Bag of Bones (10 page)

“Ralph Roberts,” he said. “I volunteer down at the Red Cross. Me and my wife, Lois.”

“Oh, okay, sure,” I said. I give blood at the Red Cross every six weeks or so. Ralph Roberts was one of the old parties who passed out juice and cookies afterward, telling you not to get up or make any sudden movements if you felt woozy. “Please, sit down.”

He looked at my paper, folded open to the crossword and lying in a patch of sun, as he slid into the booth. “Don't you find that doing the crossword in the
Derry News
is sort of like striking out the pitcher in a baseball game?” he asked.

I laughed and nodded. “I do it for the same reason folks climb Mount Everest, Mr. Roberts . . . because it's there. Only with the
News
crossword, no one ever falls off.”

“Call me Ralph. Please.”

“Okay. And I'm Mike.”

“Good.” He grinned, revealing teeth that were crooked and a little yellow, but all his own. “I like getting to the first names. It's like being able to take off your tie. Was quite a little cap of wind we had, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” I said, “but it's warming up nicely now.” The thermometer had made one of its nimble March leaps, climbing from twenty-five degrees the night before to fifty that morning. Better than the rise in air-temperature, the sun was warm again on your face. It was that warmth that had coaxed me out of the house.

“Spring'll get here, I guess. Some years it gets a little lost, but it always seems to find its way back home.” He sipped his coffee, then set the cup down. “Haven't seen you at the Red Cross lately.”

“I'm recycling,” I said, but that was a fib; I'd come eligible to give another pint two weeks ago. The reminder card was up on the refrigerator. It had just slipped my mind. “Next week, for sure.”

“I only mention it because I know you're an A, and we can always use that.”

“Save me a couch.”

“Count on it. Everything going all right? I only ask because you look tired. If it's insomnia, I can sympathize, believe me.”

He
did
have the look of an insomniac, I thought—too wide around the eyes, somehow. But he was also a man in his mid- to late seventies, and I don't think anyone gets that far without showing it. Stick around a little while, and life maybe only jabs at your cheeks
and eyes. Stick around a long while and you end up looking like Jake La Motta after a hard fifteen.

I opened my mouth to say what I always do when someone asks me if I'm all right, then wondered why I always felt I had to pull that tiresome Marlboro Man shit, just who I was trying to fool. What did I think would happen if I told the guy who gave me a chocolate-chip cookie down at the Red Cross after the nurse took the needle out of my arm that I wasn't feeling a hundred per cent? Earthquakes? Fire and flood? Shit.

“No,” I said, “I really haven't been feeling so great, Ralph.”

“Flu? It's been going around.”

“Nah. The flu missed me this time, actually. And I've been sleeping all right.” Which was true—there had been no recurrence of the Sara Laughs dream in either the normal or the high-octane version. “I think I've just got the blues.”

“Well, you ought to take a vacation,” he said, then sipped his coffee. When he looked up at me again, he frowned and set his cup down. “What? Is something wrong?”

No,
I thought of saying.
You were just the first bird to sing into the silence, Ralph, that's all.

“No, nothing wrong,” I said, and then, because I sort of wanted to see how the words tasted coming out of my own mouth, I repeated them. “A vacation.”

“Ayuh,” he said, smiling. “People do it all the time.”

*   *   *

People do it all the time.
He was right about that; even people who couldn't strictly afford to went on vacation.
When they got tired. When they got all balled up in their own shit. When the world was too much with them, getting and spending.

I could certainly afford a vacation, and I could certainly take the time off from work—
what
work, haha?—and yet I'd needed the Red Cross cookie-man to point out what should have been self-evident to a college-educated guy like me: that I hadn't been on an actual vacation since Jo and I had gone to Bermuda, the winter before she died. My particular grindstone was no longer turning, but I had kept my nose to it all the same.

It wasn't until that summer, when I read Ralph Roberts's obituary in the
News
(he was struck by a car), that I fully realized how much I owed him. That advice was better than any glass of orange juice I ever got after giving blood, let me tell you.

