Whipple's Castle (72 page)

Now Peggy must stay with him and do whatever mysterious thing she did to keep him from the visions. If he touched her the visions could not happen, so he reached for her hand. She had been watching him, sensed the slight desperation in his movement toward her, and took his hand in both of hers. Her touch did more to him than he expected. He had known perfectly that she would respond; that he had known this was astounding. There had been no doubt at all. He was filled with so much knowledge of what she would do in response to him, how she would turn her head, close her eyes, move her lips. He saw it all ahead. She was smiling: the little teeth—needles in her softness. He blinked and squinted at her. How could he not believe all he knew? Those eyes were looking at him and thinking. That other intelligence! Slowly he became aware, admitted that he owned her, this other force. Need was another matter. Her taut dark skin was his, her hair, the joints of her bones. He sat dazed and still frightened, knowing that he always would be frightened, as this strange adjustment occurred before his eyes. It seemed now that he must have known this all the time, ever since she was a child.

She stood up and pulled his hands, asking him to stand. “Let's go outside,” she said. He stood and locked his leg. The suggestion didn't seem an unnatural one for her to make. She didn't seem to be aware of the possibility of refusal. They had arrived, he saw at once, at their next relationship. Perhaps she had read his mind at the moment she had changed. He couldn't define his nervousness as fear, exactly, but it was a remembered feeling—the half-joyous apprehension of too much awareness, of any heightening.

They stood in the dark on the front steps, with the wind whispering near-words through the hedges and along the grass. She put her arm around his waist, easily, naturally. That easiness shocked him into another realization: she had always been the wanton girl of his imaginings. All the time. It was strange that his protectiveness should have hidden that deeper feeling, or prediction, or perversion—whatever it was. She was the open, friendly, wanton girl that so easily broke him in his dream. No stranger at all, but his ward, part sister, part daughter. It was all uncontrollably sweet, misty, miasmic.

She turned toward him, her other arm coming around his ribs, her face against his shirt. “Everything looks different,” she said. “The lights down there. Everything. Too many things are happening.”

 

Harvey said, “So they were all crocked before noon.”

David and Kate nodded. They knew all those interesting, first-told details. Susie had passed out sometime toward the end of the afternoon, and the boys had left. Those names were not being given out officially—Donald Ramsey, for instance, being married. But nearly everyone knew who they were, especially since those who were legionnaires arrived fairly drunk at the Legion Drum and Bugle Corps practice. Keith Joubert, Junior Stevens and the rest. Bruce Cotter had been there too, and Herb Denney. Beady and Candy Palmer both said that it wasn't their kind of party, that Susie had been getting crazier and crazier lately. Sam Davis was across the street in Futzie's all day. Evidently Susie woke up long enough to light a cigarette. The damage to the apartment was mostly from smoke and water.

“So they had a little gang bang,” Harvey said. “That's the way it all began, a long time back.”

“With Gordon Ward,” David said. “It began in high school with Gordon.” He glanced at Kate, who looked away.

Henrietta's voice came down to them from the landing, where she stood grasping the banister rail. Her voice was weak, calmly matter-of-fact but weak, as if from age. “He doesn't seem to be here at all,” she said. “I've looked everywhere for him.”

David felt danger. Kate jumped up. “Davy!” she whispered.

“Take it easy,” he said. He could think of nothing to do about it. Even if he could think of something, he wasn't the one to do it. Asshole, fuckup. Whatever he touched got out of hand. Susie was a corpse—cold, bumed. He hadn't been in on the cause of her ruin, but he had taken advantage of it. He shriveled, shivered at the memory of her companionable willingness. She had been a lot of fun because she knew every time was the last. She had the gaiety of despair, the sense of humor of a whore. No love possible there; it was a joke she laughed at, and the joke was always on her.

“David,” his mother called down to him. “You've got to find him.” Her wavery voice was on the edge. Kate ran up the stairs to her. “You've got to find him, David. You know, you're the only one left who can walk. I'm so afraid of what he'll do. He might hurt himself!”

