After the First Death (6 page)

“I know what you are,” she said. She did not recognize her voice: it was strident, off key, too loud in her ears, the voice of a stranger. “You’re holding us hostage and you’ve made demands. You’re going to hold us here until the demands are met. You’re—” She faltered, unable to say the word. Hijackers. Her mind was crowded with newspaper headlines and television newscasts of hijackings all over the world, gunfire and explosions, innocent persons killed, even children.

“This is no concern of yours,” Artkin said, his voice cold, the words snapping like whips. “The children are your concern. Nothing else. See to the children.”

She drew back as if he had struck her.

Turning to Miro, Artkin said: “It is time for the masks.”

She saw them take the masks out of their jackets. They pulled them over their heads. They had suddenly become grotesque, monstrous, figures escaped from her worst nightmares. And she saw her own doom in the masks.

She wet her pants so badly that the trickles down her thighs were like the caresses of moist and obscene fingers.

part
3

Another
picture postcard from the collected works of Benjamin Marchand: Nettie Halversham.

Color the postcard to do justice to Nettie Halversham’s beauty: eyes the color of bruises, hair like the shining black of old classic automobiles, lips like crushed strawberries. Ridiculous? Maybe. But, God, Nettie Halversham was—is—beautiful. And her heart was also black like the color of those classic cars.

Edge the postcard with guilt because guilt whistles through the tunnel in my chest. Guilt of all shades and colors plus the guilt that sends me to Brimmler’s Bridge when I should be directing snowballs at Martingale and
Donateli or contemplating the amber brew in the township of Pompey.

The guilt, however, really starts with Nettie Halversham.

Because.

Because, all during the time of the seizure of the bus, when those kids were being held as hostages and the television stations were giving out all kinds of bulletins, and Fort Delta was in a state of emergency—a bodyguard was even assigned to me and Jackie Brenner and other kids whose fathers were in positions of authority at Delta—anyway, during all that time, the headlines and the sirens screaming, I could think only of myself and how miserable I was, and I’d sit and stare at the telephone for hours. Or what seemed like hours. Once, I put my hand on the phone to pick it up and the guard came alert and said: “Who are you calling?”

He was a big guy. He looked like a former football player, or maybe a boxer. His ears were smashed and his nose was twisted. He was the original on which the cliché was based. He made me nervous because he just didn’t guard the house and all; he stayed with me, in the same room, every minute. He’d watch me when I ate, and he never wanted anything to eat himself. I figured if he ate with me I wouldn’t feel so self-conscious. At least he didn’t stare. He seemed to be contemplating something very distant and amusing. Anyway, he asked who I was calling and I shrugged and didn’t say anything. Because I knew a phone call would be useless, a futile gesture.

Why?

Because I wanted to call Nettie Halversham.

And yet I didn’t want to call her.

There’s an old song that goes “What Is This Thing Called Love?” What is it, anyway? I had never given
much thought to love before I met Nettie Halversham. And if I had, I would have figured that love was an instant emotion between two people, that if you fell in love with a girl she automatically fell in love with you. Something mutual. As if the universe had been ordered to be that way. All during the time I was a kid, a real kid, like eleven or twelve, I hardly thought above love. I thought it was loving your mother and father. I’d see love stories on television and find them dull and boring. Same with love stories in books and magazines. Later, of course, I’d read love stories to track down the horny parts and they made me wonder how it would be to touch a girl and if being horny was part of being in love, although it seemed to me you needed ultimate respect toward the girl you loved. Like my father’s attitude toward my mother: gentle, considerate.

Anyway.

I met Nettie and fell in love with her. Like lightning striking and the thunder was the boom of my heart—talk about song lyrics. I met her when Jackie Brenner and I went to the Hallowell Y one Saturday morning. Fort Delta has the same facilities as the Y, of course, but it was a treat to take a bus into Hallowell and get away from the post. Until a few years ago, my existence and my activities were confined to Delta, which is not as limited as it sounds since Delta is a self-sufficient and self-sustaining community. But I began to get a kind of claustrophobia about two years ago. Unlike some Delta kids who went to school in Hallowell, either at public or private schools, I attended schools on the post: small classes, much individual attention, and educational monitoring my father himself had instituted. So there was a sense of freedom when I went to Hallowell on the bus, not the same old kids, not the same old streets named for famous battles (Tarawa Road, Château
Thierry Avenue), not the same old barracks buildings. That Saturday last August, I met Nettie Halversham in front of the Y. She was standing there with a girl Jackie knew. I looked at her and my knees turned liquid and my stomach felt as though I hadn’t eaten for a week. She was not dressed in the usual outfit: jeans and jersey. She wore a blue blouse and a skirt, white with a blue edging. I found myself talking like a crazy man, about all kinds of things, nothing I can recall now, which is just as well. And all the time this happiness was soaring in me because she was looking at me and smiling and laughing at my jokes, whatever they were, and I felt like the most clever, most cool guy in the world. I kept my eyes on her and knew I was in love. I didn’t have to run to a dictionary for a definition of the word and I didn’t have to rush to a doctor to have my pulse taken. I knew I was in love. Irrevocably. I also figured that she was in love with me, that not just me but
we
had fallen in love, the way it was supposed to happen.

The bus came along and she boarded it with her girl friend and I said, “See you later,” as if I was sending her a secret message and she smiled intimately (I thought) and I got her full name and particulars from Jackie and knew that I would call her up and ask her to go out. On a date. We had a lot of socials on the post and I went through the usual horrors of dancing schools and girl-boy birthday parties but I had never had a date before and didn’t even know what the hell we would do on a date but I didn’t worry about that kind of stuff. I was dealing with destiny here, kismet, fate. And the words of a thousand inane love songs suddenly made sense.
Love will find a way. You are so beautiful to me.