*   *   *

When I left the restaurant, I didn't go home but tramped over half of the damned town, the section of newspaper with the partly completed crossword puzzle in it clamped under one arm. I walked until I was chilled in spite of the warming temperatures. I didn't think about anything, and yet I thought about everything. It was a special kind of thinking, the sort I'd always done when I was getting close to writing a book, and although I hadn't thought that way in years, I fell into it easily and naturally, as if I had never been away.

It's like some guys with a big truck have pulled up in your driveway and are moving things into your basement. I can't explain it any better than that. You can't see what these things are because they're all
wrapped up in padded quilts, but you don't need to see them. It's furniture, everything you need to make your house a home, make it just right, just the way you wanted it.

When the guys have hopped back into their truck and driven away, you go down to the basement and walk around (the way I went walking around Derry that late morning, slopping up hill and down dale in my old galoshes), touching a padded curve here, a padded angle there. Is this one a sofa? Is that one a dresser? It doesn't matter. Everything is here, the movers didn't forget a thing, and although you'll have to get it all upstairs yourself (straining your poor old back in the process, more often than not), that's okay. The important thing is that the delivery was complete.

This time I thought—hoped—the delivery truck had brought the stuff I needed for the back forty: the years I might have to spend in a No Writing Zone. To the cellar door they had come, and they had knocked politely, and when after several months there was still no answer, they had finally fetched a battering ram.
HEY BUDDY, HOPE THE NOISE DIDN'T SCARE YOU TOO BAD,
SORRY ABOUT THE DOOR!

I didn't care about the door; I cared about the furniture. Any pieces broken or missing? I didn't think so. I thought all I had to do was get it upstairs, pull off the furniture pads, and put it where it belonged.

On my way back home, I passed The Shade, Derry's charming little revival movie house, which has prospered in spite of (or perhaps because of) the video revolution. This month they were showing classic SF from the fifties, but April was dedicated to
Humphrey Bogart, Jo's all-time favorite. I stood under the marquee for several moments, studying one of the Coming Attractions posters. Then I went home, picked a travel agent pretty much at random from the phone book, and told the guy I wanted to go to Key Largo. Key
West,
you mean, the guy said. No, I told him, I mean Key Largo, just like in the movie with Bogie and Bacall. Three weeks. Then I rethought that. I was wealthy, I was on my own, and I was retired. What was this “three weeks” shit? Make it six, I said. Find me a cottage or something. Going to be expensive, he said. I told him I didn't care. When I came back to Derry, it would be spring.

In the meantime, I had some furniture to unwrap.

*   *   *

I was enchanted with Key Largo for the first month and bored out of my mind for the last two weeks. I stayed, though, because boredom is good. People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done. I ate about a billion shrimp, drank about a thousand margaritas, and read twenty-three John D. MacDonald novels by actual count. I burned, peeled, and finally tanned. I bought a long-billed cap with
PARROTHEAD
printed on it in bright green thread. I walked the same stretch of beach until I knew everybody by first name. And I unwrapped furniture. A lot of it I didn't like, but there was no doubt that it all fit the house.

I thought about Jo and our life together. I thought about saying to her that no one was ever going to confuse
Being Two
with
Look Homeward, Angel. “You aren't going to pull a lot of frustrated-artist crap on me, are you, Noonan?
” she had replied . . . and during my time
on Key Largo, those words kept coming back, always in Jo's voice: crap, frustrated-artist crap, all that fucking schoolboy frustrated-artist crap.

I thought about Jo in her long red woods apron, coming to me with a hatful of black trumpet mushrooms, laughing and triumphant:
“Nobody on the TR eats better than the Noonans tonight!”
she'd cried. I thought of her painting her toenails, bent over between her own thighs in the way only women doing that particular piece of business can manage. I thought of her throwing a book at me because I laughed at some new haircut. I thought of her trying to learn how to play a breakdown on her banjo and of how she looked braless in a thin sweater. I thought of her crying and laughing and angry. I thought of her telling me it was crap, all that frustrated-artist crap.