He looked at his father, who seemed to have retired from such decisions. He stared dimly, his dark eyes like rust spots on the sickish pale skin of his head. In spite of his own fear, or because of it, David distinctly thought that he would not like to be in his father's position right now. They were too much alike; he felt the weight of his father's relationship with Horace all too well. He himself was not without dishonor in that respect. Also, he had a pretty good idea that Horace knew of the times he'd taken Susie to the cabin. There was that stern, broad face again, blue with cold neon, staring at him through Futzie's window.

He did not like the memory of that judgment.

His mother still looked at him, asking him to take charge of Horace. What could he say?

“All right,” he said. Already he saw himself merely cruising around, goldbricking, safe in the cab of his truck, looking around with no real idea of finding Horace.

His father was silent.

 

The wind was a constant hiss in the trees. Against the moon or windowlights the leaves streamed and fluttered frantic signals, as if to warn against him. But none of Them would listen. Long ago he had found that the cruel were stupid. They were indifferent, and wouldn't understand. Not that he hadn't taken precautions. It was a warm night to be wearing a mackinaw, but it hid the two sections of Wood's shotgun he had cleverly tied together so they hung on clothesline around his neck. Without untying the line he could lift it over his head, fit the barrel to the action with a quick twist, then feed the shells from his pocket into the magazine. Now he walked, without visible agitation, down High Street to the left, the back way to the Town Square. They would soon discover his absence and might try pursuit. David in his truck, of course, but David would go down Bank Street. They were all so stupid. If they were not stupid they would see him burning bright as a torch along the dark streets.

The warm houselights were the deceptions they put on like smiles. If you looked closely, past the thin lace veils of those windows, just as you might look into a smile to see the cruelty, you saw the cold people. They were all enemies, laughing among themselves at Susie, at himself. They thought it thrilling to see her destruction. At his own dinner table he had once heard them snicker and call her names. The names were true, of course, according to their judgments, and could not be answered in their language. He could not call them wrong.

Up the street a car began to turn toward him, but before its lights came around he stepped smoothly into a lilac bush to watch it come blazing arrogantly toward him and pass with its swish of engine and tires. Hung around his neck he had the power to stop anything. He had seen what Wood's shotgun could do. One shot had cut down a poplar sapling three inches in diameter, blown its white pulpy wood into gruel.

He would make her death a little more important. There was a kind of justice they didn't understand, not having gone to hell and seen the resemblance between their indifference and hell's indifference. He was scourged, free, shining. He had outfaced Leverah and the Herpes, wept for their victims but not become one. Nothing left on earth could frighten him as badly as the Herpes had frightened him. Now he had no one to protect, so he was free. They had no hostages now. Wood no longer cared, Kate had been taken and turned, Peggy was lost in poor broken Wood, Susie was dead.

He fell to the ground beside a white garage—the Martins' garage. Giant rhubarb leaves, the furry smell of rhubarb, covered him. With his face on the cool earth, he was a part of that forest. He could mourn quietly because he was free. A car passed with a familiar clank of metal—David's truck. This would hurt his mother, and he was sorry for that, but no one else would do what had to be done. She would get over it soon because after tonight she would never have to worry about him again. He would never have to see her face break into fragments again, nor see her big eyes glaze and shake behind her glasses. He wanted no pity and had never asked it of them. Only in the coldest fear had he ever asked for it, and then, to his shame, it had been from Zoster and the Herpes. They had made him whimper as his father had once made him whimper, asking for fairness, that child's cry. Let them ask him for fairness now. Let them complain that it wasn't fair.

He took the cinder alley to Union Street, crossed Maple Street to avoid a woman who walked a small, brittle-legged dog, and turned east on Locust Street. Lights were on in the basement of the Methodist Church, where women washed pots and dishes down there in the brightness. He would have to cross Summerslee Street to get into the darkness behind the grammar school. Then he would be among the gravestones and the arbor vitae, whose formal lanes would take him up behind the Congregational Church and the Wards' house. He was sweating now—a hazard because his glasses fogged and became slippery over his ears and nose. He stopped in a shadow and hastily wiped them with his handkerchief.

