that earring? Here in the trash?”

But unhearing she sprang to her feet and scurried through the snow back the way we’d come.

Back in front of the municipal building, I heard her as I climbed into my car. “She hold the cup of fornication and drinking the blood of my Jesus outta that cup. She Babylon. God throw her down from the iron wall and dogs shall lick her blood.”

•   •   •

At the Bush Street Diner near Tuscarora Road, I was asleep with my face pressed into the side of the booth when Alice “Red” MacLeod tapped my shoulder and scared me. “I told you 7:30 was too early for you.”

I bolted upright, shaking my head, and she added, “Are you all right?” Tugging on her book bag, she slid into the booth.

I said, “I’m fine, it just doesn’t show.”

She unbuttoned a plaid parka; beneath it she wore a pink fuzzy sweater the color of her cheeks. “Sorry I’m late; I had some union phone business. More rumors about shutting down my division. This creep named Whetsone had us ‘analyzed’ and says we’re not ‘competitive.’”

“We’ve met,” I said. “Sounds like him.”

While we ate eggs and coffee, I explained what it was that had kept me awake all night, that Joanna Cadmean was dead, that the suspected murderer was my uncle. She said, “Justin, I’m really sorry.” She thrust forward the stubborn chin. “And it’s just disgusting what they’re doing about it. They fired you!”

“They suspended me, while they decide if they can afford to fire me.”

“What are you going to do now?”

I made an effort at a laugh. “Well, first I’m going to take it lying down for about eight hours.”

“How in hell do people like them always end up running the world?”

“God, I hope that’s not a serious question.”

“Oh, yes, it is. It sure is. It’s
the
serious question, Justin.”

I looked across the plastic tabletop at the solemn blue eyes. “You called me Justin two times,” I said. “Would you mind doing it again?”

Her blush moved up from the neck of her sweater into the freckles, and she frowned. “Isn’t that your name?” And she went back to piling scrambled eggs on her toast like pâté, eating quickly and pleasurably. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, cup to mouth.

“Not really.” The food at the diner did not look as if it had improved since my last visit, the night Cuddy rescued me from his cousin Wally’s switchblade; the old picture of eggs and bacon on the menu had an unappetizing anemic pallor. My head was logy, and my hand shook so that finally my cup of coffee just slipped through my fingers and crashed onto the tabletop, sloshing me and the table with scalding liquid. I jumped out of the booth, shaking my pants, and she jerked a wad of paper napkins from the container and started to sop up the dark stain.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Look, I do things like this all, I mean all the time. Don’t be stupid. There. You better go home and go to bed.”

I took the sticky napkins from her, both of us holding on to them until finally she let go. And smiling I said, “All right. I will. I wonder if you’d like to come too?”

Her face crinkled, the eyes stayed grave. “No.” And she sat back down. Then she smiled. “You better go home and go to
sleep
. I’m going to European History: World War I to the Present.”

“That’ll depress you.”

“No, it won’t. It’ll make me mad. It always does.”

“Yes, you’re a warrior, Alice ‘Red’ MacLeod.”

She nodded, pulled over my plate, and ate everything on it. While doing so, she told me she had two pieces of news for me. Last night, Graham and Dickey Pope had stormed into the plant when the shift ended, looking for Charlene. They told Alice they didn’t know Ron Willis, the white-haired man with the black moustache. And no one else she’d spoken to had heard of any connection between Willis and Charlene; except that one woman had told her she’d heard Charlene had taken up with a man called Luster Hudson, and Ron Willis had once palled around with Hudson when the latter had worked at C&W as a forklift operator. I thanked her, and she said she’d love to help me put Willis away; he was a stoolie paid to keep watch on union activists like herself. She said Willis had once told her floor manager the lie that she had a long affair back in Boone with a black Communist social worker.

“What was the lie?” I asked.

“That he was a Communist.”

“Oh.”

She looked across at me, her chin up. “It’s over. He had to choose between me and somebody else, and he didn’t think he ought to have to. But I thought it would be better for everybody if he did.”

“You’re…”

She cocked her head. “Archaic. High-minded. Unliberated. And a hillbilly.”

“What I’m trying to say is, you’re very pretty in the morning. Christ, I sound like a teenager. I think I’m falling in love.”

This time she didn’t blush; she just looked, and then she said, “Go home. I’m late. Here.” And hauling a coin purse out of her book bag, she took out three folded dollars.

I said, “No.”

“I asked you, remember? Plus, I ate your breakfast.”

“If you’re so unliberated, why won’t you let me pay?”