And I thought about the dreams, especially the culminating dream. I could do that easily, because it never faded as the more ordinary ones do. The final Sara Laughs dream and my very first wet dream (coming upon a girl lying naked in a hammock and eating a plum) are the only two that remain perfectly clear to me, year after year; the rest are either hazy fragments or completely forgotten.

There were a great many clear details to the Sara dreams—the loons, the crickets, the evening star and my wish upon it, just to name a few—but I thought most of those things were just verisimilitude. Scene-setting, if you will. As such, they could be dismissed from my considerations. That left three major elements, three large pieces of furniture to be unwrapped.

As I sat on the beach, watching the sun go down between my sandy toes, I didn't think you had to be
a shrink to see how those three things went together.

In the Sara dreams, the major elements were the woods behind me, the house below me, and Michael Noonan himself, frozen in the middle. It's getting dark and there's danger in the woods. It will be frightening to go to the house below, perhaps because it's been empty so long, but I never doubt I must go there; scary or not, it's the only shelter I have. Except I can't do it. I can't move. I've got writer's walk.

In the nightmare I am finally able to go toward shelter, only the shelter proves false. Proves more dangerous than I had ever expected in my . . . well, yes, in my wildest dreams. My dead wife rushes out, screaming and still tangled in her shroud, to attack me. Even five weeks later and almost three thousand miles from Derry, remembering that speedy white thing with its baggy arms would make me shiver and look back over my shoulder.

But
was
it Johanna? I didn't really know, did I? The thing was all wrapped up. The coffin looked like the one in which she had been buried, true, but that might just be misdirection.

Writer's
walk,
writer's
block.

I can't write,
I told the voice in the dream. The voice says I can. The voice says the writer's block is gone, and I believe it because the writer's
walk
is gone, I'm finally headed down the driveway, going to shelter. I'm afraid, though. Even before the shapeless white thing makes its appearance, I'm terrified. I say it's Mrs. Danvers I'm afraid of, but that's just my dreaming mind getting Sara Laughs and Manderley all mixed up. I'm afraid of—

“I'm afraid of writing,” I heard myself saying out loud. “I'm afraid to even try.”

This was the night before I finally flew back to Maine, and I was half-past sober, going on drunk. By the end of my vacation, I was drinking a lot of evenings. “It's not the block that scares me, it's
undoing
the block. I'm really fucked, boys and girls. I'm fucked big-time.”

Fucked or not, I had an idea I'd finally reached the heart of the matter. I was afraid of undoing the block, maybe afraid of picking up the strands of my life and going on without Jo. Yet some deep part of my mind believed I must do it; that's what the menacing noises behind me in the woods were about. And belief counts for a lot. Too much, maybe, especially if you're imaginative. When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.

Things in the woods, yes, sir. I had one of them right there in my hand as I was thinking these things. I lifted my drink, holding it toward the western sky so that the setting sun seemed to be burning in the glass. I was drinking a lot, and maybe that was okay on Key Largo—hell, people were supposed to drink a lot on vacation, it was almost the law—but I'd been drinking too much even before I left. The kind of drinking that could get out of hand in no time at all. The kind that could get a man in trouble.

Things in the woods, and the potentially safe place guarded by a scary bugbear that was not my wife, but perhaps my wife's memory. It made sense, because Sara Laughs had always been Jo's favorite place on
earth. That thought led to another, one that made me swing my legs over the side of the chaise I'd been reclining on and sit up in excitement. Sara Laughs had also been the place where the ritual had begun . . . champagne, last line, and the all-important benediction:
Well, then,
that's
all right, isn't it?

Did I want things to be all right again? Did I truly want that? A month or a year before I mightn't have been sure, but now I was. The answer was yes. I wanted to move on—let go of my dead wife, rehab my heart, move on. But to do that, I'd have to go back.