As he crossed Summerslee Street a car caught him unexpectedly in its headlights. It must have turned out from a side street. He kept himself from running, and it passed, not seeming to care, its taillights narrowing steadily south. The worn playground brought memories of degradation. The great tube of the fire-escape slide came like an arm akimbo from the second story of the dark school. Once in fire drill he had slid into its hollow and been deposited on the ground, still among strangers. In this building he had broken Mabel Andrews' tooth and nearly died of shame and horror that his touch could hurt her. His life had ripped apart like cloth when she screamed, and after that she had to wear a false tooth forever. All the rest of her life that artificial part of her would be in view because of him.

He climbed the wooden fence and dropped onto the smooth grass of the cemetery. This time his touch would be for justice, not for love. Following the odd lines of shadows, he crouched and moved quietly over the tended lawn between the stones. He was not a person, not even an animal, but the force of justice moving with perfect authority toward its culmination.

Voices murmured from his left, and he crouched behind a block of polished granite smooth as glass. Along the ground, not too far away, came the harsh pun of a man, then the higher one of a girl, a hummed assent, over and over: ‘Turn yum yum yum.” Absorbed in their noises, they wouldn't hear him pass. Further on he had to cross a graveled path, the crunch of his shoes half taken by the wind, then onto dark lawn again. The white steeple of the Congregational Church was outlined in pink by the store lights across the square. To its right the gables of the Wards' house crouched among the elms, black from this side. He stopped to listen; a cricket ticked next to his hand. It was here somewhere, among these graves, Gordon had offered Susie to his teammates. He saw their hard, handsome faces, their thick necks. Gordon's orange freckles glowed. He could hear their exuberant, stifled voices as they watched each other mount the girl.

It was that betrayal he'd lived over and over. She had come to Gordon's house, thinking she would meet his parents, that she was serious to Gordon. “Mother, Father, this is Susan Davis.” “How do you do, my dear?” She had told him what Gordon promised. Her aspirations—what a joke. He groaned for pity of her trust. No parents were home, but the football players giggled manfully in the barn or somewhere. She said she wore a pretty dress.

No more. Beneath a tall blue spruce he assembled Wood's shotgun and loaded five of the number-six shells into the magazine, pumped one into the chamber and slid one more into the magazine. No one heard the clash of the metal. As he moved toward the barn-garage he held the gun, barrel-down, alongside his leg. From shadow to shadow he slid, a shadow himself, to the dark along the wooden wall. Sweet peas on their strings swayed like marionettes, and somewhere a door bumped and creaked in the wind. A glassless window passed like a mouth, revealing a darkness inside so palpable it seemed to bulge softly, like velvet. He waited for a cloud to cross the moon before going around the corner. The first cloud turned silver and rushed by, missing the moon, so he waited. On such a warm night people might be sitting in the dark on the porch next door. He had no fear of them because he was the power here. He had no need of fear or rage; he merely regretted their coldness. They felt pain—their own pain, that is—and he had no desire to give pain or to make anyone fear him. So he was careful not to involve the neighbors in Gordon's execution. They would know about it soon enough.

When the clouds came over the moon he slipped into the garage. If Gordon's car was not here, he would wait. In the darkness he felt around for the cars. He could smell them, almost feel them in his head. An emptiness there ahead of him—he could feel it, or hear it. But there, to the right, something took up space. He touched its smooth enamel and ran his hand up its side. The grainy texture of canvas made it Gordon's convertible.

He had been in the Wards' house several times, and knew the downstairs part of it well. The back hall led past several pantries into the kitchen. All right. He crossed the driveway and entered the house. It had seemed that he was totally committed to what he must do, but now, in the house itself, among its own odors and vibrations, there was a new intensity of purpose. The kitchen overhead light was on, but he walked casually through that busy room. Stove, refrigerator, sink—they seemed needless now, and unsubstantial. He stepped into the unlighted dining room, hearing a voice. Two steps down from the dining room, at the hall telephone, Gordon leaned against the wall. He was relaxed, even happy in his posture, making a comma against the wall. His white shirt was too clean, his chinos and loafers too new and crisp. His hair flamed into thousands of tight curls and angles.