I called her up, three nights before the seizure of the bus. As I dialed her number, my heart began to beat faster, just like the songs say. When I heard her voice, I
melted. Went limp. I told her who I was. She said: “Who?” The word hung in the air like a bell tolling doom. I told her my name again, about meeting her in front of the Y, and she said, “Oh, yes,” as if she had just drawn my name from a file cabinet and was confirming my existence. We talked awhile and it was like pumping uphill on my bike. Because she left the talking to me. Oh, she was polite and commented on what I said—dropping in
Yes
or
Gee
or
Huh
like coins in a jukebox to keep the stuff coming—but absolutely volunteering no topics herself. I got desperate. I covered school, the weather, the schedule of activities at the Y, the comparison of summer events between Hallowell and the post, and finally ran out of gas. I was tired of the sound of my own voice but was afraid of stopping because I dreaded the terrible silence that was sure to follow. Finally, I asked her if she’d go to a movie with me. Another pause. And then: “Oh, I don’t think so.” Those devastating words and the boredom in her voice. She didn’t simply say
no
. I’d expected
sorry
at least or
some other time
(after all, she was supposed to be in love with me, wasn’t she?) but she merely said: “Oh, I don’t think so.” As if I’d asked her whether it was going to rain tomorrow. Why couldn’t she have lied and said:
I’d love to but
.… Instead she made me feel as though I wasn’t even a member of the human race.

I hung up after stammering around a bit, sounding like a fool, apologizing, for chrissakes, for having taken up her time and she didn’t say anything at all, but let me flounder and thrash around. And then it was over. Now the terrible part: I still loved her. Her face still haunted me. The world was suddenly a wasteland, cold and lonely, like the far side of the moon. And I thought: Hey, what’s going on here? Why is it that I love her and she doesn’t love me? The world was out of balance, out
of kilter, tilted. I realized then why some love songs are sad.
Picking up the pieces of my heart
 …

Three days later, I was still in ruins, without appetite, anticipating fifty years of this particular agony. When the telephone rang that morning, I rushed to it, thinking crazily that it might be Nettie Halversham, apologizing, ready to have me rush into her arms; it had been a case of mistaken identity, etc.

The caller was my father. Which was unusual. He never called from his office in Delta.

“Ben, are you okay?” he asked.

My God, I thought, he knows: about Nettie Halversham and my agony.

“Fine,” I said, the way you say
fine
even if the earth is crumbling under your feet.

And then he told me about the seizure of the bus. And the children.

What bus? What children?

And what did it have to do with me?

This bus: a yellow school bus carrying either sixteen or eighteen children (there was initial confusion about the actual number) from their various homes in Hallowell to a summer camp called Kris Kringle Kamp on the outskirts of town. The bus was hijacked by persons unknown, at least three in number, perhaps more. The bus was intercepted by the hijackers on Route 131 and driven to an old railroad bridge, no longer in use, in a wooded area on the Hallowell-Crenshaw line. A van was also involved in the hijacking and was now on the bridge as well, the van also in control of the hijackers.

The children were between the ages of five and six, preschool age, although some had attended kindergarten or nursery school.

The first communication from the hijackers came
when a ten-year-old Hallowell boy bought a letter into the Hallowell police station. The boy was paid a dollar by a man to deliver the letter. The boy described the man as “old, about forty,” with dark everything: hair, clothes, mustache, glasses. The letter was addressed to Brigadier General Rufus L. Briggs, Inner Delta, Fort Delta, Massachusetts. There was a sentence typed on the envelope:
Deliver this message within the hour—it is a matter of life or death.

This is the essence of what my father told me on the phone, although he was not in possession of all the details at the time. Because Fort Delta and children were involved, he was concerned about me. I told him I was fine and wanted to remind him that I was not, after all, five years old. However, I knew he meant well. I told him I’d been planning to play ball with Jackie Brenner on General Bradley Field. He told me to stay put; that, in fact, he would be sending someone over to watch the house. Meaning: to guard me.

“How about Mom?” I asked, alerted suddenly by the no-nonsense tone of his voice. My mother had left that morning to spend the day in Boston: shopping on Newbury Street in the morning and a matinee in the afternoon.

“I’m sending someone to Boston to track her down,” my father said. “Look, Ben, these precautions may seem as if I’m overreacting but I don’t want to take chances because …”

The
because
hung in the air, surrounded by silence. I hesitated to break that silence, although I knew what should follow the
because.
Because Fort Delta was involved and that probably meant the secret work my father was engaged in.

“But what do the hijackers want, Dad?”

“We don’t know yet, Ben. The only message they sent
tells us to stand by for further instructions. That’s all I can tell you because that’s all I know.” I realized my father had never in his life told me that much before about anything. Oh, we talked together, of course, and discussed stuff like the chances of the Red Sox winning the pennant (high hopes in May, sad truth in September) and my marks at school and such, but never anything to do with him, either his work or how he felt about life in general, as if everything aside from baseball or my marks related to his secret duties.

“So stick close to home, Ben. In fact, stay in the house. I know this is tough, but we can’t take chances with people like this on the loose,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

Then I remembered something that had bothered me during the time we were talking. “Hey, Dad,” I said. “You said the message was addressed to General Rufus Briggs. I never heard of him. Who’s General Briggs?”

I heard his quick intake of breath and then a silence at the other end of the line. And I thought: My God, General Briggs is
him
, my father, his whatchamacallit, cover name, for chrissakes.