She said, “God, I hope that’s not a serious question,” and hurried into her parka and slid fast out of the booth. “Look, are you going to bed?”

“The prospect seems to fascinate you. Are you sure you couldn’t give World War I the slip?”

“Your eyes aren’t even in focus. I think you’re already asleep.”

I pulled myself out of the booth and touched my toes five slow times. “Wide awake. In fact, I’m about to embark on a new career. Breaking and entering.”

“For a good cause?”

“Yes, ma’am, Governor.”

“Okay.” She slung the bag over her small straight shoulder. “Bye.”

“See you tomorrow, 7:30, Alice.”

•   •   •

When I reached the North Hillston colonial I planned to break into, there was a car already parked out in front. A white Oldsmobile, like a big ice floe in the white snow. The house was Rowell Dollard’s, and the car was Cuddy Mangum’s. In the front seat sat Mrs. Mitchell. I tapped the glass against her skittering paws. Cuddy was already inside, and he started yelling as soon as I opened the door. “Where’d you go, you damn jackass?!” He stood at the top of the curved stairs, hand inside his coat, probably looking for his gun.

“What are you doing in this house, Mangum?”

“Guess. Now, Justin, why in holy shit did you run off that way? I come out and you’re gone wandering off in the snow like old Doctor Zhivago. And so I ask your pal Sister Resurrection out there—wearing, I do believe, your scarf like she ate the rest of you—I ask her, ‘Sister, did you see a good-looking crazy man go by?’ But we don’t speak the same lingo the way you and her do, and all I got for an answer was that God’s in a
real
bad mood and lost His patience with trash, which I hope was not in reference to me.”

By now I had crossed the Dollard foyer and had climbed the stairs to the landing.

Cuddy shook his head. “You know, maybe you do need a sick leave. You look bad. You haven’t even changed your clothes, and that scares me. And excuse me being lewd, but did you maybe come or pee in your pants?”

I said, “What are you doing here? It’s coffee.”

A sleepless night had reddened the blue-jay eyes and shadowed the old acne scars. He still wore the three-piece herringbone suit he’d put on (or bought—I’d never seen it before) to take Briggs out last night to dinner. I’d been telling Cuddy for years that if he really wanted to take over the department; he had to stop wearing things like Elvis sweatshirts. Maybe love would be his tailor. I said, “Nice suit.”

He tilted his head at me. “I know you, General. I may not know you, but I know you. I suspicioned there might be an attempted break-in at this residence coming up, and I figured the police ought to be on the scene. And since you ain’t the police, being as V.D., that old spitlicking toadeater has fired, excuse me,
suspended
, your ass, I figured I would save you from the temptation of committing an illegality. Call me Tonto, for you are sure enough the lonesome ranger now.”

“You’re the one waltzing around his house without a warrant,” I said.

He rippled his bony hand in his jacket pocket, tugged out a loud tie, and then the paper. “Oh, I gots de warrant.”

“How?”

“Mister Ken Moize. And I got something else for you, you just going to love.” He crooked his long skinny arm and darted it at the open door of Cloris Dollard’s bedroom.

Inside, boxes were piled on the bare mattress of the queen-size bed. Cuddy loped around the bed and patted them. “I was just tidying up the lady’s closet a bit waiting on you, because it didn’t look to me like anybody’d paid it much mind, and this box here,” he tapped a cardboard crate labeled Mumms’ Champagne, “well, sir, it was full of little children’s clothes still with the price tags on them. I guess she was planning on sending them off to her little grand-children. So I wonder, maybe this was where she kept stuff she hadn’t gotten around to mailing off to folks, like Mrs. Cadmean said she was going to. And so, what you’re gonna love, Kemo Sabby, is what was down at the bottom.” He reached in and his hand came back out holding a red Moroccan leather book, gold-stamped and gold-leafed. The blank pages of the diary fell open to a small clear envelope. Inside the waxy paper glittered the golden coin. Cuddy held it up so I could see the classic smooth brow of the profile of Liberty, and the date, 1839.

Still dressed, I fell asleep and didn’t dream and didn’t wake until a thudding jarred one eye open to see by the carriage clock beside my bed that it was 5:30. I staggered to the back window and looked down in the gray light at my yard where Cuddy Mangum stood pitching up snowballs at the side of my house. When I jimmied open the window, he yelled, “We got to go to the hospital. Luster Hudson’s beat up Charlene Pope. Open your damn door, I’ve been kicking it for ten minutes, haven’t you got any ears?”